Racist Zionism Violates All Ten Commandments

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS represent the moral core of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The so-called Decalogue is something one supposes that all members of these three Faiths can essentially agree on, although different weightings are given to particular injunctions and indeed there appear to be THREE versions in the Holy Bible – (a) the injunctions on the First Tables of Stone that were later smashed by an enraged Moses (Exodus 20); (b) “words that were on the first” set of Tablets as set out subsequently in Exodus 34 and (c) the THIRD setting out of these injunctions in Deuteronomy 5. Positive Atheism  has published a convenient documented 2-page spread entitled “Which Commandments?” that sets out Protestant, Catholic and Hebrew versions of the Ten Commandments . For a similar summary of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish versions of the Decalogue see Wikipedia. The earnest Atheists declare that “To popularize this knowledge is to knock the wind out of this entire move to place “The” Ten Commandments in our schools.”

Nevertheless, in the spirit of ecumenism for Atheists, Agnostics (such as myself), Muslims, Christians and Jews let us accept a common moral intent enshrined in the various versions of the Decalogue. Thus even Atheist Humanists could accept an “interpretation” of the First Commandment (“have no strange gods before me”) as an instruction not to depart from their core principles of Humanity and Scientific approaches to Truth. However it can be argued that Racist Zionists (RZs) violate ALL of the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments represent a major part of the 3 millennium moral discourse that represents the greatest contribution of the Jewish People to Humanity. Since the Exile of the Jewish People in 135 AD, a core view of Judaism was that “Israel” was a “kingdom of the mind” and that it would only be restored in a physical sense upon the visitation of the Messiah for ALL Mankind. However, associated with de-ghettoizing and secularization of European Jews in the late 19th century, secular Zionism arose as a movement to make Jews like “other Nations” (i.e. with a country, flag, army etc) and based on Palestine at the expense of the Indigenous inhabitants i.e. racism, colonialism and genocide which were de rigeur at the time for Europeans (for an outstanding analysis of European racism and colonialism seeSven Lindqvist (1992), Exterminate All the Brutes, Granta Books, London, 2002). However secular Zionism was strongly opposed by leading Orthodox Jewish religious scholars (and indeed still is) based on their belief in the post-Messianic restoration of physical Israel i.e. pre-Messianic restoration of a physical State of Israel is regarded as blasphemy and heresy.

Political, secular Zionism was opposed, for example, by Raphael Samson Hirsch - perhaps the most outstanding 19th century rabbi in terms of modern Judaism and many other religious Jewish scholars (notably those of the Neturei Karta in Israel and elsewhere) up to and including the present (e.g. see Michael Selzer's book "Zionism Reconsidered" an anthology of the writings of outstanding religious and secular critics of secular, political Zionism). Political Zionism was also opposed by secular Jewish scholars from Nathan Birnbaum (credited with actually coining the term Zionism) to a long list of outstanding contemporary Jewish intellectuals such as Professors Chomsky, Ollman, Finkelstein, Rose, Pappe and Reinhart.

Contemporary Jewish intellectuals opposing Racist Zionism (RZ) are compelled to do so because there is no way that they can be complicit in the racism, violence, and race-based dispossession, abuse and "ethnic cleansing" practised upon Palestinians by the RZs. A powerful summary of the essential moral position of many contemporary Jewish intellectuals is given by outstanding Jewish American scholar Professor Bertell Ollman.

QUOTE:

Before proceeding any further we must make a distinction between “religious Zionism” as immortalized in the prayer “next year in Jerusalem” (i.e. when the Messiah returns) – a morally unexceptional wish – and “secular Zionism” which is racist and violent in theory and in horrendous practice. Thus for European holiday makers, saying “next year in the Bahamas, Fiji, the Costa Brava etc ” is unexceptional - unless they mean “violent physical occupation of the destination with disempowerment, deprivation, dispossession and displacement of the Indigenous inhabitants”,  which of course is egregious racism.

Accordingly, we can more specifically re-phrase Professor Ollman’s question thus: what has Racist Zionism (RZ) got to do with traditional Jewish values?

We can approach this question from the perspective of the Ten Commandments as the “core” of traditional Jewish values (and indeed of Muslim and Christian values, and in many ways of contemporary human values in general, even for agnostics and atheists). As shown below, the Racist Zionists (RZs) manifestly violate ALL the 10 Commandments of the Jewish Torah (there are subtle differences in the Decalogue numbering in the Abrahamic religions; I will use the Jewish emphasis below; see: here ).