A Diary Entry

Friday 18th October 2024

Two weeks ago, I read a piece in The New Statesman titled “What is Zionism? Why the State of Israel is Central to Jewish Identity” by Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi of Britain. 

I didn’t expect it would be anything other than the typical, historically distorted, dehumanising, and warmongering screed that Mirvis has repeated over and over in the last year, in any forum to which he is permitted access. And that’s exactly what the article was. 

A few moments did surprise me somewhat, particularly Mirvis’s desperate attempt to reframe Zionism as a modern anticolonial project in a bid for the hearts and minds of his “progressive” audience. The Rabbi references “the colonising Romans” and offers the mind-bending reflection that “It is extremely sad that the existence of a Jewish state in a land within which the Jewish people were indigenous long before the dawn of both Christianity and Islam should be seen as controversial in any way.” 

After closing the tab to return to actually meaningful perspectives, the article left my mind; an irrelevant and momentary distraction at a time of spiralling Israeli violence in Gaza and Lebanon.

…

This week we all witnessed abject horror. On Monday, the IDF bombed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital Complex, killing at least four people and injuring 70 who were living, displaced, in tents in the complex. We watched as the flames from the IDF bombs burned 19 year old Shaban al-Dalou and his mother alive. We watched the final moments of his life, while he lay on a hospital bed, attached to an IV. 

That this was only one of several near-simultaneous massacres perpetrated by the IDF is so much to comprehend. Is comprehension even possible? Who am I to be able to fully comprehend genocide?

In the days following, I watched more videos. I read the testimony of survivors of the attack in Mohammed R. Mhawish’s incredible reporting. I tracked the inevitably pointless pleas of a handful of UK and US politicians for a genuine arms embargo. I followed the discussion of how the media parroted Israeli lies after the bombing of Al-Ahli Hospital last October and how that opened the gates for a year of disinformation and manipulation.   

And for some reason, one completely asinine, utterly egregious line from the Chief Rabbi’s essay kept intruding into my thoughts, tormenting me, enraging me more and more with each appearance: 

“The Torah (Five Books of Moses) is, in effect, a 3,000-year-old constitutional document for the establishment of a nation state in the territory known previously as Canaan and later as the Kingdom of Judah or Judea. Jews know it simply as the Land of Israel.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about how this claim is so cynical, so outrageous, such an utter and complete desecration. How it cannot be allowed to simply stand, unchallenged, appearing normal or neutral, in that fucking magazine.  

And so, I write this to show this claim for what it is. And, to be honest with you, I write this because I cannot let this go. Because there is nothing else I can do. 

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In short, the Chief Rabbi’s statement is that of a fanatic. Here it is quickly in full, for my benefit at least: 

Mirvis’s poorly constructed attempt to show the eternal nature of an exclusive Jewish claim to the land via “a nation state” (a 19th-century European development) betrays its wholly modern origins. His formulation of the relationship between Jews and the land of Palestine exists in a genealogical line stretching back to the worst of the early British Christian Zionists who sought to “restore” the Jews to Palestine to initiate the “End of Times”. As Nur Masalha shows in his book The Bible and Zionism, Lord Shaftesbury, for example, placed an 1880 advertisement in the Times, to gain exposure for a memorandum to the Protestant European monarchs on the topic of the “original covenant which secures that land to the [Jewish] descendant of Abraham.” 

Further, Mirvis’s claim that the Torah is this nation state’s ultimate constitution implies the belief that the modern state of Israel is truly, or ought to be, constructed on the law of the Torah (halakah). But, as Alexander Kaye demonstrates in The Invention of Jewish Theocracy, the notion of a halakhic state is itself a modern development in Jewish thought, largely at the hands of religious Zionist Isaac Herzog in the 1940s who was responding to centralised European law (who, like Mirvis, was at one time Chief Rabbi of Ireland) and not at all reflective of the non-hierarchical, pluralistic history of halakah. Going even further, such a concept of Jewish theocracy is itself not even supported by the religious sources of Judaism, as Israeli historian Aviezer Ravitzky has argued. Importantly though, this kind of claim to the Torah as the backbone of Jewish Israeli oppression of Palestinians is not merely the preserve of religious Zionists, but also secular, purportedly socialist Zionists. Masalha shows that Ben Gurion, for example, used the Torah as a mobilising historical myth, even saying: “It is not important whether the [biblical] story is a true record of an event or not. What is of importance is that this is what the Jews believed as far back as the period of the First Temple.” And on, and on…

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But this is a time of genocide, and in truth, neither Mirvis nor his lightly read article really matter for saving lives. And neither does this I suppose...

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Evan Robins is an editor at Vashti.