Israel and War

There are many opinions being offered related to the current conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. Some trace the struggle back to incidents within comparatively “modern” history (link), but to those who are aware of and study biblical history, the dispute goes much further back.

Speaking of biblical history, I just happen to know “Professor Taboo,” who is an expert on the subject! I recently asked him if he would put together some information/background on the current conflict and he graciously agreed.

Before I present his highly competent remarks, he asked me to include this qualifying statement:

First, I must say this vehemently. I do not at all condone any sort of violence, murder, genocide, or war atrocities, by ANY nation, including Israel and their militant terror groups or Hamas, or any other terrorist groups.

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The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Is “Divine Right & Commission” a legitimate 20th and 21st century claim on land, a region, and cause to exterminate a people who are and have been an a priori resident culture to that of their attackers?

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The whole world’s wide diversity of faith-belief systems bears witness to more than one divine entity and theology. In fact, archaeological and/or paleographical evidence shows that many various religions have come and gone throughout some 150,000—300,000 years of human history. And although many have claimed to be the one and only true faith-system over all others, not everyone can be right — and yet dissimilar in their many ways and practices. The question becomes – how can anyone be right, true, and superior inside so much pluralism?

Let’s suppose that one faith/belief system considers itself infallible and the only true religion with exclusive communication rights to their/the God of the Universe. In the case we’re discussing, it would be Orthodox Judaism first, supported and followed by western Christianity.

But we’ve already run into our first obstacle before we’ve barely started: the factual oxymoron of “pluralistic Monism!” That is, the hundreds to thousands of faith-belief denominations within a Monistic concept of religious doctrine! Self-proclaiming oneself to be the only true religion/faith on Earth is not only irrational and illogical, but totally absurd. It cannot exist — especially in the 20^th or 21^st century.

And it is this undeniable fact of irrational pure Monism that brings us to the real question about the state of Israel’s 1948 creation (and occupation) inside Palestine.

If “divine right and commission” are Israel’s only claim to be a foreign state inside an already existing culture, where is the independent historical evidence outside of the Hebrew Bible i.e., the Tanakh ( or as it is more commonly known in the U.S, the “Old Testament”)? Before we tackle this subject, let’s remember three examples of past religious/faith-based justifications to invade and occupy a foreign land:

• “Manifest Destiny“ — the U.S.’s justification for removing and/or exterminating Native American tribes from their lands as federal and state’s expansion moved toward the coastline of the Pacific Ocean.
• “Mein Kampf“ — Nazi Germany’s justification for removing and exterminating Jews from their homes and businesses in 1930-40’s Germany.
• Zionist Diaspora ideology — Israel’s justification for removing and exterminating Palestinians from their homes and businesses from the 1940’s to the present Palestine — specifically Gaza and other parts of the former Palestine region and culture. (This invasion, occupation — and continued violence or wars today — were all greatly supported and aided by the U.S., the U.K., and France.)

“…they won’t be able to face [anymore] the war with us, which will include withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more. They won’t be able to exist, and they will run away from here. But it all depends on the war, and whether we will win the battles with them.” (emphasis mine)
— Benjamin Netanyahu, Maariv (newspaper) Feb. 2009,

Israel’s Divine Right and Commission of Occupation?

For modern Israel, and for that matter modern American Christian politics, the primary source or textual justification of being in Palestine “before Arabs” is the Hebrew Bible, with little or no independent corroboration to establish this myth or fragile theory. Nevertheless, what does the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament say about Jews-Hebrews in Palestine? All that is needed are three passages in just three chapters in Exodus (1:1-14; 2:15-17; 3:7-8). This is, of course, unless pro-state-of-Israel backers or supporters (like the U.S. government) want to step outside of the Judeo-Christian bibles all together. But doing so will only make their impossible case and position much, much more precarious and soon lead to their own incrimination.

Sticking with Judeo-Christian biblical traditions, the kingdoms the Jews were commissioned by their God to remove or slaughter, but not coexist with, were Canaan, the Hittite, Amorite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite kingdoms, all far northeast of modern Egypt and directly north of Midian or the Midianites (see below map). Moses and the Hebrew Israelites, according to Exodus, were originally down in the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt around the mouth of the Nile River and the middle and southern portion of the Sinai Peninsula, not modern Gaza or Palestine.

The kingdoms in bold are Canaan, then the Hittite, Amorite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite kingdoms, all far northeast of modern Egypt and directly north of Midian (or the Midianites.) Moses and the Hebrew Israelites, however, were originally down in the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt around the mouth of the Nile River and the middle and southern portion of the Sinai Peninsula.

This is as far as we need to search and ask, “Where is the Hebrew and Christian biblical evidence that Hebrews or Jews were first in Palestine.”

Sticking with only the Jewish or Christian bibles, the three chapters in Exodus clearly indicate that the Hebrew Jews in the 12th and 11th centuries BCE were in middle and southern Egypt first, not Palestine. If there is anywhere in the world that 19th through 21st-century Zionist Israelites might claim they “inhabited first,” it would be inside modern Egypt and Saudi Arabia! Aside from this biblical evidence, it is clear there were already ancient peoples in the eastern and northern Levant and Palestine before a band of Hebrews departed Egypt in approximately 1200 BCE, i.e., the Philistines and other Semitic peoples — the same Arab peoples that Israel’s present top leadership and militant groups want to push out, remove, or exterminate  … AND have done to a large extent since 1948.

In case one wants to argue and debate the minutia of the “biblical evidence” further, then it’s necessary to leave the tunnel-vision of the Hebrew and Christian bibles. As “Bill,” a fellow WordPress blogger, recently and wisely stated: “I admit that there are culture and national issues here, but the genesis is still religion.” Bill is unequivocally spot-on.

Therefore, the question that hangs in the air is … where is the independent, expanded and exhaustive, historical, secular evidence for Israel’s supposed right to be inside Palestine?

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To anyone that might be interested in further examination of Israel’s (actual) ancient history, Professor Taboo highly recommends starting with the three sources listed below. Again, this is only a start for a neutral, independent journey into today’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

• Carol Meyers, an archeologist and professor of religion at Duke University
• Pontus Skoglund, who leads the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute and Tom Booth, researcher in Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London, David Wengrow, professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London, Susanne Hakenbeck, a Senior Archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, and Rachel Pope, Senior Archaeologist at the University of Liverpool, all in this excellent Smithsonian article.
• Hashemite white paper says Arabs were first inhabitants of Jerusalem, a June 2020 article in Al-Monitor.

For even further expansion of the atrocities done by Israeli or Palestinian terrorist groups, read and watch these two reports:

https://thesilencing.org/about-the-silencing/

https://archive.org/details/sands_of_sorrow

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NOTE from Professor Taboo:

While this information wasn’t so much what Nan asked me to help her with (she asked me to show biblical evidence), since I am a DE-converted Christian with a heavy academic post-grad background in seminary, and under-grad in history, bible, and philosophy and have spent the last 30+ years studying Late Second Temple Judaism & Messianism, I instead tried to provide information/data/facts related to the situation in Israel that I hoped would  stimulate the thinking of her blog visitors.