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May 21, 2007
No idea has played a more seminal role in the recent history of Jewish and Christian Zionism than the Jewish doctrine of divine election or chosenness.[1] Since this doctrine is the cornerstone of Zionism, divine sanction for Jewish uniqueness has been inseparable from Israeli exceptionalism and Israeli history.[2]
At first, political
Zionism had little to recommend itself aside from the
mythic allure of the Promised Land. Most Jews greeted
the project alternatively with consternation and
derision. They could instantly sense that the creation
of a Jewish state would give an impetus to
anti-Semitism in Europe; the project also struck most
of them as a fantastic utopia with little chance of
success. The success of the Zionist plan required
three steps: persuading Jews to abandon their homes in
Europe for the hazards of colonizing a backward land,
wresting Palestine from its Ottoman sovereign, and
somehow making the Palestinians disappear. Some very
real hurdles blocked each of these steps.
In addition, there was
another hitch. The political Zionists did not have the
religious sanction to work for Jewish restoration to
Palestine. Jews had long believed that this would be
the work of the Jewish Messiah as part of God's plan
for the culmination of history; and some had come to
invest the return to Zion with symbolic meaning that
could be pursued even in exile. Overcoming these
theological objections would not be easy.
The Zionists, some of whom
were secular, regarded these objections as minor
inconveniences. The vision of reconstituting Jewish
power was heady. It revived Jewish memories of Davidic
splendor. It inspired hopes of establishing Jewish
power in the Middle East on a scale that their
ancestors could not attain in ancient times. In as
much as it appeared utopian, even quixotic when it was
first proposed, Zionism offered a Nietzschean
challenge to create a new world, to change a destiny
of 'exile' into which Jews had been trapped for close
to two millennia.
Once the moral
implications of their plan became clearer, the
Zionists would again find the doctrine of Jewish
chosenness handy. "One need only imagine what would
happen in the world," Nahum Goldmann was to write, "if
all the peoples who lost their states centuries or
millennia ago were to reclaim their land."[3] In other
words, how were the Zionists going to justify the
'theft' of Palestinian land? One argument claimed that
since the Palestinians were not a 'people'-presumably,
because they were not rulers over Palestine they had
no juridical rights over their lands. Another, more
cleverly argued that most of the Arabs living in
Palestine at the end of the British mandate were not
natives; they were recent immigrants from neighboring
Arab countries, attracted by the growing demand for
labor induced by Jewish colonization.[4] A third
argument was simpler. It contended that Palestine was
'empty,' that the Palestinians simply did not exist.
However, it was the
theological doctrine of chosenness that would most
convincingly settle the morality of Zionist claims to
Palestine.[5] The Zionists would have little
difficulty convincing their Jewish and Christian
audiences, the only ones that mattered at that time,
that this was no 'theft.' It was widely believed by
populations raised on Biblical myths that God had
promised Palestine to the Jews as their eternal
inheritance. Since Jewish ownership rights were
divinely ordained, they could not be annulled by
absence of the owners. In other words, Zionism was not
a colonial movement to expropriate the natives: it was
a 'messianic' movement to restore Palestine to its
divinely appointed Jewish owners. The European Jews
who arrived in Palestine could not be accused of
stealing their lands; as the Jewish National Fund
claims, they were only "redeeming" lands which had had
always been theirs.
The sacred history of the
Jews supported Zionist plans on another important
matter. The Zionist plans for a Jewish state required
a Jewish majority in Palestine, and preferably a
territory cleansed of its native inhabitants. At
first, the Zionist thinkers gave little thought to the
Palestinian presence. They assumed that the
Palestinians were Bedouins, temporary sojourners,
without any love for their land or homes, and could be
easily persuaded to move on.[6] When the Palestinian
resistance dashed these hopes, the Zionists quickly
made plans to evict them from their lands by force of
arms. Indeed, in 1948 the Zionists nearly implemented
their totalitarian vision when they expelled some
800,000 Palestinians, leveled their towns and
villages, and made sure that they would never return
to their homes in the Jewish state of Israel. This may
have been troubling to some, but Zionists steeped in
Jewish sacred history knew that their Lord had urged
even more radical measures when their ancestors were
taking possession of Canaan.[7]
The theology of chosenness
offered another advantage; it did not limit Zionist
ambitions to Palestine alone. The Lord's promise was
not restricted to Canaan; in a few more generous
verses, He had expanded the Jewish inheritance to
include all the lands between the Nile and Euphrates (Genesis:
15.18)."[8] With present-day borders, this expansive
Israeli empire would include Egypt, Israel, Jordan,
Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and perhaps more. If the
Zionists could successfully use the Bible to claim
Palestine, they could invoke the same divine authority
to claim the rest of the Arab Middle East as well. In
the middle of the Suez War in 1956, Ben-Gurion told
the Knesset "that the real reason for it [the Suez
War] is 'the restoration of the kingdom of David and
Solomon' to its Biblical borders. At this point in his
speech, almost every Knesset member spontaneously rose
and sang the Israeli national anthem."[9]
The doctrine of election
did not merely set the Jews apart from other nations;
it also set them above other nations.[10] Over
time, this has encouraged racist tendencies. Since the
Jews were the chosen instruments of God's intervention
on earth, this was interpreted by some Jewish thinkers
to mean that Jews were not subject to the laws of
nature and society.[11] In other words, as long as the
Jews believed that they were acting as instruments of
God's will, they did not have to follow the laws of
gentile nations. As Israelis have moved to the
religious right, a shift propelled by the rationale
and experience of Zionism itself, Zionist advocates
have shown an increasing willingness to justify their
human rights abuses as a Jewish prerogative. As
Zionist plans continue to be challenged by their
victims, the 'chosen people' slowly but surely take on
the hues of a 'master race:' they begin to imagine
that they have the power to legitimize their actions
by merely willing them into existence.
M. Shahid Alam is
professor of economics at Northeastern University, and
author of
Challenging the New
Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on America's
'War Against Islam'
(IPI Publications: 2007). He may be reached at
alqalam02760@yahoo.com.
Notes:
[1] All quotes from the
Jewish Bible are from: Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi
Brettler, eds., The Jewish study Bible (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 111, 383
[2] The doctrine of Jewish
chosenness incorporates three interlocking divine
choices made by the God of the Jewish scriptures.
First, God chose Abraham's lineage through Isaac to be
His "treasured people (Deuteronomy: 7.6), a
people "consecrated" to the Lord and "a kingdom of
priests and a holy nation (Exodus: 19.5)." He
also chose a land where His people would come
together; although its borders vary, this land always
included the land between the Jordan river and the
Mediterranean sea as its core. Like God's chosen
people, this land too was unique: it was a pure land,
"flowing with milk and honey (Exodus: 33.3),"
devoid of impurities, the best of all lands on the
earth; it was also a holy land, set apart from other
lands, because it was His earthly dwelling place.
Finally, this God makes a Covenant with His chosen
people. He promises to given them owners and rulers
over the holy land, and to guide, bless and favor them
as long as they observe His laws. Conversely, He
threatens them with dire punishments, including exile
from the Promised Land, if they break their Covenant (Exodus:
19.5). It appears that the cumulative deficit in
Jewish conduct finally led to their expulsion from the
Promised Land in the first century CE. In their
centuries of exile, the overwhelming majority of the
Jews lived in Europe and the Middle East outside of
Palestine.
[3] Nahum Goldmann,
"Zionist ideology and the reality of Israel,"
Foreign Affairs 57, 1 (Fall 1978): 72.
[4] This argument was
revived in 1985 by Joan Peters, From time
immemorial: The origins of Arab-Jewish conflict
over Palestine (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).
Joan Peters attributes the natural increase since the
1850s, brought about by improvements in health care
and sanitation, to immigration. This natural increase
can also be observed in Israel's Palestinian
population: that is, among the 150,000 who survived
the ethnic cleansing of 1948-49. In 2004, that
population had grown to some 1.3 million. Although
Peter's book was widely acclaimed by the leading
Zionists in United States, including Saul Bellow and
Barbara Tuchman, the book, according to Norman
Finkelstein, is a "monumental hoax." See Norman
Finkelstein, Image and reality of the
Israeli-Palestine conflict (London: Verso, 1995).
[5] This was starting
point, the chief inspiration for nearly all the early
Zionists. Anita Shapir writes: "One of the covert
assumptions present among all the poet and the
majority of Zionist thinkers and leaders was that Jews
had a special right to the Land of Israel, that is,
Palestine." Ahad Ha-Am also commented that this was "a
land to which our historical right is beyond doubt and
has no need for farfetched proofs." Anita Shapira,
Land and power: The Zionist resort to force,
1881-1948 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992): 40-41.
[6] In an essay he wrote
in 1891, after a short trip to Palestine, Ahad Ha-Am
wrote that Jews in Europe believe that "all Arabs are
savages of the desert, a people similar to a donkey."
Quoted in Anita Shapira, Land and power: 42.
[7] As the Israelites
prepared to take possession of the Promised Land, the
Lord's instructions were unequivocal: "When the Lord
your God brings you to the land that you are about to
enter and possess, and He dislodges many nations
before you and the Lord your God delivers them to you
and you defeat them, you must doom them to
destruction: grant them no terms and give them no
quarter Deuteronomy (7.1-3)."
[8] Similar promises were
also made in Deuteronomy: 11. 24 and Joshua:
1.4.
[9] Israel Shahak,
Jewish history, Jewish religion: The weight of
three thousand years (London: Pluto Press, 1994):
8-9.
[10] In 1904, Rabbi Kook,
the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Palestine, wrote: "So on
the collective level of Israel, God ordained these two
faculties: a faculty corresponding to the physical
entity, that aspires to material improvement of the
nation , and a second facet devoted to the cultivation
of spirituality. By virtue of the first aspect, Israel
is comparable to all the nations of the world. It is
by dint of the second aspect that Israel is unique, as
it says: "The Lord leads it [Israel] alone"; "Among
the nations it [Israel] shall not be reckoned." It is
the Torah and unique sanctity of Israel that
distinguish it from the nations." Rabbi Isaac Hakohen
Kook, When God become history: Historical
essays of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook,
translated by Bazalel Naor (Spring Valley, NY:
Orot Inc., 2003).
http://www.orot.com/history2.html
[11] In the fifteenth
century, Isaac Abravanel, a Jewish statesman and bible
commentator, offered a clear statement of the doctrine
that Jewish election in the words of his modern
biographer offered them "exemption from the laws of
nature and society that govern gentiles." See: Seymour
Feldman, Philosophy in a time of crisis: Don
Isaac Abravanel, defender of the faith (London:
Routledge/Curzon, 2003): 137-38.
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