Palestine is the Compass
Israel’s campaign to erase Gaza City has forced more than 800,000 Palestinians south, leveled entire neighborhoods, and now targets ancient churches whose leaders refuse to flee. As international law is trampled and silence prevails, Gaza has become the moral compass for a world deciding between complicity and courage.
Rev. J. Mark Davidson
9/4/20252 min read
Appallingly, the Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse the northern half of the Gaza Strip is underway. In advance of the scorched-earth flattening of Gaza City, over 800,000 Palestinians have been forced southwards into concentration zones. Over 1000 buildings in once-thriving Zeitoun and Sabra neighborhoods of Gaza City have been reduced to rubble. As an Al Jazeera reporter put it, “The scale of destruction is staggering. What was once alive with sound and color is now silent, grey, and buried in dust.” On July 21, 2025, Israeli warplanes attacked the Latin monastery in central Gaza City killing two civilians and injuring twelve others. Israel is now bombing the Al-Zeitoun Christian quarter in The Old City, ordering all churches to evacuate. The Latin and Greek Orthodox Patriarchates of Jerusalem are refusing to leave and will accept the “death sentence.”
Will the rogue nation of Israel destroy churches in Gaza, some 1500 years old, and murder their priests? If it happens, it would be an outrageous atrocity, a war crime, a flagrant violation of international law. But given Israel’s track record in the Gaza genocide, as astounding as it is to say it, it would not be surprising if they did. Israel has been operating completely outside the bounds of international humanitarian law – killing civilians (by Israel’s own records, over 83% of all those they have killed - current estimates over 300,000- have been noncombatants who are supposed to be protected), bombing hospitals, destroying schools and universities, obliterating civilian infrastructure, assassinating journalists (over 240 of them, more than all the journalists killed in all the wars since WWII, including WWII), deliberately causing a famine. So far, with impunity.
In 1948, after WWII, after the Nazi Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, the world witnessed human existence reduced to a condition aptly described as “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” In response, the international community drafted the Geneva Conventions. They placed sideboards on the conduct of nations in order to prevent the evil that humanity had endured and to sow the seeds of a peaceful and humane future. In Gaza – and in the West Bank, in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran - Israel has blown through them, shattering norms. It seems nothing restrains their malicious brutality. One wonders if there is any longer any power in the world today with the moral clarity and political courage to stop Israel from completely destroying and ethnically cleansing Gaza? And if the answer to that question is that there appears there is not, what does that say about the world we live in and are facing in the years ahead? On the other hand, if humanity summons the courage and the moral and political imagination to stop it, and instead steers Gaza and the fate of humanity in the direction of life, freedom, and peace, that would resurrect hope from the ashes. Either way, “Palestine is the compass.”