from 21st Century Wire:
From left to right: Otzma Yehudit leader MK Itamar Ben Gvir, Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu, and Religious Zionism head MK Bezalel Smotrich (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
Dr Martin Cohen
21st Century Wire
The United Nations is probing whether Israel is committing genocide. The US President pleads with it to stop killing civilians – to no avail. And despite its evident bias, the news media is day after day full of horrific tales of death and destruction in Gaza.
Surely any government would draw back at this point – from what is by any measure a completely futile and pointless campaign. What use is it to Israel to pile-up another ten thousand bodies of women and children?
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The fate of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia shows that defying world opinion comes at a cost.
But not for Israel.
To understand why, it’s necessary to consider the nexus of nationalism and religious extremism.
Israel is built on an Old Testament ethics which actively celebrates extermination of “enemies”, men, women and children. In other words, Israel – like South Africa under Apartheid – has institutionalised a rival ethics opposed to that of the liberal West. There’s no appealing to their better natures, because within Israel “wrong” is “right”.
Netanyahu left many in shock when he invoked this specific Old Testament story in order to justify Israel brutal military operation against the people of Gaza. “They are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world,” he said in Hebrew. “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember,” he added.
This comes from the passage the first Book of Samuel when God commands King Saul in to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to biblical Israel. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
Make no mistake here: the Israeli PM was signally to his far-right baser when chose a specific biblical reference to justify killing Palestinians.
Israel was always intended to be a theocracy. A series of “Basic Laws” serve as the country’s constitutional foundation. The Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People (Nation State Law) recognises “the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel” as “unique to the Jewish People” and calls for promotion of “Jewish settlement” as a national value.
In fact, around one in five of the world’s countries favour a particular religion. But very few allow ancient religious texts to drive practical policy to the extent that today Israel does.
After all, most of the passages in the Talmud, the primary source of Jewish religious law, are cryptic and difficult to understand. Its language even contains many obscure Greek and Persian words.
But other elements of it are familiar in the form of the Old Testament stories involving the slaughter of whole peoples – genocide in fact. One tale in the ‘holy books’ that is all too similar to the Palestinian question: the conquest of Canaan. God, it starts, promised Israel that He would give them this land, even though to do so the people living there had to be displaced. The holy text doesn’t suggest forcibly relocating them, though. Instead, God instructs the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child. Moses gives these instructions:
“As for the towns of these peoples that the Lord 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 the Lord your God has commanded.”
Just a nasty story from an crueller age? Not in Israel. Texts like these have legal standing, because the Jewish religion has legal standing. And because the Jewish religion has legal standing, Israeli governments are increasingly dominated by religious fundamentalists.
Jewish religious political parties have always been part of the Israeli political scene. In fact, their roots go back to the pre-state Zionist movement’s institutions. Over the years these parties represented two different religious sectors: the ultra-Orthodox (e.g., Agudat Israel Party) and the Orthodox or National Religious (e.g., Ha’Mizrahi, later known by the Hebrew acronym Mafdal, or National Religious Party). Neither of these parties represented or could have represented both sectors at the same time, as the two were deeply divided over the Zionist creed and the question of Israel as a Jewish entity. The ultra-Orthodox sector was anti- or at least non-Zionist and hence saw the state of Israel as a political entity with no Jewish religious value. The national Orthodox sector, however, is deeply committed to the Zionist idea and sees Israel as an entity invested with religious significance.
SEE ALSO: Seven Ways Israel Controls The News Agenda
But both kinds of parties, ultra-Orthodox and National Religious, acknowledge the authority of religious texts and both agree that even a partial withdrawal from parts of the Greater Land of Israel is forbidden, as such a move goes against the promise of God to give the land in its entirety of the Children of Israel (i.e., the Jews).
Up until recently, the Jewish Israeli religious parties, whether Zionist or non-Zionist, were still small in terms of their electoral appeal. Even so, they had a disproportionally strong political influence due to the structure of the Israeli parliamentary system with its need to build multi-partner coalitions in order to get a large enough majority in the Knesset. Add to which, almost all Israeli prime ministers, regardless of their party affiliation, sought to emphasise their commitment to Jewish history and values by having religious parties as part of their coalition-based governments.
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