Tgk1946's Blog

From Thirteen Days in September (Lawrence Wright, 2014) pp137-9

AFTER THE 1956 WAR, Begin barnstormed through Israel campaigning against the withdrawal from Sinai. “Much of the land remains to be possessed,” he said, quoting the Book of Joshua. It is interesting to consider what a post-Holocaust Jew such as Menachem Begin made of the biblical account, since the gift of the Promised Land is tied to the campaign of ethnic cleansing that Joshua waged.

In the biblical legend, when the Israelites finally emerge from the Sinai wilderness, they camp on the banks of the River Jordan. God draws Moses to the top of Mount Nebo and shows him the Promised Land, which stretches out before him, from the Jordan Valley to the Mediterranean. “This is the land about which I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘I will give it to your descendants,” the Lord tells him. “I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross over.” Moses dies, at the age of 120, having delivered his people to the border, where the land of milk and honey beckoned.

The Lord instructs Joshua, Mosess succul, lo take the Israelites into the Promised Land, saying, “Every place where you set foot I have given you.” That land was not vacant, however. The Canaanites, Hittites, and many other tribes already occupied the vast tract God awarded to the Israelites. “Be strong and steadfast!” God tells Joshua. “For the Lord, your God, is with you wherever you go.”

The River Jordan stops flowing long enough to allow Joshua and the Israeli horde to cross into Canaan, where they pause on the outskirts of Jericho. Before proceeding, the Lord commands Joshua to circumcise all the men; in this way they would be cleansed of the “reproach of Egypt” —in other words, the memory of their enslavement. The Lord advises Joshua to surround Jericho and march around it seven times; then a priest should sound a blast from a ram’s horn, whereupon the walls of the city would fall down. “And it came to pass,” the Bible says, “that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” After looting the valuables, the Israelites burn the city. Joshua then leads his legion to the city of Ai, where all the men and women — 12,000, according to the Bible-are put to the sword and the city burned, “made it an heap for ever, even a desolation unto this day.” Only the king of Ai is spared, in order to be hanged from a tree.

Word of the massacres spreads. The king of Jerusalem calls together the monarchs of Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon to band together for mutual defense. The Israelites rout even this great army, aided by a hailstorm the Lord inflicts on the fleeing warriors, killing more of them than the Israelites have done with their swords. At Joshua’s bidding, God holds the sun still so that the Israelites can finish the carnage in the daylight.

From there, the Israelites take Makkedah, killing “all the souls that were therein”; and Libnah, once again killing “all the souls that were therein”; and so on, and so on. “Joshua conquered the entire land; the mountain regions, the Negeb, the Shephelah, and the mountain slopes, with all their kings. He left no survivors, but put under the ban every living being, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.” The twelfth chapter of Joshua has a tally of all the kings that Joshua slew: thirty-one.

But the Lord is not done yet. Even when Joshua is old and “stricken in years,” God upbraids him, using the phrase that Begin quoted: “a very large part of the land still remains to be possessed.” He provides Joshua with a lengthy list of new territories, including “all the Lebanon,” to be parceled out among the tribes of Israel.

When he is close to death, Joshua calls all the elders together and relates the words of God: “I gave you a land you did not till and cities you did not build, to dwell in; you ate of vineyards and olive groves you did not plant. Now, therefore, fear the Lord and serve him completely and sincerely.” The Israelites agree to this covenant, and Joshua passes away, at the age of 110.

For many believers, the account of the annihilation of the peoples of Canaan is one of the most troubling stories in the Bible. For Begin, however, Joshua was the original incarnation of the Fighting Jew. Joshua’s mission was to carve out a living space for the Israelites, much as modern Jews sought to do in the Arab world. Over the long horizon of Jewish history, so scarred by the pogroms and death camps of Europe and semi-servitude in the regions of Islam, Joshua is a singular and daunting paragon. Begin certainly wasn’t the only Israeli leader who believed that spilling blood was a necessary ritual for the unification and spiritual restoration of the Jewish people, and that enacting revenge on the Arabs was a way of healing the traumas of the Jewish experience in Europe and elsewhere. Even many secular Israelis, such as Dayan, saw Joshua as a model for the post-Holocaust new Jewish man. “Look at these Jews,” David Ben-Gurion told his biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, when explaining the policy of massive Israeli reprisals against any Arab attacks that Dayan was carrying out.