(RNS) — Let us pray for the success of President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan for Gaza, which has now been agreed to by Israel and Hamas. But let us also take a note of caution from the Book of Jonah, which we Jews read on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Set early in the eighth century B.C.E., though written a few hundred years later, it’s the tale of a Hebrew prophet who disobeys God rather than bring a message of repentance to people he abhors — namely, the Assyrian people of Nineveh, the capital of the dominant regional power, and so far as the nearby Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah are concerned, the Evil Empire.
When God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and “proclaim against it,” the reluctant prophet flees in the opposite direction, boarding a boat for Tarshish. What follows is the best-known part of Jonah’s story: God sends a storm, Jonah knows why and has the sailors throw him overboard; he’s swallowed by the big fish, prays to God to free him, is vomited by the fish onto dry land.
But this tale of God’s deliverance isn’t the end of Jonah’s story. God orders him again to go to Nineveh. This time he does, and announces that the city will be overthrown in 40 days. Amazingly, the king orders every inhabitant, including the animals, to fast and don sackcloth and turn away from evil and violence. They do so and, seeing that the city has repented, God spares it.
Jonah, so angry that he wants to die, tells God that it is because he anticipated this merciful act that he fled to Tarshish. Then he builds a hut nearby to wait and see “what will become of the city.”
God provides a gourd plant to shade him, then sends a worm to kill the plant, leaving him to suffer under a hot sun and a harsh east wind. Angry for the loss of the plant? asks God. So angry I could die, replies the prophet.
The book ends with these words from God:
Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow, which came up in a night, and perished in a night; and should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?
Jonah understands where God is coming from but there’s no indication that he’s prepared to go along. To the contrary, the evidence is that he wants to see Nineveh destroyed — why else did he flee to Tarshish? Prophet that he is, he may know — as the author of the Book of Jonah certainly does – that the evil empire will conquer Israel not many years hence.
We might compare Jonah’s point of view to that of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a messianic religious Zionist who has called for “total annihilation” in Gaza, saying, “They are to be destroyed, destroyed, destroyed.” Nor is Smotrich an isolated voice.
In the eyes of the messianic Islamic movement Hamas, however, Israel itself is the evil empire that must be destroyed. Its never renounced 1988 covenant declares, “In (the) face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” After its Oct. 7, 2023, assault, senior official Ghazi Hamad pledged that Hamas would attack “time and again until Israel is annihilated.”
I’d like to believe that, unlike the magical tale of Ninevite repentance, the ceasefire plan for Gaza will lead to a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. But with angry messianists on both sides, I have my doubts.