It’s Holy Week. Eight days of Christian celebration beginning Palm Sunday and ending Easter Sunday. Thank God we aren’t a theocracy or the recent revelations of U.S.-Israeli negotiations might fly in the face of our intent, presuming we might base our theocracy on Christianity.
Passover has begun, and it’s good that Israel isn’t a theocracy or there might be problems philosophically with what the Israeli government is doing.
I was in Egypt in 2008. My journey reversed the route Moses took as he led the Israelites to freedom. In the Old Testament, Passover marked the final plague sent by the God of the Jews to coerce the Egyptian Pharaoh into freeing the Jews. Moses and his people exited — passing through the parted Red Sea — out of bondage.
I started my journey at the Tel Aviv airport, stayed a few days in the peaceful, religiously diverse city of Jerusalem and then hopped a bus down through Israel, past the Red Sea and into the land of the Pharaohs. I didn’t leave Israel, however, until I boarded a public transit bus a few hundred feet from King David’s castle and rode for 10 minutes or so to the wall that encloses the West Bank. I traveled through the switchback checkpoints built inside the wall, past machine gun nests and into the Palestinian territory.
President Lincoln once said, “As I would not be a slave, so would I not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.” And while the U.S. CIA World Factbook lists Israel as a parliamentary democracy, caging part of its population doesn’t seem democratic, not by my standards, not by Moses’ standards, and not by the standards of our great U.S. president aptly named Abraham.
See, on either side of the wall are the sons and daughters of the Hebrew prophet Abraham. They are Jews, Muslims and Christians. And because Israel insists that it’s not a theocracy, one would think it would handle these religious differences better. Certainly there must be something more democratic than incarcerating the innocent who outnumber the guilty by hundreds of thousands to one.
In the few days before Passover and Easter celebrations begin — as the nation of Israel imprisons its people on the West Bank and in Gaza — their prime minister was in our White House hoping to gain more U.S. favor. While the U.S. media covered stories of Benjamin Netanyahu sitting alone in the Roosevelt Room and going home mildly scolded for building more settlements in land that Israel promised to respect as belonging to others, Israeli President Shimon Peres was in Israel announcing that the U.S. had agreed to sell them more weapons.
According to the World Tribune, “Israeli sources said Obama has agreed to sell the Jewish state three C-130J air transports, manufactured by Lockheed Martin. They said the U.S. Defense Department and Israel’s Defense Ministry have reached agreement on the air transport deal, set at $250 million.” The paper goes on to de-scribe the workings behind the scene that played out in public, “As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington this week absorbing the full wrath of the Obama administration, the Pentagon and Israel’s defense establishment were in the process of sealing a large arms deal.”
The World Tribune quotes Defense Secretary Robert Gates from March 25: “I think the military-to-military relationship with Israel is as strong as it’s ever been.”
Well that’s OK, because we aren’t a theocracy. If we were, we might not sell weapons to a country that imprisons its own people. We wouldn’t worry that these three military transports are part of a bigger promise made by former President George W. Bush, which included six more planes and other military equipment totaling nearly $2 billion.
But if we were a theocracy and we suppose for a moment that we’d call ourselves a Christian nation, I’ll give the last word on this topic to Jesus, the founder of Christianity who himself was sold for 30 pieces of silver. According to Matthew 26:52 “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”
Pat LaMarche of Yarmouth is the author of “Left Out In America: The State of Homelessness in the United States.” She may be reached at PatLaMarche@hotmail.com.