“Jews
traditionally hear the story of the Amalek ambush and God’s decree
that
they be eliminated on the Shabbat service before the holiday of Purim.
[Professor]
Shanes said it is perhaps the most important of all Torah readings”.
The Biblical story of Amalek evoked by Netanyahu -
ABC listen
In one of the most controversial cases to come
before the International Court of Justice, South Africa has accused Israel of
committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel strongly rejects the
claim as a "blood libel."
In its argument,
South Africa points to a violent story in the Hebrew Bible, in which God
commands the Israelites to wipe out the people of Amalek. It’s a story Israel's
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has evoked since the attack by Hamas on
October 7. Why is this ancient story powerful in modern Israel – and a key part
of the court case?
Professor Atalia Omer specialises
in Jewish and Israeli history and politics at the University of Notre Dame in
the US.
Program: The
Biblical story of Amalek evoked by Netanyahu
Source:ABC Radio National|Program:The Religion and Ethics Report
Wed 24 Jan 2024 at
4:00pmWednesday 24 Jan 2024 at 4:00pm
The Spirit of Amalek and the War on Israel - ICEJ
There is an ancient hatred – even a demonic spirit
– at work which shares these exact aspirations. It manifested itself repeatedly
through the descendants of Amalek, and eventually infected many other peoples
as well. This vicious Spirit of Amalek arose once more on October 7th.
Rabbinic literature presents Amalek as the arch enemy of the Jewish people.
Today, we call it violent antisemitism.
Noah Lanard, for
his part, will warn of (2023):
The Dangerous History Behind Netanyahu’s Amalek
Rhetoric – Mother Jones
The Dangerous History Behind Netanyahu’s Amalek
Rhetoric
His recent biblical reference has long been used by the Israeli
far right to justify killing Palestinians.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
said that Israelis were united in their fight against Hamas, whom he described
as an enemy of incomparable cruelty. “They are committed to completely
eliminating this evil from the world,”
Netanyahu said in
Hebrew. He then added: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our
Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
There are more than 23,000 verses in the Old
Testament. The ones Netanyahu turned to, as Israeli forces launched their
ground invasion in Gaza, are among its most violent—and have a long history of
being used by Jews on the far right to justify killing Palestinians.
As others quickly pointed out, God commands King
Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek, a rival
nation to ancient Israel. “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet
Samuel tells Saul.
“‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid
them as they came up from Egypt.
Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy
all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women,
children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
Forty-seven percent of Israeli Jews said in a poll conducted last month that Israel
should “not at all” consider the “suffering of the civilian Palestinian
population in Gaza” in the next phase of fighting.
The Amalek
reference is one of many comments by Israeli leaders that serve to help justify
a devastating response to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7 that took the
lives of more than 1,400 people in Israel. A member of the Knesset has called for a second Nakba, in reference
to the expulsion of Palestinians that Israel carried out in its 1948 war with
Arab neighbors. A military spokesperson said about Israel’s initial airstrikes
that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
More than 9,000 people in Gaza have now been killed,
including more than 3,700 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
“Saul’s
failure to kill every Amalekite posed
an
existential threat to the Jewish people”.
A spokesperson for
UNICEF now says that Gaza is a “graveyard for
thousands of children” and a “living hell for everyone else.” Forty-seven
percent of Israeli Jews said in a poll conducted last month
that Israel should “not at all” consider the “suffering of the civilian
Palestinian population in Gaza” in the next phase of fighting.
Casting the enemy
as Amalek reinforces that attitude.
Joshua Shanes, a professor of Jewish Studies at the College of
Charleston, explained that the biblical animosity toward the Amalekites stems
from what is described as the merciless ambush they launched against
vulnerable Israelites making their way to the promised land. The attack
leads God to tell Moses to wipe out Amalek. Hundreds of years later, Saul
nearly fulfills the command by killing all Amalekite men, women, and children.
But he spares their king, who keeps his people barely alive by having a child.
Many more generations later, one of his descendants, the villain Haman, goes on
to develop a plot to kill all the Jews living in exile under a Persian ruler.
The lesson, when read literally, is clear: Saul’s failure to kill every
Amalekite posed an existential threat to the Jewish people.
Jews traditionally hear the story of the Amalek
ambush and God’s decree that they be eliminated on the Shabbat service before
the holiday of Purim. Shanes said it is perhaps the most important of all Torah
readings.
Rabbi
Jill Jacobs—the
head of T’ruah, a rabbinical human rights organziation—said that rabbis
generally agree that Amalek no longer exists, and that references to it do not
provide a morally acceptable justification for attacking anyone. “The
overwhelming history of Jewish interpretation is to interpret it
metaphorically,” Jacobs said, explaining that one common approach is to see it
as a call to stamp out evil inclinations within ourselves.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs said that rabbis generally agree
that Amalek no longer exists, and that references to it do not provide a
justification for attacking anyone.
Nevertheless, Jacobs said that it remains common
for Israeli extremists to view Palestinians as modern-day Amalekites. In 1980,
the Rabbi Israel Hess wrote an
article that used the story of Amalek to justify wiping out Palestinians. Its
title has been translated as “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah,” as well as
“The Mitzvah of Genocide in the Torah.”
In his 1997
book, The Vanishing American Jew, celebrity attorney and Harvard
professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz made a point of expressing his disgust about
the article and the idea that Palestine was Amalek. He asked, “How can anyone
distinguish this incitement to murder from similar incitements by Muslim
fundamentalists who quote the Koran as authority for genocide against Jews?”
The Brooklyn-born
extremist Baruch Goldstein also saw Palestine as Amalek. In 1994, he
slaughtered 29 Muslims praying at a mosque in Hebron, a city in the occupied
West Bank that is sacred to Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried out the
massacre on Purim, one week after he would have heard the biblical
retelling of the command to wipe out a rival nation. As the journalist
Peter Beinart and others have written, the timing was not a
coincidence.
Goldstein’s grave
has become a pilgrimage site for the
Israeli far right. His tomb says he died of “clean hands and pure heart.”
Goldstein’s admirers have included Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s current minister
of national security. For Purim, a holiday on which Jews sometimes wear
costumes, Ben-Gvir dressed as Goldstein on multiple
occasions in his youth. He kept a picture of Goldstein in
his living room until 2020. He has an extensive criminal record that includes
convictions for supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism.
Shanes
said that it was “incredibly dangerous and irresponsible and deliberate”
for Netanyahu to invoke Amalek, given the ongoing war and [how it] is
understood by the far right. He added that calling the enemy Amalek will make
it more difficult for people who try to defend the position that Israel is not
“involved in a crime against humanity or a genocidal act.”
Beinart, an
Orthodox Jew who previously edited the New Republic and
now writes on Substack, expressed similar
concern.
“The wisdom of
rabbinic tradition was to declare that we no longer know who Amalek is because
that restrains the genocidal plain meaning of the Biblical text,” he wrote in
email. “So in claiming that he knows who Amalek is, [Netanyahu] is undoing the
moral scaffolding created by Jewish tradition and asserting a Biblical
literalism that is alien to the Judaism of the last two thousand years and,
given the military power at his disposal, is frankly terrifying.”
Jacobs stressed
that Netanyahu saying Amalek does not mean that Israel is carrying out
genocide. She said that while Hamas and Israel have committed war crimes,
Israel’s actions do not meet the international standard of genocide. “It’s not
a term that should be thrown around casually at all,” she explained,
particularly against a people that have experienced genocide. Instead, Jacobs
sees Netanyahu, who she described as “totally right-wing and incompetent,”
referring to Amalek as yet another case of him “being irresponsible and
inciting.” (Netanyahu has previously compared the prospect of a nuclear Iran to
Amalek.)
Harvard professor
emeritus Alan Dershowitz told me this week that he supported Netanyahu “100
percent” to the extent that the prime minister was equating Hamas with Amalek.
In a brief phone
call, Dershowitz told me this week that he supported Netanyahu “100 percent” to
the extent that the prime minister was equating Hamas with Amalek. When I
mentioned the command to kill Amalekite women and children, Dershowitz
responded, “There are other parts of the Bible that say the opposite; that you
can’t even destroy a fruit tree.” That is true, but Netanyahu did not cite
those parts of the Bible. Instead, he turned to something that the far right
has long used as a justification for genocide during a war in which some argue Israel is committing
genocide. (On Thursday, a group of United Nations experts said that Palestinians are at “grave
risk of genocide.”)
Shanes was not
convinced by Dershowitz’s defense that Hamas is Amalek.
For one, he
said, Amalek is clearly described as a nation, not a
political party. “If someone says, ‘I just mean the bad members of
the Palestinians. I mean Hamas…,’ that’s not the effect it has in the body
politic,” Shanes said. “The effect it has is, We have to wipe these
people out.”
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