Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  In order to curb Jewish aggression that could endanger the nation’s survival, the Talmudic rabbis had insisted that the Temple could be rebuilt only by the Messiah, and over the centuries this had acquired the force of a taboo. But Jewish extremists were intensely disturbed by the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest place in the Muslim world, which was said to stand on the site of Solomon’s temple. This magnificent shrine, which dominates the skyline of East Jerusalem and is so perfectly attuned to the natural environment, was a permanent reminder of the centuries of Islamic domination of the Holy Land. For the Gush, this symbol of the Muslim minority had become demonic. Livni and Etzion described it as an “abomination” and the “root cause of all the spiritual errors of our generation.” For Yeshua ben Shoshan, the underground’s spiritual adviser, the Dome was the haunt of the evil forces that inspired the Camp David negotiations.53 All three were convinced that, according to Kabbalistic perennial philosophy, their actions here on earth would activate events in heaven, forcing God, as it were, to effect the Messianic redemption.54 As an explosives expert in the IDF, Livni manufactured twenty-eight precision bombs that would have destroyed the Dome but not its surroundings.55 Their only reason for not going ahead was that they could not find a rabbi to bless their operation. The plot was another demonstration of the modern death wish. The destruction of the iconic Dome would almost certainly have caused a war in which, for the first time, the entire Muslim world would have united to fight Israel. Strategists in Washington believed that during the Cold War, when the Soviets supported the Arabs and the United States Israel, this might even have sparked a Third World War.56 So crucial was the survival and territorial integrity of the State of Israel to the militants that it justified risking the destruction of the human race.

  Yet far from being inspired by their religious tradition, the militants’ conviction violated core teachings of Rabbinic Judaism. The rabbis had repeatedly insisted that violence toward other human beings was tantamount to a denial of God, who had made men and women in his image; murder, therefore, was a sacrilege. God had created adam, a single man, to teach us that whoever destroyed a single human life would be punished as though he had destroyed the whole world.57

  The Dome as a perceived symbol of Jewish humiliation, subjugation, and obliteration fed dangerously into the Jewish history of grievance and suffering, a phenomenon that, as we have seen, can fester dangerously and inspire a violent riposte. Jews had fought back and achieved a superpower status in the Middle East that would once have seemed inconceivable. For the Gush, the peace process seemed to threaten this hard-won status, and like the monks who obliterated the iconic pagan temples after Julian’s attempt to suppress Christianity, they instinctively responded, “Never again.” Hence Jewish radicals, with or without rabbinic approval, continue to flirt with Livni’s dangerous idea, convinced that their political designs have some basis in eternal truth. The Temple Mount Faithful have drawn up plans for the Jewish temple that will one day replace the Dome, which they display in a museum provocatively close to the Haram al-Sharif with the ritual utensils and ceremonial robes that they have prepared for the cult. For many, Jewish Jerusalem rising phoenixlike from the ashes of Auschwitz has acquired a symbolic value that is nonnegotiable.

  The history of Jerusalem shows that a holy place always becomes more precious to a people after they have lost it or feel that their tenure is endangered. Livni’s plot therefore helped to make the Haram al-Sharif even more sacred to the Palestinians. When Islam was a great world power, Muslims had the confidence to be inclusive in their devotion to this sacred space. Calling Jerusalem al-Quds (“the Holy”), they understood that a holy place belongs to God and can never be the exclusive preserve of a state. When Umar conquered the city, he left the Christian shrines intact and invited Jews to return to the city from which they had been excluded for centuries. But now, as they feel that they are losing their city, Palestinian Muslims have become more possessive. Hence the tension between Muslims and Jews frequently erupts into violence at this holy place: in 2000 the provocative visit of the hawkish Israeli politician Ariel Sharon with his right-wing entourage sparked the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada.

  Rabbi Meir Kahane also plotted to destroy what he called “the gentiles’ abomination on the Temple Mount.” Most Israelis were horrified when he was elected to a seat in the 1984 Knesset with 1.2 percent of the vote.58 For Kahane, to attack any gentile who posed the slightest threat to the Jewish nation was a sacred duty. In New York he had founded the Jewish Defense League to avenge attacks on Jews by black youths, but when he arrived in Israel and settled in Kiryat Arba, he changed its name to Kach (“Thus it is!”), its goal to force the Palestinians to leave the Land. Kahane’s ideology symbolizes the “miniaturization” of identity that is one of the catalysts of violence.59 His “fundamentalism” was so extreme that it reduced Judaism to a single precept. “There are not several messages in Judaism,” he insisted. “There is only one”: God simply wanted Jews to “come to this country to create a Jewish state.” Israel was commanded to be a “holy” nation, set apart from all others, so “God wants us to live in a country on our own, isolated, so that we have the least possible contact with what is foreign.”60 In the Bible the cult of holiness had prompted the priestly writers to honor the essential “otherness” of every single human being; it had urged Jews to love the foreigner who lived in their land, using their memories of past suffering not to justify persecution but to sympathize with the distress that these uprooted people were enduring. Kahane, however, embodied an extreme version of the secular nationalism whose inability to tolerate minorities had caused such suffering to his own people. In his view, “holiness” meant the isolation of Jews, who must be “set apart” in their own Land and the Palestinians expelled.

  Some Jews argue that the Holocaust “summons us all to preserve democracy, to fight racism, and to defend human rights,” but many Israelis have concluded that the world’s failure to save the Jewish people requires the existence of a militarily strong Israel, and they are, therefore, reluctant to engage in peace negotiations.61 Kahane, however, went much further. Messianic redemption, he argued, had begun after the Six-Day War. Had Israel annexed the territories, expelled the Arabs, and torn down the Dome, redemption would have come painlessly. But because the Israeli government wanted to appease the international community and refrained from this violence, redemption would come in a terrible anti-Semitic calamity, far worse than the Holocaust, that would force all Jews to leave the diaspora.62 The Holocaust overshadowed Kahane’s ideology. The State of Israel, he believed, was not a blessing for Jews but God’s revenge on the gentiles: “He could no longer take the desecration of his Name and the laughter, the disgrace, and the persecution of the people that were named after Him.” Every attack on a Jew, therefore, amounted to blasphemy, and every act of Jewish retaliation was Kiddush ha-Shem, a sanctification of God’s name: “a Jewish fist in the face of the astonished gentile world that has not seen it for two millenniums [sic].”63 This was the ideology that inspired Kiryat Arba settler Baruch Goldstein to shoot twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on the festival of Purim, February 25, 1994. The massacre was revenge for the murder of fifty-nine Jews in Hebron on August 24, 1929. Goldstein died in the attack and is revered by the Israeli far right as a martyr. His action would inspire the first wave of Muslim suicide bombing in Israel and Palestine.

  A collective memory of humiliation and imperial domination has also inspired a desire for a national character of strength in India.64 When they look back in history, Hindus are divided. Some see a paradise of coexistence and a culture in which Hindu and Muslim traditions combine. But Hindu nationalists see the period of Muslim rule as a clash of civilizations, in which a militant Islam forced its culture on the oppressed Hindu majority.65 The structural violence of empire is always resented by subject peoples and can persist long after the imperialists have left. Founded in the early 1980s
, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the “Indian National Party,” an affiliate of RSS (Hedgewar’s nationalist religious party), feeds on this bitterness and enhances it. It campaigned for a militarily strong India, a nuclear arsenal (whose warheads are named after Hindu gods), and national distinctiveness. At first, however, it made no headway in the polls, but its fortunes changed dramatically in 1989, when the issue of the Babri mosque once again hit the headlines.66 In India as in Israel, sacred geography has become emblematic of the nation’s disgrace. Here too, the spectacle of a Muslim shrine atop a ruined temple aroused huge passions, because it so graphically symbolized the Hindu collective memory of Islamic imperial dominance. In February 1989 activists resolved to build a new temple to Ram on the site of the mosque and collected donations from the poorer castes throughout India; in the smallest villages bricks for the new shrine were cast and consecrated. Not surprisingly, tensions flared between Muslims and Hindus in the north, and Rajiv Gandhi, who had tried to mediate, lost the election.

  The BJP, however, had made large gains at the polls, and the following year its president, L. K. Advani, began a rath yatra (“chariot pilgrimage”), a thirty-day journey from the west coast to Ayodhya, that was to culminate in the rebuilding of the Rama temple. His Toyota van was decorated to resemble Arjuna’s chariot in the last battle of the Mahabharata and was cheered by fervent crowds lining the route.67 The pilgrimage began, significantly, at Somnath, where, legend has it, Sultan Mahmud of the Central Asian kingdom of Ghazni had slaughtered thousands of Hindus way back in the eleventh century, razing Shiva’s ancient temple to the ground and plundering its treasure. Advani never made it to Ayodhya, because he was arrested on October 23, 1990, but thousands of Hindu nationalists from every region of India had already assembled at the site to begin the mosque’s demolition. Scores of them were shot down by the police and hailed as martyrs, and Hindu-Muslim riots exploded throughout the country. The Babri mosque was finally dismantled in December 1992, while the press and army stood by and watched. For Muslims, its brutal destruction evoked the horrifying specter of Islam’s annihilation in the subcontinent. There were more riots, the most notorious being a Muslim attack on a train conveying Hindu pilgrims to Ayodhya, which was avenged by a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat.

  Like the Islamists, Hindu nationalists are lured by the prospect of rebuilding a glorious civilization, one that will revive the splendors of India before the Muslims’ arrival. They have convinced themselves that their path to this utopian future is blocked by the relics of Moghul civilization, which have wounded the body of Mother India. Countless Hindus experienced the demolition of the Babri mosque as a liberation from “slavery”; but others argue that the process is far from complete and dream of erasing the great mosques at Mathura and Varanasi.68 Many other Hindus, however, were religiously appalled by the Ayodhya tragedy, so this iconoclasm cannot be traced to a violence inherent in “Hinduism,” which has, of course, no single essence, either for or against violence. Rather, Hindu mythology and devotion had blended with the passions of secular nationalism—especially its inability to countenance minorities.

  All this meant that the new Ram temple had become a symbol of a liberated India. The emotions involved were memorably expressed in a speech by the revered renouncer Rithambra at Hyderabad in April 1991, which she delivered in the mesmerizing rhymed couplets of Indian epic poetry. The temple would not be a mere building; nor was Ayodhya important simply because it was Ram’s birthplace: “The Ram temple is our honor. It is our self-esteem. It is the image of Hindu unity … We shall build the temple!” Ram was “the representation of mass-consciousness”; he was the god of the lowest castes—the fishermen, cobblers, and washermen.69 Hindus were in mourning for the dignity, self-esteem, and Hindutva, the Hindu identity, that they had lost. But this new Hindu identity could be reconstructed only by the destruction of the antithetical “other.” The Muslim was the obverse of the tolerant, benign Hindu: fanatically intolerant, a destroyer of shrines, and an arch-tyrant. Throughout, Rithambra laced her speech with vivid images of mutilated corpses, amputated arms, chests cut open like those of dissected frogs, and bodies slashed, burned, raped, and violated, all evoking Mother India, desecrated and ravaged by Islam. The 800 million Hindus of India can hardly claim to be economically or socially oppressed, so Hindu nationalists feed on such images of persecution and insist that a strong Hindu identity can be restored only by decisive, violent action.

  Until the 1980s, the Palestinians had held aloof from the religious revival in the rest of the Middle East. Yasser Arafat’s PLO was a secular nationalist organization. Most Palestinians admired him, but the PLO’s secularism appealed mainly to the Westernized Palestinian elite, and observant Muslims played virtually no part in its terrorist actions.70 When the PLO was supressed in the Gaza Strip in 1971, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin founded Mujama (“Congress”), an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which focused on social welfare work. By 1987 Mujama had established clinics, drug rehabilitation centers, youth clubs, sporting facilities, and Quran classes throughout Gaza, supported not only by Muslim alms (zakat) but also by the Israeli government in an attempt to undermine the PLO. At this point Yassin had no interest in armed struggle. When the PLO accused him of being Israel’s puppet, he replied that, on the contrary, it was their secular ethos that was destroying Palestinian identity. Mujama was far more popular than Islamic Jihad (IJ), formed during the 1980s, which attempted to apply Qutb’s ideas to the Palestinian tragedy and regarded itself as the vanguard of a larger global struggle “against the forces of arrogance [jahiliyyah], the colonial enemy, all over the world.”71 IJ engaged in terrorist attacks against the Israeli military but rarely quoted the Quran; its rhetoric was frankly secular. Ironically, the only thing that was religious about this organization was its name—and this may explain its lack of mass support.72

  The outbreak of the First Intifada (1987–93), led by young secularist Palestinians, changed everything. Impatient with the corruption and ineffectiveness of Fatah, the leading PLO party, they urged the entire population to rise up and refuse to submit to the Israeli occupation. Women and children threw stones at Israeli soldiers, and those shot by the IDF were hailed as martyrs. The intifada made a strong impression on the international community: Israel had long presented itself as plucky David fighting the Arab Goliath, but now the world watched heavily armored Israeli soldiers pursuing unarmed children. As a military man, Yitzhak Rabin realized that harassing women and children would ruin IDF morale, and when he became prime minister in 1992, he was prepared to negotiate with Arafat. The following year Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords. The PLO recognized Israel’s existence within its 1948 borders and promised to end the insurrection; in return, Palestinians were offered limited autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza for a five-year period, after which final status negotiations would begin on the issue of Israeli settlements, compensation for Palestinian refugees, and the future of Jerusalem.

  The Kookists, of course, regarded this as a criminal act. In July 1995 fifteen Gush rabbis ordered soldiers to defy their commanding officers when the IDF began to evacuate the territories—an act that was tantamount to civil war. Other Gush rabbis ruled that Rabin was a rodef (“pursuer”), worthy of death under Jewish law for endangering Jewish life. On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, an army veteran and student at Bar Ilan University, took this ruling to heart, shooting the prime minister during a peace rally in Tel Aviv.73

  The success of the Intifada made younger Mujama members aware that its welfare program was not truly addressing the Palestinian problem, so they broke away to form Hamas, an acronym of Haqamat al-Muqamah al-Islamiyya (“Islamic Resistance Movement”), meaning “Fervor.” They would fight both the PLO and the Israeli occupation. Young men flocked to join up, finding the egalitarian ethos of the Quran more congenial than the secularism of the Palestinian elite. Many recruits came from the lower-middle-class intelligentsia, educated now in Palestinian universities, which was no longer prepared
to kowtow to the traditional authorities.74 Sheikh Yassin lent his support, and some of his closest associates staffed Hamas’s political wing. Instead of drawing on Western ideology, Hamas found inspiration in the history of secular Palestinian resistance as well as Islamic history; religion and politics were inseparable and intertwined.75 In its communiqúes Hamas celebrated the Prophet’s victory over the Jewish tribes at the Battle of Khaybar,76 Saladin’s victory over the Crusaders, and the spiritual status of Jerusalem in Islam.77 The Charter of Hamas evoked the venerable tradition of “volunteering” when it urged Palestinians to become murabitun (“guardians of the frontiers”),78 defending the Palestinian struggle as a classical defensive jihad: “When our enemies usurp some lands, jihad becomes a duty on all Muslims [fard ayn].”79

  In the early days, though, fighting was a secondary concern; the charter quoted none of the Quranic jihad verses.80 The first priority was the Greater Jihad, the struggle to become a better Muslim. Palestinians, Hamas believed, had been weakened by the inauthentic adoption of Western secularism under the PLO, when, the Charter explained, “Islam disappeared from life. Thus, rules were broken, concepts were vilified, values changed … homelands were invaded, people were subdued.”81 Hamas did not resort to violence until 1993, the year of the Oslo Accords, when seventeen Palestinians were killed on the Haram al-Sharif, and Hamas activists retaliated in a series of operations against Israeli military targets and Palestinian collaborators. After Oslo, support for the militant Islamist groups dropped to 13 percent of the Palestinian population, but it rose to a third when Palestinians found that they were subjected to harsh and exceptional regulations and that Israel would retain indefinite sovereignty over Gaza and the West Bank.82