The Jewish Power Blog: Colonial Reflections (1)
In the Torah, God promises Canaan to Abraham’s descendants and later, after the Exodus, orders the Israelites to drive out or destroy the indigenous peoples living there (Deut. 7:1-5). However, things don’t go so smoothly. Early in Joshua’s march of conquest, he is tricked by the Gibeonites into signing a peace agreement, which, even after the deceit is revealed, he honors (Josh. 9). Thereafter, the conquest remains spotty, and for two centuries the land is a patchwork of ethnic enclaves (described in the Book of Judges). Interestingly, the Torah itself had anticipated a less-than-complete ethnic cleansing, as it sets forth rules for fair treatment of “resident aliens,” the pagans who will continue to live among Israel (e.g., Num. 15:14-5).
Moreover, archaeologists have failed to find evidence of a wave of destruction that would correspond to a war of conquest, and many now espouse the theory that there was no conquest, but rather a process of internal migration and a political power shift within Canaan (among the local tribes), with the possible arrival of one tribe, the Levites, from Egypt.
In any case, when a unified monarchy was finally established, it did not last long, first pulled apart by centrifugal forces, and then crushed by foreign empires. The Assyrians, who conquered the northern kingdom in 722 BCE, pursued a policy of enforced migration, whereby various nations in their conquered territory were forced to migrate from their homelands and mix with other populations. Hence, our “ten lost tribes” – and suddenly there were new “indigenous” inhabitants in Canaan… Later, the Babylonians who conquered the remaining kingdom, Judah, in 586 BCE, took the upper strata of the population into Babylonian exile, where they were allowed to live in separate communities and maintain their identity – an identity which came to include the belief that exile was a temporary punishment, destined to end with a return to the homeland.
Under the Persians (538 BCE) some returned; most did not. The Greeks (332 BCE) imported immigrants into conquered territories to make sure that Hellenistic culture was dominant; this is the context of the Jewish rebellion in 167 BCE that gave us Hanukah. Then came the Romans (from 63 BCE), and after a few failed rebellions (67 and 132 CE) Jewish life in the land mostly collapsed, and most (but not all) Jews scattered as exiles, slaves, and economic migrants, from Mesopotamia to Europe and North Africa.
Palestina was the name given by the Romans to the province more or less corresponding to the Jewish memory of “the Land of Israel,” named after the Philistines, a nation originating in Crete and other Aegean islands, who had immigrated and settled along the coastal strip from Gaza northward, around the same time as the Israelites first appeared as a nation in the region (~1200 BCE). The conflict between Israel and Philistia is a major theme in the biblical accounts of Samson, Saul, and David.
It has been suggested that the very presence of the Jews in the land of Israel, from the beginning, occurred in the context of “settler colonialism:” the conquest under Joshua and the Torah’s commandment of ethnic cleansing. This original sin of colonialism makes any Jewish claim of an ancient connection to the land morally problematic. To have avoided this stain, the Israelites, liberated from Egyptian slavery, should have returned to their original family homeland in Canaan as individual immigrants, with no conquest or ethnic cleansing.
But what if the original sin never happened, and there was, historically, no conquest, but rather, a nation that was formed in the land, who then created an origin story involving liberation, revelation, and conquest? Why invent such a story? To support the covenant ideology, the belief that living in the land, with sovereignty and prosperity, was conditional on obedience to God’s commandments.
So maybe it would be more productive to understand and judge Zionism as a modern movement of national self-determination, not as a re-play of Joshua’s imagined conquest. The expulsion from Lod in 1948 (for example) is a moral challenge that we can and must address; but if, before that, we have to address the destruction of Jericho in 1200 BCE, there is no way out.
The problem is that Jewish messianism throughout the ages of exile saw the future in terms of the past – even if the past was mythical: the expected restoration was depicted in biblical images of conquest and expulsion. Herzl’s Zionism arose as a secular nationalist movement – one among many in its time. Herzl was neither religious nor messianic. He saw himself as a rational, practical planner offering a solution to “the Jewish problem.” However, the tide of collective memory overwhelmed him. It was too much to expect the suffering, believing Jews of Russia to fail to connect the dots and see the movement for national self-determination as actually a messianic process of restoration. Perhaps this was inevitable, as the creation of the state, just as the exile reached its apotheosis in the Holocaust, felt so much like redemption that collective memory, current events, and future dreams got all tangled up together. And so western academics’ and Palestinian partisans’ linking Joshua’s purported settler colonialism with modern Zionism rests, alas, on many Zionists happily making that linkage for them, using a rhetoric that seeks to illuminate the events of our time with the glow of prophetic images of ingathering, conquest, and restoration. I suggest that we sober up and separate Zionism from messianic rhetoric. If we really believe that the IDF is God’s army reprising Joshua’s conquest (but getting it right this time), we are betraying the ideals of Zionism – and likely destroying its future.
