In the midst of the "Black Lives Matter" protests that broke out in the United States and affected many countries, on Monday June 1, 2020, US President Donald Trump walked a short distance from the White House to St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, and stood outside while the Bible was raised high .

In her article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Rachel Haverlock, an academic specializing in religious studies at the University of Illinois, sees that this scene made the Bible seem like an icon of military nationalism in the hands of a man who did not read it and did not serve in the army, as she put it.

Haverlock discusses how the Bible, especially the Book of Joshua in the Old Testament, became a handbook for Jewish and Christian nationalists and the state violence they promoted.

In her article, she warns the United States not to follow in the footsteps of another country (Israel), as the Bible has been used to justify militant nationalism, and to launch a relentless attack on the societies under its control.

Religious or military text?

The author says that the Bible is not a military text in nature, and its interpretation as a peace or war note depends on the reader and the interpretation provided by religious and political leaders. Historically - this book has been denied by some of them.

This book dates back to a period of three decades from the death of Moses, peace be upon him, until the death of Joshua (Joshua) bin Nun, and the rabbinic translators largely rejected the imaginations of holy war and the Jewish apocalypse movements that this book embraced and usually ended with a bitter end.

Few of the book is read in the Jewish liturgy or cited in Jewish culture, but the Zionist movement and the early leaders of Israel found in it political inspiration to seize Palestinian land, demarcate its borders, and "cleanse it of the Canaanites."

The biblical book is used to demonstrate the Promised Land and the Chosen People of God, and the Zionist movement used it extensively in the 19th century to justify its occupation of the Palestinian land. Haverlock says that Zionism summoned the travel and read it to justify its wars, and "the vocabulary of Joshua’s book fed the dictionary of Jewish nationalism."

Ben-Gurion

The founder and first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) was a fanatic of Joshua’s travel in particular. He taught it in the Israeli army and held a regular study group in which the young elite created a travel-inspired culture that focused on an imagined national culture created from Religious text.

Ben-Gurion wanted to unify the immigrant population from corners of the earth through a national military culture infused with the Bible, an idea that lasted for nearly two decades until Israel occupied the Palestinian lands in the 1967 war and settlers set out to confiscate Palestinian lands while waving the book of Joshua.

In her book "The Joshua Generation: The Israeli Occupation and the Bible", Haverlock considers that the interpretations of the biblical text are linked to war and political reality as they are interpreted and adapted to justify certain national policies (Al-Jazeera)

The settlers and their supporters offered a very nationalistic interpretation of the Bible, with many taking God's promise to Joshua that "every spot you foot is yours" literally.

And they gave the West Bank settlements names of places in the book of Joshua, such as Gilgal, Gibeon, Ofra, and others.

The book of Joshua criticizes the Israeli tribes for failing to exterminate the inhabitants of the land allocated to them and completely displace them. Thus, a stream of settlers' thought confirms that "implementing" the complete Palestinian displacement, by means of mass transfer, will achieve the Bible and realize salvation for the entire land of Israel, according to this vision Jews who oppose this vision are seen as internal enemies of the people and the divine will.

The author affirms that these texts were inspired to justify Israel's wars against the Palestinian population, as well as the policies of occupation, militarization, siege, deprivation, and restrictions imposed on the Palestinians, “and now the right-wing government, which is supported by religious political parties in Israel and evangelical groups in America, seeks to embody its“ divine right ”in the West Bank. , Through annexation. "

For many decades, American support for the Israeli side relied primarily on geo-strategic foundations, especially during the Cold War period, but with the arrival of Donald Trump to power, the basis for supporting Israel became due to biblical and evangelical religious justifications, according to a previous report by Al-Jazeera Net.

The second half of the book and the novel

The author continues her studies of the Book of Joshua and says that those who have already read the Bible may reach the second half of the Book of Joshua, where it becomes clear that the "indigenous people" have not been eliminated, but are still neighbors who are largely indistinguishable from the "people of Israel."

In return, Joshua’s army vanishes and turns into a group of tribes, clans, and families who need the inhabitants of divided cities and the sharing of water.

This story is a counter-narrative of the previous militaristic ideas contained in the first half of the Book of Joshua, and the author considers that the second half of the story "unintentionally corrupts the national anger."

In the second half of Joshua, a whole set of affiliations - familial, tribal, regional and global - can be found that guided the ancient peoples, and this is a contradiction for those who wanted to form these identities into a single state and army, as the separation between the Israelites and the Canaanites was not achieved in the end nor justified by reality. Also.

The author concludes that the national reading of the Book of Joshua by "the politicized and offensive Christianity of the Bible leads to a cultural war supported by state violence."

Alternative reading

In her recent book by Princeton University Press titled "The Joshua Generation: The Israeli Occupation and the Bible," Haverlock examines "how the controversial Bible story of conquest and genocide became the founding story of modern Israel."

The book explains the centrality of the text of the "Book of Joshua" to modern Israeli politics and contemporary occupation, and reveals why Jews have long ignored the text that was invoked in conjunction with Israel's wars and its origins in the twentieth century, while critics of the occupation see travel celebrating the genocide.

The author sees in her book "The Book of Joshua" as evidence of the existence of a decentralized society consisting of tribes, clans, and families run by women, and believes that it fits the current situation, especially when various people share the diminishing resources of a scattered land.

The book also reveals how the leaders of Israel invoke the religious text to strengthen national cohesion, as it chronicles the unification of the population under a strong monarchy, and explains how the Israeli generals, politicians, and academics reformulated the story of the establishment of Israel in the language of Joshua, by recounting the story of a brutal invasion that united immigrants from different races and backgrounds!