by Roger Garaudy - The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

by Roger Garaudy

1 - The Myth of the "Promise" : Promised Land or Conquered Land?

* "If one possesses the book of the Bible, if one considers oneself
as the people of the Bible, one should possess all the Biblical lands."

General Moshe Dayan. "Jerusalem Post". August 30th 1967.

* On February 25th 1994, Doctor Baruch Goldstein massacred Arabs praying
at the tomb of the Patriarchs.

* On November 4th 1995, Ygal Amir assassinated Isaac Rabin, "by order
of God", and of his group of "warriors of Israel", to execute whoever
should yield to the Arabs the "Promised Land" of "Judah and Samaria"
(present-day Cis-Jordania).

a) The Christian exegesis

"Divine promise and cultural legend in the cycle
of Jacob» (2 volumes,Gabalda Publishers, Paris 1975), in which he
integrates, discusses and prolongs the research of the greatest contemporary
historians of the Scriptures, including Albrech Alt and Martin Noth (see
: "History of Israel" by M.Noth,French translation published by Payot,
1954; "Theology of the Old Testament", 1971,Labor et Fides publishers,
Geneva, by Von Rad, "Ancient History of Israel" (2 volumes) by Father R.
de Vaux, Paris 1971.

"The Biblical theme of the gift of the country has its origin in the
'patriarchal promise', in other words in the divine promise made, according
to the tradition of Genesis, to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
The stories in Genesis relate several times and in different ways, that
God promised the patriarchs and their descendents the ownership of the
land in which they were in the process of settling. This promise was made
at Sichem (Genesis 12/7), at Bethel (Genesis 13/14-16; 28/13-15;
35/11-12) and at Mamre, near Hebron (Genesis 15/18-21; 17/4-8),
in other words at the principal sanctuaries of Samaria and Judea, and appears
to apply above all to the region of present-day Cisjordania.

"Biblical narrators present us the history of Israel's origins as a
succession of well-defined periods in time. All the memories,stories, legends,
tales or poems in their possession, handed down by oral tradition, were
inserted by them within a specific genealogical and chronological framework.
This determination to put order in handed-down tradition and to classify
it also left its mark on the compilation of the patriarchal tales.

"Each of the patriarchs was probably an eponymous hero or legendary
figure of independent origins, but for the narrators of the Bible all the
names must be united in the same family tree. Thus Abraham is presented
as the father of Isaac and as Jacob's grandfather. The eponyms of the twelve
tribes of Israel are regarded as the sons of Jacob, etc. It is these twelve
sons of Jacob - the embryo of the "people of Israel" concept - who left
Palestine for Egypt because of a famine. After an exile of 400 years, their
descendents having become the "people of Israel" in the meantime, they
left Egypt, wandered about in the desert and finally conquered the land
which had been promised to their ancestors. As almost all contemporary
exegets agree, this schema is mostly fictitious.

"The works of Albrecht Alt and Martin North have revealed especially
that the division into successive periods (Patriarchs - bondage in Egypt
- conquest of Canaa) is artificial."

lt is admitted today
that most of the tribe and clans which, in the 12th or the 11th century
B.C., joined up to become the "people of Israel" (perhaps in the form of
a confederation) were originally groups of semi-nomads who had become sedentary
in central Palestine, Transjordania, Galilee and the Neguev over the course
of the previous centuries.

Most of these
clans claimed to be descended from an eponymous ancestor about whom they
had preserved a body of stories and legends. Thus one of these clans regarded
itself as issued from the "patriarch" Abraham ; another was issued from
Jacob, while others still were considered to be the descendents of Ruben,
Simeon or Joseph.

It was only during
the assimilation and unification of these different tribal groups that
their "ancestors", who had no links originally between them, became integrated
within a single geneological system. It is likely that the "Abraham" and
"Isaac" became assimilated to the "proto-Israelite" tribes at a time when
Jacob-Israel had already become the common ancestor of the twelve tribes.
Thus Isaac had to make do with the status of Jacob's "father", while Abraham
was enthroned at the root of the genealogy, thus becoming Isaac's "father".

To sum up, we
can see that the Israelite "conquest" was not the "Blitzkrieg" it is made
out to be in the book of Joshuah, but rather the outcome of a gradual "Landnahme"
by nomadic groups. The few military skirmishes that may have occured only
came in the final phase of a long process of infiltration and sedentarization.

Most exegetes
have considered and continue to consider the promise of the patriarchs
in its classic form (cf for example Genesis 13/14-17 or Genesis
15/18-21) as a post-eventum legitimization of the Israelites' conquest
of Palestine under David's reign. In other words, the promise was introduced
in the patriarchal tales to turn that "ancestral epic" into a prelude and
an announcement of the golden age of David and Solomon.

It was the custom
of the heads of the clans to consult the oracle of the god El at the local
sanctuary frequented by the tribe at the time of year when they got ready
to leave the fertile lands to go to their winter pastures. The priest of
the sanctuary would then reveal to them an "oracle of salvation" which
gave the clan the assurance of divine protection during the transhumance
and of its safe and sound return to the summer pastures at the end of the
rainy season. Furthermore, as the patriarchal tales show us, these oracles
could carry a promise of sedentarization in fertile regions.

We can now summarily
circumscribe the origins of the patriarchal promise :

1. The promise of land, understood as a promise of
sedentarization, was first addressed to groups of nomads who were still
submitted to the practice of transhumance and who aspired to settlement
somewhere in inhabitable areas. In this form the promise may have been
part of the religious and narrative heritage of several different tribal
groups.

2. The goal of the nomadic promise was not the political and military
conquest of a region or a whole country but sedentarization within a limited
territory.

3. Originally, the patriarchal promise spoken about in Genesis was not
granted by Yahveh (the god who had entered Palestine with the "Exodus group")
but by the Canaanite god in one of his local hypostases. Only the local
god, owner of the land, could offer nomads sedentarization on his lands.

4- Later, when the nomadic clans had become sedentary and had regrouped
with other tribes to make up the "people of Israel", the ancient promises
took on another dimension. The goal of sedentarization had been reached
and the promise henceforth had political, military and "national" implications.

Thus
reinterpreted, the promise was seen as the foreshadowing of the definitive
conquest of Palestine, as the announcement and the legitimization of the
Davidian empire. None of the promises reported in the book of Genesis have
avoided this reinterpretation. The content of the patriarchal promise

"Whereas the "nomadic" promise aiming for the sedentarization
of a clan ofshepherds probably goes back to an ante eventum origin, the
same does not hold true of the promise that took on "national" dimensions.
Given the fact that the "Israelite" tribes united only after their settlement
in Palestine, the reinterpretation of the nomadic promise to a promise
of political sovereignty must have been made post eventum. Thus the promise
in Genesis 15/18-21, which envisages the sovereignty of the chosen people
over all the regions located "between the Egyptian Torrent (Wadi 'Arish)
and the Great River, the Euphrates", and over all the inhabitants of those
lands, is clearly a vaticinium ex eventu inspired by the Davidian conquests.
It must also be pointed out that other "goals" were added to the initial
promise, notably that of countless descendents and the divine blessing.
Each narrator has conferred his particular stamp upon the promise. The
Yahvist insisted on the countless descendence, while Deuteronomy emphacized
the possession of the lands of Canaa and the Sacerdotal on the alliance
with Yahveh implied in the promise. Exegetic research has made it possible
to establish that the broadening of the "nomadic" promise into a "national"
promise must have happened before the first patriarchal tales were set
in writing.

"The Yahvist can be regarded as the first great narrator (or rather
as the editor of tales) of the Old Testament; he lived at the time of Solomon.
Consequently, he was the contemporary and the witness of those few decades
when the patriarchal promise, reinterpreted in the light of David, seemed
to have been fulfilled beyond all hopes. A careful reading of the tales
shows us that the aim of the Yahvist was to point out the permanent opposition
between the indignity of the people to whom the promise was made and the
incomprehensible grace of Yahveh. The Genesis 12/3b passage is one of the
key texts for the understanding of the work of the Yahvist.

"According to this text, the blessing of Israel must have as its corollary
the blessing of all the "clans on earth ('adamah)". The clans of the fertile
land are, first and foremost, all the tribes which share Palestine and
Transjordania with Israel.

"We are thus not in a position to assert that at such or such a time
in history God revealed himself to a historical figure called Abraham and
conferred upon him the legal deeds of possession to the land of Canaa.
From the juridical point of view, we have no land-act signed "God" to show
for, and we even have good reasons to believe that the scene in Genesis
12/1-8, 13/14-18 does not reflect a historical event. The promise in Genesis
15/18 does not allow us either to claim the Euphrates (or even the Jordan)
as a frontier of Israel, any more than the visions of the Apocalypse enables
us to anticipate the material unfolding of events at the end of time.

"Is it possible then to "actualize" the patriarchal promise ? If to
actualize the promise means to use it as a deed of property or to put it
at the service of a political claim, however legitimate it may be, then
the answer is certainly not. No policy has the right to claim the guarantee
of the promise for itself. One cannot rally in any way to those among the
Christians who consider the Old Testament as a legitimization of the present
territorial claims of that State."

Source : All these texts are taken from the conference given on February
10th 1975 at Cret-Berard (Switzerland) during a symposium on the theological
interpretations of the Israeli-Arab conflict, published in the magazine
: "Theological and religious studies" n° 3, 1976 (Montpellier).

b) The Jewish prophetic exegesis

"It is inadmissible for anyone to plead that the
setting-up of the present state of Israel has been the fulfillment of Prophecy
and that therefore all acts performed by the Israelis in order to set their
state up and to maintain it have been automatically ratified in advance
by God. The present-day political Israel has, for all of us, obliterated
or, at least, adumbrated, the spiritual Israel. I propose to examine two
fundamental elements of the prophetic tradition.

"a - First when the Prophets evoked the restoration of Zion, it was
not the land itself which was of a sacred nature. The absolute and indisputable
criteria of the prophetic concept of the Redemption was the restoration
of the Alliance with God, at a time when that Alliance had been broken
by the King and his people.

"Micah spells it out clearly : "Hear, I pray you, O heads of Jacob,
and ye princes of the house of Israel that abhor judgment and pervert all
equity. They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with inequity...Therefore
shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become
heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high place of the forest."

Source : Micah III,1-12.

" Zion is holy only if the Law of God reigns above
it. And this does not mean that every Law edicted at Jerusalem is a holy
one.

"b- It is not only the land which depends on the observance and fidelity
to the Alliance : the people reinstalled in Zion have the same obligations
of justice, uprightness and faith to the Covenant with God.

"Zion could not expect the restoration of a people resting on treaties,
alliances, military balances of power or a military hierarchy seeking to
establish its superiority over the neighbours of Israel. ....The prophetic
tradition clearly shows that the holiness of a land does not depend on
its soil, nor that of its people's sole presence on that territory. The
only thing that is sacred and worthy of Zion is the divine Covenant which
expresses itself in the deeds of its people.

"The present State of Israel has no right whatsoever to claim the accomplishment
of the divine project for a Messianic age.... It is pure demagogy of soil
and blood. Neither the people nor the land are holy and deserving of any
spiritual privilege in this world. Zionist totalitarianism which seeks
to subject the entire Jewish people, even by violence and force, makes
it a people among others and like others."

Source : Rabbi Elmer Berger : "Prophecy, Zionism and the state of Israel."
Ed. American Jewish alternatives to Zionism. Conference at Leiden University
(Netherlands) on March 20th 1968.

Ygal Amir, Isaac
Rabin's assassin, is neither a delinquent nor a madman, but a pure product
of Zionist education. The son of a rabbi, an excellent student at the clerical
University of Bar Ilan near Tel Aviv, he has been brought up on the teachings
of the Talmudic schools. A first-rate soldier in the Golan, one of his
books was the biography of Baruch Goldstein (who murdered 27 Arabs praying
at the tomb of the Patriarchs at Hebron a few months ago). Ygal Amir probably
saw, on Israeli State television, the long documentary on the "Eyal" group
(the Warriors of Israel) swearing on the tomb of Theodore Herzl, the founder
of political Zionism, to "execute whoever would yield to the Arabs the
'Promised Land' of Judah and Samaria" (present-day Cis-Jordania).

The assassination
of President Rabin, (like the killings of Goldstein) are inscribed in the
strict logic of the mythology of the Zionist integrists : the order to
kill, says Ygal Amir, "comes from God", as in the days of Joshua.

Source : "Le Monde" (AFP) November 8th 1995.

Ygal Amir was
not an isolated case within Israeli society : on the day of Isaac Rabin's
murder, the Kiryat Arba and Hebron settlers danced for joy, reciting the
psalms of David, round the mausoleum erected to the glory of Baruch Goldstein.

Source : "El Pais" (Spain), November 7th 1995. p. 4.

Isaac Rabin was
a symbolic target, not because he supposedly "fought for Peace all his
life". as Bill Clinton claimed at Rahin's funeral. In fact, Rabin was at
the head of the occupying forces at the begining othe "Intifada", and it
was he who gave the order to "break the bones" of the children of the Palestinian
soil, whose only weapon was the ancient stones of their land with which
to defend their ancestral soil.

But Isaac Rabin
was a realist who had understood (like the Americans in Vietnam and the
French in Algeria) that there could be no definitive military solution
when an Army clashes not just with another army but with an entire people.
He had therefore agreed on a compromise solution with Yasser Arafat: a
portion of the territories, whose occupation had been condemned by the
United Nations, would be granted administrative autonomy. But the Israeli
army would continue to protect the "colonies" stolen from the natives and
which had turned into seminars of hate such as Hebron.

This was already
going too far for the integrists who had benefited from this colonialism:
they created round Rabin - whom they presented as a "traitor" - the climate
of hatred which led up to his infamous assassination. After thousands of
Palestinians, Isaac Rabin was a victim of the myth of the "Promised Land",
ancient pretext for bloody colonialism.

This assassination
by a fanatic shows once more that a genuine peace between a State of Israel,
secure within the frontiers established by the 1947 partition, and a wholly
independent Palestinian State, must involve the radical elimination of
the present-day colonialism, in other words of all the colonies which are
from within the future Palestinian State, unending sources of provocation
and so many detonators for future wars.

2- The myth of the "chosen people"

An Integrist interpretation of political Zionism.

"The inhabitants of the world can be disseminated between Israel and
the other nations taken as a whole. Israel is the chosen people: chief
dogma."

Source : Rabbin Cohen: "The Talmud" Ed.Payot, Paris 1986.p.104.

This myth is the
belief, without any historical foundation whatsoever, according to which
monetheism was born with the Old Testament. It would appear, on the contrary,
from the Bible itself that its two principal transcribers, the Yahvist
and the Elohist, were not monotheists, either of them; they only proclaimed
the superiority of the Hebrew god over the other gods, and his "jealousy"
regarding them (Exodus XX, 2-5). Kamosh, the god of Moab, is acknowledged
(Judges XI, 24 and Kings II, 27) as "the other gods" (Samuel
I, XXVII,19) (Kings I, 27).

It was only after
the exile, and especially with the Prophets, that monotheism asserted itself,
in other words when formulas such as : "Thou shalt have no god than I."
(XX,4) turned into ones that were not content with demanding obedience
to Yahveh and to no other gods (as is repeated in Deuteronomy) : "You shall
not follow other gods." (VI,14), but which proclaimed : "I am God,
there are none others." (Essau XLV,22). This indisputable assertion
of monotheism dates from the second half of the VIth century B.C. (between
550 and 539 B.C.).

For monotheism
was the fruit of a long ripening process of the great cultures of the Middle
East, those of Mesopotamia and Egypt. As early as the XIIIth century B.C.
the pharaoh Akhenaton had the plural of the word "god" erased from all
the temples. His "hymn to the sun" is paraphrased almost word for word
in Psalm 104. The Babylonian religion was heading towards monotheism; when
he evoked the god Marduk, the historian Albright delineated the stages
in that transformation : "When it is recognized that the numerous different
divinities are only manifestations of a single god... it is only one step
away from reaching a certain monotheism. "

Source : Albright. "Les religions dans le Moyen Orient." p. 159

The "Babylonian
Poem of Creation" (which dates from the XIth century B.C.) bears witness
to these "final steps" : "If humans are divided as to the gods, we by all
the names we shall have named him by, let him be He, our God." This religion
reached a high degree of interiority, in which the image of the suffering
Upright man appears :

"I want to praise the Lord of wisdom...My God has
forsaken me ... I paraded as a Lord and now I hug the walls... Each day
I moan like a dove and tears burn my cheeks. And yet prayer was wisdom
for me, and sacrifice my law. I believed I was in God's service, but who
from the depth of the abyss can understand the divine ways ?

"Who, if not Marduk, is the master of the resurrection? You whose clay
he originally moulded, Sing the glory of Marduk."

Source : Op. cit. p. 329 to 341.

This image of
Job preceded Job himself. A similar image of the "suffering upright man"
is that of Danel (not the Daniel of the Hebrew Bible) punished by God and
brought back to earth by his lord ; it can be found in all the Ugaritic
texts of Ras Shamrah, in what has been called the Canaan Bible , which
preceded that of the Hebrews since Ezekiel mentions Danel next to Job (Ezekiel
XIV, 14 and 20).

These are parables
whose spiritual meaning in no way depends on historical authentification.
This also holds true for that wondrous parable of resistance to oppression
and of liberation that we find in the tale of Exodus. It matters little,
therefore, that « the crossing of the reed-filled sea cannot be regarded
as a historical event, as Mircea Eliade writes , and that it does not concern
all the Hebrews but only a few groups of fugitives. It is, however, significant
that the date of this grandiose flight from Egypt was made to coincide
with Easter...given renewed value and integrated to the holy history of
Yahvism.

From 621 B.C.
on, the celebration of the Exodus replaced a genuine Canaan agrarian rite
at Easter, in spring : the feast of the resurrection of Adonis. The Exodus
thus became the founding act of the rebirth of a people rescued from slavery
by its god. The divine experience of this rescue of man from his ancient
bonds is to be found in many different races, from the long wanderings
of the Aztec tribe, "Mexica" in the XIIIth century : after more than a
century of trials, the tribe arrives in the valley to which its god has
led it, opening the way where no road had been traced before.

The African Kaidara
also had the same tradition of a journey of initiation towards freedom.
The settlement on a land of nomadic or wandering tribes is linked - especially
in the Middle East - to the giving of a promised land to a people by a
god.

There are myths
at every stage of man's human and spiritual development in all civilizations.
That of the Deluge, whereby God punished the sins of men and began his
creation again, is to be found in all civilizations since the Mesopotamian
Gilgamesh to the Popol Vuh of the Mayas of Guatemala (Part I, chapter
3).

Hymns of praise
to God are born of all religions, such as the psalms in honour of the Incas'
mother goddess,Pachacamac, and their other gods as well :

"Wiraqocha, root of being, God, always near... who
creates saying : let man be ! let woman be ! Wiraqocha, luminous lord,
God who causes to be and to die... Thou who renewest creation, Keep thy
creature a long time, that it may perfect itself ... walking along the
straight path."
If it were not for
an ethnocentric prejudice in our path, why should we not reflect on all
these sacred texts, which were an "Ancient Testament" for of their people,
and study the moment of the discovery of the meaning of life ?

Only then would
the message of life and the words of Jesus attain their true universality
: it would be rooted in all the experiences men have had of the divine,
and not restricted - and even stifled by a unilateral tradition. The very
life of Jesus, his radically new vision of the Kingdom of God as no longer
resting on the power of the mighty but on the hope of the poor, would cease
to be eclipsed by a historical schema going only from promises of victory
made to one People until their final victory.

We have here evoked
in their anteriority only religions of the Middle East, in which dawned
monotheism and which exterted an influence on the Hebrews. In other non-Western
cultures the move towards monotheism is even more ancient. For example
the Vedas of India.

"Wise men give
the Sole Being more than one name." (Hymn of the Rig-Veda III,7).
Vrihaspati "It is our Father, who contains all the gods." (III,18 )
"He who is our Father has engendered and contains all beings. God alone,
he has made the other gods. Everything that exists acknowledges him as
Master...You know He who has created all things; it is the same as the
one who is within you." (CXI,11) "His names are many, but He is
One."

These sacred texts
date from the XVIth to the VIth century B.C., and Father Monchanin (S.J.),
in his effort of intuition to place himself within the Vedas, called them
: "the absolute liturgical poem."

Source : Jules Monchanin : "Mystique de l'Inde, mystére chrétien".
P.231.229.

3. The myth of Joshua : ethnic purification.

On April 9th 1948,
Menahem Beghin and his Irgun troops massacred the 254 inhabitants of the
village of Deir Yassin, men, women and children.

We are studying
this passage of fossilization of the myth into history and the claims of
that "historical touch-up job" to justify a policy, in just one specific
case : that of the instrumentalization of the Biblical tales. They have
never ceased to play a determinant role in the fate of the West, insofar
as they covered its most bloody deeds, from the persecution of the Jews
by the Romans, then by the Christians, until the Crusades, the lnquisition,
the Holy Alliance, the colonial dominations exerted by the "chosen people",until
the exactions of the state of Israel, not only through its policy of expansion
in the Middle East, but also through the pressures of its lobbies, the
most powerful of which is the American one, that plays a major role in
the American policy of world domination and military aggression. This is
the reason for our choice : the exploitation of a mythical past is influencing
the future towards what might prove to be world suicide.

The Bible contains
some of the most outstanding images of the divine presence in history,
from that first and grandiose explosion beyond our petty morals and logic,
of the transcendent sacrifice of Abraham, to the eternal symbol of mankind's
flight from servitude in the epic of Exodus, along with the great prophecies
of Amos and Ezekiel, of Isaiah and Job, all the way to the announcement
of a new alliance with David.

This "new alliance"
(or "New Testament") heralds the greatest mutation in the history of men
and gods with the advent of Jesus, whom, as the Fathers of the Eastern
Church put it : « God became man so that man could become God. »
Then, with Saint Paul,returned the traditional vision of a sovereign, all-powerful
God who directs the life of men and communities from above and from without,
not through the Jewish "law" any more but through a Christian "grace" which
similarly destroys man's responsibility.

"It is through
grace that you are saved. You have nothing to do with it. It is the gift
of God." (Ephesians. II. 10) We will not deal with the Bible in
general, but only with that part of it which is claimed to inspire the
theocratic lsraeli regime of today and the Zionist movement : the Torah
(which the Christians call the Pentateuch, in other words the five first
books : Genesis, Exodus, Levitique, Numbers and Deuteronomy) and its so-called
"historical" annexes, the books of Joshua, Judges, Kings and Samuel; it
does include the "prophetic" portions of the Torah, which constantly recall
that "God's alliance with men" is unconditional and universal, bound to
the observance of the divine law and open to all nations and all mankind.

The Torah (the
Pentateuch) and the "historical" books (as has been proved for more than
a century by the exegetes) are a compilation of oral traditions, set in
writing by the scribes of Solomon in the IXth century B.C. Their chief
preoccupation was to legitimize (by amplifying them) the conquests of David
and his empire; these are in any case impossible to verify through other
historical documents or archeological traces. There are no other sources
than the Bible, except for the story of Solomon. of which we find some
evidence in the Assyrian archives. Before then,no sources, outside the
Biblical tales, can confirm or infirm the historical veracity of the Torah.
For example, the archeological vestiges of Ur in Irak give us no more information
on Abraham than the excavation of the ruins of Troy have given us on Hector
or Priam.

In the Book
of Numbers (XXXI, 7-18) we are told of the exploits of the "sons of
Israel" who, when they vanquished the Madianites, "killed all the men as
the Lord had ordered Moses to do", "took all the women into bondage", "burned
all the cities." When they returned to Moses, "Moses was wrathful. What
! he told them, you have suffered all the women to live...! Now, go forth
and slay all youths, and slay all the women who have known a man in wedlock...
But all the virgins...keep them for yourselves." (14-18).

During the conquest
of Canaan, the successor of Moses, Joshua, carried on with this systematic
policy of "ethnic purification" dictated by the God of the armies.

"On that day, Joshua seized Maqqeda and slew them
all, including the king with the edge of his sword, and all the souls that
were therein; he let none remain in it; but did unto the king thereof as
he did unto the king of Jericho And Joshua passed from the Libnah and all
Israel with him, onto Lachish into the hand of Israel which took it on
the second day and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls
that were therein, according to all that he had done to Libnah.

Then Horam, king
of Gezer, came up to help Lachish ; and Joshua smote him and his people,
until he had left him none remaining. And from Lachish Joshua passed on
to Eglon and all Israel with him; and they encamped against it and fought
against it : and they took it on that day, and smote it with the edge of
the sword, and all souls that were therein he utterly destroyed that day
according to all that he had done to Lachish. And Joshua went up from Eglon,
and all Israel with him, unto Hebron; and they fought against it."

Source : The book of Joshua. X, 34 , X 36.

And thelitany
continues, enumerating the "sacred exterminations" perpetrated in Cisjordania.
We must, before such tales, raise two fundamental questions :

1 - That of their historical truth ;

2 - That of the consequences of a literal imitation of this exaltation
of a policy of extermination.
a - Regarding the first point :

Here, we come
into conflict with archeology. Excavations have apparently revealed that
the Israelites arriving at the end of the XIIIth century B.C. could not
have taken Jericho because the city was already deserted. The mid-Bronze
Age city was destroyed towards 1550 B.C. and subsequently abandoned. It
was sparsely resettled in the XIVth century B.C. : pottery dating from
this period has been found in Mid-Bronze Age tombs that were re-utilized,
and a house containing a small pitcher dating from the mid-XIVth century
B.C. Nothing can be attributed to the XIIIth century. There are no traces
of New Bronze Age fortifications. The conclusion of Miss K.M. Kenyon is
that it is impossible to associate a destruction of Jericho with an entrance
of the Israelites at the end of the XIIIth century B.C.

Source : Cf. K.M. Kenyon, "Digging up Jericho", London 1957, pp.
256-265;

"Jericho", in
"Archeology and Old Testament Study", D.Winton, Oxford, 1967, spec. pp.
272-274 ; H.J. Franken, "Tell es-Sultan and Old Testament Jericho", in
OTS, 14 (1965), pp. 189-200. M.Weippert, "Die Landnahme der isrealitischen
Stamme, pp.54-55.

The same holds
true of the "taking of Ay".

"Of all the tales of conquest, this one is the most
detailed : it contains no miraculous element and appears to be the most
likely. Unfortunately, archeology gives it the lie.

"The site was searched by two different expeditions. The results tally
: at the time of the Early Bronze Age, Et-Tell was a large city whose name
is unknown to us, and which was destroyed during the Early Bronze Age,
around 2,400 B.C. It remained deserted until after 1,200 B.C., when a poor,
unfortified village grew up upon a portion of the ruins. This village subsisted
only until the beginning of the Xth century B.C. at the latest; after which
the site was definitively abandoned. At the time of the arrival of the
Israelites, there was no city of Ay, there was no king of Ay, there was
nothing but a 1,200 year-old ruin."

Source : Père de Vaux (O.P.) : "Histoire ancienne d'Israel".
Ed. Lecoffre et Gabalda. Paris 1971 TI, p.565.

See : in 1933-35
by Judith Marquet-Krause, "Les fouilles de 'Ay (etTell), Paris 1949, then
by J.A. Callawy from 1964, Cf. J.A. Callaway, Basor 178 (after 1965), pp.
13-40 ; RB, 72 (1965), pp. 409 415 ; K. Schoonover, RB 75 (1968) pp. 243-247
; 76 (1969), pp. 423-426 ; J.A. Callaway, Basor, 196 (Dec. 1969), pp. 2
-16.

b - Regarding the second point.

Why, therefore,
if a Jew is pious and an integrist (in other words a literal reader of
the Bible) should he not follow the example of such highly prestigious
figures as Moses and Joshua ?

Is it not said
in Numbers, of the conquest of Palestine (Canaan) : "And the Lord hearkened
to the voice of Israel, and delivered up the Canaanites; and they utterly
destroyed them and their cities" (Numbers XXI,3), and regarding the Amorites
and their king : "So they smote him, and his sons, and all his people,
until there was none left alive : and they possessed his land." (Numbers
XXI, 35)

Deuteronomy does
not demand only spoliation of the land and the expulsion of its inhabitants,
but massacre, as it repeats : « And when the Lord thy God shall deliver
them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them;thou shalt
make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them. » (Deuteronomy
VII, 2)

From Sharon to
Rabbi Meier Kahane, it is the prefiguration of the way the Zionists behave
towards the Palestinians. Was not Joshua's voice that of Menahem Begin,
when, on April 9th 1948, the 254 inhabitants of Deir Yassin, men, women
and children, were massacred by his "Irgun" troops,to force the unarmed
Arabs to flee out of terror?

Source : Menahem Begin : "La révolte : Histoire de l'Irgoun"
(p.200). Editions Albatros. 1978.

He called upon
the Jews "not only to push back the Arabs but to lay hold of all Palestine."
Was it not the voice of Joshua which made itself heard through Moshe Dayan,
when he said :

"If one owns the Bible and one considers oneself
to be the people of the Bible, one should also own the lands in the Bible."

Source : "Jerusalem Post", August 10th 1977.

The voice of Joshua
also made itself heard in the words of Yoram Ben Porath when he was quoted
in the major Israeli newspaper, "Yediot Aaronoth" on July 14th 1972 :

"There is no such thing as Zionism, as colonization
by the Jewish State, without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation
of their lands."
As to the means of
that dispossession of the lands, they were set by Rabin when he was general-in-chief
of the occupied territories : to break the bones of the Intifada stone-throwers.
What was the reaction of the Israeli Talmudist schools? To help to power
one of the people most directly responsible for the Sabra and Chatila massacres
: General Rafael Eytan, who asked for the "reinforcement" of the existing
Jewish colonies.

As we have seen,
Moses and Joshua applied to the letter these prescriptions of their God
in the Torah. Literalism leads to the same massacres.

Animated by the
same convictions, Doctor Baruch Goldstein, a colonist of American descent
from Kiryat Arba (Cisjordania) killed over fifty Palestinians with a machine-gun
as they were praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. He was a member of
an integrist group founded under the patronage of Ariel Sharon (under whose
protection were perpetrated the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, and who
was rewarded for his crime by a promotion : Minister of Housing, in charge
of developing the "colonies" in the occupied territories). Baruch Goldstein
is now the object of a genuine cult on the part of the integrists, who
come to put flowers on his grave and to kiss it, for he was strictly faithful
to the tradition of Joshua, having received the order to exterminate all
the people of Canaan in order to seize their lands.

This "ethnic purification"
which has become systematic in the State of Israel, stems from the principle
of ethnic purity which must prevent the mixing of Jewish blood with the
"impure blood" of any other race.

In the lines that
follow God's order to exterminate the population put at their mercy, the
Lord advises Moses that his people must not be allowed to marry the girls
from these peoples (Exodus,XXXV,16).

This command of
the Torah is confirmed in the same terms in Deuteronomy : the "chosen people"
(Deut. VII,6) must not mingle with others : "Thy daughter thou shalt
not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son."
(Deut. VII,3) This "apartheid" is the only way to prevent the soiling
of the race chosen by God, the faith that binds it to Him.

This separation
from the Other has remained the law : in his book "le Talmud" (Paris, Payot
1986, p.104), Rabbi Cohen wrote : "The inhabitants of the world can be
divided between Israel and the other nations taken as a . Israel is the
chosen people : a capital dogma." On their return from exile,"Ezra and
Nehemiah" watched over this the re-establishmentt of this "apartheid."
:

Ezra weeps because
the "Holy (sic) race has mingled with the peoples of the lands" (Ezra
IX, 2)...With the divine blessing, people are punished :

Pinhas impales
a mixed-blood couple... and thus wins Jehovah's approbation. Ezra orders
racial selection and exclusion : "all those who had taken strange wives,
they cast them away, women and children" (Ezra, X, 44). Nehemiah
says of the Jews : "Thus cleansed I them from all strangers." (Neh :
XIII, 30).

This mixophobia
and rejection of others go beyond the racial dimension. To refuse the other's
blood through mixed mariage is also to refuse his religion, his culture
or his way of being. Thus Jehovah fulminates against those who move away
from his truth, the only possible truth, of course : Sophonia struggles
against foreign ways of dressing, Nehemiah against foreign languages :
"I saw Jews that had married wives of Ashdod, of Ammon and of Moab. And
their children spake half in the speech of Aschdod, and could not speak
in the Jews' language, but according to the language of each people. And
I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them and plucked
off their hair... " (Nehemiah,XIII, 2325)

All those who
disobey the law are harshly judged. Next to the multiple divine speeches
demanding racial purity flourish the comments of those who adhere to these
rules, such as Rebekah, wife of Isaac and mother of Jacob, who declares
: "I am weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth ; if Jacob take
a wife of the daughters of Heth...what good shall my life do me ?" (Genesis
XXVII, 46). Samson's parents, outraged by their son's mariage to a
Philistine woman, cry out : "Is there never a woman among the daughters
of thy brethren or among all my people, that thou goest to take a wife
of the uncircumcised Philistines ?" (Judges, XIV, 3)

Haim Cohen, who
was a judge at the Supreme Court of Israel, noted "the bitter irony of
fate which has led the same biological and racist laws propagated by the
Nazis and which inspired the infamous Nuremberg laws, to serve as a basis
for the definition of Judaism within the State of Israel." (see Joseph
Badi : "Fundamental Laws of the State of Israel". New York 1960, p.156).

And indeed, during
the trial of the war criminals at Nuremberg, the question was raised at
the interrogation of Julius Streicher, the race "theoretician" :

"In 1935, at the Nuremberg Party Congress, the "racial
laws" were promulgated. During the preparation of the law-project, were
you called upon for consultation and did you participate in any way in
the elaboration of these laws ?

"The accused (Streicher) : - Yes, I believe I participated in it insofar
as, for years, I had been writing that all mixing of German and Jewish
blood had to be prevented in the future. I wrote articles to that effect,
and I have always repeated that we had to take the Jewish race,or the Jewish
people, as a model. I have always repeated in my articles that the Jews
were to be regarded as a model by other races, for they have given themselves
a racial law, the law of Moses, which says :

"If you go unto foreign lands, you must not take foreign wives. And
this, Gentlemen, is of great importance in judging the Nuremberg laws.
It was these Jewish laws that were taken as a model. When, centuries later,
the Jewish legislator Ezra saw that, despite this, many Jews had married
non-Jewish wives, these bonds were broken. This was the origin of Jewery
which, thanks to its racial laws, survived for centuries, whereas all the
other races and civilizations were destroyed."

Source : Trial of the major war criminals before the International Military
Court (Nuremberg : November 14th 1945 October 1st 1946). Official French
text. 26th April 1946 Debates, Tome XII. D 321).

This was indeed
how the jurists who acted as advisers for the Nazi Ministry of the Interior,
had elaborated the "Nuremberg Laws, of the right of the Reich population
and the protection of German blood and of the German honour." These jurists,
Bernard Losener and Friedrich Knost, thus commented the text in the compilation
: "The Nuremberg laws" :

"According to the Fuhrer's will, the Nuremberg laws
do not really imply measures designed to accentuate and perpetrate racial
hatred : on the contrary, such measure signify the begining of a lull in
relations between the Jewish people and the German people. If the Jews
already had their own State, in which they would feel at home, the Jewish
question could be considered resolved, as much for the Jews as for the
Germans. It is for this reason that the most convinced Zionists have not
raised the least objection against the spirit of the Nuremberg laws."
Hebrew racism, the model for all other racisms, appears as an ideology
of the extermination of different peoples.

"The Puritan settlers of America, when they hunted
down the Indians to grab their lands, invoked Joshua and the 'sacred exterminations'
of the Amalecites and the Philistines."

Source : Thomas Nelson, "The Puritans of Massachussets", Judaism, Vol
XVI, n°2 1967

Between mixophobia
and Cannanite-style Shoah, we now have an ideology of population "transfer"
which is approved of by 77% of the rabbis in Judea-Samaria. This doctrine
of exclusion and extermination is partly founded on religion (it is GOD
who wills it), but this in no way excuses the political Zionism of the
refusal of others. In Leviticus, God enjoins the Jews not to practise the
mixture of "species" (Lev.XX.20,25) as He himself has distinguished
Israel from the other nations (Lev. 20,24), to practise racial discrimination
(« I will make a distinction between my people and your people »,
(Ex. IIX, 19).

In 1993, Chief Rabbi Sitruk could declare without any fear of being
called to order by any authority whatsoever :

"I would wish young Jewish men never to marry any
but Jewish girls."
This phobia reaches
its highest point when Israel is at stake. Thus Israel "which shall be
holy" (Lev.XX,26) must not "soil" itself through contact with the
other nations that God has taken "in disgust" (Lev. XX, 23). The
prohibition is oft repeated. God threatens and storms when it is not respected
:

"Neither shalt thou make marriages with them (the
Canaanite nations); thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor
his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son..." (Deut. VII,3-4).

"Else if ye do in any wise go back, and cleave unto the remnant of these
nations, even these that remain among you, and shall make marriages with
them, and go unto them, and they go to you ; know for a certainty that
the Lord your God will no more drive out any of these nations from before
you; but they shall be snares and traps unto you, and scourges in your
sides, and thorns in your eyes, until ye perish from off this good land
which the Lord your God hath qiven you." (Joshua. XXIII. 12-13)
On November 10th
1975, at a plenary session of the United Nations, it was declared that
Zionism was a form of racism and racial discrimination. Since the break-up
of the Soviet Union, the United States have taken over the U.N. Among many
other acts of international banditry, it obtained the repeal of the just
1975 resolution, once more washing away the blood that covers Israel and
its leaders. In fact, nothing has changed since 1975; or rather, the repression,
the slow massacre of the Palestinian people and colonization have increased
tenfold.