What to do about Psalm 124?

Yesterday (29th September 2024) I was on the rota for reading at Church, and found myself reading Psalm 124, one of the lectionary readings for the day:

1 If the Lord had not been on our side –
  let Israel say –
2 if the Lord had not been on our side
  when people attacked us,
3 they would have swallowed us alive
  when their anger flared against us;
4 the flood would have engulfed us,
  the torrent would have swept over us,
5 the raging waters
  would have swept us away.
6 Praise be to the Lord,
  who has not let us be torn by their teeth.
7 We have escaped like a bird
  from the fowler’s snare;
the snare has been broken,
  and we have escaped.
8 Our help is in the name of the Lord,
  the Maker of heaven and earth.

I don't need to spell out the problems with this, in the light of the activities of the state of Israel over the past year, do I? 

In the past I wouldn't have worried. or not much anyway. The psalms are notorious for 'difficult' content ("happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks", psalm 137 v. 9) and need lots of interpretation. For example, I heard someone suggest that the infants being dashed against the rocks should be thought of as evil thoughts starting to grow in your mind: smash them before they become too big. For myself, I see the bible as a human creation and, like any book, open to criticism. We can contexualise all we like, we can interpret it in the light of modern understanding, but at some point we just have to say: no, I think that is wrong.

At the end of the reading, as is the custom, I said 'this is the word of the Lord', and the congregation responded 'thanks be to God'. I toyed with instead saying 'this is what it says in the bible' or something like that, but in the end I didn't have the courage to break with what we are 'supposed' to say.

But if this psalm is being read in churches across the world, at the very least we have talk about it surely? To put it crudely, is it saying that God is on the side of modern-day Israel? That the slaughter of 40,000 people in Gaza, and the bombing of Lebanon and the Yemen will succeed (is succeeding) because the Lord is with them?  

And, before you shout 'anti-semitism', I'm talking about the state of Israel, and about Christian churches. And, let's be clear, the most ardent Zionists, the most dangerous Zionists, are right-wing Christians in the USA. I don't know what goes on in most Synagogues, but I do know that large numbers of Jews would have no sympathy whatsoever with Zionism, certainly not Zionism which leads to the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians.

In my church, the minister's sermon was based on the New Testament reading* and made no mention of the psalm. I suggest that's not really good enough: we can't just have a reading which some people might read as giving religious cover to genocide, without at least saying something about it.

*Mark 9: 38–41. "Whoever is not against us is for us", and he spoke of the need for diversity and a range of perspectives in the church. This was fine, but could have been preached at any time. And, TBH, I've heard it plenty of times before.