When
Israel’s Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu took the
podium at the U.N. General
Assembly last week, dozens of
governments walked
out of the chamber. The
global opprobrium of Netanyahu
and his government is due to
Israel’s depraved violence
against its Arab neighbors.
Netanyahu purveys a
fundamentalist ideology that
has turned Israel into
the most violent nation in the
world.
Israel’s
fundamentalist credo holds
that Palestinians have no
right whatsoever to their own
nation. The Israeli Knesset
recently passed
a declaration rejecting
a Palestinian State in what
the Knesset calls The Land of
Israel, meaning the land west
of the Jordan River.
The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.
To
call the land west of the
Jordan the “heart of the Land
of Israel” is breathtaking.
Israel is one part of the land
west of the Jordan, not the
entire land. The International
Court of Justice has recently
ruled that
Israel’s occupation of the
Palestinian lands (those
outside of Israel’s borders as
of June 4, 1967, before the
June 1967 war) is plainly
illegal. The U.N. General
Assembly has recently
voted overwhelmingly
to back the ICJ ruling and
called on Israel to withdraw
from Palestinian territories
within one year.
It
is worth recalling that when
the British empire promised a
Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine in
1917, the Palestinian Arabs
constituted around 90% of the
population. At the time of the
1947 U.N. partition plan, the
Palestinian Arab population
was approximately 67% of the
population, though the
partition plan proposed to
give the Arabs only 44% of the
land. Now Israel asserts the
claim to 100% of the land.
There
are many sources of this
Israeli brazenness, the most
important being the backing of
Israel by U.S. military power.
Without the U.S. military
backing, Israel could not
possibly rule over an
Apartheid regime in which
Palestinian Arabs constitute
nearly one half of the
population yet hold none of
the political power. Future
generations will look back in
amazement at the success of
the Israel Lobby in
manipulating the U.S. military
to the severe detriment of
U.S. national security and
global peace.
Yet
in addition to the U.S.
military, there is another
source of Israel’s profound
injustice to the Palestinian
people, and that is the
religious fundamentalism
purveyed fanatics such as the self-proclaimed
fascist Bezalel
Smotrich, Israel’s Minister of
Finance, and Minister of
National Defense Itamar
Ben-Gvir. These fanatics hold
fast to the biblical Book of
Joshua, according to which God
promised the Israelites the
land "from the Negev
wilderness in the south to the
Lebanon mountains in the
north, from the Euphrates
River in the east to the
Mediterranean Sea in the
west." (Joshua 1:4).
At
the U.N. last week,
Netanyahu once again staked
Israel’s claim to the land on
Biblical grounds: “When I
spoke here last year, I said
we face the same timeless
choice that Moses put before
the people of Israel thousands
of years ago, as we were about
to enter the Promised Land.
Moses told us that our actions
would determine whether we
bequeath to future generations
a blessing or a curse.”
What
Netanyahu did not tell his
fellow leaders (most of whom
had in any event vacated the
hall), was that Moses laid out
a genocidal path to the
Promised Land (Deuteronomy
31):
[The LORD] will destroy these nations before you, and you shall dispossess them. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you, just as the LORD has spoken. “The LORD will do to them just as He did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and to their land, when He destroyed them. “The LORD will deliver them up before you, and you shall do to them according to all the commandments which I have commanded you.”
Israel’s
violent extremists believe
that Israel has the Biblical
license, indeed a religious
mandate, to destroy the
Palestinian people. Their
Biblical hero is Joshua, the
Israelite commander who
succeeded Moses, and who led
the Israelites’ genocidal
conquests. (Netanyahu has also
referred to the Amalekites,
another case of a God-ordained
genocide of foes of the
Israelites, in a clear
“dog-whistle” to his
fundamentalist followers.)
Here is the Biblical account
of Joshua’s conquest of Hebron
(Joshua 10):
Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron, and they fought against it. They captured it and struck it and its king and all its cities and all the persons who were in it with the edge of the sword. He left no survivor, according to all that he had done to Eglon. And he utterly destroyed it and every person who was in it.
There
is a deep irony to this
genocidal account. It almost
surely is not historically
accurate. There is no evidence
that the Jewish kingdoms arose
from genocides. Most likely
they arose from local
Canaanite communities adopting
early forms of Judaism. Jewish
fundamentalists adhere to a
6th century BCE text that is
most likely a mythical
reconstruction of purported
events several centuries
earlier, and a form of
political bravado that was
common in ancient Near Eastern
politics. The problem is 21st
century Israeli politicians,
illegal settlers, and other
fundamentalists who propose to
live by—and kill by—6th
century BCE political
propaganda.
Israel’s
violent fundamentalists are
some 2,600 years out of step
with today’s acceptable forms
of statecraft and
international law. Israel is
duty bound to the UN Charter
and the Geneva Conventions,
not to the Book of Joshua.
According to the recent ICJ
ruling and UN General Assembly
resolution backing it up,
Israel must withdraw in the
coming twelve months from the
occupied Palestinian lands.
According to international
law, Israel’s
borders are those of June
4, 1967, not the
Euphrates to the Mediterranean
Sea.
The
ICJ ruling and U.N. General
Assembly vote is not a ruling
against the state of Israel per
se. It is a ruling only
against extremism, indeed
against extremism and
malevolence on both sides of
the divide. There are two
peoples, each with roughly
half the overall population
(and with no shortage of
internal social, political,
and ideological divisions
within the two communities).
International law calls for
two states, living side by
side, in peace.
The
best solution, which we should
strive for and hope for sooner
rather than later, is that the
two states, and the two
peoples, get along, and
actually draw strength from
each other. Until then,
however, the practical
solution will be peacekeepers
and fortified borders to
protect each side from the
animosity of the other, but
with each having the chance to
prosper. The utterly
intolerable and illegal
situation is the status
quo, in which Israel
rules brutally over the
Palestinian people.
Hopefully, there will soon be
a State of Palestine,
sovereign and independent,
whether the Knesset wants it
or not. This is not Israel’s
choice, but the mandate of the
world community and of
international law. The sooner
the State of Palestine is
welcomed as member state of
the U.N., with the security of
both Israel and Palestine
backed by U.N. peacekeepers,
the sooner will peace come to
the region.