The Tanks of Jehovah

The organizers of massacres have a peculiar inclination toward poetry. While some plan troop deployments and armaments before their gigantic maps, as we’ve seen in movies, others engage in the task of searching for suggestive names for their military operations or the deadliest weapons they use. It’s a job that requires some preparation and literary sensitivity, often destined for unjust anonymity. We know the names of the scientists who constructed the first atomic bomb in the Los Alamos desert, but not the name of the person who named those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the first was called Little Boy; the second, Fat Man. In the first Gulf War, we had the epic ring of Operation Desert Storm, which initially alternated with Desert Shield, like early drafts of a poem. After 9/11 came Operation Infinite Justice, so infinite that some of its victims are still imprisoned and awaiting trial in the cages of Guantanamo. The 2003 invasion of Iraq began as Operation New Dawn, until the disasters of the following years left the most vociferous euphemism inventors at a loss for words.

Due to these superfluous interests, I have taken note of the name that the Israeli Army has given to the new phase in its extermination plan against the defenseless population of Gaza. It is called Operation Gideon’s Chariots. The Israeli military draws upon poetic and biblical references perhaps more sophisticated than those of the United States. They have a missile named Gabriel, after the archangel, and over the years have used evocative names such as Operation Rainbow Among the Clouds, Operation Blue Sky, and Operation Olive Branch, none of which hint at the dead and destruction they have caused. However, there are more alarming names, like Operation Cast Lead, or the terrifying Operation God’s Fury.

As I am also fond of reading the Bible, I sought the trace of Gideon in the Old Testament, in the Book of Judges, which led me back to Exodus and the Book of Joshua, leaving me stunned. I did not remember such obscene violence, such an inflexible persistence in the annihilation of the enemy, under the direct orders of Jehovah. It is in these biblical books where the radicals of religious orthodoxy and the extreme right in Israel find the legitimacy for their genocidal projects: “I will send my terror ahead of you and will throw into confusion every nation you encounter, and I will give you the necks of all your enemies,” Jehovah tells Moses as he prepares to head toward the Promised Land.

When Moses died, Joshua continued the invading campaign against peoples that do not enjoy divine favor: “… And they destroyed everything in the town, men and women, young and old, even the cattle and sheep and donkeys, with the sword…”. “And they burned the city and everything in it, but put the silver and gold, the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the Lord’s house.” Once the massacre was complete, “Joshua made this oath: Cursed before Jehovah is the man who rises up and rebuilds this city of Jericho.” With minor topographical changes, these are words that any Netanyahu minister could easily repeat, and I fear that a significant portion of the population of Israel, starting with the president, who declared without blinking that there are no innocents in Gaza, would agree: “And when the Israelites had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the field, in the desert, where they had pursued them, and all had fallen by the sword until they were consumed, all the Israelites returned to Ai and put it to the sword… and plundered for themselves the livestock and the spoils of the city, according to the word of Jehovah.” If necessary, even the stars pause by divine design to ensure that night’s arrival does not impose a truce: “And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped until the nation avenged itself on its enemies… And there has never been a day like it before or since, because Jehovah fought for Israel.”

The fearsome Spanish I am quoting is from The Bear Bible, translated over 12 years and published in Antwerp in 1569 by the Lutheran and fugitive friar Casiodoro de Reina, who was burned in effigy by the Inquisition and would have been burned alive if he hadn’t escaped in time from Philip II’s Spain. Protestants still use it, and it can be purchased at the Spanish Bible Society, in a fairly corrected and modernized version, which, however, does not lose its dazzling beauty, that of a language in its prime that must be stretched to the maximum to convey the power of the original, which ranges from the bloody exaltation inspired by a merciless Jehovah to the compassionate temperance of many passages in the Gospels, including the ethical radicalism of the prophets and the erotic fervor of the Song of Songs.

Casiodoro de Reina’s Bible is the invisible summit of literature in Spanish, the unknown masterpiece that could have been as fertile as La Celestina or Don Quixote de la Mancha. Reading it in the sinister light of these times inevitably brings to mind the vengeful delirium that has seized Israel, with the complicity of the United States and Germany, and the fervor of American evangelical extremists, who want to read literally every call to the law of retaliation and the wait for the Apocalypse. One also wonders where other currents of the Jewish tradition remain, many of which extended into the best of Christianity, emphasizing ethical rigor, solidarity with the weak, the foreigner, and the persecuted, the sanctification of the everyday, and the scrupulous will to avoid harm. “You shall stone them with stones and they shall die,” decrees the law of Moses as punishment for adultery. In the Gospel of John, Christ challenges those about to stone the adulterous woman: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” After uttering those weighty words, Christ seems to disengage from his surroundings: “And bending down, he wrote on the ground.” When he lifts his eyes, the crowd of accusers has disappeared: “And Jesus was left alone, and the woman was standing there in the midst.”

In Jewish culture, the just person is one who does good while resisting the collective inertia of iniquity, and their personal acts acquire secret greatness: “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in.” No matter how limited each person’s ability may be: “Whoever saves a life saves humanity.” Even the wrathful Jehovah is willing to save Sodom from imminent destruction if Abraham can find at least 10 righteous people within it. “Never do such a thing,” Abraham dares to say to him, “to kill the righteous with the wicked. Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” According to Jewish legend, each generation is saved from annihilation because there are 36 righteous individuals who exercise their goodness so secretly that no one knows them, not even they know that they are. If there is any justice in the world, Netanyahu and his accomplices will one day sit beside the leaders of Hamas before the Hague Tribunal, and they will have to answer for crimes against humanity. The question is whether there remain enough just individuals in Israel for the entire country not to sink into irreversible moral shame.