By Will Assad
Introduction
The phenomenon of “verse-lifting” refers to the selective use of scriptural texts, without establishing context, to support specific ideological agendas. Arguably, the most famous example is known as the “Sword Verse” from the Qur’an (9:5), often taken in isolation as “kill the idolaters wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them”. Without establishing the context as war and self-defense, this verse appears to divinely mandate genocide. In reality, this directive was issued within a specific historical context and critics who use this verse to claim Islam is a “violent religion” or those Islamic extremists themselves who justify their own violence are engaging in selective interpretation. Religion is a lens to view violence; the atrocities committed by those using that lens are the ones responsible for their actions.
Within Zionism, there is a comparable pattern of verse-lifting, where biblical texts are employed to assert contemporary political and territorial claims and, as I will later discuss, to incite genocide. I will argue that the concept of the “Land of Israel” is not founded in the Torah; the land itself is not equal to the current State of Israel, the establishment of a Jewish State by man is forbidden in the Torah, and the Torah does not exclude the Palestinians from the land claim but rather includes them. I will reveal the dissonance between the moral teachings of the Torah and the contemporary practices of the Israeli state, both from its very existence to its present-day actions in Operation Swords of Iron.
The Concept of the “Land of Israel”
In the Book of Numbers (33:53), the children of Israel are divinely instructed to “take possession of the land … and settle in it, for [God has] given [them] the land to possess.” In modern Zionist rhetoric, this verse can be interpreted as a mandate not just for the possession but also for the active settlement and development of the land. But does this land geographically correspond to modern-day Israel/Palestine?
The Children of Israel are promised the land of Canaan, all the way from the Nile to the Euphrates (Genesis 15:18-21). While this includes modern day Israel/Palestine, it also includes much of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and parts of Egypt and Turkey. Jacob (Genesis 28:17) describes the land as “none other than the house of God” standing in Harron (modern-day Turkey); Jacob (Genesis 31:21- 55) flees from Laban in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) to Gilead (modern-day Jordan); Moses (Deuteronomy 1:1) provides Jacob with a retrospective account of their journey and laws in Moab (modern-day Jordan); Moses (Deuteronomy 34:1-6) views the Promised Land from Mount Nebo (modern-day Jordan) where he dies and is buried in the land of Moab (modern-day Jordan); and the conquest of Og (Deuteronomy 3:1-11) took place in Mount Hermon (modern-day Syria).
However, Zionists clearly do not identify with Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey as their “homeland” as they do Israel/Palestine. This is because the biblical basis for the land claim is rather a justification than a modus operandus. The true purpose, as Theodor Herzl wrote, was to “solve the Jewish question”, which he said was “no more a social than a religious one”. The “Land of Israel” or Eretz Israel was not in territorial correspondence with the sovereign territory of the State of Israel established in 1948. In fact, Sand writes “in no text or archaeological finding do we find the term ‘Land of Israel’ used to refer to a defined geographic region”. Verse-lifting to justify the current State of Israel has transformed ancient promises into a modern political manifesto. Sand elaborates that:
Jerusalem […] was always located within the land of Judea, and this geopolitical designation, which took root as a result of the establishment of the small kingdom of the House of David, appears on twenty-four occasions. None of the authors of the books of the Bible would have ever dreamed of calling the territory around God’s city the “Land of Israel.”
If the modern-day State of Israel does in fact correspond to the Promised Land (or at least a portion of it), is man himself allowed to establish a state there?
The Torah says that the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land should be seen as an act of divine will rather than human endeavor. It is specifically God that will return man to the land, and otherwise would be for man to act as God.
Deuteronomy 30:3-5: Then the LORD your God will restore your fortunes and have mercy upon you, and he will gather you again from all the peoples where the LORD your God has scattered you. If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there the LORD your God will gather you, and from there he will take you. And the LORD your God will bring you into the land that your fathers possessed, that you may possess it.
Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss says that “Judaism is a covenant with God to uphold God’s Torah — to be subservient to God” and “Zionism is a transformation to nationalism”. Haredim are seen carrying signs at protests saying, “Judaism condemns the state of Israel and its atrocities”. In Job 1:21, it is said that “the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away”. The opinion of “most of the rabbinically educated figures whose writings have survived the passage of time” was that only when God would send the Messiah, would the “cosmic order” of things change. The establishment of a state based on selective biblical interpretations fundamentally challenges the Torah’s vision and is a clear instance of verse-lifting where divine command is repurposed for nationalist aims.
Even if the promise of the land can be reestablished, is the Palestinian excluded from it? The Balfour Declaration did not exclude the Palestinian from the proposed Jewish national homeland, but what does the Torah say? God says to Abraham (Genesis 12:7), “to your offspring I will give this land” and (Genesis 13:15) “for all the land which you see, I will give to you and to your descendants forever.” The promise is reiterated to Isaac (Genesis 26:3-4) when God says “I will establish the oath that I swore to Abraham your father”. It is further extended to Jacob during his dream of the ladder reaching to heaven.
Genesis 28:13-14: The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
Modern-day Jews are considered to be the descendants of Jacob, so the covenant of the land is extended to them in these verses. But do we know for certain that modern-day Jews actually are the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
About 75 percent of Sephardic, Mizrahi, or Ashkenazi Jews have ancestors that trace back to “the general Middle East” (World Jewish Congress). More specific estimates have found that about 30- 60% of the modern Jewish genome could be traced back to the ancient Levant (Atzmon et al). On the other hand, genetic studies show substantial genetic overlap between Palestinians and Ashkenazi Jews (Genet). To say that a given modern-day Jew is more of a descendent than Abraham than a Palestinian would not be grounded in any real evidence. The inclusion of Palestinians in the land covenant is overshadowed by selectively lifting verses that indirectly exclude them or are incorrectly interpreted to be exclusive.
Judaism was in fact a dynamic and proselytizing religion between the second century BCE and the eighth century CE. Many Judaized kingdoms “emerged and flourished throughout history in various geographic regions”. Sand once again explains that:
[To deny this would be] to delete from collective memory the enormous number of persons who converted to Judaism under the rule of these Judaized kingdoms, providing the historical foundation for most of the world’s Jewish communities; and […] to downplay statements of the early Zionists—most prominently those of David Ben-Gurion, founding father of the State of Israel—who well knew that an exile had never taken place and therefore regarded most of the territory’s local peasants as the authentic offspring of the ancient Hebrews.
Even if the Palestinians are not the descendants of Abraham (or at least are far less likely to be than the Jews of today), what does this mean for how they should be treated in the land by the “Indigenous” Jewish population?
Leviticus 6:1-5: If anyone sins and is unfaithful to the Lord by deceiving a neighbor about something entrusted to them or left in their care or about something stolen, or if they cheat their neighbor, or if they find lost property and lie about it, or if they swear falsely about any such sin that people may commit— when they sin in any of these ways and realize their guilt, they must return what they have stolen or taken by extortion, or what was entrusted to them, or the lost property they found, or whatever it was they swore falsely about. They must make restitution in full, add a fifth of the value to it and give it all to the owner on the day they present their guilt offering.
When considering the decades-long conflict over land, these verses seem to be completely ignored by the religious Israeli Jews. While the events of the 1948 expulsion are far more complex, the settlements in the West Bank — which Jewish supporters insist on calling “Judea and Samaria” to lay a biblical claim to the land — are surely a flagrant violation of this ordinance. Perhaps the issue is that the Palestinian is not viewed as the “neighbor” and rather the “foreigner”, which seems to be easily debunked by the following:
Leviticus 19:33-34: When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. [emphasis added]
Jeremiah 22:3: This is what the LORD says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.
The Palestinian is entitled to be “treated as native-born” and should not be wronged or face violence. But still, does that mean that the Palestinian “foreigner” is equal to the “Indigenous” Jew? In fact, it does.
Numbers 15:15-16: The community is to have the same rules for you and for the foreigner residing among you; this is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. You and the foreigner shall be the same before the Lord: The same laws and regulations will apply both to you and to the foreigner residing among you. [emphasis added]
The Torah then clearly establishes that the Palestinians and the Israelis are to be considered equals. What is more, if these laws are not followed, the covenant of the land is to be taken away.
Deuteronomy 28:58-64: If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law […] the Lord will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses. He will bring upon you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you. The Lord will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disaster not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed. You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the Lord your God. […] You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess. [emphasis added]
I have spent some time dealing with the historical and biblical foundations of land claims and moral imperatives as they pertain to the Jewish and Palestinian peoples. While I have shown its supporting evidence in the Torah is insufficient and absent, the fact of the matter, however, is that the State of Israel does exist. I never intended to question the right of modern-day Jewish Israelis to live in the state of Israel; rather I have argued that the biblical claims made to support the State of Israel and the claim of Jewish indigeneity over the Palestinian are extremely ill-founded.
The dissonance between the supposed scriptural mandates and their application becomes particularly glaring in viewing Israel’s contemporary military operations. In Operation Swords of Iron, an ongoing example, we have seen prominent members of Israeli society use the Torah (and Tanakh more generally) to make genocidal statements about the Palestinians in Gaza. Unlike the use of the Torah to wrongly justify the “Land of Israel” as the “State of Israel”, the use of the Torah in Operation Swords of Iron is rather direct, intentional, and genocidal.
Operation Swords of Iron
In December 2023, South Africa initiated legal proceedings against the State of Israel, alleging violations of the Convention on Genocide in relation to Israel’s Operation Swords of Iron. While I do not intend to delve into the specifics of this case or the operational details of Operation Swords of Iron, my focus here will be on examining the alleged genocidal intent in context of the Torah.
On October 7, militants from Hamas killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and took around 240 hostages. This occurred as they launched attacks on over 20 communities in southern Israel. October 7th, 2023 was the same day as Simchat Torah, the day that the new cycle of weekly Torah readings commence, beginning with the Book of Genesis. In response, Israel launched Operation Swords of Iron. “Unsatisfied” with the name “Swords of Iron”, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested the name “Genesis War” as a replacement, infusing a religious connotation to Israel’s retaliation.
On 28 October 2023, when Israeli airstrikes had already killed over 7,703 Gazans, including 3,195 children and 1,863 women, Netanyahu paraphrased Deuteronomy 25:17-19, stating “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
1 Samuel 15:2-3: This is what the LORD Almighty says: “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack Amalek, and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
Perhaps Netanyahu only meant Hamas was Amalek, but this does not explain the LORD Almighty’s directive to put to death “women, children and infants”, which Israel had already killed 5058 of out of the 7703 total. President Isaac Herzog also clarified that “[it is] an entire nation out there that is responsible. [It is] not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true”. He followed this with “we will fight until we break their backbone”.
Israeli army soldiers in uniform were filmed on 5 December 2023 dancing, chanting and singing “may Gaza be erased” and two days later, “we know our motto: there are no uninvolved civilians” and “to wipe off the seed of Amalek”. By that date, 17,177 Gazans had been killed with the UN estimating 70% killed were women and children.
Yair Ben David, commander in the 2908th Battalion of the Israeli army, said that the Israeli army had “entered Beit Hanoun and did there as Shimon and Levi did in Nablus,” and that “[t]he entire Gaza should resemble Beit Hanoun”, referring to the city in northern Gaza which has been entirely devastated by the Israeli army.
Genesis 34:25: On the third day, when they were in pain, Simeon and Levi, two of Jacob’s sons, brothers of Dinah, took each his sword, came upon the city unmolested, and slew all the males.
These biblically inspired statements, made by prominent members of Israeli society, including former parliamentarians and news anchors, were argued by South Africa as constituting “clear direct and public incitement to genocide, which has gone unchecked and unpunished by the Israeli authorities” in violation of Article III (b) of the Genocide Convention and direct and public incitement to commit genocide in violation of Article III (c) of the Genocide Convention.
Operation Swords of Iron, intended to be named with biblical resonance, is the employing of verse-lifting to sanctify aggressive military policies and shows a profound disconnect from the Torah teachings that emphasize just and equal treatment of the foreigner, a divinely mandated obligation of the Children of Israel.
Conclusion
The practice of verse-lifting within Zionism serves not only as a foundation for ideological assertions but also as a justification for territorial expansions and military operations that starkly contrast with the teachings of the Torah. The ethical gap widens with the genocidal claims incited in Operation Swords of Iron, where verses are inappropriately lifted to sanction profound human suffering.
Just as verse-lifting the Qur’an has been used to justify acts of terror and subsequently fueled Islamophobia, verse-lifting of the Torah (and Tanakh more generally) is currently legitimizing policies of the Israeli state that are in direct violation of the Genocide Convention. Distorting the foundational teachings of Judaism to justify a secular-nationalist project and employing it to justify genocidal actions unfortunately creates nothing but resentment of the global Jewish community, which the State of Israel purports to represent. Similarly, much of the antisemitism we are seeing today on college campuses across America is a consequence of these actions.
Israel, as intended, was established to provide a safe haven for the Jewish people, but this has been undermined by the very interpretations of their own sacred texts. These interpretations, intended to justify and secure a peaceful state, have recreated a climate of resentment and hatred, ultimately undermining the original intention of establishing a safe haven for the Jewish people. But it does not have to be this way.
Micah 6:8: He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
References
Application Instituting Proceedings. Filed by South Africa, December 29, 2023. Published by Courthouse News Service. https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/South Africa-v-Israel.pdf.
Auerbach, Jerold S. “The ‘West Bank,’ or Judea and Samaria?” JNS.org, January 7, 2022. https://www.jns.org/the-west-bank-or-judea-and-samaria/
Herzl, Theodor. A Jewish State. Leipzig & Vienna: M. Breitenstein’s Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1896.
“Initial Reporting: Ongoing Israeli Retaliatory Attacks in Gaza, Reporting Period 7-28 October 2023, Based on Preliminary Documentation.” ReliefWeb, November 13, 2023.
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/initial-reporting-ongoing-israeli retaliatory-attacks-gaza-reporting-period-7-28-october-2023-based-preliminary-documentation-enar
McGreal, Chris. “The Language Being Used to Describe Palestinians Is Genocidal.” The Guardian, October 16, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/16/the-language-being used-to-describe-palestinians-is-genocidal
“Netanyahu Declares ‘Holy War’ Against Gaza, Citing the Bible.” Middle East Monitor, October 29, 2023. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231029-netanyahu-declares-holy-war-against-gaza citing-the-bible/
Republic of South Africa. Application Instituting Proceedings and Request for Provisional Measures Against the State of Israel. December 29, 2023. International Court of Justice. https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/192-20231229-pre-01-00-en.pdf.
Sand, Shlomo. The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland. Translated by Geremy Forman. London: Verso, 2012.
“Simchat Torah.” Judaica WebStore Blog, October 1, 2023.
“Unsatisfied with ‘Swords of Iron’ as Name of Gaza War, Netanyahu Floats Alternatives.” The Times of Israel, December 18, 2023. https://www.timesofisrael.com/unsatisfied-with-swords-of-iron-as name-of-gaza-war-netanyahu-floats-alternatives/
Ventre, Sarah. “Neturei Karta: an Orthodox Jewish Sect That Doesn’t Believe in the Concept of a Jewish State of Israel.” The World, 19 March 2024. https://theworld.org/stories/2024/03/19/neturei karta-jewish-sect-doesn-t-believe-concept-jewish-state-israel
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