masada complex: myths and madness

Masada.Collective patriotic suicide. The craggy stronghold beside the Dead Sea where Zealots killed themselves rather than surrender to Rome. A cautionary tale of fantaticism  and using the Messiah as an ideology? Koranic zealots have found a kinfolk in the power of Jewish resurgence capable of detering the state through a religious based ideology backed by the threat of collective violence that impedes if not sabotages the attainment of legitimate political goals. Illegal settlements on the West Bank and the resistance to their demolition and related price-tag violence invokes the potential of a battle with the IDF. And all without any remorse, the option is on the table for civil war in place of a peace treaty and a division of land with the Arabs.  It recalls the context of Masada when now, as then, religion becomes a tool of misguided nationalism, of xenophobia sanctified in the name of God replete with self-righteousness as a shield for valid disapproval: the drug of spiritual comfort and a reason to close ranks within a very unhealthy nationalism…

One of antiquity’s most terrible wars erupted in the year A.D. 66, when the Jews, goaded past endurance by decades of misrule and inspired by hopes for the coming of the Messiah, rebelled against against Rome. Despite overwhelming odds and immense loss of life, they continued fighting for seven years. The rebellion had been seething for almost a century. Roman taxation was harsh and the imperial procurators continually offended the religious sensibilities of the Jews. Time after time, in they ears before the war, riots broke out when the Romans marched into the holy city of Jerusalem bearing their eagle standards- graven images that were worshipped by legionaires.

The Jews had almost no chance to win, and to their contemporaries the rebellion seemed an act of madness. The rebels imagined they could block Roman shipping to the Mediterranean, but that hope proved illusory. They thought that the Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire would rise in rebellion to id them; there were indeed riots between Jews and Gentiles in Alexandria and Damascus, but they were quickly subdued. They hoped that the Parthians, the only power strong enough to rival Rome, might invade Palestine to aid them; but the Parthians failed to move.

Finally, the Jews expected God to intercede on their behalf, to send his Messiah to overthrow the Roman Empire and set up his own kingdom in its place. That hope proved illusory as well.

For hundreds of years the dream of the advent of the Messiah had entranced Jewish minds. Only a part of the nation believed that his coming and the end of the world, or the end of the world as it was known, was imminent. Still, they carried the rest of the people along with them, though occasionally, a calmer voice, such as that of the Jewish general Josephus, who later wrote a history of the great rebellion, called down scorn on the fanatics.

The leaders of the Smaria and Judea settlement project appear to remain totally convinced of their own ideals typical of cults and zealots; the same dialogue of identity and roots under the umbrella of strict Judaism, as if the paradox, the oxymoron of religious Zionism held no contradictions. Though, a good argument is that the BDS and so-called “human rights” activists and Islamic fundamentalists hold the same chips of profound intolerance, resort to violence and overall disagreement, almost normative in a region accustomed to blood spilling as the trademark of political imperative.

(see link at end):In 1927, poet Yitzhak Lamdan wrote Masada, a poem glorifying the heroism and self-reliance of the early Zionist movement. The poem helped transform the remote hilltop fortress, largely forgotten since the writings of the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus, into an enduring symbol of the young State of Israel. Lamdan’s most famous line, “never again shall Masada fall,” became a rallying cry for a generation of Israeli soldiers who repeated these words in countless inauguration ceremonies.

But there is another meaning of the Masada fable: that compromise is intolerable. Masada was the last chapter in a bloody and self-destructive campaign that started during the siege of Jerusalem. The Zealots refused to negotiate with the vastly superior Roman Army, turned against those Jews who sought compromise and later burned the food stocks of their compatriots in a misguided effort

motivate resistance. At every turn, the Zealots refused to alter their course of action.

As Jerusalem stood in ruin, its temple sacked, a handful of surviving Zealots, led by Elazar ben Yair, fled to Masada. They held out for three years as the Romans laid siege. When defeat was inevitable, ben Yair gathered the survivors.

Josephus recorded his rousing words: “I cannot but esteem it as a favor that God has granted us, that it is still in our power to die bravely and in a state of freedom.” The account of the carnage that followed is quite vivid: husbands cut the throats of their wives and children and then proceeded to kill themselves. Nine hundred and sixty men, women and children died.

But not all of ben Yair’s followers were moved by the prospects of mass suicide. The seven survivors who provided Josephus with their accounts of the slaughter are a testament to this. According to Josephus, ben Yair “cut [debate] off short and made haste to do the work, as full of an unconquerable ardor of mind, and moved with a demoniacal fury.” Despite dissent, ben Yair would not “think of flying away” nor would he “permit any one else to do so.”

Masada was a historical dead end for the Zealots, but not for Zealotry, which remains alive in Israel today. Netanyahu’s hard-line policies undermine the wellbeing of the state and its citizens, much as Elazar ben Yair’s actions did on the top of Masada.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s ceaseless policy of annexing Palestinian land to expand the settlements not only saps valuable state resources, which are desperately needed to provide good jobs and housing in Israel proper, but also needlessly endangers the lives of Israeli soldiers who are charged with protecting the increasingly unprotectable. With every further encroachment into Palestinian land, the route of the separation barrier becomes more irrational, following neither internationally recognized boundaries nor those dictated by nature or security. While separation was its goal, today the barrier neither keeps Palestinians out nor Israelis in.

But Netanyahu’s determination to absorb ever-greater quantities of biblical land comes with an even greater cost. Israel cannot continue to exist as both a Jewish and democratic state as long as it occupies millions of West Bank Palestinians, who are rapidly approaching numerical parity with the Jewish population. To enfranchise them would mean the end of the Jewish state. To continue to deny them full participatory rights, the end of Israel’s democratic character….

..There are alternatives to Netanyahu’s stubborn path, just as there were on top of Masada. While the Zealots chose suicide, more pragmatic Jews survived and even thrived. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, for example, negotiated with the Romans, thereby obtaining permission to establish the Academy of Yavneh. It was there that the mishnah was written, the wellspring of rabbinic Judaism that sustained Jewish Diaspora life for two millennia.

Israel, former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin once noted, must make peace with its enemies, not with its friends. Netanyahu must shake off his Masada complex, recognize that there is no nobility in self-destruction and open himself up to compromise. A lesser known-line from Lamdan’s poem reminds us that Masada has nothing to offer other than mass suicide:Read More:http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/The-Masada-complex