Dennis Fox’s Weblog

The approaching Passover holiday celebrating the Israelites’ escape from Egyptian slavery has me thinking about parallels and context. Liberation for whom, for example? What about those plagues? When, exactly, does killing innocents bother us? At last year’s poor excuse for a seder, I raised a number of questions. This year I may just skip the whole experience.

The tribalism/universalism disjunction’s twisting of moral decision making is captured nicely in a year-old posting by journalist Tony Karon about Passover seders in his native South Africa. An excerpt:

Toasting God’s Terrorism and Other Passover Themes:

As a child, I loved nothing more than making a huge mess of sweet kiddush wine in my plate (for which I’d previously stomped the grapes in a plastic bucket in my aunt Sonia’s basement) as we chanted our way through the Ten Plagues visited by God upon the Egyptians in order to force Pharaoh to free us. Later, it just became another numb ritual that I executed without thinking. But I remember one year, now a twentysomething activist in the liberation movement, being a little horrified by what we were celebrating here. (After all, the ANC had, in the face of strong pressure from angry township youth, scrupulously maintained its rejection of terrorism, i.e. of deliberately targeting civilians — one or two guerrillas had crossed this line, but it was never policy and they were subject to discipline.) The plagues include poisoning the Egyptians’ drinking water, killing their cattle by disease, blistering their skin with boils, sending a hailstorm that killed people and destroyed a year’s crops and following that up with a plague of locusts to finish off the vegetation that survived the hail, and then, when Pharaoh still didn’t heed Moses’s plea, God killed the firstborn son of every Egyptian family.

The objective, universally accepted definition of terrorism [is] violence directed randomly against the non-combatant population in order to force an authority to make a desired political change. And having watched the ANC grapple with that issue and then choose the ethical course, I was a little repelled by the fact that, for all these years, our seders had been celebrating the murder of children as a means of securing our freedom.

So, at that particular seder, I made a comment to the effect that this seemed to be the equivalent of the ANC deciding to start blowing up white kindergartens in order to hasten the collapse of apartheid. It seemed morally repugnant. A family member could see my qualms, but nonetheless insisted, “Yes, but this is different. In Egypt, this was the only thing that worked.” Which, of course, is exactly the argument used by those Palestinians who have advocated the morally and politically disastrous strategy of sending suicide bombers to kill Israeli children.

Karon later adds this:

It is traditional, at the seders of more liberally-minded people, to invite those gathered to think, for a moment, of the many people in the world who are not free, and to whom the universal message of freedom inherent in the Passover story nonetheless applies. It is as well that we teach our children to think not only of their own freedoms, but also to remember the suffering people of Darfur, or Chechnya, or Burma or countless other places. But I wonder how often that injunction is taken as an opportunity to think about the Palestinians, whose bondage is maintained in our name.

…

My South African Habonim elders, by then settled on Kibbutz Yizreel, warned us during a visit there in 1978 that the settlement strategy being pursued by the then-Begin government, and its Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon, was a disaster that would turn Israel into an apartheid state. And they were not wrong. ….

Karon’s blog, Rootless Cosmopolitan, is worth reading.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Israel/Palestine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.