The massacre in Hebron on February 25, 1994 is yet another
indication that we are in the midst of a process that might turn
the protracted political conflict between Israelis and Palestinians
into a religious conflict. The murderer, Goldstein, saw himself as
a religious Jew and his supporters are motivated among other
reasons by what they see as a fundamentalist reading of Jewish
tradition. This development is paralleled by a growing terror
performed by the Hamas on the Palestinian side, an opposition also
informed by a religious Islamic ideology. The slow movement towards
political reconciliation is faced on both sides by a growing
religious opposition. If indeed the political conflict will turn
into an apocalyptic war between Judaism and Islam, a perverse
religious mentality of "all or nothing at all" will dominate the
relations between the two peoples, and the Middle East will be
doomed - God forbid - to an everlasting religious war.
This threatening scenario is another reason why a political
resolution is more urgent now than ever before. The leadership of
both the Israelis and Palestinians must remember that every void
created by the political impasse is immediately exploited by the
fundamentalist ideology. Thus, both Rabin and Arafat ought to be
aware that the usual delays and maneuvers that are part and parcel
of regular political negotiations, are a dangerous luxury in this
situation. We have to keep the peace momentum going before
fundamentalism makes new gains. But politics is not the solution to
a religious conflict, and shifting the responsibility towards the
political leadership is only a partial cure to a dangerous
situation. The answer must come from the religious communities
themselves. What is needed today is an alternative religious
interpretation of Islam and Judaism that will undermine from within
the ultra-nationalistic interpretation of these traditions. Such a
reading will channel the religious energy into a force of
reconciliation and will help to validate religiously both peace and
the sacredness of human life. Besides my conviction that the
development of a religious vocabulary and sensibility is necessary
for any solution, as a religious Jew what is at stake for me is not
only the future of Israel as a democratic state, but the future of
Judaism. I will attempt to demarcate two areas where an alternative
religious vision to that of Gush Emunim ought to be focused. The
first is sacredness of land and sanctity of life, and the second is
particularism and the consciousness of shared humanity.
According to Jewish tradition there are only three Mitzvot
(commandments) that a person must not transgress on pain of death:
idolatry, incest and murder. Or, to put it in contemporary terms,
there are three and only three, commandments that supercede
considerations of physical security. As for the rest of the
commandments, a person is not obligated to sacrifice his life in
order to fulfill them. For example, according to Jewish law a Jew
is obligated to desecrate the Sabbath in order to save someone
else. In light of this view of sanctity of life, the majority of
rabbinical authorities see the new religious ideology developed by
Gush Emunim as a distortion of values. According to Gush Emunim's
religious ideology, the commandment to settle the land precedes
even peace. Thus the religious right claims that territorial
compromise is prohibited by Jewish law. The counter-religious
ideology has to stress the sanctity of life over and above the
sacredness of land. If territorial compromise will save human life
of both Israelis and Palestinians, a Jewish government is not only
permitted to give back territories but it is obligated to do so.
Thus, Gush Emunim's ideology that absolutizes the land as the
primary value preceding even human life is a form of idolatry in
itself. This ruling that a land-for-peace compromise is prohibited
by Jewish law is hardly an instance of fundamentalism. It is,
instead, a new ideology that carries the traditional rabbinical
ideas about the sacredness of the land to the absurd conclusion
that land is more sacred than life. Territorial compromise is
therefore not only prohibited: it is obligated. One of the most
common distortions of religion in modernity is the recruitment of
religious ideology for ultra-nationalistic use. The greatest
challenge of the religious community is to maintain religion
autonomously and to battle the desecration and instrumentalization
of God as "the guardian of the national interests." As part of the
instrumentalization of religion for national politics, the radical
right reinterpretation of tradition extends also to the
relationship between Jews and Arabs, and not only to the
relationship between Jews and the land of Israel. Meir Kahane used
to quote the biblical account of Joshua's conquest of the land of
Canaan as the Jewish paradigm for treating indigenous enemies: just
as Joshua expelled the Canaanites from the land, so should the
Palestinians be expelled. This may look a lot like fundamentalism,
but it is more properly described as a sloppy reading of the text.
In the Bible, the harsh treatment of the Canaanites was justified
by the desire to eradicate paganism from the land. The biblical war
was not a national conflict over possession of the land; it was a
war between monotheists and pagans. I do not know whether Israeli
secularists in Tel Aviv are more or less pagan than Palestinian
monotheists in Nablus, but one thing is clear: their conflict has
very little to do with the Bible, and the view to the contrary not
only poisons the political atmosphere, it also represents a really
diabolical deformation of Judaism for political purposes.
Maimonides, the greatest codifier of Jewish law, defined Muslims as
monotheists, claiming that both Muslims and Jews worship the same
God. To murder God's worshippers in a sacred place while praying is
both a perversion of Jewish tradition and a desecration of God's
name.
The task of the alternative religious ideology countering the right
is to establish a religious stance which denies the absolutism of
land as idolatrous. It also has to carve a religious domain of a
shared humanity which transcends any kind of heightened
particularism. The Mishnah - an authoritative text of Jewish law
from the second century - asks the following question: Why did God
at the beginning create the world with one person alone? The first
answer in the Mishnah is that creation of one Adam teaches us that
if someone sheds the blood of an individual, it is as if he
destroyed a whole universe. The second answer is that Adam was
created alone so that no one can say "my father is greater than
your father." Humanity as defined in the biblical creation
narrative has one father, and racism is defeated by the
foundational story of the creation in the Bible. In each of us -
Jew and Muslim, Christian and Hindu - there is the human created in
the image of God ad dignified as God's creature. Thus the sacred
and the human in us is unexhausted by our particularistic religious
or national history and loyalty. If we lose sight that God is in
His deepest form the principle that transcends particularism, we
are doomed to worship the fist rather than the God of Abraham. The
task of the religious leadership of Jews and Muslims is to remind
us all that God, Whom we worship together, transcends national
boundaries, and that to use God as a divisive factor is to make Him
the idol of the tribe rather than God of the universe.