Reading the Bible with the Eyes of the Canaanites: Neo-Zionism, Political Theology and the Land Traditions of the Bible (1967 to Gaza 2009)
In modern times, a whole range of colonial enterprises have used the Bible. The book of Joshua and other biblical texts evoking the exploits of ancient Israelites have been deployed in support of secular Zionism and settler colonisation in Palestine. The mega narratives of the Bible, however, appeared to mandate the ethnic cleansing and even genocide of the indigenous population of Canaan. This article argues that, with the rise of messianic Zionism since 1967, a Jewish theology of zealotocracy, based on the land traditions of the Bible, has emerged in Israel – a political theology that demanded the destruction of the so-called modern Canaanites; since 1967 fundamentalist rabbis have routinely compared the Palestinian people to the ancient Canaanites, Philistines and Amalekites, whose annihilation or expulsion by the ancient Israelites was predestined by a divine design. This article focuses on the politics of reading the Bible by neo-Zionists and examines the theology of the messianic current which embraces the paradigm of Jews as a divinely ‘chosen people’ and sees the indigenous Palestinians as no more than illegitimate squatters, and a threat to the process of messianic redemption; their human and civil rights are no match for the biblically-ordained holy war of conquering and settling the ‘Promised Land’.
From Divine Commandment to Political Act: The Eighteenth-Century Polemic on the Extermination of the Canaanites
The article discusses the ways in which eighteenth-century European writers treated the biblical account of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites and the massacre of its inhabitants. The legitimacy of Canaanite extermination was one of the most controversial historical-theological questions in the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters, as English Deists and other anti-clerical writers protested against the immorality of the extermination commandment. Conservative Bible scholars of the German historical-critical school, who attempted to defend the morality of the Bible, were forced to devise novel legal and theoretical tools in order to justify the conquest of the land by modern reasoning.
First Along the River: A Brief History of the U.S. Environmental Movement
Chapter 1: Philosophical Foundations Chapter 2: The 1400s through the 1700s: Inhabiting a New Land Chapter 3: The Early 1800s: Destroying the Frontier Chapter 4: The Late 1880s: Building an Industrial Nation Chapter 5: The 1900s through the 1930s: Beginnings of the Conservation Movement Chapter 6: The 1940s through the 1960s: Prelude to the Green Decade Chapter 7: The 1970s: The Conservation Movement Matures Chapter 8: The 1980s: A Conservative Backlash Chapter 9: The Early 1990s: Government Retrenchment and Public Apathy Chapter 10: The Environmental Movement in the Post-9/11 World Conclusion