Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Framing the conflict: instrumentalizing the Hebrew Bible and settler-colonialism in Palestine
- 2 Promised land and conquest narratives: Zionism and the 1948 Palestine Nakba
- 3 Archaeology as civic religion: secular nationalist ideology, excavating the Bible and the de-Arabization of Palestine
- 4 Colonialist imagination as a site of mimicry and erasure: the Israeli renaming project
- 5 God's mapmakers: Jewish fundamentalism and the land traditions of the Hebrew Bible (1967 to Gaza 2013)
- Conclusion: The new scholarly revolution, and reclaiming the heritage of the disinherited and disenfranchised Palestinians
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Promised land and conquest narratives: Zionism and the 1948 Palestine Nakba
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Framing the conflict: instrumentalizing the Hebrew Bible and settler-colonialism in Palestine
- 2 Promised land and conquest narratives: Zionism and the 1948 Palestine Nakba
- 3 Archaeology as civic religion: secular nationalist ideology, excavating the Bible and the de-Arabization of Palestine
- 4 Colonialist imagination as a site of mimicry and erasure: the Israeli renaming project
- 5 God's mapmakers: Jewish fundamentalism and the land traditions of the Hebrew Bible (1967 to Gaza 2013)
- Conclusion: The new scholarly revolution, and reclaiming the heritage of the disinherited and disenfranchised Palestinians
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Appeal to the Bible to justify inhumane behaviour is not uncommon in the history of imperialist colonisation emanating from Europe … the Bible frequently has been used as the idea that redeems the conquest of the earth. It is also the potentially most convincing apologia legitimizing the Zionist enterprise of establishing a state for Jews at the expense of an indigenous population.
(Prior, 2001: 9)Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (1993, 1994), of Ben-Gurion University, described the Zionists' secularizing of the sacred agenda as follows: “God does not exist, but he promised us this land”. In modern secular Zionist nationalism the religious language, theology, myths and fairy tales of the Hebrew Bible are transformed not only into ethno-centric nationalist myths, but also into positively corroborated legal rights and a “title deed” to the land underpinned by sacred documents and a “divine mandate” – a supremacist mandate towering above both indigenous rights and international law. For David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel – who was posthumously named one of Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people of the twentieth century – international law and UN resolutions were only meant to underpin superior “biblical rights”; if not, the UN was infamously dismissed by Ben-Gurion as Um Shmum, where um is the Hebrew acronymic for the UN, and Shmum, like Klum (“nothing” in Hebrew), is a scorning phrase coined by Ben-Gurion, at an Israeli cabinet meeting on 29 March 1955, as utter contempt towards the UN and international law.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Zionist BibleBiblical Precedent, Colonialism and the Erasure of Memory, pp. 73 - 114Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013