Imagine this: A man with an automatic rifle kills a woman in downtown Chicago. He runs into a church, with police in pursuit, bolts the door behind and holds 30 worshipers at gunpoint. The police chief arrives and demands the gunman surrender. When he refuses, the chief calls in a bomb strike, killing 31 people. He explains that the deaths of 30 innocent worshipers were solely the responsibility of the gunman because he was using them as human shields.

Would any American approve of this?

Yet Israel uses the same argument: that Hamas is hiding among innocent civilians, so it is the fault of Hamas if Israel kills 40 Palestinian non-combatants to kill one Hamas member. The only explanation possible here is that Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters do not believe Palestinians to be fully human.

Too many Americans seem to agree. What matters here is the calculated decision to treat some as expendable, as were the Jews during the Spanish Inquisition. Somehow it is always the powerless who are expendable. Palestine has no tanks, no air force, no nuclear weapons, no superpower ally, and little visibility in the U.S. Who requires “defense?”

Of course we cannot understand the massive bombing of Gaza without recognizing that Hamas struck first and quite brutally. But in a similar way, we can’t understand the current violence without seeing the deeper problem: Israel has continuously pushed Palestinians from their homes, many to foreign countries like Lebanon where they are hardly safe from American-made bombs.

Yes, the region is deeply complex, but the central issue is more direct: Palestinians are being treated as expendable, something Americans would surely condemn were it applied to an American church congregation.

Americans have been lied to about Israel and Palestine just as Russians have been lied to by the Putin regime. And this is a matter of almost complete agreement by the leadership of both major parties and their media supporters. Unlike the U.S., when the state of Israel was created over 70 years ago, it was designated not by a philosophy of government or common values, but simply as a home for one ethnic group, a disaster for the Palestinians whose ancestors had lived in that land for more than a millennium.

The basic problem here is that the state of Israel, despite Netanyahu’s insistence, is a humanly created institution. It is not sacred. Too many people in too many places see this creation as the very soul of the Jewish people, but it is something crafted by human hands, like a golden calf. Refusing to bow down is not antisemitism.

Ignoring the deep Jewish tradition of concern for the powerless, Netanyahu and his American backers have confirmed that the state itself comes first rather than any concern for those it has displaced. It has the right to “defend itself” in a way that would be a crime if any individual did it to another.

Perhaps someday, after Israel has gained even more dominance over the region, will we hear these words at public events: “We acknowledge that the land upon which we stand today was once the homeland of the Palestinian people. We respect them and their way of life and we are sorry we slaughtered so many and took this land from them.” The humanity of Palestinians, for leaders like Netanyahu, can only be recognized after their land has been taken, their will broken and their resistance crushed.

The state of Israel is not chosen, it is just a worldly power.

Patrick McGreevy lives in Greenfield and invites comments at pmcgreevy64@gmail.com.