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Madness and Monotheism:
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By J A Miller |
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"Western progressives must understand, expose and combat the pernicious role their religion has in creating and maintaining the injustice and violence committed against the Palestinians."
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Jerusalem attracts all kinds of people. Religious fanatics and cranks of different degrees of mental derangement seemed drawn as by a magnet to the Holy City…men and women who thought themselves the reincarnation of saints, prophets, priests, messiahs and kings. --Bertha Vester, Our Jerusalem Hechler had a touch of madness, and so did Herzl…It would seem that such is the rule today for the ones, Jews or Christians, who believe in the unique destiny of the capital of Israel – Jerusalem – as the place of spiritual espousals and salvation for the entire world. Blessed is the madness which hungers for the absolute… --Andre Chouraqui, The Prince and the Prophet Of all crotchets in the world the most mischievous…are religious crotchets. --Edward Wilmot Blyden A Christian Madhouse Accursed is a land that has been lumbered with the title of “The Holy Land”. The sole geographic entity on the planet that bears this dubious distinction is Palestine. To be sure there are numerous cities around the globe called “holy”-- Rome, Mecca, Karbala, Lhasa and Lourdes to name but a few. But once outside the city limits of such a municipality at least the visitor can take a deep breath, loosen the collar and pull out a hip flask for a quick restorative. But to place at the very fulcrum of religious belief a holy land, where the vast majority of that religion’s adherents do not live? Where every rock, every scrap of a ruin, every town, every mountain or rill, every shard is heavy with perceived significance for millions of people not resident in that land? To have the bad fortune to be the native of such a land, a map of which can be found on every Protestant Sunday school wall in the United States which displays the land’s ownership attributed to the so-called tribes of Israel? Green for Gad, pink for Asher, yellow for Judah: God’s real estate plat in tasteful pastels, confirming a sense of ownership in the minds of young congregants from the very beginning of their religious instruction. The cultural resonance of this embedded concept is incalculable; its impact on Palestine’s original inhabitants is immense. A land that a heavily armed and righteously powerful portion of the outside world has long deemed holy in its entirety and over which accordingly it has asserted ownership rights both conscious and unconscious. A land about which the Archbishop of York smirked in 1875, a year when Teddy Herzl was barely out of knee pants: “Our reason for turning to Palestine is that Palestine is our country. I have used that expression before and I refuse to adopt any other”. [1] To the natives of such a land, born in innocence of western Judeo-Christian crotchets -- for crotchets they are -- this is misfortune indeed. Because of this real-estate based religious affliction, it is appropriate to examine the history and political implications of western Christian and Jewish religiosity within any discussion of the Middle East or more particularly of the problem of Israel/Palestine. To be sure, as Jeffrey Blankfort has pointed out, there exists in America (and to a lesser extent in Europe) a large cadre of devoted, highly organized “gatekeepers” marshaled at the grassroots and national levels who vigilantly oppose any political positions, actions or statements that might question or endanger the intrinsic Jewish nature of Israel. AIPAC (the American-Israel Political Action Committee) lobbyists with their enormous financial resources ensure that American lawmakers toe the Zionist line and keep the cornucopia of American dollars flowing to support the Zionist state, to the tune of $4 billion per annum. A full third of all US foreign aid for a country with a mere .001% of the earth’s population, this sum comprises only what is auditable; unknown amounts are buried in various departmental budgets (notably that of the Pentagon), not to mention the remittances from Jews and fundamentalist Christians to hasten prophecy. The gatekeepers and lobbyists are certainly real enough but their organization and bankroll alone do not explain their extraordinary success. One needs not only to understand the gatekeepers’ motivations but also the audience of their vigilant blandishments. Let me put this plainly. Picture, if you will, a Buddhist America, with the same active, well-oiled Zionist machine hard at work. The same successes are scarcely imaginable. The image simply does not compute. We must therefore consider that the efforts of these gatekeepers and lobbyists fall on what is already a receptive, fertile ground: A Judeo-Christianity steeped in centuries of Old Testamentary religious ideology serves as a religious and psychological Petri dish which readily incubates both overt and covert support for Zionism in its latter day manifestation as the armed, racist state of Israel. Let us listen to A.A. Berle, no wild-eyed dispensationalist he, describing in 1918 the background of western gatekeeping: "No commonwealth on earth [i.e. the Jewish state] will start with such a propaganda for its exploitation in world thought, or with such eager and minute scrutiny by millions of people, of its slightest detail. The value of this to such a state can only be conjectured. But that it will give impetus to it, that it will aid it and upbuild it goes without saying…Think what it would mean to any enterprise to have millions of Sunday-school children studying about it every Sunday in the year!" [2] Old Testamentary exceptionalism provided the ideology that powered a bloody and rapacious American expansion in North and South America as well as most European colonial enterprises. In America specifically, English Puritans and their descendants fancied themselves the elect of God and embodied a self-conscious Old Testamentary spirit by giving biblical names to hundreds of towns, cities and geographic markers in the land they stole from Native Americans who they freely slaughtered in the same spirit. But nowhere has imperial aggression been more entangled so interactively and dare I say so psychotically with biblical imperative than the Middle East in general and Palestine in particular. Moreover, this psychosis originates on one side of the conflict only, the side of the aggressors be they Zionists or Protestant, European or American. Understanding the western crotchets that enable this murderous state of affairs to continue with scarcely a protest is critical to understanding the conflict in Palestine and planning effective political action to combat Zionism. The late Edward Said brilliantly explicated the ideology of orientalism, linking as he did literature, art and historiography to imperial policy. But it is a sick western Christian religiosity, and most particularly the Judeo-Protestant strain, grounded as it is in the perception of Palestine as a parcel of God-ordained real estate and thus freighted with a psychological religiosity that lies at the very core of the problem of Palestine. This crotchet invisibly suffuses the ideology of orientalism, providing it with a virulent power when it engages the Middle East in the political, military and academic spheres. As Protestantism spun off from the Roman church its ideologues refocused spirituality on the Old Testament, which text exudes a strong and frequently explicit sense of blut und boden, lebensraum and God-approved genocide of the Other. A key component in the development of this cult was the firm welding of scripture and territory, as ‘demanded’ by W.D. Davies in 1974, which concept flows directly from the territorial traditions saturating the Old Testament: The need to remember the Jesus of History entailed the need to remember the Jesus of a particular land. Jesus belonged not only to time, but to space; and the space and spaces which he occupied took on significance, so that the realia of Judaism continued as realia in Christianity. History in the tradition demanded geography. (emphasis added) [3] This Judeo-Protestant obsession with the Middle East in general and Palestinian “space” in particular has contributed a ready-made, compliant ground for Zionist lobbyists and gatekeepers in the societies and institutions of America and Europe. It also sheds light on the seemingly inexplicable paralysis of western progressives on this issue. Genuinely “anguished” western progressives and liberals continually wring their hands over what they perceive as the issue’s "complexity". In reality the issue of Palestine is really quite simple: Israel is nothing less than a manifestation of traditional colonial conquest by an alien population which stole land and resources from the resident indigenes and then engaged in the violent expulsion of as many of said indigenes as possible while oppressing those left behind. But this definition only works if the religious implications are stripped away completely. Third world progressives, for example, remain remarkably anguish-free when the issue arises and are able to analyze it easily enough under the rubric of colonialism and racism, full stop. What complicates the issue in the west therefore is a long standing, often unconscious, religious indoctrination with Old Testamentary land traditions and its underlying component of madness, which I believe is particularly strong in Protestants as a group. I myself have on several occasions been roundly scolded by American progressives actually quoting scripture to me on the subject of Israel/Palestine. In the next breath and with a straight face these same individuals proclaim their devotion to secularism insensible to the contradiction they present. The history of Christian religious obsession with Palestinian real estate goes back in time to the Crusades, if you will, as its premier manifestation. Over the centuries, however, the obsession took on a more Zionist format, whereby instead of Christian Europe going to the trouble of wresting the Holy Land from the “Mussulmans” it was envisioned that the task could instead be sub-contracted to the Jews thereby achieving prophecy while getting rid of a despised minority at the same time. As ably documented by Mohameden Ould-Mey, Protestant Europe in particular developed an active ideology of Christian Zionism long before the current American strain so belligerently and psychotically exemplified by Pat Robertson. During the Reformation, English Protestants began stressing, as Ould-Mey points out, “the Palestinian origins of Christianity, the Old Testament, the Biblical Israelites and Jerusalem in order to reduce the pretensions and claims of Roman Catholicism”. [4] The religious restructuring that took place involved replacing the Pope with the bible as ultimate spiritual authority, which theological shift is consonant with the Reformation’s retribalization of religious universalism, giving it a nationalized and mercantilized cast. In the resultant religious-cum-mercantile cult, the individual’s bottom line and/or nationality became the true, worldly measure of God’s grace and constituted a visible sign of the believer’s qualification for eternal life or eternal hellfire. The concept of covenanted biblical land also fits seamlessly with the rising capitalist age, for what is a covenant but a binding business contract issued by the deity? Protestants “demanded geography” and saw Palestine as the property named in a holy business contract to which, although the original signatories were Jews, they as a cult were now qualified to sign. To assure its success, capitalism necessitated not only disciplining the means of production, social relations, education and sexuality but also spirituality. Protestantism provided an ideal spiritual disciplinary tool; for nothing disciplines so much as contractual bulleted points and sub clauses conveying an unspoken legal threat by an all-powerful deity should the signatories fail to meet the terms therein. The Judaic concept of chosen-ness was also updated by Calvin’s concept of the elect. The Reformation drained away frivolous concern with pomp, ritual and contemplation, substituting instead a focus on personal market success and a spirituality embodied in an actual, worldly piece of real estate, all of which assisted the formation of a national, capitalist, bordered state. We are instructed in Fox’s Book of Martyrs (1517), that the only “luving” God is the English God. Thus was spirituality given a passport and the resultant national deity hoisted to a position above those of other nations, most particularly that brie-eating, wine-swilling Papist deity. This sentiment has echoed repeatedly down the centuries amongst Protestant jihadis; the repellant General Boykin who battled Muslims in Somalia was surely channeling John Fox when he declared: "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God". When British imperial ambition, which coveted strategic control of Palestine and its surrounds, combined with the aforementioned theological developments, the holy territorial obsession was refined yet further. As Ould-Mey documents (and for which he was excoriated by Zionist and Israeli organizations for daring to document the Christian origin of Zionism) the idea of the return of European Jewry to Palestine as colonists -- not only to fulfill prophecy but also to provide a settler population to serve as Britain’s local thugs – began to be widely circulated. Long before Herzl was born, a nascent Christian Zionism was embodied by the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews established in 1809 with a prospectus that cheerfully reveals both its Zionist and anti-Semitic intent:
Given the long history of Christian Zionism, the obsession with Palestinian real estate has only infected Jews comparatively recently but like all viruses has perhaps increased its virulence with transmission. As the 19th century progressed, western pilgrims -- flush with discretionary income spun from the wages of empire -- began to pour into Palestine; European imperial designs on the Ottoman Empire sharpened using Palestine as a wedge and the Ottoman rulers of Palestine’s sanjaks began to sense a threat. The Grand Vizier Fuad Pasha appears to have grasped the abnormality of European interest and is said to have declared in 1865: “I shall never concede to these crazy Christians any road improvement in Palestine as they would then transform Jerusalem into a Christian madhouse.” [6] This flood of largely British and American travelers produced an extraordinary outpouring of travel literature as many pilgrims, suffused with western conceit and religious exaltation, felt compelled upon their return to write a book describing every detail of their journey, every religious ecstasy. This corpus of literature which has no equal in time or geography anywhere provides not so much a source of accurate information on conditions in Palestine as it opens a window on both western imperial designs and religious derangement as well as the absolute sense of ownership of Palestine felt by the authors of these accounts. Like many peasant societies, Palestinian peasantry regarded the extreme among the religion-besotted travelers as “simples” (basiteen) and treated them with compassion and liberality, unaware of the danger they represented. Khalid Masha’al of the recently victorious Hamas indicated that perhaps Palestinians now understand the element of madness they are facing: “We shall never recognise the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil in order to atone for somebody else's sins or solve somebody else's problem”. Western progressives must understand, expose and combat the pernicious role their religion has in creating and maintaining the injustice and violence committed against the Palestinians. A diseased faith The so-called Jerusalem Syndrome in which the sufferer exhibits “a large variety of extreme and excited behaviors and anxiety states” while in the environs of the Holy Land was said to have been first diagnosed by a Jerusalem psychiatrist in the 1930s. Psychiatric hospitals in Israel report hundreds of cases among visitors each year. But the largely Protestant phenomenon of “religious excitement” had been identified long before. The “popular error” of Millerism in mid-19th century America was regarded as so aberrant that the worst affected sufferers were confined to insane asylums. In 1844 the first issue of the American Journal of Insanity (later the American Journal of Psychiatry) devoted an article to religious insanity or “diseased faith”. [7] An end-time obsession based on numerical calculations, Millerism was described as a mania of which "the subject is momentous, the time fixed for the final consummation of all things so near at hand, and the truth of all sustained by unerring mathematics" and which the author ranked above even yellow fever and cholera as a threat to public health. However, what was once deemed a disease is now utterly mainstream, “hunger for the absolute” is politically correct. Dispensationalism or belief in the Rapture is today a thoroughly respectable policy-maker and money-maker; its acolytes and toadies occupy or influence many of the highest seats of power in the United States. The psychology of “diseased faith” lies beyond the scope of this essay. However, I would suggest that a belief system which grants exemption from ordinary societal rules and innate human inhibitions by a concept of being “elect” or “chosen” might well induce a state whereby violent ravings seem perfectly appropriate. Certainly the stress of not achieving worldly manifestation of one’s hoped-for chosen-ness (financial failure, appearance of the messiah) could conceivably lead to depression or psychosis in a susceptible individual. A conceit of exceptionalism could likewise feed a tendency to assign blame outside the elect self, for how could someone elect possibly be culpable? The peculiar American phenomenon of “going postal” is perhaps bound up in this pervasive religious sensibility. Baruch Goldstein in Hebron and Michael Dennis Rohan at al-Aqsa are notable examples of religious postal behavior. Zionism and Protestantism promote a belief in the exceptional self/group which encourages the view that the external, non-elect Other is the cause of all problems faced. The list of Others thus imagined is endless, but they are interchangeable as circumstances dictate: Anti-Semites, illegal immigrants, Hitler, suicide bombers, “red menace” (historically), weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaeda, black welfare mothers, “Ay-rabs”, pedophiles, gangsta rappers, even one’s ex-spouse. The individual and group ego is thus absolved of responsibility by simply Otherizing the problem. Among the flood of British and American travelers to Palestine in the 19th century were not only sufferers from Jerusalem Syndrome but those seeking relief from their demons or grief by placing themselves in therapeutic proximity to “their” holy real estate. A premier example of this would be the well-known case of Americans Horatio and Anna Spafford who, after losing four children in the sinking of the SS Ville de Havre in 1873, sold all their belongings and relocated to Palestine to await the Messiah. The Spaffords, who epitomize the fusion of personal grief, religious real estate obsession and American-style entrepreneurialism, founded the American Colony in Jerusalem that, although seemingly a benign religious foundation, was nevertheless a colonizing enterprise. Our Jerusalem (note the possessive “our”) by Bertha Spafford Vester exudes an ownership sensibility and is a veritable casebook of Palestine’s function as psych ward for western Christians and Jews unable to cope with their problems in their home country. Vester describes case after case of individuals and religious groups setting up residence in Palestine to enact their private religious vision, sometimes deranged, sometimes "rational". [8] Another mental health pilgrim to Palestine was none other than American literary giant Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, which narrative is thick with biblical references and a sort of gloomy Calvinism. Melville’s wife Elizabeth described her husband’s deteriorating mental state: “We all felt anxious about the strain on his health in Spring of 1853…his health being impaired by too close application”. Nathaniel Hawthorn further detailed the author’s “neuralgic complaints in his head and limbs” brought about by “too constant literary occupation…and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind”. [9] After the success of Moby Dick, Melville appeared to suffer from writer’s block, his sanity questioned by friends, neighbors and relatives alike. The result of Melville’s sojourn in Palestine and Egypt in 1857, during which he suffered “epiphanies and panics” while ruminating on ancient history, Yahweh and his overbearing father, was the critically unsuccessful poem Clarel. Featuring a good deal of tortuous religious contemplation, the interminably long poem also contains some startling Zionist themes, including Zionist colonists in Palestine and a love affair with a Jewess. [10] That the trip and subsequent poem were Melville’s form of therapy seems evident. In a less tortured but similar vein the popular 19th century American painter Edward Church undertook a trip with his wife to Palestine and Syria during 1867-1868 to escape the grief attendant upon the deaths of two children. Upon returning, Church turned his New York estate on the Hudson River into an orientalist confection ornamented with Arabian and biblical motifs. The Churches, like Melville and the Spaffords, undertook their Palestine pilgrimage seeking solace from grief and despair, instinctively mapping an itinerary to a land considered their own by dint of religious affiliation. The crowd of western travelers in Palestine throughout the 19th century came because they regarded the space of Palestine with an innate sense of religious and imperial ownership. They sought its environs not only when their psyches were troubled or grief overwhelming but also simply to imprint their ownership on the sacred space. It could be suggested that in the wake of the Holocaust, European Jews likewise looked to “their” covenanted sacred space to salve their post-war psychic problems which were certainly not inconsiderable. In all cases, the sense of ownership was automatic and unquestioned by scarcely anyone within the larger Judeo-Protestant and European communities. Palestine was, after all, simply a piece of real estate deeded by a contract that not only carried no expiration date but to which the Palestinians could never be signatories. The scholar as terrorist Diseased faith does not always present extreme symptoms of delusional ravings, violent behavior or moody depression. Western obsession with Palestinian real estate and its intrinsic irrationality is not confined to the psychotic layman or depressed believer. The inviolability of geographic Palestine as covenanted biblical land extends beyond perfervid dispensationalists and mainstream Judeo-Christians straight into the groves of academe, to those practitioners of scholarship who regard themselves complacently as paragons of objectivity. The depth and breadth of this obsession in its scholarly form provides a formidable shield to the Israeli state, in spite of its blatantly racist construct carrying out a slow and steady genocide, as the failed academic boycotts of Israel thus far have proved. A singular example of how the western academy closed ranks against one “heretical” theory provides, if nothing else, a bit of comic relief to grim Zionist zealotry. The academy’s reaction in this case reveals the extent to which the concept of Palestine as eternal sacred space has gripped western political consciousness even in a so-called academic setting. There ensured a full-throttle effort marshaled to suppress the mere suggestion that Old Testamentary events might just possibly have taken place in another geographic location altogether. In 1985 the Lebanese scholar Kemal Salibi published a book with the arresting title “The Bible Came from Arabia”. Wielding detailed convincing linguistic and geographic analysis, Salibi proposed that scenes of Old Testament action took place not in Palestine, but rather in the West Arabian highlands of ‘Asir hard by the Red Sea. Salibi’s serendipitous discovery of an inordinately high concentration of Biblical place names in a narrow portion of the ‘Asir region and the astounding degree that the coordinates for these Arabian sites corresponded to those plotted by Old Testament action led him, a proper historical sleuth if ever there was one, to investigate further. [11] That biblical action was historically sited in Arabia is not even a particularly new idea, as Salibi points out; ancient Arabic literature and texts contain numerous mentions of “Israelites” as a West Arabian people and several 19th century orientalists posited an Arabian biblical location until, as we have seen, it was supplanted with the more politically and religiously advantageous focus on Palestine as Protestantdom’s Holy Land. Salibi very reasonably states that further research, including archeological investigation, must be pursued in order to prove or disprove his thesis and invites the scholarly community so to do. Biblical scholars have long puzzled over the historicity of biblical events because the names and the coordinates as they exist in geographic Palestine simply do not fit biblical narrative. A group of scholars known as minimalists who view the bible as imaginative narrative rather than history have lately emerged precisely because of the paucity of verifiable biblical sites in Palestine. However, it is significant that although scholars and archaeologists have continued to argue over the vagueness of Palestinian biblical geography, they nevertheless almost unanimously refused to consider any heretical suggestion from “outside their closed circle”. Salibi writes: “The one factor that appears to have united these scholars since 1984 has been my own suggestion that the Bible need not have come from Palestine at all, and that one might seriously entertain the possibility that its origin is West Arabian”. [12] What is certain is that after more than a hundred years of archeological excavation only a handful of biblical place names have been identified in Palestine and, moreover, many of these names were bestowed either by religious travelers (themselves besotted with the sacred real estate motif) or western archaeologists and scholars verifying them for religious reasons of their own. In spite of the PR campaign in the 1950s-60s which featured the uplifting image of muscular, tanned Israelis engaged en masse in the wholesome hobby of biblical archaeology in their spare time to “rediscover” their roots, verifiable archaeological discoveries linking biblical events to Palestinian real estate have been, in a word, negligible. The Israeli mania for amateur archaeology should therefore rest in its proper place: A desperate collective attempt to “prove” claims to stolen land and thus salve the group conscience. Salibi’s thesis leaked in advance of its publication and so alarmed theologians and scholars that a preemptive strike was issued in 1984 in which a certain James Sauer, bearing the sonorous title of President of the American Schools of Oriental Research, lashed out in a childish dismissal of the sort favored these days by Fox News punditry. “By dropping all the vowels and using only consonants,” grumbled Professor Sauer, “I bet you could find the same place names as far away as Egypt or even Africa, and then conclude that ancient Jerusalem was really in Nairobi”. Salibi invited the good professor to demonstrate the ease of his contention by locating ancient Jerusalem in the Kenyan capital or anywhere else in the world, which of course Prof. Sauer declined so to do. [13] Salibi’s heretical proposition was immediately and furiously attacked by the denizens of the closed circle and beyond. The most eager among Salibi’s critics was the SOAS academic Tudor Parfitt. In the Sunday Times of 1985, Parfitt’s rebuttal screamed under the headline “Salibi Hijacks Israel”, thereby birthing the useful notion of the scholar as terrorist which has since been applied to such great advantage in American academia. [14] It seems at first astounding that, apart from the attacks, Salibi’s thesis did not engender any serious follow-up research. But the inviolability of Palestine as the fixed and unchanging theater of the bible is apparently not to be questioned, not only by rank and file of believers and self-proclaimed secularist but by scholars as well. On basis of geographic coordinates, place names and brilliant linguistic analysis Salibi built a strong case for the ‘Asir region of the Arabia Peninsula as the true backdrop for biblical “action”. Were the spirit of enlightenment not so completely moribund in the west, one might expect that such a thesis would have become the subject of further research and excavation at the very least. [15] The inability of western monotheists to even consider the possibility that biblical events took place outside of the sacred site as specified by terms of the contract seems absurd. The only possible explanation for such arrant irrationality can be the dreaded dead influence of that map of the Holy Land on the wall of the religious classroom representing the overwhelming political, religious and psychic importance of locating biblical events in a single piece of real estate, now and forever, amen. This religious crotchet -- an irrational and widespread ownership belief in God-bestowed real estate -- provides a sort of force field that prevents clear thinking about Israel and Zionism on all levels. Throughout the realm of Judeo-Protestantdom we find everyone --secular progressives, ordinary Christians, dispensationalists, Zionists (from the so-called Left Zionists to the Shas party adherents), erudite scholars -- completely unable to utter the phrases “Palestinian right of return” or “secular democratic state”, because of the fixed belief in a piece of religious real estate. Salibi’s dangerous thesis was not only actively opposed by Zionists and their shills, but also by mainstream academics who reenacted a sort of Mennonite shunning against him precisely because he threatened the sacrosanct covenant, the implacable location of biblical events in geographic Palestine. In no other area of the world does this crotchet with its high saturation level throughout the population of the aggressor nations come into play in such a tangible and ultimately lethal manner. Nevertheless, the delicious image of swaying Hasidim, armed Gush Emunim, phalanxes of American dispensationalists clad in plaid shorts and baseball caps flanked by a troop of liberal Protestant ministers brandishing their Testaments, all jostling one another for rights to holy elbow room in the ‘Asir highlands of the Arabian peninsula while the Wahhabis nervously watch from the sidelines biting their fingernails, does not fail to elicit a smile at the poetry that can surely be derived from justice. [16] J A Miller is an American activist grandmother who lived and studied in the Middle East for many years. She maintains a blog at www.secularavatar.blogspot.com and may be contacted at jsec_miller@hotmail.com.
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