Eddie Finnegan: The Curse of being a Chosen People with a Promised Land
In May 2019 myself and the wife got to Palestine. Well, not quite. We got to Israel, with a few deviations around Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and an hour in Palestinian Jericho, to gaze at Jebel Quruntul, the Mount of Temptation, and buy some dates in the city of palm trees [Deut. 34:3]. The view of all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour from Jebel Quruntul suggests that friend Satan was not very well travelled.
Jericho’s Hebrew name, Yeriho, may derive from the Canaanite word for ‘fragrant’, though much of its fragrance seems to have departed. It’s reputed to be one of the world’s oldest inhabited walled cities. Archeologists have traced several sites of settlement in the immediate area but absolutely none date to relevant OT or Torah periods of conquering, ethnic-cleansing Israelites led and egged on by their genocidal tribal deity, YHWH.[1]
Many Yeriho walls have risen and many have fallen, but none apparently to the sound of Joshua’s trumpets or his Ark-led Israelite Defence Force’s week of circumambulating YHWH’s specially selected prototype for liberation/destruction. (The Israelites) “enforced the ban or herem on everything in the town: men and women, young and old, even the oxen and sheep and donkeys, massacring them all.” All except Rahab the Harlot and her extended family [Joshua 6].
We may catch some echo of that ancient herem in modern Israel’s sense of exceptionalism in recent displays of touchiness towards An tUachtarán agus An Taoiseach, or doubts about Irish neutrality by Ambassador Erlich and Foreign Minister Cohen. We cannot, however, be deaf to the blast of YHWH’s trumpets every time Israel’s ultra-right politicians or ambassadors or ‘settlers’ open their gobs. The DNA of Deuteronomy and Chapters 1-12 of Joshua has survived nearly three millennia to influence every thought and expression, not only of Bezalel Yoel Smotrich, Leader of his Religious Zionist Party and Netanyahu’s Finance Minister, but of Tsipi Hotovely, prominent member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party and, since 2020, Ambassador to the UK. Their virulence of Orthodox anti-Palestinian expression may have been inherited, not from the Torah or Joshua, but from their Ukrainian and Georgian forebears.
‘How odd of God to choose the Jews‘, quipped an English journalist a century ago. But just as odd to choose your god for his every harumph and herem and walk in his shoes.[2] YHWH and his Israelite génocidaires and settlers owe Canaanite descendants and neighbours a long overdue apology and restitution. A two-state solution would be a half-hearted compromise at best.
Professor Mordechai Cogan’s[3] title [THE TORAH website, 2022, last updated 15 Dec 2023] is prescient: ‘Deuteronomy’s Herem Law: Protecting Israel at the Cost of its Humanity.’ Can Netanyahu’s War Cabinet, Minister Gallant, IDF and President Herzog note the title and link?
Cogan’s final footnote (fn 32) may have the likes of Smotrich and Hotovely in mind: “Thus it is not surprising to find the Canaanite herem alive and kicking among a small number of the fundamentalist Right in the State of Israel, tainting Israel’s image until this very day.” Since Cogan wrote that, YHWH’s ancient herem has become mainstream again. Netanyahu had a whole Bible to quote from in late October, more than three weeks after the Hamas atrocity, when primal anger and tribal vengeance might have given way to soberly advised judgement. He could only think of Amalek and the Amalekites: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” He was recalling Samuel’s warning to Saul: ‘Thus speaks YHWH Sabaoth: I will repay what Amalek did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go and strike down the Amalekites, putting them under the ban with all that they possess. Do not spare them, but kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey’ [ISamuel 15:1-3].
Netanyahu was not particularly interested in Saul’s failure to do what he was told. He was simply reaching for an ancient biblical trope long used by the fundamentalist Right to whom he’s in thrall, a familiar dog-whistle identifying today’s Palestinian, not just Hamas, with the long extinct Amalekite.
Some four weeks ago, Pádraig McCarthy had another excellent Letter in the Irish Times seeking to educate Ambassador Dana Erlich about land ownership in Southern Israel, specifically in the kibbutzim area bordering the Gaza Strip. I didn’t see Erlich’s opinion piece of the previous day, so I’m relying on my memory of reading between Pádraig’s lines. He again touched on this bit of historical geography in posts or comments on this site in November and December. Almost 70 years ago in April 1956, a little before Dana’s time, IDF Chief of Staff and later Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan went down to Kibbutz Nahal Oz[4] to give the eulogy at the funeral of young Roi Rutenberg, the kibbutz security officer, who had been ambushed by a group of Palestinian fedayeen.[5] Dayan had no doubt about the origin of that kibbutzim land after the 1948 Nakba:
“Early yesterday morning Roi was murdered. The quiet of the Spring morning dazzled him and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him, at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate. It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst, that we must seek Roi’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?”
YHWH’s Postscript
A very contrary crowd to deal with. I don’t know why I ever chose them. I promised Avram this land from the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River, the Euphrates, the land of Kennites, Kennizites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites. Now they’re complaining that their neighbours want ‘from the river to the sea.’ No pleasing some people. And of course I’ll get blamed in the end.
Eddie Finnegan, 19 December
[1] Vowels omitted lest some of my fellow-devotees of the 1966 Jerusalem Bible are offended on the Deity’s behalf.
[2] Another version, variously misattributed to Belloc, Chesterton or Knox, goes: ‘How odd of God to choose the Jews, But not so odd as those who choose a Jewish god, yet spurn the Jews.’
3 Mordechai Cogan is Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
[4] Founded 1951, 1km from Gaza. On 7/10/2023 many civilians, and unarmed female soldiers, killed/kidnapped.
[5] In 1956, the IDF killed 275 in Khan Yunis and 111 in Rafah refugee camp due to “refugee resistance”. No IDF soldier casualties!
Thanks, Eddie, for that. I had not come across Moshe Dayan’s speech at the funeral of Roi Rutenberg.
Yes, “Dayan had no doubt about the origin of that kibbutzim land after the 1948 Nakba”: it had been the home of the refugees in Gaza for generations. I thought at first that Dayan was acknowledging with regret, even repentance, their guilt in expelling the Palestinians and taking their land. When I read the whole short speech, just 417 words in the English translation, I realised it was nothing like that.
While the occasion was the funeral of Roi, it is not really a eulogy in the normal sense of the word. And he says: “It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood.” Not that his own people were guilty of an injustice in taking the land, giving rise to “a sea of hatred and desire for revenge”, but that his people, in the light of that, were responsible for failing to implement secure protection: “we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the canon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home.” No awareness whatever of the injustice in expelling the previous inhabitants and taking their land. “Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken… This is our life’s choice – to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.”
He said, “The young Roi – left Tel Aviv to build his home at the gates of Gaza to be a wall for us – The yearning for peace deafened his ears and he did not hear the voice of murder waiting in ambush.” But that yearning for peace in no way referred to peace with their neighbours, those they had driven out: peace only for the victors.
It seems a faithful reflection of how Prime Minister Netanyahu sees the matter.
The full speech is at Moshe Dayan’s Eulogy for Roi Rutenberg – April 19, 1956 (jewishvirtuallibrary.org):
“Early yesterday morning Roi was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning dazzled him and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him, at the edge of the furrow.
“Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.
“It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?
“Beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path, for the day when we will heed the ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy who call upon us to lay down our arms.
“Roi’s blood is crying out to us and only to us from his torn body. Although we have sworn a thousandfold that our blood shall not flow in vain, yesterday again we were tempted, we listened, we believed.
“We will make our reckoning with ourselves today; we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the canon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken.
“This is the fate of our generation. This is our life’s choice – to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.
“The young Roi who left Tel Aviv to build his home at the gates of Gaza to be a wall for us was blinded by the light in his heart and he did not see the flash of the sword. The yearning for peace deafened his ears and he did not hear the voice of murder waiting in ambush. The gates of Gaza weighed too heavily on his shoulders and overcame him.”