Anyone who wrongly believes that religiosity is a private affair of personal faith needs to educate themselves about the danger religious nationalism poses in many places around the world, including Israel.
I wrote a post about this yesterday for my Salem Political Snark blog, "Two well-researched stories show how badly Israel is treating Palestinians."
One of those stories was a lengthy piece in the New York Times Magazine, with the title shown above. Since I'm a subscriber to the online New York Times and gifted that link, you should be able to click on it and read this disturbing investigative journalism.
Below I've shared some excerpts from the story that focus on how Jewish religious nationalism has been a major force in Israel's oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank territory occupied by Israel. I've boldfaced passages that pertain most directly to religious extremism.
What deeply irks me is how conservatives in the United States, and also some Democrats, sadly, keep talking about how the students engaged in campus protests against the inhumane way Israel is conducing its war against Hamas in Gaza need to educate themselves about the history of Israel.
Well, I suspect that most of the students are well aware of how badly Israel has treated Palestinians since the founding of Israel in 1948, I believe it was. In part the reasons why this has happened are rooted in ordinary nationalism. But the Jewish faith has played an even greater role, as you can read below.
Politics is always messy. However, when religion becomes intertwined with a political cause, typically positions become hardened and more extreme, since God's will is imagined to be the basis for religious nationalism. Which is what is happening in Israel at the moment.
Here's the excerpts with my boldfacing.
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Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands. Just two months earlier, according to news reports at the time, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal Amir.
Now Ben-Gvir was Israel’s national security minister and Smotrich was Israel’s finance minister, charged additionally with overseeing much of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank. In December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet, including a clear statement that the nationalistic ideology of his new allies was now the government’s guiding star. “The Jewish people,” it said, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel.”
...With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the territories animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands.
Gush Emunim followers believed that the coming of the messiah would be hastened if, rather than studying holy books from morning to night, Jews settled the newly occupied territories. This was the land of “Greater Israel,” they believed, and there was a pioneer spirit among the early settlers. They saw themselves as direct descendants of the earliest Zionists, who built farms and kibbutzim near Palestinian villages during the first part of the 20th century, when the land was under British control. But while the Zionism of the earlier period was largely secular and socialist, the new settlers believed they were advancing God’s agenda.
...The Jewish Department found itself continually behind in its efforts to address the onslaught. In April 1984, it had a major breakthrough: Its agents foiled a Jewish Underground plan to blow up five buses full of Palestinians, and they arrested around two dozen Jewish Underground members who had also played roles in the Islamic College attack and the bombings of the Palestinian mayors in 1980. But only after weeks of interrogating the suspects did Shin Bet learn that the Jewish Underground had been developing a scheme to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque. The planning involved dozens of intelligence-gathering trips to the Temple Mount and an assessment of the exact amount of explosives that would be needed and where to place them. The goal was nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the messiah.
...That evening marked the beginning of Purim, the festive commemoration of the victory of the Jews over Haman the Agagite, a court official in the Persian Empire and the nemesis of the Jews in the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. Right-wing Israelis have often drawn parallels between Haman and Arabs — enemies who seek the annihilation of Jews. Goldstein woke early the next day and put on his I.D.F. uniform, and at 5:20 a.m. he entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, an ancient complex in Hebron that serves as a place of worship for both Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried with him his I.D.F.-issued Galil rifle. It was also the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and on that morning hundreds of Muslims crowded the hall in prayer. Goldstein faced the worshipers and began shooting, firing 108 rounds before he was dragged down and beaten to death. The massacre killed 29 Muslim worshipers and injured more than 100.
...The killings shocked Israel, and the government responded with a crackdown on extremism. Kach and Kahane Chai, the two political organizations most closely affiliated with the Kahanist movement, were outlawed and labeled terrorist groups, as was any other party that called for “the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land.” Rabin, in an address to the Knesset, spoke directly to the followers of Goldstein and Kahane, who he said were the product of a malicious foreign influence on Israel. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” he said. “You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”
...The I.D.F. refused to allow Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel with “clean hands and a pure heart.”
...The warnings noted that rabbis in West Bank settlements, along with some politicians on the right, were now openly advocating violence against Israeli public officials, especially Rabin. Extremist rabbis issued rulings of Jewish law against Rabin — imposing a curse of death, a Pulsa Dinura, and providing justification for killing him, a din rodef.
...The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.
Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth “genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for Israel’s future.”
It's a plain fact that Israel is acting toward the Palestinians as Hitler did to the Jews.
That enormity is compounded by the support of (usually conservative) Americans for Israel's atrocities. And that every American's tax dollars are funding the slaughter of women and children.
The current administration doesn't impress me either. As I wrote here months ago, their finger-wagging at Netanyahu is all political kabuki, as Biden and friends have done nothing to stop Israel's genocide.
Posted by: sant64 | May 19, 2024 at 07:20 AM
Very interesting article. The audio feature came in handy there. It's around an hour and a half long, but it's completely riveting, and you can listen in while multitasking.
Thanks for the link, Brian.
It's ...unspeakable, horrible beyond articulation, what's happening there. But then horrible evil people doing horrible evil things is nothing new. What's completely disgraceful is how US tax dollars and US support have enabled this enormity, and continue to fuel this carnage even today.
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Agreed 100% with what you've said there, sant64. It's ironic, and such a pity, that these people, so brutally persecuted once, have learnt the one lesson from that time that they shouldn't have, and have turned into these inhuman monsters themselves.
Of course, it's just Bibi and his murderous IDF, not the people at large. And yet I've seen polls that put support for what's happening at very high levels (I forget how much exactly, but very high). Much like Hitler's Germany, while only a few are the actual authors of the killings and the all-round evil, but the entire nation shares the guilt of letting it happen.
...And yet, I ask myself, if I were an Israeli myself, would I have had the balls to stand up and speak up aloud and try to stop it all, at considerable risk to myself? Do I have the balls to do that when I see injustice happening around me right where I am? Or do I stay put as long as I myself remain personally unaffected? When I ask myself that, I find myself unable to point my finger at others. At the likes of Bibi, sure; but not at the people at large, not at Israel as a whole.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | May 19, 2024 at 11:09 AM
AR, I don't know about Israelis, but if the NYT is a reliable gauge of American Jewish sentiment, many Jews are not on board with what Israel's doing. On the other hand, if the attitude of the WSJ represents the sickening sentiment of most American conservatives (Jewish or otherwise) then that faction can't get enough of Israel's mowing down anything that moves in Gaza. These are strange times we live in.
Posted by: sant64 | May 19, 2024 at 02:30 PM