My friend John showed up in South Jerusalem. Long ago and far away, John and I slouched in the back of high school classes together in Los Angeles, mumbling snidely about what was being left out of American history (women, blacks, slaughter of Indians, lynch mobs, poor folk…). Eventually I went into mumbling snidely as a profession. John, by contrast, is gainfully employed in high-tech, working for an Israeli firm that kindly brought him for a visit to the home office.

In late afternoon we walked out to the promenade. Some Palestinian kids were playing soccer on a stretch of lawn despite the ferocious heat. In front of us was the Old City and the Dome of the Rock. On the east, I pointed out to John, was the high concrete wall dividing the Palestinian side of Jerusalem from the Palestinian towns of the West Bank.

“So,” John asked me, “is there anything parallel to Israel’s control of the West Bank? What do you think of Jimmy Carter calling it apartheid? Is it like Jim Crow?” (I don’t claim this is a precise quote; it was Shabbat afternoon, when I don’t write.) But that’s the gist.

I don’t know if there’s any precise parallel to a military occupation that’s lasted 41 years, I told him. Everyone looks for parallels in history and politics, trying to judge an unfamiliar situation on the basis of a familiar one, or a morally ambiguous condition on the basis of a morally clear one. But history isn’t like medicine, in which 100 million cases can be classified as one disease. In history, there are two few cases, each one too idiosyncratic. Every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own way, to misquote Tolstoy.

If, nonetheless, one looks for a category, what is happening in the West Bank resembles colonialism more than apartheid. It is closer to Algeria than South Africa, though there are flaws in the Algerian parallel as well. Apartheid applied to the entire territory under the rule of the old South African regime; it was explicitly based on the construct of “race” and had no other purpose but to divide the races.

Even if the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary, does not appear on official Israel maps, it exists as a legal and administrative boundary. Inside sovereign Israel, pre-1967 Israel for practical purposes, there’s a democracy, even if flawed. Palestinian citizens of Israel face discrimination, but they are voting citizens. The multiparty system insures that their votes can’t be gerrymandered away. They have more reasons than I’d like to list here for being dissatisfied – and are sometimes able to use an imperfect political and legal system to press for change.

The West Bank, on the other hand, isn’t legally part of Israel. Legally, for 41 years, it has been under military rule, temporary in apparent perpetuity. It was originally acquired in Israel in 1967 in something close to a fit of absence of mind – a defensive war, planned at the last minute, in which the goals shifted from hour to hour and the troops advanced further than anyone expected in advance. Palestinians live under military rule, and in some areas with the limited home rule of the Palestinian Authority.

But Israeli citizens who have settled there, with government support, as if Israel will control the territory forever, have the rights of Israeli citizens and then some. The two-tier legal system has been there virtually from the start. In a secret memo written in 1968, urging expanded settlement, then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan acknowledged that “settlement in administered territory, as we know, contravenes international agreements,” dismissed that as a problem, and went on to worry about the legal status of settlers. He didn’t want them subject to local law. He got his way. (Much more on this in my book, The Accidental Empire.)

He did want economic “integration” of the West Bank and Israel, which meant Palestinians would work for Israelis. He expected Palestinians to be appreciative. In a cabinet debate, he proposed German rule of Togo as a positive model. Dayan’s opponents explicitly warned from the summer of 1967 onward that permanent Israeli rule of the West Bank would be colonialism and would be denounced as such internationally. They lost the political argument. Shlomo Gazit, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the military officer working directly under Dayan in administering the West Bank, wrote three decades later:

At the end of the sixties, the world was already watching the end of the era of colonialism, and precisely then Israel found itself marching in the opposite direction.

But colonialism is also imprecise. On one hand, France could leave Algeria without fearing that Algerians would claim France as their own and keep up the war. Domestic support for leaving the West Bank would be much higher in Israel if we could abandon our Algeria as easily. Israelis on the moderate left would be much more comfortable at labeling the occupation as “colonialism” if Palestinians and their supporters did not apply the same term to pre-1967 Israel, as if Jews were just Frenchman who’d come here to build plantations, with no historical tie to the land.

On the other hand, as I once explained in the American Prospect, Ariel Sharon’s plans for Palestinian “autonomy” in fragmented enclaves, and later for “statehood” in those same enclaves, was influenced by South Africa’s grand apartheid, with its fictitiously independent bantustans.

In general, I don’t like the use of “apartheid” as a term, because it delegitimizes Israel as such, and not just the occupation. It also ignores the original cause of the occupation, a war of defense. But as long as the occupation continues, and settlement grows, and the possibility of withdrawal and a two-state agreement grows dimmer, the use of the word will grow. The insult exaggerates but is not utterly imaginary.

I’m not trying to reproduce word for word what I told John as we looked out over the wall-divided landscape of Jerusalem. This is more or less the idea. At the end I suggested one more weak parallel. He’d brought me a book about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. In those awful days of American history, many Americans were willing to allow the moral blight of slavery to continue lest civil war erupt. Today many Israelis would rather accept the occupation than face armed conflict with the settlers. Their fear is justified, yet the blight cannot continue. One of our deepest challenges is to find a way to leave without fratricide. It will take more than one quiet Shabbat afternoon with a friend to figure out a solution to that problem.

See also:

Is All Criticism Anti-Israel? A Question for NGO Monitor

The First Settlement, the Lasting Danger

Israeli Right Supports Right of Return

Tzvi Yehudah Kook was the teacher of many of the rabbis who have continued to created the theology of the religious right in Israel – a theology in which all political developments point to approaching redemption and in which Jewish possession of the entire Land of Israel has been transformed into the supreme commandment. He is the central figure in propagating a radical, theologized nationalism as Judaism.

And my son is right: Tzvi Yehudah Kook gave practically the same theological explanation of the Holocaust as Hagee does: It was God’s way of forcing the Jews to return to their land in order to speed final redemption.

Aviezer Ravitzky, the brilliant scholar of Jewish thought, discusses this in his 1993 book, Haketz Hameguleh Umedinat Hayehudim (Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism) . Ravitzky quotes Tzvi Yehudah Kook as explaining, "The people of God was so attached to the impurity of the land of the gentiles that it had to be cut and sliced from it, with spilling of blood, when the time of the End came."

This was not just a passing thought; it was a doctrine he imparted to his disciples. Following the Six-Day War, a group of students from Kook’s yeshivah, Merkaz Harav, met with  kibbutzniks who were conducting discussions with soldiers about their war experiences. The interviewers expected the same post-war melancholy and questioning they found among others who fought. Instead, they heard the students explain the war and the rest of history, including the Holocaust, as God’s plan:

The Holocaust was some sort of giant broom that sped immigration to the Land… As if the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to us, ‘Enough children, you’ve played what you wanted… Now I’ll move you to the Land.

(There’s more on this surreal conversation and its place in Israeli history in my book, The Accidental Empire .) Jonathan Blass, a rabbi of the Tzvi Yehudah school, laid out the same idea in an article (archive payment required) for the Jerusalem Report in 1992.

So this kind of thinking isn’t confined to the dark imaginings of one religion. Besides the obvious divisions between religions – Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism – there are another set of religious divisions: manners of religious thought, and religious responses to modernity, that cut accross faith communities. Hagee and Kook share a way of thinking, and are opposed to Jews, Christians and others who interpret their traditions in a very different manner.

Hagee has rather clearly argued that he came up with this idea in order to defend the concept of God’s omnipotence:

…all people of faith have had to wrestle with the question of why a sovereign God would allow evil in the world. After Auschwitz, this question became more urgent than ever.
Many people simply could not explain how a loving God would permit such horrors. After the Holocaust, they abandoned their faith in a sovereign God who intervenes here on earth… But I and many millions of Christians and Jews came to a different conclusion. We maintained our faith in a sovereign God who allows both the good and the evil that is in the world. We therefore search the scriptures for an explanation for that evil. We believe that the words of the Hebrew prophets… may help us understand the mind of God.

As God’s unappointed legal team, that is, Hagee and Kook have come up with this defense against the charge of divine negligience: He wasn’t negligient; He shared direct responsibility. He needed this horror. In some way, He wanted it to happen. The lawyers are announcing to the court: Our client pleads guilty to a more serious charge.

I think that anyone with faith can have faith that God doesn’t want this defense team.

The simplest response to this argument - and I’m stating it far too simply here – is that the greatest gift God gave to human beings is free choice. Being able to choose good implies that there is also the choice of evil. Evil means that the innocent are hurt.  I’ll get back to this in a moment, but first I want to point out some other qualities of Hagee’s thinking, and in some respects of Tzvi Yehudah Kook’s thinking as well.

Hagee belongs to a stream of Christianity that claims to take the Bible literally. Read the text of his sermon, and you’ll find it hard to understand how the verses from Jeremiah that he cites could possibly be read literally as referring to the Holocaust. Such ‘literalists’ are constantly involved in decoding, especially of the prophetic books of the Bible: Where it says "hunter," read "stormtrooper, 1942." What they mean by "literal" is a belief that even the most poetic passage describes a specific historical event to come; that each word in the Bible has a one-to-one relationship with a place, person or action. These people literally don’t understand poetry.

But as Hagee says, they are reading the Bible for information. They want explanations. They come to the text in search for God’s plans. They want the confusion of life explained, straightened out. The explanation that they create is a myth: A grand picture of past, present and future, designed by God, in which human beings play parts that they don’t understand – unless they are the chosen few who know how to decode the Book. Since the tumult of modernity is particularly confusing, it has produced people in various faiths who want and find such explanations. They generate faith that history is headed in the right direction, directed by God. In the process, they sacrifice human responsibility for evil, and portray a God willing to use genocide to promote his means.

The opposite approach is implied in a text from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, The Prophets , that I’ve quoted before :

Why should religion, the essence of which is worship of God, put such a stress on justice for man? Does not the preoccupation with morality tend to divest religion of immediate devotion to God?… Did not the prophets overrate the worth of justice?

Perhaps the answer lies here: righteousness is not just a value; it is God’s part of human life, God’s stake in human history.

In Heschel’s approach, the reason to study the Bible (or any religious text) is not to search for God’s reassuring plans. It’s to find God in search of human beings, demanding that they act justly. Justice is God’s stake in history, but justice is performed by human beings.

The problem with both Hagee and Kook is that they suggest that we put aside our moral feelings and admire the divine machinery bringing a better world even if millions must suffer on the way. In their "defense" of God, they promote acceptance of injustice. 

So once again we have a choice. We can misread verses as Hagee does, as Tzvi Yehudah Kook did, and sit back and believe that we understand what it all really means. Or we can read the verses as Heschel did, or as Martin Luther King did, and ask what we are supposed to do. This isn’t about faith versus secularism, or Christianity versus Judaism, or Islam versus Christianity. It’s about a division that cuts through religions, not between them.