Harry's Place

A Haaretz story that has been doing the rounds online and which has been met with glee by several Jew-hating sites and blogs concerns the accounts given by a group of IDF soldiers about their experiences during Operation Cast Lead. One of these soldiers, ‘Ram’, reports that:

There was a huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out. The Education Corps published a pamphlet for commanders – something about the history of Israel’s fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present. The rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles, and … their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war. From my position as a commander and ‘explainer,’ I attempted to talk about the politics – the streams in Palestinian society, about how not everyone who is in Gaza is Hamas, and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us. I wanted to explain to the soldiers that this war is not a war for the sanctification of the holy name, but rather one to stop the Qassams.

This follows another Haaretz article in January on religious publications distributed to IDF soldiers:

Following are quotations from this material:

“[There is] a biblical ban on surrendering a single millimeter of it [the Land of Israel] to gentiles, though all sorts of impure distortions and foolishness of autonomy, enclaves and other national weaknesses. We will not abandon it to the hands of another nation, not a finger, not a nail of it.” This is an excerpt from a publication entitled “Daily Torah studies for the soldier and the commander in Operation Cast Lead,” issued by the IDF rabbinate. The text is from “Books of Rabbi Shlomo Aviner,” who heads the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva in the Muslim quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem.

The following questions are posed in one publication: “Is it possible to compare today’s Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David?” Rabbi Aviner is again quoted as saying: “A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land … They invaded the Land of Israel, a land that did not belong to them and claimed political ownership over our country … Today the problem is the same. The Palestinians claim they deserve a state here, when in reality there was never a Palestinian or Arab state within the borders of our country. Moreover, most of them are new and came here close to the time of the War of Independence.”

A ‘miracle’, a ‘Holy Land’, comparisons drawn from the Bible… If any of this is accurate, this is deeply worrying. Hamas likes to present the Middle East conflict in religious terms and is doing huge damage to attempts to bring about a peaceful resolution to the situation as a result. The last thing Israel needs is for religious propaganda like this to be fed to IDF troops, who do not fight on the basis that God ‘gave’ Israel to Jews in the way that Hamas fighters carry out attacks on the basis that Allah has ‘given [the land] as endowment for all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection’ and that Israel is ‘an offence against God‘.

I’m reminded here of a passage from Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great:

I once heard the late Abba Eban, one of Israel’s more polished and thoughtful diplomats and statesmen, give a talk in New York. The first thing to strike the eye about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, he said, was the ease of its solubility. From this arresting start he went on to say, with the authority of a former foreign minister and UN representative, that the essential point was a simple one. Two peoples of roughly equivalent size had a claim to the same land. The solution was, obviously, to create two states side by side. Surely something so self-evident was within the wit of man to encompass? And so it would have been, decades ago, if the messianic rabbis and mullahs and priests could have been kept out of it. But the exclusive claims to god-given authority, made by hysterical clerics on both sides and further stoked by Armageddon-minded Christians who hope to bring on the Apocalypse (preceded by the death or conversion of all Jews), have made the situation insufferable, and put the whole of humanity in the position of hostage to a quarrel that now features the threat of nuclear war.

If we are to ever see peace in the Middle East, one of the first things that needs to go for good is the discourse of ‘holy lands’, Jews vs. Gentiles, Muslims vs. Kuffar, and political and military decisions based on what pre-modern religious texts have to say about the world. When Israeli troops are told that ‘we need to fight to expel the gentiles’ or that ‘war is being waged for the sanctification of His name’ and that rabbis should be seen as ‘Anointed Priests of War’, we have a problem.