Gaza and the Bible

“I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee.…I will drive out the Hivites, the Canaanites, and the Hittites; … I will drive them out little by little before you, until you have grown numerous enough to take possession of their land... I will set your boundaries from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert to the River[Euphrates]... all who dwell in this land I will hand over to you to be driven out of your way. You shall not make a covenant with them or their gods.” Many Zionists accept the word of their Bible that their God has defined the true borders of Israel and determined how that land should be regained. The ongoing conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians for many is centred upon a few words found in the bible that proclaim the land was God’s gift to the Israeli people.

 Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (The Bible Unearthed) suggests that the Biblical narrative of the Exodus did not happen. They conclude rather that both Egypt and Judah during the seventh century BCE was a time of great revival. “It was a time when Josiah embarked on an ambitious attempt to take advantage of the Assyrian collapse and unite all Israelites under his rule. His program was to expand to the north of Judah, to the territories where Israelites were still living a century after the fall of the kingdom of Israel, and to realize the dream of a glorious united monarchy: a large and powerful state of all Israelites worshipping one God in one Temple in one capital—Jerusalem—and ruled by one king of Davidic lineage.” Instead of the Exodus happening in the 13th century BCE, when the estimated population of the Israelites numbered somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000, it never happened as told about the Israelites. It was recorded in the 7th century BCE using ancient stories gathered together into a “history” of the Israelites to aid Josiah in creating his dream kingdom. The conclusion that the Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible seems irrefutable when we examine the evidence. It will disturb many Zionists who justify modern Israel's existence and the proposed annexation of "Judah and Sumaria" based on the Biblical Texts. 

 There wasn't actually an Exodus. The Jews were never slaves in Egypt and that the entire story of Exodus is fiction. The same is true of the tumbling of the walls of Jericho. And David, far from being the fearless king who built Jerusalem into a mighty capital, was more likely a provincial leader whose reputation was later magnified to provide a rallying point for a fledgling nation. Margaret Steiner writes that from the tenth century B.C.E. there is no archaeological evidence that many people actually lived in Jerusalem, only that it was some kind of public administrative center. "We are left with nothing that indicates a city was here during their supposed reigns (of David and Solomon)...It seems unlikely, however, that this Jerusalem was the capital of a large state, the United monarchy, as described in Biblical texts."

The most sacred holiday in Judaism is Passover. This commemorates the day that the Jewish God killed the first born of the Egyptians while passing over the homes of the Hebrews, hence the name. In 1977, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin visited Egypt's National Museum in Cairo and stated "We built the pyramids."
We know quite a lot about the labor force that built the pyramids. The best estimates are that 10,000 men spent 30 years building the Great Pyramid. They lived in good housing at the foot of the pyramid. They ate well and received the best medical care. And, also unlike slaves, they were well paid. The pyramid builders were recruited from poor communities and worked shifts of three months (including farmers who worked during the months when the Nile flooded their farms), distributing the pharaoh's wealth out to where it was needed most. Each day, 21 cattle and 23 sheep were slaughtered to feed the workers, enough for each man to eat meat at least weekly. Virtually every fact about the workers that archaeology has shown us rules out the use of slave labor on the pyramids. Israel itself did not exist until at least 600 years after the completion of the last of Egypt's large pyramids. Thus it is not possible for any Israelites to have been in Egypt at the time, either slave or free; as there was not yet any such thing as an Israelite. The story of Jewish slaves building the pyramids originated with Herodotus of Greece in about 450 BCE. He's often called the "Father of History". Herodotus was also called the "Father of Lies".

 No Egyptian record contains a single reference to anything in Exodus despite the fact that the Egyptians kept many documented records, many of which are still in existence today. Not a shred of evidence discovered in the Sinai Desert supports the claim that a large number of Jews had wandered it for 40 years. It seems extremely unlikely for this many people to leave absolutely no trace, especially when traces have been found for smaller groups of people which predated the Exodus in that same desert. In Israel at that time, there was no sudden change in the kind or the volume of pottery being made. (If people suddenly arrived after hundreds of years in Egypt, their cups and dishes would look very different from native Canaanites'.) There was no population explosion. Most archeologists conclude that the Israelites lived largely in Canaan over generations, instead of leaving and then immigrating back to Canaan.

These conclusions would suggest that the Bible as the word of God is rather a fabrication created for the masses for political, religious and cultural reasons. There’s no story like the weak rising against the stronger foe and coming out the winner; the humble and oppressed Hebrew slaves rise up against mighty Egypt and escape to the Promised Land. Many Jews are led to understand that God's hand is in Israel's politics and is a pillar of belief for many.

 Israel's Supreme Rabbinical Council gave their endorsement to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, declaring that it conformed to the Halachi (religious) law and that participation in the war ‘in all its aspects’ is a religious duty. The military Rabbinate meanwhile distributed a document to soldiers containing a map of Lebanon with the names of cities replaced by alleged Hebrew names taken from the Bible. A military Rabbi in Lebanon explained the biblical sources that justify ‘our being here and our opening the war; we do our Jewish religious duty by being here.’

In 2007, Mordechai Eliyahu, the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel wrote that “there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings”. His son, Shmuel Eliyahu chief rabbi of Safed, called for the “carpet bombing” of the general area from which the Kassams were launched, to stop rocket attacks on Israel, saying “This is a message to all leaders of the Jewish people not to be compassionate with those who shoot [rockets] at civilians in their houses.” he continued, “If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill 1,000. And if they don’t stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000. Even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”

An influential Chabad  Lubavitch Hassid  rabbi  Manis Friedman in 2009 was quoted as saying: “I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men.”
The current state of Israel uses passages from an ancient text, a series of myths, to rally its citizens. It resurrects the words of men who concocted these tales to unite against its current enemies. The recent offensive was called "Pillar of Cloud" although for foreign media consumption it is re-named "Pillar of Defense".  According to Exodus, the pillar of cloud guided the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt.

Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, thinks Jews are neither a race nor a nation, but an invented people most likely made up of ancient pagans – in the main Berbers from North Africa, Arabs from the south of Arabia, and Turks from the Khazar empire – who converted to Judaism between the fourth and eighth centuries CE. There as forcible exile of Jews from the area now bordered by modern Israel. According to Sand, the Palestinians are probably descended from Hebrews who embraced Islam or Christianity. Sand doesn’t challenge Israel’s right to exist but he thinks that sovereignty is undermined by its exclusively ethnic base, which stems from the racism of Zionist ideologues. In other words, Israel shouldn’t be a Jewish state, but a democratic secular one which belongs to all its citizens. Socialists would go further, Israel should not be a state. Nor should there be a Palestinian state.

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