The Fall of Jericho: biblical genocide?

The guest preacher, Terry Boyle, at the Church I attend this morning (Sunday 17/11/2024) preached on this reading:

Joshua 5: 13–15  The Fall of Jericho

Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”

‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.’ Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, ‘What message does my Lord have for his servant?” 

The commander of the LORD’s army replied, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so.

Boyle's key message from the reading was that Joshua achieved success because he was obedient to God. And, he said: 'We all know what happened next'. 

Indeed we do, and I remember as a child joyfully singing "and the walls came tumbling down". 

It was a great triumph for Joshua because he followed the will of God, and Boyle took it for granted that we would all rejoice at this story of victory in the history of the Israelites. That is indeed always how I remember the story in my Christian upbringing.

But here's what the bible tells us happened after the walls came tumbling down:

"They devoted* the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys." Joshua 6:21

*A footnote to the NIV translation on Bible Gateway explains that the Hebrew term translated as 'devoted' refers to "the irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the Lord, often by totally destroying them".

And:

"Then they burned the whole city and everything in it...." Joshua 6:24

Sound familiar? 

How did we deal with these passages when I read the story in the past? When singing the song you go no further in the narrative beyond the walls coming tumbling down, and you don't need to think about what happened next. From bible classes I have vague memories of worrying about killing so many people, but I think we read it as a story and which was no more real than, say, the Lord of the Rings. If it is 'just' a story it is an exciting tale! (The business with Rahab the prostitute sheltering Joshua's spies, Joshua 2, and Joshua in turn saving her and her household from the killing, Joshua 6:22, is weird but a memorable story.)

But now Israel is acting-out a modern-day slaughter of Palestinians and it is very, very real. Israel is destroying "men and women, young and old' and 'burn[ing] the whole city and everything in it' - but not just Gaza City, the whole of the Gaza strip. And people in Israel, and even more so Zionist Christians in America, are justifying it based on the authority of the bible.

As I said about Psalm 124, it is not good enough that churches use these stories without joining the dots. We can no longer stop at 'the walls came tumbling down'. We've got to ask about the slaughter.

What to do about Psalm 124?

Yesterday (29th September 2024) I was on the rota for reading at Church, and found myself reading Psalm 124, one of the lectionary readings for the day:

1 If the Lord had not been on our side –
  let Israel say –
2 if the Lord had not been on our side
  when people attacked us,
3 they would have swallowed us alive
  when their anger flared against us;
4 the flood would have engulfed us,
  the torrent would have swept over us,
5 the raging waters
  would have swept us away.
6 Praise be to the Lord,
  who has not let us be torn by their teeth.
7 We have escaped like a bird
  from the fowler’s snare;
the snare has been broken,
  and we have escaped.
8 Our help is in the name of the Lord,
  the Maker of heaven and earth.

I don't need to spell out the problems with this, in the light of the activities of the state of Israel over the past year, do I? 

In the past I wouldn't have worried. or not much anyway. The psalms are notorious for 'difficult' content ("happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks", psalm 137 v. 9) and need lots of interpretation. For example, I heard someone suggest that the infants being dashed against the rocks should be thought of as evil thoughts starting to grow in your mind: smash them before they become too big. For myself, I see the bible as a human creation and, like any book, open to criticism. We can contexualise all we like, we can interpret it in the light of modern understanding, but at some point we just have to say: no, I think that is wrong.

At the end of the reading, as is the custom, I said 'this is the word of the Lord', and the congregation responded 'thanks be to God'. I toyed with instead saying 'this is what it says in the bible' or something like that, but in the end I didn't have the courage to break with what we are 'supposed' to say.

But if this psalm is being read in churches across the world, at the very least we have talk about it surely? To put it crudely, is it saying that God is on the side of modern-day Israel? That the slaughter of 40,000 people in Gaza, and the bombing of Lebanon and the Yemen will succeed (is succeeding) because the Lord is with them?  

And, before you shout 'anti-semitism', I'm talking about the state of Israel, and about Christian churches. And, let's be clear, the most ardent Zionists, the most dangerous Zionists, are right-wing Christians in the USA. I don't know what goes on in most Synagogues, but I do know that large numbers of Jews would have no sympathy whatsoever with Zionism, certainly not Zionism which leads to the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians.

In my church, the minister's sermon was based on the New Testament reading* and made no mention of the psalm. I suggest that's not really good enough: we can't just have a reading which some people might read as giving religious cover to genocide, without at least saying something about it.

*Mark 9: 38–41. "Whoever is not against us is for us", and he spoke of the need for diversity and a range of perspectives in the church. This was fine, but could have been preached at any time. And, TBH, I've heard it plenty of times before.

Understanding events in Palestine through the narrative of the Racial Contract of Charles W. Mills

According to the “Racial Contract” of Charles W. Mills [1] there is a binary divide: white and nonwhite. The whites are fully human, have the power, money and, crucially, human rights. Nonwhites have less power and money, do not have full human rights and, indeed, are slightly less than human.

The Racial Contract allows whites to exploit nonwhites in the same way that people exploit animals. There are countless examples in the history of European and American imperialism and colonisation: the slave trade, the genocide of the indigenous peoples of North and South America and Australia, British atrocities in India, apartheid in South Africa and so on.

Who is defined as white and who as nonwhite is not fixed [2]. In the UK, Irish people were once classified as nonwhite. Infamously, rooms to let in London would stipulate: No Irish, no blacks, no dogs [3]. Few people would now think like that about Irish people. For most people, the Irish are now unequivocally white.

There was a time (and still is, for modern-day antisemites) that Jews were classified as nonwhite. That, in harness with the Racial Contract, was one of the weapons of anti-semitism, and it reached its terrible climax in the Holocaust when Jews were murdered alongside other not-quite-human people such as Roma and Sinta people, homosexuals and people with disabilities.

One of the unique features of the Holocaust was that it took place on European soil, and after the war Western powers recoiled in horror as they were presented with details what had gone on, and declared ‘never again’. It turned out, though, that the mechanism for 'never again' was not the ending of the Racial Contract. No, the Racial Contract remains in force to this day. "Never again" meant redefining Jews as white so that they should no longer be oppressed. They could join the ranks of the oppressors. Israel was set up as white colony, not even acknowledging the existence of the Palestinians. It could be said that it was “a land without a people for a people without a land” because the Palestinians were, in the terms of the Racial Contract, not really people.

And today the terms of the Racial Contract allows the slaughter of Palestinians by the state of Israel backed by white Western powers, especially the USA and the UK. The nonwhite victims are the Palestinians. The Racial Contract requires the nonwhites to be perceived as barbaric, so every opportunity is taken to talk-up the killing of Israeli civilians on the 7^th October. By contrast, the whites are by definition civilised and not barbaric, so no matter how many civilians, including children, are slaughtered by the IDF, no matter how indiscriminate the Israeli air bombardment of Gaza, never mind the individual tales of cruelty by the Israeli forces, the Western narrative will always be of Western civilization, represented by Israel, up against the barbarian terrorists of Hamas.

Read, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks on the situation in Israel and Gaza to the General Synod of the Church of England on 13^th November 2023 [4]. Justin Welby calls for an end to the killing of both Israelis and Palestinians, but the killing of Israelis he describes as “barbaric slaughter of innocent Israelis by Hamas” whereas while he calls the killing of innocent Palestinians “a great wrong” and says it “cannot be morally justified”, he doesn’t call it barbaric. Indeed, he says “there is no equivalence between the atrocities of Hamas against Israeli civilians, and the right and duty of Israel to defend itself”. Even today, after the bombing of hospitals, targetting Red Crescent ambulances, killing people who are waving a white flag, the murder of more than 12,000 children, you will search in vain for any suggestion by Justin Welby that anything done by Israel is barbaric. [5]

Notes:

1 Mills, Charles W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press

2 It is information.

3 https://www.rebelnews.ie/2023/01/18/no-blacks-no-dogs-no-irish-a-short-history-of-discrimination-against-irish-migrants/

4 https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/speaking-writing/speeches/general-synod-archbishop-canterburys-presidential-address

5 Search Twitter (X) for from:@JustinWelby barbaric

Not guilty

Further to my previous post Accusation of antisemitism: rebuttal I have finally received a decision: No Further Action. Over 21 months after the complaint was made. See the letter below. (I might get in trouble for sharing the letter, but so be it.)

Notice that there is no apology for putting me through it. Also, it is only "on this occasion" that they conclude that I have not breached the rules, so I suppose they are reserving the right to trawl through my history and find an instance where I have done wrong. I dare say if they try hard enough they will succeed. After all, in the words of Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis:

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

I am expected to consider that this matter is now "behind me". It is not that easy. Of course I'm pleased about the outcome, but I remain bitter that it was ever taken seriously and at the length of time it has taken to be resolved. Moreover, whilst I have been exonerated ("on this occasion"), I heard this week that a hard-working Labour Councillor in Milton Keynes, an honest person of the utmost integrity, has been expelled from the Party for contributing to a Facebook group of an organisation which has since been proscribed - but was not proscribed at the time she contributed to it. I know this individual well, and her only crime is to be on the left of the Party and to have supported Jeremy Corbyn.

Letter from the Party:

Dear Mr Chapman,

 

Notice of Outcome of Investigation: No Further Action

 

We are writing to inform you that the Labour Party (the Party) has concluded its investigation into the allegation that you had breached Chapter 2, Clause I.8 of the Party’s Rule Book (the Rules).

 

A panel of the National Executive Committee (the NEC Panel) met on 28 January 2022 and considered all of the evidence that the Party put to you and any evidence submitted by you in response.

 

The NEC Panel found that your conduct on this occasion did not amount to a breach of the Rules and the Party will be taking no further action in relation to this matter.

 

Consequently, any restrictions that the Party may have imposed on your membership rights pending the outcome of this investigation have now ended. This includes any administrative suspension of your membership that may have been in place.

 

The Party would like to thank you for your cooperation with the investigation and we hope that this matter is now behind you.

 

Yours sincerely,

Disputes Team

Governance and Legal Unit

The Labour Party

Accusation of antisemitism: rebuttal.

This post is prompted by the fact that I was issued with a 'Notice of Investigation' (NoI) by the British Labour Party Complaints Team, arising from something I put on Facebook but which I also put in a post on this blog. The Complaints Team have told me they received a complaint about my Facebook post in May 2020, and they issued the NoI in August 2021. I responded within 7 days as required but they are unable to say when it will be resolved.

The charge from the Labour Party

“Dr Chapman (the Respondent) has engaged in conduct prejudicial and / or grossly detrimental to the Party in breach of Chapter 2, Clause I.8 of the Labour Party Rule Book by engaging in conduct which

A - may reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on race;

B - may reasonably be seen to involve racist stereotypes and sentiments;

C - undermines the Party’s ability to campaign against racism:

i. On 25 May 2020, a complaint was raised against Dr Chapman after he shared a post to Facebook that contained an antisemitic meme with the Star of David, referring* to it as a conspiracy theory.”

*This is factually incorrect in that I didn’t refer to it as a conspiracy theory, the diagram was labelled “conspiracy theory” in the original source.

The ‘Philosophy Matters’ image

The post in question shared the image below, which was taken from a post on the ‘Philosophy Matters’ Facebook page.

 

Anyone who has been reading this blog will immediately see the similarity of this diagrams to the ‘dots and lines’ that I have been using to help understand the nature of information. (See, for example, Facts, data and information. But above all, the narrative.)

The series of images (without the final frame) in the Philosophy Matters diagram is a graphical representation of the “DIKW” hierarchy (data-information-knowledge-wisdom – with ‘insight’ added in this case – see Section 2.1 of Chapman and Ramage 2021).

The idea is that data are linked by a narrative to become information. Dots on the diagrams are the data (“facts”), and the lines joining the dots represent the narrative. Information is defined as meaningful data, so the narrative gives meaning to the data to turn them into information. (Alternatively, the ‘information’ is the process of giving meaning to the data.) The Philosophy Matters image presents similar ideas but also attempts to illustrate knowledge, insight and wisdom within the narrative by colouring the dots and lines.

An important insight from the work of the 'Difference That Makes a Difference (DTMD) project led by Dr Magnus Ramage and me, together with other members of the Critical Information Studies Research Group, is that information is never ethically neutral and is always shaped by power, authority and hierarchy (see Chapman and Ramage 2021).

To a naïve (uncritical) reductionist the data (facts) are incontestable and with any set of data there is one unique true narrative. But reality is not like that. There is the choice of which data to include in narrative (which points to display) and then more than one narrative will fit any set of data, leaving plenty of space for things like ideology and politics.

But it is not that ‘anything goes’. Data have to be true to be information (the veridicality thesis of information - see Luciano Floridi, “The Philosophy of Information”, OUP 2011, chapter 4) and the data constrain the narrative. Some narratives fit the data and some don’t.

The final frame of the Philosophy Matters image illustrates this idea by drawing a Star of David to represent a conspiracy-theorist imposing an antisemitic conspiracy [1] narrative on the data, even though it simply does not fit the data.

Conspiracy theorists do this because their ideology is antisemitic.

[1] Antisemitic conspiracy theories: 

“The claims that “the Jews” or “Zionists” are in possession of considerable wealth, power and influence, and are using it to control democratic governments, financial institutions, media corporations, and cultural establishments...” 

Will Yarokberg, Section 6.6 of “Antisemitism: From Its Origins to the Present.” FutureLearn online, which I studied in March/April 2019. Accessed 13 August 2021.

Comment

It should be clear from the discussion above that, far from being antisemitic, the Philosophy Matters diagram is anti-antisemitism. It is mocking conspiracy theorists. To reiterate: the point is that the Star of David is not a legitimate interpretation of the data (that is why it is labelled 'conspiracy theory'). I struggle to understand how my sharing of this post can be deemed to be conduct prejudicial and/or grossly detrimental to the Party. The only way that I can make sense of it is that the complainant knows that I am a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, believes Jeremy Corbyn to be antisemitic, saw the Star of David, and drew a false and damaging conclusion without either thinking it through or asking me about it. The fact that that the complaint referred to my Facebook post which was only supposed to be visible to my (approximately 200) Facebook 'friends' is disturbing.