In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, Jeffrey Goldberg, revealed: “I recently asked one of his [Netanyahu's] advisers to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran. His answer: ‘Think Amalek’.”

Goldberg then goes on to soften the import this answer for his American readers by explaining that “ ‘Amalek’, in essence, is Hebrew for ‘existential threat.’ Tradition holds that the Amalekites are the undying enemy of the Jews. They appear in Deuteronomy, attacking the rear columns of the Israelites on their escape from Egypt. The rabbis teach that successive generations of Jews have been forced to confront the Amalekites…”

However, as Daniel Luban points out:

Goldberg does not mention what is perhaps the most striking and well-known fact about the Amalekites: they were the targets of divinely sanctioned genocide. As related in 1 Samuel 15, God instructed the Israelite king Saul to “go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (emphasis added). Saul “utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword,” but spared their king Agag and the best of Amalek’s livestock, for which he was punished by God. When Saul’s successor David attacked the Amalekites (along with the Geshurites and Gezrites), he “smote the land, and left neither man nor woman alive.” (1 Samuel 27:9, emphasis added).

Unsurprisingly, these passages have been the subject of a great deal of commentary in the millenia since, and a number of rabbis have offered interpretations that seek (with varying degrees of success) to mitigate the apparent brutality of God’s command. But as Christopher Hitchens noted a few months ago, Amalek has also in recent decades become a rhetorical touchstone on the right-wing fringes of Israeli society, as rabbis such as Schmuel Derlich and Israel Hess have promoted the idea that the Palestinians are the new Amalekites and must be dealt with accordingly. Apparently Netanyahu has altered this line of thinking to identify the Amalekites with the Iranians rather than the Palestinians.” (Emphasis added.)

In a long, extensively referenced article that merits a full reading, Holocaust and Holodomor (Origins of Anti Semitism), Nicholas Lyssson sheds additional light on the Amalek passages in the Old Testament have been read to justify genocide by Jewish and Christian Fundamentalists:

[BEGIN QUOTE]  Then there’s the widely-reprinted article that Rabbi Israel Hess, campus rabbi at Bar-Ilan University, wrote for its student magazine, Bat Kol, entitled “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah” (Feb. 26, 1980). Rabbi Hess took as his text Deuteronomy 25:17-19 (“[T]hou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget [to do] it”). Amalek, he said, is any people that declares war on Israel. The Israeli state rabbinate has never taken direct issue with Rabbi Hess—as it has for example with Reform Judaism.

[Begin Footnote] Not only have the rabbis reacted indulgently to such verbal expressions. They have also endorsed mass killing directly after the fact, a time when sober second thoughts might be expected. See David Hirst in the Nation, Feb. 2, 2004 (online only) on Dr. Baruch Goldstein’s Purim 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians and wounding of scores more, children included, by machine-gunning them in the back as they bent heads-to-ground in prayer (whereupon Israeli troops killed 25 more as the survivors rose to retaliate):

Many were the rabbis who praised this “act,” “event” or “occurrence,” as they delicately called it. Within two days the walls of Jerusalem’s religious neighborhoods were covered with posters extolling Goldstein’s virtues and lamenting that the toll of dead Palestinians had not been higher. In fact, the satisfaction extended well beyond the religious camp. . . ; polls said that 50 percent of the Israeli people, and especially the young, more or less approved of it. [End Footnote]

In 2001, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, formerly Sephardi chief rabbi, and founder and leader of Israel’s third largest political party, Shas, called sweepingly for “extermination of the Arabs,” saying “it is forbidden to be merciful to them.” Shas M.K. Eli Yishay (later Ehud Olmert’s vice prime minister) said Rabbi Yosef was merely echoing Ariel Sharon. BBC News, April 10 and 11, 2001, available online.

Desire to escape the Jewish condition—with its ethical double standards, its “virtue of hate,” its abhorrence of “the curse of friendship,” its obsession with “total eradication of the nations,” and the consequent esotericism of the rabbinical literature—motivated those early secular Zionists who longed for direct labor on the land and disparaged intellectual and commercial occupations reminiscent of the arendar role. Lenni Brenner discusses such attitudes in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, ch. 2 (1983), available online. See also Slezkine, The Jewish Century, above, pp. 327-28. That group of Zionists hoped to make Israel a “normal” nation.

But their religious successors, returning to Judaism’s roots, have countered that normality is precisely what Israel can never have, because of its unique relationship with God. See Shahak and Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism, above, p. 71:

The Gush Emunim [Bloc of the Faithful] argument is that secular Zionists measured. . . “normality” by applying non-Jewish standards that are satan-ic. . . . [According to] one of the group’s leaders, Rabbi [Shlomo] Avner: “While God requires. . . normal nations to abide by abstract codes of justice and righteousness, such laws do not apply to Jews.” . . . Relying upon the Code of Maimonides and the Halakha, Rabbi [Israel] Ariel [of Gush Emunim] stated: “A Jew who kill[s] a non-Jew is exempt from human judgment and has not violated the [religious] prohibition of murder.”

[Begin Footnote] See id. at p. 43 for a similar statement by the head of a yeshiva near Nablus, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, that a Jew’s killing non-Jews does not constitute murder in the Jewish religion. Ginsburgh wrote this in his contribution to a book of essays praising Baruch Goldstein. The interesting point is that “[n]o influential Israeli rabbi has publicly opposed Ginsburgh’s statements.” At p. 63, Shahak and Mezvinsky quote Rabbi Yehuda Amital—whom Shimon Peres considered a moderate and appointed to his cabinet in 1995—as saying “our war is directed against the impurity of Western culture and against rationality as such.” (End Footnote.)

On the other hand Shahak and Mezvinsky say (id.) that “the murder of a Jew, particularly by a non-Jew, is in Jewish law the worst possible crime.” [END QUOTE]

Postscript (30 May 2009)

See followup posts: More on Amalek, and Final Word on Amalek.