Why the Passover Story Is a Colonialist Myth
Sunday, April 17, 2022 at 11:28PM Exodus is a story of liberation from slavery, but it has also inspired numerous colonialist movements. It’s a myth that needs to be treated with caution
by Ofri Ilani 15 April 2022 Haaretz
In the eyes of many, the story of the exodus from Egypt is one of the greatest liberation narratives ever written. The plot contains impressive political elements that aren’t found in other works from antiquity. Whereas most of ancient myths and chronicles heap praise on the conquests of immensely powerful kings and empires, the exodus from Egypt is a story centering on a group of dispossessed slaves. It’s the tale of an oppressed, subjugated people that stands tall and liberates itself from bondage. As such, some see the victory over Pharaoh as the first revolution in history and an inspiration for all subsequent revolutions.
The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said was less enthusiastic about the Exodus. In an article he published in 1986, a response to Michael Walzer’s book “Exodus and Revolution,” he offered a reading of the story from the viewpoint of the people living in the Land of Canaan. The exodus episode manifests solidarity with the oppressed, he acknowledged, but it also contains a dark side. If the exodus from Egypt is a revolution, it also harbors a violent element of oppression: the oppression of those who worship the golden calf, and no less, of “the unfortunate native inhabitants [of the Promised Land] who by definition are not members of the Chosen People.” In Said’s view, “The text of Exodus does categorically enjoin victorious Jews to deal unforgivingly with their enemies, the prior native inhabitants of the Promised Land.” The basic approach is: “get rid of the natives.”
Said offers a Canaanite point of departure for the biblical narrative, but underlying this is of course a Palestinian viewpoint of the Zionist movement. He notes that the iconic narrative of the birth of a nation has two sides: the independence of one people comes at the expense of victims among other peoples. From the vantage point of the original occupants of the land, the exodus from Egypt is a chronicle of conquest and annihilation. The peoples of Canaan did not survive to set forth their narrative, but the Palestinian residents of Jericho, Nablus and Hebron might identify with their plight, or at least will have a hard time admiring the narrative of the Israelites’ heroism.
The Book of Exodus does in fact tell a story about oppressed slaves who took their fate into their hands. Accordingly, it has inspired different subjugated groups in history, including the slaves in the United States, and the movement to free them. But the parallel between what is described in the Bible and the reality in the American South is only partial, because the Blacks remained in the United States after being released from slavery (apart from the few who founded Liberia in Africa). Not so the Israelites, who moved on to conquer another land.
The story of the Exodus would truly constitute a positive political myth if Moses had demanded that Pharaoh grant the Israelites equal rights in Egypt – exactly like those of his subjects who worshiped the gods Horus and Seth. Alternatively, a scenario can be conjured up in which the slaves and their descendants would have been integrated into another kingdom – Babylon, say, or the Hittite kingdom. But that’s not what happened. The Israelites embarked on a journey rife with wars and killing, in which they inflicted deaths on every people they came across along the way. In the end, they conquered a populated land and settled in it.
Settler colonialism is a type of colonial takeover whose perpetrators don’t want to rule the locals (like the British colonialists in India), but rather to settle in a new land with the aim of displacing the natives and taking control of their lands. In most cases, the settlers sever themselves from the motherland and establish a country that is indeed independent but is based on the dispossession and in some cases the eradication of the indigenous inhabitants. The typical examples of countries that were created in this manner are the United States, Australia and South Africa.
There are good reasons too to consider Zionism a movement of settler colonialism. In any event, almost all the modern movements of settler colonialism adopted the narrative of the exodus from Egypt as their seminal myth. Which is only logical: Each of these movements had some sort of “promised land” whose conquest they needed to justify.
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There were people here, too
In his 2015 book “Exodus: The Revolution of the Ancient World” (in German), the Egyptologist Jan Assmann noted that this story became the formative myth of the United States. “The seventeenth-century Puritans set out for a promised land of their own in the New World, based on an awareness that, as the ‘New Israel,’ they had inherited the divine promise and the mission to forge an exemplary society.” From this point of view, the close connection between the United States and the State of Israel is not accidental. Assmann further notes that the story contains “exclusivist pathos” – in other words, an inbuilt distinction between those who are part of the chosen people and all the rest. None of this detracts from the revolutionism of the narrative, which is the seminal myth of monotheism and even of the very idea of history in the way we know it today.
Indeed, even if the exodus from Egypt is not historically true, the story exercised a tremendous influence on human history. Unfortunately, that same story underlies many of the destructive political phenomena in the modern world. That is also something to remember when we tell the story of the Exodus. It’s not a story of refugees but of armed settlers. This is not to say that the Exodus narrative should be expunged from culture or nullified – which in any case is not feasible. Every ancient text contains elements of a dangerous potential. But it needs to be treated with caution.