Christians worship two gods, Christ and Yahweh, but claim they are one. Certainly, the God of the Old Testament plays a secondary role in Christian consciousness. He remains behind the scenes. But he nevertheless pulls a number of strings. It was he who inspired the Christians to promise Palestine to the Jews in 1917 (by the British Balfour Declaration, preceded five months earlier by the French Cambon Declaration), and to give it to them in 1948.
There is a theory attributing geopolitical motives to the British: they needed Israel as a bridgehead in the Middle East, to control the Suez Canal. That's Chomsky's theory, and a blatant falsehood. From 1916, British foreign policy in the Middle East favored good relations with the Arab regimes they had set up in Arabia, Jordan and Iraq. The creation of a "Jewish home" in Palestine, leading predictably to the Jews' full takeover, was deeply upsetting to the Arabs, and conflicted with British Arab policy. That is why in May 1939, the British Government tried to get out of its commitment to the Zionists with a White Paper providing for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state within ten years. It stated:
His Majesty's Government believe that the framers of the Mandate in which the Balfour Declaration was embodied could not have intended that Palestine should be converted into a Jewish State against the will of the Arab population of the country. ... His Majesty's Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of the their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would indeed regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been given to the Arab people in the past, that the Arab population of Palestine should be made the subject of a Jewish State against their will.[1]It is a fact that the Balfour Declaration and its inclusion in the British Mandate created an inextricable dilemma that would ultimately be fatal to British-Arab relationships. The British could find no way out but to withdraw in 1948, frustrated and humiliated. They waited a year before recognizing the Jewish state.This historical detour was necessary to put to rest the theory that the British supported — even created, some say — Zionism out of geopolitical calculation. No. The immediate motive for the Balfour Declaration is well known: it was given to the Zionists in exchange for their dragging the United States into the war. Chaim Weizmann was frank about it. In 1941, he reminded Churchill that, "it was the Jews who in the last war actually helped to tip the scales in America in favor of Great Britain. They are ready to do it — and can do it — again." In return for giving Churchill a Second World War, he asked for only one thing: a Jewish state in Palestine, which Churchill was more than willing to give him[2]
There is a twin theory saying that the British supported Zionism for religious reasons: they saw it as a way to hasten the coming of Christ, who was waiting for the Jews to return to Palestine. This theory, favored by anti-Zionist Jewish authors, is not completely false, but it greatly exaggerates the factor of British "Dispensationalism", a trend more symptomatic than etiological. Blaming Dispensationalism for Zionism is a way of avoiding the root cause of the Christian world's support for Zionism.
Balfour was a Christian, that is enough. Truman was also a Christian — the Baptist kind — and arguably more so than Balfour. He did not particularly expect the return of Christ, but he had a soft spot for the biblical people, and that — plus two million bucks in a suitcase.[3] According to John Kennedy, as quoted by Gore Vidal in his preface to Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Two Thousand Years, Central Connecticut State University, 1994. — counted in his decision to recognize Israel within ten minutes. He was very moved to receive as a token of gratitude an authentic Torah scroll, presented to him by the first president of Israel, none other than Chaim Weizmann (who had declared at Versailles in 1919, "The Bible is our mandate").
The ultimate reason why the Christian world gave Palestine to the Jews is because the Christian world has always idealized biblical Israel. It is because Christians revere biblical Israel as the people created and loved by God that they allowed themselves to be seduced by the Zionist project of reviving Israel. Certainly, it was the ruling elites who made Israel. However, until very recently, there was no divorce between the elites and the people on this issue. Holding it as an indisputable truth, or at least as an acceptable notion, that God had created Israel in biblical times, European public opinion, both Catholic and Protestant, was rather well disposed towards a project which explicitly aimed to revive this same Israel.
For it is beyond discussion that modern Israel was conspicuously designed as a rebirth — almost a clone — of biblical Israel. It says so in its Declaration of Independence:
ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) - the Land of Israel] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom. Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland.Imagine if, instead of worshipping biblical Israel, Western civilization had learned to view biblical Israel as the archetypal sociopathic nation, and Jewish choseness as the most diabolical lie even imagined. If Western civilization had come to its senses before the twentieth century, Zionism would have gone nowhere. The very idea would have sent a shiver of horror across the whole Gentile population of Europe. This, actually, almost happened, as I will argue below.
Zionism is biblical from head to toe. If the statements of the Zionists themselves are not enough to convince us, then let's look at their actions: they have settled in biblical land, claim the biblical capital (Tel Aviv will not do), and give biblical names to the lands they have stolen; they resurrected the biblical language; they apply the biblical law of endogamy (mixed marriages are not recognized in Israel), as well as the biblical law of eighth-day circumcision (virtually all Jewish male babies are circumcised in Israel). What more do we need to admit what they keep saying: everything Zionist is biblical. We can even say that everything biblical is Zionist, as the two are so intertwined.
Pope Francis once said that, "Inside every Christian is a Jew." We can also say that inside every Christian is a Zionist. This applies not only to "Christian Zionists," who are self-consciously Zionist, but to Christians in general, who are Zionist to the extent that they are biblical. Christians found legitimate the rebirth of Israel as a nation in Palestine, and strongly disapproved of the Arabs who resented it. The Christian world is complicit in the creation of Israel. The Christian world is also complicit in the crimes of Israel. Consider those two points:
- Christians believe that ancient Israel had a divine right — nay, a divine duty — to steal land from Canaanites and massacre entire cities.
- Christians helped Jews to recreate Israel, on the assumption that they were the legitimate heirs of ancient Israel.
Christians today have a tendency to forget their collective responsibility in the genocidal madness of Israel. How do they do that? By trying to convince themselves that, "no, there's nothing biblical there." In a recent video, Colonel Douglas McGregor said in preamble to his otherwise masterly analysis:
Well, a lot of things that seem to be religious in character are often not purely religious but cultural, racial, and also involve political interests. So I'm not sure I would see everything through the biblical lens. I don't think that's necessarily a good answer.[4]The underlying syllogism is: "It's not religious, the Bible is a religious book, therefore it's not biblical." In reality, as I have often pointed out, our standard notion of "religious" is unsuitable for understanding the Jewish view of the Bible. When we say "religion," we mean "salvation religion," and by "salvation" we mean "individual salvation." But individual salvation is not an issue in the Torah. The only thing that matters is the salvation of Israel as a people. Only the people have a soul, a destiny, and immortality. The Jews swear they are a religion when it serves them (as did the Grand Sanhedrin convened by Napoleon), but Zionists dismissed that anyway, insisting that they are a nation and proving their ownership of Palestine with the Bible.
The Bible is therefore not for Jews a "religious" book in the Christian sense. It was the "portable homeland" of the Israelites before Zionism (in the words of Heinrich Heine), and it serves today as the roman national for Israelis, religious or not. Ben-Gurion, a professed atheist and bacon eater, yet a biblical prophet according to his biographer,[5] 1983.wrote in a telegram to the Israeli forces who conquered Sharm el-Sheikh in 1956:
"We can once more sing the song of Moses and the Children of Ancient Israel ... with the mighty impetus of all the IDF divisions you have extended a hand to King Solomon, who developed Eilat as the first Israelite port three thousand years ago..."[6]Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Six Day War, also a self-proclaimed atheist, titled his memoir Living with the Bible.
Israel's founders and today's Israelis view Israel through a "biblical lens." Christians used to see Israel through a "biblical lens," too. They created Israel through a biblical lens. They loved the film Exodus in 1960. It wasn't until 1967 that they began to mistrust the biblical lens. A little embarrassed, Christians now prefer to forget that they gave Palestine to the Jews because of the Bible, and they do not want to look at Israel through the biblical lens any more. As a result they only see the surface of Israel. They can neither comprehend nor predict what Israel is doing.
So let's put it this way: The Jews wrote a book that says God gave Palestine to the Jews, and Christians have taken that book seriously for two thousand years. By choosing Christianity, Western civilization has accepted everything written in this book written by the Jews: jealous God, chosen people, promised land, divine right to genocide, and so on. In doing so, Christendom granted the Jews immeasurable power. Granted, it did not give the Jews unlimited license to steal and kill: according to Christian doctrine, God was disappointed with the Jews and decided to unilaterally withdraw from the alliance, in order to constitute instead the Church — the community of people who, by choice or obligation, believe that the Jewish messiah Jesus will save them.
The Book that drives Israel insane
Netanyahu is mad, but he is mad with a biblical kind of madness, like many other members of his government. Itamar Ben-Gvir, his Minister of National Security, had on his wall a photo of Baruch Goldstein, author in 1994 of the massacre of 29 Palestinians in a mosque in Hebron. His tomb, on which is written "He gave his life for the people of Israel, their Torah and their land," is a site of pilgrimage. Yigal Amir said he made the decision to assassinate Yitzhak Rabin during Goldstein's funeral.[7]
Some will say that Goldstein, Amir and Ben-Gvir are Talmudist Zionists, and therefore heretics since the Talmud is emphatically anti-Zionist. Who cares? The fact is that today in Israel and outside Israel, the majority of religious Jews, educated in the Talmud or not, defend Eretz Yisrael, regardless of whether they are expecting one messiah, two messiahs (son of Joseph and son of David), or zero messiah (Reformed Judaism). The Haredim, orthodox Talmudic Jews living in Israel, are today ultra-Zionists who do not speak their name. There are no people more determined than them to defend their colonies with automatic weapons[8]
Zionism is an idea, like all nationalisms,[9] but it is a biblical idea. Israel sees itself as biblical Israel redivivus, and has passed itself off as such to the Christian world. The Christian world is complicit in the crimes of Israel by the simple fact of approving — even sanctifying — the crimes of biblical Israel. Israel looks at himself in the Bible as in a mirror, and finds himself divinely beautiful, partly because the Christian world tells him that biblical Israel is divinely beautiful.
Zionists are Bible freaks. To be honest, it's the Bible that drives them crazy. How could the Bible make Jews crazy, when it doesn't make Christians crazy? It's simple: the Bible says God chose the Jews; this idea can only drive Jews crazy. A people convinced that God has chosen them to dominate the world, that God gave them the land of another people, and that God grants them the right — nay, the duty — to massacre like "human animals" the people whose land they stole, such a people is crazy. It's psychiatric. If God himself was responsible for convincing the Jews that He chose them, then God would be guilty of driving the Jews crazy.
Therefore, the main responsibility of the Christian world today is to stop pandering to Zionist madness, and to say to the Jews: no, you are not the chosen people. You were never the chosen people. You are not a superior people. You are simply a people who believe themselves chosen and superior, and this is dangerous madness. Yes, it's true, we believed for two thousand years that God had chosen you. You managed to make us believe this insane idea. And because we believed it, we unwittingly encouraged you in your madness. But it's over. We have come to our senses, and we will help you, by any means, to come to yours.
Bauer, Marx and the Nietzschean enlightenment
How can we do that? We must deconstruct this mad idea that is driving Israel mad. We must deconstruct the biblical narrative. The tool for this is historical criticism (once called "higher criticism").
Without getting into details here, historical criticism has shown that, in the oldest editorial layers of the Bible, Yahweh is conceived as a national god, who in successive stages (under Josiah, then Ezra, then the Hasmoneans) came to be assimilated to the God creator of the universe, while retaining his ethnocentric jealousy. I summarize this process in this way: Yahweh is a national god who is so jealous of other gods that he ends up denying their existence and considers himself the only true god, hence God.
Historical criticism was born in Germany in the nineteenth century. The philologist Julius Wellhausen is considered the father of the "documentary hypothesis" which he formulated in the 1870s and 80s and which, after some revisions, is still authoritative. The story of the conquest of Canaan began to be questioned in the 1920s and 1930s by German historians such as Albrecht Alt. After promising expectations by its British founder William Albright, biblical archeology found itself empty-handed and joined in the discredit of biblical stories, concluding for example that Solomon's Kingdom never existed (denying the existence of Solomon's Kingdom is not yet prohibited by law.)
Bruno Bauer was a German scholar involved in this biblical revisionism. He was also a leading figure of the Young Hegelians, who didn't shy away from the Jewish Question. In 1842, at the age of 33, he published a book titled Die Judenfrage (1842)[10]
Bauer pointed out that even secular thinkers who subscribed to the new science of "higher criticism" and criticized Christianity and religion shied away from criticizing Judaism, as if all social questions called for a radical criticism of religion, except the Jewish question. "There is an outcry as if it were treason against humanity if a critic starts to investigate the particular character of the Jew."
Bruno Bauer discovers the essence of Jewishness in the Torah, which, he said, makes them a fossil people: "The Law has fenced them off from the influences of history, the more so, as their Law commanded from the start seclusion from the other nations."
The Jews as such cannot amalgamate with the nations and cast their lot with them. As Jews they must expect a special future, one which will be theirs alone as the Jewish nation: world dominion. As Jews they believe only in their own nation; this is the only belief of which they are capable and which is their duty.Therefore, there can be no emancipation of the Jews. A Jew can only emancipate himself by ceasing to be a Jew. "Jewish emancipation" is an oxymoron, because the Jew's alienation is his Jewishness.
This is how Bauer solved the Jewish question, which has now become the "Israel question". It is by virtue of the Hebrew Bible that Israel considers that massacring his enemies is a divine right, even a divine duty. This divine right is justified by the ontological superiority of the Jews, who constitute a super-humanity, in comparison with whom non-Jews are an infra-humanity. For Israel, this divine right prevails over international law. And this divine right only applies to Israel. Israel is, by definition, above the law, always has been and always will be.
By the time he published these texts, Bauer was already a famous and influential socialist theoretician. He had a young collaborator at the Rheinische Zeitung named Karl Marx. Marx did not forgive him for his lucidity on the Jews. He responded to him in 1843 and 1844 in two brief essays published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, in which he criticized Bauer for considering "the ideal and abstract essence of the Jew, his religion, as being his total essence", while the real Jew is in reality only the bourgeois.
An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society.
Marx wanted to make the Jewish question disappear into the economic question. His attack on Bauer precedes the Communist Manifesto by four years, and Das Kapital by more than twenty years. These are his first two important articles. Marx was then only 24 years old (Bauer was ten years older). Marx would attack Bauer again the following year in The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company, co-written with Engels. We can therefore consider that denying the Jewish question was the primary incentive of all of Marx's work. Marx will never again write on the Jewish question. As Nesta Webster pointed out in her book World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization (1921), Marx would never even target Jewish financiers: "he never once indicates the Jews as the leading financiers, or the Rothschilds as the super-capitalists of the world."[11] Marxism was, among other things, the Jews' attempt to silence Bauerism. It did not succeed entirely.
Bauer was a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). He was part of what I would call the "Nietzschean awakening". It deserves that name because it was Nietzsche's philosophical hammer which gave the most resounding expression of the German revolt against the biblical lie. Nietzsche was, in that regard, the offspring of a German philosophical tradition that goes back to Kant and culminated with Hegel. He felt especially indebted to Schopenhauer. In 1798 Kant called the Jews "a nation of deceivers," and Schopenhauer later called them "great masters of lies." Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist (1888):
In Christianity all of Judaism, a several-century-old Jewish preparatory training and technique of the most serious kind, attains its ultimate mastery as the art of lying in a holy manner. The Christian, this ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew once more — even three times a Jew.[12](Find more good quotes by Nietzsche in David Skribna's book The Jesus Hoax.)
Germany was the heroic nation ready to lead Europe toward emancipation from the Bible hoax. She had been the first European nation to free herself from papal oppression. The last book written by their national hero Martin Luther bore the title: On the Jews and Their Lies, and warned Germans that, "the sun has never shone on a more bloodthirsty and vengeful people than they are who imagine that they are God's people who have been commissioned and commanded to murder and to slay the Gentiles" (more here).
Note also that, unlike France and England, which were partially contaminated by the biblical virus of choseness (France with the "religion of Reims" inspired by Davidic kingship, and England later, with puritanism culminating in the delusion of British Israelism), Germans never identified as a chosen people in the biblical manner. They had their own glorious history, and their paradigm was that of the Roman Empire.
The Nietzschean Zeitgeist climaxed in 1933. Which is why in that same year, a declaration of war was printed on the British Daily Express's front page, with the title, "Judea Declares War on Germany. Jews of All the World Unite in Action." It announced that: "Fourteen million Jews dispersed throughout the world have banded together as one man to declare war on the German persecutors of their co-religionists."
And they won.
General Patton bitterly regretted in his journal August 18, 1945 that, "the English and the Americans have destroyed in Europe the only sound country."
Perhaps now is the time to ask the Jewish question again. Let's put it this way: The Jews wrote a book that says God chose the Jews. Should we take their word for it? Should we take this book as the word of God, or as the word of the Jews? This book written by the Jews claims that God gave them a fertile land inhabited by another people. Should we believe it? This book written by the Jews claims that the Jews had a divine right to massacre Amalek. Should we believe it? If we believe it, or if we profess to believe it, or if we don't denounce it as a lie, then what can we object to Netanyahu when he massacres the Gazans while telling Israelis: "You must remember what Amalek did to you, says our Holy Bible"?
Notes
[1] Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, Penguin, 2018, pp. 89-90.
[2] Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, Henry Holt & Company, 2007.
[3] According to John Kennedy, as quoted by Gore Vidal in his preface to Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Two Thousand Years, Central Connecticut State University, 1994.
[4] January 2024, Douglas McGregor on YouTube
[5] Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983.
[6] Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, Verso, 2009, p. 108.
[7] Israel Shahak, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, new edition, Pluto Press, 2004.
[8 Ibid.
[9] Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background, Macmillan, 1946, pp. 18-19.
[10] Bruno Bauer, The Jewish Problem (1843) Translation on Archive.org
[11] Nesta Webster, World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization, 1921 (archive.org), pp. 95-96.
[12] Antichrist, sec. 44, quoted in David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How saint Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years, new edition 2023 , pp. 109-110.
The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist, wrote Charles Baudelaire.
He was wrong: the devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he is God.