What role did the Bible play in supporting Zionist claims to Palestine ?
The Bible’s importance in Jewish life provided a clear distinction between Judaism and Zionism. In the pre-Zionist Jewish world, the Bible was not taught as a single text with political or even national implications in the many Jewish educational institutions throughout Europe and the Arab world. The greatest rabbis regarded the Bible’s political history and the concept of Jewish sovereignty over the country of Israel as peripheral subjects in their spiritual sphere of learning. They, and indeed Judaism in general, were far more concerned with the holy literature focusing on the interaction between believers, and particularly on their relationship with God.
From 1882’s “The Lovers of Zion” through the Zionist leaders on the eve of World War I, who pleaded with Britain to back the Jewish claim for Palestine, biblical references were prevalent. Zionist leaders profoundly questioned established scriptural interpretations in pursuit of their own objectives. For instance, the Lovers of Zion read the Bible as the account of a Jewish nation born in Palestine as an oppressed people under the yoke of a Canaanite regime. The latter deported the Jewish people to Egypt, where they remained until Joshua led them back to the country and freed it. By contrast, the conventional understanding views Abraham and his family as a group of individuals discovering a monotheistic god, rather than as a country and homeland. The majority of readers are familiar with this conventional narrative of the Abrahamites encountering God and eventually settling in Egypt, hardly a story of an oppressed people engaged in a liberation fight.1 However, the latter was the accepted Zionist interpretation, and it continues to hold water in modern-day Israel.
One of the most interesting applications of the Bible in Zionism is that of the movement’s socialist side. After Herzl’s death in 1904, the various socialist groups became the major parties in the World Zionist movement and on the ground in Palestine. According to one communist, the Bible gave “the myth for our right over the land.”2 They read stories of Hebrew farmers, shepherds, kings, and wars in the Bible, which they claimed as representing their nation’s ancient golden age of birth. Returning to the land entailed a return to farming, shepherding, and kingship.
Thus, they had a conundrum, since they desired both to secularize Jewish life and to utilize the Bible to justify invading Palestine. In other words, despite their lack of faith in God, He had promised them Palestine.
For many Zionist leaders, the biblical reference to Palestine was merely a means to an end, not the substance of Zionism. This was particularly evident in Theodor Herzl‘s writings. He grounded the Jewish claim for Palestine on the Bible in a famous article in The Jewish Chronicle (July 10, 1896), but underlined his desire for the future Jewish state to be ruled according to the European political and moral philosophies of his time.Herzl was arguably more secular than his successors. This movement’s prophet seriously explored alternatives to Palestine, including Uganda, as Zion’s given land. He also considered places in northern and southern America, as well as Azerbaijan.3
With Herzl’s death in 1904 and the emergence of his successors, Zionism homed in on Palestine, and the Bible became much more valuable as proof of a divine Jewish entitlement to the territory than it had been previously. The growing power of Christian Zionism in Britain and Europe supported the new post-1904 obsession on Palestine as the only place in which Zionism could be implemented. Theologians who studied the Bible and evangelical archaeologists who explored “the Holy Land” welcomed the arrival of Jews as confirmation of their religious belief that the “Jewish return” would herald the fulfillment of God’s end-time promise. The return of the Jews foreshadowed the Messiah’s coming and the resurrection of the dead. This esoteric religious doctrine was advantageous to the Zionist objective of occupying Palestine.4
However, these religious views are based on traditional anti-Semitic attitudes.For directing Jewish communities toward Palestine was not simply a religious duty; it also contributed to the establishment of a Europe devoid of Jews.Thus, it constituted a double gain: eliminating Jews from Europe while also completing the divine plan for the Second Coming to be hastened by the return of the Jews to Palestine (and their subsequent conversion to Christianity or their roasting in Hell should they refuse).
From that point forward, the Bible served as both a rationale and a road map for Zionist colonization of Palestine. The Bible has historically aided Zionism from its inception through the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. It played a significant role in the dominant Israeli narrative, both domestically and externally, arguing that Israel is the land promised to Abraham by God in the Bible.
In this tale, “Israel” existed until 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed it and banished its inhabitants. The religious remembrance of that date, which marked the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem, was a day of grief. In Israel, it has developed into a national day of mourning, with all leisure-industry establishments, including restaurants, having to close beginning the evening prior.
The primary scholarly and secular evidence for this tale has emerged in recent years through a process known as biblical archeology (in itself an oxymoronic concept, since the Bible is a great literary work, written by many peoples in different periods, and hardly a historical text 5 According to the legend, the area was mostly deserted after 70 CE, until the Zionist return. However, senior Zionists recognized that appealing to the Bible’s authority would not suffice. colonizing already populated Palestine would necessitate a concerted campaign of colonization, dispossession, and even ethnic cleansing. To this goal, portraying Palestine’s eviction as the culmination of a divine Christian plan was invaluable in energizing global Christian support for Zionism.
Once all other geographical alternatives were ruled out and Zionism became concentrated on the reclaiming of Palestine, the leaders who succeeded the early pioneers began infusing the rising secular movement with socialist, and even Marxist, ideology. Now, with God’s assistance, the goal was to construct a secular, socialist, colonialist Jewish project in the Holy Land. As the colonized indigenous people swiftly discovered, their fate was determined regardless of whether the settlers brought the Bible, Marx’s books, or tracts of the European Enlightenment with them. All that mattered was whether or not you were incorporated into the settlers’ future vision. It is also telling that in the compulsive records kept by early Zionist leaders and settlers, the natives were depicted as an impediment, an alien, and an enemy, regardless of their identity or ambitions.6
The earliest anti-Arab entries were made in such records when the settlers were still being sheltered by Palestinians on their route to the old colonies or cities. Their grievances originated from their formative experiences while seeking work and subsistence. This situation appeared to impact them universally, regardless of whether they settled in the old colonies or ventured into towns. Wherever they were, they had to work side by side with Palestinian farmers or labourers in order to exist. Even the most uneducated and belligerent settlers knew that Palestine was entirely an Arab country in terms of its human landscape as a result of such direct contact.
David Ben-Gurion, the Mandatory period’s leader of the Jewish community and Israel’s first prime minister, referred to Palestinian labourers and farmers as beit mihush (“an infested hotbed of pain”). Additional settlers referred to Palestinians as foreigners and aliens.
“The people here are stranger to us than the Russian or Polish peasant,”one of them wrote, adding, “We have nothing in common with the majority of the people living here.”? 7 They were taken aback to discover that there were people in Palestine at all, having been told the region was deserted.
“I was disgusted to find out that in Hadera [an early Zionist colony built in 1882] part of the houses were occupied by Arabs,”
one settler reported back to Poland, while another described being appalled to witness numerous Arab men, women, and children crossing through Rishon LeZion (another colony from 1882).8
Given that the country was not deserted and you had to contend with the indigenous people, it was advantageous to have God on your side, even if you were an atheist. Both David Ben-Gurion and his close friend and colleague Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (who, along with Ben-Gurion, led the Zionist socialist forces in Palestine and subsequently became Israel’s second president) relied heavily on the biblical promise to justify the colonization of Palestine. This remained true for the ideologues who succeeded them in the Labor party until the mid-1970s, and up to the Likud party’s and its offshoots’ current relatively superficial secular Bible-ism.
The view of the Bible as divine justification for Zionism aided socialists in reconciling their commitment to universal values of solidarity and equality with the with the colonization agenda of dispossession.Indeed, given Zionism’s primary objective of colonialism, one needs to wonder what type of socialism this was. After all, many people link the golden age of Zionism with the collectivist, egalitarian way of life exemplified in the establishment of the Kibbutz. This way of life persisted long after Israel’s establishment, attracting young people from around the world who came to serve and experience communism in its purest form. Few of them recognized, or could have known, that the majority of the Kibbutzim were erected on the ruins of Palestinian villages whose residents were ethnically cleansed in 1948. Zionists justified their annexation of these communities by claiming that they were ancient Jewish settlements referenced in the Bible, and hence that their acquisition was not an occupation but a liberation. A special team of “biblical archeologists” would enter an abandoned settlement and ascertain its biblical name. The colony would then be renamed by energetic officers of the Jewish National Fund. After 1967, the then-minister of labor, Yigal Alon, a secular socialist Jew, used a similar strategy to establish a new town near Hebron, claiming that it “belonged” to the Jewish people according to the Bible.
Several critical Israeli historians, most notably Gershon Shafir and Zeev Sternhell (as well as American researcher Zachary Lockman), have demonstrated how colonial seizure of land stained socialist Zionism’s ostensibly golden era. As these historians demonstrate, socialism within Zionism has always been a conditional and constrained form of the universal concept. The universal ideas and aspirations that defined the Western left’s diverse ideological groups were very quickly nationalized or Zionized in Palestine. It’s unsurprising, then, that socialism lost its appeal to the following generation of settlers.9
Nonetheless, religion remained a significant part of the process, even after the Palestinians’ land was taken. In its name, you might invoke and proclaim an ancient moral right to Palestine, defying every other foreign claim to the territory during imperialism’s latter days. Additionally, this right superseded the indigenous population’s moral claims. One of the twentieth century’s greatest socialist and secular colonialist enterprises requested exclusivity in the name of a pure heavenly promise. The Zionist settlers’ dependence on the sacred text proved immensely profitable, but extremely costly to the indigenous inhabitants. The Bible and Colonialism, the late and great Michael Prior’s final book, demonstrated how similar programs were pursued around the world in ways that have a strong resemblance to the colonization of Palestine.10
After Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Bible was continued to be utilized for similar purposes. I have already highlighted Yigal Alon, who used the Bible to justify the construction of a Jewish community, Qiryat Arba, on land expropriated from the Palestinians of Hebron. Qiryat Arba rapidly developed a reputation for being a haven for those who took the Bible even more seriously as a guide for action. They cherry-picked biblical passages and words that, in their opinion, justified the dispossession of Palestinians. As the occupation years passed, so did the regime of oppression against the dispossessed. This process of deriving political legitimacy from a sacred text can result in deadly fanaticism. The Bible, for example, contains references to genocide: Joshua exterminated the Amalekites. Today, there are people who refer to not only Palestinians as Amalekites, but also to those who, in their opinion, are not Jewish enough.11
Similar allusions to genocide committed in the name of God appear in the Jewish Pesach Haggadah (Passover). The central story of the Passover Seder—in which God sends Moses and the Israelites to a place inhabited by others in order to possess it as they see fit, it is, of course, not a pressing concern for the vast majority of Jews. It is a literary work, not a war manual. It can, however, be utilized by the new strain of Jewish messianic thought, as was the case with Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 and the burning to death of a Palestinian kid and two Palestinian parents and their infant in the summer of 2015.
Israel’s new minister of justice, Ayelet Shaked,has expressed similar sentiments, but so far only for Palestinians who have died resisting Israel:
their entire family should “follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”12
For now, this is a warning for the future. As we have seen, the Bible has been used to justify eviction since 1882. However, throughout the state of Israel’s early years, 1948–67, reference to the Bible waned and was used exclusively by the right-wing fringes of the Zionist movement to explain their portrayal of Palestinians as subhuman and eternal enemies of the Jewish people. Following the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, these messianic and fundamentalist Jews grew up in the Religious National Party, MAFDAL, and took the opportunity to translate their dreams into tangible action on the ground. They established themselves throughout the newly captured territory, with or without the government’s authorization. They established Jewish enclaves within Palestinian territory and began acting as if they owned it all.
Israeli prime minister Naftali bennet Justifying the occupation of the Westbank:
The more radical groups of Gush Emunim, the post-1967 settlement movement, exploited the unique circumstances provided by Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to run wild with their permission to dispossess and mistreat in the name of sacred texts. In the occupied territories, which were governed by military emergency restrictions, Israeli law did not apply. However, this military legal system did not apply to the settlers, who were largely immune to punishment under both legal systems. Their forced settlements in the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods in Hebron and Jerusalem, uprooting Palestinian olive trees, and torching Palestinian fields were all justified as part of the divine mandate to settle in “Eretz Israel.”
However, the violent interpretation of the biblical message by the settlers was not limited to the seized regions. They began pushing their way into the heart of historic Palestine’s mixed Arab-Jewish towns, such as Acre, Jaffa, and Ramleh, in order to disrupt the delicate modus vivendi that had existed there for years. The movement of settlers into these sensitive areas inside the pre-1967 Israeli border has the potential to sour already fragile relations between the Jewish state and its Palestinian minority in the name of the Bible.
The Final justification presented for Zionism’s restoration of the Holy Land, as defined by the Bible, was the necessity for Jews worldwide to find a safe refuge, particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Even if this were true, it may have been possible to find a solution that was not limited to the biblical geography and did not result in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
This position was taken by a number of prominent figures, including Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. These critics sought to imply that the Palestinians should be requested to offer a safe haven for persecuted Jews alongside, not in place of, the indigenous people. However, such propositions were viewed as heresy by the Zionist movement.
Mahatma Gandhi recognized the distinction between settling among indigenous people and outright expelling them when he was urged to lend his support to the Zionist mission by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.
In 1938, Ben-Gurion encouraged Buber to exert pressure on some prominent moral personalities to demonstrate their public support for Zionism. They believed that Gandhi’s endorsement, as the leader of a nonviolent national movement against imperialism, would be particularly beneficial, and they were willing to utilize his respect for Buber to obtain it. Gandhi’s major remark on Palestine and the Jewish question occurred in a widely circulated editorial in the Harijan on November 11, 1938, in the midst of great uprising against the British government’s pro-Zionist policies by indigenous Palestinians. Gandhi opened his article by expressing his complete sympathy for the Jews, who had endured centuries of terrible abuse and persecution.However, he added:
My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood? 14
Gandhi thus called into doubt the political Zionist movement’s fundamental rationale, opposing the notion of a Jewish state in the promised land by pointing out that “Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract.” Thus, Gandhi was opposed to the Zionist goal on political as well as religious grounds. The British government’s sponsorship of that scheme only served to further alienate Gandhi.
He had no illusions about who owned Palestine:
Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs … Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.15
Gandhi’s stance to the Palestine dilemma is complex, spanning from an ethical position to political reality. What’s remarkable is that, despite his adamant belief in the inseparability of religion and politics, he persistently and passionately opposed Zionism’s cultural and religious nationalism. A religious justification for declaring a nation state made no substantive sense to him. Buber attempted to justify Zionism in response to this article, but Gandhi had evidently had enough, and the correspondence ceased.
Indeed, the Zionist movement’s need for space was not motivated by the desire to save oppressed Jews, but by the desire to acquire as much of Palestine as possible with the fewest possible inhabitants. Sober and secular Jewish intellectuals strove to be “scientific” in their attempt to translate a vague promise from the distant past into a contemporary reality. The project was initiated by Ben-Zion Dinaburg (Dinur), the chief historian of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, and was continued actively upon the establishment of the state in 1948, and continues to this day.
Dinur’s mission in the 1930s, as it has been for his predecessors ever since, was to demonstrate scientifically that Jews have been in Palestine from Roman times. Not that anyone doubted this claim. Despite historical evidence showing that Jews lived in eighteenth-century Palestine rejected the idea of a Jewish Sate, as did Orthodox Jews in the late nineteenth century, This was completely rejected in the twentieth century. Dinur and his colleagues used the figure that Jews constituted less than 2% of the population of eighteenth-century Palestine to demonstrate the biblical promise’s validity and the modern Zionist demand for Palestine’s legitimacy.16 This narrative has evolved into the traditional, widely accepted version of history. Sir Martin Gilbert, one of the most eminent historians in the United Kingdom, authored the Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, which was published by Cambridge University Press in numerous versions over the years.17 The Atlas opens the fight in biblical times, presuming that the area was a Jewish monarchy to which the Jews had returned following 2,000 years of exile. Its opening maps reveal the entire story: the first depicts biblical Palestine; the second depicts Roman-era Palestine; the third depicts crusader-era Palestine; and the fourth depicts Palestine in 1882. Thus, between the medieval era and the advent of the first Zionists, nothing significant occurred. It is only when foreigners are present in Palestine: Romans, Crusaders, or Zionists, that it is worthwhile to notice.
Israeli educational texts now convey the same concept of a biblically guaranteed right to land. According to a letter delivered to all Israeli schools in 2014 by the education ministry:
“the Bible provides the cultural infrastructure of the state of Israel, in it our right to the land is anchored.”18
Bible studies have been elevated to a critical and expanded component of the curriculum, with an emphasis on the Bible as a record of ancient history that justifies the land claim. The biblical stories and the national lessons they contain are woven into the study of the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
There is a direct link between this 2014 letter and David Ben-Gurion’s 1937 testimony to the Royal Peel Commission (the British inquiry set up to try to find a solution to the emerging conflict). During the public debates on Palestine’s future, Ben-Gurion waved a Bible at the committee members, shouting:
“This is our Qushan [the Ottoman land registry proof], our right to Palestine does not come from the Mandate Charter, the Bible is our Mandate Charter.”19
Footnotes: