Confronting the Bible's
Ethnic Cleansing
In Palestine
The Zionization of the American Media by Edward Said
Confronting the Bible'sEthnic Cleansing In Palestine
12
February, 2002
Orthodox
Jews Mass Protest Against the State of
Germany and the Jews The Role of the Jews in WWI and WWII speech by Benjamin Freedman
The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler. Random House, 1976. 256 pp. Reviewed by Grace Halsell
Israel Can't Hide From Its History Forever by Greg Felton
New York Times Reveals that European-Descended Jews have no Blood line to Abraham
The Jews Are Not A Race! By Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal Excerpt from his book, What Price Israel? (1953)
THE NEW COMPLAINT OF PORTNOY By Israel Shamir March 18, 2001
Introduction of Victor Ostrovsky and Comments on the USS Liberty by Republican Paul N. McCloskey
After 19 years, The Truth at Last? By Robert Fisk The Independent
Gandhi on "The Jews," November 26, 1938:
[The material that follows is taken from the December, 2000, issue of The Link, which is published by Americans for Middle East Understanding. It may be reprinted in part or in full without prior permission, but those who do so should send a copy of the extracted material to: AMEU, 475 Riverside Drive, Room 245, New York, NY 10115-0245.]
About This Issue
Is Yahweh the Great Ethnic-Cleanser? Did He not instruct the Israelites to rid
their Promised Land of its indigenous people?
Few biblical scholars want to wrestle with these questions. Rev. Michael Prior
needs to wrestle with them. He's been to today's Holy Land and has seen today's
variation on biblically sanctioned genocide.
Dr. Prior is Professor of Biblical Studies in the University of Surrey, England,
and visiting professor in Bethlehem University, Palestine. He is a biblical
scholar and author of "Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral
Inquiry" and "The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique."
John F. Mahoney
Executive Director
Confronting the Bible's
Ethnic Cleansing
In Palestine
BY MICHAEL PRIOR, C.M.
It is mid-October 2000; to
date, at least 98 Palestinians and 7 Jews have been killed, and over 3,000,
mostly Palestinians, injured in the Holy Land's most recent un-holiness. That's
the math of it.
It is, however, the morality of it that has engaged me over the past quarter of
a century.
I would have been spared some pain had I not undertaken significant portions of
my postgraduate biblical studies in the land of the Bible. And although the
focus of my engagement was "the biblical past," I could not avoid the
modern social context of the region. As a result, my studying the Bible in the
Land of the Bible provoked perspectives that scarcely would have arisen
elsewhere.
For me, as a boy and young man, politics began and ended in Ireland, an Ireland
obsessed with England. It was much later that I recognized that the history I
absorbed so readily in school was one fabricated by the nationalist
historiographers of a newly independent Ireland, who refracted the totality of
its history through the lens of 19th-century European nationalisms. Although my
Catholic culture also cherished Saint Patrick and the saints and scholars after
him, the real heroes of Ireland's history were those who challenged British
colonialism in Ireland. I had no interest in the politics of any other region -
except that I knew that Communism, wherever, was wrong. Anyhow, the priesthood
beckoned.
My seminary courses on the Old Testament first sensitized me to the social and
political context of theological reflection. We inquired into the real-life
situations of the prophets, and considered the contexts of the Wisdom
Literature. Beyond the narratives of Genesis 1-11 and Exodus, however, I do not
recall much engagement with the Torah. The atrocities recorded in the Book of
Joshua made no particular impression on me. The monarchy period got a generous
airing, noting the link between religious perspectives and changing political
circumstances. But just as I was not sensitive at that stage to the fact that
Irish nationalist historiography had imposed a rigid nationalist framework on
everything that preceded the advent of interest in the nation state, it never
crossed my mind that the biblical narrative also might be a fabrication of a
past, reflecting the distinctive perspective of its later authors.
Prior to the 5-10 June 1967 war, I had no particular interest in the State of
Israel, other than an admiration for Jews having constructed a nation state and
restored a national language. In addition to stimulating my first curiosity in
the Israeli-Arab conflict, Israel's conquest of the West Bank, the Golan
Heights, the Gaza Strip and Sinai brought me "face to face," via TV,
with wider, international political realities. The startling, speedy, and
comprehensive victory of diminutive Israel over its rapacious Arab predators
produced surges of delight in me. And I had no reason to question the
mellifluous mendacity of Abba Eban at the United Nations, delivered in that
urbanity and self-assurance characteristic of Western diplomats, however
fraudulent, claiming that Israel was an innocent victim of Egyptian aggression.
Later that summer in London, I was intrigued by billboards in Golders Green,
with quotations from the Hebrew prophets, assuring readers that those who
trusted in biblical prophecy could not be surprised by Israel's victory. Up to
then, my understanding was that biblical prophecy related to the period of the
prophets, and was not about predicting the future. The prophets were
"forth-tellers" for God, rather than foretellers of future events. I
was intrigued that others thought differently.
I was to learn later, in the 1980s and 1990s, that the 1967 war inaugurated a
new phase in the Zionist conquest of Mandated Palestine, one which brought
theological assertions and biblical interpretations to the very heart of the
ideology that propelled the Israeli conquest and set the pattern for Jewish
settlement. After two more years of theology, ordination, and three years of
postgraduate biblical studies, I made my first visit to Israel-Palestine at
Easter 1972, with a party of postgraduate students from the Pontifical Biblical
Institute in Rome.
Seeing and Believing
The visit offered the first challenge to my favorable predisposition toward
Israel. I was disturbed by the ubiquitous signs of the oppression of the Arabs,
whom later I learned to call Palestinians. I was witnessing some kind of
"institutionalized oppression" - I cannot recall whether 'apartheid'
was part of my vocabulary at the time. The experience must have been profound
since, when the Yom Kippur War broke out in October 1973, my support for Israel
did not match my enthusiasm of 1967. I had no particular interest in the area
for the remainder of the 1970s, but I recall watching on TV the visit of Egypt's
President Sadat to the Israeli Knesset in November 1977, an initiative which
would culminate in a formal peace agreement in Camp David in 1979. Things
changed for me in the 1980s.
In 1981 I went with a party from my university to visit Bir Zeit University in
the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Because the campus was closed by the military
just before our arrival, carefully planned programs had to yield to Palestinian
"ad-hocery." Bir Zeit put a bus at our disposal, and equal numbers of
its and our students constituted a university on wheels. I was profoundly
shocked when I began to see from the inside the reality of land expropriation
and the on-going Jewish settlement of the West Bank. I began to question the
prevailing view that the Israeli occupation was for security reasons, but even
with such obvious evidence I could not bring myself to abandon it.
I spent my 1983-84 sabbatical year at Jerusalem's École Biblique researching
the Pauline Epistles. Again, the day-to-day life in Jerusalem sharpened my
sensitivities. I was beginning to suspect that the Israeli occupation was not
after all for security reasons, but was an expansion toward the achievement of
"Greater Israel," which, I was to learn later, was the goal of even
mainstream Zionism.
One incident in particular alerted me to the religious dimension of the
conflict. On a spring morning in 1984, the Voice of Israel radio reported that
during the night a Jewish terrorist group had been caught attempting to blow up
the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Haram al-Sharif (the Temple
Mount), only a few hundred meters south of the École. Subsequently the
newspapers published a picture of one of those convicted of the offence, wearing
the typical dress of the religious settler movement Gush Emunim. He had the Book
of Psalms in his hand as the judge read out the verdict. That an attempted act
of such enormous international and inter-faith significance sprang from
religious fervor shocked me. Settler Jews performed other acts of terror during
that year, and the name of the overtly racist Rabbi Meir Kahane was seldom off
the headlines.
I can date to that period also voicing my first displeasure at my perception
that the land traditions of the Bible appeared to mandate the genocide of the
indigenes of '"Canaan." At the end of his public lecture in Tantur, I
suggested to Marc Ellis, a young Jewish theologian who was developing a Jewish
Theology of Liberation with strong dependence on the Hebrew prophets, that it
would be no more difficult to construct a Theology of Oppression on the basis of
other biblical traditions, especially those dealing with Israelite origins that
demanded the destruction of other peoples.
Following my sabbatical in 1984, I returned to London where, later that year, a
colleague told me of the plea of Abuna Elias Chacour of Ibillin to pilgrims from
the West to meet the Christian communities, "the Living Stones" of the
land, and not be satisfied with the "dead stones" of archaeological
sites. Soon a group of interested people in London established the ecumenical
trust, Living Stones, which promotes links between Christians in Britain and the
Holy Land, and appointed me Chairman. In 1985 I co-led a study tour to Israel
and the Occupied Territories, and led a group of priests on a "Retreat
through Pilgrimage" in 1987 and made other visits in 1990 and 1991.
In 1991, I participated in an International Peace Walk from Jerusalem to Amman,
and although I did not reach the destination, I gained the acquaintance of
several groups of Israeli soldiers and police, enjoyed detention twice, and
faced into what appeared to be an inevitable spell in prison. Officially, my
crime, in the first instance, was to have trespassed into "a closed
military zone" on the outskirts of Ramallah, and in the second, to have
refused to leave a similarly designated area on the way from Taybeh to Jericho.
The real purpose of such designations was to halt the silent walk of some 30
"peaceniks" from about 15 countries. Our presence was having a
decidedly energizing effect on the Palestinians, who did not dare protest so
forthrightly.
A few hours into walking silently over the Judean hills, before beginning our
descent into the Jordan Valley, we were informed by the military that we were
inside "a military zone." While our negotiators were engaging the
Commanding Officer of the district, we sat on the side of the road and sang
peace songs. I opened with a rendition, in my bel canto Irish-accented Hebrew,
of Psalm 119 (118). My singing of this Passover song of deliverance had an
obviously disturbing effect on the young soldiers "guarding" us.
Formal arrest and several hours' detention in Jericho followed. To the policeman
who informed me that I could make one phone call, I replied that I wished to
speak to the Pope. "I am sorry, it cannot be international." My
comportment during the day-long detention - insisting on the group being fed,
being polite but firm under interrogation, refusing to sign my 'statement' of
incrimination, etc.- left the police in no doubt about whom I considered to be
the criminals.
After a long, wearying day in detention in sun-baked Jericho, we were driven to
what we were assured would be a "prison." This was not good news. The
principal of my college would not be pleased to read: "Sorry I cannot be
there in time for class - am in prison in the Holy Land!" In the event, we
were brought to a police station in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, and even
having refused to sign another declaration, we were released. The peacewalk
experience demonstrated how police, defense forces and the noble discourse of
jurisprudence itself, designed to protect the vulnerable, can legitimize
oppression, something I had experienced already in London while I struggled for
the human rights of gypsies.
It took some time for my experiences to acquire an ideological framework.
Gradually I read more of the modern history of the region. In addition to
bringing a university group in 1992, I spent August in the Ècole Biblique, and
while there interviewed prominent Palestinians, including the Latin Patriarch of
Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Timotheos, the Anglican
Bishop Samir Kafity, Canon Naim Ateek, and the Vice-President of Bir Zeit
University, Dr. Gabi Baramki.
I made three visits in 1993, one at Easter to prepare the Cumberland Lodge
Conference on Christians in the Holy Land, one for study in August, and the
third to bring a group of students. Although my academic concentration in that
period was on the scene of Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4.16-30), my
growing unease about the link between biblical spirituality and oppression
stimulated me to examine the land traditions of the Bible, and so I began to
read the narrative systematically with that theme in mind.
Yahweh and Ethnic Cleansing
What struck me most about the biblical narrative was that the divine promise of
land was integrally linked with the mandate to exterminate the indigenous
peoples, and I had to wrestle with my perception that those traditions were
inherently oppressive and morally reprehensible. Even the Exodus narrative was
problematic. While it portrays Yahweh as having compassion on the misery of his
people, and as willing to deliver them from the Egyptians and bring them to a
land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3.7-8), that was only part of the
picture. Although the reading of Exodus 3, both in the Christian liturgy and in
the classical texts of liberation theologies, halts abruptly in the middle of
verse 8 at the description of the land as one "flowing with milk and
honey," the biblical text itself continues, "to the country of the
Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the
Jebusites." Manifestly, the promised land, flowing with milk and honey, had
no lack of indigenous peoples, and, according to the narrative, would soon flow
with blood:
When my angel goes in front of you, and brings you to the Amorites, the
Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I
blot them out, you shall not bow down to their gods, or worship them, or follow
their practices, but you shall utterly demolish them and break their pillars in
pieces (Exodus 23.23-24).
Matters got worse in the narrative of the Book of Deuteronomy. After the King of
Heshbon refused passage to the Israelites, Yahweh gave him over to the
Israelites who captured and utterly destroyed all the cities, killing all the
men, women, and children (Deuteronomy 2.33-34). The fate of the King of Bashan
was no better (3.3). Yahweh's role was central:
When Yahweh your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and
occupy, and he clears away many nations before you - the Hittites, the
Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites...and
when Yahweh your God gives them over to you...you must utterly destroy
them...Show them no mercy...For you are a people holy to Yahweh your God; Yahweh
your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his
treasured possession (Deuteronomy 7.1-11; see also 9.1-5; 11.8-9, 23, 31-32).
And again, from the mouth of Moses:
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, so that
they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their
gods, and you thus sin against Yahweh your God (Deuteronomy 20.16-18).
It was some shock to realize that the narrative presents "ethnic
cleansing" as not only legitimate, but as required by the deity. The book
ends with Moses's sight of the promised land before he dies (34.1-3). Although
Moses was unequalled in his deeds, he left a worthy successor, Joshua, who,
after Moses had lain his hands on him, was full of the spirit of wisdom
(34.4-12). So much for the preparation for entry into the Promised Land.
The first part of the Book of Joshua (chapters 2-12) describes the conquest of a
few key cities, and their fate in accordance with the laws of the Holy War. Even
when the Gibeonites were to be spared, the Israelite elders complained at the
lapse in fidelity to the mandate to destroy all the inhabitants of the land
(9.21-27). Joshua took Makkedah, utterly destroying every person in it (10.28).
A similar fate befell other cities (10.29-39): everything that breathed was
destroyed, as Yahweh commanded (10.40-43). Joshua utterly destroyed the
inhabitants of the cities of the north as well (11.1-23). Yahweh gave to Israel
all the land that he swore to their ancestors he would give them (21.43-45). The
legendary achievements of Yahweh through the agencies of Moses, Aaron, and
Joshua are kept before the Israelites even in their prayers: "You brought a
vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it" (Psalm 80.8;
see also Psalms 78.54-55; 105.44).
By modern standards of international law and human rights, what these biblical
narratives mandate are "war crimes" and "crimes against
humanity." While readers might seek refuge in the claim that the problem
lies with the predispositions of the modern reader, rather than with the text
itself, one could not escape so easily. One must acknowledge that much of the
Torah, and the Book of Deuteronomy in particular, contains menacing ideologies
and racist, xenophobic and militaristic tendencies. The implications of the
existence of dubious moral dispositions, presented as mandated by the divinity,
within a book which is canonized as Sacred Scripture, invited the most serious
investigation. Was there a way of reading the traditions which could rescue the
Bible from being a blunt instrument of oppression, and acquit God of the charge
of being the Great Ethnic-Cleanser?
In that August of 1994, the École library had just received a Festschrift
consisting of studies in Deuteronomy. In addition to articles covering the
customary source, historical-critical, and literary discussions, it contained
one by F.E. Deist, with the intriguing title, "The Dangers of
Deuteronomy," which discussed the role of that book in support of
apartheid.1 It dealt with the text from the perspective of its reception
history, especially within the ideology of an emerging Afrikaner nationalism.
During that month I also read A.G. Lamadrid's discussion of the role of the
Bible and Christian theology in the Iberian conquest of Latin America.2 The
problem, then, went beyond academic reflection on the interpretation of ancient
documents.
Somebody must have addressed the moral question before, I presumed. Back in
Jerusalem in August 1995, I realized that this was not the case. Even though
Gerhard von Rad lamented in 1943 that no thorough investigation of "the
land" had been made, no serious study of the topic was undertaken for
another 30 years. Even W.D. Davies acknowledged later that he had written his
seminal work "The Gospel and the Land" at the request of friends in
Jerusalem who, just before the war in 1967, had urged his support for the cause
of Israel. Moreover, he confessed that he wrote both his 1982 "The
Territorial Dimensions of Judaism" under the direct impact of that war, and
its 1991 updated version because of the mounting need to understand the theme in
the light of events in the Middle East, culminating in the Gulf War and its
aftermath. I was intrigued by the frankness with which Davies publicized his
hermeneutical key: "Here I have concentrated on what in my judgment must be
the beginning for an understanding of this conflict: the sympathetic attempt to
comprehend the Jewish tradition."3
While Davies considers "the land" from virtually every other
conceivable perspective, little attention is given to broadly moral and human
rights issues. In particular, he excludes from his concern, "What happens
when the understanding of the Promised Land in Judaism conflicts with the claims
of the traditions and occupancy of its other peoples?" He excused himself
by saying that to engage that issue would demand another volume, without
indicating his intention of embarking upon such an enterprise. I wondered
whether Davies would have been equally sanguine had white, Anglo-Saxon
Protestants, or even white Catholics of European provenance been among the
displaced people who paid the price for the prize of Zionism. Reflecting a
somewhat elastic moral sense, Davies, although perturbed by the aftermath of the
1967 conquest, took the establishment of the State of Israel in his stride.
Showing no concern for the foundational injustice done to the Palestinians in
1948, Davies wrote as if there were later a moral equivalence between the
dispossessed Palestinians and the dispossessing Zionists. The rights of the
rapist and the victim were finely balanced.
Walter Brueggemann's "The Land" brought me no further. While he saw
land as perhaps "the central theme" of biblical faith, he bypassed the
treatment to be meted out to the indigenous inhabitants, affirming, "What
is asked is not courage to destroy enemies, but courage to keep Torah,"
avoiding the fact that "keeping Torah" in this context demanded
accepting its xenophobic and destructive militarism. By 1994, however,
Brueggemann was less sanguine, noting that while the scholastic community had
provided "rich and suggestive studies on the 'land theme' in the
Bible...they characteristically stop before they get to the hard part,
contemporary issues of land in the Holy Land." 4
It was beginning to dawn on me that much biblical investigation - especially
that concentration on the past which is typical of the historical-critical
method - was quite indifferent to moral considerations. Indeed, it was becoming
clear that the discipline of biblical studies over the last hundred years
reflected the Euro-centric perspectives of virtually all Western historiography
and had contributed significantly to the oppression of native peoples. The
benevolent interpretation of biblical traditions which advocate atrocities and
war crimes had given solace to those bent on the exploitation of new lands at
the expense of native peoples. While the behavior of communities and nation
states is complex, and is never the result of one element of motivation, there
is abundant evidence that the Bible has been, and still is for some, the idea
that redeems the conquest of the earth. This was particularly true in the case
of the Arabs of Palestine, in whose country I had reached these conclusions as I
studied the Bible.
By the autumn of 1995 I was well into a book on the subject, and in November I
went to discuss with Sheffield Academic Press a draft MS on "The Bible and
Zionism." The editor, apprehensive at my concentration on Zionism,
persuaded me to use three case studies. The task ahead, then, would require
further immersion in the histories of Latin America, South Africa, and Israel,
as well as a more detailed study of the biblical narrative and its
interpretation in the hands of the biblical academy.
Having had my moral being sensitized by the biblical mandate to commit genocide,
I was amazed that scholars had a high esteem for the Book of Deuteronomy.
Indeed, commentators conventionally assess it to be a theological book par
excellence, and the focal point of the religious history of the Old Testament.
In the Nov. 14, 1995 Lattey Lecture in Cambridge University, Professor Norbert
Lohfink argued that it provides a model of an utopian society in which there
would be no poor.5 In my role as the formal proposer of a vote of thanks - I was
the chairperson of the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain - I
invited him to consider whether, in the light of that book's insistence on a
mandate to commit genocide, the utopian society would be possible only after the
invading Israelites had wiped out the indigenous inhabitants. The protocol of
the Lattey Lecture left the last word with me, and subsequently I was given a
second word, being invited to deliver the 1997 Lattey Lecture, for which I chose
the title, "A Land flowing with Milk, Honey, and People."6
O Little Bantustan of
Bethlehem
The final revision of my study on the relation between the Bible and colonialism
was undertaken in 1996-97 while I was Visiting Professor in Bethlehem University
and Scholar-in-Residence in Tantur Ecumenical Institute, Jerusalem. My context
was a persistent reminder of the degradation and oppression which colonizing
enterprises inflict on their indigenes. I also became more aware of the
collusion of Western scholarship in the enterprise.
Working against a background of bullet fire, and in the shadow of tanks, added a
certain intensity to my research. Several bullets landed on the flat roof of
Tantur on 25-26 September 1996. Two Palestinians, one a graduate of the
University, were killed in Bethlehem, and many more, Palestinians and Israeli
soldiers, were killed in the disturbances elsewhere in the West Bank. However,
with no bullets flying in Jerusalem on the 26th, I was able to deliver my
advertised public lecture in the Swedish Christian Study Center, entitled
"Does the God of the Bible sanction Ethnic Cleansing?" By mid-December
I was able to send the MS of "The Bible and Colonialism" to Sheffield
Academic Press.
I preached at the 1996 Christmas Midnight Mass in Bethlehem University, presided
over by Msgr. Montezemolo, the Holy See's Apostolic Delegate, a key player in
the signing of the Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of
Israel on 30 December 1993. I reflected with the congregation that,
notwithstanding the Christmas rhetoric about God's Glory in the Highest Heaven
and Peace on Earth, the reality of Bethlehem brought one down to earth rather
quickly. I assured them that passing by the checkpoint between Bethlehem and
Jerusalem twice a day made me boil with anger at the humiliation which the
colonizing enterprise of Zionism had inflicted on the people of the region. I
suggested that the Christmas narratives portray the ordinary people as the
heroes and the rulers as the anti-heroes, as if assuring believers that the
mighty will be cast down, and that God is working for the oppressed today. I
would meet His Excellency again soon.
On 30 December, I listened to Msgr. Montezemolo lecture in Notre Dame on the
third anniversary of the Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and Israel.
The audience was composed exclusively of expatriate Christians and Israeli Jews,
with not a Palestinian in sight.
Well into the question time, I violated the somewhat sycophantic atmosphere:
"I had expected that the Agreement would have given the Holy See some
leverage in putting pressure on Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians, if only on
the matter of freedom to worship in Jerusalem - Palestinians have been forbidden
entry into even East Jerusalem, whether on Friday or Sunday, since March
1993."
His Excellency replied rhetorically, "Do you not think that the Holy See is
doing all it can?" At the reception afterwards, a certain Ambassador Gilboa,
one of the Israeli architects of the Agreement, berated me in a most aggressive
fashion for my question. Rather than assuming the posture of a culprit, I took
the attack to him on the matter of the Jews having "kicked out" the
Palestinians in 1948. "No, they were not kicked out," he, who was a
soldier at the time, insisted. "In fact helicop ters dropped leaflets on
the Arab towns, beseeching the inhabitants to stay put, etc."
I told him I did not believe him, and cited even the Israeli revisionist
historiographer, Benny Morris, whom he dismissed as a compulsive
attention-seeker. It was obvious all round the room that a not insignificant
altercation was taking place. In the hope of discouraging him from trying to
stifle the truth in the future, I assured him that he should have remained a
soldier, because he had the manners of a "corner-boy," and not what I
expected from a diplomat. I went home righteous.
Academic life rolled on. My 28 Feb. 1997 lecture on "The Bible and
Zionism" seemed to perplex several of the students of Bethlehem Bible
College. Most of the questions reflected a literalist understanding of the
Bible, and I struggled to convey the impression that there were forms of
discourse other than history.
Having visited the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron as a gesture of
solidarity on 6 March, I returned home for the Tantur public lecture on
"The Future of Religious Zionism" by the Jewish philosopher, Professor
David Hartman. It was an eventful occasion. Hartman gave a dazzling exegesis on
the theme of covenant, from the Bible through the Rabbis, to Zionism. My journal
takes the matter up from the second half of his talk, devoted to questions:
I made the fourth intervention, to the effect that in being brought through the
stages of understanding of the covenant, from the Bible to Rabbinic Judaism, I
was enchanted, and much appreciative. However, I was shocked to hear Zionism
described as "the high point of covenantal spirituality." Zionism, as
I saw it, both in its rhetoric and in its practice, was not an ideology of
sharing, but one of displacing. I was shocked, therefore, that what others might
see as an example of 19th-century colonial plunder was being clothed in the
garment of spirituality.
Somewhat shaken, Professor Hartman thanked me for my question, and set about
putting the historical record straight. The real problem was that the Arabs had
not welcomed Jews back to their homeland. Moreover, the displacement of the
Arabs was never intended, but was forced on the Zionist leadership by the attack
of the Arab armies in 1948. Nevertheless, great developments in history
sometimes require initial destruction: consider how the USA had defeated
totalitarianism, although this was preceded by the displacement of the Indians.
On the following day, in the discussion time after my final session of teaching
on "Jesus the Liberator" in Tantur, one of the Continuing Education
students brought the discussion back to the previous day's deliberations. He was
very embarrassed by my attack on "that holy man."
There was a particularly lively exchange with several getting into the
discussion. A second student said that he was delighted with my question
yesterday and was sure that it represented the disquiet of many of the group. A
third responded enthusiastically to my liberation ethic, saying that it
disturbed him, but he had to cope with the disturbance. An American priest came
to me afterwards, saying how much he appreciated my courage in speaking
yesterday, and on a previous occasion, etc. His enthusiasm was not shared by
everyone. After the class, an advertising notice appeared on the board from the
overseer of the Scholar's Colloquium. It read, "Dr. Michael Prior presents
a largish paper, 'Zionism: from the Secular to the Sacred,' which is a chapter
from a book he is in the process of writing." The next paragraph read:
Zionism is a subject on which there are hot opinions - not least from the author
himself. Some have suggested to me that this disunity is a reason why we should
not discuss such matters at all. I believe the opposite: the quality of hot
opinions is best tested in a scholarly discussion, where they must be supported
by evidence and good argument. One can even learn something. Welcome!
The Swedish New Testament scholar, Bengt Holmberg, chaired the Colloquium.
The first scholar to respond to my paper, a U.S. Catholic veteran of the
Jewish-Christian dialogue, did so in a decidedly aggressive manner, accusing me
of disloyalty to the Church, etc.
The second was long in praise.
The third intimated that there was nothing new in the paper, and rambled on
about the Zionists' intentions to bring benefits to the indigenous population,
etc. Losing patience, I asked him to produce evidence for his claims, adding
that not only was there not such evidence, but the evidence there was showed
that the Zionist ideologues were virtually at one in their determination to rid
the land of Arabs.
A fourth scholar, a Dutch Protestant veteran of the Jewish-Christian dialogue,
chastised me for my audacity in addressing the question at all, insisting that I
should be silent, because I was an outsider and a Christian.
I rose to the challenge. Was I understanding him to say that, having seen the
distress of the Palestinian people for myself, I should now not comment on it?
Was he asking me to deny my experience, or merely to mute my critique? I assured
the Colloquium that as a biblical scholar, and an ongoing witness to what
transpired in the region, I considered it an obligation to protest what was
going on. Once again, the admiring remarks were made later, in private.
The proofs of "The Bible and Colonialism" arrived on Good Friday. I
got my first taste of teargas in the vicinity of Rachel's Tomb on my way to
Easter Sunday Mass at St. Catherine's in Bethlehem. On 3 April, I delivered the
Tantur public lecture, "The Moral Problem of the Bible's Land
Traditions,'" followed by questions, both appreciative and hostile.
Uniquely for the series, the lecture was not advertised in the Jerusalem Post.
In dealing with a trilogy of hostile questions I availed of the opportunity to
say that I considered Zionism to be one of the most pernicious ideologies of the
20th century, particularly evil because of its essential link with religious
values.
Stars from the West studded the sky over Bethlehem for the celebrations of
Tantur's 25th birthday (25-28 May 1997). Under the light of the plainly visible
Hale-Bopp comet, a frail Teddy Kollek was introduced at the opening ceremony as
though he were the founder of the Institute. A choir from the USA sang, one song
in Hebrew. Palestinian faces, not least that of Afif Safieh, the Palestinian
Delegate to the UK and the Holy See, looked decidedly out of joint throughout
the opening festivities. But the Palestinians were not altogether forgotten,
being thanked profusely for their work in the kitchen and around the grounds.
Moreover, for the lecture on "Christians of the Holy Land" which was
given on May 27, prominent Palestinians were invited to speak from the floor.
Although the lecture was billed to be presented by a distinguished expatriate
scholar "with local presenters," in fact the Palestinian savants had
been invited only to the audience floor. Having excused himself from dealing
with the political context, the lecturer delivered an urbane, accomplished
historical perspective.
The token Palestinians were invited to speak from the floor, first Naim Ateek,
then Mitri Raheb, and then Kevork Hintlian. After two rabbis had their say, also
from the floor, I was allowed to speak, wishing to make two points: that my
experience with the Palestinians had impressed upon me their unity, rather than
their diversity, and, secondly, that the Jewish-Christian dialogue had been
hijacked by a Zionist agenda. After one more sentence had escaped from my mouth
the Chair stopped me short. I had broken the Solemn Silence. This was the third
time that year I had been prevented from speaking in public. I paused, producing
a most uncomfortable silence, thanked him, and sat down.
Saturday 31 May, 1997 being the 28th anniversary of my ordination, I determined
to do something different. Since it was also the Feast of the Visitation, I
decided that I would go to Ein Karem, the traditional site of Mary's visit to
her cousin Elizabeth. But on the way, I would call at Jabal Abu Ghneim, the hill
opposite Tantur, which, despite UN condemnation, was being prepared for an
Israeli settlement. The teeth of the high-tech machinery had cut into the rock,
having chewed up thousands of trees. Joseph Conrad's phrase, "the
relentless progress of our race," kept coming at me.
On the way to Ein Karem, I visited Mount Herzl to see the grave of the founder
of Zionism. Knowing that I would also visit the grave of Yitzhak Rabin, I was
struck by the irony of the situation. Theodor Herzl was sure that Jews could
survive only in their own nation state. Nevertheless, he died a natural death in
Europe, and was re-interred in the new state in 1949, while Prime Minister
Rabin, born in Palestine, was gunned down by a Jewish religious zealot in what
was intended to be the sole haven for Jews.
Back in England
I returned to London in July 1997. By December, "The Bible and
Colonialism" and "Western Scholarship and the History of
Palestine" were hot off the press. In "The Bible and Colonialism"
I promised that I would discuss elsewhere the more theological aspects of
Zionism, and, while still in Jerusalem in 1997, I had laid out my plans for
writing the book I had really wanted to write some years earlier.
I submitted a draft MS to a distinguished publisher in November 1997, and even
though the anonymous reader found it to be "a brilliant book which must be
published," the press declined, because, I was informed orally, the press
had "a very strong Jewish list," and could not offend its Jewish
contributors and readers. While an American publishing company judged it to be
"a prodigious achievement of historical and theological investigation"
and "a very important work," it deemed that it would not really suit
its publishing program. Routledge "bit the bullet," publishing it
under the title "Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry."7
On the basis of his having read my "The Bible and Colonialism,"
Professor Heikki Räisänen of the University of Helsinki invited me to address
the most prestigious of the international biblical conferences, the Society of
Biblical Literature International Conference (Helsinki-Lahti, 16-22 July 1999)
on the subject, "The Bible and Zionism." The session at which I was
invited to speak dealt with '"Reception History and Moral Criticism of the
Bible," and I was preceded by Professors Robert Jewett (USA) and David
Clines (UK) on aspects of Paul and Job, respectively.
When my hour came, I invited biblical scholarship not to maintain an academic
detachment from significant engagement in contemporary issues. I noted that
"the view that the Bible provides the title-deed for the establishment of
the State of Israel and for its policies since 1948 is so pervasive even within
mainstream Christian theology and university biblical studies, that the very
attempt to raise the issue is sure to elicit opposition. The disfavor usually
took the form of personal abuse, and the intimidation of publishers."
In the light of what happened next I might have added that one is seldom honored
by having the substantive issues addressed in the usual way.
After I had delivered my 25-minute lecture the official respondent, who had my
paper a month in advance, said he would bypass the usual niceties ("A very
fine paper, etc."), and got down to his objections, which were so standard
as not to deserve my refutation. Instead I suggested to the Chair to open up the
discussion.
Some five Israelis in turn took up the challenge. "Jews have always longed
for the land." "They never intended displacing anyone." "The
land was empty - almost." "I was wrong historically: Herzl never
intended dislocating the Arabs."
I interrupted, quoting Herzl's 12 June 1895 diary entry - in the original German
for good measure - about his endeavor to expel the poor population, etc.
I was berated for having raised a '"political matter" in an academic
conference: "See what can happen when one abandons the historical critical
method!" Another Israeli professor began by saying, "I am very pleased
to have been here this morning," but added, "because I understand
better now how anti-Semitism can present itself as anti-Zionism, all under the
guise of academic scholarship." A cabal, including at least one Israeli and
a well-known scholar from Germany, clapped. The Chair had to restore order.
In the course of my "defense" I reiterated that it was the
displacement of another people that raised the moral problematic for me. I had
witnessed the effects of the oppression rather more than even most of the
audience. Having been given the last word, I professed that until Israelis
acknowledge their having displaced another people and make some reparation and
accommodation, there would be no future for the state.
In the course of the following day several who had attended expressed their
appreciation, albeit in private. A Finnish scholar congratulated me on having
raised a vital issue, adding, "The way you were received added sharpness to
your argument." A distinguished biblical scholar from Germany, who was very
distressed by my having raised the question, later pleaded that his people were
responsible for killing six million Jews.
The Importance of the Issue
I have learned that, distinctively in the case of Zionist colonisation, a
determined effort was made to rid the terrain altogether of the native
population, since their presence in any number would frustrate the grand design
of establishing a Jewish state. The necessity of removing the Arabs was
recognised from the beginning of the Zionist enterprise - and advocated by all
major Zionist ideologues from Theodor Herzl to Ehud Barak - and was meticulously
planned and executed in 1948 and 1967. In their determination to present an
unblemished record of the Zionist achievement, the fabricators of propagandistic
Zionist history are among the most accomplished practitioners of the strange
craft of source-doctoring, rewriting not only their history, but the documents
upon which such a history was based. The propagandistic intent was to hide
things said and done, and to bequeath to posterity only a sanitized version of
the past.
In any case, the argument for the compelling need of Jews to settle in a Jewish
state does not constitute a right to displace an indigenous population. And even
if it had never been intended from the start, which it most certainly was, the
moral problematic arises most acutely precisely from the fact that Zionism has
wreaked havoc on the indigenous population, and not a little inconvenience on
several surrounding states. Nor can the Shoah (Holocaust) be appealed to
credibly to justify the destruction of an innocent third party. It is a dubious
moral principle to regard the barbaric treatment of Jews by the Third Reich as
constituting a right to establish a Jewish state at the expense of an innocent
third party. Surely the victims of Auschwitz would not have approved.
My study of the Bible in the Land of the Bible brought me face to face with the
turbulence of Israel-Palestine and raised questions not only about the link
between biblical interpretation and colonial exploitation but about the nature
of the biblical narrative itself. An academic interest became a consuming moral
imperative.
Why should the State of Israel, any more than any other state, be such a
challenge to morality? The first reason, I suggest, derives from the general
moral question attendant upon the forcible displacement of an indigenous people
from its homeland. The second springs from the unique place that the land has in
the Sacred Scriptures of both Jews and Christians, and the significance attached
to it as the location of the state for Jews. In addition, there is the positive
assessment of the State of Israel on the part of the majority of religious Jews
of various categories, as well as in certain Christian ecclesial and theological
circles.
As a biblical scholar, I have been shocked to discover that the only plausible
validation for the displacement of the Palestinians derived from a naïve
interpretation of the Bible, and that in many Church and academic parties - and
not only the "fundamentalist" wing - biblical literalism swept away
any concerns deriving from considerations of morality. I contend that fidelity
to the literary genre of the biblical traditions and respect for the evidence
provided mainly by archaeological investigation demands a rejection of such
simplistic readings of the biblical narratives of land, and of the prophetic
oracles of restoration.
And to these academic perspectives, one must add one of faith, namely, that God
is fundamentally moral, and, for those espousing the Christian vision, loves all
his people, irrespective of race, etc.
Rather than relate the establishment of the State of Israel to the Shoah, I have
been led gradually to situate Zionism within the category of xenophobic
imperialism, so characteristic of the major European powers towards the end of
the 19th century. I consider the espousal of it by a majority of Jews world-wide
to mark the nadir of Jewish morality. Because I trust in a God before whom
tyranny ultimately dissolves, and because one learns something from history, I
have no doubt that a future generation of diaspora and Israeli Jews will
repudiate its presumptions, and repent for the injustices perpetrated on the
Palestinians by their fathers and grandfathers.
While I regret the descent of Judaism into the embrace of Zionism, there is
little I can do about it. However, the degree to which a thoroughly Zionised
Judaism infects the so-called Jewish-Christian dialogue - which I prefer to
designate "a monologue in two voices" - is a matter of grave concern.
I am perturbed that concurrence with a Zionist reading of Jewish history - that
Jews everywhere, and at all times, wanted to re-establish a nation state in
Palestine (with no concern for the indigenous population), etc.- is virtually a
component of the credo of the dialogue. In that fabricated scenario, the
planned, and systematically executed dislocation of the Palestinian population,
far from incurring the wrath of post-colonial liberalism, becomes an object of
honor, and even religious significance. While most Jews world-wide - there are
notable exceptions-allow themselves to be deluded by such perspectives, I see no
reason why Christians should.
God the Ethnic Cleanser?
Often I am asked: How do you as a Catholic priest and biblical scholar explain
to an ordinary believer the Yahweh-sanctioned ethnic-cleansing mandated in some
of the narrative of the Old Testament? Is not this also the Word of God? Such
questions have forced themselves on me in a particular way as a result of my
contact with the Holy Land. Let me indicate some of my perspectives. But first,
let us look at the stakes.
Recently a full-page advertisement in the 10 September 2000 New York Times,
signed by over 150 Jewish scholars and leaders, stated:
Christians can respect the claim of the Jewish people upon the land of Israel.
The most important event for Jews since the Holocaust has been the
reestablishment of a Jewish state in the Promised Land. As members of a
biblically-based religion, Christians appreciate that Israel was promised - and
given - to Jews as the physical center of the covenant between them and God.
Many Christians support the State of Israel for reasons far more profound than
mere politics. As Jews, we applaud this support.
Here we see clothed in the garment of piety the Zionist enterprise, which was
determined to create a state for Jews at the expense of the indigenous Arab
people - a product of the nationalistic and imperialistic spirit of 19th-century
Europe.
Whatever pangs of conscience one might have about the expulsion of a million
Palestinian Arabs, and the destruction of their villages to ensure they would
not return, the Bible can salve it. Zionism, a program originally despised by
both wings of Judaism, Orthodox and Reform, as being anti-religious (by the
Orthodox) and contrary to the universal mission of Judaism (by Reform Jewry), is
now at the core of the Jewish credo. And credulous Christians allow themselves
to be sucked into the vortex. Only when Zionism is being evaluated are normal
rules of morality suspended; only here is ethnic-cleansing applauded by the
religious spirit.
Many theologians on seeing how the revered sacred text has been used as an
instrument of oppression seek refuge in the view that it is the misuse of the
Bible, rather than the text itself which is the problem. The blame is shifted
from the non-problematic biblical text to the perverse predispositions of the
interpreter.
This "solution" evades the problem. It must be acknowledged that
several traditions within the Bible lend themselves to oppressive
interpretations and applications, precisely because of their inherently
oppressive nature.
Towards a Moral Reading of
the Bible
My approach is set forth in a chapter of my book, "The Bible and
Colonialism. A Moral Critique."8 I begin by stressing how important it is
to acknowledge the existence of texts of unsurpassed violence within Sacred
Scripture, and to recognise them to be an affront to moral sensitivities. The
problem is not only theoretical. In addition to being morally reprehensible
texts, some have fuelled terrible injustices through colonialist enterprises.
The Holy War traditions of the Old Testament pose an especially difficult moral
problem. In addition to portraying God as one who cherishes the slaughter of his
created ones, they acquit the killer of moral responsibility for his
destruction, presenting it as a religious obligation.
Every effort must be made to rescue the Bible from being a blunt instrument in
the oppression of one people by another. If a naïve interpretation leads to
such unacceptable conclusions, what kind of exegesis can rescue it?
Some exegetes note that Christians read the Old Testament in the light of the
life and paschal mystery of Christ. In such a perspective, the writings of the
Old Testament contain certain "imperfect and provisional" elements,
which the divine pedagogy could not eliminate right away. The Bible, then,
reflects a considerable moral development, which finds its completion in the New
Testament. I do not find this proposal satisfactory.
The attempts of the Fathers of the Church to eliminate the scandal caused by
particular texts of the Bible do little for me. The allegorical presentation of
Joshua leading the people into the land of Canaan as a type of Christ, who leads
Christians into the true promised land does not impress.
The Catholic Church deals with the embarrassment of having divinely mandated
ethnic cleansing in the biblical narrative by either excluding it altogether
from public use, or excising the most offensive verses. The disjuncture between
this censoring of the Word of God and the insistence on the divine provenance of
the whole of the Scriptures has not been satisfactorily resolved.
There is another method which is more amenable to modern sensibilities, one
which takes seriously the literary forms of the materials, the circumstances of
their composition, and relevant non-literary evidence. According to this view,
the fundamental tenet of the Protestant Reformation that the Bible can be
understood in a straightforward way must be abandoned. Narratives purporting to
describe the past are not necessarily accurate records of it. One must respect
the distinctive literary forms within the biblical narrative - legend,
fabricated myths of the past, prophecy and apocalyptic, etc.
The relevant biblical narratives of the past are not simple history, but reflect
the religious and political ideologies of their much later authors. It is now
part of the scholarly consensus that the patriarchal narratives of Genesis do
not record events of an alleged patriarchal period, but are retrojections into a
past about which the writers knew little, reflecting the author's intentions at
the later period of composition. It is naïve, then, to cleave to the view that
God made the promise of progeny and land to Abraham after the fashion indicated
in Genesis 15.
The Exodus narrative poses particular difficulties for any reader who is neither
naïve nor amoral. It is the entrance (Eisodus) into the land of milk and honey
which keeps the hope of the wandering Israelites alive. It is high time that
readers read the narrative with sensitivity to the innocent third-party about to
be exterminated, that is, "with the eyes of the Canaanites."
Moreover, there is virtual unanimity among scholars that the model of tribal
conquest as narrated in Joshua 1-12 is unsustainable. Leaving aside the witness
of the Bible, we have no evidence that there was a Hebrew conquest. Evidence
from archaeology, extra-biblical literature, etc., points in an altogether
different direction from that propounded by Joshua 1-12. It suggests a sequence
of periods marked by a gradual and peaceful coalescence of disparate peoples
into a group of highland dwellers whose achievement of a new sense of unity
culminated only with the entry of the Assyrian administration. The Iron I Age
settlements on the central hills of Palestine, from which the later kingdom of
Israel developed, reflect continuity with Canaanite culture, and repudiate any
ethnic distinction between "Canaanites" and "Israelites."
Israel's origins, then, were within Canaan, not outside it. There was neither
invasion from outside, nor revolution within.
A historiography of Israelite origins based solely, or primarily on the biblical
narratives is an artificial construct influenced by certain religious
motivations obtaining at a time long post-dating any verifiable evidence of
events. Accordingly, pace the 150 plus Jewish scholars and rabbis who signed The
New York Times ad, the biblical narrative is not sufficient to transform
barbarism into piety.
Conclusion
Western theological scholarship, while strong in its critique of repressive
regimes elsewhere, gives a wide berth to Zionism. Indeed a moral critique of its
impact on the Palestinians is ruled out.
I try to break the silence in my "The Bible and Colonialism" and
"Zionism and the State of Israel." The former explores the moral
question of the impact which colonialist enterprises, fueled by the biblical
paradigm, have had on the indigenous populations in general, while the latter
deals with the impact of Zionism on the Palestinians. They are explorations into
terrain virtually devoid of inquirers, which attempt to map out some of the
contours of that terrain. They subject the land traditions of the Bible to an
evaluation which derives from general ethical principles and criteria of human
decency, such as are enshrined in conventions of human rights and international
law.
Such an enterprise is necessary. When people are dispossessed, dispersed and
humiliated, not only with alleged divine support, but at the alleged express
command of God, one's moral self recoils in horror. Any association of God with
the destruction of people must be subjected to an ethical analysis. The obvious
contradiction between what some claim to be God's will and ordinary civilized,
decent behavior poses the question as to whether God is a chauvinistic,
nationalistic and militaristic xenophobe. It also poses the problem of biblical
prophecy finding its fulfillment in what even unbelievers would regard as a form
of "ethnic cleansing."
I consider that biblical studies and theology should deal with the real
conditions of people's lives, and not satisfy themselves with comfortable
survival in an academic or ecclesial ghetto. I am concerned about the use of the
Bible as a legitimization for colonialism and its consequences. My academic work
addresses aspects of biblical hermeneutics, and informs a wider public on issues
which have implications for human well-being, as well as for allegiance to God.
While such a venture might be regarded as an instructive academic contribution
by any competent scholar, to assume responsibility for doing so is for me, who
has witnessed the dispossession, dispersion and humiliation of the Palestinians,
of the order of a moral imperative. It is high time that biblical scholars,
church people, and Western intellectuals read the biblical narratives of the
promise of land "with the eyes of the Canaanites."9
End Notes
1 Deist, F. E., The Dangers of Deuteronomy: A Page from the Reception History of
the Book, in Martinez, F. Garcia, A. Hilhorst, J.T.A.G.M. van Ruiten, and A.S.
van der Woud (eds), "Studies in Deuteronomy. In Honour of C.J. Labuschagne
on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday," 1994, Leiden/New York/Köln: Brill,
13-29.
2 Lamadrid, A.G., Canaán y América. La Biblia y la Teologia medieval ante la
Conquista de la Tierra, in "Escritos de Biblia y Oriente. Bibliotheca
Salmanticensis," Estudios 38, 1981, Salamanca-Jerusalén: Universidad
Pontificia, 329-46.
3 Davies, W.D., "The Gospel and the Land. Early Christianity and Jewish
Territorial Doctrine," 1974, Berkeley: University of California Press. See
also his "The Territorial Dimensions of Judaism," 1982, Berkeley:
University of California Press; and his "The Territorial Dimensions of
Judaism. With a Symposium and Further Reflections," 1991, Minneapolis:
Fortress.
4 Brueggemann, Walter, "The Land. Place as Gift, and Challenge in Biblical
Faith," 1977, Philadelphia: Fortress. See also his Forward in March, W.
Eugene, "Israel and the Politics of Land. A Theological Case Study,"
1994, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press.
5 Lohfink, Norbert, The Laws of Deuteronomy. Project for a World without any
Poor, in Scripture Bulletin, 1996, 26:2-19.
6 Prior, Michael, "A Land flowing with Milk, Honey, and People," 1997,
Cambridge: Von Hügel Institute; and in Scripture Bulletin, 28 (1998):2-17.
7 Prior, Michael, "Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry,"
1999, London and New York: Routledge.
8 Prior, Michael, "The Bible and Colonialism. A Moral Critique," 1997,
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
9 My study of the Bible in the Land of the Bible obviously aided me in seeing
"with the eyes of the Canaanites." Others, surely, have had no less
interesting experiences to tell, some of which I have collected in "They
Came and They Saw. Western Christian Experiences of the Holy Land," Michael
Prior, ed., 2000, London: Melisende. ?
by Arthur Koestler. Random
House, 1976. 256 pp. List: $9.95; AET: $7.95 for one, $9.95 for two.
Reviewed by Grace Halsell (as appeared in The Washington Report For Middle
East Affairs, June 1991)
AET and Washington Report e-mail: wrmea@aol.com
AET and Washington Report website: http://www.washington-report.org
Since 1948, when Zionists succeeded in carving out a Jewish state from the land of the Palestinians, the question "who is a Jew" has been endlessly debated.
Zionists (both Christian and Jewish) often declare that "God gave the land" of Palestine "to the Jews." They infer that God deeded territories, in perpetuity, to a biblical tribe of Oriental Middle Eastern people.
Since millions of American Christians accept a dogma that God has a Chosen Land and a Chosen People (the Jews), then the question "who is a Jew?" takes on political connotations that impinge on national and international decisions.
In his carefully researched book entitled The Thirteenth Tribe, Arthur Koestler refutes the idea of a Jewish "race." Moreover, he says that most Jews of the contemporary world did not come from Palestine and are not even of Semitic origin. His research shows that most Jews originated in what today is the Soviet Union. And that a group of people there became Jews through conversion, on the orders of their king.
"The bulk of modern
Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin," Koestler writes.
"Their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from
Canaan but from the Caucasus." And he stresses: "The mainstream of
Jewish migrations did not flow from the Mediterranean across France and Germany
to the east and then back again. The stream moved in a consistently western
direction, from the Caucasus, from the Ukraine into Poland and thence into
Central Europe."
While Jews of different origin also contributed to the existing Jewish world
community, "the main bulk originated from the Khazar country" in the
USSR.
Koestler, a Jew born in 1905
in Budapest, writes that the Khazars, who flourished from the 7th to the 11th
century, were a major power. Their empire extended from the Black Sea to the
Caspian and from the Caucasus to the Volga.
They were located "between two major world powers: the Eastern Roman Empire
in Byzantium and the triumphant followers of Muhammad."
Since the world was
polarized between these two superpowers representing Christianity and Islam, the
Khazar Empire, representing a Third Force, "could only maintain its
independence by accepting neither Christianity nor Islam- for either choice
would have automatically subordinated it to the authority of the Roman Emperor
or the Caliph of Baghdad."
Not wishing to be dominated by either of the two, the Khazar king "embraced
the Jewish faith" in AD 740 and ordered his subjects to do the same.
Judaism thus became the state religion of the Khazars.
The king's motives in adopting Judaism, Koestler stresses, were purely political.
At the peak of its power, from the seventh to the tenth centuries AD, the Khazar kingdom controlled or exacted tribute from some 30 different nations and tribes inhabiting the vast territories between the Caucasus , the Aral Sea, the Ural Mountains, the town of Kiev and the Ukrainian steppes.
People under Khazar suzerainty included the Bulgars, Burtas, Ghuzz, Magyars (Hungarians), the Gothic and Greek colonies of the Crimea, and the Slavonic tribes in the northwestern woodland.
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, in the 16th century Jews numbered about one million. Koestler quotes scholars as docu-menting that "the majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were Khazars."
Koestler, who after the Second World War became a British citizen, and whose most famous book, Darkness at Noon, was translated into 33 languages, has one main thesis: the bulk of Eastern Jewry-and hence of world Jewry is of Khazar-Turkish, rather than Semitic, origin.
As Koestler points out, Jews of our times fall into two main divisions: Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The Sephardim, descendants of the Jews who had lived in Spain until their expulsion, with the Muslims, at the end of the 15th century, and who later settled in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, spoke a Spanish-Hebrew dialect, Ladino. In the 1960s, the Sephardim numbered about 500,000.
The Ashkenazim, at the same
period, were about 11 million. Thus, "in common parlance, Jew is
practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew." However, Koestler adds, the
term Ashkenazim is misleading because it is generally applied to Germany, thus
contributing to the legend that modem Jewry originated on the Rhine. There is,
however, no other term to refer to the non-Sephardic majority of contemporary
Jewry, which came after conversion to Judaism from the Khazar country.
After the destruction of their empire (in the 12th or 13th century), the Jewish
Khazars migrated into those regions of Eastern Europe, mainly Russia and Poland,
where, at the dawn of the modem age, the greatest concentrations of Jews were
found. It is "well documented," Koestler writes, that the numerically
and socially dominant element in the Jewish population of Hungary during the
Middle Ages was of Khazar origin.
An Israeli scholar, A. N.
Poliak, a Tel Aviv University professor of medieval Jewish history, quoted by
Koestler, states that the descendants of Khazar Jews, "those who stayed
where they were (in Khazaria), those who emigrated to the United States and to
other countries, and those who went to Israel--constitute now the large majority
of world Jewry."
Since Israel's support among millions of American Christians is founded on a
concept that God had bequeathed territory to a biblical "tribe" of
Oriental Middle Eastern Jews, it becomes ironic to learn from Koestler's
research that most Jews today are not descended from natives of the "holy
land," or even of the Middle East.
Koestler, who originally published the Thirteenth Tribe in 1976, noted that the
story of the Khazar empire "begins to look like the most cruel hoax history
has ever perpetrated." The Palestinians, imprisoned and brutalized by
Zionism's "hoax," would be the first to agree.
Needless to say, the book has been difficult to find. It disappears from many library shelves. A check at the Library of Congress reveals that the most prestigious library of our land had one reading copy. That one copy, however, is "missing from the shelf."
Grace Halsell is a journalist based in Washington, DC and the author of more than 10 books.
Read Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe on line
Israel Can't Hide From Its History Forever
by Greg Felton(Article first appeared in the May 11, 1997 Vancouver Courier. Reprinted in the Jan/Feb 1998 Washington Report for Middle East Affairs.)
A country is part fact, part myth. The former is a province of economists, politicians and other practitioners of the mundane; the latter principally belongs to history, and is no less important to a healthy country. For a country to be healthy and united , its leaders must promote a unifying national ethos replete with heroes, traditions and celebrations of its past. It's all well and good to beat the drums of pragmatism, fiscal and otherwise, but a people who needs to know that it belongs to a larger community and to have that membership reinforced through ritual and common celebration. Otherwise, there'd be nothing that could properly be called a country -- just a community of communities.
However, myths and their attendant celebrations have a dark side. If used to prop up ideologies and false histories, their innate mendacity will sooner or later tear a country apart.
This brings me to Israel, which celebrates its 49th birthday on Thursday. Given the events of the past year, one wonders how many it has left. Notwithstanding the fact that it was created by a United Nations decree, Israel is built on a lie.
The lie manifests itself from time to time, as in last year's tunnel opening and the construction of the latest Jewish colony in Arab East Jerusalem. In good Zionist fashion, prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu has often declared that Israel is in the West Band and Jerusalem to stay, and that all Jews have a historical right to settle there. From the Israeli view, the Palestinians must accept this before there can be peace. The Palestinians will have none of it, and for good reason. Although Netanyahu's claim is familiar with Israeli history, it is entirely fallacious. It fails to mention the Khazars.
The Khazars were a nomadic Turko-Finnic people who migrated out of the Caucasus in the second century and came to settle, broadly speaking in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine. In AD 740, Bulan, the khagan (ruler) of Khazaria, declared that paganism wasn't good enough for his people and decided to adopt one of the "heavenly" religions: Judaism, Christianity or Islam. He sent for representatives of each faith, but found their arguments unconvincing. Bulan then asked each of them a question: if they had to give up their creed for one of the others, which would it be. When the Christian and Muslim both said Judaism, Bulan had his answer. From that moment, the Khazars lived according to Judaic law.
The Khazar Empire lasted until the Mongol invasions of the 13th century forced its Jewish population to flee northwest into Poland, Germany, Russia and elsewhere. They quickly outnumbered the established Semitic Jews who had come centuries earlier from the Middle East. We know these Khazari Jews today as the Ashkenazim, or European Jews.
The history of the Khazars and their Judaic conversion is a documented, undisputed part of Jewish history, but you see why it causes the Zionists fits. It proves that the European Jewry is largely Caucasian, not Semitic. This means that Israel's Zionist founders Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir and Golda Meir, for example, cannot claim affiliation with Israel's biblical past. In fact, the region's Semitic Jews, Christians and Muslims who have genealogies going back to biblical times do have a right to live in Israel. It is with good reason that author Alfred M. Lilienthal declared Judaism's Khazar's heritage to be Israel's Achilles heel.
The false history of Israel as a homeland for victims of European persecution is tied up with fallacies of Israel's "war" of independence. Zionist history says the victorious Jews won nationhood in a war against superior Arab numbers. We know this to be a fiction. On May 15, when Israel received formal U.S. recognition, well equipped Zionist forces included: 30,000 fully mobilized regulars, 32,000 second-line troops; 15,000 settlement police, a home guard of 32,000, as well as 3000-5000 troops from the Irgun and 200-300 from the Stern Gang. Soldiers in the Arab forces comprised fewer than 20,000 poorly trained and armed troops, including volunteers of the Arab Liberation Army.
More than falsified history, though, European Jews exploited the suffering of their own people to further a policy of aggression and expropriation. As prof. Ilan Pappe of Haifa University wrote in the Journal of Palestine Studies (winter 1997): " generally speaking, the Zionists succeeded in persuading large segments of world public opinion to link the Zionist cause with the Holocaust. Against such a claim, even able Palestinian diplomats --and there were not many in those days- could hardly win the diplomatic game."
(Ironically, the term anti-Semitic, so often used to label critics of Israel, is a misnomer; European Jews are the true anti-Semites in Israel.)
Within Israel today, Pappe said Zionist version of the truth are beginning to loose credibility. So-called "New Sociologists" and "New Historians" are openly criticizing traditional verities, such as Israel never provokes hostilities, and whole peoples can be displaced and marginalized in the name of "national security". They're even exposing the false history of 1948. While some Zionists are willing to criticize Israel's post-1967 expansionism, Pappe says the period 1882-1967 is still of limits.
Now that Israel's expansionism in the West Bank is open to general debate, perhaps one day so too will be the period 1947-48 and maybe even Zionism itself.
REFERENCES:
Khalidi, Walid. From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine
Problem until 1948. Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, DC, 1987.
Koestler, Arthur. The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage.
Random House, New York, 1967.
Lilienthal, Alfred M. What Price Israel? Institute for Palestine Studies,
Washington, DC, 1953.
New York Times Reveals
that European-Descended Jews have no Blood line to Abraham
The fact that most of those who call themselves Jews are not Jews and have no claim to the lands of Palestine because they have no genetic relation to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob can no longer be suppressed. The October 29, 1996 N.Y. Times, in an article entitled, "Scholars Debate Origins of Yiddish and the Migrations of Jews," states:
"Arching over these questions is the central mystery of just where the Jews of Eastern Europe came from. Many historians believe that there were not nearly enough Jews in Western Europe to account for the huge population that later flourished in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and nearby areas.
"By reconstructing the Yiddish mother tongue, linguists hope to plot the migration of the Jews and their language with a precision never possible before.
"It has even been suggested, on the basis of linguistic evidence, that the Jews of Eastern Europe were not predominantly part of the diaspora from the Middle East, but were members of another ethnic group that adopted Judaism.
"...One linguist has recently argued that Yiddish began as a Slavic language that was 'relexified,' with most of its vocabulary replaced with German words.
"...Even more troublesome are demographic studies indicating that during the Middle Ages there were no more than 25,000 to 35,000 Jews in Western Europe. These figures are hard to reconcile with other studies showing that by the 17th century there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe.
"...Some scholars believe the roots of Yiddish, and even the Ashkenazic people themselves, lie much farther east. In his 1976 book, The Thirteenth Tribe, Arthur Koestler made the startling suggestion, never taken seriously by linguists, that the Eastern European Jews were not really Semitic -- that they were largely descended from the Turkish Khazars, who converted en masse to Judaism in medieval times.
"More recently, Koestler's controversial thesis has been revived and expanded in a 1993 book, The Ashkenazic 'Jews': A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity (Slavica Publishers), by Dr. Paul Wexler, a Tel Aviv University linguist.
"Wexler uses a reconstruction of Yiddish to argue that it began as a Slavic language whose vocabulary was largely replaced with German words. Going even further, he contends that the Ashkenazic Jews are predominantly converted Slavs and Turks who merged with a tiny population of Palestinian Jews from the Diaspora."
The Jews Are Not A Race!
By Dr. Alfred
M. Lilienthal
Excerpt from his book, What Price Israel? (1953)
Today, to trace anyone's descent to ancient Palestine would be a genealogical impossibility; and to presume, axiomatically, such a descent for Jews, alone among all human groups, is an assumption of purely fictional significance. Most everybody in the Western world could stake out some claim of Palestinian descent if genealogical records could be established for two-thousand years. And there are, indeed, people who, though not by the widest stretch of imagination Jewish, proudly make that very claim: some of the oldest of the South's aristocratic families play a game of comparing whose lineage goes farther back into 'Israel'. No one knows what happened to the Ten Lost Tribes of 'Israel', but to speculate on who might be who is a favored Anglo-Saxon pastime, and Queen Victoria belonged to an 'Israelite' Society that traced the ancestry of its membership back to those lost tribes.
Twelve tribes started in Canaan about thirty-five centuries ago; and not only that ten of them disappeared - more than half of the members of the remaining two tribes never returned from their "exile" in Babylon. How then, can anybody claim to descend directly from that relatively small community which inhabited the Holy Land at the time of Abraham's Covenant with God?
The Jewish racial myth flows from the fact that the words Hebrew, 'Israelite', Jew, Judaism, and the Jewish people have been used synonymously to suggest a historic continuity. But this is a misuse. These words refer to different groups of people with varying ways of life in different periods in history. Hebrew is a term correctly applied to the period from the beginning of Biblical history to the settling in Canaan. 'Israelite' refers correctly to the members of the twelve tribes of 'Israel'. The name Yehudi or Jew is used in the Old Testament to designate members of the tribe of Judah, descendants of the fourth son of Jacob, as well as to denote citizens of the Kingdom of Judah, particularly at the time of Jeremiah and under the Persian occupation. Centuries later, the same word came to be applied to anyone, no matter of what origin, whose religion was Judaism.
The descriptive name Judaism was never heard by the Hebrews or 'Israelites'; it appears only with Christianity. Flavius Josephus was one of the first to use the name in his recital of the war with the Romans to connote a totality of beliefs, moral commandments, religious practices and ceremonial institutions of Galilee which he believed superior to rival Hellenism. When the word Judaism was born, there was no longer a Hebrew-'Israelite' state. The people who embraced the creed of Judaism were already mixed of many races and strains; and this diversification was rapidly growing...
Perhaps the most significant mass conversion to the Judaic faith occurred in Europe, in the 8th century A.D., and that story of the Khazars (Turko-Finnish people) is quite pertinent to the establishment of the modern State of 'Israel'. This partly nomadic people, probably related to the Volga Bulgars, first appeared in Trans-Caucasia in the second century. They settled in what is now Southern Russia, between the Volga and the Don, and then spread to the shores of the Black, Caspian and Azov seas. The Kingdom of Khazaria, ruled by a khagan or khakan fell to Attila the Hun in 448, and to the Muslims in 737. In between, the Khazars ruled over part of the Bulgarians, conquered the Crimea, and stretched their kingdom over the Caucasus farther to the northwest to include Kiev, and eastwards to Derbend. Annual tributes were levied on the Russian Slavonians of Kiev. The city of Kiev was probably built by the Khazars. There were Jews in the city and the surrounding area before the Russian Empire was founded by the Varangians whom the Scandinavian warriors sometimes called the Russ or Ross (circa 855-863).
The influence of the Khazars extended into what is now Hungary and Roumania. Today, the villages of Kozarvar and Kozard in Transylvania bear testimony to the penetration of the Khazars who, with the Magyars, then proceeded into present-day Hungary. The size and power of the Kingdom of Khazaria is indicated by the act that it sent an army of 40,000 soldiers (in 626-627) to help Heraclius of the Byzantines to conquer the Persians. The Jewish Encyclopedia proudly refers to Khazaria as having had a "well constituted and tolerant government, a flourishing trade and a well disciplined army."
Jews who had been banished from Constantinople by the Byzantine ruler, Leo III, found a home amongst these heretofore pagan Khazars and, in competition with Mohammedan and Christian missionaries, won them over to the Judaic faith. Bulan, the ruler of Khazaria, became converted to Judaism around 740 A.D. His nobles and, somewhat later, his people followed suit. Some details of these events are contained in letters exchanged between Khagan Joseph of Khazaria and R. Hasdai Ibn Shaprut of Cordova, doctor and quasi foreign minister to Sultan Abd al-Rahman, the Caliph of Spain. This correspondence (around 936-950) was first published in 1577 to prove that the Jews still had a country of their own - namely, the Kingdom of Khazaria. Judah Halevi knew of the letters even in 1140. Their authenticity has since been established beyond doubt.
According to these Hasdai-Joseph letters, Khagan Bulan decided one day: "Paganism is useless. It is shameful for us to be pagans. Let us adopt one of the heavenly religions, Christianity, Judaism or Islam." And Bulan summoned three priests representing the three religions and had them dispute their creeds before him. But, no priest could convince the others, or the sovereign, that his religion was the best. So the ruler spoke to each of them separately. He asked the Christian priest: "If you were not a Christian or had to give up Christianity, which would you prefer - Islam or Judaism?" The priest said: "If I were to give up Christianity, I would become a Jew." Bulan then asked the follower of Islam the same question, and the Moslem also chose Judaism. This is how Bulan came to choose Judaism for himself and the people of Khazaria in the seventh century A.D., and thereafter the Khazars (sometimes spelled Chazars and Khozars) lived according to Judaic laws.
Under the rule of Obadiah, Judaism gained further strength in Khazaria. Synagogues and schools were built to give instruction in the Bible and the Talmud. As Professor Graetz notes in his History of the Jews, "A successor of Bulan who bore the Hebrew name of Obadiah was the first to make serious efforts to further the Jewish religion. He invited Jewish sages to settle in his dominions, rewarded them royally... and introduced a divine service modeled on the ancient communities. After Obadiah came a long series of Jewish Chagans (Khagans), for according to a fundamental law of the state only Jewish rulers were permitted to ascend the throne." Khazar traders brought not only silks and carpets of Persia and the Near East but also their Judaic faith to the banks of the Vistula and the Volga. But the Kingdom of Khazaria was invaded by the Russians, and Itil, its great capital, fell to Sweatoslav of Kiev in 969. The Byzantines had become afraid and envious of the Khazars and, in a joint expedition with the Russians, conquered the Crimean portion of Khazaria in 1016. (Crimea was known as "Chazaria" until the 13th century). The Khazarian Jews were scattered throughout what is now Russia and Eastern Europe. Some were taken North where they joined the established Jewish community of Kiev.
Others returned to the Caucasus. Many Khazars remarried in the Crimea and in Hungary. The Cagh Chafut, or "mountain Jews," in the Caucasus and the Hebraile Jews of Georgia are their descendants. These "Ashkenazim Jews" (as Jews of Eastern Europe are called), whose numbers were swelled by Jews who fled from Germany at the time of the Crusades and during the Black Death, have little or no trace of Semitic blood.
That the Khazars are the lineal ancestors of Eastern European Jewry is a historical fact. Jewish historians and religious text books acknowledge the fact, though the propagandists of Jewish nationalism belittle it as pro-Arab propaganda. Somewhat ironically, Volume IV of the Jewish Encyclopedia - because this publication spells Khazars with a "C" instead of a "K" - is titled "Chazars to Dreyfus": and it was the Dreyfus trial, as interpreted by Theodor Herzl, that made the modern Jewish Khazars of Russia forget their descent from converts to Judaism and accept anti-Semitism as proof of their Palestinian origin.
For all that anthropologists know, Hitler's ancestry might go back to one of the ten Lost Tribes of 'Israel'; while Weizmann may be a descendant of the Khazars, the converts to Judaism who were in no anthropological respect related to Palestine. The home to which Weizmann, Silver and so many other Ashkenazim Zionists have yearned to return has most likely never been theirs. "Here's a paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox": in anthropological fact, many Christians may have much more Hebrew-'Israelite' blood in their veins than most of their Jewish neighbors.
Race can play funny tricks on people who make that concept the basis for their likes and dislikes. Race-obsessed people can find themselves hating people who, in fact, may be their own racial kith and kin.
Dr. Alfred Lilienthal, an anti-Zionist Jew, is a graduate from Cornell University and Colombia Law School. He is also a historian, journalist and lecturer. He is the author of five books.
Nov. 2000
By Edward Said
The events of the past four weeks in Palestine have been a near-total triumph for Zionism in the United States for the first time since the modern re-emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the late 1960s. Political as well as public discourse has so definitively transformed Israel into the victim during the recent clashes, that even though 140 Palestinian lives were lost and close to 5,000 casualties have been reported, it is still something called "Palestinian violence" that has disrupted the smooth and orderly flow of the "peace process." There is now a small litany of phrases that every editorial commentator either repeats verbatim or relies on as an unspoken assumption: these have been engraved in ears, minds, and memories as a guide for the perplexed, a manual or machine for turning out phrases that have clogged the air for at least a month.
I can recite most of them by heart: Barak offered more concessions at Camp David than any Israeli prime minister before him (90 per cent of the territories and partial sovereignty over East Jerusalem); Arafat was cowardly and lacked the necessary courage to accept Israeli offers to end the conflict; Palestinian violence, directed by Arafat, has threatened Israel (all sorts of variations on this, including the wish to eliminate Israel, anti-Semitism, suicidal rage in order to get on television, putting children in the front lines so that they would become martyrs) and proved that an ancient "hatred" of the Jews motivates Palestinians; Arafat is a weak leader who allows his people to attack Jews and incite against them by releasing terrorists and producing schoolbooks that deny Israel's existence. There are probably one or two more formulae that I have not cited, but the general picture is that Israel is so surrounded by rock-throwing barbarians that even the missiles, tanks and helicopter gunships that have been used to "defend" Israelis from the violence are simply warding off a terrible force. Bill Clinton's injunctions (dutifully parroted by his secretary of state) for Palestinians to "pull back" goes a long way to suggest that it is Palestinians who are encroaching on Israeli territory, not the other way round.
It is also worth mentioning
that so successful has this Zionisation of the media been that not a single map
has been published or shown on television to remind American viewers and readers
-- notoriously ignorant of both geography and history -- that Israeli
encampments, settlements, roads and barricades crisscross Palestinian land in
Gaza and the West Bank. Moreover, as happened in Beirut in 1982, there is
a veritable Israeli siege of Palestinians, including of Arafat and his men.
Completely forgotten, if it was ever at all understood, is the system of Areas
A, B, and C by which the military occupation of 40 per cent of Gaza and 60 per
cent of the West Bank continues, and which the Oslo peace process was never
really designed to end, much less totally modify.
As suggested by the absence of geography in this most geographical of conflicts,
the resulting void is a vitally important point since the pictures that are
either shown or described are without context at all. I think the omission by
the Zionised media was a deliberate one at the outset and has now become
automatic.
It has allowed phony commentators like Thomas Friedman to peddle his wares shamelessly, droning on about American even-handedness, Israeli flexibility and generosity and his own perspicacious pragmatism with which he berates Arab leaders and stuns his bored readers. It has the result not only of permitting the completely preposterous notion of a Palestinian attack on Israel to prevail, but it also further dehumanizes Palestinians as being beasts without sentience or motive. Thus little wonder that when the figures of the dead and wounded are recited no nationalities are given: this lets Americans assume that the suffering is equally divided between the "warring parties," and in fact elevates Jewish suffering and reduces or eliminates Arab feelings entirely, except of course for rage. Rage and its cognates remain as the only and certainly the defining Palestinian emotion. It explains the violence, and indeed, it reifies it so that Israel has come to represent a decency and democracy that is forever surrounded by rage and violence.
No other process can logically explain the stone throwers and the stalwart Israeli "defense." Nothing is said of house demolitions, land expropriations, illegal arrests, torture and the like. Nothing is cited about what is (except for the Japanese occupation of Korea) the longest military occupation in modern times; nothing about UN resolutions; nothing about Israeli contraventions of all the Geneva Conventions; nothing about the sufferings of one entire people and the obduracy of another. Forgotten are the catastrophe of 1948, ethnic cleansing and massacres, the devastation of Qibya, Kafr Qassem, Sabra and Shatila, the long years of military government for non-Jewish Israeli citizens to say nothing of their continued oppression as a persecuted 20 per cent minority within the Jewish state.
Ariel Sharon at best is a provocation, never a war criminal, Ehud Barak a statesman, never the assassin of Beirut. Terrorism is always on the Palestinian side of the ledger, defense on the Israeli.
What Friedman and pro-Israeli "peaceniks" fail to mention when they extol Barak's unprecedented generosity is the real substance of it. We are not reminded that his commitment to a third withdrawal (of about 12 per cent) made at Wye 18 months ago has never occurred. Of what value then are more such "concessions?" We are told that he was willing to give back 90 per cent of the territory. What gets left out is that the 90 per cent is of what Israel has no intention of giving back. Greater Jerusalem is well over 30 per cent of the West Bank; large settlements to be annexed are another 15 per cent; military roads of areas have yet to be determined. So after all this is deducted, 90 per cent of the balance isn't so much after all. As for Jerusalem: the Israel concession was principally in being willing to discuss and maybe, just maybe, to offer shared authority over the Haram Al-Sharif. The breathtaking dishonesty of the matter is that all of West Jerusalem (principally Arab in 1948) was already conceded by Arafat, plus most of a vastly expanded East Jerusalem.
One detail further:
Palestinians' firing by small arms on Gilo is routinely made to seem like
gratuitous violence, whereas no one mentions that Gilo itself sits on land
confiscated from Beit Jala, the place from which the firing emanates. Besides,
Beit Jala was disproportionately shelled by Israeli helicopters using missiles
to destroy civilian houses.
I have made a survey of the major newspapers. Ever since 28 September, there
have been anywhere between one and three opinion articles per average day in the
New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles
Times and the Boston Globe. With the exception of perhaps three articles written
from a pro-Palestinian point of view in the Los Angeles Times, and two (one by
an Israeli lawyer, Alegra Pacheco, the other by a pro-Oslo liberal Jordanian
journalist, Rami Khoury) in the New York Times, all the articles -- (including
those by regular columnists like Friedman, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer
and others like them), have been in support of Israel, the US-sponsored peace
process, and the idea that Palestinian violence, Arafat's lack of cooperation,
and Islamic fundamentalism are to blame. The writers have been former US
military as well as civilian officials, Israeli apologists and officials, think
tank specialists and experts, officials of pro-Israeli lobbies and
organizations.
In other words, the total
blanketing of the mainstream has taken place on the assumption that no
Palestinian or Arab or Islamic
position on such matters as Israeli terror tactics against civilians,
settler-colonialism, or military occupation exists at all, or is worth
hearing from. This is simply without precedent in the annals of US
journalism, and is a direct reflection of a Zionist mind-set that makes Israel
the norm in human behavior, thereby excluding from equal consideration the
existence of 300 million Arabs and 1.2 billion Muslims. In the long run
this is of course a suicidal position for Zionists to be in, but such is the
arrogance of power that the thought seems not to have occurred to anyone.
The mind-set I have described is truly staggering in its recklessness and, were it not very much a practical as well as actual distortion of reality, one could quite easily be talking about a form of private mental derangement. But it corresponds very closely to official Israeli policy of dealing with Palestinians not as a people with a history of dispossession for which in large measure Israel is directly responsible, but as a periodic nuisance for whom force, and neither understanding nor full accommodation, is the only possible response. Everything else is literally unthinkable. This astonishing blindness is compounded in the United States since Arabs and Muslims are scarcely paid attention to except as (I have said in an earlier article) the butt of every aspiring politician. A few days ago Hillary Clinton announced in a gesture of the most revolting hypocrisy that she was returning a $50,000 donation from an American-Muslim group because, she said, they supported terrorism; this in fact was an outright lie, since the group in question had only said that it supported Palestinian resistance against Israel during the current crisis, not in itself an untoward position but criminalized in the American system only because a totalitarian Zionism requires that any -- and I mean literally any -- criticism of what Israel does is simply intolerable and the rankest anti-Semitism.
And this despite the fact that (again literally) the entire world has criticized Israel's policies of military occupation, disproportionate violence, and the siege of the Palestinians. In America you must refrain from any criticism, otherwise you are hounded as an anti-Semite requiring the severest opprobrium.
The further peculiarity of
American Zionism, which is a system of antithetical thought and Orwellian
distortion, is that it is impermissible to speak of Jewish violence, or Jewish
actions when it comes to Israel, even though everything done by Israel is done
in the name of the Jewish people, for and by a Jewish state. That such a
state is a misnomer, since almost 20 per cent of the population is not Jewish,
is never mentioned and this too accounts for the amazing, entirely deliberate
discrepancy between what the media calls "Israeli Arabs" and "the
Palestinians:" no reader or viewer could possibly know that they are the
same people in fact divided by Zionist policy, or that both communities
represent the result of Israeli policy -- apartheid in one case, military
occupation and ethnic cleansing in the other. In fine, American Zionism
has made any serious public discussion of
Israel, by far the largest ever recipient of US foreign aid, its past and its
future, a taboo not be broken in any circumstance. To call this literally the
last taboo in American discourse is by no means an exaggeration. Abortion,
homosexuality, the death penalty, even the sacrosanct military budget have been
talked about with some freedom (although always within limits).
The American flag can be burned in public, whereas the systematic continuity of Israel's 52-year-old treatment of the Palestinians is virtually unimaginable, a narrative with no permission to appear. This consensus might be somehow tolerable were it not for the fact that it makes the continuing punishment and dehumanization of the Palestinian people an actual virtue. There is simply no people in the world today whose killing on television screens seems to be considered by most American viewers to be acceptable as well-deserved punishment.
This is the case with Palestinians whose daily loss of life in the past month is herded under the rubric "the violence on both sides," as if the stones and slings of young men thoroughly tired of injustice and repression were a major offence rather than the courageous resistance to a demeaning fate meted out to them not just by Israeli soldiers armed by America, but by a peace process designed to coop them up in Bantustans and reservations fit for animals. That the US supporters of Israel could have plotted for seven years to produce a document designed essentially to cage people like inmates in an asylum or prison -- that is the real crime. And that this could be passed off as peace instead of the desolation that it really has been all along, that surpasses my powers to understand or adequately describe as anything less than untrammeled immorality.
The worst thing of all is that so iron-like is the wall protecting American discourse about Israel that no questions can be put to the minds that produced Oslo and that for seven years have been passing off their scheme to the world as peace. One scarcely knows which is more pernicious, the mentality that thinks of Palestinians as not entitled even to express a sense of injustice (they are too low a form for that) or the one that continues to plot their further enslavement. Were this the whole it would be bad enough. But our miserable status as far as US Zionism is concerned is compounded by the absence of any institution here or in the Arab world ready and able to produce an alternative. I fear that the coverage of those stone-throwing protesters in Bethlehem, Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron may not be adequately reflected in the dithering Palestinian leadership, unable either to retireor to go forward. That is the ultimate pity of it.
Reproduced From: http://www.al-bushra.org/zionism/media.htm
By Israel Shamir
March 18, 2001
The Viennese Jewish shrinks decided to disinvite the American Palestinian Professor Edward Said, who had been called to lecture them in memory of Sigmund Freud. The Professor had been seen throwing a stone towards an Israeli border. The psychiatrists said it speaks a lot about his subconscious. They would never throw a rock, as the wild Arab from Columbia University; they prefer Sharon’s missiles.
I think it is a right approach, and it should be applied not only to professor Said. In the far-away 1969, Phillip Roth decided to probe the subconscious of his contemporary American Jew. In the novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s hero, Alexander Portnoy, lies on the psychiatrist’s couch and tells of his inner feelings, domineering mother and adolescent sex. What would a modern Portnoy blubber on the newest reclining couch model 2001?
We can find this out by turning towards the press. Philip Weiss[i] in the New York Observer noted that the Jews are to politics and media what the blacks are to basketball. The leading media powerhouses like the New York Times Corporation and the Washington Post are fully kosher, owned by Jews and a substantial majority of the editorials and the op-eds are written by Jews. They are representative of the Jewish American opinion. With a very few exceptions, they are supportive of Israel, its policies towards the Palestinians and its brave ruler, general Sharon.
The situation in our land is well known. The Jews rule supreme. The local non-Jewish inhabitants have few rights. The majority of them is disenfranchised. Their property is seized at will and their sources of independent livelihood are destroyed. Their cities are besieged, activists assassinated, women and children starved. They have no access to public media, to welfare; they are not allowed to even go to the beach. None of this is secret. It is freely discussed in the Israeli media.
It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the Jews of Israel hate goys and wish them all gone. To borrow the expression of Conrad Black, the owner of British and Canadian newspapers, it would be ‘a lie worthy of Goebbels’. Israel imports hundreds of thousands of goys and shiksas: Chinese, Thai, Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians and Africans. In just the last few months, the Israeli Ministry of Labour issued thousands of new permits for guest workers. The Jews of Israel welcome goys, as long as they have no rights, make no demands and agree to work for minimal wage. At the first objection, they are taken by force to the first plane back home.
That is the country adored by William Safire, Tom Friedman and other Jews in the mainstream media. ‘Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are’, goes the Latin adage. The pro-Israel position of the American Jews in the media is a good indication of their subconscious feelings towards the world at large.
Their favourite neo-liberal globalist trend is but a tendency to turn the whole world, including the United States, into a Palestine with a small ruling class, big security machine and voiceless impoverished natives. But let us give their due to the gentlemen of the press. They could be worse. The more vocal part of American Jewry considers them rather soft. The US correspondent of Haaretz in Washington, Nitzan Horovitz, writes in today’s edition (March 16, 2001), “The Israeli lobby in the US (AIPAC) is more intransigent[ii] than any government of Israel, including that of Sharon.” It is a Jewish supremacist organisation, according to Yossi Beilin, an Israeli ex-minister who is not much of a liberal himself.
What do they hate in Palestinians? The Palestinians have roots, they are living in harmony with their environment, they love their villages, they stick to their land, they can live without Jewish guidance. The Jewish supremacists wish to destroy their society, to confiscate their land and turn them into slaves sweating in the Jewish factories. If that is what Portnoy-2001 feels about Palestinians, why would he feel any different about other goys? A good Viennese shrink would pronounce him sick and possibly dangerous to his neighbours. He is as sick as any bigot of Ku Klux Klan, but much more influential due to his control over the media.
What is the source of Portnoy’s influence? Why did he change so much since 1969? Phillip Weiss explains it by the success of the Jews to break through the barriers, to enrich themselves and to occupy the commanding positions in the establishment. He writes, “I don’t claim to know how Jewish the membership of the establishment is. Twenty percent, 50 percent? I’m guessing 30”. Even 30% would be sufficient to promote any idea, if the other 70% have no interest in the subject. In many financial companies, a 10% controlling share is as good as total ownership, as the rest is divided among small shareholders.
In the absence of solid statistics for the US, it is instructive to consider the economy of Apartheid-era South Africa. The Economist, hardly a ‘hate publication’, estimated that the Jews who constituted 0.03% of the population owned sixty percent of that rich country’s market capitalization. All other players, Anglos, Boers, Indians and native Africans competed for the remaining 40%.
The power of money is translated into the rule over the minds by the feudal structure of the media. At the peak, there are media lords, the proprietors. They delegate authority to their faithful retainers, the chief editors, who in turn, choose loyal soldiers. The structure does not stand alone, but links to the financial and trading structures, the main ad-suppliers. The ad-suppliers are more important than the readers. In England, the Daily Herald, a newspaper targeted at a working class constituency, went bankrupt. Although it had five times as many readers as The Times, it only attracted half the advertising revenues. Advertisements account for approximately 75% of the revenue of an average newspaper. In the case of Radio and TV broadcasters, that figure leaps to almost 100%. It is no wonder that the media is accountable to its ‘paying’ patrons, the privileged few who are members of an elite club.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the media is not the message. The media is not a line of business, either. Lev Chernoi, a Russian-Israeli billionaire who sold his vast media empire to another Jewish tycoon, Mr. Berezovsky, put it concisely in a recent interview: “Media is politics”. The media is a means of shaping public consensus; of swaying the consciousness of a nation. Once, the readership provided a feedback, not anymore. Ordinary people still own most of the body parts of America and they are the muscle, but the nerve system and the brain have been taken over by the club of media lords and the managers of finance and trade, a new dominant power in the world. They decide what Americans think. Americans enforce their decision how we should manage our planet, from the rain forests of the Amazon to the last besieged Palestinian village.
The Club disposed with the pretence of the pluralism in press. Russian politicians and journalists visiting the US often express amazement at how in this huge and heterogeneous country the scope of expressed opinions is so narrow. “You succeeded where the communists failed”, is a frequent refrain. Indeed, the differences between American newspaper coverage and TV News have all but disappeared.
Noam Chomsky recently wrote, “the editors of the NY Times, and their brethren, have refused - not "missed," but refused to publish a single word about the sending of unprecedented numbers of military helicopters to Israel. Last week, the latest $.5 billion deal was struck between the Pentagon and the IDF for more advanced Apaches. They recognize how the (US) population is likely to react. To date, the total coverage of this massive transfer of public funds has been one opinion piece in a newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina. I've actually attempted to personally contact editors I've known for years. No use. The discipline, and uniformity, are really impressive. People who thought that Stalin had reached the limits of totalitarianism are quite wrong”.
Well, Joseph Stalin had no such compliant media machine or the modern technology at his disposal. Its potential is not fully realized yet, as the three major networks plan to launch one united and unified news programme every night, to spread its message to every house in America. A painter Diane Harvey wrote in despair: “its main technique is through feeding the public an entire world-view made out of toxic substitutes for information and truth. The 360-degree, surround-sound World Lie most people believe is built and sustained by the non-stop flow of highly purposeful, integrated and carefully directed fabrications. The spirit of truth has departed, an upgraded version of global totalitarianism has been coalescing into a new death-grip on human freedom”[iii].
Paradoxically, this machine is vulnerable as it is too formidable. Subjugation and destruction of Palestine is but one of its applications. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you, as no man is an island, said the Elizabethan poet, John Donne, proclaiming the common humanity of Man. These words sent Ernest Hemingway to fight for freedom in Spain in 1936, as freedom is indivisible. We repeated these words in 1968, we should repeat it now. The struggle for freedom in the US and the battle for Palestine are but one war.
Whenever the Almighty sends
a malaise, says a Jewish wisdom, He sends the cure for it. The cure lies in
democracy. The media should be returned to people, taken out of the rich men’s
hands. Israel/Palestine should be democratised, equal rights provided to Jew and
Gentile alike. It would cure the New Complaint of Portnoy.
[i] New York Observer, 22.01.01
[ii] In Israeli parlance, the Jewish supremacists are called ‘right-wing’, while national moderates are called ‘left-wing’, though this division has no connection to their social positions.
[iii] http://www.rense.com/general8/harv.htm
Israel Shamir is an Israeli writer and journalist. His articles The Rape of Dulcinea, The Test Failed, Galilee Flowers could be found on many Internet sites, http://www.thestruggle.org/ , http://www.antiwar/, http://www.nilemedia/ etc. He can be reached at shamiri_@netvision.net.il, or write P.O.B. 23714 Tel Aviv 61236
Germany
and the Jews
The Role of the Jews in WWI and WWII
Speech By:
Benjamin H. Freedman
1961
Introductory Note:
Benjamin H. Freedman was born of Jewish parents in 1890. He became a successful businessman in New York City, and was at one time the principal owner of the Woodbury Soap Company. He broke with organized Jewry after World War II, and spent the remainder of his life and at least 2.5 million dollars publicizing the facts of Jewish influence on the United States. Mr. Freedman knew. He had been an insider at the highest levels of Jewish organizations, and was personally acquainted with Bernard Baruch, Samuel Untermyer, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, and many more of the movers and shakers of his time.
This speech was given in 1961 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., on behalf of a newspaper of that time, Common Sense.
Here in the United States, the Zionists and their co-religionists have complete control of our government. For many reasons, too many and too complex to go into here at this time, the Zionists and their co- religionists rule these United States as though they were the absolute monarchs of this country. Now you may say that is a very broad statement, but let me show you what happened while we were all asleep.What happened? World War I broke out in the summer of 1914. There are few people here my age who remember that. Now that war was waged on one side by Great Britain, France, and Russia; and on the other side by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey.
Within two years Germany had won that war: not only won it nominally, but won it actually. The German submarines, which were a surprise to the world, had swept all the convoys from the Atlantic Ocean. Great Britain stood there without ammunition for her soldiers, with one week's food supply -- and after that, starvation. At that time, the French army had mutinied. They had lost 600,000 of the flower of French youth in the defense of Verdun on the Somme. The Russian army was defecting, they were picking up their toys and going home, they didn't want to play war anymore, they didn't like the Czar. And the Italian army had collapsed.
Not a shot had been fired on German soil. Not one enemy soldier had crossed the border into Germany. And yet, Germany was offering England peace terms. They offered England a negotiated peace on what the lawyers call a status quo ante basis. That means: "Let's call the war off, and let everything be as it was before the war started." England, in the summer of 1916 was considering that -- seriously. They had no choice. It was either accepting this negotiated peace that Germany was magnanimously offering them, or going on with the war and being totally defeated.
While that was going on, the Zionists in Germany, who represented the Zionists from Eastern Europe, went to the British War Cabinet and -- I am going to be brief because it's a long story, but I have all the documents to prove any statement that I make -- they said: "Look here. You can yet win this war. You don't have to give up. You don't have to accept the negotiated peace offered to you now by Germany. You can win this war if the United States will come in as your ally." The United States was not in the war at that time. We were fresh; we were young; we were rich; we were powerful. They told England: "We will guarantee to bring the United States into the war as your ally, to fight with you on your side, if you will promise us