Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, 11/7/23, interviewed on DemocracyNow about the genocidal violence happening in Gaza, “the world’s largest open air prison”:
And I don’t understand, in all of my conversations with people at the White House and the State Department, that they don’t just get it. I don’t know what they’re taking in the morning that makes them think, “Today is going to be a better day. Israel is going to kill more people, and Arabs are going to say, ’Let’s have peace with Israel.’” It doesn’t work that way. And I’ve been down this road now for the last 40, 50 years doing this work full time, and, frankly, it gets worse, not better.”
I’ll help Mr. Zogby understand why the WH does not use its superpower to stop the genocides.
The reason is: the Anglo-Am culture of the USA has for 400 years relied on the Torah not only to justify but also sanctify its own genocides. You can read all about that here. An epitomizing example of this is Harvard president, witch hunter, and Native American genocider Increase Mather’s c.1676 assertion that:
"we finde that the second Generation, of them who came out of Egypt whilst yet in the Wilderness having also a difficult undertaking before them, being to engage with their Heathen Enemies, and in other respects their state and case to be parallel with ours, they did most solemnly renew their covenant with God.
when the Canaanites fought against Israel, and took some of them Prisoners (just as it is with us) and Israel vowed a vow unto the Lord, and the Lord hearkened to the voice of Israel, and delivered up the Canaanites, Numb. 21.1,2,3." The Anglo-Americans are not unique in using the Torah to sanctify genocide. Whenever white western colonists have invaded and stolen lands from indigenes, they have rationalized their actions by invoking the narrative of Moses’ and the Israelites’ genocide of the Canaanites as they followed the command of their deity, and established the “promised land” thereby.
Israel was originally established by genocidal invaders, just like the USA was. This is why the USA today supports the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. They both use the biblical “god” as the ultimate excuse for their war crimes. At the same time the US and all western nations except Ireland support Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, the majority of their citizens are demanding peace—as Mr. Zogby observes. This undemocratic disjunction between citizens and oligarchs is characteristic of the way the Moses’ narrative manifests itself: because the narrative is the opposite of Jesus’s. The NT, written by Greeks, is invoked by those who demand respect for universal human rights.
The Torah is a political narrative that is employed, or transposed, by racist ethnonationalists who, rely on the ur-definition of “God’s chosen people”, believe in “blood purity” and “master race”. It’s sacralization of colonist’s genocide of indigenes is enabled by the narrative of “God’s chosen people”; for in the Moses’ narrative the deity makes a covenant with the colo nists that requires them to commit genocide as proof of their chosenness. If they don’t commit genocide, the deity abhors and abandons them; for example Numbers 31: 14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.
15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. The OT is, in fact, a narrative about how the deity abandons the Israelites, who lose their promised land because they have—through multiculturalism/"worship of the golden cow"—lost the covenant and their chosen status. The NT and the Koran begin with this moment of separation between Israelites and their deity, and they lay claim for their own followers of the status of “God’s chosen people”. The nearly 2000 years of the diaspora coincide with the rise of Christianity; and Calvinists (who invoke the OT more than the NT) like Increase Mather assumed that his culture had taken the place of the Israelites. The Crusades were an expression of the competition between western Christians and nonwestern Muslims to govern Jerusalem, claim the “blood and soil” site where the biblical deity is placed, and thereby prove their chosenness.
Antisemitism is grounded in the OT narrative that the Israelites lost their chosenness, and the resulting competition between non-Jewish cultures to attain that status. A primary way of proving chosenness was/is to be antisemitic; and this way was/is used by theists and atheists like the Nazis, who concocted their own industrial-era versions of blood purity and master race.
Today’s Israelis use the Moses’s narrative to sacralize their genocide of the Palestinians, as they re-colonize “Canaan” and re-establish their “chosen” status. They do this in conflict with the NT Christian, liberal, cosmopolitan narrative of universal human rights, which betrays their own history of being rescued from the Holocaust by those who condemn genocides, and who could never imagine that they would brazenly commit genocide for racist, ethnonationalist reasons. Today’s Israelis are protected by the USA as they commit genocide because they both use the Moses’ narrative to structure, rationalize and give sacred status to their citizen’s colonialist behaviors. Every time we hear a politician bellow “God bless America” we must recognize how trapped we are in that narrative. Israelis and those who actualize the Moses’ narrative will find no peace, however, because “God” as defined by the Torah is a primitive projection of tribal identity; it was invented to unify and encourage a nomadic people to steal land from indigenes. Because it was latterly revised to be a universal deity lording over all cosmos “god” lost its specific tribal affiliation and became owned by any powerful population that wanted to claim it; this again is the history of the Crusades which has not ended. Because it invented the deity, and does not have the power to take ultimate possession of the deity it launched into world culture, Israel will always be challenged for that unpossessable possession, and punished for its presumption that it does possess it and the accompanying status of chosenness.
As long as the Moses narrative survives to sacralize the genocides perpetrated by colonial cultures, so will its accursedness stick to its actualizers—for a “master race” is one that, in practice and ultimately, has no friends or allies. A master race is opposed to universal human rights—and does not realize that, within a world of multiple cultures, it rejects its own argument for protection under those universal rights, thereby. Update: thank you New Yorker magazine for interviewing West Bank Zionist Daniella Weiss, who confirms the "curse" that bedevils those who actualize the Moses' narrative: "The first nation that got the word from God, the promise from God—the first nation is the one who has the right to it. The others that follow—Christianity and Islam, with their demands, with their perceptions—they’re imitating what existed already. "
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