Antisemitism threatens Jews, occupation threatens Judaism.
By James M. Dorsey
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Israeli historian Yuval Noah Hariri is seeing his
worst nightmare unfold before his eyes.
“Imagine a world where Judaism discards the spiritual and
moral legacy it has accumulated over generations, burns down ‘love your
neighbor as yourself’ and sets fire to ‘you shall not covet your neighbor’s
house.’ Imagine a world in which ‘Judaism’ becomes a synonym for religious
fanaticism, racism, and brutal oppression. Could Judaism survive such a
spiritual destruction?” Mr. Hariri asked three months before Hamas’s
game-changing October 7 attack on Israel.
Yuval Noah
Hariri. Source: Yuval Noah Hariri’s website
Mr. Hariri’s nightmare began to unfold when Binyamin
Netanyahu partnered in 2022 with militant religious Zionists,
ultra-conservatives, and ultra-nationalists to form the most far-right
government in Israel’s history.
The nightmare became reality with Israel’s response to the
Hamas attack; the devastation of Gaza; the killing of tens of thousands of
innocent Palestinians and the wounding of tens of thousands more; and the
mindless effort to subject Palestinians, destroy traces of their existence as a
distinct group, and quash their hope of achieving their national aspirations.
However, the seeds of the nightmare were planted decades
earlier with the Israeli capture of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in
the 1967 Middle East war and its occupation of Palestinian land since.
Mr Hariri’s nightmare and scholars’ research into
problematic precepts of the Halakha, Jewish law, take on added significance
with religious Zionism increasingly driving Israeli claims to all of Palestine.
As a result, Israel’s claims, West Bank policies, and Gaza
war conduct shine a spotlight on Jewish religious
legal precepts, much like the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks did with Islam.
Religious
Israeli soldiers pray during a training of an Ultra-Orthodox unit near the
Israeli city of Beit Shemesh, Credit: Flash90
Religious Zionism struggled for decades to identify a
project that would match secular Zionism’s success in creating a Jewish state.
The settlement of occupied lands historically claimed by religious Zionists as
Jewish was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Settlements became religious Zionists’ flagship project,
facilitated by the ruling Labour Party’s propagation of settlements south of
Jerusalem and in the Jordan Valley for security purposes. Settlements have led
religious Zionists down a path of belief in Jewish supremacism that has turned
them into an existential threat to Judaism as we know it.
It is a path that surrendered religious Zionism, despite the
silent majority’s rejection of religious extremism to men like Meir Kahane, an
America-born ultranationalist and racist rabbi, who was convicted on terrorism
charges and is National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s idol; Baruch
Goldstein, an American-Israeli settler who in 1994 killed 29 Muslim worshippers
and wounded 125 others in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs that served as a
mosque; and Yigal Amir, a right-wing extremist, who a year later assassinated
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Mr. Hariri likens the threat posed by the rise of extremist
religious Zionists to the Babylonians’ destruction of the First Jewish Temple
in 586 BC when they conquered Jerusalem and the Romans’ razing of the Second
Jewish Temple in 70 AD.
It is a threat far more existential than the renewed rise of
anti-Semitism accelerated by Israel’s Gaza war conduct.
“Can Judaism survive a Third Destruction?... What if the
Third Destruction is different? What if, this time, the Zealots succeeded in
creating a messianic state that would destroy Israeli democracy and would
persecute Arabs, secular people, women, and LGBTQ people? What if that state
were to embrace a racist ideology of Jewish supremacy – but thanks to its
nuclear weapons and cyber industries, it managed to avoid for some time
economic and political destruction? If this were to happen, then Judaism would
have to deal with an unprecedented kind of destruction – a spiritual
destruction… Every day that religious Zionist rabbis and politicians are
leading Israel toward spiritual destruction, without encountering serious
in-house resistance, will just make their future spiritual crisis more
intractable,” Mr. Hariri warned.
Destruction
of the Temple in Jerusalem by Francesco Hayez. Oil on canvas, 1867. Source:
Wikipedia
Resistance by what likely is the silent majority of
religious Jews opposed to ultra-conservative, extremist religious Zionism is
one path towards evading what Mr. Hariri dubs the Third Destruction.
Resistance needs to be coupled with religious reform that
tackles problematic precepts of Jewish law.
“The Jewish people were always ethnocentric. It believes in the supremacy of its ethnic collective over other nations. This is a blatantly hierarchical conception, according to which the Jew is superior to the non-Jew. But throughout history, this was a supremacy that lacked the force of a state and an apparatus for wielding control over non-Jews,” said political scientist Menahem Klein.
Menahem
Klein. Source: YouTube
Like Mr. Hariri, Mr. Klein is one of several scholars who
have charted the emergence of contemporary expressions of militant Judaism. Mr.
Klein labels it Jewish messianism and categorises it as “a
new Judaism.”
Mr. Klein argued that “this new Judaism was not shaped in
the beit midrash (study hall of the Torah) as classical Judaism was, but within
the framework of a dominant Israeli regime in general and rule over the
Palestinians in particular. The ethnocentrism evolved from a form of
self-awareness into a modus operandi, from a universal mission into oppression
and occupation.”
Mr. Klein suggested that “Jewish messianism has undergone a transformation.
Classic Jewish literature depicted the advent of a messianic age following a
catastrophe or great crisis, the birth pangs of the Messiah, a war of Gog and
Magog. All those elements are part of the messianic transition from the realm
of history into one that transcends history.”
He went on to say that “in contrast, the new Jewish
messianism is a product of historical success, the achievement of Jewish
sovereignty, and the wielding of power over non-Jewish surroundings.”
Sociologist Gershon Shafir has charted what he describes as
an evolution from a perceived secular Jewish privilege that justified a claim
to Palestine based on religion, ethnicity, and/or race to notions of Jewish supremacy rooted in Jewish religious law
as articulated by members of Israel’s current government and proponents of
militant religious Zionism.
Gershon
Shafir. Credit University of South California
The transition raised tricky legal questions for religious Zionist
rabbis and scholars.
While the harsh commandments of conquest codified in Maimonides’s 12th-century
Mishne Torah barred a return to Arab
sovereignty of occupied land, Mr. Shafir said the status of the territories’
inhabitants needed to be defined.
On what conditions did Palestinians qualify as ger toshav? Were
they idolaters, or did they observe the seven commandments of the Sons of Noah
that constitute principles imposed on non-Jews? Did residents need to recognise
Jewish supremacy? If so, was it still necessary to make them ‘wretched and
humiliated’ following Maimondes’ commandments, and how does one do that? What would
the fate of the residents be if they did not qualify as ger toshav and,
therefore, had no right to remain on the territory?
Israelis evaded answering these questions before the capture
of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. They were effectively fudged as Israel
tried to figure out how to deal with a non-Jewish minority within its legal
borders. The willingness and ability to continue to do so post-1967 was
fundamentally altered by the demographics of the conquest of land that held
great significance for religious nationalists.
Credit: B’tselem
Post-1967, fudging issues was no longer an option. Israelis
could no longer evade coming to grips with the commandment to inherit and
settle the land of Israel.
The conquest set off a process in Judaism not unlike the
impact of Muslim religious forces’ political and social involvement in the
search for a social order in Muslim-majority lands that accommodated both Islam
and modernity with similar outcomes.
Militant religious Zionism's Halakhic state is not that
different from concepts of an Islamic state's notions of the caliphate and
political Islamic and jihadist thinking regarding what it means for the
majority of the population as well as minorities.
The process of building support for notions of a Jewish or
an Islamic theocracy involved ensuring that a politicized religion played an
ever more important role in identity.
Much like in the Islamic State, politicization involved
territorial ambition. In militant religious Zionist views of a Jewish state
grounded in the Halakha, this meant an Israel controlling the land of ancient
Israel in which there would be no place, no equitable place, for non-Jews.
The transition from privilege to supremacy involved
emphasising different religious texts. Initially
dominating Israel, the secular Labour movement and the left sought religious
grounding in the Talmud, the primary rabbinical source of religious law and
theology.
Babylonian
Talmud. Source: Wikipedia
In contrast to the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible, the Talmud
focuses less on the history of Jewish life in the Land of Israel in Antiquity.
The Bible’s focus makes it more of a guiding text for religious Zionists and
ultra-nationalists like Messrs. Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
“A sovereign state with a large Jewish majority could not
have existed without the ethnic cleansing carried out in the 1948 war and its
aftermath. Back then, a new form of Judaism had already started to take on form
and substance. That process was accelerated after 1967 with the establishment
of the settlements. In school textbooks, the Books of Joshua, Judges, and Kings
supplanted those of the prophets who had preached social justice and a moral
regime – Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos,” Mr. Klein noted.
Unlike discussions in Islam about the nature of an Islamic
state, the Jewish battle over the primacy of texts was fought in an environment
in which legal debate about the rules that govern statecraft, warfare, and
policies towards minorities had stagnated for more than a millennium because
they were of no relevance to a community that did not control a state and land
of its own and was a minority in its own right.
“There is no precedent in Jewish history for the existence
of a Jewish state that constitutes a regional power and rules another people.
Never before has the Jewish people possessed a combination like this of
sovereignty, power, and control, which are being exploited to oppress another
people,” Mr. Klein said.
Religious Zionists had little, if anything, to help them
come to grips with the immense changes in the structure and legitimacy of the
state since Maimonides codified Jewish law in the 12th century.
Credit: My
Jewish Learning
The codification represented a worldview that did not bode
well for Jews or non-Jews, certainly not in a 21st-century world. Yet,
Maimonides' 14-volume magnus opus constitutes legal ground zero for religious
Zionists.
Maimonides codified Jewish concepts that influenced Muslim
legal thinking and have been retained in Judaism and Islam even though they
were no longer appropriate or fit for purpose.
The Halakhic notion of the ger toshav or resident alien was
not all that different from the notion of the dhimmi, the protected but unequal
status in Islam of People of the Book, Jews and Christians, but suddenly had
taken on a relevance it had not had for a thousand years.
Like the dhimmi, the ger toshav was expected to pay tribute.
Also, like the dhimmi, the ger toshav did not enjoy equal rights.
Maimonides argued in favor of the subjugation of the ger
toshav that needed to be “demeaning and humiliating.” Residents were not
allowed to lift their heads against Israel or be offered preferential
treatment.
The modern-day religious Zionist interpretation of these
principles means that the Israeli government must demand that ger toshav or
residents recognise Jewish sovereignty and Israel as a Jewish state. Refusal to
do so would deprive them of the right to reside on the land, a principle that
has crept into Israeli policies.
“As long as Jewish nationalism is bound up with Judaism as a
historic religion and people, equality and partnership of non-Jews in
sovereignty cannot be seen as just a secular phenomenon involving a division of
power and government.” Mr. Klein said.
He suggested that the solution may be “to find a Jewish
theological and historic basis for sharing sovereignty with non-Jews. That
challenge now awaits the opponents of Jewish supremacy.”
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior
Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.
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