In the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Kings, a story is told about a ruthless king of Israel who abused his authority and was punished for it by God.
King Ahab’s realm was in Samaria, what is now known by most as the occupied West Bank. The monarch coveted some land that did not belong to him, a vineyard owned by a man named Naboth. Ahab wanted the vineyard for a vegetable garden near his palace, so he offered to buy the land or trade land of equal value for it.
But Naboth refused. “The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my ancestors,” he told the king.
Ahab sulked and refused to eat, until his wife Jezebel provided a solution. Pretending to be the king, she wrote to the elders of Naboth’s village under his seal and ordered them to hold a feast, with Naboth seated prominently. Then she ordered two witnesses to falsely charge that the vineyard owner had cursed God and the king, whereupon Naboth was taken out and stoned to death. When word came that he was dead, Ahab took possession of the land he coveted.
So, a trifecta, three of the Ten Commandments were broken: Thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill.
God was displeased, the Bible says, so he sent the Prophet Elijah to find Ahab, who was in the purloined vineyard. “This is what the Lord says,” Elijah tells him. “Have you not murdered a man and seized his property?” As punishment, Ahab’s kingly line would be wiped out, but not before the dogs would rip Jezebel to death and drink her blood by the wall surrounding Naboth’s vineyard. This, the Lord says, “because you have aroused my anger and have caused Israel to sin.”
Might this story have a current parallel? Modern Jewish settlers of the West Bank, many of whom profess to be religious believers, would do well to read these verses and consider what they mean for their ongoing actions. Likewise, their zealous supporters in America.
These vigilantes, facing unarmed Palestinians who they accuse — often without credible evidence — of terrorism, have stolen olive harvests and cut down the trees at gunpoint; stolen or slaughtered Palestinian farmers’ livestock; and, under the eyes of the Israeli military, who were sometimes complicit, shot some of the rightful residents and driven others from the land.
Despite an official ban on new settlements, the Israeli government has effectively enabled new or expanded Jewish settlements by arbitrarily declaring land part of a military or security zone. Then the land it turned over to the settlers. Cumulatively, these recent displacements add to the estimated 750,000 Palestinians forced out of Mandatory Palestine in 1948, and 300,000 more since the 1967 Six-Day War.
Like the farmer who only covets the land that adjoins his own — which is effectively endless — the settlers want all of the West Bank land they don’t already have. Since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, drew global attention to Gaza, settler attacks have driven at least 57 West Bank Palestinian communities off their land. According to the left-wing Israeli group Peace Now, 10 of these new Jewish settlements were built close to Palestinian communities, and then the new residents subsequently drove their neighbors off the land.
To their credit, groups of unarmed Israeli and Palestinian civilians have tried to prevent the seizures by interposing themselves between protesting Palestinians trying to save their homes and settlers and soldiers, although with mixed results.
Here in America, university officials, perhaps fearing hostile donors and members of Congress, have developed new disciplinary regulations aimed at student supporters of the Palestinian cause. But in doing so, they have increasingly focused on the content of speech, as much as the conduct of protesters.
In particular, pro-Palestinian protesters have been and are expected to face charges for chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which has roots in the Hamas charter. To many of Israel’s North American supporters, that is tantamount to calling for Jewish genocide, and students on campus should be disciplined, even expelled, for doing so.
But what began in the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorism as an understandable effort to characterize support for Hamas as an antisemitic call for genocide has effectively escalated into calling any support for the Palestinian cause, including a two-state solution, as antisemitic. Others even cite President Biden’s vacation reading matter to bolster previous charges that he, too, is antisemitic.
“You cannot have a system where one person’s property is sacred and another’s can be taken, based on nationality,” Rashid Khalidi — the author of the book in question, “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” — who is an outspoken anti-Zionist but not an antisemite, recently told an informal meeting with Orthodox Jews in Manhattan.
Yet it has been an article of faith (and policy) for the West Bank settlers and their surrogates in the Likud cabinet that Israel should be a land without Arabs. Their quest for taking Palestinian land for more “living space” seems insatiable. They echo 1975 Likud party platform that explicitly states that from the Jordan to the Mediterranean will only be Jewish sovereignty. Their slogan is, effectively, “From the river to the sea, Israel will be Jewish.”
What if American student supporters of Israel, facing a cynically ginned up hysteria about the extent of campus antisemitism, were to chant such a slogan? Would they, too, be fairly disciplined for advocating Palestinian “genocide?”
After all, what would the endgame solution be if West Bank Palestinians and those in Gaza refuse to be ethnically cleansed? Drive them into the sea, or into the desert?
The lesson of Naboth’s vineyard for the Israeli government and the West Bank settlers is that the strong and the powerful — even a king, a cabinet minister or an armed mob — should not take advantage of the weak and powerless. I’m no theologian, but what has been going on in the West Bank looks a lot like Ahab’s sin to me.
Mark I. Pinsky is a Durham, N.C.-based journalist and author who served as a civilian volunteer attached to the Israeli military in El Arish, Sinai, in 1967.
