Palestine's burned children, the Holocaust and the sacrifice

The Hajj season and Eid al-Adha are a great event in which a confrontation, or an encounter, among the ummahs of the Abrahamic religions takes place in one way or another. The quarrels, wars and disputes among them in today's world are, in a sense, reflections, reaching down to the present, of events going back 3,500 years. The positionings during those events and the separations afterward write, for each of them today, roles suited to their personalities and characters, which have practically become firmly settled.

The treatment Israel today inflicts on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the unlimited support the US gives it, Europe's approving and supportive silence, the limitless silence and covertly supportive attitude of the hypocritical leaders of the Islamic world... All the characters match one to one with the characters described in the Book. The Book, through which you watch and read what is happening today, takes you to history just as it brings history to today, to the very middle of the events you are living.

Are the scenes in which Israel kills Palestinian children, women and adults by burning them, and manages to turn this into practically a matter of boasting before its own people without feeling any need for defense, related only to the present day, to death and killing having become very easy with the technical means modernity offers, to its having become a matter of technical possibility? After all, for the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman's famous book reduced the subject to a question of modernity. Perhaps by this he tried to explain that the subject has its roots not only in National Socialism but in the Enlightenment and in modernity. There the Holocaust, that is, the burning to death of Jews in the name of a modern racism, was seen as a crime into which a modern subject could easily and at any time lapse. According to Bauman, whereas the Holocaust was traditionally seen as an outburst of irrational hatred or barbarism, it was made possible by the coming together of modern elements such as modern rationality, bureaucracy, scientific thought and technological progress.

The functioning of modern bureaucracy prevents individuals from feeling moral responsibility for their actions. Within the chain of command, people become merely "officials doing their duty." This made it psychologically and ethically possible for Nazi officials to take part in genocide. Similar to Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil," Bauman too, by drawing attention to the cold-blooded nature of modern bureaucracy, tried to explain that such savage violence and genocide emerged from within modernity itself.

If the Holocaust that the Jews suffered was a result of modernity, is the genocide the Israelis carry out today, reaching the point of "burning people" and "burning children," also a result of modernity?

According to a recent public opinion poll, 82 percent of Jewish Israelis were found to support expelling the Palestinians from Gaza. A significant part of the criticisms directed today at Netanyahu have no problem at all with the murders he has committed in Gaza. Their only problem is that Netanyahu has been unable to carry out the massacres he promised at the level that would destroy Hamas and perhaps sweep the Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank. There is no sin here that can be attributed to modernity. The sin is related to a people's theologically regarding itself as having the right to commit every kind of violence, massacre, theft, deportation and burning against other people, and this has nothing to do with modernity. Of course I have no concern here to defend modernity against Bauman. The criticism by Bauman and Arendt of the banalization of evil in bureaucratic indifference to duty is of course correct and appropriate. But the evil we face today is related to a hatred, a religious bigotry and a hostility far worse than banalized evil.

In the journey of Sacrifice that we are entering, it is perhaps also related to the falsification of the Jewish and Christian understandings of sacrifice and its having become a matter of separation and hatred when it should have brought one closer to God and all His servants. Just like Passover, a festival that should open onto the deepest and broadest meanings of liberation as a feast, having turned into a display of hatred and hostility against the Palestinians. A heavy arrogance, from the jealous attitude displayed on the point of whether it was Isaac or Ishmael who was sacrificed, presenting laughing at Ishmael as an insolence whose price must be heavily paid.

Ishmael, merely because he displayed, appropriately or not, the laughter (idhak) that only Isaac deserved, was perhaps someone who had to be punished by being burned. Thus his sacrifice would become a punishment for him. For the Children of Israel it was his destruction, in the name of a grabbing of position, trying not to cede to anyone else the place before God. The method of drawing near to God is thus carried out in a perverse way, by a murder, by destroying other candidates who are alternatives to oneself. The massacres we witness in Gaza are the present-day manifestation of an unending hatred and hostility toward the Children of Ishmael since that day. The sacrifice of a society in its entirety.

Holocaust is a word of Greek origin and means holos (whole) + kaustos (burned), that is, "wholly burned sacrifice." In the Torah, in popular Jewish culture, it is thought that in the sacrifice as a ritual carried out by burning the whole of it after slaughter (holocaust), the fact that its smoke in particular flies away rapidly is what brings it to God. "God said, 'Take Isaac, your beloved 'only son,' and go to the region of Moriah,' 'There, on a mountain I will show you, offer your son as a burnt offering'" (Genesis 22:2).

A belief in God that is falsified with anthropomorphic imaginings as far as possible starts from here. The thought that the smoke of the sacrifice will draw near to God is nothing other than a falsification of the concept of sacrifice itself. This conception of sacrifice is not a result of the original belief of the Jews, but an inspiration and influence from the ancient Greek understanding. Indeed, in antiquity this term denoted sacrifices offered to God by wholly burning. For this reason some find the Holocaust being called by this name disturbing. Because this name can lead to the Jewish victims killed through the Holocaust in the Nazi camps being perceived as sacrifices offered to God. This is both very demoralizing from the standpoint of an understanding that regards sacrifice as punishment, and those who deserve to be sacrificed in this way, as God's beloved servants, are not the Jews but their enemies.

Yet Sacrifice is not a punishment; it is a drawing near and a bringing near. To God and to people, to the poor. It is not a withholding and a waste but a way of sharing and of entering other people's hearts. It is not a matter of hatred but a matter of the settling, by means of ritual, in the depth of the personality, of a consciousness of friendship, brotherhood, and unity in essence. It is an occasion to reflect that God needs neither the meat nor the blood of the sacrifices slaughtered. Life belongs to Him in any case, blood belongs to Him, and He is nearer to the jugular vein of both blood and life than anyone.

Whenever He wishes He takes from whom He wishes, whenever He wishes He gives to whom He wishes. Through this ritual God has willed both that this be realized and, on this occasion, that the meat of the sacrifices be distributed to the poor.

Well, when the ritual of Sacrifice itself has in fact been abolished in the Jewish and Christian tradition, what is it to try to sacrifice today a whole nation by punishing it, and to do so with the perversion of thinking that one will thereby appear more pleasing to God? To where does this sacrifice bring Israel near (qurb)?