Netanyahu's Autochthon

Kurt Heidinger

Mar 13, 202313 min read

Updated: Feb 23, 2024

Zionism's Autochthon: West Bank Occupiers

Zionism is a political-religious movement-belief that contemporary Jews have a right to return to and inhabit lands described in the Torah. It arose as a reaction to, and defense against, racist anti-Semitism in Europe during the Victorian and Progressive Eras (1870-1930). After the Holocaust, Israel was established (1947) and since then the world has witnessed decades of crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israelis against Palestinians. Israelis employ the Abrahamic blood and soil myth, with its emphasis on "blood purity" and "covenant made with deity via genocide" trope, to rationalize these crimes.

Anglo-American support for these crimes and tropes is due to the use of the Abrahamic myth to rationalize similar Anglo-American crimes executed during colonial and imperial theft of indigenous lands and resources. Increase Mather used the Abrahamic myth to celebrate the Anglos genocide of the Pequots, as we recall:

"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".

"Although most Zionists well knew that Palestine had many local inhabitants, and periodically mentioned them in their writings, they did not construe their presence as meaning that the Land was not open for free colonization.

Their fundamental consciousness on this point was consistent with the general climate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: as far as the white man was concerned, the non-European world had for all intents and purposes become a space devoid of people, just as America had been desolate two hundred years earlier, prior to the arrival of the white man." (178) The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland

-Shlomo Sand

Martin Buber's Blood and Soil myth

Buber calls for Jews to go to Palestine so they can restore an authentic racial self that has been lost due to the Diaspora. By living once again on "Canaanite soil" Zionists will restore the "blood" relationship between themselves and their deity.

excerpts from On Judaism

1909

from Judaism and the Jews

"This insertion [of Zionists] in the great chain [of ancestors] …. is present when … the homeland where he grew up is also the homeland of his blood; when the language and the ways in which he grew up are, at the same time, the language and the ways of his blood"

1912 from The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism

"the whole spiritual and religious life of ancient Judaism was closely bound up with the life of the soil, the life of this familiar earth. God was the lord of the field; His festivals were agrarian festivals, his law an agrarian law. However high a peak of universalism prophecy attained, it remained forever rooted in this nature-bound life, and its command was to be fulfilled in this same nature-bound life; its spirit at all times wanted to be clothed in a body of this particular Canaanite soil"

"All creative work took its strength and its form from its organic ties to the soil. And now these ties were sundered, and, with them, the inner cohesion of the Jewish spirit. God, the lord of the soil, became the patron of piety; His festivals, once agrarian, became synagogue festivals; His law, once agrarian, became a ritual law. The spirit became detached from its roots. It was then that the Jews did indeed become a nomadic people." "Once it comes into contact with its maternal soil, it will once more become creative. The Jew can truly fulfill his vocation among the nations only when he begins anew, and, with his whole, undiminished, purified original strength, translates into reality what his religion taught him in antiquity: rootedness in his native land; leading the good life within narrow confines; and building a model community on the scanty Canaanite soil"

1918

from The Holy Way: A Word to the Jews and to the Nations "Our revolution, the revolutionary settlement, signifies the elective fulfillment of a task with which our tradition has charged us. We must choose in this tradition the elements that constitute closeness to the soil, hallowed worldliness, and absorption of the Divine in nature; and reject in this tradition the elements that constitute remoteness from the soil, detached rationality, and nature’s banishment from the presence of God."

“We must create a community, cemented by joint labor and joint sacrifice, a community of men who, in the name of the nameless God, will journey to the Zion of His realization.”

Ignatz Zollschan's "Zionist Ubermensch" > To counter the Euro-Am Eugenicist's antiSemitic definitions, Zollschan defended the "Jewish race" using Social Darwinist eugenic pseudoscience. Against the pure bred Nordic he pitted the pure bred Jew, and claims victory. Speaking of the Zionist project he emphasizes blood purity, while celebrating the success of the "Jewish race" in the "struggle for existence".

1914 from Jewish Questions "Through the conscious efforts of numerous generations of thinkers and statesmen and through the influence of religion, a nation of pure blood, not tainted by diseases of excess or immorality, of a highly developed sense of family purity, and of deeply rooted, virtuous habits, would develop an exceptional intellectual activity.

Furthermore, the prohibition against mixed marriage provided that these highest ethnical treasures should not be lost, through the admixture of less carefully bred races. This prohibition brought it about that heredity, which is the first factor in the formation of a race, should exercise its power in a most beneficial way, and thus the racial qualities are not only transmitted from generation to generation, but are gradually heightened.

Thus from the striving after eternal existence (which was likewise a commandment of the Deity), there resulted that natural selection which has no parallel in the history of the human race. In the struggle for existence imposed upon this nation, which was shaken by fire and sword, by the hardest economic and moral oppression, and by constant enticements to fall away, only those individuals who were morally and physically strong could survive and propagate.

Thus the Jews form an ancient, chaste race of a maximum cultural value. If a race that is so highly gifted were to have the opportunity of again developing its original power, nothing could equal it as far as cultural value is concerned.” "What can we say with certainty about the purity of the Jewish race? .... we can assume with certainty, that the blood which flows to-day in the veins of the Jews, is the same as that of two thousand years ago.

That Ezra's commandments, among which is also the one about purity of blood, have been kept for thousands of years, is due to the fact that they claimed to be religious ordinances coming from God"

1921 Aaron David Gordon, founder of Hapoel Hatzair:

"For Eretz Israel, we have a charter that has been valid until now and that will always be valid, and that is the Bible, and not only the Bible .... And what did the Arabs produce in all the years they lived in the country? Such creations, or even the creation of the Bible alone, give us a perpetual right over the land in which we were so creative, especially since the people that came after us did not create such works in this country, or did not create anything at all."

(71-2) quoted in The Founding Myths of Israel by Zeev Sternhell, trans. by Maisel, David, Princeton U Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996.

1940

Lehi, the Zionist terrorist group that included future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, formed to kill English leaders and Palestinians. It uses the Abrahamic Blood and Soil myth to excuse its crimes against humanity, and to justify its interest in forming an alliance with the Nazis. From its propaganda: "Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: "Ye shall blot them out to the last man."

Its outreach to Nazis: "Late in 1940, Lehi, having identified a common interest between the intentions of the new German order and Jewish national aspirations, proposed forming an alliance in World War II with Nazi Germany. The organization offered cooperation in the following terms: Lehi would rebel against the British, while Germany would recognize an independent Jewish state in Palestine/Eretz Israel, and all Jews leaving their homes in Europe, by their own will or because of government injunctions, could enter Palestine with no restriction of numbers. Late in 1940, Lehi representative Naftali Lubenchik went to Beirut to meet German official Werner Otto von Hentig. The Lehi documents outlined that its rule would be authoritarian and indicated similarities between the organization and Nazis. Israel Eldad, one of the leading members of Lehi, wrote about Hitler "it is not Hitler who is the hater of the kingdom of Israel and the return to Zion, it is not Hitler who subjects us to the cruel fate of falling a second and a third time into Hitler's hands, but the British."

1947-49 The Nakba results as Zionists actualize the Abrahamic Blood and Soil myth: "Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres." May 15, 1948: Recognition of the nation of Israel by the United Nations 1951 Citing the Abrahamic Blood and Soil myth, and recontextualizing Buber's messianism and Zollschan's racist eugenics, Israel Eldad promotes the rebuilding o f the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem, at the site of Islam's Al-Aqsa Mosque: "The Temple Mount, referred to in the Book of Deuteronomy tens of times as "The place the Lord will choose," called the ritual center by Biblical scientists, and of which was said in the beautiful, the mother of all prayers, of Solomon of the Temple (1 Kings 8) "The Lord said that the He would dwell in, a settled place for you to abide forever." ....

The imagery and phrasing of this prayer are so concrete and concise that they make it the ultimate expression of Hebrew belief. It rises above all that philosophers and theologians and even prophets have written in all the generations that followed.

....

Also note the reference in this prayer to war; let us do away with the notion of on being a pacifist before the era of the Messiah, for the ideas are intertwined: God’s return to the Temple and a war of conquest, with revenge upon enemies.

As for the location of this spot, let artists try to explain it with their paint brushes. Let strategists expound, geopolitists and geologists and archeologists exigese. This is not our business. What is our concern is that this spot, with no possibility of change is "the place that is chosen." No apparent "rationalism," no "enlightened" philosophy can change this, nor move even one square meter of the mount.

And especially he who believes most deeply in the oneness, the all-encompassing-ness, the infinity of God, as every believing Jew, he will be most adamant about this oneness, this unique example in time and space; Temple Mount. No other Temple is acceptable, no matter how beautiful, if it is not on this Mount. Nor is this Mount acceptable without the "Great and Holy Temple" standing on it. Great and holy, both symbolizing the unification and synthesis of the material basis, the great foundation in the land that surrounds it, with the quality of Holiness.

A secular historian might try to evade this point by suggesting "The spot is sanctified by the blood zealots spilled in defending her." But the question remains: Why so much blood spilled over this spot? The reason for which so much blood was spilled is that which obligates the spilling of more blood to re-conquer her, if necessary. And the reason is: the objective holiness of this spot as the Kodesh Kodeshim , Holy of Holies, of our nation , and in the Days to Come, of all nations, for this is the meeting place of Heaven and earth. The Temple allows us to recognize that God is above nature, beyond us, yet still within our reach. Here man takes hold of God, and God takes hold of man." 1974 After Israel's victory in the Yom Kippur War, the racist terrorist group Gush Emunim is founded to realize the fascistic-religious goals expressed above by Israel Eldad: "According to Harold Fisch, an ideologue of Gush Emunim and a professor at Bar Ilan University, the Jewish people’s divine imperative to settle every inch of the Land was a value above all others. In his 1978 book, The Zionist Revolution, he interpreted Zionism according to the Gush Emunim worldview, stating that the covenant between the Jews and God behooved the Jewish people to act in the interests of the Land of Israel and exercise their right to settle and control it.

To Fisch, the Arab opposition was “suicidal,” and the Jewish people must not compromise with them in any way. The Jews’ role as the vanguard of the redemption means that they will never be a normal nation among the nations, and they must operate in a different dimension, fulfilling their God-given destiny. ... In light of its view that settling the Land of Israel will hasten the redemptive process, Gush Emunim established settlements throughout the territories captured in 1967, especially in Judea and Samaria. The belief that Jews have a God-given right to settle every part of the Land of Israel–and that no government, foreign or Israeli, has the right to prevent this–became a central pillar in the tactics and planning of the movement.

After the conservative Likud party won control of the Israeli government in 1977, Gush Emunim found a sympathetic partner in Prime Minister Menachem Begin and other hawkish leaders, who supported Gush Emunim’s efforts to populate large areas of Judea and Samaria in order to thwart the possibility of an eventual “Land for Peace” agreement with the Palestinians."

2004

Israeli professor Zeev Sternhell, one of the world's leading theorists of the phenomenon of fascism, publishes "Blood and Soil", stating as analysis what Buber and Eldad stated as fact: "The Gush Emunim, which preaches both religious fundamentalism and nationalist fanaticism in support of its 'mission to recover' the West Bank by means of settlement, and the non-religious elements who support it, are right to present settlement in Judaea, in Samaria or in the very heart of Hebron as the logical, natural and legitimate continuation of the intentions of Zionism in its original form"

April 16, 2010

Nobel Peace Prize-winning Holocaust victim Eli Weisel self-publishes For Jerusalem: Open Letter to President Obama, in US newspapers to criticize the president's demand that illegal Israeli development in the West Bank cease. Weisel employs the fascistic Abrahamic Blood and Soil myth exactly as Eldad did to justify more genocidal violence against Palestinians: "For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics. It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Koran. ... It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city, it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming." Expressing what Sternhall called the "intentions of Zionism in its original form," Weisel positions the genocide of Palestinians outside of Western -history and -political control. The world has no standing in this enormity because, as a messianic Zionist, his people's covenant with their deity supercedes any secular issues: "The anguish over Jerusalem is not about real estate but about memory.

What is the solution? Pressure will not produce a solution. Is there a solution? There must be, there will be. Why tackle the most complex and sensitive problem prematurely? Why not first take steps which will allow the Israeli and Palestinian communities to find ways to live together in an atmosphere of security. Why not leave the most difficult, the most sensitive issue, for such a time?"

The "time" he refers is when Israel takes full control of the Temple Mount, rebuilds Solomon's temple and welcomes the messiah—as he put it:

“I believe in the messiah. Jesus was not the messiah.” 2023