DUCKPOND

Without exception, establishment religion have inevitably been co-oped by State power to support war, despite the fact that the fundamental tenets of their religions almost always propose peace. Marginal and small Christian religious bodies, such as the Quakers, the Mennonites and some others, have maintained their adherence to conscientious objection to war. I do not understand how the process develops through time and circumstances for the major Abrahamic religions, but it is interesting to witness it in action.

Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the founders of religious Zionism, and first Chief Rabbi of Palestine, in a 1904 letter wrote:

With regard to the matter of war, it was simply impossible at a time when all the surrounding neighbours were truly a pack of threatening wolves for Israel (ie the Jewish people) to refrain from fighting, for they then could all gather together and – God forbid – eradicate the Remnant; to the contrary it was necessary to instill fear in the wild ones, even with some cruel measures, if only in the hope of bringing humanity to which that is should be. And bear in mind that in communal laws generally the Torah did not take upon itself to push the spirit of the people to extreme piety, for then piety would become a matter of rote and obligation, whereas the goal of the Torah is to establish enlightenment with the force of love and free will.

Professor Nagler and his class deconstruct much of this passage, but I cannot now find  that  lecture. So let me just state the obvious in relation to the Rabbi’s words that he is dehumanizing of the enemy, conveying  the sense of almost overwhelming threat they represent, and not recognizing the the justice of their cause.

I am inclined to believe that dehumanization not only makes more violence possible; it makes greater violence inevitable. Regardless, of the teaching most religions, particularly when they assume the role of the establishment theology find it possible despite their teachings to respond in kind to threats or perceived threats. The just cause of the enemy is never an issue, because they have already been typecast as wolves, gooks, or ragheads, as the case may be.

Then there is the argument that in some cases nonviolence is not possible. From the same source this argument, from Yehudah Mirsky’s  chapter, “The Political Morality of Pacificism and Nonviolence: One Jewish View”, in War and its Discontents (Princeton, 1996) is expressed as:

Where the oppressor or evil doer threatens to vanquish or eradicate his victim pure and simple there is no call for non violence. Indeed, in that situation nonviolence would do nothing more than further empower the oppressor, and force the oppressed to acquiesce to his or her destruction, forfieting human dignity in the process by ceding to the oppressor the validity of his aims. Nonviolent resistance seeks to push the latent contradictions of a society to the surface. Hence it is inapplicable in societies whose violence and oppression are not contradictions but rather of their essence (the best examples are the totalitarian “republics of fear”, that twentieth century contribution to the political taxonomy). The “nonviolent moment” if you will, arises only in those situations where, to begin with, the oppressor does not seek annihilation but only subjugation, not destruction but the act of submission. (p53)

The “republic of fear” may apply to China, which case by this argument the Dalai Lama, much to the consternation of the Chinese are following the wrong approach in the pursuit of nonviolence. In the case of Tibet, they are following principled nonviolence, since strategic nonviolence is not an option given the tenets of the Buddhist religion.

In a contrast with the historical situation in Palestine, the Holocaust is the case where the oppressors sought annihilation and, in so far as I know, neither violent or nonviolent resistance was employed by German Jews. In that case nonviolence, appealing to the essential humanity of the agents of the oppression might have worked more generally, as it apparently did in a few specific instances. I suppose that nonviolence acts on the individual participants independent on their roles in violence.

The justice of the Palestinian case seems to have be ignored then, as now, both by the powers that be in the state of Israel, and those that support is formation and continued existence. Part of the justice of the Palestinian case since 1945, is that they had nothing to do with events that were produced by Europeans acting in Europe.