The NYT is calling on President Biden to do the right thing by the country and leave the race. In the so-called debate of Thursday night, he appeared as a shadow of the great public servant he once was. He presently is the only person who can rise to the occasion and bar the way to a second mandate of an indicted Trump by pulling out of the race. He would be keeping his reputation intact rather than be the candidate that gave us Trump. The risk is too great to find ourselves in a strong man’s regime, a dictatorship. There is no reason to run that risk when there are many more good choices in the Democratic Party and there’s ample time to choose a candidate who can take on Mr. Trump. The paper reminds us that it is Mr. Biden who challenged Trump to a verbal duel. The fact that he stumbled when presenting his own vision and responding weakly to Trump’s lies and provocations means that he foundered by his own test. The responsibility now lies with the Democratic Party to choose someone else since the Republican Party is willing to ruin the Republic by being completely beholden to Trump. There is no dearth of prepared democratic candidates, such as Newson, the governor of California, or Widmer, the governor of Michigan.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant publicly says that Israel will not be the one to instigate a war in southern Lebanon. It would only respond to attacks. But it is hard not to think that both Hezbollah and the government of Israel are eager, for different reasons, to go to war whether it is latent or fully blown. Pressures are mounting regarding the decision-making and responsibility of PM Netanyahu that would be temporarily deflected if Israel maintained a state of war. The High Court of Israel has just announced that it is granting the government one month to respond to the petition requesting a government commission of inquiry that will assess the events of October 7, 2023.

A few thoughts about Israel: it looks like Netanyahu and the right wingers that he is a willing hostage to are itching for a full war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Gaza and neighboring cities have been completely destroyed and so the war-bent Israeli government cannot continue to shirk its initial responsibilities for the disaster by continuing the bombing of the area. It needs a bigger enemy. The US does not support this kind of adventure but is in an electoral year, which makes it very weak. The Israeli government and army are far from having destroyed Hamas, which apparently is still the leading force in Gaza and will be the only party the Israeli government can negotiate with. Is Israel planning a full-blown war with Iran?

The following quote of Ronit Lentin, found on the web page of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, struck me as not only misleading but inviting hate:

The creation of the Jews as a race and the insistence on its own homeland was based on ideas of blood, on ideas of soil, and ideas of folk. All of these are very much Nazi ideas.

My comments in French have been translated in English, which can be found at the bottom of the present page. Comments could run to many pages but time is short.

À part la dernière phrase peut-être, le lecteur est tenté de voir dans les phrases précédentes sur le sang, la terre et le peuple un reflet exact et terrible de la réalité. Mais en fait l’auteur parle d’Europe plutôt que de christianisme, ce qui met la puce à l’oreille. Car le vrai problème est le fait que le christianisme et le judaïsme se sont enfermés dans une dialectique profonde dont la période moderne des deux derniers siècles n’a pas vraiment changé les termes sinon en les rebaptisant. Or, c’est la Bible elle-même qui nous donne une idée critique des effets politiques de la biologie et qui nous a engagés dans ce pari qui va bien au-delà d’une parenté physique en laquelle on se recroqueville. Il y aurait beaucoup à dire sur cela. Il me suffit de rappeler que le peuple d’Israël,—ou le peuple juif à sa suite, mais ceci est une longue histoire—est une création basée non sur la biologie et les rapports de clans et de tribus mais au contraire sur la fidélité et la confiance en la promesse d’un dieu qui lui-même a perdu et dû effacer ses aspects biologiques ou, pour le dire autrement, est devenu une ouverture sur le monde—un guide—plutôt qu’un chef de guerre vengeur à l’assyrienne, babylonienne, ou perse. Il serait long de retracer l’arrachement à la famille ou au peuple qu’Abraham ou sa descendance miraculeuse incarnent dans leur retour vers une terre qui après les effondrements dynastiques d’Israël et de Judah ne peut plus être un sol d’origine et qui se mue en une promesse. Adam n’est plus ni le sang ni la terre. Le peuple d’Israël ne peut plus être seulement défini comme la source d’une Ur-ethnographie. Blut, Boden, Volk sont devenus d’impossibles terrains institutionnels. D’où également l’impossibilité de continuer à justifier l’exploitation du travail par les dieux comme c’était le cas sous les rois ou les empereurs.

English:

Apart from the last sentence perhaps, the reader may be tempted to see in the previous sentences about blood, soil and people an exact and terrible reflection of reality. But it must be noted that the author talks about Europe rather than Christianity, which strikes me as oddly revealing. The real problem is the fact that Christianity and Judaism have locked themselves since at least Paul and his letter to the Romans into a dialectic whose terms have not changed in the modern period of the last two centuries, except by renaming them. However, it is the Bible itself that gives us a critical idea of the political effects of biology and that has engaged us in this belief that goes far beyond a physical kinship in which we get enmeshed. There would be a lot to say about this. It is enough to recall that the people of Israel,—or the Jewish people in its wake, and this is a long history—is a creation based not on biology and the relations of clans and tribes but on the contrary on the fidelity and trust in the promise of a god who himself had to erase his biological aspects or, to put it another way, had become an opening unto the world—a guide—-rather than a vengeful warlord in the Assyrian, Babylonian, or Persian modes. It would be long to trace the uprooting from his family or people that Abraham or his miraculous descendants embody in their return to a land that after the dynastic collapses of Israel and Judah could no longer be a land of origin and turned into a promise. Adam is no longer blood or soil. The people of Israel can no longer be only defined as a source of an Ur-ethnography. Blut, Boden, Volk have become impossible institutional grounds. Hence also the impossibility of continuing to justify the exploitation of work by one’s closeness to the gods as was the case under kings or emperors.

J’ai vu hier soir le film israélien Birth of a Conflict qui retrace les origines du conflit israélo-palestinien. Deux choses qui m’ont surpris dès l’abord sont l’usage qui est fait de la musique et la rapidité du défilé d’images et de lambeaux d’interviews. Les plans se succédaien à un rythme saccadé, peut-être toutes les trois secondes. Il est difficile de se laisser emporter par un film qui veut assommer plutôt que convaincre.

Ce documentaire m’est apparu tendancieux. Il présentait d’une façon assez juste le rôle des puissances colonisatrices qui ont été obligées d’appeler mandat ce qui en réalité était une autre version de la colonisation par la Grande-Bretagne et la France. Par exemple, il montrait que l’intérêt marqué par la Grande-Bretagne pour le mouvement sioniste était en réalité guidé par le souci de garder l’Inde sous son contrôle et était loin d’être une expression de philosémitisme. Le film insistait par ailleurs sur le rôle de l’Allemagne d’avant la Première Guerre mondiale et le choix qu’elle avait fait de l’empire ottoman comme allié.

Les auteurs ont fait la part belle aux nationalismes arabes et particulièrement à Fayçal, donc aux élites, mais sans s’interroger sur l’aspect religieux de la grande révolte anti-ottomane de 1916, sans considérer le rôle des chrétiens arabes en Syrie, en Palestine ou en Irak dans ce nationalisme, ni expliquer la réaction opposée des peuples arabes et leur désir de voir s’établir un gouvernement religieux universel, ce qui explique par exemple le développement des frères musulmans en Égypte à partir de 1928.

Il me semble que cette interprétation des nationalismes arabes voulait suggérer des solutions politiques qu’un Netanyahu pouvait faire siennes. Je veux dire par-là que l’horizon de ce film était l’espoir de créer des liens économiques et culturels avec les états qui ont hérité de la situation mise en place par la Grande-Bretagne et la France après la Première Guerre mondiale—d’où l’intérêt relatif pour les mouvements nationalistes—,mais sans se préoccuper des espoirs du peuple palestinien—particulièrement de leur désir de liberté—et en les abandonnant à leur sort. En ce sens, le film avait en partie raison de présenter Israël et la Palestine comme le fruit d’un marché de dupes où le même fondement de l’état—la terre et son histoire—, avait été promis à deux peuples qui en réalité partageaient une histoire à la fois très longue et très compliquée. Mais alors il faut aussi noter que ce film ne parle nulle part de l’achat de terres arabes par le fond juif. Plus généralement, le film ne montre aucun intérêt, ou si peu, pour le peuple palestinien et la situation catastrophique qui lui est faite. Peut-être pourra-t-on éventuellement le re-baptiser Birth of Two Nations [On a Promised Land].

The writers of the exodus story imagine a god who dwells on Mount Sinai and transforms its terrifying divine thundering into the time-worn, tamed linearity of writing. The rumblings in the desert stun the people as a formidable presence, if only a distant, untranslatable echo, while writing affords another kind of being, a shift to a more easily reachable text, however irremediable in it the memory of an absent voice.

We are at the foot of the mountain in the desert, freshly liberated. We depend on manna. We are landless. Yet we manage to think of ourselves as proud, limned autochthones. What text engages us to speak of land as an uninhabited Ur-possession? Aren’t we all allochthones and heirs to the conditional promise of the land?

These are a couple notes on trade in the ancient economy after reading Howe in his 2015 edited book (Traders in the ancient Mediterranean). According to Monroe in the first paper of this collection, donkeys were a “rather inefficient means of long-distance transportation” (p. 13 of “Tangled up in blue: Material and other relations of exchange in the Late Bronze age world”). He mentions their carrying capacity as being a third of their weight. Wasn’t it a fifth rather, i.e. 20 to 30% of their weight, that is about 50 kgs (36 to 82kgs)? How is one to measure their efficiency? Monroe doesn’t detail the low consumption of feed, the longevity, resistance to disease, etc. He does note that they are cheap. So, in ground transportation, the “point of diminishing returns” was rapidly reached, but what if the goods were luxury goods rather than grain? I think of the example of the Samaritan in Luke 10. Fortunately, we now have the 2018 book on The donkey in human history. An archaeological perspective, by Peter Mitchell. Here is a quote from chapter 8, the donkey’s tale, about the nature of the association of donkeys and people.

… donkeys (and mules) extended the geographical reach of human societies. They ate away, in other words, at what James Scott has termed ‘the friction of distance’, bringing people into closer contact with each other and making desired resources more accessible (page 225).

Concerning “importations” of grain, the figure of 80,000 kors of grain is reported by Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 15.314, and accepted by APPLEBAUM, “Economic life in Palestine,” 2:669. The figure seems impossible at first sight. The overland transport of such a quantity of grain would require in the neighborhood of 100,000 camel-trips or donkey-trips, and a great deal of time to organize the continuous train of caravans. It represents ca. 16,000 tons, which about one hundred heavier boats of the time could carry. One may however accept that very large quantities of grain were brought in. Josephus insists on the magnitude of the effort and on the deep impression it made on Herod’s subjects as well as neighbors. For comparison, it may be noted that thousands of camels and donkeys could be mobilized for long periods of time in the 1920s to transport cereals from the Hauran to the coast of Lebanon: WEULERSSE, Paysans de Syrie et du Proche-Orient, 137.

As for entrepreneurship and “incipient capitalism” in the ancient Mediterranean, Monroe gives a simplistic definition of capitalism. It would be a “rational, continual pursuit of profit”. His approach is to give a catalogue of examples or what he calls “indications”: rationally used weights with known ratios, the use of symbols (seals), etc. No structural reasoning that I can see.

Why not add military conquest to this “incipient capitalism?” Use of force was a much more efficient way of getting at stored silver, bronze, gold and luxury cloth in palaces and temples, as well as at specialized labor—including soldiers—that would be useful for more conquests or revenue. In two ways: a) by helping the military machine; b) by suppressing the local capacity to rebel and therefore appropriating directly the mostly agrarian goods and local metal trade that were absolutely vital for carrying on more wars. This use of force required that the local political systems had reached a certain level of development that made them attractive targets for military powers of similar or superior strength. Not too surprisingly, ancient Israelite prophets—or the exilic and post-exilic leadership that had to make do without kings and prophets and edited the prophetic books we have—saw the accumulation that kings and elites went after for what it would become: an unmitigated disaster, no matter the religiously-framed excuses they had in their competition for security and risk abatement.

For antisemites and fundamentalist thinkers, the hatred of Israel has many causes whose edge cannot be easily taken off and that are not amenable to reason. In this short page, I’ll try nonetheless to follow a partially historical view and see where it may lead. Muslim fundamentalists have their own special theological and political reasons to resent and reject a democratic style of life that Israel has managed to keep so far by choosing to separate religion from politics and civil life. Many Muslims in the Middle East, however, live in countries that are not democracies, far from it. They want to see new democratic regimes come to power as they made so overwhelmingly clear in large revolutionary movements for freedom in Tunisia, Egypt, and many other countries in 2011 and after. But poverty, religion, and the deep trust granted to a party like the Muslim brothers of Egypt, unfortunately help dictatorships and aristocratic regimes inherit power and hold to it. There are nations whose history reaches far beyond Islam, as in Egypt and Iran, who both claim a glorious and imperial past. For many people however, even today, the only avenue is to turn to God and Islam in the hope that justice and peace can be secured that way. Their nations and states are recent creations bound to histories of colonization and exploitation. The only unity and trust that seem workable in these nations, therefore, is within the ummah of Islam, the great community of believers, rather than in national governments.

Regardless of their having a similar political history, however, a number of nations have succeeded in separating religion from politics since the sixteenth century, at least for some ostensibly “enlightened” European kingdoms. It took decades of violence and cruelty in a terrible civil and religious war before practical, hard negotiated solutions could find a way to peaceful relations. But it is also true that those conflicts lost their pathos when the economies of these nations improved dramatically from the sixteenth century on and especially in the nineteenth century when an industrialization that was fueled by enormous oil and gas deposits made it easier for freedom and democracy to spread further (Gaël Giraud, Composer un monde en commun. Une théologie politique de l’anthropocène. Paris: Seuil, 2022). This new freedom and rejection of institutions like the immensely powerful Church couldn’t prevent the new economic forms in Europe or the USA from competing and using military violence to colonize and often bring ruin to local peoples. So-called modern nations did this while presenting this new form of greed under the guise of access to civilizational values and unabated progress.

Israel came into modern existence as a home for dispersed, delegitimized, and surviving victims of a most murderous totalitarianism. It was and still is a Zionist home, a refuge and a return to an ancient story that is irremediably attached to Christianity and Islam. In the thirties and forties, many Jewish immigrants were leery of being associated with colonizing forces. But in spite of this reluctance, Israel was/is also following in the wake of modern nations for whom the process of industrialization and use of power cannot be separated from violence. So, the perceptions that Palestinians have of the nakba are more justified than I could ever estimate. The barbarous murders by hamas are not. Neither is the extreme response by the Israeli government, especially when used for other reasons than self-defense, such as political advantage.

My page above is an attempt to understand a few features of the situation of local peoples and states. It doesn’t justify believers to be willing and ready to do what they do. It understands the principle of self-defense. But only compassion and a willingness to hear the opponent’s story can hope to close some wounds in time.

The Supreme Court is looking at the possibility of regulating gun ownership. Some of the judges believe in originalism. This is the notion that the interpretation of constitutional law has been drifting too far and that one should go back to the origins of those laws. We should adopt stricter interpretations that reflect more accurately what the writers of the constitution and its amendments were envisioning at the time of their writing.

So, let’s see how this intellectual frame of mind would play out if confronted to a similar problem, namely the interpretation of the Bible. There are at least six Catholics or ex-Catholics among the nine judges of the Supreme Court. They are not professional exegetes but surely appreciate the essential role still played by the Bible in our secular times. Would they be willing to apply the legal principle in question–––originalism–-–to the Bible? The interpretation of the Bible, whether Jewish, Catholic, or Reformed, has long hesitated about that matter and still does, at least in certain congregations. Must it keep to conservative readings, or can it develop meanings that take into account new events, formulations, or needs. Even the most traditional Jews would frame their Torah study obligations as a duty to reveal the multiplicity of meanings meant by the divinity to be discovered over time.

Let us look at one famous story, that of the Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37. It cannot be properly explained without having an inkling of the Greco-Roman surroundings and more importantly of the long development of the notion of neighbor in Israelite and Jewish society after the earlier catastrophic collapse of their small kingdoms and the temple. In other words, I am suggesting that the value of the story of the Samaritan cannot be appreciated without having a sense of the development of the concept of neighbor. In fact, the expansion of the notion of neighbor to the whole of humanity has its roots in that story. That notion and its expansion, if one adopted the principle of strict originalism, would become impossible to understand. It would require belief in a Jesus entirely bereft of his Jewish and Israelite background. It would make it impossible to appreciate the profound value that the story and its biblical background have had and continue to have on the development of compassion and care in a complex, unfolding world. So, this is not a purely intellectual matter. One may actually ponder how much slower the development of hospices and hospitals would have been in past centuries if the notion of originalism had been the main guiding principle and had killed the expanding notion of neighbor.

Two days ago, Hamas launched a complex military action against many towns and villages in the South of Israel. We do not know what the numbers of victims are. The latest news today indicated that there might be hundreds of people killed on both sides, and Hamas also kidnapped a number of Israeli soldiers and civilians, even children. A cursory reading of Haaretz shows that top officers and intelligence people were aware that the tensions were growing in both Palestinian territories and Gaza. But the new government of Israel had other plans. Their ideas regarding economic development with India, the Arab emirates, and Saudi Arabia now look very distant. But much more importantly, the government’s project of taking control of the Supreme Court and the democratic structures of Israel are all going to be pushed aside for a while. A unity government is taking over, which is not simply to satisfy the psychological need for unity but may allow Netanyahu to detach himself from the hard right. It looks pretty clear or at least it is a distinct possibility that Hamas could do what they did, not only for their own reasons, economic and religious, but also because there was a massive failure of trust in Israel, which the present government, beginning with Netanyahu, is to be blamed for. Many people are criticizing intelligence agencies. We don’t know what the reality was since intelligence is by nature secretive, but it is clear that the months-long struggle about the nature of Israel, the division of minds in the country, the social divisions, and the complete lack of concern for Palestinians and how they can endure an-ever tightening Israeli rule, all of this is partly to blame for this war.

There are other reasons such as the long arc of injustice and violence that spans over the people of the area since around the 1900s, long before many Jews began to flee to Palestine from their countries. And a powerful religious message of justice and peace that often gets derailed.

The military response will be harsh as usual even though the taking of hostages by Hamas will complicate the situation. It has always been Israel’s policy to make sure that they are the clear winners of any engagement. Still, precisely because of that policy, it becomes dubious whether Israel can continue to win, especially if the government becomes more authoritarian, the social differences continue to increase, and the cultural and religious dimensions of the conflict become a justification for the first two aspects.

An ex ambassador of Israel to France, Elie Barnavi is fairly representative of Israeli thinking. He is of the opinion that this second Kippur, like the other 50 years ago, may ruin the fragile equilibriums of the region and even lead to a third Intifada, given the terrible situation that Palestinians are living under.