mad in pursuit home

greed & arrogance index

contact

6.1.04 Jewish Settlers

I've been reading "Among the Settlers" by Jeffrey Goldberg (The New Yorker, 5/31/04) to learn more about the Jewish settlers in Gaza and the West Bank. I've always been curious about why people would put themselves in harm's way like that -- and then about how they have achieved such power.

The answer to my first question is that these people are extremest wackos of the same ilk as Hamas and the white supremacists who have their militias out in Montana and North Dakota.

Except for the longdrawn aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing you don't hear much these days about our homegrown extremists. But imagine if they decided that Canada was rightfully ours -- that God had decreed it -- and they started settling over the border in the well populated parts of Ontario -- just picked out a suburban shopping mall parking lot, threw down some rusted shipping containers for shelter, and declared an American village. Then burned down the mall to create land for farming. The Canadians would freak out.

And let's say that, while Washington agreed that this was naughty, they began running electricity to the settlers and erecting cell phone towers and then supplying troops to keep them safe. And the settlement got bigger and bigger and more self-styled militias started new ones along the road to Toronto.

This activity might cause even the mild-mannered Canadians to go a little berserk with us.

This analogy doesn't really work because it doesn't capture the utter hatred and contempt the Jewish settlers have for Arabs. Maybe it would be better to describe neo-Nazi skinheads deciding to settle in north St. Louis to take back territory from African-Americans. It doesn't take much imagination to see how ugly that could get, even though it is still a weak analogy to what is occurring is Israel.

Let's face it. The world is full of hateful God-told-me-to-do-this nuts. But the thing I don't get is why these people are now the drivers of Israeli public policy. They are as in love with death as suicide bombers. They are religious psychotics, dreaming of genocide as their key to heaven.

The pity is that Zionism was supposed to be about peace and freedom from hatred.

The strategic flaw is Israeli thinking is the notion of a "Jewish democracy." Either you have a pluralist democracy or else you have theocracy or a non-God alternative (e.g., Communism). People who share space in democratic societies just can't get on their high-horses about which group deserves more freedoms and rights. The minute one group starts pursuading their government they have certain God-given rights over another group, the jig is up.

I'm grateful that our Founding Fathers were savvy enough to realize that the best way to guarantee religious freedom is to keep it out of politics. Their strategic flaw of not extending equal right to women and to African-Americans had to be corrected after some considerable agony, but I think their basic formulation was incredibly wise.

It is such a temptation though, isn't it? As the world becomes driven by frantic religionists, we keep wanting to justify our own actions as "a Christian nation" or as a country "blessed by God." We really need to tell ourselves that God wants nothing to do with our ugly politics and genocidal hatreds.

Thumbs Up if you liked this entry