I once lived in a desert, over 10 years ago. The Southern Californian desert changed me. I have never considered the swamplands of the gulf coast to be a forgiving land, but the urban environment has always obscured this, I grew up in a concrete steam room that I only learned was a marsh thick with insects and alligators on weekend trips to the wilderness. The desert, however, immerses you. It travels to your doorstep and does not let you forget.
The environment bargains with you, time for respite and shade, oases for desolation. The temporal dimension moves differently in the desert, preserving ancient ruins and traditions over millennia. Cacti, olive trees and Joshua trees embed themselves in the sand and do not let go for hundreds or even over a thousand years. In the desert of the US southwest lives the hardy and stalwart desert tortoise, it can live to be over 80 years old. The way life can thrive and persist across such vast periods of time inspires a sense of deep admiration in me.
The lush olive groves and patient desert tortoises are caught in a whirlwind of unhinged prophets, frauds, and the end of the world. In Palestine, the Israeli government has long pursued the devastation of the olive tree as a means of conquering land and depriving the Palestinian people of life. [1] In Nevada, efforts to conserve the desert tortoise are caught in a crossfire between the federal government, the military, and a rancher named Cliven Bundy. In 1993, Bundy began refusing to pay his rather modest grazing fees after conservation efforts limited grazing to certain months in some areas, to protect the desert tortoise. Over time, he and his sons have become figures in American conservative and “Patriot” movements. [2]
Bundy represents a particular confluence of American politics. The Bundys are Mormon, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (henceforth, LDS Church). They are perhaps the most peculiar product of manifest destiny, sometimes called “the quintessential American religion”. [3] After the ascension of Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson to the prophet and president of the LDS Church, groups like the John Birch Society found a strong base in the far west. The Mormon corridor became a hotbed of far-right activities, especially “tax resistance”, a movement for which Bundy is torch bearer. [4] However, in 2014, when Bundy took over a federal Bureau of Land Management office, his cause became a rallying call for the Patriot Militia movement on a national scale.
A Place for Violent Faith
Bill Keebler sits down with investigative journalist Leah Sotille and for about an hour paints a sad picture of someone radicalized by the Bundy movement and entrapped by the FBI. He and a group of informants and FBI agents drove to a remote Bureau of Land Management facility and set up explosives in 2016, which was of course foiled at that time. [5] The conversation takes a dark turn when Keebler begins delving into deranged Islamophobia.
The thing is, I’ve heard the things about Muslims that Keebler is saying before, except I didn’t hear them from Bundy’s Patriot movement. I grew up hearing them from Zionists. Perhaps not with the same paranoid conspiratorial view as Keebler, but the same zealous hatred and derangement. Take such example as Shai Davidai, Zionist professor of business at Columbia University, posting video of students simply praying at the Gaza solidarity encampment, as if this is suddenly a threat on its own. [6] Suddenly the parallels start flying so fast in my head that they bend, and what started as a Venn diagram becomes a circle. These aren’t just similar movements united by their Islamophobia, Bundy’s ideology and Zionism are the same.
Mormon colonization of Utah was a violent affair. Bloodier than Bleeding Kansas in the same period. [7] As in Israel, some did indeed come fleeing their own persecution, and some were initially welcomed. However, the Deir Yassin and Provo River massacres became the order of the day, baptizing the sand with blood. The Saints and the Zionists also both found it necessary to go to war with their colonial arch-lords, the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively. In order to bring about this course of events, a people had to be gathered and transformed into something new, and that’s precisely what the founders of Mormonism and Zionism did.
Crafting a People, Erecting a Temple
The Mormon pioneers and Zionists both rely on religious mythology to claim indigeneity and nativism. The mythology is eerily similar, lost tribes of Israel returning from other continents after thousands of years to bring about a messianic age through conquest. They call their Kingdom of God “Zion”.
Joseph Smith and Theodore Herzl lived secretive, mysterious lives. No man knows their history, but history knows their names. Neither would live to see where their people would find Zion, neither of them had ever heard of a place called Tel-Aviv or Salt Lake City. Both could craft a people from their dreams but could not retain the devotion of those closest to them. Smith’s polygamy was denounced by his first wife, Emma Smith, who privately resented his infidelity. [8] She and Smith’s eldest son, Joseph Smith III, would eventually lead an anti-polygamist rival, the Reorganized LDS church, to his LDS successor church based out of Utah. Herzl’s wife took little interest in his politics and was similarly troubled by his abandoning of her and his children, and his preoccupation with his political life. [9] All of Herzl’s children and grandchildren would die tragic, young deaths.
Smith and Herzl were enigmatic men driven by charisma who possessed above all, followers, not fans. [10] Smith’s wife and children would deny his polygamy to their graves. Herzl put his ideas forward with a commanding zeal devoid of any intrigue, despite the pluralism of the early Zionist movement, he declared you were either for or against him. [11] It mattered little if their lives were good, or if their ideas were sound. They were engaged in a form of nation craft that made sense of their people’s persecution. What they had was more than an ideology, a political program, or even a spiritual revelation of salvation. They offered a new form of exaltation beyond this, and a new colonial project beyond any kingdom their followers could imagine.
The keys would pass from the founders to the great builders, Brigham Young and David Ben-Gurion. Both proliferated cooperative economies in their colonization, leading writer and historian Mike Davis to call the 19th century Utah colonial settlements “Mormon Kibbutzim” [12]. The precise way by which the LDS church and Zionist state embarked on demographic conquest is also strikingly similar. They made calls for religious pilgrimage to establish a majority. [13] People all over the world were made to see the Salt Lake Valley and Palestine as their indigenous and ancestral homeland. Young established the Perpetual Emigration Fund in 1850 to drive tens of thousands to the Salt Lake Valley. [14] Upon arrival, migrants would be greeted with feasting and celebration. They would soon find themselves in a position of perpetual indebtedness to the church, forming a base for the dispossessed working class that would take Utah by storm in the coming generation. [15]
In February 2020, an anonymous article was published by Jewish newspaper the Forward, that blew a whistle in Jewish day schools in New York. [16] Children sing Israeli national anthems and pledge allegiance to the Flag of Israel. They attend assemblies with IDF soldiers and wear kippot with IDF insignia. President Biden makes repeated statements that imply that Jews can never be safe in America with Israel, three times in the past six months, but going back to the 80’s: “Folks,” he continued, “there is no place else to go, and you understand that in your bones. You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States … there’s only one guarantee. There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel.” [17]
Israel has many weapons, from advanced machinery to antisemitism charges, but it would seem Aliyah, the Israeli policy of state building through Jewish immigration, has been their greatest. After all, they seek domination through demographic change. For decades, Aliyah has been a major campaign of American evangelicals, who have increasingly become more and more philosemitic. To some, philosemitism refers to a genuine admiration of Judaism, but when used pejoratively for evangelicals today, it refers to a disingenuous fetish. Ariel Sharon often repeated that the central goal of the state was Aliyah [18], and the number one thing that Philosemities can support. [19] Philosemites also help drive the settlement front in the West Bank, funding everything from surveillance to day-care. [20]
Apocalyptic Colonialism
Zionists make effort to unite with American Philosemites in their eschatology, joining in the chorus of an apocalyptic hymn. Israeli police have had to counter efforts to sacrifice goats at the temple mount, seen by many as a nuclear-like religious act marking the end-times. [21] Earlier this year I wrote about the Lori Vallow Daybell murder case in the Mormon corridor. Lori and her co-conspirators travelled across the country visiting LDS temple after temple, leaving behind a trail of ritual death. They too carried messages of the impending end times. [22]
There is a Christian saying, first popularized by St. Peter and no doubt held dearly by Latter-day Saints, “the time is short”. Prepping is a pervasive culture in Mormonism with its origins in the early traditions of the church, food and supplies are prepared and stored for immanent disaster and emergency. [23] The church teaches a benign version of this; however, members can be found self-organizing more explicitly apocalyptic motivated groups. [24]
With nuclear-armed Israel invoking Amalek to promise genocide of biblical proportions, time may indeed be short. [25] The story of Amalek is one of total annihilation, in the first book of Samuel God commands King Saul to “put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys”. Biden’s comments on Palestine’s “ancient hatred of Jews”, certainly do not help. Biden seems to be overcome with a Freudian death drive, sacrificing himself to take galvanizing actions in Israel’s favor, while his popularity is currently in free-fall. We can’t expect Biden’s loyalty to Netanyahu to waver, however. In 2010, when then President Barack Obama and secretary of state Hilary Clinton tasked Biden with delivering unprecedently stern demands to Netanyahu against the expansion of new settlements, Biden flatly refused and did his own diplomacy, giving Netanyahu the green light to defy Obama. [26]
The Bundy’s honor an unofficial, secret church doctrine known as the White Horse Prophecy. [27] The prophecy, foretold by none other than Joseph Smith, says that one day the US Constitution will hang “by a thread” and the Mormon settlers would be tasked to save it. In Israel, the masses are sprung into action by the millions, not to defend Palestinians but to defend their constitutional order and judicial system [28], the same order which dispossesses the Palestinian working class in Sheikh Jarrah.
How to Kill a Desert
Smith and Herzl aren’t isolated figures in separate historical tracts, and the olive groves and desert tortoises today live fates that are intrinsically bound. They both want to make the desert bloom by drenching the soil with blood. The hills of Palestine were once filled with lush olive groves which reproduced entire communities. For millennia, her people made life in the desert possible through the way of life crafted for it. Zionists came and burned the olive groves, salted the fields, and today tell you that it was they who made it bloom. [29]
Israel has weaponized the river Jordan and changed the geographical landscape by diverting the waters to deprive Palestinians of water while providing water for Israeli settlements in the river valley. [30] Water usage rights have also characterized the western tax rebellions. However, this tradition goes back even further to Mormon colonization in Utah and Idaho. [31] After initially settling the “No Man’s Land” between the Ute and Shoshone tribes in present day Salt Lake City, the Mormons set their eyes southward towards the agriculturally desirable lands between the Wasatch Range and Lake Utah. What followed was a particularly brutal event known as the Provo River Massacre or Battle of Fort Utah (although it was not much of a battle). [32] Some of the largest massacres of Indigenous people in American history were perpetuated by the Mormons and many of those took place near sites of water. It is no mistake that Indigenous people today take action as “water protectors”, such as in Standing Rock.
Indigenous dispossession and climate change find the desert as their nexus in America. The Land Grant University system has turned over millions of acres of land to private entities, most of which are used for fossil fuel extraction, mining, and timber. [33] Meanwhile, the second largest private landowner in America is none other than the LDS church. [34] What begins as massacres, carries on in courtrooms and boardrooms, and finds its way full circle to more death and ecological devastation. It’s important to note that much of Palestine and the US Southwest isn’t desert (or even where it may be, not quite what we imagine as a “desert”) but fertile lands that receive rainfall. This is of course under constant threat of desertification, as the boundaries between biospheres shift concurrent with land theft. [35]
Even the Bundy’s cannot escape another force continually reshaping the desert, the US military. The Bundy’s themselves have a deep historical memory of being poisoned by nuclear fallout in Nevada in the 1950’s. [36] Israeli airstrikes in Gaza render large swathes of land as completely uninhabitable and unusable. [37] The endeavors of war and conquest accelerate the Anthropocene, sending a clear message, “if we cannot have this land, no one will for a thousand years”. In this history, the olive groves and desert tortoises don’t stand a chance.
Judaism vs. Judaism
Amidst an imposing penchant for self-destruction, both Judaism and Mormonism contain a yearning for self-discovery. Is there a Mormon people? What is a Jew? I want to locate the answer not in the traditions of old, but in the present moment. At the same time, I find myself challenged at every turn to stomach the questions. Piles of dead bodies make it hard to think. I have grown pessimistic and cynical, even as it concerns the tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism, and I want a way out of this disaffection.
While writing this, I took a trip to the California desert again. I don’t know what I was looking for, perhaps I thought I might see a tumbleweed pass that could trigger some epiphany or give me some anecdote. It was here that I received news that Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. [38] Suddenly the question of self-discovery and yearning becomes unimportant, as I curse the sky, and wonder “why is he not worth saving to this world?”.
We are living in the twilight of Enzo Traverso’s Jewish Modernity. [39] For a few centuries, Jews were at the center of European critical thought, whether as a part of “the Jewish Question”, or on part of their citizenship, intellectual and cultural breakthroughs. After the end of the Second World War, this paradoxical epoch of emancipation and genocide rapidly closed, shifting the previous paradigms. What now exists is a new Judaism of order in the United States and Israel, which are today shaped by the Islamophobic thought. The old world of Judaism is dying and the new cannot be reborn.
The LDS Church and today’s Jewish institutions are facing similar faith crises, with members leaving in droves as they double down on the status quo, particularly young people who are dissatisfied. [40] Today the Church mostly plays the role of mediating and containing its right wing, finding a need to denounce the Bundy’s praise for Benson and the Church, while heavily policing the intellectual activities of its members who challenge the church’s anti-LGBTQ policies and racist history. The Church identifies groups like Ordain Women, a group trying to extend the Priesthood to everyone (instead of virtually all adult men), and dissident podcaster John Dehlin, as direct threats driving people away from Mormonism. A whole ecosystem of ex-Mormons, excommunicated Mormons, and lapsed Mormons collide in what seems like a permanent fixture between the Church and the modern world.
A widely read relic of this disaffection is what is known now as the CES Letter, in which Jeremy Runnels outlined his truth crisis to the Church Educational System, earnestly searching for answers, eventually receiving no response but rather discipline, choosing to resign four years later in 2016. For Mormons, the CES Letter provides the most potent and succinct point-by-point debunking of the Church’s truth claims. In just over 130 pages, an entire worldview can be disrupted. [41] For Mormon Feminist Lindsay Hansen Park, this is precisely the problem. In her friendly critique of the CES Letter, Park explains why the CES letter sells a deeper deconstruction and analysis of Mormonism too short: “if you take the CES letter as an authoritative source, believe it with your whole heart, and live accordingly, that is recreating the Mormon pattern or paradigm. Making it a new prophet instead of a resource … you should use it as a tool to disrupt that thinking, rather than a tool for reinforcing black and white thinking” [42] Most relevant here is that Park situates the critique with the reader, rather than the author.
Perhaps you have discovered the Exodus story isn’t “real”. Perhaps you read Shlomo Sand and believe you are actually supposed to be Khazarian now. You may even refuse to circumcise your child. None of this inflicts reckoning on Judaism as we know it today. Judaism as we know it must fundamentally change, but there is no substitution we can make by individual acts. It would seem you either do Judaism or it will do you; you are condemned to either the fate of Hans Herzl, a life of oedipal bitterness, [43] or the stalwart patience of olive groves and desert tortoises. My preference is for the latter, but I can’t help but feel more and more like Shemon Salam, in his 2022 essay: “The desert is not moonlit. It is dark, only the shifting winds and sands are our groundings in this wasteland.” [44]
Iranian social theorist and religious scholar Ali Shariati presented an unorthodox view in his series of lectures, “Religion vs. Religion”. [45] Shariati accepts much of Marx’s analysis of religion to be true, religion is a force frequently called to legitimize the status quo throughout history. However, he critiques Marx in that Marx only analyzed one side of religion, the side of “priestly function” and legitimation. Shariati explains how real religion in history has time and time again challenged and overturned the status quo, as religion does not struggle primarily against disbelief, but against religion itself. For Shariati, in revolutions throughout history, idol destroyers heed the call of original prophecy, who bring with them reckoning for class, gendered and racial difference. Judaism doesn’t find itself in conflict with disbelief, it finds itself in conflict with Judaism. It is Judaism vs. Judaism.
In Marx’s historical background, religion served as an incubator for his own ideas, beyond the methodological influence of Hegel and Spinoza. Marx’s fundamental political principles, from that of Perfectionism, embodied in his views on “free development”, to “each according to their need”, were the dominant ideas of the Second Great Awakening which coincided with his youth. The maxims were spoken in the sermons of Joseph Smith before Marx ever had a word on the Jewish question. [46] Before they would form the foundation of communist principles, they were religious prophecy.
It is easy to look at the LDS Church today and see a dogmatic institution, conservative and resistant to change. This is a major oversight however, as the Church shifts and changes greatly over time. It is an artifact of class struggle. Church historian Leonard J. Arrington points out how dynamic the LDS Church is, even from his vantage point in 1958, “the body of revealed knowledge … is not static but constantly changing and expanding. Revelation is continuous and expedient – ‘suited to the people and the times’… The true essence of God’s revealed will, if such it be, cannot be apprehended without an understanding of the conditions surrounding the prophetic vision, and the symbolism and verbiage in which it is couched.” [47] When looking at Arrington’s tenure as Church Historian and career as a historian, you can see the struggle against the establishment he embarked on, with he and his colleagues fending off spies from the John Birch Society and Ezra Taft Benson’s McCarthyism. [48] Today, the period of openness that Arrington led is widely celebrated.
Avi Mayer, former editor of the Jerusalem Post, declared in November 2023 that Jews against Zionism to be “no longer part of us”. [49] Judaism vs. Judaism isn’t something we’ve decided on, it’s a condition forced upon us. So be it, for to deny the truth set before us by the Palestinian question is to deny the oneness of God. In Shariati’s theory, it is the forces with reckon with the religious status quo and priestly functionaries are driven by that which is uncreated in essence, and it is that status quo that is in service against it. In the millennia of Judaism, it is the not-even centuries old Zionism and the decades-old Jewish state that is the created. To be cast as takfir by Avi Mayer can only be interpreted as a blessing and honor.
Religion scholar Reza Aslan in his recent interview with Jacobin magazine gives an important view: “All of those trends — scientific advancements, technological advancements, secularization, education, and even wealth — affect religion. They change religion. They allow religion to evolve and shift to better meet the needs of modern human beings. As far as we can tell, they don’t just make religion go away.” [50] He is right about religion not going away, the decline of religion is often overstated. In the United States where I am writing from, upwards of 76% of people are still identifying with a religion. It has mostly been white Christianity that has been in decline, as the numbers for non-white people in the same group have mostly stayed the same. [51] What we can count on, however, is that religions will change. My grandparent’s Reform Judaism originally had no bar mitzvot, very little Hebrew, and Zionism was taboo and cryptic. A Jew in the same synagogue 100 years ago would be astonished at what they found today, and it would be the same for a Jew 100 years before them to see the Judaism of their time. The world historic task of de-Zionizing Judaism and Mormonism might be intrinsically bound in saving the planet from devastation, and therefore to the struggle of all things.
I think back to Asad Haider in Land and Existence in Gaza back in 2021: “Let us, too, allow the defiance and persistence of the Palestinian people to transform us. This is the way that politics begins.” [52] Allow ourselves, once again, to be changed. We must have open, circumcised hearts that can continue to be moved and shaken. There once was a place called Rhodesia, and then there wasn’t. One day, Zionism and Bundyism will be gone, and if the world is just and God is willing, the olive groves and desert tortoises will return to the desert and become wild again.
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For other writings from the author on these subjects, see:
Let the Blood Moon Shine
https://hardcrackers.com/let-the-blood-moon-shine/
Socialists in the Kingdom of God
https://jacobin.com/2024/04/socialists-in-the-kingdom-of-god
Race, Class and the Zionist State
https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/06/race-class-and-the-zionist-state/
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