#101

# 101, Kooky, Kooky, Kooky
In the June war of 1967, the Israeli army took over the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip and the Golan. Zionists saw this as literal fulfillment of scripture and as indicating that the end of time had begun. They thought they could not return the territories to the Arabs in exchange for peace. Radical Kookists squatted in Hebron and built a city at Kiryat Arba, even though this was against Geneva Conventions which forbade settling territory taken during hostilities.
This settlement movement got worse after the October War of 1973.

Religious Zionists joined with the secular right in opposition to any peace deal. For them, true peace meant preserving the whole land of Israel for Jews only. Kookist rabbi, Eleazar Waldman stated that Israel was engaged in a battle against evil and the peace of the whole world hung in the balance. (So many of us interpret the Bible as though the world is centered around us. We should never do that. It is just another expression of our selfishness.)

On another but related track of thought, a small group of Jewish Fundamentalists came up with a biblical version of genocidal thinking to match the Nazis. They made the Palestinians like the ancient Amalekites, a cruel people that scripture commanded the Israelites to kill without mercy. But this was the writing of priestly and deuteronomic authors centuries after Moses and Joshua who wanted to expand Israelite territory in the time of King Josiah.

Rabbi Meir Kahane had a narrowed down way of reading the Bible which produced a terrible caricature of Judaism. It gave a biblical rationale for ethnic cleansing just as the Nazis did with the Jews and others. He said, “Judaism had only one message. God wants us to live in a country on our own, isolated, so that we have the least possible contact with what is foreign.” (Karen Armstrong, The Bible, p. 213.)
Kookists got really kooky in the 1980s when a small group of them planned to destroy all the Muslim shrines on the site of the ancient Jewish Temple which was the third most holy spot in the Muslim world. They felt they should do this because the Messiah could not return when this holy site was so polluted.

These Kookists believed that by forcing war with the whole Muslim world they would make God send the Messiah to save Israel. This conclusion was drawn from the Kabbalistic principle that events on earth influenced divine action. This could have led to World War III. It was a nihilistic project which was not considered out of place in a world where some were willing to expose their own people to nuclear destruction so as to defeat a hated enemy.

Beware! This is what a wrong reading of the Bible can lead to, self- destruction and self-defeat, the triumph of the demonic. A majority of the Jews do not think as these above but as with ultra religious conservatives almost everywhere the above thinkers are angry, bullying, loud and aggressive and influence policy way too much. Good people must not stay silent. The heart of the Bible is the love of God and neighbor.