Blog 2: The Land Will Vomit You Out
Immersed in the desperate and desolate reality of life under the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine,[1] my 12 days here have acutely reminded me that the core of this longstanding conflict, with its almost countless horrors of human rights abuses that stem from it, is still one about land, its rights, and its use. Although we are quite far removed, and dare I say disillusioned, from the agrarian worldview and reality of our ancestors, it is imperative for us today to re-ascertain the indelible, paramount value and function of land in our lives. Israel, despite its paradoxical and counterintuitive approach, which I will address in this blog, still holds sacred this attitude towards land it is central place in a society. In fact, as their appalling and degrading strategies demonstrate, they are willing to utilize the most extreme measures to secure the land that some of them believe God has given them defacto, with an essentially stipulation-less, license-to-kill at all costs kind of promise.
On the other side of the coin, the Palestinians, who had rightfully and peaceably lived on this land for hundreds of years prior to the post-WWII international legislation establishing an Israeli state in 1948, also embody this deep human sentiment of inextricable attachment to the land they call home. Many of them, including a number of the locals I met and befriended, live in a daily state of remorse and unquenchable restlessness as a result of losing their land, homes, and livelihoods to which they are not allowed to return. This is the bottomless pain lived by those who have been forcefully and unjustly displaced from their lives by an imperial, occupying power. Although they are on Israel’s blacklist and risk arrest every time they show their face and share their story with visitors, many young adult refugees that I met have committed their entire lives and every associated cost to the cause of resisting the occupation and seeking to peacefully return their homes and lands, even in cohabitation with their Israeli occupiers.
Thus, what we have are 2 groups of people whose existence is fundamentally fueled by the hope of living on this particular land that they call home in perpetuity. This land is the base of their identity as families, communities, and nations, that which they wish to pass from generation to generation. It is my humble observation, and that of ecological specialists that spoke at Sabeel’s conference like Jad Isaac, that Israel’s refusal to peacefully coexist with their Palestinian neighbors, epitomized by their violent displacement and complex eradication or ethnic cleansing strategies, is making a future life for any people, Israeli or Palestinian, impossible through the subsequent and drastic ecological devastation that their occupation practices are causing.
Disastrous is hardly an adequate description of the situation in the Gaza strip, a literal prison where Israel exerts ruthless and often violent control over its access by land, sea, and air, with only 2 existing ways in or out, heavily restricted border checkpoints. Jad Isaac and Mazin Qumsiyeh estimate that this land will be wholly unlivable by 2020. Its aquifer is degraded beyond repair, sourcing water from outside would entail economic investments Israel would never be willing to make and that Gazans could not afford. Israel’s continual import (and export) restrictions have cornered Gazans into extreme circumstances of dependency on foreign humanitarian aid and desperate lifestyles that increasingly marginalize and depredate the land. Furthermore, Israel has failed to comply with the Oslo Accord stipulations of a 20 mile perimeter for Gazan fishing in the Mediterranean, narrowing it to 3 miles and enforcing it by gunboats that fire on unarmed, poor fishermen if they cross the imaginary line, and often even when they are still within it. Such ridiculous nautical regulations have led to all Gazan fisheries being all but irreparably depleted, making this vital food source and the equally vital livelihood of fishing all but an impossibility for future life here. Gaza, in almost every ecological category, is on a path of doom that Israel’s occupation tactics have all but etched into stone.[2]
In the West Bank, Israel’s detrimental presence is wreaking different but still life-threatening havoc on the land and its residents. For lack of space in this essay, I won’t go into details concerning the ecological and related social and economic injustices that go on unchecked here. Let it suffice to say that the diversion of the upper Jordan river, done to provide water to Israelis only, the incessant demolishing of houses, displacement and refugee camps/towns where unsettled and desperate living creates major, unneeded pressure on ecosystem and local resources. As is the nature of an occupation, life constrained and stolen from God’s creation will always engender wide-ranging problems from the land itself to the people who live on it. In short, the land, including all of its people, is in dire jeopardy, careening towards a cataclysmic dismantling. God’s creation, however, in all of its defiant resilience, won’t give up that easy.
Zeal is something for which Israel, at least in some of its camps, has been known; and certainly, a “zeal for Zion,” if I may use such a phrase, has been a hallmark of Israel’s exile-delimited history. When it is co-opted into a misguided and destructive vision, however, like that of Israel’s xenophobic quest to secure an Arab-free Israeli state on this Holy Land, zeal has the tendency to implode upon its greedy constituents. If Israel continues its current, comprehensively catastrophic strategies of occupation as the praxis of their “zeal for Zion,” there will be no Zion in the future; much of their precious Zion land will be sucked dry of its life-giving capacities, leaving Israelis, Palestinians, and any others who reside in this land truly homeless. Nevertheless, this ominous future for Zion is one for which Israel should be innately expectant, if they know their Torah and actually listen to its teachings. God, through the writers of Torah, goes to great length in the detailed prescriptions for Israel’s life and ethics in community to warn them that if they don’t adhere to God’s ways, the land itself, God’s creation, will administer God’s punishment on them. Leviticus’ language, however, is much more provocative: “And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you (Lev 18:28).” God and God’s land won’t tolerate defilement, and the penalty for such practices sounds quite vile, an experience no one could stomach!
The obvious question to be asked of Israel, and which it must ask itself, is what are the criteria of defiling the land that would warrant its being vomited out? When analyzing the linked section of Leviticus 18-20, which contains repetitions of numerous laws and a double occurrence of this evocative warning of being vomited out (18:28, 20:22), some clear patterns emerge to form of context for criteria. Of course, the extensive prohibitions on an array of sexual practices, most pertaining to inter-familial relations, stand out, but it’s the overarching categories under which they are spoken that demand more attention. First and foremost, the opening tagline to these instructions includes an admonition to Israel to not do as Egypt does (18:3) More or less, Israel is called to not form a society that operates like Egypt, a preeminent empire of the ancient world whose oppressive practices, imperial presence, and religious cult influenced its neighboring nations, like those of Canaan, whom Israel is also told not to emulate. As the prophets decry, Israel’s kings and its elite later failed to heed these warnings, a reality that demonstrated a pithy axiom I once learned in class: it was much easier to take Israel out of Egypt than to take Egypt out of Israel. In assessing the horrific injustices that Israel is levying upon Palestinians today, might we say “Israel,” specifically the Israeli government and those in active support of the occupation, is still in need of learning this lesson about not mimicking imperial societies like Egypt?
Throughout the rest of this section, Lev. 18-20, Israel is admonished to embrace a number of key ethical practices that would undoubtedly guide them in cultivating a society and life in contradistinction to imperial Egypt, ordered around God’s justice. For one, Israel is commanded to always keep its Sabbaths, a foundational, Israelite tradition that entailed not only the weekly rest for the whole community, but also the year of rest and rejuvenation for the land itself (Lev 25:2-4), and the climactic Sabbath practice of Jubilee, in which slaves are emancipated, debt is canceled, and land is returned to the people to whom it originally belonged (Lev 25:10-54). Clearly, Israel today has failed to keep most or any of these Sabbaths, as their neighbors continue to be indebted, oppressed, and in many ways, enslaved to Israel, their occupiers. Most importantly, the land that Israel has stolen from Palestinians has not been returned, as thousands of Palestinians still live in refugee camps and in places not their own, displaced and forgotten in their own country.
And if that’s not enough, these teachings on how to not live like imperial Egypt have clauses about how Israel should care for the poor and the alien among them, commands to deal justly with one another, to not deceive, hate, slander, or endanger the lives of their neighbors, and ultimately, the call to love their neighbors as themselves. Surely, even Israel can’t deny that the Palestinians living with them in the Holy Land are their neighbors. Israel’s actions more accurately seem to render them aliens, however, despite their rightful claim to a place and life on this conflicted land. Nevertheless, one of Torah’s hallmark teachings that is threaded throughout its books is the directive for Israel to care for the aliens living among them for they were once aliens in Egypt. And yes, you guessed it: this teaching appears here in this section, 19:34, a poignant reminder of how Israel must organize its society and treat all non-Israelites who live within and around them. Failure to love and care for the aliens, especially those who shouldn’t be considered aliens because of their right to some of this land, is cause for the land to vomit Israel out, a defilement that renders their God-given privilege to reside on the land obsolete. If Israel continues to neglect God’s commands to care for God’s people and land with love and justice, this blessed land of Palestine will surely, as it appears very close to doing in places like the Gaza strip, vomit them out, as life in all the beauty with which God endowed it will be unable to continue in this state of defilement.
May Israel heed its Torah to live justly and love their land and their neighbors, especially the aliens, so that life in this land for all of God’s people and Creation may once again thrive in harmony and peace. Amen.
[1] Israel is in direct violation of numerous international laws concerning human rights within circumstances of military occupation. Perhaps the most explicit violation is its illegal establishment of Israeli settlements (permanent communities, think colonies) on the Palestinian land that it militarily occupies.
[2] Most of the figures and facts used in this article have been gathered from notes from the speakers of Sabeel’s summer 2013 Moving Mountains conference
