The Myth of Israeli Innocence – Part One
Part One
Part One – A Land Without People for a People Without Land
The people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel than any other nation upon the globe. – Thanksgiving sermon by Massachusetts minister Abiel Abbot, 1799
The more invested you are in America’s own founding myth, the more you’re going to find Israel’s founding myth appealing. – Peter Beinart
I don’t expect to convince anyone of anything. You have your own strong opinions by now. But I would like you to consider this story in a mythological context, from which it may be possible to see more clearly. At times, we’ll see the word “myth” in its usual meaning of something false. But mostly, I invite you to see it as the stories we tell ourselves to know who we are. In the 21st century, when most of the old guideposts to understanding where we stand in the world have disappeared, the one thing we fall back upon is stories. We often tell them about other people, but they are always attempts to know ourselves. The core of these narratives may not be a pretty picture, but that is the work we are meant to do.
In 1948, only three years after the end of World War Two, Israeli forces led by future Prime Minister Menachem Begin massacred 110-250 Palestinian civilians at a village called Deir Yassin.
Seventy-eight years later, the testimonies by survivors (“I saw a fair number of corpses...mostly women and old men”) are difficult for us to process. Afterwards, the area became part of Givat Shaul, a West Jerusalem neighborhood.
Five years after the massacre, Israel opened its Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem on the Mount of Remembrance. Visitors who come there to learn about or to mourn the Holocaust look out directly at what was once called Deir Yassin, just 2,000 feet away, contained within the grounds of the (Jewish-only) Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center. The world-renowned museum to memory is just a short walk from a place where memory has nearly been erased. Just to the north is Mevaseret Zion, the site of another memorial, to James Jesus Angleton, about whom we’ll learn later.
This essay series is not really about history; it’s about how history reflects mythology. It’s about how we create the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, how we call these stories “history” and how we choose to ignore other stories. It’s about how Biblical myth influenced the myth of America, and how this myth, in turn, influenced the various narratives that have determined how we’ve thought about Israel for over 75 years. For background, I invite you to become familiar with some of my other writings on the myth of American innocence.
Learning how the myth of Israeli innocence is intimately connected with our own may help us approach this question: As the U.S. government and all the major media have consistently maintained, were the terrible events of October 7th, 2023 completely unprovoked? In trying to excavate these issues fairly, I’ll be quoting many Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian writers. We begin with mythically tinged words. Historian Karen Armstrong writes:
…a crusading enthusiasm is not only embedded deeply in the American identity and crucially formative in American history, but also…there is a natural American affinity with Zionism…like the Zionists, the Pilgrim Fathers were fleeing oppression in Europe…America, like Israel later, was a country born out of suffering in Europe…
When 15th-Century European explorers encountered the “new world,” the power of myth determined their impressions of its indigenous inhabitants. From the start, these invaders and colonizers – indeed, almost all Europeans – were already so attached to a form of collective innocence that they could honestly speak of “discovering” lands and the people who lived there, people who, from their own point of view, certainly didn’t need to be “discovered”.
How to explain these beings? Since there could be no alternative creation story (as we find in most cultures other than those derived from the Bible), then they must have originally migrated from the Old World. It was impossible to believe that they were not descendants of the first Adam by way of Noah and the Ark. Learned theologians argued that they were a lost tribe, one of the dregs and refuse of the lost posterity of Adam. Protestants debated whether they had souls.
Some argued that they were children, to be protected and civilized, while others invoked Aristotle to describe them as “natural slaves”, set apart by God to serve those born for more lofty pursuits. Columbus initially wavered between the projection of the “noble savage” (innocent, generous and childlike) and its opposite (sub-human and treacherous). Quickly, the latter won out. To most of the invaders, especially the English Puritans who settled in the north, these “Indians” were shameless, naked fornicators and idolaters who inhabited “…a waste and howling wilderness, where none inhabited but hellish fiends, and brutish men that Devils worshipped”.
However, like any narrative that does not arise organically from people indigenous to the land, this one is rife with contradictions, and they relate directly to our American story. Historians Charles Segal and David Stine make the Biblical comparison:
For the Puritans, they were primarily the villains in a sacred drama, counterpart of the heathen tribes that Joshua conquered, children of the Devil who tempted Christ in the desert, forerunners of the legions of darkness that would gather at Gog and Magog for a last furious but futile battle against the elect.
Ultimately, it was their notions of ownership that condemned them. Few native tribes had any concept of private property. In maintaining the land collectively, they were the original red communists. “They are fit to be ruled,” wrote Columbus; they could be trained to be industrious slaves. When this prediction proved unrealistic, the Spaniards and later the English resorted to genocide – mass murder – and eventually to large scale importation of Africans. Some compared the Natives who resisted them with the Amalekites and the Philistines of the Old Testament.
The comparison had some merit, in that Palestinian peasants did hold their most productive lands communally well into the late 19th century (the Musha system). Both their Ottoman rulers and the British who succeeded them made great legal efforts to enclose and partition these lands (as the English Lords had done to their own peasantry in the 16th century).
The Europeans in America were generating a new version of an ancient mythology. And this story was based on an idea about land: empty land. The land itself was full of potential. However, wrote John Locke, “…land that is left wholly to nature is…waste.” This, to Puritan thinkers, was sinful. And if land was not completely wasted, then sharing of the land (to the budding capitalist mentality) was nearly as bad, since both the Puritan and the capitalist had elevated the radically separate individual (and his property rights) to the highest level.
In 1452 Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which authorized Portugal to conquer and enslave Saracens and pagans. Further bulls determined that European powers could claim land not inhabited by Christians. France, Spain and England would also use this “Doctrine of Discovery” to justify their claims on the New World.
As early as the 1570s, allegorical personifications of “America” as a female nude appeared in European art. “Virgin” land evokes fantasies of defloration. Sir Walter Raleigh was quite clear about that: Guiana “…hath yet her maydenhead.” Robert Cushman, an early Puritan, wrote in 1622:
As the ancient patriarchs therefore removed from straiter places into more roomy, where the land lay idle and waste, and none used it, though there were dwelt inhabitants by them…so it is lawful now to take a land which none useth...
Seven years later, John Winthrop sermonized, “…who knows but that God hath provided this place to be a refuge for many whom he means to save out of the general calamity…”
Naïve as it may seem, this is deliberately constructed mythic language. The indigenous people had, of course, worked the land for eons. Indeed, since the vast majority were already farming the land, particularly the best land, this forced the English to construct stereotypes which portrayed Indians primarily as hunter-gatherers. Eventually – thanks to 19th-century mythmakers – most Americans and Europeans would picture them only as pony-riding, headdress-wearing nomads of the western plains, the classic savages who swooped down to attack innocent pioneers. This was the earliest appearance of the myth of American innocence.
And the land was hardly empty. The pre-1492 population of the Western Hemisphere is now estimated at over 100 million (although by 1620 the Pilgrims would discover that most of coastal New England had been decimated by European-borne diseases).
But why were these beings so dangerous? The answer, to the English, was that they might infect the newcomers with their evil ways. Since neither the Biblical Hebrews nor the Europeans found unpopulated lands, the settler colonization projects required that they develop rationalizations of how those people did not deserve their lands – Philistines because they were pagan idolaters and Native Americans because they did not own land privately. So, the settlers saw both groups as savages, barbarians, barely human. This stereotyping was necessary for the whites to see themselves as superior.
If the land was empty of anyone of value, it was easy to slide into the next fiction: perhaps there really were no people there at all. Or if they were there, another myth – the idea of human progress – demanded that they be removed. Once the invaders internalized these notions, anything, including genocide, became possible, acceptable, inevitable and eventually quite logical.
Both groups of invaders could now perceive the indigenous people as lacking any merit. In Protestant terms, their victims were guilty of original sin and therefore deserved to suffer. And the whites could resolve the contradiction of victim/chosen people by seeing themselves as the innocent targets of unprovoked attack (otherwise known later as “popular resistance”) but selected by God to multiply and be fruitful. To use Protestant terms again, the whites were among the elect.
To justify these unprovoked military invasions, Christians (they would not call themselves “white” until the mid-1600s) needed to differentiate themselves from these people. The way to do this was to further elaborate an ideology that was already a deeply ingrained notion of the racialized “Other” in the European mind. In Chapter Four of my book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence, I show how this projection of our own minds allows us to believe in both our own innocence – and the inherent evil of others.
Read Part Two here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-190532297