Horror in the Holy Land
Even if I am not well yet, I feel I should write this piece. It is hard, very hard, for me to write it. In fact, I think it is quite right to say that the situation in the Holy Land now is saddening me so much that my health declined when it should have improved already.
I love Israel. I spent my teenage years in a Zionist movement, I lived in Israel, I prayed at the Western Wall, and I love the people of Israel. I hate Hamas. I hated them before and I hate them much more after what happened on October 7.
Nevertheless, in the present situation, the worst elements in both Israeli and Arab cultures have taken the lead. What we see now is the dark side of both cultures. What we see is pure, sheer, unadulterated hatred being set loose as the monster in a horror movie, and all that is made much worse by the technological prodigies of our time. Now we can kill without being drenched in blood, by just pressing a button, and be home for dinner. Now we can be a monster without feeling like one.
But how did we get there? How did hatred reach such a level, how can it be strong enough to make all the horrors we safely witness from our screens understandable, even if never justifiable? For it is not a war for oil, like those that laid waste to much of the very same region. It is not a war for geopolitical goals that are so vague it is easy to disguise them as something else, as the war in Ukraine (whose civilian death toll throughout all those months of the war is smaller than that of Gaza in just a few weeks). It is a war for land, yes, but not in the classical sense, as when Nazi Germany invaded Eastern Europe to get itself some Lebensraum, “living space”.
The State of Israel, in many ways, is another iteration of the Crusader States that survived in the same place for a bit more than one hundred years. Israel is 75 years old, younger than that. It is an island of something else in the middle of a Muslim sea of sand and people. It is a bridgehead. Unlike the Crusaders’ bridgehead at the same place, though, it has no vast European lands to go back to. As the great Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld wrote a few weeks ago:
Still I want to tell you a story. Just one trivial story with no consequences and presumably long forgotten by everyone except myself. Yet one that, in view of recent events here in Israel, seems more relevant than ever. It took place back in the summer of 1981 when I was on sabbatical and living near Freiburg in southwestern Germany. One day my daughter, nine years old, needed her ear to be operated on. I fell into a conversation with the surgeon, Dr. Kuhn of the local university clinic.
These were the days immediately following the attack in which the Israeli Air Force demolished Iraq’s nuclear reactor, then under construction. The good doctor asked me why I was staying in Israel. So much trouble, he said; so many wars. Strange question, that, coming from a German! But that was not what I said. Instead I told him the story of the Jewish swine. Suppose, I said, I had the same operation done in Israel and then refused to pay my bill. In that case people would have called me a swine. However, had I done the same anywhere else, they would have called me a Jewish swine.
“You are right” he said.
The Crusader States were established to protect the Christians in the Holy Land and to ensure that European Christian pilgrims could go there in peace. Israel was established so that the Jews — who had just suffered Hell on Earth at the hands of the Germans — had a place to be. A place where a bad Jew could be called a swine: just a swine, not a Jewish swine.
However, it was built in the worst of all places. Establçishing the State of Israel there, in a place so full of religious meaning, was a mistake, a grievous mistake. There were several other places where it could have happened. Even Stalin had already established a “Jewish Autonomous Territory” before WWI. Not that anything could be really “autonomous” under Stalin, even if it was next door to China, as far away from Moscow as it could possibly be. Madagascar (a nice place: islands don’t have to worry about borders) and Uganda were also considered. The following map is part of a pre-WWII pamphlet advocating for a Jewish State; each number is a possible place:
Establishing it in the Holy Land, by the way, at first made it an exclusively secular project, as it was widely believed among Orthodox Jews that the Jewish people could only go forcefully back to the Holy Land after Christ arrived. Needless to say, they don’t believe He did yet, and anyway, their expectation is, let us say, of a rather apocalyptical arrival.
Had it been established anywhere else the religious elements of the place would not have become as important, and it would be just a nation-state among others, a place any Jew could call home, for the first time in centuries — there were some Jewish kingdoms in some moments of the last couple of millennia, and even during the time of the Second Jerusalem Temple (Our Lord’s) there were other Jewish settlements and even temples, but it’s irrelevant to this text.
When the UN decided to give the surviving Jews a State in the Holy Land, after WWII, the British Empire was in charge of it, having grabbed the land from the Ottoman Turks at the end of the Great War. It wasn’t anything like the Crusader States, though. After all, even if the Anglicans were a tad more serious at the time (not that much: they were the first Protestant denomination to allow contraception, and it happened between the world wars), the only god recognized and duly worshipped by any British colony (or Protectorate, or whatever) was Mammon, the god of money. It was by that time that oil became one of the most important commodities, and the vast oil reserves of Arab lands became known. That is why the European powers invented the Arab States of the Middle East (and gave each a ruling dynasty) out of whole cloth. The idea of a Jewish State was evidently not pleasant for the Arabs, and the English wanted to keep their influence over them. That is why they wouldn’t allow the Jewish refugees who survived Hitler’s goons to disembark in their territory of Palestine (the common name for the region since Roman times. It means Philistine, as in the guys who got Samson. In Gaza, by the way), diverting the ships to Cyprus and doing whatever they could to spoil the UN plans for a Jewish State, even if the (British) Balfour Declaration had more or less advocated for a Jewish State precisely there more than thirty years before.
The Zionist movements in British Palestine were not blushing flowers. As a matter of fact, they were what we now call terrorists. They would blow up innocent people, trying to drive the Arabs out. They blew up the biggest hotel in Jerusalem. They killed the UN envoy.
Why? Because in a way Zionism was a replacement religion for Jewish Orthodoxy. They did not believe in God (the founding document of the State of Israel, after long debates, settled on mentioning “The Rock of Israel” instead of writing down the word “God”), but they believed that land belonged to them, because the Bible said so. Zionism is actually a fruit of Reform Judaism, a religious movement that wanted to make Judaism a religion just like the other European religions of the 19th Century, a private matter. No more funny clothes, no more strange diets that wouldn’t allow people to have a nice dinner in a nice restaurant in town. Just another vanilla religion.
But when you take religion out of Judaism, you’ll still have Nationalism, as the Jewish People is at once a nation and a religion, and that is what happened, especially whenever assimilated Jews encountered anti-semitism. Zionism grew in the early 20th century alongside all other nationalisms, in a time of fervent and often ugly nationalism. There are some ugly stories about that, but I think they are not pertinent; I’ll just leave my solitary reader with the fact that Max Nordau was at once a Zionist leader and a theoretician of national identity of the very worst kind.
So, having established that Biblical history is important even if religious practice isn’t, we have to go back to the Good Book. Abraham bought land there to bury his wife (Genesis 23), so at least that piece of land would have been inherited by his son. Now, for Muslims, the biblical text is corrupted. The Bible (Gn 21) says Abraham kept Isaac and sent Ismael away, but the Koran says he kept Ismael instead. Ismael is the father of all Arabs, and Isaac the father of all Jews (his son Jacob was given the name “Israel” by God — Gn 32). In a way, this dispute is at the root of the present war.
For Zionism, of course, it goes much further than the possession of that small piece of land; after all, the whole Promised Land was given to the Hebrews after God delivered them from Egyptian slavery. But it had people living there, and God told the Chosen People to fight them, even if they were more or less relatives of the Hebrews (Amalek, the father of the Amalekites about whom God orders to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven” — Dt 25:19 — was a great-grandson of Isaac). The Zionist movement, again, was not religious in the sense of religious observances, but they have always taken very seriously the war stories in the Bible. In fact, Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, called the inhabitants of Gaza “Amalek”. For anyone who knows his Bible, it means “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (1Sam 15:3)
Needless to say, the Koran is at least as bloodthirsty when it says what is to be done with the enemies of Islam. It says nothing about suicide bombings, but one can certainly say they follow the spirit of the text.
All of that sounds horrible to us, but it is because we live in the ruins of a Christian Civilization. The basic, the most essential social difference that marks the Christian Faith from any other religion or culture is the universal value of human life. For virtually all cultures and religions, it was obvious that a king’s life was worth more than a beggar’s, but we learned from the Church that when God made Himself man, he had “not where to lay his head.” (Mt 8:20), while neither Herod was that great of a guy. For virtually all cultures and religions, only the members of one’s tribe or nation were the “real men” — most self-given names for tribesmen mean something akin to “human being”, implying that other people weren’t fully human.
This is not so for either Islam or Judaism. Many important scholars within the same Jewish Orthodoxy that would not accept Zionism (there are some ultra-orthodox who still don’t, and many if not most hardcore Orthodox don’t serve in the IDF) consider that non-Jews have no immortal soul and were created by God to serve the Jews. I once read a book by an Israeli Civil Rights activist who got started on that path when he learned that a non-Jew was hurt and an Orthodox man did not allow his phone to be used to call an ambulance, because the man was not a Jew. The author asked for a rabbinical ruling (he was not Orthodox, but he sincerely thought the rabbinical court would condemn the man who refused to help), and the rabbi commended the Orthodox guy’s denial of the telephone. After all, for many schools of Jewish Orthodoxy, “the Torah does not permit the desecration of the Sabbath to save the life of a gentile.” What I found funny and sad at the same time was that the secular Jewish author who sincerely believed the rabbinical court would side with what he considered obvious was thinking in what may be called humanistic terms, but humanism is just a watered-down version of Christianism. He was thinking like a Christian, in other words.
The present horrors happening in the Holy Land, in religious terms, own much to the fact that it is a war between two non-Christian religions, especially if we understand Zionism (and even more the most radical forms of religious Zionism) as one among many other forms of mainstream Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform…). It is not a Christian faith, and it does not have a Christian worldview. When I was a teenage Zionist I thought it was funny to sing “אנחנו רוצים להרוג ערבים”, “we want to kill Arabs”. Of course, it was meant as a joke, but later, when I found the Church and came home, I could clearly see how horrifying it is to have kids singing that, “joke” or not.
Now let’s leave aside the religious aspect for a while and see the situation under a historical prism.
Israel is just like the US: a textbook case of settler colonialism. The main kinds of colonization are exploitation colonies (like British India or Portuguese Brazil), wherein the colony is taxed, precious metals are mined, and carpetbaggers go there to get rich and come back home with plenty of gold, and settler colonies, where people, well, settle. In somebody else’s land. The US had the Indians, and Israel has the Palestinians (which could also be called, even if only to make it clearer that it’s not an isolated people like, say, the Armenians, Japanese, or Koreans, the “local Arabs”). Well, where are the American Indians? Most of them were killed. It was another example of that unfortunately very common thing that we now call genocide. The famous American General Sheridan would have famously said that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Even if he didn’t, he could have and nobody would have thought it strange. I bet some very similar remarks are common among IDF generals these days.
The greatest problem of settler colonialism, after all, is what to do with the natives. Exploitation colonies don’t have that much of a problem, because, first, not many people settle there and, second, as even fewer women go, the few who do usually marry ladies of the land. That’s why most Latin American countries have a heavily mixed population. But settlers arrive with the missus and the kids, and they don’t want to have anything with the natives. They want to build their “little house on the prairie” and be left to their own devices, even if the little house is in Indian territory. The natives are a nuisance; the basic idea of settler colonialism is that the land should be a blank slate.
Now, for Israel the very beginning was hard. In 1948, when the fatidical date established by the UN for the birth of the Jewish and the Palestinian States arrived and the British finally allowed the people who survived the Nazis to disembark, all the Arab countries around invaded at the same time. People would literally step on land, be given a gun and basic instructions on how to shoot it, plus a smattering of Hebrew words (“left”, “right”, “forward”, “shoot”, etc.) and join the war. They were not in the proper frame of mind, let us say, to verify who among the Arabs was a local and who was not. The very beginning of the State of Israel made its citizens see all Arabs as a vast mass of enemies.
That is how what is now called the Nakba happened. Around half of the native Arab population was expelled or fled what came to be Israel. Villages were raised to the ground. Innocent families were murdered. The fact that the UN-defined borders were not defensible (or sensible; it was not hard to predict that the establishment of a Jewish State would not be gladly accepted by the Arab countries around) also led to a new arrangement in which the de facto war borders became the new borders of Israel. The Palestinian Arab State was stillborn.
The 700,000 people who fled or were expelled became refugees in the countries around Israel. Perpetual refugees, as a matter of fact; not having been given citizenship (even if speaking the same language and having the same basic culture), they — and their children and grandchildren — became cannon fodder for the enemies of Israel. The vast influx of people disturbed the precarious peace of Lebanon, eventually leading to the establishment of Hezbollah and its Civil War. And many went to then-Egyptian Gaza.
Other wars happened; I won’t go into detail. All of them were started by neighboring countries and won by Israel, and the territory controlled by Israel grew (and contracted when most of the vast Negev desert was given back to Egypt).
When a Palestinian National Authority was eventually established following the Oslo Accords 30 years ago, it was given (some) authority over two separate territories:
The region between the Jordan River and the rest of Israel (Judea and Samaria, using the biblical names, or the West Bank of said river), which would have been part of the Palestinian State but had been conquered by Jordan in 1948, and almost a generation later was conquered by Israel, where there are now several incidents between settlers and natives, and
The Gaza Strip, that is currently being bombed to dust.
Things are pretty bad in the West Bank. A huge wall has been built to separate it from Israel proper, but it’s a nightmarish hodgepodge of Israeli settlements and Arab farms and villages (as well as some biggish cities). Many Israeli settlements are built on land whose owners are expelled, around the few sources of water, etc. They are in fact armed outposts, illegal according to international law, and often built against the will of the Israeli government. Not this one, though: there has never been such a settler-friendly Israeli government before. We could say it is as if there were two different regions superposed; one is Judea-and-Samaria, inhabited by settlers who see it as undoubtedly part of Israel (some say the Greater Israel should go from the Euphrates to the Nile), and the other is the West Bank, inhabited by people whose families have been there since time immemorial.
But things are much worse in Gaza. There are too many people in too little space, and since Israel decided it was too dangerous to allow people to come and go and essentially walled it off and turned the Gaza Strip into the world’s largest concentration camp, with almost two and a half million people in 365 km2 (141 sq mi), it is desperately poor. The perfect breeding ground for desperate and extremely violent young men.
What happened on October 7 is better understood as a prison break or riot. The terrorists were probably told to go out and bring hostages, because Israel often trades one single Israeli hostage for many prisoners. Netanyahu himself traded 1027 prisoners for one single Israeli hostage a few years ago. But they were Muslims (therefore did not accept Christian notions about the sanctity of all human life, did not see “immodest” women as deserving any respect, and so on), and they were furious. It was like releasing mad dogs; they killed potentially good hostages, they raped, they brought hostages who were obviously not Israeli (Thai, Africans…), therefore not that valuable, and so on. But in the end, it was a victory for them in two different planes: other Muslims saw it as waging good war and imposing Israel a defeat, and the very predictable Israeli overreaction would pretty soon make Israel lose all the international support the monstrous attacks had engendered. There was an Eastern European politician who said that Israel had all the world on their side for fifteen minutes, and then blew it.
The second part is important, because overreacting is a permanent and deliberate policy of the State of Israel. Again, not very Christian, but they are not Christians and we cannot forget that. They systematically bulldoze the familial homes of people who commit terror attacks, they shoot to kill (or to maim, and it can be much worse) people who are peacefully protesting, etc. If an idiot in a suicide vest blowing up a bunch of innocent people in an Israeli market more-or-less guarantees that Israel will bulldoze houses and kill lots of unarmed people, something truly horrible like the terror attacks of October 7 would obviously bring such savage retribution the whole world would be horrified. And it did.
The present Israeli government is so radical its Minister of National Security was not allowed to serve in the IDF because he was too extreme. The guy used to hang in his office a picture of Baruch Goldstein, the American-Israeli settler terrorist who opened fire on Muslims praying at the Tomb of Abraham (the same he bought for his wife in Hebron), killing dozens and wounding many more! It was obvious that it would be the overreaction to end all overreactions.
And that is what they got. I don’t know if even the Hamas terrorists-in-chief could have predicted such a grievous horror, though, as for the most extremist elements of an already too extreme government the October 7 terrorist attack became the perfect reason for ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip. One said an atomic bomb would be an option. Others said that the people who live in (or survive…) the Gaza Strip should go to Europe or Canada. Thus they would get rid of about half the natives (the minuscule Gaza Strip has almost as many inhabitants as the much larger West Bank), and, even better, of that vast concentration camp that can obviously only breed hatred against them.
Both sides are being ruled by madmen, and I don’t only mean that not having Christian morals is madness (even if it is). The blindness of the present Israeli government is putting it in a situation not unlike that of apartheid South Africa in its latter years. The uglier side of the State of Israel — its racism, its violence — is now like a festering wound, open for all the world to see. It endangers the very existence of the State, which, I repeat, has not yet reached the age of the Crusader kingdoms when they fell. Unlike the Crusaders, though, the people of Israel have no place to go back to. The State of Israel has atomic bombs, but Masada 2.0 would be stupidity reiterated, even if the original story makes for good propaganda.
The despicable bombing of women and children, hospitals and churches, is making antisemitism rise its ugly head all around the world. In the past, some Zionist movements would rejoice in antisemitism because it meant Jews from the places infected by that plague would go to Israel. I am scared that the present government adheres to this kind of idiocy. Israel must have peace, must be a peaceful place, precisely because the Jewish nation needs a home of its own. Peace cannot be attained by bombing women and children for the world to see, nor can it be attained by locking millions of people in concentration camps. When one’s home is bulldozed or bombed, when one’s children and old relatives are murdered, the natural reaction is to go and bomb back. One needs God’s grace to be able to turn the other cheek, and neither side even considers demanding that grace. Both see overreaction as the best way to go forward.
But if antisemitism grows and grows worldwide because of what is being perpetrated in the name of the Jews by the Israeli government, the State of Israel is seriously weakened. In fact, its very existence is put in danger, because it’s a tiny sliver of land between the Mediterranean and a Muslim sea of angry young men, sand, and oil. Atomic bombs may well protect against Hezbollah troops marching South from Lebanon, but using them would make Israel an international pariah, and if we think antisemitism is bad now, well…
Israel needs friends. Israel needs peace. Without friends and without peace, Israel cannot survive on its own, just like the Crusader kingdoms did not survive at a time when the world was much less connected. And then, where will Jews flee when antisemitism arises again? Unlike the Crusaders, there is no place to go back to for the Israelis. And without Israel, there is no place to go for the Jews, period. Israel is necessary.
Oy, if it had only been established in Madagascar!