The perils of Israeli settlement

Bruce Chatwin

On 18 May last year Menahem Begin, after claiming victory for his Likud Coalition, turned to thank his wife with a paraphrase of Jeremiah 2.2.: 'I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in a land that was sown with mines.'

The mines presumably refer to 1945 and his leadership of the guerrilla organisation Irgun Zvai Leumi, which strung up the British sergeants and bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

Irgun's motto was: 'Judah collapsed in fire and blood. Judah will rise in fire and blood.' — which it did. Jerusalem and the Temple were, of course, first destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 585 BC and again by Titus in AD 70. Today friends of Israel are seriously alarmed that the Likud's policies of expansion will invite a third visitation.

Persecuted in Poland, imprisoned in Soviet Russia, hunted by the British Army and haunted by the lessons of the Final Solution, Mr Begin is a man fascinated by risk. He is a zealous reader of the Bible and is always ready with a quotation to back up any new political action. His election speeches made no secret of his belief in Israel's right to the Land promised to Abraham 'in its historic entirety'; that Israel exists on both sides of the Jordan; that Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip were 'liberated territories'; and that there would be 'many many more settlements in the next few weeks.' • Certainly Jahweh promised Abraham the frontiers of present-day Israel — and much more besides: 'Unto thy seed have I given the land, from the river of Egypt, unto the great river, the river Euphrates' Genesis 15.18 —which, if put into effect, would definitely trigger off the Third World War. Certainly Jahweh encouraged the series of brilliant guerrilla manoeuvres, described in the Book of Joshua, which captured the cities of Canaan, thus earning Ernest Renan's quip: 'Le dieu d'Israel est un dieu national, c'est a dire un tres mechant dieu.' But of all the texts in the Bible Mr Begin was rash to start playing with Jeremiah. Or was he tempting' fate?

Jeremiah 2.2 reads: 'I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thy espousals when thou wentest after me in a land that was not sown.' — In other words God loved his Children when they were nomads living in black tents.

No one will deny the unique character of the bond between the One God, His One People and Their One Land. (The bond was so strong that the Jewish agricultural colonies in Argentina, or Herzl's proposed homeland in Uganda, were doomed to fail

ure). No one will suggest that a nomad's attachment to his land is less strong than the settler's: he sees land in terms of paths, rather than fields or houses. But Jeremiah 2.2 is one of the key verses in the Old Testament which suggest that Jahweh's original terms for occupying the Land were — to say the least — ambiguous.

What were the Chosen People to do with this complicated piece of geography, this corridor sandwiched between two great civilisations, which combined desert, mountain, forest, sea-coast, river-valley and lake? Did He intend them to herd their sheep through it without disturbing its inhabitants, as Moses suggested? Or were they to fence off fields for cultivation? Were they to be wanderers or settlers or both? There is no clear answer, but the question has perplexed Jews down to the present day. It is their central dilemma (and being theirs is ours.) The biblical case for settling the land (which roughly coincides with the Zionist position) may be stated thus: Jahweh finds his people lost in a howling wilderness. He hears their cry and leads them 'by the right way that they might go to a city of habitation.' Psalm 107. He gives them cities they did not build and vineyards they did not plant. He teaches them the arts of agriculture. 'The fountain of Jacob shall be upon a land of corn and wine.' Deuteronomy 33.28.

Finally, he makes a Covenant with David and agrees to the building of the Temple at Jerusalem. He has walked long enough 'in tent and tabernacle' and is exhausted from being jolted on long journeys. The Throne of David 'established for ever' celebrates the People's coming of age: they have at last grown up and settled down. 'I will appoint a place for my people Israel that they may dwell in a place of their own and move no more.' 2 Samuel 7.10.

The other voice in the Old Testament is the voice of the nomad. 'Behold a people that dwells alone and amid the nations and is not accounted.' A free people, a unique people, with the nomad's insufferable sense of superiority over the feeble-minded settlers. This voice worried the philosopher Martin Buber, but was heeded by those Orthodox Jews who opposed the State of Israel On the grounds that their destiny was fulfilled in Exile.

In 1895 the biblical historian Karl Budde first set down his concept of a Golden Age of wandering patriarchs in a paper called The Nomadic Ideal in the Old Testament: 'Yahweh is the god of the steppe and of the roaming nomads to whom agriculture fixed to the soil cannot be an acceptable honour. All corruption and disaster.. .above all the worship of Baal, derive from the one fundamental fact that Israel had left tents and herds and turned to house and field.'

The nomad's ingrained horror of cutting the soil appears at the beginning of Genesis in the story of Cain the farmer and Abel the herdsman; Cain's weapon was not a handaxe but a hoe; his fratricide was a sin of settlement that was purged in wandering; his name probably derives from a Semitic root meaning to 'accumulate' or 'acquire', whereas Abel means 'breath, movement, life.' And having set up this duality, the rest of the Bible may be read as an impassioned exploration of the urge to wander and the need to stay, as illustrated in the history of the Jews.

Emotionally the Israelites identified themselves with the wanderers. They traced their descent from Seth, who replaced Abel as the archetypal shepherd. Their Land was

promised to Abraham, the bedouin sheikh!

The Word came to Moses in the Sinai desert. And it was as desert nomads, fleeing from the death-bound civilisation of Egypt, that they found their national identity (just as, in reverse, the Slays found theirs by resisting the horsemen of the steppes): 'I that am the Lord thy God from the Land of Egypt will yet make ye dwell in tents as in the days of the solemn feast.' Hosea 12.9. In his study of Moses, Martin Buber makes it clear that the Passover, the most vital of all Jewish rituals, is a mimed re-enaction of the nomad's spring migration. Jahweh's food is matzoh the nomad's unleavened bread: the Pachal Lamb must be roasted and seasoned with bitter herbs, not boiled in the fashion of settlers. Such is the significance of 'the love of thy espousals when thou wentest after me in a land that was not sown', which Begin misquotes. For Jahweh is a God of the Way, who orders his people to worship him three days journey into the pure air of the desert. And

if they extracted from Him a mobile sanctuary, he was far more doubtful of a Temple in

the style of a Canaanite sanctuary. Once installed at Jerusalem, restlessness strikes Him. 'The Temple which is called after my name is polluted, filled with abominations.

For his Children have turned it into a sculpture gallery, have lined its courts with ogle-eyed images and golden calves, and have indulged in the ritual brouhaha that blackened the name of Baal and the Syrian Goddess.

As the hostile empires of the Ancient Near East closed in on Judah and Israel, the advantages of settlement became less and less obvious. The later prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Hosea are all nomadic revivalists. 'Woe unto them that rise up and join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place that they may be placed'alone in the midst of the earth' Isaiah 5.8. Yet they anticipate a time when the People will again find favour with their Lord, when the land is cleared of settlers, 'when a tenth that is in it, the land shall serve again as pasture.' 6.13. And in prom ising the Saviour, Isaiah juxtaposes an ideal Land of Milk and Honey against a perverted one of Corn and Wine. 'Butter and Honey shall be his food that he may know how to refuse the evil and choose the good.' 7.15.

Jeremiah positively welcomes the Babylonian captivity as God's instrument for purging the People of the sins of settlement, and looks forward to a day when they return to the black tents and the Covenant 'may be broken with David my servant.' And when Nebuchadnezzar appears before the walls of Jerusalem it is Jeremiah who looks to the Rechabites, those zealous Jahwists, who alone obeyed the commands of the desert God and alone will escape the horrors of the seige warfare: 'We drink no wine, for our father Jonadab commanded us: "Ye shall drink no wine, neither ye, nor your sons for ever, neither shall ye build house, nor sow seed, not plant vineyard: but all your days Ye shall dwell in tents that ye may live long

in• the land where ye are strangers." Jeremiah 35. 6-7.

Yet it was through Jerem iah's sombre vision that Jews were able to be Jews wherever they might be. Their wanderings in exile were the source of their vitality, their imagination, their tragedy, but also their ingrained knowledge that they will survive every catastrophe. A Bedouin purity was preserved in ghettoes of Eastern Europe where no green thing was allowed to grow. It was even present in the 'Great Stone Desert' of New York.

For the men who influence the State of Israel the Book of Jeremiah is perhaps more relevant than Genesis or Joshua. Mr Begin seems intent on re-enacting the history of Ancient Israel, its triumphs and its tragedy, within the framework of modern power politics. Perhaps only by jettisoning Jahweh's promises will the Israelis avert a new Nebuchadnezzar, a new Titus, a new Diaspora — or worse.