You’ve no autonomy
under Deuteronomy;
it’s your obligation
to your tribal nation
to kill all Palestinians
so you don’t sin against
God, who’s neurotic.
Yes, Yahweh’s psychotic.
No escaping his wrath,
no path but the psychopath.
*****
For Christians and Jews who state (as Jesus did) that every reported command by God in the Torah / Old Testament must be obeyed, I ask their position on Deuteronomy 20. This contains the command for the complete genocide of the non-Jews living in the land which Moses claimed had been given to the Jews by God. (Note: not expulsion or enslavement of the people living there, but the death of all of them and their animals.) The reason? So that they don’t teach evil ways to the Jews:
16 But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee:
18 That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the Lord your God.
To the extent that fundamentalist Jews constitute a large percentage of the Israeli population and are influential in the national government, the Palestinian situation cannot be resolved until scriptural passages like this are dragged out into the open and examined and discussed: was that passage only for then, and things are different now? Or does the command to massacre non-Jews still hold for today’s Jews in “the Holy Land”?
This poem was first published in The HyperTexts, where Michael R. Burch maintains extensive collections of poetry related to both the Holocaust and the Palestinian Catastrophe.
Illustration: “Moses has the mature women and the male children of the Midianites killed” is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.
Form in Formless Times 
Robin, I was glad to add your poem to our collection of poems about the Holocaust (Hebrew for “catastrophe”), the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), the Trail of Tears, and other similar atrocities.
It bears noting that the satanic book of Deuteronomy commands the ghastly stoning to death of boys for being stubborn and girls for being raped or not bleeding sufficiently on their wedding nights to prove their virginity. The real Creator would have known that all girls don’t bleed the first time they have sex, so obviously the book was authored by primitive witch doctors, not an all-wise God.
I have a poem on the subject:
who, US?
by Michael R. Burch
jesus was born
a palestinian child
where there’s no Room
for the meek and the mild
… and in bethlehem still
to this day, lambs are born
to cries of “no Room!”
and Puritanical scorn …
under Herod, Trump, Bibi
their fates are the same—
the slouching Beast mauls them
and WE have no shame:
“who’s to blame?”
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