That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow. That is the whole of Torah. —Hillel the Elder (died 10 CE)
We should never desire to be over others. Instead, we should be servants who are submissive to every human being for God's sake. —Francis of Assisi (1181-1226)
Extra ecclesiam nulla salvatio.
A couple decades ago a book was written by a Roman Catholic priest who had spent most of his life as a missionary in Burma. The priest wrote he had come to believe there are many ways to God—Christian, Buddhist, et al. The Papacy in Rome condemned the book with the Latin formula quoted above, a statement of the Church's official teaching on the matter: "Outside the Church there is no salvation."
That may or may not be what individual Catholics believe today, just as an apocalyptic end to the world in which only they will be saved from hellfire may not be what all Christian fundamentalists believe. But those doctrines are at the core of their faiths. And the divine chosen-ness of the Jewish people, along with the gift by their God of the biblical Land of Israel, may not be what all Jews believe, but it is at the heart of Zionism and is in the DNA of the Israeli state.
To describe Israel as a settler-colonial state, a nation founded in a land already occupied by another people, is accurate. But it is not sufficient for understanding why Israel and its supporters behave the way they do. The USA is also a product of settler-colonialism. So is Australia and Canada. In all three instances the newcomers from Europe came to stay, not just to exploit the land as happened in places like India and Africa. The settlers may also have had other motives, as did the Puritans who established a religious colony in what was to become Massachusetts, but the common goal was permanence, and that meant the elimination of the indigenous inhabitants. Israel fits the definition of such a settler-colonialist project. Its intention from the start in 1886 was, and still is, to rid Eretz Israel, its God-given real estate, of the Palestinians who had been living there from time immemorial.
The Zionist enterprise is rooted in an ideology of a Jewish state for a Jewish people, just as the fundamentalist Christian ideology produces its own: a White, Christian America. That ideology derives from a religious narrative as much as Zionism's does. Ignoring the religious underpinnings in either Zionism or other fundamentalist ideologies is to turn a blind eye to what is really going on.
Christianity in whatever form it takes is rooted in an exclusivist idea of who is "saved" and who is not. Zionism may have started out as a secular, if not atheist, movement, but it has been driven by the idea of Jewish exclusiveness and an antipathy toward non-Jews that predates Christianity. This animus runs through the Talmud, the commentaries forming the basis of Jewish belief and practice, as Israel Shahak documents thoroughly in Jewish History, Jewish Religion, written in 1993.
These narratives of exclusiveness and superiority are the proverbial elephants in the room for both Zionism and fundamentalist forms of Christianity: they each are religious ideologies that view the non-Jewish or non-Christian world with contempt.
It should go without saying that what I am calling "Jewish" and "Christian" does not refer to all Jews and all Christians. "Classical Judaism" as it existed in eastern Europe for a thousand years, and its counterpart in modern ultra-Orthodox communities, does not represent the ideas and values held by most people who identify as Jewish. This should go without saying, but it can't because to suggest the politics of the state of Israel since its inception 76 years ago is not just an apartheid or even a fascist nation but one based upon hostility toward everything not Jewish is falsely branded as anti-Semitism or, to put it in plain English, hatred of Jews.
It's important to emphasize that Judaism is a religion, not a "race." To conflate the two, as both Nazis and Zionists have done, is to muddy the waters. Both have claimed the authority to decide who is a Jew and who is not. How many of the millions of Jews the Nazis killed actually identified as Jewish in any sense other than the way an American of some Irish descent thinks of themselves as Irish? But even "secular" Jews today are branded or describe themselves as Jewish, sometimes out of a sense of respect for their ancestors, but also because they are led to believe what the Zionists (or the Nazis) believe: born a Jew, always a Jew. As the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand puts it, being a Jew is the only club in the world you can't resign from.
It was only under Roman rule, by an agreement the rabbis reached with the empire after the last Judean uprising against Rome, that the notion of Jewish descent came to be determined through the maternal line. Throughout the Bible it was paternity that counted. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all married non-Jewish women. Today, if someone can show their mother and grandmother were Jewish, they can get an Israeli passport within 48 hours of their arrival in that country. That's citizenship by "blood," just as Jewishness was defined by the Nazis as Jewish "blood" back to the third generation. The notion that you are whatever the identity of the birth canal you passed through is still popular in many parts of the world, including eastern Europe where most of the Israeli ruling elite derive from. By contrast, in Western liberal democracies, citizenship is defined as membership in a nation-state.
Christianity is a death cult, while Judaism, for all its faults, is not. Christianity's focus is not on this life but on the hereafter. The material world is a testing ground for that afterlife, which unlike our brief material existence on earth, will be spiritual and eternal. We will be judged and assigned to spend eternity in heavenly bliss or in everlasting torment.
Christianity (not to be confused with the actual teachings of the rabbi Jesus, or Jehoshua ben Josef, as he was actually named) is about death because salvation, i.e., dying in a state of sinlessness, is the ultimate goal, not something to fear (unless you are sinner). Johann Sebastian Bach composed love songs to death. In Wachet Auf, what sounds like a duet of two lovers is actually the soul (female) longing for death (male). She keeps asking him when he will come. He repeatedly assures her he is coming soon.
The religious group led by Jim Jones that swallowed poisoned Kool Aid back in 1978 in order to take a shortcut to paradise was not just a "cult," it was Christianity writ large. Suicide is officially forbidden by Christianity, but death is the consummation devotedly to be wished. Ergo... The material world is an evil, sinful place. Even flowers used to be seen as the work of a Devil whose power is only checked by an almighty God.
Judaism traditionally celebrates life. Le Chaim!" the Jewish traditional toast, "To life!" represents more than a casual well-wishing. Until the Holocaust became a central part of the Jewish narrative, those words expressed a Jewish emphasis on the here and now, to the living and to this mortal life, which is all we have. But the Nazis' murder of millions they defined as Jews has turned Judaism into a death cult as well, as Robert Novick points out in The Holocaust in American Life, whose abuse for financial gain (not distributed to actual victims but mostly to lawyers and Jewish organizations) is documented in Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry.
Sex in Christianity is the ultimate evil, only tolerated for the sake of making new souls for Christ. Women are loathsome creatures in both Christianity and Judaism ("sacks of shit" as one sage put it). But at least in Judaism, life is the goal, not death. Women in Christianity are vessels of filth and temptresses, starting with Eve who lured Adam into the original sin of disobedience. Augustine of Hippo, a preeminent "father" of the Church, maintained that in the Garden of Eden, sexual intercourse was done without pleasure. Augustine was a very neurotic libertine-turned-moralist who abandoned his wife and child for a life devoted to his faith. We can thank him for the idea of the "just war," which over the millennia has cost the lives of tens of millions of human beings, most of whom believed God was on their side.
The West, our civilization, is Christianity. In the 4th century it became the Roman empire's official religion and started persecuting other faiths, destroying their temples and expurgating works of so-called pagan or heretical origin. Out went science and any thinking contrary to Christian doctrine. It was not until the Middle Ages that critical thinking about the physical world returned to Europe thanks to the introduction of Islamic science, and our freedoms, to the extent they actually exist in the West, are the product of European contact with native-American and other indigenous societies.
Europe is a pastiche of other cultures' achievements, which arrived late and have been adopted piecemeal. The only constant over the last 1700 years has been Christianity. Its mishmash of neo-Platonic philosophy and Eastern myth loosely based on traditional Jewish ethics elbowed out the advances being made in the Hellenistic world, including the bold materialism of Lucretius's De Rerum Naturam and its practical application by scientists like the physician Galen. Christians and Jews alike (Judaism morphed into its present form under Hellenistic thought just as Christianity did) condemned what today we recognize as the early days of modern science, which remained under a dark cloud of ignorance until the works of Islamic thinkers filtered into the West.
Talmudic orthodoxy had the same effect on Judaism. The two religions have run on parallel tracks, however much we may like to distinguish them. Talmudism and Christianity are twin ways of thinking that developed at the same time under the same cultural influences—a pseudo-scholarship based on Biblical revelation, policed by strict clerical control.
Unless we understand the underlying doctrines of Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion, we can never understand what drives their politics... and ultimately their behavior. If Israel or any other nation is allowed to commit mass murder, that is because they think of themselves as exceptional, children of what we in the US used to call a "Manifest Destiny." At the heart of that notion is a corpus of belief, much of it shared by both faiths, that God has made an exception of them from obeying the kind of rational, humane law fought so hard for by the men and women of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and America. To allow our political leaders to behave as if they were characters out of the Bible who were ordered by their god to kill everyone and anything that breathed in the land of Canaan is to play with the kind of fire that gave us the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the genocides we have witnessed in more recent years... and are still seeing. If we do not divorce ourselves from such beliefs, we are as culpable as those who turned away from the atrocities they knew were being committed but felt no responsibility for because they were happening far away or without their consent.
