God and the Concentration Camp
Where is God from all this suffering? A Palestinian-Muslim perspective.
The soldiers yell in Hebrew, “men to the left, women and children to the right!”
Terrorized witnesses report that the ditches are around 15-feet deep. There are testimonies that some women dropped dead on the spot out of fear. The rest are blind folded and told to kneel. If they protest or move, they are immediately shot on site. The smell of rotten corpses nearby and the screams of children overwhelm the air.
The stench of smoke, empty bellies, thirsty tongues, death and blistering skin permeates.
Is this Auschwitz?
No. This is Gaza. Today, in fact. October 22nd, 2024. The 21st century’s live-streamed Holocaust.
The other day, an incensed reader commented on one of my Substack notes on the absurdity of Americans carrying on with their Harris/Trump signs, Halloween prep and their pumpkin spice lattes while this genocide rages on: “it is not a Holocaust,” he objected.
How dare you compare Gaza to the Holocaust? Nothing compares to the Shoah.
OK, would you feel better if I said it was a holocaust with a small “h”, because that is what burning a group of people alive means? Would it help your conscience if I compared it to other atrocities, say Vietnam? Or Cambodia? Perhaps Haiti? To the extermination of Native Americans? Would that help remove the moral stain off the fiber of your being?
Nothing can. And nothing will.
Claim all the victimhood and suffering in the world you want as yours.
But for the love of God, grant them one thing: do not claim God. Leave God for the people of Gaza. Whether one understands it or not, their immovable faith is the only thing that has allowed them to withstand living under this unspeakable horror for over a year and a 75-year long brutal occupation.
Respect that. Acknowledge that. Consider that, perhaps they are the “Chosen Ones.” Perhaps they are the epic heroes, the ultimate underdog: pre-destined to resist the culmination of all of modernity’s moral depravity. Perhaps they are the ones chosen to uphold their innate, Divine spark in one of the most demonic, inhumane moments in history.
Due to decades of “war on terror” rhetoric, hard wired anti-Muslim animus, prejudice against Arabs, pre-programmed Orientalist Islamophobia, what so many atheists/Westerners/onlookers fail to understand—and what Israelis seek to destroy—is the unyielding reality of Muslim—and specifically—Palestinian faith.
For all the “God is dead” programming, denigration of religion as “backwards,” extreme secularization and looking down on Muslims who uphold their faith in this age of debauchery as “extremists”, Palestinians are living revivalists of the true essence of God and godliness in the world. And they do it beautifully.
Preserving their full-bodied, bloodied, tragic humanity under atrocity is actually a declaration against the soullessness of faithlessness. Gaza is, in reality, a calling cry against what decades of systemic, unchecked godlessness can produce: an orgy of mass evil as shameless as this. Their living, vivid, real connection to a just, omnipotent transcendental Creator—as the ultimate source of all good, love, truth and justice, whose wisdom is infinite, whose power is greater than all of earth’s armies combined—sustains them. It is their unwavering connection and commitment to the loving, ever-present, merciful God of Abraham, Jesus, Moses and Muhammad.
Palestinians are putting out the dumpster fire that is humanity’s collective dead, cold heart.
They are prying back what it means to be human out of the cold, morbid hands of a soulless, maniacal, deathly civilization.
They are bringing God back to a godless world.
“Oh yea, if there is one, where is God? Why doesn’t He do anything to stop this?”
Jewish theologians grappled deeply with the question of where God was during the Holocaust and why He did not stop it. They came up with the following key theories, among others:
"God is dead." If there were a God, he would surely have prevented the Holocaust. Since God did not prevent it, then God as traditionally understood either does not exist or has changed in some way.
"The Eclipse of God." There are times when God is inexplicably absent from history. Martin Buber made this phrase famous, suggesting that the 20th century was passing through a period where God, for reasons unknowable to us, refused to reveal himself.
A Distant God. The experience of the Holocaust calls for Jews to reinterpret their belief in God. God is obviously not a being who actually interferes with human existence in any tangible, measurable way. Arthur A. Cohen holds that God is so transcendent that he cannot be held responsible for the Holocaust.
A Limited God. God is not omnipotent. He does not have the power to bring to a halt such things as the Holocaust. Harold Kushner made this view popular in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
Free Will & God. Terrible events such as the Holocaust are the price we have to pay for having free will. God will not and cannot interfere with history, otherwise, our free will would effectively cease to exist. Eliezer Berkovits, for example, stresses that God is all-powerful but that he curtails his own freedom to respect human freedom, even with such horrific consequences.
A Suffering God. Borrowing from Christian reflection on Christ and the passibility of God, Hans Jonas has suggested that God is limited in power but able to suffer with the pain of the Jewish people. Others stress the compassion and love of God, even if not understood in the Holocaust.
No Theology nach Auschwitz. Any attempt at theology totalizes the ultimate horror, and by doing so, it lessens the suffering of what happened, as well as opening up humanity to ultimately excusing it and letting it happen again. For some this is a radical negation of any attempt to explain, while for others it is a simple dismissal of religious attempts at an answer. Any talk of God's justice or love makes a mockery of what happened in the Shoah.1
But for Gazans, the answer is unequivocally none of the above. If you ask an average person there—an average child even—where is God? They will proudly and without hesitation declare, “He is always with us, He is here.” They know God. They’ve experienced God.
They might even think your question patronizing, perverse, rude, insane even, that, in their signature sass, they would probably ask you in return: “ask those who kill us in the name of David and Moses, ‘where is their God?’ They surely know Him not. They probably know his enemy, Satan, though, just give them a mirror and you can find him there.” We Palestinians are known for our sass. It is another attribute that sustains us.
If you insist in your stubbornness and still wonder, where is God, they might say: “it is you who failed us. It is humanity that moved away from God. He is with us and we are with Him.” We are taught that Allah has 99 names: the Merciful, the Generous, the Loving, the Kind, the Sustainer. The sweet, tender, loving Palestinians are living embodiments of these attributes, so—when you ask them where is God—you are asking them to find their own selves. An absurdity. They are the immovable center. The mirror image of the Divine. They know one thing: everyone who moved from this center, everyone who failed us is not God.
What we are witnessing now is nothing short of a miracle in the modern age: an experiential reality of a lived, collective faith, activated in its power and agency, en masse, that no amount of billions spent by way of military and security expenditure can undo or defy. No 2000-pound bombs can remove this faith from the chambers of peoples’ hearts.
It is those who walk willingly and blindly away from that immovable center, those who want to “play god” like deranged devils with their quadcopters, machine guns and apaches that should be asked what they did to bury the spark of Divinity in them and for what reason.
Ask those that think they are above God—who think they are “chosen” based on some ethnic and religious right—why they worship all else except the Divine. Why they worship self, power, money, supremacy and nationalism.
As witnesses to this harrowing moment, we would be remiss not to acknowledge, that Gaza is not only a school of humanity, it will go down in history as its own school of theology and ethics. It has done more for Islam than any contemporary cleric or religious leader. It is the most striking embodiment of Islamic virtues the modern world has ever seen. It is revolutionizing faith after the West and the Communist world declared it “dead.”
Just read the words of Gaza’s incredibly gifted and inspired writers and poets. Dr. Alaa’ Qatrawi, a kindred spirit and author of the viral ‘Letter to the Prophet Muhammad’ as a bereaved mother, recently wrote another stunning, evocative piece on the ethnic cleansing happening in the north of Gaza:
I do not know what to call northern Gaza, but it most resembles the verse that says: “Wherever you turn, there is the face of God.” (Qur’an 2:115). It is as if I feel that the outpouring of Allah Almighty is manifesting itself on every atom in the northern Gaza Strip, which includes Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, Jabalia, Al-Shuja’iyya, Gaza, and Al-Shati’. Here in the Gaza Strip, if we see someone with a dry (stubborn) head, we say to him: Are you Jabali (ie. from Jabalia refugee camp)? But today we say, if you want to see the face of Allah manifesting in all directions, go to Jabalia.
For most Muslims and even non-Muslim allies and sympathizers, Gaza has reaffirmed their faith rather than weakened it. While they are being genocided, if you are still having an existential crisis one year into the genocide, you are missing the point of this juncture in human history, in the meaning of life in general and the temporality of this world completely.
Do not let their sacrifices and their deaths go in vain. Existential crises reek of cushioned privilege and haughty, individualistic insularity.
Where have you been this whole year? Have you not seen the pious, turbaned, bearded grandfather kiss every inch of the face of his angelic, perfectly coiffed granddaughter Reem, the “soul’s soul” in a final, loving embrace? Have you not heard Hind Rajab recite the Fatiha (the opening chapter of the Qur’an) with her panicked mother on the phone before IOF forces opened fire and shot at her 355 times? Have you not seen Gaza’s doctors and journalists, sing praises to the Prophet ﷺ while drenched in blood, bent but not broken on the burning hospital floors? Have you not seen people say, Alhamdulillah, “praise be to God,” as they lose limbs, lives and homes? Have you not seen God, scripture and the lives of Prophets come to life through this genocide?
Have you not seen how the defiant stick of Sinwar has been compared to the staff of Moses?
Then We inspired Moses, “Throw down your staff,” and—behold!—it devoured the objects of their illusion! (Qur’an 7:117)
The “illusions” being reveled here as the Gazan Moses threw his staff are, of course, the soothsaying lies of genocidal apologists, Zionist propaganda and the ruse-based order that colluded to strangulate the small, David-esque population of Palestine and humiliate the spirit of its resistance. By showing the footage of his last moments, Pharaoh’s modern day magicians did the exact opposite: they garnered more sympathy, admiration and respect for the lionhearted leader and his peoples’ righteous struggle against oppression. In their delusional hubris and arrogance, they memorialized him.
Not only that, the Qur’an itself is coming to life through Gaza. Today, Mahmoud al-Amoudi, the wonderful, magnanimous, reverent father and heroic journalist, posted this hopeful dispatch from where he and his family have been holding on and remaining steadfast under the threat of bombs and starvation in the north of Gaza for a full year:
His post reads, “We in Gaza are a living embodiment of the people referred to in the Constellations Chapter (Surat al Buruj, the 85th Chapter of the Qur’an). Open your Qur’ans, look at how the verse begins and how it ends. Focus on the end, “Indeed, the crushing retribution of your Lord is severe.” I think the time is near for us to see this crushing retribution in real time.”
In honor of Mahmoud's clairvoyant dispatches despite living under such unspeakable horror, allow me to put on my theologian hat and let us undergo a quick Qur’anic exegesis of Al-Buruj together, shall we? Here is an excerpt, though the full chapter can be read here:
By the sky full of constellations and the promised Day and the witness and what is witnessed. Condemned are the makers of the ditch—the fire pit filled with fuel—when they sat around it, watching what they had ordered to be done to the believers, who they resented for no reason other than belief in Allah—the Almighty, the Praiseworthy—the One to Whom belongs the kingdom of the heavens and earth. And Allah is a Witness over all things. Those who persecute the believing men and women and then do not repent will certainly suffer the punishment of Hell and the torment of burning. Surely those who believe and do good will have Gardens under which rivers flow. That is the greatest triumph. Indeed, the crushing retribution of your Lord is severe.
The Chapter starts by swearing upon the “sky full of constellations.” Could not the constellations connote the extensive coverage of events from “high in the sky”, through satellites orbiting the Earth from outer space? Could not the “promised day” emphasize the inevitability of resurrection and the necessity of it for the judgment of humanity, where justice will be served, and the oppressed will be avenged against the oppressors? Could not the reference to the “Witness and the Witnessed” point to the the live-streamed atrocity, witnessed by all? Surely, the genocide in Gaza represents the first instance of mass atrocity on full display, broadcast live to a global audience for over a year, with the crimes still ongoing unabated and unpunished and witnessed by almost the entire global population.
As regards “the Ditch,” this could surely refer to the ditches dug as mass graves, or the the moats currently being used as concentration camps in the northern area of Gaza to exterminate the thousands of defiant people still holding on to their right to stay on their land and in their homes. In a sense, the economic, political, food, and trade blockade of Gaza also turned it into a ditch. As such a small, isolated strip of land, cut off from the entire world, one could say that Gaza represent’s the world’s ditch. And within it, its resistance fighters on the carve out tunnels; their own "internal trenches."
“The fire pit filled with fuel” of course, could so clearly refer to the bombs of fire being dropped on the tents, schools and hospitals of those fragile souls taking shelter, turning their entire lives into a fire pit that consumes their flesh but not their souls. The verse, “as they sat around it” might refer to the prolonged duration of the war and the comprehensive destruction and fire that has engulfed both earth and man, as well as the animals, vegetation and even the sea in Gaza. No where is safe.
Verse 7, “And they were witnesses to what they did to the believers” might refer those who colluded with Israel and the US to sustain this slaughterhouse, as well as the forces of tyranny oppression in the Arab and Muslim world such as the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi and the UAE, who stood as passive spectators to the burning, extermination, and destruction of the people in Gaza, completely useless and devoid of shame.
On verse 8, “And they were resented only because they believed in Allah” is precisely why the Palestinian people are so hated—but it is also why they cannot be annihilated. The Gazan Virtues—patience, gratitude, courage, valor, resilience and their pride in their faith—have bestowed honor upon them and raised their rank in the eyes of the world, while all surrounding nations have been humiliated.
This is revelation alive. This is faith alive. So next time anyone asks, “where is God?” Tell them to “look up at the sky full of constellations.”
Then tell them to turn their gaze to Gaza, for there, “wherever you turn, you will find the face of God.”
“Complaining to other than God is humiliation”
Source: Jewish Views of the Holocaust: Theology Nach Auschwitz https://www.dbu.edu/mitchell/modern-resources/holocaust-views.html#:~:text=God%20was%20not%20absent%20in,the%20Jewish%20God%20into%20Auschwitz.