Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  Although religion had not figured in the action, many Israelis would experience this dramatic reversal of fortune as a miracle similar to the crossing of the Red Sea.58 Above all, the conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem, closed to Israelis since 1948, was a numinous experience. When in 1898 the Zionist ideologue Theodor Herzl had visited the Western Wall, the last relic of Herod’s temple, he had been repelled by the sight of the Jewish worshippers clinging cravenly to its stones.59 But in June 1967 tough paratroopers with blackened faces and their atheistic officers leaned against the Wall and wept, their secular ethos momentarily transformed by sacred geography. Nationalism, as we have seen, easily segues into a quasi-religious fervor, especially in moments of heightened tension and emotion. Devotion to Jerusalem had been central to Jewish identity for millennia. Long before people began to map their landscape scientifically, they had defined their place in the world emotionally and spiritually, drawn irresistibly to localities that they experienced as radically different from all others. The Israeli experience in 1967 shows that we have still not entirely desacralized the world.60 The soldiers’ “beliefs” had not changed, but the Wall evoked in them something akin to the way others experienced the sacred—“something big and terrible and from another world,” yet also “an old friend, impossible to mistake.” Just as they had narrowly escaped destruction, they recognized the Wall as a survivor like themselves. “There will be no more destruction,” one soldier said as he kissed the stones, “and the Wall will never again be deserted.”61

  “Never again” had been a Jewish watchword since the Holocaust, and now generals and soldiers were using it once more. For the first time too, the term holy city entered Zionist rhetoric. According to the ancient sacred geography of the Middle East, the whole point of a “holy city” was that nobody could own it because it belonged to the god—to Marduk, Baal, or Yahweh. The “City of David” had been ruled by Yahweh from his throne in the temple, the king merely acting as his anointed representative. Instead of becoming the personal property of the ruler, Jerusalem was “holy” (qaddosh) precisely because it was “set apart” for Yahweh. But once the emotions of sacred geography were fused with the Israelis’ secular nationalism, in which territorial integrity was all important, politicians had no doubt that Jerusalem belonged absolutely to the Israeli state. “We have returned to our most holy places,” said the avowed secularist commander Moshe Dayan; “we have returned and we shall never leave them.”62 Jerusalem had become a nonnegotiable absolute that transcended all other claims. Even though international law forbade the permanent occupation of territory conquered during a conflict, Abba Eban, Israel’s delegate to the United Nations, argued that Jerusalem “lies beyond and above, before and after, all political and secular considerations.”63

  The sacred geography of Israel also had a strong moral and political dimension. While Israelis lauded Jerusalem as the city of shalom (“peace,” “wholeness”), the Psalms had insisted that there would be no shalom in Jerusalem without justice (tzeddek). The king was charged by Yahweh to “defend the poorest, save the children of those in need and crush their oppressors.”64 In Yahweh’s Zion there could be no oppression and violence; rather, it must be a haven for the poor (evionim). But once the “holiness” of Jerusalem had been fused with the secular nation-state, its Palestinian inhabitants became a vulnerable minority and their presence a contamination. On the night of June 10, 1967, after the signing of the armistice, the 619 Palestinian inhabitants of the Maghribi Quarter beside the Wall were given three hours to evacuate their homes. Then, in contravention of international law, the bulldozers came in and reduced this historic district—one of the earliest Jerusalem awqaf—to rubble. On June 28 the Israeli Knesset formally annexed the Old City and East Jerusalem, declaring them part of the State of Israel.

  Secular nationalism had exploited and distorted a religious ideal; but a religious embrace of the modern nation-state could be equally dangerous. Well before 1967, Orthodox Jews had sacralized the secular state of Israel and made it a supreme value. A somewhat despised religious version of Zionism had always existed alongside the secular nationalism of most Israelis.65 It became slightly more prominent during the 1950s, when a group of young Orthodox, including Moshe Levinger, Shlomo Aviner, Yaakov Ariel, and Eliezer Waldman, had fallen under the spell of the aging Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who regarded the secular State of Israel as a “divine entity” and the Kingdom of God on earth. In exile it had been impossible to observe the commandments tied to the Land; now there was a yearning for wholeness. Instead of excluding the sacred from political life, Kookists, as the rabbi’s followers became known, intended it to pervade the whole of existence once again—“all the time and in every area.” Political engagement, therefore, had become an “ascent to the pinnacles of holiness.” The Kookists transformed the Land into an idol, an earthly object that had absolute status and required the unquestioning veneration and commitment that traditionally applied only to the transcendence we call God. “Zionism is a heavenly matter,” Kook insisted. “The State of Israel is a divine entity, our holy and exalted state.”66 For Kook, every clod of Israel’s soil was holy; its institutions were divine; and the weapons of Israeli soldiers were as sacred as prayer shawls. But Israel, like any state, was far from ideal and guilty of both structural and martial violence. In the past, prophets had challenged the systemic injustice of the state, and priests had been critical even of its holy wars. For the Kookists, however, secular Israel was beyond criticism and essential to the world’s salvation. With the establishment of Israel, Messianic redemption had already begun: “Every Jew who comes to Eretz Yisrael, every tree that is planted in the soil of Israel, every soldier added to the army of Israel constitutes another spiritual stage; literally, another stage in the process of redemption.”67

  As we have seen, ancient Israel from the very first had looked askance at state violence; now the Kookists gave it supreme sanction. Once the nation-state becomes the highest value, however, as Lord Acton had predicted, there is no limit to what it can do—literally, anything goes. By elevating the state to the divine level, Kookists had also given sacred endorsement to nationalism’s shadow side: its intolerance of minorities. Unless Jews occupied the entire Land, Israel would remain tragically incomplete, so annexing Arab territory was a supreme religious duty.68 A few days after the Six-Day War, the Labor government proposed to return some of the occupied territories—including some of the most important biblical sites on the West Bank—to the Arabs in exchange for peace and recognition. The Kookists vehemently opposed the plan and, to their surprise, found that for the first time they had secular allies. A group of Israeli poets, philosophers, and army officers, fired by the victory, had come together to prevent any such handover and offered the Kookists moral and financial support. Secular nationalists made common cause with the hitherto despised religious Zionists, realizing that they had exactly the same objectives.

  Enthused by this backing, in April 1968, Moshe Levinger led a small group of families to celebrate Passover in Hebron on the West Bank. They checked into the Park Hotel and, to the embarrassment of the Labor government, refused to leave. But their chutzpah tugged at Laborite heartstrings because it recalled the audacity of the chalutzim, who in the days before the state had defied the British by squatting aggressively in Arab land.69 Yet again, secular and religious enthusiasms merged dangerously. For the Kookists, Hebron—the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—was contaminated by the presence of the Palestinians, who also revered these prophets. They now refused to leave the Cave of the Patriarchs in time for Muslim communal prayer, noisily blocking the entrances and flying the Israeli flag at the shrine on Independence Day.70 When a Palestinian finally threw a hand grenade, the Israeli government reluctantly established an enclave guarded by the IDF for the settlers outside Hebron; by 1972 Kiryat Arba had five thousand inhabitants. For Kookists it was an outpost pushing against the frontiers of the demonic world of the “Other Side.”

  Y
et still Labor refused to annex the territories. After the October War of 1973, when Egypt and Syria invaded Sinai and the Golan Heights and were repelled only with great difficulty, a group of Kookists, rabbis, and hawkish secularists formed Gush Emunim, the “Bloc of the Faithful.” A pressure group rather than a political party, its objective was nothing less than “the full redemption of Israel and the entire world.”71 As a “holy people,” Israel was not bound by UN resolutions or international law. Gush’s ultimate plan was to colonize the entire West Bank and transplant hundreds of thousands of Jews into the occupied territories. To make their point, they organized hikes and rallies in the West Bank, and on Independence Day 1975 nearly twenty thousand armed Jews attended a West Bank “picnic,” marching militantly from one location to another.72

  The Gush experienced their marches, battles with the army, and illegal squats as rituals that brought them a sense of ecstasy and release.73 The fact that they attracted so much secularist support showed that they were tapping into nationalistic passions that were felt just as strongly by Israelis who had no time at all for religion. They could also draw on the Western tradition of natural human rights that had long declared that an endangered people—and after the October War, who, they asked, could deny that Israelis were endangered?—were entitled to settle in “vacant” land. Their sacred task was to ensure that it was truly “empty.” When the Likud party led by Menachem Begin defeated Labor in the 1977 elections and declared its commitment to Israeli settlement on both sides of the Jordan, Kookists believed that God was at work. But the honeymoon was short-lived. On November 20, 1977, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made his historic journey to Jerusalem to initiate a peace process, and the following year Begin and Sadat, two former terrorists, signed the Camp David Accords: Israel would return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for Egypt’s formal recognition of the State of Israel. Observing this unexpected development, many Western people concluded that secular pragmatism would prevail after all.

  The Iranian Revolution shattered that hope. Western politicians had regarded Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi as a progressive leader and had put their muscle behind his regime, regardless of the fact that he had no legitimacy among his own people. Iranians were in fact experiencing the structural violence of “the West and the Rest” in an acute form. Independence, democracy, human rights, and national self-determination were for “the West”; but for Iranians, violence, domination, exploitation, and tyranny were to be the order of the day. In 1953 a coup organized by the CIA and British Intelligence had unseated the secular nationalist premier Muhammad Musaddiq (who had tried to nationalize the Iranian oil industry) and reinstated the shah. This event showed Iranians how little they could command their own destiny. After 1953, like the British before them, the United States controlled the monarch and Iran’s oil reserves, demanding diplomatic privileges and trade concessions. American businessmen and consultants poured into the country, and though a few Iranians benefited from the boom, most did not. In 1962 the shah began his White Revolution by closing the Majlis legislature and pushed his unpopular reforms through with the support of SAVAK, the dreaded secret police trained by the CIA and Israeli Mossad. These reforms were applauded in the West, since they established capitalism, undermined feudal landownership, and promoted literacy and women’s rights, but in fact they favored the rich, concentrated on city dwellers, and ignored the peasantry.74 There were the usual symptoms of an economy modernizing too rapidly: agriculture declined, and rural migrants poured into the cities, living in desolate shantytowns and eking out a precarious existence as porters and street vendors.75 SAVAK made Iranians feel like prisoners in their own country, and clandestine Marxist and Islamist guerrilla groups formed in opposition to a secular government that violently suppressed all opposition.

  One little-known cleric had the courage to speak out publicly against this oppressive regime. In 1963 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–89), professor of ethics at the Fayziyah Madrassa in Qum, began a sustained attack on the shah, condemning his use of torture, his closing the Majlis, his spineless subservience to the United States, and his support for Israel, which denied Palestinians fundamental human rights. On one occasion he stood with the Quran in one hand and the 1906 constitution in the other, and accused the shah of betraying both.76 On March 22, 1963, the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Sixth Imam, SAVAK attacked the madrassa, arrested Khomeini, and killed some of the students. After his release, Khomeini resumed the offensive. During the Ashura rituals, in his eulogy for Husain, he compared the shah to Caliph Yazid, the villain of the Karbala tragedy.77 When Khomeini was arrested for a second time, thousands of Iranians poured onto the streets, laymen and mullahs protesting side by side. SAVAK was given shoot-to-kill orders, and clerics braved the guns wearing the white shroud of the martyr, demonstrating their willingness to die like Husain in the struggle against tyranny. By the time peace was finally restored, hundreds of civilians had been killed.78

  The regime, Khomeini protested, was assaulting its own people. Always he championed the poor, the chief victims of its systemic injustice, ordering the shah to leave his palace and look at the deplorable conditions in the shantytowns. Iran, he claimed on October 27, 1964, was virtually an American colony. It was a rich country, and it was a disgrace that people were sleeping in the streets. For decades foreigners had been plundering their oil, so that it was of no benefit to the Iranian people. “I am deeply concerned about the conditions of the poor next winter, as I expect many to die, God forbid, from cold and starvation,” he concluded. “The ulema should think of the poor and take action now to prevent the atrocities of last winter.”79 After this speech Khomeini was deported and went into exile in Iraq. Overnight, he had become a hero in Iran, a symbol of resolute Shii opposition to oppression. Marxist or liberal ideology could have appealed to only a few Iranians, but everybody, especially the urban poor, understood the imagery of Karbala. In the West we are accustomed to extrovert and crowd-pleasing politicians, so it was hard for us to understand Khomeini’s appeal, but Iranians recognized his withdrawn demeanor, inward-seeming gaze, and monotonous delivery as the sign of a “sober” mystic who had achieved full control of the senses.80 In exile in Najaf too, near the tomb of Imam Ali, Khomeini became closely associated with the Twelve Imams in the minds of the people, and thanks to modern communications, he would continue to direct events from afar—not unlike the Hidden Imam.

  In the West, Khomeini would be widely regarded as a fanatic and his success seen as a triumph of superstition over rationality. Yet his principled opposition to systemic violence and demand for global justice was deeply in tune with contemporaneous religious developments in the West. His message was not dissimilar to that of Pope John XXIII (r. 1958–63), whose encyclical letter Mater et Magistra (1961) insisted that unfettered capitalism was immoral and unsustainable; instead, “all forms of economic enterprise must be governed by the principles of social justice and charity.” The pope also called for global equity. National prosperity was not enough: “Man’s aim must be to achieve in social justice a national and international juridical order … in which all economic activity can be conducted not merely for private gain but also in the interests of the common good.”81 In Pacem in Terris (1963), the pope insisted that human rights rather than economic profit must be the basis of international relations—a plea clearly critical of the exploitative Western policies in undeveloped countries.

  At about the same time as Khomeini was inveighing against the injustice of the shah, the Catholic Church in Latin America was evolving its Liberation Theology. Priests and nuns encouraged small communities of the poor to study the Bible in order to redress the systemic violence of Brazilian society. In 1968 Latin American bishops met in Medellín, Colombia, to support the emerging themes of this new movement, which argued that Jesus was on the side of the poor and oppressed and that Christians must struggle for justice and equality. In Latin America, as in Iran, this kind of theology was deeply threatening to the po
litical and economic elites. Liberation priests were dubbed “communists” and, like Iranian clerics, were imprisoned, tortured, and executed because they made it clear that the economic order imposed on the “Third World” by the colonial West was inherently violent:

  For centuries, Latin America has been a region of violence. We are talking of the violence that a privileged minority has been using, since the colonial period, to exploit the vast majority of the people. We are talking of the violence of hunger, of helplessness, of underdevelopment … of illegal but existing slavery, of social, intellectual, and economic discrimination.82

  They insisted that because the world was now so economically interdependent, a North American individual was able to live a comfortable life only because other people, living perhaps in a Brazilian slum, were impoverished; they could purchase goods cheaply because others had been exploited in their production.83

  In the United States too, religion acquired a revolutionary edge and for the first time in the twentieth century opposed the policies of the American government. While presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were careful to keep religion out of politics, liberal Catholics, Protestants, and Jews campaigned in the name of their faith against the structural and military violence of the United States. Like Iranian Shii Muslims, they took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War and joined Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement against racial discrimination at home. In 1962 the National Council of Churches asked Kennedy to commit the nation to “an all-out effort to abolish [poverty], both at home and abroad.”84