"Among the most powerful and persistent of all the myths that Americans invoke about themselves is the myth that America is a chosen nation and that its citizens constitute a chosen people," writes religion professor Richard T. Hughes in Myths America Lives By.
The combination of democracy and religion is a potent one. When thousands of Puritans, fleeing persecution in their native England, founded New England in the early 17th century, it allowed them scope to develop their culture unfettered in a way that they could not in England. Pious, righteous and self-absorbed, they saw themselves as a new Israel, a chosen nation, in covenant with God.
Unfortunately, when the chosen nation needs to push other people aside to establish its heavenly kingdom, the results are neither pretty nor Godly. The Puritans faith defined the native inhabitants of New England as heathens who could be destroyed with impunity. From their massacre of the Pequots in 1637 to the genocidal King Philip's War in 1675, the Puritans showed their native neighbors more steel and lead than humanity.
The birth of New England as a settler state had profound consequences for America, as I have previously written. The expropriation of native lands provided the material basis for the growth and prosperity of the colonies. The pattern of driving off and killing the native peoples which continued for the next three centuries was justified by a racist worldview that it is (white) Americans who deserve the land, who have a manifest destiny, who are modern and advanced. This worldview is derived from Puritanism, but it is alive and well today. John Judis traces the impact of the "chosen nation" thesis on American foreign policy, and particularly on the George W. Bush administration.
The Thanksgiving myth captures the identity of the settler state. The Indians join with the Pilgrims and teach them how to hunt American turkeys and cultivate American crops such as corn and pumpkins. Yet we know, even as we contemplate the peaceful Thanksgiving scene, that it is the Pilgrims, not the Indians, who are chosen to rule; it was those who came on the Mayflower whose descendants are in charge, while the Wampanoag stubbornly assert that they are still here.
So it is with Israel today. Fleeing the Holocaust, they migrated to Palestine; rising up in 1947, they expelled most of the Arabs and formed their state. Unlike the Puritans, most of the founders were not religious; but like them, many Israelis today do look to a Biblical covenant to justify their claim to the land. And the state of Israel has always behaved with the self-righteousness of the chosen.
The First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Bedford, Massachusetts, heir to the Puritan tradition, recently presented Jerusalem: East Side Story, a film about the tactics used by Israel to dispossess and drive Palestinians out of East Jerusalem. The Israeli settler state uses residence permits, home demolition, innumerable checkpoints, and the Wall, to divide, harrass, and intimidate Palestinians in the hope that they will leave the holy city. They hope that the Palestinians will scatter like the Wampanoags and Pequots before them. But the East Jerusalem Palestinians, though pushed seemingly beyond endurance, are hanging on for dear life, they do not move, and they do not leave. The film is available for $25 and it is a great educational tool.
The just struggle of the people of East Jerusalem to preserve their life, land, and nationhood in the face of the settler state deserves our support. 30 or 40 modern New Englanders came out on a cold night last week to express that support. And, as filmmaker Mohammed Alatar reminded them at the film screening, it is U.S. aid of $10 million a day which allows Israel to build its settler state. The American chosen nation is spending freely to aid the Israeli one, despite its continual violation of U.N. resolutions calling for the neutrality of Jerusalem. Unless Americans cut off the aid, Alatar said, Israel will not stop.
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