Drive the indigenes out, enslave them, wipe them off the face of the Earth, the Old Testament commands us. Gamal Nkrumah decries the pernicious twin concepts of the Promised Land and Chosen People "The Hebrew Bible stands out for the way in which it sees the violence of both nature and human beings as part of earthly reality; the power of evil can be held in check only provisionally. It bluntly reports acts of violence, whereas in other ancient cultures (as René Girard has shown) violence is covered with a veil of silence, either mentioned only indirectly, seen through rose- tinted spectacles or exalted in myths," extrapolates Hans Kèng in his Islam: Past, Present and Future (American University in Cairo Press, 2007). The works Kèng refers to by Girard are Violence and the Sacred (1979) and The Scapegoat (1989). The Hebraic concepts of the "Promised Land" and the "Chosen People" were unique among the ancient peoples of the Middle East. The ancient Egyptians were convinced that their fertile land was the most bountiful place on earth. The people of Mesopotamia, too, were evidently content with their land. However, this is not quite the point. What is eerily disturbing is that the notion of exterminating the indigenous population in order to claim their land was justified and sanctioned by the Hebraic religion. This particular ideology set a dangerous precedent. In more recent centuries, with the rise of colonialism and the mass migrations from centre to periphery this entailed, the concept of massacring the "natives" was justified on biblical grounds. Slaughtering the Native Americans of the Western Hemisphere; the Australian Aboriginals; the indigenous peoples of southern Africa, Algeria, Kenya and other parts of the African continent which appealed to the European settler colonist -- all was justified by the Old Testament. Ironically today, the peoples of the former colonies look up to the metropolitan countries as their own "Promised Lands". At first in the Swinging Sixties, they were deliberately lured into European capitals as cheap labour. Half a century later, they are voluntarily risking their lives to storm Fortress Europe in search of greener pastures, in spite of the overt hostility of the descendants of the former colonial masters to the newcomers who are viewed in much the same way as the Philistines of the ancient Israelites. A central theme of the Bible is that upon their arrival in the Promised Land, the northern tribes of Israel were repeatedly punished because they did not wipe out the indigenous people. The southern tribes of Judah, on the other hand, were championed; they mercilessly massacred the indigenes. "In the Bible, the northern tribes are consistently depicted as weak-hearted failures, with a pronounced tendency to sinfulness. This is particularly clear in the book of Judges, where the individual tribes struggle with the idolatrous peoples around them," note Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in their masterpiece The Bible Unearthed. "Among the descendants of the twelve tribes of Jacob, only the tribes of Judah and Simeon succeeded in conquering all the Canaanite enclaves in their God-given inheritance. As a result, in the south there were no Canaanites left, no Canaanite women to marry and to be influenced by." Not only racial purity was upheld as the ideal, but even worse, the very act of exterminating the indigenes was cited as proof of their piety. "[The northern tribes] Benjamin, Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali, and Dan did not accomplish what they had to do; to finish off the Canaanites. As a result they would be tempted again and again," conclude Finkelstein and Silberman. This very ideology is used today by the Zionists to annihilate the Palestinian people. Genocide was a God-given right to reclaim the Promised Land -- a prerequisite and proof of piety and of a God-fearing nation. Indeed, the death this week of Ian Smith, was a grim reminder of the era of European settler colonialism in Africa. As a pilot in the Royal Air Force, he crashed his warplane in Egypt and sustained an eye injury and while it did not impair his vision of European superiority over Africans, it reinforced his determination to resist African majority rule. He declared unilateral independence from Britain and ruled the country with an iron-fist, buttressed by this very biblical idea of the white man's civilising mission and the thwarting of the aspirations of the indigenes. The Boers of South Africa, long before Smith, pioneered the very concept of wiping out and enslaving the indigenous peoples of southern Africa, inspired by their rigidly Protestant tradition, which is much more reliant on the Old Testament, much closer to its Judaic precursor, than the Catholic. They expressed their political ambitions in explicit biblical language. They, too, saw themselves as the Chosen People and the Africans were the Canaanites to be conquered. Africa was their Promised Land. Mind you, the harrowing experience of the natives in South and Central America doesn't say much for their Catholic rivals. Smith's Rhodesian Front and the Apartheid regime of the National Party of South mimicked the biblical Hebraic exploits in the Holy Land. The British settlers in Kenya and the French Pieds Noirs in Algeria also adopted the biblical logic, even if they did not quite acknowledge it officially. Kamal Salibi in his famous and highly controversial The Bible came from Arabia arrives at much the same conclusion. Salibi, a Lebanese Christian linguist and Emeritus Professor at the American University in Beirut, is also former director of the Amman-based Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies. "Among the known religions of the ancient Near East, Judaism stands in a category by itself; no attempt to explain its origins in terms of the religions of ancient Mesopotamia, Syria or Egypt has so far been truly successful, except at the level of mythical borrowings," Salibi notes. "According to the historical books of the Hebrew Bible, the Israelite kingdom was established largely at the expense of such communities as the Philistines and the Canaanites of the land. Defeated and demoralised by the Israelites in successive wars, these Philistines and Canaanites," observes Salibi, were sacrificed for the cause of YHWH, the Hebraic God. Worse, the victims were portrayed as the evil ones trying to corrupt the Israelites. According to Finkelstein and Silberman, recent archaeological developments have enabled scientists to better link the study of biblical texts and archaeological finds. "Much of the biblical narrative is a product of the hopes, fears and ambitions of the kingdom of Judah. The historical core of the Bible arose from clear political, social and spiritual conditions and was shaped by the creativity and vision of extraordinary women and men, without a doubt, but what is commonly taken for "history" -- the stories of the patriarchs, the Exodus, the conquest of Canaan, and the saga of the glorious united monarchy of David and Solomon -- is really "the creative expression of the religious reform movement that flourished in the kingdom of Judah in the Late Iron Age", and has much more to do with the ideology and worldview of the writers than any real historical events. The tragedy is that this very same ideology is at work today in a most brutish fashion. First and foremost is the untold suffering of the Palestinian people. In Gaza, in particular, under the pretext of its Hamas government, the most stringent economic sanctions have been applied. Palestinians go for months on end without receiving their wages, and are reduced to selling their furniture and wedding rings just to feed their families. According to World Bank figures 70 per cent of the 1.5 million Palestinians residing in Gaza are living below the poverty line. Some two thirds of 100,000 private sector workers and 165,000 public sector workers are out of jobs. Furthermore, tens of thousands of Palestinians who used to seek employment opportunities in Israel are now banned from working in Israel. It is in this context that we must consider the continued controversy over the excavation works of Israeli archaeologists, and the provocative speeches and actions of Israeli politicians hinting at the desecration of the Islamic holy sites in the name of reviving an ambiguous Hebraic legacy in Palestine. Ariel Sharon, the notorious former Israeli prime-minister, toured the compound with Jewish religious fanatics in 2000, sparking the riots of the Palestinians which became known as the second Intifada. Al-Haram Al-Qudsi Al-Sharif (Temple Mount) is considered the third holiest site in Islam after the Masjid Al-Haram in Mecca and the Masjid Al-Rasool in Medina. Since British colonial rule, the Hashemites in their capacity as descendants of the Prophet Mohamed, were granted guardianship of the Islamic holy sites in Palestine and Israel. To this day Al-Aqsa Mosque falls within the custodianship of the Jordanian Ministry of Al-Awkaf (Religious Endownments), even though strictly-speaking Jordan administered the West Bank only from 1948 to 1967. In February 2007, the Israeli Antiquities Authority started work on the construction of a new pedestrian footpath to Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Mosque is also supposedly the site of the temple of Solomon. "What Israel is doing in its practices and attacks against our sacred Muslim sites in Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa is a blatant violation that is not acceptable under any pretext," warned King Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. East Jerusalem, of course, was Jordanian territory until 1967 when the Israelis occupied the West Bank. Israeli provocations over Al-Aqsa Mosque took a turn for the worse this year when in May a group of religious Zionist rabbis entered the area, "knowingly and irresponsibly bringing a burning torch closer to the most inflammable hill in the Middle East," acknowledged an editorial in Ha'aretz. The incident divided the Israeli religious authorities. The hawks that advocated the permission of Jewish entry into the sacred Muslim site included rabbi Shear Yishuv HaCohen, the Chief Rabbi of Haifa, and rabbi Dov Lior, rabbi of Kiryat Arba. The doves who argued against Jews entering Muslim hallowed grounds included such political heavyweights as rabbi Yona Metzger, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, and rabbi Shlomo Amar, the Sefardi Chief Rabbi of Israel. In any case, even though Israeli archaeologists are prevented from excavating around the Al-Aqsa area, it was announced last month that Israeli archaeologists have found definitive proof of the temple of Jerusalem ostensibly built by King Solomon. In practice this means that in spite of the Wakf being granted full autonomy over the Islamic holy sites, Israeli archaeologists do manage to sneak into the area and to dig up evidence that supports the Zionist ideology of cleansing Palestine of its history and heritage. Salibi sets forth the theory that the original "Holy Land" was not Palestine, but in present-day Arabia, and that the events -- or proto-events -- of the Bible actually took place on the paradisic maritime slopes of the southwestern-most province of Asir. While reading a Saudi paper in 1977, examining it for place-names of non-Arabic origin in West Arabia, it struck him that he was looking "not just at place names in West Arabia but also at those of the Biblical Old Testament." Salibi justifies his theory by proving that linguistically many place names mentioned in the Old Testament actually are to be found in Asir today. "It is the persistent survival of place names that has made my toponymic analysis possible, providing in some instances greater insight into the geography of the Hebrew Bible than archeology ever could," Salibi explains. For example, the Jordan ( h-yrdn ) according to Salibi is not a river (Hebrew and Arabic nhr ) but the mountain range today called Sarat, running from Taif in southern Hijaz to Yemen. The Hebrew and Arabic root yrd meaning "descend" and hence h-yardn hzh means this escarpment or this ridge. Imagine what the Zionists would do if archeological excavations corroborate Salibi's theory: An Arabian Judah? All hell will be let loose as the Zionists come down on the Hejaz and Asir? The original "Promised Land"? Fathom the Armageddon that would ensue. But, this is a moot and hypothetical point for the time being. The essence of my argument is that there have historically been several "Promised Lands" in Africa, in the Americas, and in Australia. And, they are all peopled by settlers armed with a genocidal agenda to eliminate the indigenous people and dispossess them of their land. A convenient ideology is conjured up to cover up the criminal intention of land appropriation. "For centuries, Bible readers took it for granted that the scriptures were both divine revelation and accurate history, conveyed directly from God to a wide variety of Israelite sages, prophets, and priests. Established religious authorities, both Jewish and Christian, naturally assumed that the Five Books of Moses were set down in writing by Moses himself -- just before his death on Mount Nebo as narrated in the book of Deuteronomy," Finkelstein and Siberman state. "The first question was whether Moses could really have been the author of the Five Books of Moses, since the book of Deuteronomy describes in great detail the precise time and circumstances of Moses' own death," Finkelstein and Siberman note wryly. They infer that the Biblical narrators virtually invented the Chosen People ideology for expansionist purposes. This Hebraic Bible sharply contrasts with the New Testament, or Christian, vision of the fetishisation of sacred sites. Jesus is reported in the Gospel according to Mark to have told a Samaritan woman who asked him whether Jerusalem or the Samaritan holy shrine was found at Mount Gerazin, "Neither this Mount nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. But an hour is coming and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth." How much better would it have been for humanity if Christians had adopted the attitudes of the founder of their religion instead of harking back to the Hebraic example as the ideal?
