"You will chase your enemies, and they
shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a
hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight;
your enemies shall fall by the sword before you.”
Leviticus, Chapter 26, verses 7-9
"When the Lord your God brings you into
the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you
many nations…then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty
with them and show them no mercy.”
Deuteronomy 7:1-2,
"…do not leave alive anything that
breathes. Completely destroy them…as the Lord your God has
commanded you…”
Deuteronomy 20:16
There is not much doubt amongst Biblical
scholars that the Hebrew Bible contains some highly charged
non-ethical suggestions, some of which are no less than a call
for a genocide. Biblical scholar
Raymund
Schwager has found in the Old Testament
600 passages of explicit violence,
1000 descriptive verses of God's own violent actions of
punishment, 100 passages where God expressly commands others to
kill people. Apparently, violence is the
most often mentioned activity in the Hebrew Bible.
As devastating as it may be, the Hebrew Bible
saturation with violence and extermination of others may throw
some light over the horrifying genocide conducted momentarily in
Gaza by the Jewish state. In broad daylight, the IDF is using
the most lethal methods against civilians as if their main
objective is to ‘destroy’ the Gazans
while showing ‘no mercy’ whatsoever.
Interestingly enough, Israel regards itself
as a secular state. Ehud Barak is not
exactly a qualified Rabbi and Tzipi Livni is not a Rabbi’s wife.
Accordingly, we are entitled to assume that it isn’t actually
Judaism per se that directly transforms Israeli politicians and
military leaders into war criminals. Moreover, early Zionists
believed that within a national home Jews would become 'people
like all other people', i.e., civilised and ethical. In that
very respect, Israeli reality is pretty peculiar. The Hebraic
secular Jews may have managed to drop their God, most of them do
not follow Judaic law, they are largely secular, and yet they
collectively interpret their Jewish identity as a genocidal
mission. They have successfully managed to transform the Bible
from being a spiritual text into a bloodsoaked land registry.
They are there, in Zion i.e., Palestine, to invade the
land and to lock up, starve and destroy its indigenous
habitants. Accordingly, it seems as if the artillery commanders
and IAF pilots that erased northern Gaza two nights ago were
following Deuteronomy 20:16 they indeed did ".. not leave
alive anything that breathes.” And yet, one question is
left open. Why should a secular commander follow Deuteronomy
verses or any other Biblical text?
Some very few sporadic Jewish voices within
the left are insisting upon telling us that Jewishness is not
necessarily inherently murderous. I tend
to believe them that they themselves consider their words as
genuine and truthful. But then one may
wonder, what is it that makes the Jewish state brutal with no
comparison? The truth of the matter is actually pretty sad. As
far as we can see, Zionism is the only secular ideological and
political Jewish collective around and as it happens, it has
proved once again this week that it is genocidal to the bone.
As far as genocide is concerned the
difference between Judaism and Zionism can be illustrated as
follows: while the Judaic Biblical context is soaked with
genocidal references, usually in the name of God, within the
Zionist context, Jews are killing Palestinians in the name of
themselves i.e., the ‘Jewish people’.
This is indeed the ultimate success of the Zionist revolution.
It taught the Jews to believe in themselves. To believe in the
Jewish state. ‘The Israeli’ is Israel’s
God. Accordingly, the Israeli kills in
the name of ‘his or her security’, in the
name of ‘his or her democracy’. The Israelis destroy in the name
of ‘their war against terror’ and in the name the ‘their
America’. Seemingly, in the Jewish
state, the Hebraic subject reverts to mass killing as soon as he
finds a ‘name’ to associate with.
This doesn’t really leave us too much room
for speculation. The Jewish state is the ultimate threat to
humanity and our notion of humanism. Christianity, Islam and
humanism came along with an attempt to amend Jewish tribal
fundamentalism and to replace it with universal ethics.
Enlightenment, liberalism and emancipation allowed Jews to
redeem themselves from their ancient tribal supremacist traits.
Since the mid 19th century, many Jews had been
breaking out of their cultural and tribal chain.
Tragically enough, Zionism managed to pull many Jews back
in. Currently, Israel and Zionism are the only collective voice
available for Jews.
The last twelve days of merciless offensive
against the Palestinian civilian population does not leave any
room for doubt. Israel is the gravest danger to world peace.
Clearly the nations made a tragic mistake in 1947 giving a
volatile racially orientated identity an opportunity to set
itself into a national state. However,
the nations’ duty now is to peacefully dismantle that state
before it is too late. We must do it before the Jewish state and
its forceful lobbies around the world manage to pull us all into
a global war in the ‘name’ of one banal populist ideology or
another (democracy, war against terror, cultural clash and so
on). We have to wake up now before our
one and only planet is transformed into a bursting boil of
hatred.
