Fields of Blood (62 page)

Yet still Labor refused to annex the territories. After the
October War of 1973, when
Egypt and
Syria invaded Sinai and the Golan Heights and were repelled only with great difficulty, a group of Kookists, rabbis, and hawkish secularists formed Gush Emunim, the “Bloc of the Faithful.” A pressure group rather than a political party, its objective was nothing less than “the full redemption of
Israel and the entire world.”
⁷¹
As a “holy people,” Israel was not bound by UN resolutions or international law. Gush’s ultimate plan was to colonize the entire West Bank and transplant hundreds of thousands of Jews into the occupied territories. To make their point, they organized hikes and rallies in the West Bank, and on Independence Day 1975 nearly twenty thousand armed Jews attended a West Bank “picnic,” marching militantly from one location to another.
⁷²

The Gush experienced their marches, battles with the army, and illegal squats as rituals that brought them a sense of
ecstasy and release.
⁷³
The fact that they attracted so much secularist support showed that they were tapping into nationalistic passions that were felt just as strongly by Israelis who had no time at all for religion. They could also draw on the Western tradition of natural human rights that had long declared that an endangered people—and after the October War, who, they asked, could deny that Israelis
were
endangered?—were entitled to settle in “vacant” land. Their sacred task was to ensure that it was truly “empty.” When the
Likud party led by
Menachem Begin defeated Labor in the 1977 elections and declared its commitment to Israeli settlement on both sides of the Jordan, Kookists believed that God was at work. But the honeymoon was short-lived. On November 20, 1977, President
Anwar Sadat of Egypt made his historic journey to
Jerusalem to initiate a peace process, and the following year Begin and Sadat, two former terrorists, signed the
Camp David Accords: Israel would return the
Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for Egypt’s formal recognition of the State of Israel. Observing this unexpected development, many Western people concluded that secular pragmatism would prevail after all.

The
Iranian Revolution shattered that hope. Western politicians had regarded
Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi as a progressive leader and had put their muscle behind his regime, regardless of the fact that he had no
legitimacy among his own people. Iranians were in fact experiencing the structural violence of “the West and the Rest” in an acute form. Independence, democracy, human rights, and national self-determination were for “the West”; but for Iranians, violence, domination, exploitation, and tyranny were to be the order of the day. In 1953 a coup organized by the
CIA and British Intelligence had unseated the
secular nationalist premier
Muhammad Musaddiq (who had tried to nationalize the Iranian oil industry) and reinstated the shah. This event showed Iranians how little they could command their own destiny. After 1953, like the British before them, the
United States controlled the monarch and Iran’s oil reserves, demanding diplomatic privileges and
trade concessions. American businessmen and consultants poured into the country, and though a few Iranians benefited from the boom, most did not. In 1962 the shah began his White Revolution by closing the
Majlis legislature and pushed his unpopular reforms through with the support of
SAVAK, the dreaded secret police trained by the CIA and
Israeli
Mossad. These reforms were applauded in the West, since they established
capitalism, undermined feudal landownership, and promoted literacy and women’s rights, but in fact they favored the rich, concentrated on city dwellers, and ignored the peasantry.
⁷⁴
There were the usual symptoms of an economy modernizing too rapidly: agriculture declined, and rural migrants poured into the cities, living in desolate shantytowns and eking out a precarious existence as porters and street vendors.
⁷⁵
SAVAK made Iranians feel like prisoners in their own country, and clandestine
Marxist and
Islamist guerrilla groups formed in opposition to a secular government that violently suppressed all opposition.

One little-known cleric had the courage to speak out publicly against this oppressive regime. In 1963
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–89), professor of ethics at the Fayziyah Madrassa in
Qum, began a sustained attack on the shah, condemning his use of torture, his closing the Majlis, his spineless subservience to the United States, and his support for Israel, which denied
Palestinians fundamental human rights. On one occasion he stood with the Quran in one hand and the 1906 constitution in the other, and accused the shah of betraying both.
⁷⁶
On March 22, 1963, the anniversary of the
martyrdom of the Sixth
Imam, SAVAK attacked the madrassa, arrested Khomeini, and killed some of the students. After his release, Khomeini resumed the offensive. During the
Ashura rituals, in his eulogy for
Husain, he compared the shah to
Caliph Yazid, the villain
of the
Karbala tragedy.
⁷⁷
When Khomeini was arrested for a second time, thousands of Iranians poured onto the streets, laymen and mullahs protesting side by side. SAVAK was given
shoot-to-kill orders, and clerics braved the guns wearing the white shroud of the
martyr, demonstrating their willingness to die like
Husain in the struggle against tyranny. By the time peace was finally restored, hundreds of civilians had been killed.
⁷⁸

The regime, Khomeini protested, was assaulting its own people. Always he championed the poor, the chief victims of its systemic injustice, ordering the shah to leave his palace and look at the deplorable conditions in the shantytowns. Iran, he claimed on October 27, 1964, was virtually an American colony. It was a rich country, and it was a disgrace that people were sleeping in the streets. For decades foreigners had been plundering their oil, so that it was of no benefit to the Iranian people. “I am deeply concerned about the conditions of the poor next winter, as I expect many to die, God forbid, from cold and starvation,” he concluded. “The ulema should think of the poor and take action now to prevent the
atrocities of last winter.”
⁷⁹
After this speech Khomeini was deported and went into exile in
Iraq. Overnight, he had become a hero in Iran, a symbol of resolute Shii opposition to oppression. Marxist or liberal ideology could have appealed to only a few Iranians, but everybody, especially the urban poor, understood the imagery of Karbala. In the West we are accustomed to extrovert and crowd-pleasing politicians, so it was hard for us to understand Khomeini’s appeal, but Iranians recognized his withdrawn demeanor, inward-seeming gaze, and monotonous delivery as the sign of a “sober” mystic who had achieved full control of the senses.
⁸⁰
In exile in
Najaf too, near the tomb of Imam Ali, Khomeini became closely associated with the Twelve
Imams in the minds of the people, and thanks to modern communications, he would continue to direct events from afar—not unlike the
Hidden Imam.

In the West, Khomeini would be widely regarded as a fanatic and his success seen as a triumph of superstition over rationality. Yet his principled opposition to systemic violence and demand for global justice was deeply in tune with contemporaneous religious developments in the West. His message was not dissimilar to that of
Pope John XXIII (r. 1958–63), whose encyclical letter
Mater et Magistra
(1961) insisted that unfettered
capitalism was immoral and unsustainable; instead, “all forms of economic enterprise must be governed by the principles of social justice and charity.” The pope also called for global equity. National prosperity was
not enough: “Man’s aim must be to achieve in social justice a national and international juridical order … in which all economic activity can be conducted not merely for private gain but also in the interests of the common good.”
⁸¹
In
Pacem in Terris
(1963), the pope insisted that human rights rather than economic profit must be the basis of international relations—a plea clearly critical of the exploitative Western policies in undeveloped countries.

At about the same time as Khomeini was inveighing against the injustice of the shah, the Catholic Church in
Latin America was evolving its
Liberation Theology. Priests and nuns encouraged small communities of the poor to study the
Bible in order to redress the systemic violence of
Brazilian society. In 1968 Latin American bishops met in Medellín,
Colombia, to support the emerging themes of this new movement, which argued that
Jesus was on the side of the poor and oppressed and that Christians must struggle for justice and equality. In Latin America, as in Iran, this kind of theology was deeply threatening to the political and economic
elites. Liberation priests were dubbed “
communists” and, like Iranian clerics, were imprisoned, tortured, and executed because they made it clear that the economic order imposed on the “Third World” by the colonial West was inherently violent:

They insisted that because the world was now so economically interdependent, a North American individual was able to live a comfortable life only because other people, living perhaps in a Brazilian slum, were impoverished; they could purchase goods cheaply because others had been exploited in their production.
⁸³

In the
United States too, religion acquired a revolutionary edge and for the first time in the twentieth century opposed the policies of the American government. While presidents
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were careful to keep religion out of politics, liberal Catholics,
Protestants, and
Jews campaigned in the name of their faith against the
structural and military violence of the
United States. Like
Iranian
Shii
Muslims, they took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War and joined
Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement against racial discrimination at home. In 1962 the
National Council of Churches asked
Kennedy to commit the nation to “an all-out effort to abolish [poverty], both at home and abroad.”
⁸⁴

Khomeini, often thought in the West to be a rabble-rouser, was not advocating violence. The crowds who protested on the streets were unarmed, and their deaths laid bare the ruthless ferocity of the shah’s secular regime. The assassination of Martin Luther King, who had insisted that a
nonviolent response to injury was “an absolute necessity for our survival … the key to the solution of the problems of our world,”
⁸⁵
also revealed the latent violence of American society. King would have agreed with Khomeini’s demand for global justice. He had lamented Kennedy’s disastrous colonial misadventure in the
Bay of Pigs (1961), and even though
Johnson had given
African Americans more than any previous president, he refused to support his war in Vietnam. But in the late 1970s, when the Iranian revolution broke out, the mood in the West had changed. In 1978 the conservative bishop of Cracow
Karol Wojtyla, a fierce opponent of
Liberation Theology, was elected to the papacy, taking the name of John Paul II. The
fundamentalist
Moral Majority had surged to the forefront of American religious life, and the Democratic president
Jimmy Carter, a “born-again” Christian who campaigned vigorously for human rights, was a loyal supporter of the shah’s dictatorship.