It's all in the Bible and the Fabricated Identities

The deep historical narrative and psychological trap behind the West's serf mentality where Israel is concerned

As I sit down to write my final essay for 2024, I’m thinking about what I’ve been through this year both biographically and in terms of the ideas and big-picture connections it has inspired.

I left Israel this summer, months, and maybe years after I began feeling I could hardly breathe in it. Since maybe 2014, I gradually became smothered with sadness and dread; it was like witnessing a great creature of darkness awaken and stretch its limbs and knowing, with persistent assurance, that so much blood was going to be shed.

For reasons I don’t want to get into at the moment, seeking solace in common interactions and pastimes never really worked for me all too well. One thing, though, has always been a steady source of comfort and strength for me, and that is reaching a higher understanding.

What ‘higher understanding’ means can be debated, but I’d argue that realizing how perceived conflicts are not what they appear to be makes up a serious chunk of it. A dialectic view, a harmony of former contradictions - for me, much wisdom and peace can be found there.

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Two threads characterized my work this year: one relating to colonialism in general (which I have touched on in many texts, but in the most concentrated form in my Colonizer Psyche series of posts, which begins with Colonizer Homelessness); another thread dealt with the story of Zionism and Israel. Now I’m going to weave the two into one.

(Reading my Colonizer Psyche series is not required reading to understand this, but at least familiarize yourself with the first in that series, which you can also find on Twitter).

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One of the great mysteries of the past year has been the question of Western complicity, or rather sweeping, enthusiastic participation in Israel’s genocide of Gaza. We could feel this mystery perplexing and tormenting people for the first half of the year or so, then it started dying out. People stop asking ‘why is it happening?’ about things that recur more than a certain number of times. When something happens so many times, or for so long, it becomes just another part of reality, however outrageous it may seem at first.

We have come to accept the unity between Israel’s direct and deranged genociders and much of the West as a fact of life. We almost don’t try to understand the roots of this collaboration anymore.

But I have been thinking a lot about this issue. It never stopped bothering and intriguing me. What I’m going to attempt here is a possible answer to this question. I see understanding this phenomenon as crucial for the decolonial struggle. I also notice that though not voiced openly quite as often as it used to be earlier in the genocide, the boundless willingness to serve Israel, as far as Western powers are concerned, still keeps people almost existentially mystified.

I am not going to dedicate time to well-acknowledged issues like shared colonial desires and psyche, white supremacy, or Holocaust guilt. I am not going to even mention the subject of Jewish lobbies. These factors are powerful in my estimation, but they don’t provide a full answer. The conviction and enthusiasm displayed by Western leaders over the past 14 months cannot be explained by coercion, emotional extorsion, or general ideological affinity. Western countries are sustaining real reputational damage as a result of their open support for the mass murder of innocent human beings. Keeping this up with such zeal, in the face of fierce criticism and anger, in defiance of the most basic human emotions - this cannot be fully explained by fear of losing a primary, or genuinely wanting to see a white empire dominating the entire planet.

There is something deeper than that in there, and it goes to the most profound sense of identity among Western elites and establishments. There is something Western establishments fear more than being implicated in the mass murder of children (that they know the whole world can see).

What is that thing that they fear so much? The answer, to me, is surprisingly simple: they fear being exposed as who they are for real. They fear, in other words, the scorching light of truth.

A truth that inspires such maddening fear always involves identity and the most basic narratives behind one’s history (aka historiography). And this is where I went looking for answers, armed with my more than decent proficiency in the Jewish self-story, namely how Jews, collectively (theologically but also on a popular and widely internalized level) believe they came to be, and what they represent. I was also helped by my familiarity with America’s founding narratives, which I was exposed to in my English Literature and Language studies some 20 years ago at Haifa University.

If you’re ready for this, then let’s go.

The precise point in the Bible where the Jewish (self) story begins, and the Western parallel

To make my argument, I’m going to need to use some references. Not many, just enough to establish a point that is already widely accepted as fact in historical research. That point relates to Western colonialism relying heavily on Christianity and the Bible to conceptualize what it was doing when it came across America, and, well, colonized it (while genociding virtually all antives).

I want to demonstrate this perceived parallel not as a point in itself (as it is, as I’ve said, widely accepted), but as a way to advance my bigger argument.

But first, before I talk a little about how European settlers in America saw themselves as God’s chosen people, let’s take a look at how the Israelites saw themselves, and how they conceptualized their own history.

Genesis 12 is where the story of the Hebrews begins in the Hebrew Bible. In the preceding 11 chapters the Bible tells its readers how the world was created, the story of Noah’s flood, and some other stuff about the ancient families and people of God’s world. After describing the rise and fall of the Tower of Babel in the previous chapter, and introducing the character of Abraham, chapter 12 does something new: it tells the readers about the special, intimate, and lasting connection (soon to become a covenant) between God and Abraham:

This is the moment the nation of the Hebrews was created, which Jews claim to be the direct descendants of.

What can we learn from the 4 verses brought here? First, obviously, the Hebrews did not originate in Canaan. They did not originate in Haran (in today’s Turkey, close to the Syrian border) either, as Chapter 11 tells us

“Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Harran, they settled there."

Ur of the Chaldees is located in Tell el-Muqayyar in southern Iraq.

So Abraham’s father took him from Iraq to Turkey, and it was there that God told Abraham to go to Canaan, which thus came to be known as The Promised Land.

The historical irony surely does not evade you: what this little Biblical screenshot tells us is that, just like the second time their purported descendants attempted it, the first time the Hebrews colonized Palestine it was not theirs, they had no historical claim to it, and weren’t its natives. They invaded, plundered, and murdered because they believed God told them to do so. And, just like the second time, the native people of Canaan, as they were trying to defend themselves against an invading party, were described as evil and demonic creatures.

This, in itself, deserves some pause.

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We continue. As I mentioned earlier, this next part of my argument is treated as a fact by historians and is profusely documented in a great number of books and articles. I am referring to the famous fact that the first European settlers in America saw themselves as new Israelites, and believed that America was the Promised Land that they had been given as part of a covenant with God.

This is not an anecdote or a passing observation: this belief was crucial and instrumental to the colonization process and was at the very center of the colonial psyche and mindset. They talked and wrote about it endlessly.

Here is a screenshot from the Wikipedia entry Promised Land

And this is from the entry Exodus narrative in Antebellum America

John Winthrop was one of the most influential figures in shaping the consciousness of the American colonial project. A Puritan Englishman who felt pushed out of Britain by the anti-Puritan King Charles I, he was instrumental in creating the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was its governor for many years, and led a big wave of migrants out of Britain and into the New World. In a famous sermon he gave in 1630 (recently the identity of the actual author has been put in question, but there’s no doubt that it was delivered on the eve of Boston’s colonization) titled ‘A Model of Christian Charity‘ he uses the term ‘city on a hill‘ for the future colony, and speaks in very specific biblical terms about the endeavor:

John Cotton was another very influential British Puritan figure from the same period, and his essay God's Promise to His Plantation from 1630 lays out in great detail how Puritan settlers in America are akin to King David building a house for God in a land given by God himself.

I could go on and on, but the point is well-known (and you can go on and do some research yourselves, you’ll find plenty of materials on this subject). The idea that America was God’s Promised Land and that the European settlers that colonized it were Israelite-like from a religious perspective is essential to understanding the roots of American consciousness.

But what if that’s what they thought, you might ask

Well, here’s where it gets interesting. Because, at first glance, this might not seem too exciting: people have different crazy ideas, and the European colonizers in America had this. Where’s the controversy? What’s the outrage about?

Well, let me remind you that we embarked on a journey of trying to understand why the US and the West in general are wrapped around Israel’s finger, including at their own risk. Do we start to see the picture?

But wait. Colonial Western societies seeing themselves as a new iteration of ancient Israel is a big and meaningful element of their psychology and attachment to Jewish narratives. The colonial West was founded, essentially, around Jewish mythology.

But I was talking about a fear so great that facing it seems more terrible than being implicated in mass murdering children. So, in the context we’re talking about, what could this terrifying primordial fear be?

Fake is the knot that binds all of it together

I think that as you’re reading this, dear friend, although the truth stares at you quite openly, it’s still not fully seen. But it’s by no fault of your own: we’ve been educated in an uncannily foolish culture that taught us to accept as self-evident some remarkably bizarre things. One of those things is the fantastic notion that the Jewish Bible is an actual text given as-is by the creator of the universe, no less.

As often is the case, reality is much more prosaic than that. In reality, Hebrews wrote the Bible about themselves over centuries. This means that this whole story about God promising them lands is just fables, fabrications, and after-the-fact justifications, alongside, probably, a desire to look capable of unusual cruelty, which some see as proof of strength and fierceness (It’s just psychopathy).

Once you truly realize the whole thing is made up - a self-fabricated mythology - the scope of the insanity begins to reveal itself.

Now we can look at the fear

If the Hebraic narrative was fake the first time, when a proverbial god’s promise to a so-called Abraham was fabricated in retrospect, what about the supposed imitations of that made-up origin story?

What do the European settlers look like in a world where Hebrews and Jews made up stories about themselves, and British people went out to destroy civilizations and steal their lands and resources in an attempt to copycat a completely false pseudo-historical account of made-up events and fictional characters?

If the story of Israel is established as fake, in other words, where does it leave the colonial West? If the Bible is just myths and not facts, what are Europeans doing in America? What have they done to be there? And why?

If there’s no divine Bible and the Jewish self-story is just a self-aggrandizing fable, then the entire story of the colonial West is naked barbarism; no sermons, no manifest destiny, no exceptionalism, and no mystical higher purpose.

Seeing this, we can begin to grasp why they have to defend Israel’s story at all costs.

There is another layer to this

Many times this year I’ve spoken about colonizers’ fake identities. Now is the time to link this thread to our main line as well. You see, when they set out to start a new society and a new world, the European colonizers in America left behind everything they knew.

They could not and didn’t want to be British subjects anymore: they did not live in Britain. They had to create a new vision of who they were, and what meaning the new place they were occupying had as part of that vision.

They did not go far in inventing the meaning, and really, identity, of that new place. As Puritans and Protestant believers, they turned to the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, in search of this old-new meaning.

It is there that they found the Exudos and the Promised Land. They made up what they were and stood for in a way that served their belief system, but mostly their inflated egos. I mean, what else can be said about people who declare themselves to be God’s chosen people as an alibi for theft and mass murder?

So they prefabricated the meaning and identity of a society they were creating from scratch. In doing so they relied on an old mythology that was itself fake and made up for the same egotistical, or narcissistic reasons a millennium or two earlier. In other words, America was founded as a simulacrum of a lie.

Not just any lie, mind you: a lie that allows it to steal, deceive, exterminate, and enslave millions under a special license from God himself. This adds a special explosiveness to the fear of exposing Israel, or the Jewish self-story, as just an over-dramatic local mythology: it leaves the US with absolutely nothing. No identity at all. A black hole where its identity used to be, only filled with the blood and cries of innocent natives, and no god to condone it.

It is this fear - this paralyzing fear of being exposed for what they are, in a world where Israel and the Jewish story are also exposed as what they are - that drives the colonial West to follow Israel into the abyss and destroy whatever was left of its image and reputation.

Paradoxically, it is this attempt at denial and concealment that does the exposing, and makes Israel and its Western backers look like what they really are: ungodly, bloodthirsty, narcissistic barbarians.

Realize the place of Colonialism in Western culture

Colonialism is not something that the West does, Colonialism is what the West is. Over the past 500 years or so (or perhaps some 400 years more, if we count the Crusades as early Western colonialism), spreading into other people’s countries, genociding them, and stealing everything they had was the foremost occupation of Western societies. It was not a side activity: it was the heart and soul of Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and other countries as well.

Colonialism is the main thing European settlers in North America have been doing since they first got there, and it only increased over time, now sending US tentacles into every corner of the earth, in an attempt to monopolize the entire human consciousness with platforms and channels and takeovers and media companies, NGOs and bought-and-paid-for politicians and public figures.

Taking over, dominating, monopolizing, subverting, coercing, subjugating, exploiting - this is the big legacy of Western culture. We should not be fooled by some suits and research institutes; they are the minor side activity. The main thing is colonialism and at the center of this colonialism, there was always the Bible and the Jewish self-story.

Understanding the centrality of the Jewish Bible in Western colonialism makes it clear why Western establishments choose to commit suicide in the defense of indefensible Israel: for the colonized, actual death may be better than subjugation. For the colonizer, a symbolic death is preferable to the humiliation involved in the exposure of the lie it always stood for. They cannot handle the shame.

What Western establishments are doing when they support Israel’s deranged bloodbath is not defending Israel, it is defending themselves and their own very shakey, very unstable, and shame-inducing fake identity and history of bloodcurdling crimes. Without Israel, without the Jewish self-story, they have nothing to give a fake higher meaning to their barbaric conduct, and there is nothing to hide the gaping emptiness of colonial identity which is, in fact, nothing more than some self-aggrandizing fantasies conducted in the minds of people who wanted to plunder and murder, but still keep their respectable, moral appearance. They’d rather destroy the whole world than let it be known all they ever stood for were lies and crimes.

One word about ancient Christianity

With my argument here in mind, it also makes sense why Western establishments show so much disdain for the older branches of Christianity, say in Syria, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Russia.

Having a kind of Christianity around that is not colonial in nature - namely one that does not see itself as a continuation of the Jewish self-story, feels like an embarrassment; the existence of such Christianity, which lives in harmony with its past (as its origins are not laced with murder and theft) and can engage with the political present (as it seeks to exist, not to violently expand) sheds a very unflattering light on colonial Christianity. They want it eradicated so as to stay as the only true belief.

What this will not be about:

Shared colonial interests, white supremacy and the power of Jewish lobbies.

Why they like to keep ancient Christianity subdued and bearely surviving

As a native and non-colonial ideology, it negates their Christian story, and weakens it