Fields of Blood (61 page)

Religious extremism often develops in a symbiotic relationship with a virulently aggressive secularism. One of the Brothers detained in 1954 was
Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), the Society’s chief propagandist.
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As a young man, Qutb had felt no conflict between his faith and secular politics, but he had been alienated by the ruthless policies of the British and shocked by the racial prejudice he experienced during a visit to the United States. Still, his views had remained moderate and tentative; what radicalized him was the violence of Nasser’s prison. Qutb was himself tortured and was horrified to see twenty prisoners slaughtered in a single incident. Dozens more were tortured and executed—and not by foreigners but by their own people. Secularism no longer seemed benign but cruel, aggressive, and immoral. In prison, Qutb took
Maududi’s ideas a step further. When he heard Nasser vowing to privatize Islam on the Western model and observed the unfolding horror of his prison life, Qutb came to believe that even a so-called Muslim ruler could be as violently jahili as any Western power. Like so many others terrorized by violence and injustice, Qutb had developed a dualistic ideology that divided the world starkly into two camps: one accepted God’s sovereignty, and the other did not. In the career of Muhammad, God had revealed a practical program for the creation of a properly ordered society. First, acting under God’s orders, he had created a
jamaat,
a “party” committed to justice and equity that held aloof from the pagan establishment. Second, at the hijrah, he had effected a complete severance between the Godly and the Godless. Third, Muhammad had established an Islamic state in
Medina; and fourth, he began his
jihad against jahili
Mecca, which eventually bowed to God’s sovereignty.

Qutb formulated these ideas in his book
Milestones,
which was smuggled out of prison and read avidly. He was a learned man, but
Milestones
is not the work of an official Islamic authority; rather, it is the outcry of a man who has been pushed too far. Qutb’s program distorted Islamic history, since it made no mention of Muhammad’s nonviolent policy at
Hudaybiyya, the turning point of the conflict with Mecca. Humiliation, foreign occupation, and secularizing aggression had created an Islamic history of grievance. Qutb now had a paranoid vision of
the past, seeing only a relentless succession of jahili enemies—pagans,
Jews, Christians,
Crusaders, Mongols,
Communists,
capitalists, colonialists, and Zionists—intent on the destruction of Islam.
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Executed in 1966, he did not live long enough to work out the practical implications of his program. Yet unlike some of his later followers, he seems to have realized that Muslims would have to undergo a long spiritual, social, and political preparation before they were ready for armed struggle. After his death, however, the political situation in the
Middle East deteriorated, and the increasing violence and consequent alienation meant that Qutb’s work would resonate with the disaffected youth, especially those Brothers who had been likewise hardened in
Egyptian jails and felt that there was no time for such a ripening process. When they were released in the early 1970s, they would bring Qutb’s ideas into mainstream society and try to implement them practically.

After the
Six-Day War between
Israel and its
Arab neighbors in June 1967, the region experienced a religious revival not only in the Muslim countries but also in Israel.
Zionism, we have seen, had begun as a defiantly secular movement, and the military campaigns of the Jewish state had had no religious content; their violent suppression of the
Palestinian people had been the result of their secular
nationalism rather than a religious imperative. Before the war, as they listened to Nasser vowing to throw them all into the sea, many Israelis had been convinced that yet another attempt would be made to exterminate them. They responded with lightning speed, achieving a spectacular victory in which they took the Golan Heights from
Syria, the
Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the
West Bank and the Old City of
Jerusalem from
Jordan.

Although religion had not figured in the action, many Israelis would experience this dramatic reversal of fortune as a miracle similar to the crossing of the Red Sea.
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Above all, the conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem, closed to Israelis since 1948, was a numinous experience. When in 1898 the Zionist ideologue
Theodor Herzl had visited the Western Wall, the last relic of Herod’s temple, he had been repelled by the sight of the Jewish worshippers clinging cravenly to its stones.
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But in June 1967 tough paratroopers with blackened faces and their atheistic officers leaned against the Wall and wept, their secular ethos momentarily transformed by sacred geography. Nationalism, as we have seen, easily
segues into a quasi-religious fervor, especially in moments of heightened tension and emotion. Devotion to Jerusalem had been central to Jewish identity for millennia. Long before people began to map their landscape scientifically, they had defined their place in the world emotionally and spiritually, drawn irresistibly to localities that they experienced as radically different from all others. The
Israeli experience in 1967 shows that we have still not entirely desacralized the world.
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The soldiers’ “beliefs” had not changed, but the Wall evoked in them something akin to the way others experienced the sacred—“something big and terrible and from another world,” yet also “an old friend, impossible to mistake.” Just as they had narrowly escaped destruction, they recognized the Wall as a survivor like themselves. “There will be no more destruction,” one soldier said as he kissed the stones, “and the Wall will never again be deserted.”
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“Never again” had been a Jewish watchword since the
Holocaust, and now generals and soldiers were using it once more. For the first time too, the term
holy city
entered Zionist rhetoric. According to the ancient sacred geography of the
Middle East, the whole point of a “holy city” was that nobody could own it because it belonged to the god—to
Marduk,
Baal, or
Yahweh. The “City of David” had been ruled by Yahweh from his throne in the temple, the king merely acting as his anointed representative. Instead of becoming the personal property of the ruler, Jerusalem was “holy” (
qaddosh
) precisely because it was “set apart” for Yahweh. But once the emotions of sacred geography were fused with the Israelis’ secular nationalism, in which territorial integrity was all important, politicians had no doubt that Jerusalem belonged absolutely to the Israeli state. “We have returned to our most holy places,” said the avowed secularist commander
Moshe Dayan; “we have returned and we shall never leave them.”
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Jerusalem had become a nonnegotiable absolute that transcended all other claims. Even though international law forbade the permanent occupation of territory conquered during a conflict,
Abba Eban, Israel’s delegate to the
United Nations, argued that Jerusalem “lies beyond and above, before and after, all political and secular considerations.”
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The sacred geography of Israel also had a strong moral and political dimension. While Israelis lauded Jerusalem as the city of
shalom
(“peace,” “wholeness”), the
Psalms had insisted that there would be no shalom in Jerusalem without justice (
tzeddek
). The king was charged by
Yahweh to “defend the poorest, save the children of those in need and crush their oppressors.”
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In Yahweh’s Zion there could be no oppression and violence; rather, it must be a haven for the poor (
evionim
). But once the “holiness” of Jerusalem had been fused with the secular nation-state, its Palestinian inhabitants became a vulnerable minority and their presence a contamination. On the night of June 10, 1967, after the signing of the armistice, the 619 Palestinian inhabitants of the Maghribi Quarter beside the Wall were given three hours to evacuate their homes. Then, in contravention of international law, the bulldozers came in and reduced this historic district—one of the earliest Jerusalem awqaf—to rubble. On June 28 the
Israeli Knesset formally annexed the Old City and East Jerusalem, declaring them part of the State of Israel.

Secular nationalism had exploited and distorted a religious ideal; but a religious embrace of the modern nation-state could be equally dangerous. Well before 1967,
Orthodox
Jews had sacralized the secular state of Israel and made it a supreme value. A somewhat despised religious version of Zionism had always existed alongside the secular nationalism of most Israelis.
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It became slightly more prominent during the 1950s, when a group of young Orthodox, including
Moshe Levinger,
Shlomo Aviner,
Yaakov Ariel, and
Eliezer Waldman, had fallen under the spell of the aging Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who regarded the secular State of Israel as a “divine entity” and the
Kingdom of God on earth. In exile it had been impossible to observe the commandments tied to the Land; now there was a yearning for wholeness. Instead of excluding the sacred from political life,
Kookists, as the rabbi’s followers became known, intended it to pervade the whole of existence once again—“all the time and in every area.” Political engagement, therefore, had become an “ascent to the pinnacles of holiness.” The Kookists transformed the Land into an idol, an earthly object that had absolute status and required the unquestioning veneration and commitment that traditionally applied only to the transcendence we call God. “Zionism is a heavenly matter,” Kook insisted. “The State of Israel is a divine entity, our holy and exalted state.”
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For Kook, every clod of Israel’s soil was holy; its institutions were divine; and the weapons of Israeli soldiers were as sacred as prayer shawls. But Israel, like any state, was far from ideal and guilty of both structural and martial violence. In the past, prophets had challenged the systemic injustice of the state, and priests had been critical even of its holy wars. For the Kookists, however, secular Israel was beyond criticism and
essential to the world’s salvation. With the establishment of
Israel, Messianic redemption had already begun: “Every Jew who comes to Eretz Yisrael, every tree that is planted in the soil of Israel, every soldier added to the army of Israel constitutes another spiritual stage; literally, another stage in the process of redemption.”
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As we have seen, ancient Israel from the very first had looked askance at state violence; now the Kookists gave it supreme sanction. Once the nation-state becomes the highest value, however, as Lord Acton had predicted, there is no limit to what it can do—literally, anything goes. By elevating the state to the divine level, Kookists had also given sacred endorsement to
nationalism’s shadow side: its intolerance of minorities. Unless Jews occupied the entire Land, Israel would remain tragically incomplete, so annexing Arab territory was a supreme religious duty.
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A few days
after the
Six-Day War, the Labor government proposed to return some of the occupied territories—including some of the most important biblical sites on the
West Bank—to the
Arabs in exchange for peace and recognition. The Kookists vehemently opposed the plan and, to their surprise, found that for the first time they had secular allies. A group of Israeli poets, philosophers, and army officers, fired by the victory, had come together to prevent any such handover and offered the Kookists moral and financial support. Secular nationalists made common cause with the hitherto despised religious Zionists, realizing that they had exactly the same objectives.

Enthused by this backing, in April 1968,
Moshe Levinger led a small group of families to celebrate
Passover in
Hebron on the West Bank. They checked into the Park Hotel and, to the embarrassment of the Labor government, refused to leave. But their chutzpah tugged at Laborite heartstrings because it recalled the audacity of the chalutzim, who in the days before the state had defied the British by squatting aggressively in Arab land.
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Yet again, secular and religious enthusiasms merged dangerously. For the Kookists, Hebron—the burial place of
Abraham,
Isaac, and
Jacob—was contaminated by the presence of the Palestinians, who also revered these prophets. They now refused to leave the
Cave of the
Patriarchs in time for
Muslim communal prayer, noisily blocking the entrances and flying the Israeli flag at the shrine on Independence Day.
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When a Palestinian finally threw a hand grenade, the Israeli government reluctantly established an enclave guarded by the IDF for the settlers outside Hebron; by 1972
Kiryat Arba had five thousand inhabitants. For
Kookists it was an outpost pushing against the frontiers of the demonic world of the “Other Side.”