Report #2 - "Our God Will Kill Your God!"

by Jerry Levin
Hebron, West Bank, Palestine
July 10, 2002

My wife, Sis, and I thought it couldn't get any worse when we first started participating in and later shepherding fact-finding delegations to Palestine/Israel in the mid 1980s and early 1990s. But it has.

By the time of our participation in a CPT (Christian Peacemaker Team) delegation a year ago we could see for ourselves how wrong we had been. Nevertheless, even then we thought it couldn't get any worse. But again it has.

For the first time in our experience Christian and Muslim children are begging in West Bank towns and cities, and rats are actually dying in the streets-possibly because there is no rat version of a land of milk and honey to which they can flee in order to survive.

"Happy are those who reject the advice of evil people, who do not follow the example of sinners or join those who have no use for God. Instead they find joy in obeying the law of the Lord." Those words, although they sound proverbial are actually taken from the very first Psalm. And they seem to signify that - at the time of their writing - the distinctive God of history had been leading the ancient Hebrews to the novel understanding that faith fully understood needs to be expressed - exemplified actually - in part through the sort of justice they were seeking for themselves and which they were sure they had been empowered from above to apply.

But events today in the Holy Land indicate quite dramatically that the theological clock has been turned back scandalously and with what amounts to almost complete abandon. Radicals among the adversaries here (and supporters of both outside its borders in the East and the West) are fostering the bombing of each other back if not to the stone age then to at least certainly back to a time that predates the radical Mosaic attitudes towards retribution and revenge - when eye for eye tooth for tooth represented a revolution in the concept of justice and violence.

This back to the future regression, which makes eye for an eye look like the good old days, extends all the way back to the time of Lamech, that boorish churlish Hells Angeles, Sharks and/or Jets prototype who proudly boasted (see Gen. 4:23) that "I have killed a young man because he struck me." [Read: "I have killed a Palestinian child because he hit me with a stone