THE ZIONIST BIBLE BibleWorld Series Editors: Philip R. Davies and James G. Crossley, University of Sheffield BibleWorld shares the fruits of modern (and postmodern) biblical scholarship not only among practitioners and students, but also with anyone interested in what academic study of the Bible means in the twenty-first century. It explores our ever- increasing knowledge and understanding of the social world that produced the biblical texts, but also analyses aspects of the Bible’s role in the history of our civi- lization and the many perspectives – not just religious and theological, but also cultural, political and aesthetic – which drive modern biblical scholarship. The Zionist Bible Biblical Precedent, Colonialism and the Erasure of Memory Nur Masalha First published 2013 by Acumen Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Nur Masalha, 2013 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein. isbn: 978-1-84465-657-8 (hardcover) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Designed and typeset in Warnock Pro by JS Typesetting Ltd. CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1. Framing the conflict: instrumentalizing the Hebrew Bible and settler-colonialism in Palestine 51 2. Promised land and conquest narratives: Zionism and the 1948 Palestine Nakba 73 3. Archaeology as civic religion: secular nationalist ideology, excavating the Bible and the de-Arabization of Palestine 115 4. Colonialist imagination as a site of mimicry and erasure: the Israeli renaming project 145 5. God’s mapmakers: Jewish fundamentalism and the land traditions of the Hebrew Bible (1967 to Gaza 2013) 195 Conclusion: The new scholarly revolution, and reclaiming the heritage of the disinherited and disenfranchised Palestinians 223 Notes 255 Bibliography 261 Index 287 v This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book could not have been written without the practical help and emo- tional support of my family and friends. Many friends and colleagues have contributed to and shaped this project, directly and indirectly, with ideas, conversations, criticism, material, logistics and moral support, including four extraordinary individuals who are no longer with us: Israel Shahak, Edward Saïd, Michael Prior and Samih Farsoun. I am also particularly grateful to the following colleagues: Thomas Thompson, Ahmad Sadi, Ilan Pappe, Oren Ben-Dor, Ronit Lentin, Haim Bresheeth, Mary Grey, John Docker, Duncan Macpherson, Samuel Kuruvilla, Isabelle Humphies, Anthony Towey, Tarcisius Mukuka and Saad Chedid. I am particu- larly indebted for the encouragement and practical support of Professor Philip R. Davies. Last but not least, I owe enormous gratitude to my wife Dr Stephanie Cronin, of Oxford University, and my daughter Maryam Masalha, for their tremendous support. Any credit for this book should be shared with the people above, but all mistakes are mine alone. vii This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION The secular founding fathers of Jewish Zionism sought to underpin the legitimacy of their European movement in the biblical text. Testifying before the British Royal (Peel) Commission in 1936, David Ben-Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency, declared “The Bible is our mandate”. For Ben-Gurion, the Tanakh,1 the “Hebrew Bible”, was the master text of Zionism and the foundational text of the State of Israel. Like Ben-Gurion, the founding fathers of the Israeli state also viewed the Tanakh not only as a reliable historical source but also as a guide for Zionist and Israeli state pol- icies towards the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, the Palestinians. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the land traditions and narratives of the Hebrew Bible, reconfigured and reinvented in the last century as a “foundational” metanarrative of Zionism and the State of Israel, have been instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today the same land traditions continue to be at the heart of the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians (both Muslims and Christians) from Jerusalem. The Bible as a whole (both Old and New Testaments) is also the “first” text of the West and central to the “Judeo-Christian tradition”, and, as such, it has been (and remains) central to Western support for the State of Israel. Since the late nineteenth century political Zionism (and today’s “Israel lobby”) has continued to enjoy an extraordinary influence in the corridors of power of the West. For a variety of reasons (which include epistemology and politics of the biblical text), the Israeli state has been central to Western policies in the oil-rich Middle East. In addition to its geopolitical–strategic value and its immense military and nuclear capabilities, the Israeli state has had enormous significance for post-Second World War Western politics. In the post-Holocaust period the massive financial, military and political sup- port for the “Jewish State” in Palestine has also been seen as an opportunity to “redeem” Europe (and the West) from the genocidal crimes of Nazism. In her book Bible and Sword: How the British came to Palestine (1956, 1982) Barbara Tuchman shows how the two magnets, the Bible and the 1 2 The Zionist Bible sword, have drawn countless British pilgrims, crusaders, missionaries, archaeologists and conquerors and ultimately led to the British conquest of Palestine in 1918. Central to this book is the idea that the land conquest narrative of the Bible has been the key text that redeems the European settler-colonization of Palestine. Outside the Middle East the Bible has redeemed European empires and European settler-colonialism, the con- quest of the earth, and even current American imperialism. As a fact of power, the authority of the biblical narrative has also been central to organ- ized religion and collective memory. As organized memory, the authority of the Bible became critical to the political theologies of the medieval Latin crusaders, Spanish conquistadors – in the struggle for colonial power in Latin America from 1492 until the twentieth century – and a whole variety of settler-colonialist projects. Indeed in modern times a range of Western settler-colonial enterprises have deployed the power politics of the biblical text and its “famous” land conquest narrative very effectively and with devastating consequences for indigenous peoples. The narrative of Exodus has been widely deployed as a framing narrative for European settler-colonialism and the European mission civilisatrice, while other biblical texts have been appropriated and used to provide moral authority for European “exploration” in, and set- tler-colonial conquests of, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas (Prior, 1997, 1999). The chapters that follow explore the politics of the biblical text – lan- guage, narrative, epics, genres, theologies, paradigms and organized mem- ory – and its utilization in the service of a settler-colonialist project and Israeli secular state policies. The book also examines the politics of collec- tive identity-fashioning and the retrospective colonization of the ancient past. It argues that the continuing mobilization of the allegorical narratives of the Hebrew Bible in the service of settler-colonization is central to ongo- ing collective identity-fashioning in Israel. Framing and morally examining the authority of biblical text and its mis- appropriation in Israeli state policies are at the heart to this work. Central to the politics of the Hebrew Bible in Israel is the struggle for the land of Palestine, as well as the use and abuse of the biblical text in underpin- ning Israeli settler-colonial policies. Today, while post-colonial academic discourses in the West have opted for a wide range of critical approaches to the biblical text and language, in Israel the ethnocratic, mono-cultur- alist discourses of Zionism focus exclusively on the Hebrew Bible, with almost complete disregard for the New Testament. Being “Christian”, the latter is outside the biblical discourse of Israel. The New Testament is effec- tively a taboo subject in Israeli Jewish schools, neither taught nor men- tioned. Occasionally the New Testament makes headlines in the Israeli press for the wrong reasons: as we shall see in Chapter 5, from time to time fundamentalist Jewish rabbis (including some serving in the Israeli