Religions are all about the ritual, and the ritual of American presidential candidates promising to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and then failing to do so is a long-standing one. It was one of the few signs of intelligent life from the Obama Administration that, this year, it did not instantly rush to make this gesture of unlimited obeisance to the whims of AIPAC. But now, it is clear, the Administration repents of its intelligence and promises never to think again.
Afterwords
One can take some comfort in the fact that the motion to restore this nonsense to the platform encountered significant resistance from the actual delegates at the convention. Good for the Democrats!
The myth of Jerusalem as a Jewish town is intimately interwoven with the myth of Judaism itself. It’s likely that that Jerusalem was never the capital of a united Israel—the Israel of David and Solomon was entirely a fantasy, invented by post-Exilic Jewish leaders to justify as traditions what were in fact inventions (every religion works this way; doctrines are invented to “explain” and reshape pre-existing rituals and beliefs). Throughout its history, Jerusalem has been ruled by pretty much everyone but the Jews (Wikipedia gives a nice timeline here), though for the last 1,500 years mostly by Moslems.
As is well-known, modern Zionism was created by Theodore Herzl, who didn’t want to get back to Israel but rather to get the hell out of Europe. He would have preferred Bermuda. I mean, it’s Bermuda! What’s not to like? But, of course, only Israel itself could have the emotional pull necessary to create an effective mass movement. And, thanks to the massive horrors of European anti-Semitism, even more monstrous than Herzl could have imagined, we have the modern cult of Jerusalem today, and we have the foreign policy of a nation of 300 million determined by the conflicting millenarian fantasies of perhaps 30 million right-wing Christians and Jews, dreaming alternatively of the conversion of Israel and its eternal triumph.
