Ted Cruz and the Meaning of Israel (5)

What makes Ted Cruz’s argument so interesting and so useful is that it opens the door into a virtual universe of convoluted logic that leads us straight into the tangled web of Zionism. In the interview, Cruz made his argument sound like it was the most uncontroversial and self-evident thing he could say, on the same level as statements like “the earth is round” and “the fire is hot.” He must have repeated this argument hundreds if not thousands of times, probably without ever noticing how deceitful it really is. The argument is designed to look like it is based on biblical teaching, but that’s only an illusion. It is, in reality, a secular argument intended to undermines religion—specifically Judaism.

Allow me to explain.

The main culprit behind the argument is a series of conflations, or leaps of logic, intended to transform—in a fundamental sense—the very meaning of Jewish identity, denuding it of its religious significance and secularizing it into something completely alien to the Jewish tradition. The following diagram depicts the basic logic of Cruz’s argument, which is identical with the basic logic of Zionism itself.

The Four Steps of Zionist Logic

STEP 1. We start at Israel_D, the idea that Jews are “the Children of Abraham” through his son Isaac and grandson Jacob. Taken literally, it means that Jews are basically an extended tribe and therefore an ethnic group. As such, Jews anywhere in the world can trace their lineage, at least in theory, all the way back to Abraham.

STEP 2. Judaism is not just a religion; it is also an ethnicity. The belief that the only characteristic common to all Jews is their shared religion—i.e., their obligation to follow the Torah, or the 613 mitzvot—is both unimportant and irrelevant. This renders Israel_C obsolete.

STEP 3. The most significant aspect of Judaism is that it represents a “nationality” just like all the other nationalities, such as French or Italian. As such, all the Jews of the world make up a single “nation,” or Israel_N, which is as real and legitimate as the French nation or the Italian nation.

SETP 4. Every nation of the world has its own state, and so should the Jewish people. The relationship between between Israel_S and Israel_N is the same as the relationship between France and the French people, or between Italy and the Italian people.

Interrogating these four steps can reveal some of the numerous contradictions of Zionist ideology. For starters, describing the Jewish people as an ethnic group is highly problematic. It is one thing to say that Jews are the descendants of Abraham in a spiritual or metaphorical sense, an idea supported by the Bible, and quite another to claim that they are his biological descendants. The latter belief has become popular not because it is logically or historically sound but because it is politically useful. Believing that Jews are the literal descendants of Abraham helps justify the claim of Jewish people being an ethnic group; this, in turn, relativizes the importance of religion for Jewish identity and bolsters the concept of a “Jewish nation.”

It is hard to imagine how Jews from such diverse places and cultures as Yemen, Morocco, Poland, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Ukraine, India, and France can all be part of a single ethnic group. There are no physical features or facial characteristics that all Jews share, and there is no genetic marker that is found in the DNA of all Jewish people but is absent from the Gentile DNA. According to biblical chronology, Abraham is supposed to have lived in early second millennium BCE. For all Jews to be “the children of Abraham” in the biological sense, we would have to believe that for a period of almost four thousand years Jews were able to maintain some sort of ethnic purity. Yet, the Bible itself mentions numerous marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Similarly, the worldwide presence of Jewish people cannot be explained by migration alone; conversion to Judaism has to be taken into account as well. We know both from the Bible and from post-biblical history that countless people have converted to the Jewish faith throughout the centuries.

Here are a bunch of Jewish faces, some of them belonging to famous individuals. Notice the diversity.

Judaism is a religion, similar in many ways to Christianity and Islam. The adherents of these latter religions also consider themselves to be “the children of Abraham,” just like the Jews. It is well known that the disciples of Jesus were all Jews, but Christianity emerged as a distinct religion by attracting Gentiles; that’s why the New Testament describes Christians as related to Abraham primarily in a spiritual or metaphorical sense. The same is true for Muslims. At the dawn of Islam in the seventh century CE, Arabs were believed to be the biological descendants of Abraham through his elder son, Ishmael; it is impossible to make that claim today because of the inevitable intermingling between Arabs and non-Arabs. Moreover, only about 15% of Muslims are Arabs. As a result, neither Christians nor Muslims claim Abraham as their biological ancestor. But even if the impossible happened and some group of Christians or Muslims was able to prove its members’ genetic connection to the Patriarch, it would be a discovery of no religious significance, for both Christian and Muslim identities are built upon faith and not on lineage.

Here are some indubitable and non-controversial facts. Christianity is a global religion, not a “nationality.” The 2.4 billion Christians today represent a faith community, not a “nation.” They don’t speak the same language or share a common culture; they belong to a variety of ethnicities and are citizens of the countries in which they live. The same is true for the world’s 2 billion Muslims. They too are members of a faith community. Just like Christians, all Muslims don’t speak the same language or share a common culture; they belong to a variety of ethnicities and are citizens of the countries in which they live. Islam is not a “nationality” and Muslims are not a “nation.” Moreover, Christians have never claimed that a given piece of land is their one and only homeland, and nor have Muslims. They do have their holy places—such as Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Makkah, and Madinah—that they visit for pilgrimage. Yet, Christians and Muslims from other parts of the world don’t want to migrate and settle in their holy places. When the pilgrimage is over, they return to their home countries. For both groups, it doesn’t matter where they live, since the entire earth belongs to God.

Everything I said above about the adherents of Christianity and Islam is also applicable to the adherents of Judaism. The nearly 16 million Jews today do not speak the same language, nor do they share a common culture. They belong to a variety of ethnicities and are citizens of the countries in which they live. Until the rise of Zionism, Jews everywhere saw themselves as members of a global faith community who could practice their faith anywhere on God’s spacious earth, just like Christians and Muslims. It is true that the Jews always had a deep love and emotional longing for the land of Palestine, but before the rise of Zionism they did not show any interest in migrating there en masse. Even in biblical times there were thriving Jewish communities outside Palestine, such as is Babylonia and Egypt, which means that the Jewish diaspora had begun long before the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. Nor is it true that the Romans had expelled the Jews from Palestine as punishment for their rebellions; in fact, there has been a continuous presence of native Jewish communities in Palestine over the last two thousand years. During this period, many Jewish authorities maintained that Jews in diaspora were prohibited from migrating and settling in Palestine on their own; their return would only happen when God decided to send the Messiah.

To reiterate, the only factor common to all Jews is religion; it is not language, not culture, not ethnicity, and not homeland. It was only in the late nineteenth century that European Jews began to be viewed and described in racial and ethnic terms, first under the influence of Antisemitism and subsequently due to the rise of Zionism. Here’s how it happened:

Throughout the middle ages, anti-Jewish hostility in Europe was rooted in certain element of Christian theology, such as the belief that Jews were responsible for killing Christ. Following the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, this theological justification became increasingly untenable due to the general decline in Christianity’s social influence. The result was a significant reduction in anti-Jewish sentiments and the integration of Jews into mainstream society as equal citizens, a process called “Jewish Emancipation.” However, the hostility against the Jews did not vanish completely; it soon found a new justification in biological racism—the pseudoscientific theory that the human species was divided into a hierarchy of distinct races. One of the claims made on the basis of this theory was that the “Semitic races” were inferior to the “Aryan races.” The evidence of the shift in justification from Christian theology to the pseudoscience of race can be seen in the word Antisemitism, which reflects the then popular belief that all Jews were “Semites.” The influence of this racial classification was so pervasive that it apparently found its way into certain Jewish circles. Theodore Herzl acknowledged as much when he wrote in his 1896 book The Jewish State: “We are a nation, one nation—our enemies have made us one without our consent . . . .”

The challenge for early Zionists was two-fold: First, they were predominantly secular people with a strong dislike, even disdain, for practicing Jews, whom they saw as weak and unfit for the competitive modern world. Second, the dominant form of religion was Rabbinic Judaism, which offered barely any resources for developing a national consciousness. Their solution was to highlight the racial and ethnic element of Jewish identity and to downplay its religious core, with the goal of transforming a world-wide faith community into a strong, modern “nation.”

So, when Senator Ted Cruz claims that he is the leading defender of Israel_S because the Bible instructs him to bless Israel_D, which he claims is the same as Israel_N, he is merely retracing the four steps of the Zionist logic. What gets completely sidelined in the process is the religious core of Jewish identity—as reflected in Israel_C—and even Judaism itself.

Ted Cruz’s argument is an anti-religious attack on Judaism, disguised as a pro-Jewish biblical imperative. He claims, and probably believes, that the political entity he is supporting is “Jewish,” when it is merely Zionist.