Theologies of Liberation in Palestine-Israel: Indigenous, Contextual, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Postmodern Ethics Book 4) by Nur Masalha

Author:Nur Masalha [Nur Masalha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickwick Publications
Published: 2014-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

5

God’s Mapmakers: A Theology of Dispossession

Prof. Gareth Lloyd Jones

On 25 February 1994 Dr. Baruch Goldstein, an ultra-Orthodox Jew of American extraction, entered a mosque in his home town of Hebron in Israeli-Occupied Territory carrying a machine gun. Before he was overpowered and beaten to death, he had shot twenty-nine Muslim worshippers as they knelt in prayer. Today the assassin’s grave in a park outside Hebron looks like a garden of remembrance. His massive gravestone, illuminated at night by ornamental lights, refers to him as a saint. The inscription reads: “Having given his life on behalf of the Jewish people, its Torah and its ancestral homeland, he was an innocent, pure-hearted individual.” Pilgrims hold services and light memorial candles. Supporters kiss the tomb and stop to pray.

At his funeral Rabbi Jacob Perrin commended his action by stating in his sermon that “one million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” When Goldstein’s son became a bar mitzvah two years later, the officiating rabbi said to him: “Jacob Jair, follow in your father’s footsteps. He was a righteous man and a great hero” (Jerusalem Report [12 December 1996 ] 10; cited in Prior, The Bible and Colonialism, 149n41 ).

The British Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, condemned the massacre in no uncertain terms by declaring that “violence is evil. Violence committed in the name of God is doubly evil. Violence against those engaged in worshipping God is unspeakably evil.” Reflecting on Sacks’s reaction, Rabbi Norman Solomon commented, “The problem with Sacks” position is that, much as we may concur with the sentiment, and however many Biblical and Talmudic citations we may amass in praise of peace, we are left with numerous texts that do summon us to violence in the name of God, and this makes it difficult to argue against Perrin and the like on purely textual grounds” (unpublished lecture “Jewish Sources for Religious Pluralism”).

On 4 February 1995 Yigal Amir, the son of an Orthodox Rabbi and a student at the Institute of Advanced Torah Studies in Tel-Aviv, founded by the National Religious Party, assassinated Israeli Premier Yitzchak Rabin. In his defense he claimed that he was acting in the name of God. Because Rabin had signed the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993 , which traded land for peace, and shook hands with Arafat, Amir maintained that Rabin endangered the Jewish nation. Rabin’s action was that of a traitor. The Torah made provision for such treachery: the sentence was death.

In assassinating Rabin, Amir honored Goldstein. Among the books found in his apartment was one praising his hero’s actions. For both men the Palestinians had no rights to their ancestral homeland. Their removal from Hebron, Jerusalem, and the entire West Bank was a mitzvah , a commandment which the Jews were expected to honor. Expulsion was part of God’s plan. In carrying out their mission, both were confident that they were doing so in obedience to the divine mandate.

These two notorious instances are noted because they point to the religious dimension of Zionism, the chosen topic of this essay.

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