Myth: Zionism is Judaism

To properly examine the assumption that Zionism is synonymous with Judaism, one must first understand its historical context. Since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, Zionism has been a minor component of Jewish cultural life. It grew out of two impulses within Central and Eastern European Jewish communities. The first was a desire for safety within a society that refused to accept Jews as equals and occasionally persecuted them, either through legislation or through riots organized or encouraged by the ruling class to divert attention away from economic crises or political upheavals. The second impetus was a desire to emulate other emerging national movements in Europe at the time, dubbed the European Spring of Nations by historians. Jews seeking to redefine Judaism as a nation were not alone among the numerous ethnic and religious groups within the two collapsing empires of Austro-Hungary and Ottoman that desired to redefine themselves as nations.

Modern Zionism has its origins in the eighteenth century, in what was known as the Jewish enlightenment movement. This was a group of writers, poets, and rabbis who revitalized the Hebrew language and expanded the scope of traditional and religious Jewish education to include science, literature, and philosophy. Hebrew newspapers and journals began to proliferate throughout Central and Eastern Europe. From this group emerged a few individuals, dubbed the “Harbingers of Zionism” in Zionist historiography, who exhibited stronger nationalist tendencies and associated the revival of Hebrew with nationalism in their writings. They advanced two novel ideas: redefining Judaism as a national movement and the necessity of colonizing Palestine in order to restore the Jews to their ancient homeland, from which they were expelled by the Romans in 70 CE. They argued for “return” via what they termed “agricultural colonies” (in many parts of Europe Jews were not allowed to own or cultivate land, hence the fascination with starting anew as a nation of farmers, not just as free citizens).

These ideas gained popularity following a wave of pogroms in Russia in 1881, when they were transformed into a political program promoted by a group calling itself “The Lovers of Zion,” which dispatched a few hundred enthusiastic young Jews to establish the first new colonies in Palestine in 1882. This initial phase of Zionism’s history concludes with Theodor Herzl‘s writings and actions. Herzl began his career as a playwright interested in the status and problems of the modern Jew in his society, initially asserting that complete assimilation into local society was the solution to this predicament. He became a journalist in the 1890s and, according to his own account of his life, it was during this time that he realized the strength of anti-Semitism. He concluded that assimilation was impossible and advocated for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as the best solution to what he termed the “Jewish Problem.”

When these early Zionist ideas gained traction among Jewish communities in countries such as Germany and the United States, prominent rabbis and community leaders vehemently opposed the new approach. Religious leaders condemned Zionism as a form of secularization and modernization, while secular Jews feared that the new ideas would cast doubt on Jews’ loyalty to their own nation-states, thereby increasing anti-Semitism. Both groups had divergent perspectives on how to deal with contemporary persecution of Jews in Europe. Some argued for further enshrinement of Jewish religion and tradition (as Islamic fundamentalists would do in the face of European modernization), while others argued for increased assimilation into non-Jewish life.

Between the 1840s and 1880s, when Zionist ideas first appeared in Europe and the United States, the majority of Jews practiced Judaism in two distinct ways. One involved entrenchment: living in extremely close religious communities, rejecting new ideas such as nationalism, and viewing modernization as a threat to their way of life. The other way involved leading a secular life that differed only slightly from that of non-Jewish communities in terms of celebrating certain holidays, attending synagogue on Fridays, and probably abstaining from eating in public on the day of atonement’s fast (Yom Kippur). Gershom Scholem, one of these Jews, recalled in his memoirs Berlin to Jerusalem how, as a member of a young Jewish group in Germany, he used to dine with his friends in the same Berlin restaurant on Yom Kippur; upon their arrival, the proprietor would inform them that “the special room for the restaurant’s fasting gentlemen was ready.”{{{Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Youth Memoirs, Jerusalem: Am Oved, 1982, p. 34 (Hebrew).}}} Individuals and communities found themselves caught between these two poles of secularization and Orthodoxy. However, let us examine their attitudes toward Zionism in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Of course, Jewish secularism, like Christian or Islamic secularism, is a slightly bizarre concept. Secular Jews, as defined above, were individuals with varying degrees of religiosity (very much as a secular Christian in Britain celebrates Easter and Christmas, sends his children to Church of England schools, or attends Sunday mass occasionally or frequently). In the latter half of the nineteenth century, this contemporary form of Judaism developed into a powerful movement known as the Reform movement, which sought to adapt religion to modern life without succumbing to its anachronistic aspects. It enjoyed a particularly strong following in Germany and the United States.

When the Reformists encountered Zionism for the first time, they vehemently opposed the idea of redefining Judaism as nationalism and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Their anti-Zionist stance, however, shifted following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the majority of them established a new Reform movement in the United States, which grew to become one of the country’s most powerful Jewish organizations (although not until 1999 did the new movement officially vow allegiance to Israel and Zionism). However, a significant number of Jews defected from the new movement and founded the American Council of Judaism (ACJ), which reminded the world in 1993 that Zionism remained a minority view among Jews and remained committed to the old Reformist conceptions of Zionism.{{{The following quotes from the Reformists are taken from an assessment of their position, critical and pro-Zionist but nonetheless very informative, which includes the documents in full. See Ami Isserof, “Opposition of Reform Judaism to Zionism: A History,” August 12, 2005, at zionism-israel.com.}}}

Prior to that schism, both Germany and the United States’ Reform movements made a compelling and unifying case against Zionism. They publicly rejected the concept of a Jewish nation in Germany and self-identified as “Germans of the Mosaic faith.” One of the early acts of the German Reformists was to eliminate all references to a return to “Eretz Israel” or the rebuilding of a state there from their prayer rituals. Similarly, American Reformers stated in one of their first conventions in 1869:

that the messianic aim of Israel [i.e. the Jewish people] is not the restoration of a Jewish state under a descendant of David, involving a second separation from the nations of earth, but the union of the children of God in the confession of the unity of God, so as to realize the unity of all rational creatures, and their call to moral sanctification.

Another Reformist conference stated in 1885:

“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any laws concerning the Jewish state.”

Rabbi Kaufman Kohler, for example, was a well-known opponent of the notion “that Judea is the home of the Jew—an idea which ‘unhomes’ [sic] the Jew all over the wide earth.” Isaac Mayer Wise, another late-nineteenth-century leader of the movement, frequently mocked Zionist leaders such as Herzl, comparing them to charlatan alchemists claiming to contribute to science. Adolf Jellinek argued in Vienna, Herzl’s hometown, that Zionism would jeopardize the position of Jews in Europe, claiming that the majority of them opposed the idea. “We are at home in Europe,” he declared.

Apart from the Reformers, liberal Jews at the time rejected the assertion that Zionism was the only remedy for anti-Semitism. As Walter Lacquer demonstrates in his book, The History of Zionism, liberal Jews viewed Zionism as a fanciful movement that offered no solution to Europe’s Jewish problems. They argued for what they termed a “regeneration” of the Jews, which would entail a complete commitment to their homelands and a willingness to be fully integrated as citizens.{{{Walter Lacquer, The History of Zionism, New York: Tauris Park Paperback, 2003, pp. 338–98.}}} They hoped that a more liberal world would resolve the persecutory and anti-Semitic problems. History demonstrated that liberalism rescued those Jews who immigrated to or lived in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Those who believed it was possible in the rest of Europe were proven false. However, many liberal Jews today, with hindsight, believe that Zionism was never the right answer, neither then nor now.

Socialists and Orthodox Jews began criticizing Zionism only in the 1890s, when Zionism gained more recognition as a political force late in the decade, owing to Herzl’s zealous work. Herzl grasped contemporary politics and penned utopian stories, political tracts, and newspaper articles arguing that it was in Europe’s best interests to assist in the establishment of a modern Jewish state in Palestine. The world’s leaders were unimpressed, as were the Ottomans, Palestine’s rulers. Herzl’s greatest achievement was convening all activists at a single conference in 1897 and establishing two fundamental organizations from there—a world congress promoting Zionism’s ideas globally and local Zionist outfits expanding the Jewish colonization of Palestine.

Thus, as Zionist ideas crystallized, the criticism leveled at Jews opposed to Zionism became clearer. Apart from the Reform movement, the left, lay leaders of various communities, and Orthodox Jews all voiced criticism. In 1897, the same year as the first Zionist conference in Basel, a socialist Jewish movement called the Bund was founded in Russia. It was a political movement as well as a Jewish labor union. Bund members believed that a socialist, if not Bolshevik, revolution would be a far superior solution to Europe’s Jewish problems than Zionism. They viewed the latter as an escapism technique. More importantly, during the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe, Bundists believed that Zionism contributed to this brand of anti-Semitism by casting doubt on Jews’ loyalty to their homelands. Even after the Holocaust, Bundists believed that Jews should seek a place in societies that valued human and civil rights, and did not believe that a Jewish nation state was the panacea. This strident anti-Zionist conviction, however, gradually waned beginning in the mid-1950s, and the remnants of this once-dominant movement eventually decided to publicly support the state of Israel (they even had a branch in the Jewish state).{{{The most recent work on the movement is Yoav Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers’ Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia, London: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.}}}

Herzl was less concerned with the Bund’s reaction than with the lukewarm response of Jewish political and economic elites in countries such as Britain and France. They viewed Herzl as either a charlatan whose ideas were far removed from reality, or worse, as someone who could undermine Jewish life in their own societies, where they had made enormous strides toward emancipation and integration, such as in the United Kingdom. His call for Jewish sovereignty in a foreign land on an equal footing with other sovereign states in the world alarmed Victorian Jews. For the more established segments of Central and Western European Jewry, Zionism was a provocative vision that called into question the allegiance of English, German, and French Jews to their respective homelands. Due to their opposition to Herzl, the Zionist movement was unable to develop into a powerful actor prior to World War I. Only after Herzl’s demise in 1904 did other movement leaders, particularly Chaim Weizmann, who immigrated to Britain the same year Herzl died and rose to prominence as a scientist, contributing to the British war effort during World War I, forge a strong alliance with London that benefited Zionism.{{{M. W. Weisgal and J. Carmichael (eds.), Chaim Weizmann: A Biography by Several Hands, New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.}}}

In its early years, the third critique leveled at Zionism came from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish establishment. Many ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities continue to be vehemently opposed to Zionism, despite the fact that they are much smaller than they were in the late nineteenth century and that some have relocated to Israel and become integrated into its political system. Nonetheless, they continue to represent another non-Zionist way of being Jewish, as they have done in the past. When Zionism first arrived in Europe, many traditional rabbis forbade their adherents from interacting with Zionist activists. They viewed Zionism as interfering with God’s plan to keep the Jews in exile until the Messiah’s return. They categorically rejected the notion that Jews should do everything possible to bring the “Exile” to an end. Rather than that, they were required to wait for God’s word on the matter and continue living the traditional way of life in the interim. While pilgrims were permitted to visit and study in Palestine, this was not to be interpreted as authorization for a mass movement. The great Hasidic German Rabbi of Dzikover succinctly summarized this approach when he stated that Zionism requires him to abandon centuries of Jewish wisdom and law in exchange for a rag, soil, and a song (i.e. a flag, a land, and an anthem).{{{Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p. 70.}}}

However, not all prominent rabbis were anti-Zionist. There was a small group of significant authoritative personalities who endorsed the Zionist program, including the rabbis al-Qalay, Gutmacher, and Qalisher. They were a small minority, but in retrospect, they were a significant group since they set the groundwork for Zionism’s national religious wing. Their religious acrobatics were quite spectacular. In Israeli history, they are referred to as the “Fathers of Religious Zionism.” Religious Zionism is a powerful movement in contemporary Israel as it serves as the ideological home of the messianic settler movement, Gush Emunim, which colonized the West Bank and Gaza Strip beginning in 1967. Not only did these rabbis urge Jews to flee Europe, but they also maintained that it was a religious obligation, not merely a nationalist one, for Jews to settle Palestine through land cultivation (not surprisingly the natives of the land do not feature in their writings). They maintained that such an act would not interfere with God’s purpose; rather, it would fulfill Prophetic prophesies and progress the Jewish people’s ultimate redemption and the coming of the Messiah.{{{Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, New York: Basic Books, 1981, pp. 187–209.}}}

The majority of Orthodox Judaism’s leading lights rejected this idea and interpretation. They had a different beef with Zionism. Not alone did the new movement seek to conquer Palestine; it also sought to secularize the Jewish people, to construct the “new Jew” in opposition to Europe’s devout Orthodox Jews. This resulted in the idea of a new European Jew who was unable to dwell in Europe due to the continent’s anti-Semitism and was forced to live as a European outside the continent. Thus, like many groups during this era, Zionism remade itself in national terms—but its conversion was markedly different because it picked a new location.
Zionists mocked Orthodox Jews and considered them as someone who could only be redeemed through hard work in Palestine. This transition is vividly shown in Herzl’s futuristic utopian novel, Altnueland, which chronicles the arrival of a German tourist mission in the Jewish state long after it was formed. Prior to arriving in Palestine, one of the tourists encountered a young Orthodox Jewish beggar; he runs into him again in Palestine, this time secular, educated, and incredibly wealthy and content.

The Bible’s importance in Jewish life provided another 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 brink 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.{{{Eliezer Shweid, Homeland and the Promised Land, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1979, p. 218 (Hebrew).}}} 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.” {{{Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, “On Both Sides,” quoted in Asaf Sagiv, “The Fathers of Zionism and the Myth of the Birth of the Nation,” Techelt, 5 (1998), p. 93 (Hebrew).}}} 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.{{{A useful examination of these alternatives can be found in Adam Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel, New York: NYU Press, 2014.}}}

With Herzl’s assassination in 1904 and the emergence of his successors, Zionism honed 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.{{{This idea is eloquently summarized with relevant sources in Stephen Sizer’s article “The Road to Balfour: The History of Christian Zionism,” at balfourproject.org.}}}

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 {{{Ingrid Hjelm and Thomas Thompson (eds.), History, Archaeology and the Bible, Forty Years after “Historicity,” London and New York: Routledge, 2016.}}}). 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.

As we have seen, 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 indigenous people were depicted as an impediment, an alien, and an enemy, regardless of their identity or ambitions.{{{Ilan Pappe, “Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers,” Settler Colonial Studies, 2:1 (2012), pp. 39–58.}}}

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.”{{{Moshe Bellinson, “Rebelling Against Reality,” in The Book of the Second Aliya, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1947 (Hebrew), p. 48. This is the most comprehensive collection of Second Aliya journal entries, letters, and articles ever published.}}}

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). {{{Yona Hurewitz, “From Kibush Ha-Avoda to Settlement,” in The Book of the Second Aliya, p. 210.}}}

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 evicted 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.{{{Ilan Pappe, “The Bible in the Service of Zionism,” in Hjelm and Thompson, History, Archaeology and the Bible, pp. 205–18.}}} 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.{{{For an examination of these publications and the colonialist paradigm’s early entry to Zionism research, see Uri Ram, “The Colonisation Perspective in Israeli Sociology,” in Ilan Pappe (ed.), The Israel/Palestine Question, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 53–77.}}}

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.{{{Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique, London: Bloomsbury 1997.}}}

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.{{{Sefi Rachlevski, The Messiah’s Donkey, Tel Aviv: Yeditot Achronot, 1998.}}}

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—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.”{{{This was posted on her official Facebook page on July 1, 2014, and was widely quoted in the Israeli press.}}}

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:

“If you want to say that our land does not belong to us, I suggest you go change the Bible first,”