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Founding myths of the state of Israel by Louis Proyect 11 March 2002 20:31 UTC |
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Last Friday night I attended a lecture by Jillian Schwedler on "Political Islam" at Simon's Rock College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Her talk was marred by a kind of conventional political science approach to the question. She stated that when the Islamic Brotherhood was "included" in the political process in Jordan, it was successfully co-opted. But when it is "excluded", as it was in Egypt, the result is terrorism. During the discussion period, a particularly perceptive member of the audience commented that terms like "inclusion" or "exclusion" are not helpful when they are presented without a side-by-side class analysis of Jordan and Egypt. The absence of terrorism in Jordan might have more to do with the absence of extreme economic inequality than anything else. To her credit, Schwedler admitted that this was true. Afterwards we attended an informal reception for the speaker at the elegant new home of Prof. Ahmet Tonak, organizer of the lecture series and gracious host. As might be expected, the topic of discussion remained centered on the evening's lecture. Given the progressive make-up of the attendees, it is not surprising to have found universal condemnation of Ariel Sharon. Perhaps fortified by my third bottle of beer and my customary desire to shock and outrage conventional liberal thinking, I stated that the only solution was to create a purely secular state based on equal rights for the Palestinians, especially since everybody knows that there is no archaeological basis for the claim of a Jewish state in the Biblical era. I said that Moses never existed; the walls of Jericho never came tumbling down; and, most importantly, there were no Kingdoms of Israel or Judah led by Solomon, David, et al. This led one guest to practically jump out of her seat and shout, "How can you say that? The evidence is all around you if you visit Israel. Just go, you'll see it for yourself." Almost on cue, the Saturday NY Times reported on the following morning: "Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, probably never existed. Nor did Moses. The entire Exodus story as recounted in the Bible probably never occurred. The same is true of the tumbling of the walls of Jericho. And David, far from being the fearless king who built Jerusalem into a mighty capital, was more likely a provincial leader whose reputation was later magnified to provide a rallying point for a fledgling nation." Lee I. Levine, a professor at the Hebrew University, wrote a recent essay titled "Biblical Archaeology," that states: "There is no reference in Egyptian sources to Israel's sojourn in that country and the evidence that does exist is negligible and indirect." Furthermore, the few indirect pieces of evidence, like the use of Egyptian names, "are far from adequate to corroborate the historicity of the biblical account." Nor is there clear evidence for the conquest and settlement of Canaan, the ancient name for the area including Israel. Since excavations show that Jericho was unwalled and uninhabited, Levine is forced to admit that there is scant evidence for "the violent and complete conquest portrayed in the Book of Joshua." And, as if intended to give the guest at Ahmet's reception a stroke, there is, according to Levine, an "almost total absence of archaeological evidence" backing up the Bible's grand descriptions of the Jerusalem of David and Solomon. The net effect of this and other scholarship in the same vein has been the creation of a new Torah, accepted by all wings of Judaism except the orthodoxy, that now treats the story of Moses, etc. as legends. The hope is to re-establish the ethical core of Judaism, an urgent task obviously in the light of the brutality of the state of Israel today, which rests on these bloody legends of the Old Testament. Although I was pleasantly surprised to find my arguments corroborated in the NY Times, I had been following this "revisionist" scholarship in one form or another for quite some time. Only a couple of weeks earlier, I had come across an article titled "False Testament: Archaeology Refutes the Bible's Claim to History" by Dan Lazare in the March 2002 Harper's Magazine, an article that I referred my antagonist to. I told her that I would be glad to visit Israel, if she would read the article. Although Harper's, as is their wont, does not make this or any of their other fine articles online, I would strongly urge comrades to track it down since Lazare's stance is far more radical than the NY Times's, as one might expect. He starts his article with a call to re-evaluate all that we have associated with unvarnished Old Testament history, like the reactionary Paul Johnson's 1987 best-selling "History of the Jews" (I would add bad movies like "Exodus" to the list). Lazare says: >>Not long ago, archaeologists could agree that the Old Testament, for all its embellishments and contradictions, contained a kernel of truth. Obviously, Moses had not parted the Red Sea or turned his staff into a snake, but it seemed clear that the Israelites had started out as a nomadic band somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Mesopotamia; that they had migrated first to Palestine and then to Egypt; and that, following some sort of conflict with the authorities, they had fled into the desert under the leadership of a mysterious figure who was either a lapsed Jew or, as Freud maintained, a high-born priest of the royal sun god Aton whose cult had been overthrown in a palace coup. Although much was unknown, archaeologists were confident that they had succeeded in nailing down at least these few basic facts. That is no longer the case. In the last quarter century or so, archaeologists have seen one settled assumption after another concerning who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from proved false. Rather than a band of invaders who fought their way into the Holy Land, the Israelites are now thought to have been an indigenous culture that developed west of the Jordan River around 1200 B.C. Abraham, Isaac, and the other patriarchs appear to have been spliced together out of various pieces of local lore. The Davidic Empire, which archaeologists once thought as incontrovertible as the Roman, is now seen as an invention of Jerusalem-based priests in the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. who were eager to burnish their national history. The religion we call Judaism does not reach well back into the second millennium B.C. but appears to be, at most, a product of the mid-first. This is not to say that individual elements of the story are not older. But Jewish monotheism, the sole and exclusive worship of an ancient Semitic god known as Yahweh, did not fully coalesce until the period between the Assyrian conquest of the northern Jewish kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C. and the Babylonian conquest of the southern kingdom of Judah in 586. Some twelve to fourteen centuries of "Abrahamic" religious development, the cultural wellspring that has given us not only Judaism but Islam and Christianity, have thus been erased. Judaism appears to have been the product not of some dark and nebulous period of early history but of a more modern age of big-power politics in which every nation aspired to the imperial greatness of a Babylon or an Egypt. Judah, the sole remaining Jewish outpost by the late eighth century B.C., was a small, out-of-the-way kingdom with little in the way of military or financial clout. Yet at some point its priests and rulers seem to have been seized with the idea that their national deity, now deemed to be nothing less than the king of the universe, was about to transform them into a great power. They set about creating an imperial past commensurate with such an empire, one that had the southern heroes of David and Solomon conquering the northern kingdom and making rival kings tremble throughout the known world. >From a "henotheistic" cult in which Yahweh was worshiped as the chief god among many, they refashioned the national religion so that henceforth Yahweh would be worshiped to the exclusion of all other deities. One law, that of Yahweh, would now reign supreme.<< For those who want to pursue the topic in depth, I recommend Keith Whitelam's "The Invention of Ancient Israel" (Routledge, 1996), which is the best all-round scholarly treatment of the topic and, just as importantly, the political ramifications. In the chapter titled "Inventing Ancient Israel," he mounts an extended critique of biblical scholar G. E. Wright, who uses the out-of-date understanding of Israel's past to implicitly defend justify Israel's territorial ambitions today. Wright states: "The conquest of Canaan whereby Israel secured a land for itself, was interpreted as God's gift of an inheritance. The land was not interpreted as belonging to various individuals and families of Israel as a natural right, but was thought of as a gift of God. Thus there came about a special understanding of the meaning of property and of obligation in relation to God, the land, which was God's gift, would be taken away at a future time." Whitelam replies: "It is astounding that he should believe that it was to the benefit of the indigenous people that they were wiped out and their land appropriated by Israelites or Arameans. This is an even more extreme variant of Lord Balfour's speech to Parliament in June 1910, critiqued by [Edward] Said, in which he argues that the British government of Egypt was exercised for the good of Egyptians and the whole of the civilized West. It forms part of the standard justification of imperialism and colonization in that the imperial power acts on behalf of the indigenous population. Equally astounding is Wright's view that this appropriation of land was in the long-term good of Palestine since the survivors were forced to remain on a thin strip of the coast where they became a great trading force. As Elon (1983: 150) points out, many early Zionists were of the unthinking belief that Zionism represented progress with the implied or expressed assumption that Jewish settlement would ultimately benefit the Arabs. In fact, the Arab population were considered to be potential Zionists and were expected to welcome the Jews as a matter of course. Elon concludes that this was so self-evident for most Zionists that they never considered any alternative perception of what was happening. Similarly, the facts of the past are so self-evident for Wright that he does not consider any alternative construction." Now that we have an "alternative construction" accepted by segments of official Jewry, it should be integrated with the task of exposing Zionism's crimes. Not only is Israel acting against the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, it is doing so in the name of a bunch of lies. -- Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 03/11/2002 Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org
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