I’ve always disliked the Old Testament, ever since I was given it to study in ‘Divinity’ classes at school, and then seeing it through New Testament eyes in my former (very liberal: today it would be called ‘wokeish’) Christian church. But I’m glad now that I was made to read it, because it makes some sense of what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon today.

The Old Testament – roughly identical, as I understand it, to the Jewish Torah – has some good stuff in it, much of it appropriated by Christianity; but also contains some rank bigotry (Leviticus), silliness (dietary rules), bad pre-history (Genesis), and also wars, massacres of whole peoples (the Flood); and of course – as its main narrative – the sufferings but eventual triumph (hopefully) of ‘God’s chosen people’, inspired by heroic and supernaturally empowered ‘Prophets’.

I wonder whether Netanyahu sees himself as one of those? The IDF’s conduct in Palestine and latterly Lebanon – especially the indiscriminate bombing, widely seen as ‘genocidal’ – strike me as being very ‘Old Testament’ in character. Netanyahu seems to be casting himself as a successor to the old Prophets, the latest saviour of the Chosen People (and never mind the rest of humanity); with the USA, perhaps, performing the ‘supernatural’ role here.

(Incidentally – and I’m by no means the first person to raise this question: why do American Christians make so much of the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments, insisting that they be displayed in schools, for example; in preference to the New Testament’s – rather more woke-ish – Beatitudes?) 

But Netanyahu’s elevation to the status of an Old Testament prophet will of course require him to win his present war: the whole project, that is, not just the fight against the Hezbollah. And, of course, it also rests on worldwide Jewry’s acceptance of his militant, racist, nationalist, colonialist and frankly amoral reading of the Torah, which many other Jews dispute. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2024/08/24/gods-covenant/.) Moral: beware ‘holy books’. The Koran, of course, read selectively, serves much the same purpose for the other ‘side’.

I do hope these comments don’t brand me as ‘anti-Semitic’. It is of course difficult these days for even a friendly critic of Israel to avoid this.