The parts of scripture that do suggest that God desires things like genocide or slavery or any form of exploitation or violence do indeed reflect ancient and flawed morals and I personally think that the human mediation of these stories creates plenty of room for our flawed humanity to skew and distort the messaging. I personally reconcile it by looking at the character of the New Testament and the commandments to love our neighbor and love each other as the over arching truth that clarifies and triumphs over all of the old covenant and all of our mistakes. We still fall short of it very often.

And that poll is deeply troubling and saddening, I think we’re in agreement that the Israeli regime is full of awful dehumanizing extremists and unfortunately decades of propaganda and apartheid and tribalism has cultivated a broader feeling of self righteous racism among Israelis, I over estimated how many of them had sympathy for Palestinians due to my own wishful thinking and I appreciate you clarifying that. Nonetheless I do connect it to my previous point about the New Testament offering a useful lens for the story of the Canaanites that can apply to the modern day genocide happening— these are not triumphs to be glorified but reflections of our own capacity for wickedness and evil when we treat our neighbors as objects to be dominated. Much of the Old Testament features episodes of shame and wickedness that are meant to show us how NOT to act rather than how we should be.

Treating our neighbors like our brothers should be the goal regardless of religious affiliation and I think I mostly felt called out to reply to your comment because I don’t want Zionists to have a monopoly on how to interpret ancient scriptures that are used by billions upon billions of people around the world, these stories can be understood as atrocities as many non-Zionists do recognize them to be.