It took one metallic sledgehammer, one narrow mind, and one smartphone’s shocking photo to display the gravity of the problem we have come to face.
The photo that showed a soldier axing a Jesus statue in southern Lebanon was appalling enough – religiously and politically – but even more mind-boggling was the villain’s frivolous attitude: post it on social media, so the whole world would see.
The world indeed saw, and lost no time responding, with intercontinental rebuke. Fortunately, the IDF summarily court-martialed the culprit and his photographer, sending them to a military prison and removing them from future combat service. Unfortunately, what they did represents a syndrome much larger than the two young idiots they evidently are.
And that syndrome is the very one with which Israel’s worst enemies are plagued. It’s called fundamentalism, and its bearers share ignorance of the outer world, impatience with history’s course, and an inability to tolerate the existence of other faiths.
The fundamentalist scourge reared its head in 2001
THE FUNDAMENTALIST scourge was displayed in all its ugliness and brutality in 2001, when the Taliban had Afghanistan’s Buddha statues hammered, axed, and dynamited.
“These idols have been gods of the infidels,” said the iconoclasts’ leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, referring to any Buddhist statue, but most famously to a pair of monuments taller than a 12-story building, carved into a sandstone cliff some 150 km. west of Kabul.
Like all things fundamentalist, this atrocity was not about whim. It was about faith. Islam’s founders destroyed hundreds of idols when they conquered Mecca, they said, so we must do the same.
Non-fundamentalists say that what was done centuries ago in entirely different settings does not necessarily apply today, but fundamentalists disagree. To them, change is blasphemy. Restoring “fundamentals” and ignoring history’s progress is what they are all about. That’s their attitude toward the past, and also toward the future. And since the future, as they see it, will be all about their triumph over the rest of humankind, all others must bow, and since progress is anathema, change is a threat, and history is an aberration, they had better bow now.
This is fundamentalism, regardless of its religious stripe. Early Christians were also once in the business of smashing images – that’s how the term iconoclasm came into being – as were early Protestants, who broke into Catholic churches and did there what two Jews just did in Lebanon.
Did Judaism originally wage war on idolatry? Of course it did, but that was when idolatry was murderous. That is why a great sage like Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi, according to the Talmud (Avoda Zara 10b), could have a close friendship with a pagan like Roman Emperor Caracalla.
Fundamentalists can’t get this kind of interfaith harmony because they don’t look outside the narrow, deep, and opaque trench in which they spend their days. To them, the outer world is barbarian, and otherness is a crime.
And in Israel, fundamentalist ignorance has become in recent years a cultural embarrassment and a strategic threat.
When Israel’s finance minister exhibits his lack of spoken English, as Bezalel Smotrich did in a public speech, and when National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, in a taped quarrel with a foreign worker, can’t utter even an eight-word English sentence, millions are embarrassed.
Yes, such provinciality can be dismissed as anecdotal. That cannot be said of this duo’s misunderstanding of the big world with which they are evidently unfamiliar.
That is how Smotrich, as finance minister, can say of Wall Street’s rating agencies, after they downgraded Israel’s rating, that they are politically motivated. And when the finance minister does not understand how Wall Street works, he also does not understand what he does to Israel’s international position by sending violent fundamentalists to the West Bank.
At this writing, the identity of the iconoclasts who smashed the Lebanese statue is not known. Theoretically, they may have never visited a synagogue, studied in a yeshiva, or spent one day in a West Bank settlement. Yet even in this unlikely event, the fact is that thousands of Israelis do follow fundamentalist rabbis who feed them with triumphalism, hatred, and messianic zeal. And these people know precious little about the outer world in general, and Christianity in particular.
Lebanon’s Christians are on our side
THE SMALLER thing of which this week’s two-cent crusaders were evidently unaware is that Lebanon’s Christians are on our side. That is why the particular village where they did their number, Debel, was not evacuated by the IDF. They resisted Hezbollah.
The bigger thing such thugs don’t know is that Christianity, led in this by the Vatican but joined by most other denominations, has long abandoned its forebears’ antisemitism and cultivated a historic dialogue with the Jewish faith.
This dialogue is part of what the Zionist dream was all about. It was never about domineering over other faiths, rivaling other nations, or fighting other states. For that, we could have stayed in the shtetl and the ghetto. The dream was to join humankind, not as superiors, but as equals. That’s what ancient Judea’s zealots didn’t get when they canceled the Temple’s daily sacrifice in honor of Rome, and thus ignited Jerusalem’s destruction and Judea’s grand defeat.
Not only was universal harmony part of the Zionist quest, but it was also part of the prophetic vision.
That is why Isaiah, when he imagined the days to come, when the House of God will “stand firm” and “tower above the hills” – he saw it drawing not only Jews, but “all the nations.” (Isaiah 2:2) And on that day, when “many peoples” will “go up to the Mountain of God” – they will no longer impose themselves on one another, because “nation shall not take up sword against nation,” and “they shall never again know war.”
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarrim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.
Source:
www.jpost.com
