Masalha - The Zionist Bible (BibleWorld)

THE ZIONIST BIBLE

BibleWorld

Series Editors: Philip R. Davies and James G. Crossley, University of Sheffield

BibleWorld shares the fruits of modern (and postmodern) biblical scholarship not only among practitioners and students, but also with anyone interested in what academic study of the Bible means in the twenty-first century. It explores our ever-increasing knowledge and understanding of the social world that produced the biblical texts, but also analyses aspects of the Bibles role in the history of our civilization and the many perspectives not just religious and theological, but also cultural, political and aesthetic which drive modern biblical scholarship.

The Zionist Bible

Biblical Precedent, Colonialism and the Erasure of Memory

Nur Masalha

First published 2013 by Acumen

Published 2014 by Routledge
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Nur Masalha, 2013

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Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

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ISBN : 978-1-84465-657-8 (hardcover)

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This book could not have been written without the practical help and emotional support of my family and friends. Many friends and colleagues have contributed to and shaped this project, directly and indirectly, with ideas, conversations, criticism, material, logistics and moral support, including four extraordinary individuals who are no longer with us: Israel Shahak, Edward Said, Michael Prior and Samih Farsoun. I am also particularly grateful to the following colleagues: Thomas Thompson, Ahmad Sadi, Ilan Pappe, Oren Ben-Dor, Ronit Lentin, Haim Bresheeth, Mary Grey, John Docker, Duncan Macpherson, Samuel Kuruvilla, Isabelle Humphies, Anthony Towey, Tarcisius Mukuka and Saad Chedid. I am particularly indebted for the encouragement and practical support of Professor Philip R. Davies. Last but not least, I owe enormous gratitude to my wife Dr Stephanie Cronin, of Oxford University, and my daughter Maryam Masalha, for their tremendous support. Any credit for this book should be shared with the people above, but all mistakes are mine alone.

The secular founding fathers of Jewish Zionism sought to underpin the legitimacy of their European movement in the biblical text. Testifying before the British Royal (Peel) Commission in 1936, David Ben-Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency, declared The Bible is our mandate. For Ben-Gurion, the Tanakh, , the land traditions and narratives of the Hebrew Bible, reconfigured and reinvented in the last century as a foundational metanarrative of Zionism and the State of Israel, have been instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today the same land traditions continue to be at the heart of the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians (both Muslims and Christians) from Jerusalem.

The Bible as a whole (both Old and New Testaments) is also the first text of the West and central to the Judeo-Christian tradition and, as such, it has been (and remains) central to Western support for the State of Israel. Since the late nineteenth century political Zionism (and todays Israel lobby) has continued to enjoy an extraordinary influence in the corridors of power of the West. For a variety of reasons (which include epistemology and politics of the biblical text), the Israeli state has been central to Western policies in the oil-rich Middle East. In addition to its geopolitical-strategic value and its immense military and nuclear capabilities, the Israeli state has had enormous significance for post-Second World War Western politics. In the post-Holocaust period the massive financial, military and political support for the Jewish State in Palestine has also been seen as an opportunity to redeem Europe (and the West) from the genocidal crimes of Nazism.

In her book Bible and Sword: How the British came to Palestine (1956, 1982) Barbara Tuchman shows how the two magnets, the Bible and the sword, have drawn countless British pilgrims, crusaders, missionaries, archaeologists and conquerors and ultimately led to the British conquest of Palestine in 1918. Central to this book is the idea that the land conquest narrative of the Bible has been the key text that redeems the European settler-colonization of Palestine. Outside the Middle East the Bible has redeemed European empires and European settler-colonialism, the conquest of the earth, and even current American imperialism. As a fact of power, the authority of the biblical narrative has also been central to organized religion and collective memory. As organized memory, the authority of the Bible became critical to the political theologies of the medieval Latin crusaders, Spanish conquistadors in the struggle for colonial power in Latin America from 1492 until the twentieth century and a whole variety of settler-colonialist projects.

Indeed in modern times a range of Western settler-colonial enterprises have deployed the power politics of the biblical text and its famous land conquest narrative very effectively and with devastating consequences for indigenous peoples. The narrative of Exodus has been widely deployed as a framing narrative for European settler-colonialism and the European mission civilisatrice , while other biblical texts have been appropriated and used to provide moral authority for European exploration in, and settler-colonial conquests of, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas (Prior, 1997, 1999).

The chapters that follow explore the politics of the biblical text language, narrative, epics, genres, theologies, paradigms and organized memory and its utilization in the service of a settler-colonialist project and Israeli secular state policies. The book also examines the politics of collective identity-fashioning and the retrospective colonization of the ancient past. It argues that the continuing mobilization of the allegorical narratives of the Hebrew Bible in the service of settler-colonization is central to ongoing collective identity-fashioning in Israel.

Framing and morally examining the authority of biblical text and its misappropriation in Israeli state policies are at the heart to this work. Central to the politics of the Hebrew Bible in Israel is the struggle for the land of Palestine, as well as the use and abuse of the biblical text in underpinning Israeli settler-colonial policies. Today, while post-colonial academic discourses in the West have opted for a wide range of critical approaches to the biblical text and language, in Israel the ethnocratic, mono-culturalist discourses of Zionism focus exclusively on the Hebrew Bible, with almost complete disregard for the New Testament. Being Christian the latter is outside the biblical discourse of Israel. The New Testament is effectively a taboo subject in Israeli Jewish schools, neither taught nor mentioned. Occasionally the New Testament makes headlines in the Israeli press for the wrong reasons: as we shall see in army) publicly and ritualistically burn copies of the New Testament. These incidents are conveniently ignored by the Western media a media often obsessed with Islamic