One of the greatest friends of my life was an Israeli Defense Forces veteran who turned to hospice work after her rather disastrous tour. She was an irrepressible, exuberant, Mary-Poppins-like personality who was relentless in her passion to raise the spirit of everyone she met. She was killed by the Islamic State in 2016 doing humanitarian relief work in Syria. To be clear, I am not interested in mindless moral equivalency, favoring one side over another. I do not care about nations or flags, religions or ruins; I care about People. The targeting of innocent civilians no matter by whom is always unacceptable.

In 2022, I was outraged to find that Israeli bombers were targeting Palestinian hospitals and news organizations; there can be no excuse for such war crimes. It makes the Israeli Defense Forces into no better than Hamas and Hezbollah when they randomly fire into Israeli residential neighborhoods, pointlessly giving up any moral high ground they might have had.

Now these 2023 attacks on Israeli civilians by land, sea, and air… One thing I can see in favor of the IDF is that they do not machine gun children hiding in shelters, behead infants, or parade the naked bodies of unconscious girls in the backs of their pickup trucks. Such savagery, no matter the tribal affiliation, should be completely intolerable to all the civilized peoples of the earth.

But frankly, how can anyone possibly be surprised? One group worshipping a genocidal desert war god, attacks another group likewise an identical genocidal desert war god and what were supposed to act shocked? Every news organization seems to stubbornly ignore the underlying cause of the violence (the underlying Beliefs). It is not the last attack by group A that precipitated the next attack by group B, those are just symptoms of the disease. It is the underlying ideology of both groups’ vengeful god/belief and primitive tribal blood feuds that are the root cause of endless human insanity.

Again, I am not trying to make a morally relativistic argument, the especially heinous crimes of Hamas, like those of the Islamic state, necessitate their eradication as a group. No, my argument is an attempt at an objective perspective- the entire holy land claim/dispute is based around the bronze aged schizophrenic scribbles of ethnic-cleansing, enslaving war lords that spoke to a malevolent god, and their unfortunate descendants have been watering the same cracked patch of dirt with an orgy of blood-letting ever since.

I weep for the people Palestine who just want to live in peace but are bombed and herded by Hamas zealots.

I despair of Israel, who live their liberal values but are forced to fight the wars of (militarily exempt) Hasidic land thieves.

Both groups are led by disgusting old men playing zero-sum politics with people’s lives all while feeding on the diminishing individual freedom of their citizens. They do not see individual lives, personal suffering, they see only the make believe of factions and flags, but this is not a game. This is Theocracy, and Theocracy is hell. Even when everyone is forced to worship at the alter of the same evil god there can be no peace. Try it in Ireland with the Christian Catholics and protestants, or in Iran with the Shiite and Suni Muslims, there can be no peace in the worship of an “us vs. them” tribalistic war god.

Consider numbers 31: 17-18 “And the Lord spoke to Moses saying…Kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman who has known a man intimately but keep alive for yourselves all the young girls who have not known a man intimately.”

Or 1 Samuel 1:2-3 “Thus says the lord of hosts…now go and attack Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have and do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child.”

And Hosea 13:16 “They shall fall by the sword; their infants shall be dashed in pieces and their women with child ripped open.”

All these books are held as holy by both theocratic groups, do the atrocities of such sex-slavery, genocide, and brutal infanticide sound at all familiar? Does it not seem that their hateful primitive savagery is being replicated in the 21^st century?

Hamas is as bad as ISIS, and for the sake of both Palestinian and Israeli civilians it must be destroyed, and what about the bombings by Israel, certainly it is easier to dissociate from the malevolence of an act when all is required is the push of a button, but concussive explosions sever the limbs from babies just as easily. Now again, the IDF does not go around raping and machine-gunning cowering civilians, but with their air superiority they can reap similar terror in other ways. This begs the question- if both Hamas and the IDF get the “divine” inspiration for their violence from the same genocidal rapist god is this truly a civilized, secular nation’s fight against terrorism or/and is it the hideously immoral continuation of a tribal, bronze-aged blood feud.

My deceased Israeli friend was not just a war hero, she was a Good Person. She was a queer, liberal woman and an adorable geek. Does a Zionist theocratic Israel much less a homosexual, women-killing, enslaving Hamas sound like the kind of world she would have wanted to live in. Hell no.

Yet she was as “Israeli” as an IDF veteran, but she saw through the nationalistic tribalism and what she had done in its name had turned her stomach. A religiously Jewish nation is not by definition a secularly tolerant one. For all her “Jewish” ancestry, my irrepressibly affectionate atheistic soul sister did not want to shed any more blood in the favor of one theocratic state over yet another. The Values we are fighting for are Better than that of our enemies unless the values we are fighting for are better than our enemies. No amount of technology will set us apart from the barbarian sadists we claim to oppose. It is never just the fanatics who bleed— every war is a war against Innocence.