Netanyahu, Amalek and Deuteronomy

BiBi believes he is the hand of God cleansing the land of demons

I am blessed to live in a safe little neighborhood of small homes in Worcester, MA. The residents are quite an eclectic group. Black people, Armenian, Israeli Jews, Hispanic , Filipino, and a small cadre of us Western European white types. Residents not only greet one another but sometimes we actually sit and talk.

No, honest. I’m not lying. We actually talk to one another. It’s mind bending.

This hot stuffy morning after my un-brisk walk I sat in the front yard in an attempt to cool off. One of my favorite persons walked by, a 72 year old woman who is a devout Hassidic Jew. She is a brilliant woman, quick to laugh or crack a joke and has a lifetime of experience she is willing to share.

Today I learned about something probably many of you already know but was new information to me. We were discussing Israel and Gaza and I asked her if she could help me understand why Netanyahu is leveling and killing everything?.

She and I never judge one another. We simply exchange history, facts, experience and our perceptions. We have this tacit agreement to learn from one another, to listen, and not enter into petty arguments. That said, in an to my question she replied, “Netanyahu is following Old Testament scripture, Torah, that is as old as time.”

She said she could not do justice to the passages but to research Deuteronomy 20:16-18. So I did.

Moses, the great law-giver of Israel, is the author of the book of Deuteronomy, the Fifth Book of the Old Testament. Deuteronomy means, ‘The Final Words of Moses.’ The book is regarded as Moses’ farewell to the Israelites as they entered the Promised Land.

The message of this book is that we have a choice before us every day: We can choose allegiance to things of our own creation or we can choose to live life according to the wisdom of Yahweh, ‘neither adding to nor subtracting from the word of God.’ And the word of God is this, “Now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you? He requires only that you fear the LORD your God, and live in a way that pleases him, and love him and serve him with all your heart and soul.

But there is another message from God in Deuteronomy that Netanyahu seems to be following … that he is utilizing as the basis for his abhorrent behavior. It IS important that you read this so that you can better understand the depravity of the mind and soul of the ‘person’ responsible for the genocide in Gaza. Netanyahu believes he is a soldier of Moses, of God, simply acting out his part as ordered by God Himself.

Deuteronomy: Going to War

When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than yours, do not be afraid of them, because the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, will be with you.

When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace.  If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you.  If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.

When you lay siege to a city for a long time, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them, because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees people, that you should besiege them? However, you may cut down trees that you know are not fruit trees and use them to build siege works until the city at war with you falls.

In other words, in the eyes of Netanyahu the Palestinian people are not ‘fully’ human and that by their evil intentions are corrupt. Therefore the Israel is charged, on behalf of God, to ‘clean things up’. Bottom line, it is an act of Love. God loved man, and for man’s ‘good’, this ‘cleansing’ is the humane action.

Read once again what Netanyahu believes: God commands the Israelites to leave nothing that breaths alive. The cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, but thou shalt utterly destroy them.

And then there is this biblical story which is also referenced by Zionists such as Netanyahu.

God commands King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek. Amalek is described in the Hebrew Bible as the enemy nation of the Israelites. The name "Amalek" can refer to the descendants of Amalek, the grandson of Esau, or anyone who lived in their territories in Canaan. “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”

The biblical animosity toward the Amalekites stems from what is described as the merciless ambush they launched against vulnerable Israelites making their way to the promised land. The attack leads God to tell Moses to wipe out Amalek. Hundreds of years later, Saul nearly fulfills the command by killing all Amalekite men, women, and children. But he spares their king, who keeps his people barely alive by having a child. Many more generations later, one of his descendants, the villain Haman, goes on to develop a plot to kill all the Jews living in exile under a Persian ruler. The lesson, when read literally, is clear: Saul’s failure to kill every Amalekite posed an existential threat to the Jewish people.

Jews traditionally hear the story of the Amalek ambush and God’s decree that they be eliminated on the Shabbat service before the holiday of Purim. It is perhaps the most important of all Torah readings. Some Jews take the story literally. That is, Amalek the people, must be destroyed. And others metaphorically. The metaphor being, ‘we must eliminate our own inner ungodliness.’

Quite the choice there based upon one’s interpretation of an ancient book. Either kill all the demons (non-Israelites) one experiences out there in the world or kill one’s inner demons. We had better rid the world of Netanyahu because he is on a death quest. A quest he truly believes supported by the Word of God ‘to kill all the demons out there.’

Lord, have mercy on us.