NB: If religious texts sanctify hatred and cruelty towards others, there is something wrong with them, and especially with us, for taking such injunctions literally. There is no such thing as my god versus your god, because the creator of the universe cannot possibly have chosen a small fragment of humanity to be regardful of, leaving the rest of us to the devil. Here is something to be mindful of, it is written by someone who lost his mother to the Holocaust, and was himself a Zionist fighter in 1948. He was a great philosopher, one of the first to write about ecological matters. Jonas argues for ‘the manifest opaqueness’ of myth to be kept ‘transparent for the ineffable.’
He ends thus: This is how he ends one of his essays: Myth taken literally is crudest objectification / Myth taken allegorically is sophisticated objectification / Myth taken symbolically is the glass through which we darkly see. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (1966; 2001); in Heidegger and Theology. DS
Reader in Religion and Politics and Director of the Centre for Religion and History and the Holy Land Research Project School of Theology, Philosophy and History, St Mary’s University College
Strawberry Hill; Twickenham TW1 4SX, England
ABSTRACT: In modern times, a whole range of colonial enterprises have used the Bible. The book of Joshua and other biblical texts evoking the exploits of ancient Israelites have been deployed in support of secular Zionism and settler colonisation in Palestine. The mega narratives of the Bible, however, appeared to mandate the ethnic cleansing and even genocide of the indigenous population of Canaan. This article argues that, with the rise of messianic Zionism since 1967, a Jewish theology of zealotocracy, based on the land traditions of the Bible, has emerged in Israel – a political theology that demanded the destruction of the so-called modern Canaanites; since 1967 fundamentalist rabbis have routinely compared the Palestinian people to the ancient Canaanites, Philistines and Amalekites, whose annihilation or expulsion by the ancient Israelites was predestined by a divine design.
This article focuses on the politics of reading the Bible by neo-Zionists and examines the theology of the messianic current which embraces the paradigm of Jews as a divinely ‘chosen people’ and sees the indigenous Palestinians as no more than illegitimate squatters, and a threat to the process of messianic redemption; their human and civil rights are no match for the biblically-ordained holy war of conquering and settling the ‘Promised Land’.
Introduction
The land traditions of the Hebrew Bible are theologically problematic and morally dubious (Prior 1998: 41–81). In the narrative of the Book of Exodus, there is an inextricable link between the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and the divine mandate to plunder ancient Palestine and even commit genocide; the invading Israelites are commanded to annihilate the indigenous inhabitants of ‘the land of Canaan’ (as Palestine was then called).1 In the Book of Deuteronomy (often described as the focal point of the religious history and theology of the Old Testament) there is an explicit requirement to ‘ethnically cleanse the land’ of the indigenous people of Canaan (Deuteronomy 7.1–11; see also 9.1–5,
23, 31–32; 20.11–14, 16–18; Exodus 23.27–33) (Prior 1997a: 16–33, 278–84).
Ironically, however, as biblical scholar Robert Caroll argues, so much of the religion of the Hebrew Bible belongs to Canaanite belief and practice; biblical antagonism towards the Canaanites (and Philistines) was partly a way of distancing the ‘new’ Hebrew religion from its Canaanite antecedents (Cited in Docker 2008: 103). Contrary to the vitriolic anti-Canaanite rhetoric of the Bible authors, the new biblical scholarship has shown that the biblical portrayal of the Israelites’ origins in terms of a conflict between them and the Canaanites or the Philistines is not justification for assuming that such a conflict ever took place in history, in either the twelfth century BC or any other period. Canaanites and Israelites never existed as opposing peoples fighting over Palestine (Thompson 2004: 23; Lemche 1991). Biblical scholar Niels Peter Lemche comments on the invention of the ethnic and racial divide between the Hebrews and
Canaanites by the Bible writers during the post-exilic period:
The ‘Canaanites’ embraced that part of the Palestinian population which did not convert to the Jewish religion of the exiles, the reason being that it had no part in the experience of exile and living in a foreign world which had been the fate of the Judaeans who were carried off to Babylonia in 587 BCE. The Palestinian – or rather old Israelite – population was not considered to be Jews because they were not ready to acknowledge the religious innovations of the exilic community that Yahweh was the only god to be worshipped. Thus the real difference between the Canaanites and the Israelites would be a religious one and not the difference between two distinct nationals. (1991: 162, n.12)
In modern times, however, a whole range of settler colonial enterprises have used the mega-narratives of the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Exodus has been widely deployed as a framing narrative for Western imperialism, while other biblical texts have been used to provide moral authority for colonial conquests in Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas…
Masalha, N. (2009). Reading the Bible with the Eyes of the Canaanites: Neo-Zionism, Political Theology and the Land Traditions of the Bible (1967 to Gaza 2009). Holy Land Studies, 8(1), 55–108.
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Michael Brenner: Europe-Jews-Muslims
After the truth-shower 