Israel and the G-d of War

David Wetherell ponders the role of language in land claims.

The conviction held by religious Zionists that God has given them the Holy Land in perpetuity is one of the underpinnings of Israel's occupation of the West Bank. The religious claim to occupy the West Bank rests with the Bible, which is used as the essential text for the provision of moral legitimacy. While the Bible is not the only justification, it certainly is the most powerful one, without which Zionism is only a conquering ideology. Read at face value and without recourse to doctrines of human rights, the Old Testament appears to propose that the taking possession of the Promised Land and the forcible expulsion of the indigenous population is the fulfilment of a biblical mandate.

In the United States the views of the Christian religious right support this claim. Republican senator James Inhofe said: "God appeared to Abraham and said: 'I am giving you this land' the West Bank. This is not a political battle at all. It is contest over whether the word of God is true." Former Senate majority leader Dick Armey was even more forthright: "I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank I happen to believe that the Palestinians should leave."1

The assertion that Israel has a God-given prerogative to dismiss the claims of others, mainly the Palestinians, is a political claim founded upon religious belief. The religious Israeli claim to the West Bank on the basis of divine right is, of course, only one of a recurrent practice of grounding a political program upon a religious sanction. There is the jihad of Islam, which consisted not of fighting but in the non-violent propagation of Islam. This is based on the Muslim division of the world into dar al-Islam, the place or possession of Islam, and dar al-harb, the abode of war. And the claim by some Israelis to a God-given right to displace Palestinians is not different in essence from the jurisdiction claimed by medieval Christendom to subjugate pagans, Jews and Muslims. Under Boniface VIII the papacy claimed universal political power in the name of Christ.

According to the Canadian theologian Charles Davis, any attempt to ground upon religious belief a political claim to territory as absolute and irrevocable amounts to an abuse of religious language. "It is a misuse because it does not respect the way religious language is created and functions," writes Davis.2

In the ancient Melanesian societies of the Pacific, what came first in language as absolute and unalterable for example God's (or the deities' or the ancestors') promise of land arose from an undifferentiated experience that did not chalk out differing lines of meaning between politics and religion. Any one with experience of the history of the Pacific Islands will know that the bane of early missionaries was the constant confusion between metaphorical and literal levels of meaning. And this Zionist-like confusion is alive and well in parts of the present-day Pacific. In recent years this has sometimes led to a tragically literalist misunderstanding of the Old Testament. For example, in 1987 the Fijian coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka insisted that the rationale for the overthrow of the Indian-dominated Bavadra government was religious: a covenant existed between the Almighty and the Fijian people. "God gave us this land," said Rabuka. In other words, God did not give it to the Fiji Indians.

Only slowly and gradually has the literal sense been teased out of the luxuriant forest of metaphorical language. Areas in which European colonial enterprise gained similar support from a biblical ideology include the invasion of Latin America from the 15th century, the Dutch settlements in the Cape Colony in South Africa from 1652 and its sequel over the rest of southern Africa until 1900. To this may be added Zionist settler-colonialism on the West Bank after the Six-Day War of 1967.

Despite the submerged literal sense in a tropical foliage of metaphor, a basis in literal meaning, grounded in common human experience, is always presupposed in a set of religious concepts and meanings. Take for example the description "God is our Father". What gives us our notion of "fatherhood"? Though the description is applied to God, originally there was no specifically religious meaning. Our application of the words "God is our Father" is grounded in our experience of the reality of human fatherhood. We extract the elements we want to use and by analogy we apply those elements of meaning to God. There is no such thing as a "proper" concept of divine fatherhood, because we have no "proper" first-hand knowledge of God. God is not a known object but a transcendent reality beyond our apprehension.

Language about the fatherhood of God or God's covenant with such particular peoples as the Jews or Fijians or Boers is derived from a particular social and cultural situation. Its meaning depends upon, and is drawn from, that cultural setting. In the religious use of words we are dealing with a dependent and derivative use of language. Language used religiously is always taken from the sphere of our worldly experience and the immediate meaning of religious language always exists in relation to the world. One cannot speak of religion, says Davis, as providing us through a supposed verbal revelation with information unknown beforehand to human experience and with meaning unformed by human culture.3

So the religious use of the concept of fatherhood has to be done first at the level of human interaction. There is no "revealed" concept of "the father" coming down, as it were, from on high, any more than the ownership of territory as asserted by Zionists about Palestine is a revelation given to a particular people from on high. The religious use of the concept does not give us any elements of meaning that are not found in human society. All the elements of meaning are taken from our knowledge of finite reality, and by extrapolation and analogy are then transferred to our response to transcendent reality. And it is on this misuse of religious language that the basis of the religious Zionist claim ultimately rests: that is, that God or Yahweh commanded their occupation of the whole of the ancient Holy Land and the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians.

Because language used religiously is always taken from the sphere of our worldly experience, the immediate meaning of religious language is always in relation to the world. The language becomes religious when its immediate secular meaning is cancelled or rendered inoperative by some level of meaning that compels one to interpret it as having a deeper meaning and pointing towards mystery.4

Religious language about God, then, is based upon taking elements of literal meaning as created by human culture. This is then changed into metaphors about God's dealings with humans as individuals or as groups. But we may not move the other way and translate religious metaphors into literal propositions about a God-given right to occupy territory. As Davis says, we may take human fatherhood, or kingship, and turn it into a metaphor for our understanding of God. We may not take divine fatherhood, or kingship, and use it as a basis for the literal subjugation of women to men or for the literal right to dispossess Palestinians.5

Ian Ramsey, a former bishop of Durham, has pointed to the role or qualifiers in his analysis of religious language. So, we speak of "our Heavenly Father", "the Father almighty", or "our all-powerful, all-loving Father". But, whatever the device used, in one way or another the literal meaning with its reference to this world is cancelled as literal; "at the same time it is saved as a metaphor referring to transcendent reality".6

An outstanding example of the religious use of political language is the biblical history of Israel. In the Bible, political concepts, words, and images are used to create a particular religious language. Political events are interpreted as actions of God or Yahweh, symbols of divine intervention exodus, covenant, conquest, judges and kingship all these were originally political language. In particular, a "covenant" that designated a particular kind of political association was elevated to receive a religious meaning.

The moral problem that is underlined in the rest of this article is that the biblical record of Yahweh's treatment, not of the Jews but of the indigenous Canaanites and Hittites, is of a god who sanctions genocide. Though the Bible is generally taken as a yardstick of moral excellence, the land traditions of the Bible appear to sanction the maltreatment of the indigenes of Canaan. They seem to be in violation of general ethical principles and criteria of human decency such as is enshrined in contemporary conventions of human rights and international law.

The founder of political Zionism, the German Theodor Herzl, outlined the program of a state for Jews in 1896. The leading Zionists were non-religious or agnostics, and the secular program of Herzl's political Zionism was originally rejected out of hand by virtually all strata of religious Judaism. For his part, Herzl, while speaking of the common binding faith of Judaism, insisted on drawing a line between sacred and secular: "We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples in the same way as we keep our professional army within the confines of their barracks."7

This separation of religion and its vocabulary from politics was not to last. Rethinking the promise of the "land of Canaan" to Abraham and his posterity through the political misuse of religious language has been used by Herzl's successors, religious and secular, to justify the Zionist enterprise. It has been used in the same way by many Christian fundamentalists. So today the most vibrant supporters of Jewish conquest come from the ranks of the religious establishment whose leaders 100 years ago regarded political Zionism as heretical and wrong.

While a longing for "Zion" was present in virtually all periods of Jewish history, a pious yearning for Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon should not be confused with the desire to establish a nation state for Jews in Palestine. It is significant that during the 1800 years before the 19th century there was no concerted effort to resettle in Israel, let alone any attempt to recover a lost independence there. There has always been a voluntary Jewish diaspora, and living in a diaspora had its advantages. Just as the idea of Zion was accepted among Christians as purely figurative, it was also a religious metaphor when taught within the network of rabbinic institutions.8

When General Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem in 1917, making Britain the dominant power in the region, Jewish people numbered from 5 to 10 per cent (38,000 to 85,000) of the whole population of well over half a million people. Of these about half were estimated to be political Zionists. Chaim Weizmann, elected president of the English Zionist Federation earlier that year, quickly sought to have a declaration of support from the British government. In the war cabinet meeting of October 4, Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the cabinet, wrote that he regarded Zionism as "a mischievous political creed" and argued against British support, and said that the project of creating a Jewish state would end by driving out the Arab inhabitants. JH Hertz, the first Zionist sympathiser appointed to the post of chief rabbi, welcomed the reference to the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish inhabitants in the confidential declaration of the war cabinet to US President Woodrow Wilson, saying that such a reference was an affirmation of the basic principles of the Mosaic legislation, "If a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, you shall not [oppress] him".9

The Balfour Declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations (November 1917) viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a "national home" for the Jewish people, "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine". Fewer than 50,000 British Jews settled in Palestine during the first 10 years of the League of Nations Mandate.10

Between 1932 and 1937, 144,000 Jews migrated to Palestine, but Jewish ownership of land still amounted to only 5.7 per cent. By way of response to violence in 1929 and in the mid 1930s, and to a call by the Arab Higher Committee for a strike until Jewish immigration ceased, the Peel royal commission of mid-1937 reported that the mandate was unworkable as it involved two irreconcilables, a Jewish homeland and Palestinian Arab independence. Resorting to Solomonic wisdom, the Peel commission recommended Palestine be partitioned. The plan proposed to give Jews, who owned only 5.7 per cent of the land, some 40 per cent of Palestine, in which the Jewish state would embrace hundreds of Arab villages as well as the Arab bloc in Galilee from which, if necessary, there would be a forcible expulsion of Arabs. The plan rekindled the flames of Arab nationalism, to which the British responded with massive, repressive measures, resulting in 5000 Arab deaths and 15,000 wounded of a population of 1 million.11

Britain, recognising that partition would not work, outlined its goal in the white paper of May 17, 1939: "the establishment within 10 years of an independent Palestine state to which Arabs and Jews share in government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded". The white paper required restrictions on land acquisition and Jewish immigration. Realising that British interests might conflict with Zionist ones, David Ben-Gurion began to activate American Jewry and gain more support from the US.12 President Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt's successor in April 1945, proved to be an ardent supporter of Zionist intentions. He won the double advantage of securing Jewish support while allaying fears that the US might have to bear the brunt of receiving, at America's expense, 300,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi barbarism. Instead, they would go to Palestine. Truman explained to Arab diplomats in late 1945, "I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents".13

On October 4, 1946, Truman sponsored a Zionist map giving 75 per cent of Palestine to the Jews, who then still owned less than 7 per cent. While only 10 Jewish settlements (2000 inhabitants) would come under Arab rule, about 450 Arab villages (700,000 inhabitants) would come under Zionist rule. The flight of the Palestinians is a sombre reason for the extent of the resultant catastrophe. The major Arab towns were emptied of their Arab inhabitants with their assets falling to the Zionists. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated and destroyed. The estimates of the number of Palestinian Arabs displaced in 1948 fall between 700,000 and 800,000. This constituted about 54 per cent of the total Palestinian population of mandated Palestine and has now grown to create a diaspora of some 5 million. One of the best guarded secrets of the early Israeli state is the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages, and the fact that they were completely destroyed helped create the myth that Palestine was virtually an empty country before the Jews entered.14

About 100 Palestinian villages were not destroyed or depopulated, and survive. But over 80 per cent of the lands of those who did not leave their homes have been confiscated since 1948, and are at the exclusive disposal of the Jewish citizens of the state. Some 414,000 inhabitants of 213 villages had become homeless before the expiry of the British Mandate on May 15, 1940.15 Further, Israel's refusal to allow the displaced persons from the 1967 war to return strengthens the judgement that Zionism in its essence required the Jewish supplanting of the indigenous Palestinian population. As for the critical question of land: while before 1948 Jews had bought only 7 per cent of Arab land, the exclusive reserving of lands for Jewish use means that today 92 per cent of the area of the state of Israel is completely closed to non-Jews. But the Zionist conquest from 1967 has led to even further gains.

In November 1988 at Algiers, the Palestine National Council declared that the state of Palestine should exist side by side with the state of Israel. Chairman Yasser Arafat confirmed the Palestine Liberation Organisation's acceptance of Israel, its renunciation of violence, and its willingness to negotiate a peaceful settlement based on UN resolutions. Hamas rejected the Algiers Declaration, regarding it as an act of treason.16

Read literally, the Bible has been the foundation of Israel's post-1967 expansion over villages and lands occupied by Palestinians. The intellectual achievement of Zionism has been the turning of figurative language into a literal "promise" of land and thus a weapon of political legitimacy. This is reflected in the propagandistic claim of Ben-Gurion in 1954 that the Bible is the "Jews' sacrosanct title-deed to Palestine . . . with a genealogy of 3500 years".17 That the Bible provides a literal "title-deed" for the establishment of the state of Israel and its continued dispossession of the indigenous people has become the mainstream theology of the Jewish religious establishment. Zionist circles within fundamentalist Christianity hold a similar belief in Israel's right to pre-empt all other claims to the old land of Palestine, as is evidenced by the statements of US politicians Inhofe and Armey cited above. But here there is a contradiction, for the Christian fundamentalist hopes for the ultimate demise of Judaism. Much of the rationale for the belief in recapturing the whole of Palestine derives from literalist interpretations of particular biblical texts.

The Bible narrates God's promise of Canaan to Abraham and his posterity, and to Moses and his fellow escapees from Egypt. The "promise and preparation" lies between the books of Genesis and Deuteronomy and the "conquest-settlement" in the books of Joshua to Judges. The moral problem posed by such texts when read at face value may easily be seen in its starkness.18

In the biblical narrative, Yahweh promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 12, 6-7). The Exodus theme symbolises God's deliverance of those in bondage, to bring them "to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey . . .". Yahweh confirms Moses as the leader and speeds the people on their way to possess the land of Canaan:When my angel goes in front of you, and brings you to the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanite, the Hivites, and the Jebusites and I will blot them out . . . you shall utterly demolish their gods and break their pillars to pieces. (Exodus 23, 23-4)

Yahweh appointed Joshua to succeed Moses. Numbers 27, 31 brings us back to the war against the Midianites, the killing of every male and of the five kings of Midian. The Israelites captured the warriors of Midian and their little ones, took all their earth, buried all their towns and encampments, retaining all the booty, people and animals. Moses had been particularly aggrieved that they allowed the women to live (Numbers 31. 8-16). He ordered the killing of every male child, and every woman who had slept with a man. Yahweh directed Moses to speak to the Israelites, saying,When you cross over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, destroy all their figured stones, destroy all their images, and demolish all their high places.

The rules for the conduct of war to gain control of the land from the wilderness to Lebanon, and from the Euphrates to the Western Sea (Deuteronomy 11, 24) dictate that if a besieged town does not surrender, the Israelites shall kill all its males, and take as booty the women and children. The narrative, then, presents "ethnic cleansing" as not only legitimate, but as required by the divinity:But as for the towns of these peoples that Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites just as Yahweh your God has commanded . . . (Deuteronomy 20, 16-18)

Moses, having seen the Promised Land, laid hands on his successor Joshua. The first part of the Book of Joshua describes in epic style the conquest of the land, the capture of a few key cities and their conquest in accordance with Yahweh's rules of war. The crossing of the Jordan is followed by the destruction of Jericho. The city and all its inhabitants were to be given over to Yahweh for destruction (Joshua 5, 13-6, 17). When the ravaging troops moved on to Ai at Yahweh's command they encountered a spirited defence of the Hittites and their allies, but the inhabitants of Gibeon, spared the destruction, were destined to become "hewers of wood and drawers of water for all the congregation" (Joshua 9.21).

Thus the metaphor "God is our father" becomes "God is our general" who sanctions slavery and wholesale killing. By modern standards of international law and human rights, the land narratives from Exodus to Joshua mandate war crimes and crimes against humanity. One must also acknowledge that much of the Torah and Deuteronomy in particular contain menacing ideologies as well as xenophobic and militaristic tendencies.

Yet biblical scholars maintain a high regard for the Book of Deuteronomy, assessing it to be a theological book par excellence and the focal point of the religious history of the Old Testament. Nonetheless, however highly one esteems the theological thrust of Deuteronomy, the narrative does require the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants.

In his book The Bible and Colonialism (1997), Michael Prior argues that such narrative traditions as those in Joshua and Deuteronomy have the capacity to "infuse exploitative tendencies in their readers", and have in practice "fuelled virtually every form of militant colonialism emanating from Europe, resulting in the suffering of millions of people, and loss of respect for the Bible".19

The Hebrew slaves who left Egypt invaded a land already occupied, and engaged in systematic pillage and killing. What distinguished the biblical account, whether through the blitzkrieg mode represented in the Book of Joshua, or the more gradual one reflected in the Book of Judges 20 is that it is presented as having not only divine approval, but mandated by the divinity. The Israelites killed in conformity with the directives of God.

This presentation of God as requiring the destruction of others poses problems for anyone who presumes that the conduct of an ethical God will not fall lower than decent, secular behaviour. The commandment that "You shall devour all the peoples that Yahweh your God is giving over to you, showing them no pity" (Deuteronomy 7, 16) is thus seen in a new light in Palestine when one recalls how such texts were used earlier than the period of modern Zionism in support of colonialism in Latin America and Africa, in which the native peoples were seen as the counterparts of the Hittites and the Canaanites.

GEM de Ste Croix, the foremost authority on the history of class politics in the ancient world, notes the unprecedented character of the biblical traditions of divinely mandated ferocity:I do not wish to give the impression that the Romans were habitually the most cruel and ruthless of all ancient imperial powers. I can say that I know of only one people which felt able to assert that it actually had a divine command to exterminate whole populations among those it conquered, namely, Israel. Nowadays Christians, as well as Jews, seldom care to dwell on the merciless ferocity of Jahweh, as revealed not by hostile sources but by the very literature they themselves regard as sacred . . . There is little in pagan literature quite as morally revolting as the stories of the massacres allegedly carried out at Jericho, Ai, and Hazor, of the Amorites and Amelekites all not merely countenanced by Jahweh but strictly ordained by him . . . The Greek and Roman gods could be cruel enough, in the traditions preserved by their worshippers, but at least their devotees did not seek to represent them as prescribing genocide.21

Suspecting the possible impact of biblical narratives on the formation of Israeli youth consciences, the Israeli socio-psychologist Georges Tamarin surveyed the presence of prejudices in the ideology of Israeli youth. He evaluated the degree to which an uncritical teaching of notions of the "chosen people", the "covenant" with Yahweh to possess the land, the superiority of monotheistic religions, and the study of acts of genocide carried out by biblical heroes contributed to the development of prejudice towards Arabs.

Tamarin chose the Book of Joshua, in particular the genocides at Jericho and Makkedah, because of its special position in the Israeli educational system, as national history and as one of the cornerstones of Israel's national mythology. He asked two questions:

* Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?

* Suppose the Israeli army conquers an Arab village in battle. Do you think it would be good or bad to act towards the inhabitants as Joshua did towards the people of Jericho and Makkedah?

Only 20 per cent of the respondents disapproved of Joshua's behaviour, while 62 per cent would disapprove of genocide carried out by the Israeli army.

The figures were quite different when Tamarin substituted a fabricated "Chinese version" of the Book of Joshua, with "General Lin" committing a god-inspired genocide. Seventy-five per cent of the respondents totally disapproved of General Lin's genocide. Tamarin concluded that,The uncritical teaching of the Bible to students too young even if not taught explicitly as a sacred act, but as national history or in a quasi-neutral atmosphere concerning the real or mythological character of its content, no doubt profoundly affects the genesis of prejudices even among non-religious students, in accentuating the negative-hostile character of the strangers.22

In conclusion, the Yahweh depicted in the books between Judges and Deuteronomy is a god whose actions are taught in religious and secular schools in Israel. A modern secular Israeli may not subscribe to Yahweh who commanded the maltreatment/extermination of the original Canaanites and Hittites but still support Israel's expansion into the lands of the indigenous Palestinians. A citizen of Israel does not need to be a religious Jew to endorse the national mythology. Supported by right-wing Christian fundamentalists in the US, the deeds of Israel's national heroes in the Bible have come to non-religious Jews as a means of organising biblical history to provide moral legitimacy for the walling in of indigenous Palestinians.

The state of Israel is part of the present hope of the Jewish people and is of deep concern to almost all Jews. Disregard for its safety and welfare is incompatible with concern for the Jewish people. But concern for the safety of the state of Israel can in no way exclude concern for the Palestinian people, Muslim and Christian, living within Israel and on the West Bank and Gaza. They, too, have a claim on the attention and concern of the world.

David Wetherell is a senior lecturer in history in the school of social and international studies at Deakin University in Geelong.

NOTES

1: Cited in The Melbourne Anglican, November 2002.2: Charles Davis, Religion and the Making of Society: Essays in Social Theology, p114. Davis is emeritus professor of religion at Concordia University, Montreal.3: Ibid p116.4: Ibid.5: Ibid p1196: Ian I Ramsey, Religious Language. An Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases, pp35-102.7:Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, translated by Raphael Patai, p146. 8: Michael Prior, Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry, 1999, p65.9: Ibid p12-13.10: Ibid p15.11: Prior, The Bible and Colonialism, 1997.12: Prior, 1999, p21.13: Khalidi, Walid (ed) 1992 All that Remains, pp48, 50-51.14: Prior, 1999, p.28.15: Khalidi, 1992, ppxix.16: Prior 1999, p37.17: David Ben-Gurion, 1954, p100.18: Prior, 1999, p159.19: Prior, 1997.20: Prior, 1999, p165.21: GEM de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, pp331-2.22: Georges Tamarin, "The influence of ethnic and religious prejudice on moral judgement" in Johan Niezing, The Israeli Dilemma: Essays on a Warfare State, 1973, p.189.

REFERENCESDavis, Charles, 1994, Religion and the Making of Society: Essays in Social Theology (Cambridge University Press).Ben-Gurion, David, 1954, The Birth and Destiny of Israel. Philosophical Library.De Ste Croix, GEM, 1982, The Class Struggle and the Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests. Cornell University Press.Khalidi, Walid (ed.) 1992, All that Remains Institute for Palestine Studies. Prior, Michael, 1997, The Bible and Colonialism, Sheffield Academic Press. 1999, Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry, Routledge.Ramsey, Ian I, 1963, Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases Macmillan.Tamarin, Georges, 1973, "The influence of ethnic and religious prejudice on moral judgement" in Niezing, Johan, The Israeli Dilemma: Essays on a Warfare State, Rotterdam University Press.

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Israel and the G-d of War