Jewish liberals want to assimilate, but not to become normal in the sense of acting like other nations do. Think of it: if an American Jew wants to assimilate, would not it be natural for him to ask that Israel wage her wars like Americans do? Instead, we’re asked to be suicidally humane. Here lies the answer: liberal Jews do not want assimilation, they sense that despite all of their efforts they remain distinct from Gentiles. Instead, they want Jewish national suicide, to kill the very entity which makes them uncomfortably different. That’s why, of all countries, they marched against Israel and Jew-friendly apartheid South Africa; no Jewish organization marched against Pol Pot. Jewish liberals are anti-Jewish rather than pro-anyone.

But I’m ready to jump on their logic. Jews are indeed normal people, a nation like any other; our only difference is transcendental. Jews must grab the land for their state just like every other nation did instead of agonizing over the natives’ rights. Indeed, the Torah explicitly sanctions our conquests—and no, we do not need a righteous king for that. Some very unrighteous kings of Israel and Judea conducted some very successful military campaigns. It is enough that our aim is righteous, to establish a viable Jewish state.

Liberals love the word shalom and use it as a proof of Jewish peacefulness. There is a surprise in store for them. Shalom does not mean peace, but fullness. It is related to shalal, loot. The idea of peace is alien to the Tanakh: Jews went to war over trivial issues; indeed, it is required to fight over hay if an enemy demands it. Rather, shalom is an ideal of achieving religious and material fullness.

Peace with some Arabs who happen to migrate to the Land of Israel is not a legitimate consideration. Nor is it sensible. Sephardi Jews are much more different from Ashkenazis than the West Bank Arabs are from their Syrian brethren. If “Palestinians” are entitled to a state, why are Sephardis not? Russian Jews are still more distinct—should we have a third Jewish state for them, too? Arabs have twenty-one states, Muslims—fifty-two; do they desperately need a Levantine statelet? There is no desire for justice here, but a basic desire to extinguish the Jewish state. “Palestine” must be Judenrein—all Jewish settlers must go, yet Israel must accept a third of its population Arab. Palestinian sovereignty over a handful of villages becomes more important than a defensible border for Jewish state. We did not attack the Arabs, they attacked us. Wouldn’t it be just to allocate Israel defensible borders and at least a token depth of defense? Americans trust God for their banknotes; could we trust him when he promised us defensible borders from Suez to the Red Sea, and from the Mediterranean to Iraq?

Rabbi Meir Kahane often repeated that all the Arabs in the world are not worth a fingernail of one Jewish child. This saying of his was well within halacha. Theology and nationalism deal in absolutes: to God and themselves, Jews are absolutely more important than their enemies. It’s not that N Jews are more valuable than M Arabs, but less valuable that 1,000*M of them. Theologically, we are entitled to kill the largest number of Arabs to save the smallest number of Jews. Secular nations think likewise: in WWII, the Allied commanders sought to kill as many Germans as possible and to save the American soldiers’ lives whatever the concomitant losses among the Nazis. Jews need not be ashamed of practicing the most human of all human traits: killing enemies, in the widest sense and in the largest numbers, is far preferable to dying or endangering your own people. And more than that, it just feels great to see your enemies dead.

As King David remarked, the righteous should wash their feet in the blood of the wicked.

Rabbis virtually eliminated death sentences by erecting impossible procedural requirements and fully rejecting circumstantial evidence. Nominally, the Torah requires two witnesses, and thus excludes evidential proof. Such a narrow reading makes the divine law senseless. Can’t we sentence a person on DNA tests? Or in antiquity, on possession of a bloody knife and stolen items? Certainly not only the crime, but also evidential proof can be witnessed.

The Talmudic assertion that capital punishment was only disbursed rarely in history is baseless. Since the Torah does not set out alternative punishments, refusing to hand down death sentences would have meant acquitting murderers, rapists, and kidnappers. Surely the populace would have revolted against such a liberal application of law. As always, such fake humanism would have resulted in a wave of violence: driven by the Bedouin code of ethics, victims’ families would have taken blood revenge. No one would accept the rabbinical standard, which disqualified a witness who saw the accused coming into the house with a knife and coming out of it dripping blood. Though in high judicial theory the witness did not see the murder, sensible Jews would not allow the murderer to be set free on that technicality. And if they did, all the unpunished criminals would wreak havoc on their society.

Mishna’s elaborate description of execution modes leaves no doubt that Jewish judges had little compunction about sentencing criminals. Later on, Roman magistrate courts in Judea usurped the power of the death sentence In the Diaspora Jews generally did not have it, and rabbis adopted a face-saving approach: instead of admitting themselves legally powerless, they exorcised the death sentence from Jewish jurisprudence.

In that, rabbis abrogated the lawgiver’s intention: to purge Jewish society of criminals and immoral individuals. Not only do such people threaten society, but they are worthless: the sooner they are executed, the less they will stain themselves.

Aren’t executions for immorality bizarre? Not at all. Liberal states jail people for immorality, such as child porn. The feeble explanation that watching it increases the likelihood of assault is ridiculous: by the same token, societies should ban action movies, which possibly provoke violence. People can get into trouble for clearly moral transgressions such as public nudity. Why it is that public nudity is punishable while public expression of homosexuality cannot be?

Executions are only practical if Jewish law is reduced back to the Torah. Slapping a Jew with a death sentence for speaking on the phone on Shabbat would be absurd, but banning exhausting labor on pain of death is perfectly within reason. The enforcement of religious morality has important political consequences: the Jews who know that Shabbat work or sexual immorality is a punishable crime won’t consider a land-for-peace deal with the Arabs. Sages have an interesting concept that no one sins except by a feat of insanity: a person who knows that God watches all his actions and sins nevertheless certainly acts in a state of temporary insanity. While many people don’t believe in God, everyone believes in the state’s repressive power; there would be no transgressors willing to risk their lives in gay parades. In reality, executions would only be a threat—but that threat must be credible.

Death sentences are still more justified for major criminal acts. Every normal person wants death for the murderer of his loved one. In the age of DNA testing, wrong convictions are relatively few, and we must accept them as the price of justice.

Opponents of the death penalty argue correctly that executions are exceedingly ugly. But they misread the problem. The ugliness comes from the sterile environment in which the executions are carried out. Execution is revenge for an utter crime. It is naturally carried out in a hateful matter: with screaming public and splashes of blood. Detached from revenge, execution loses its meaning. Lethal injections in a clean white room fit the cognitive profile of murder. That is why the Torah’s modes of execution are important: crowds must kill the criminals, each citizen must stand ready to cleanse the society.

It is both the Torah and common sense that all arrested terrorists must be executed.

Life without Sanhedrin was okay in the Diaspora when Jews usually lacked criminal jurisdiction, could not wage wars, and Jubilee-year restoration of sold land to its original owners was irrelevant. More importantly, in isolated Diaspora communities Jews could reasonably rely on the opinions of local rabbinical leaders while ignoring the often divergent opinions of other communities. In Israel, however, that arrangement fragments the religious community. There are dozens of major sects, each of which listens only to its own rabbinical leader. In Exile, the sects were physically separated from each other; they were generally town-based. In Israel, they rub against each other and provoke significant hostility. Sanhedrin can end this pitiful situation by establishing uniform opinions.

A technical objection to reassembling Sanhedrin is its broken line of succession: presumably, a new Sanhedrin would be illegitimate. Such reasoning is ridiculous. Sanhedrin was invented to begin with; it is not an institution dating to time immemorial as the rabbis want us to believe. While the Temple was controlled by Sadducean priests, there is no way that Pharisaic rabbis—their enemies—sat in the Chamber of Unhewn Stones and promulgated obligatory laws. If there had been Sanhedrin at the time of Nehemiah, he wouldn’t have struggled with practical issues of intermarriage and purity: presumably, Sanhedrin would have decided them. If there had been Sanhedrin at the time of the Maccabees, they wouldn’t have been puzzled about how to dispose of the polluted sanctuary’s stones—that would have been a rabbinical question. If there had been Sanhedrin at the time of Agrippas and the Romans, it would have been quite a humiliated institution: the Romans usurped the power of capital punishment, severely restricted punishment for religious violations, and Jewish kings exercised their own judicial prerogative. Mishnah Sanhedrin paints the institution as utterly unworkable: no criminal court could operate under such impossibly stringent rules of evidence. If there had been a Pharisaic-controlled Sanhedrin with powers of enforcement, then the Pharisaic-Sadducean debates we know of could never had happened: the rabbis would have executed the alleged heretics, who only accepted the Torah, rather than the entire Bible, as divine.

For all we know about history, Sanhedrin as an all-powerful body never existed. At most, a rabbinical council decided on Pharisaic interpretation of the commandments, and its opinions were not binding. It was constituted arbitrarily if at all, and certainly traced itself neither to Moshe nor to High Priest Zadok.

Why then, do modern rabbis resist “reinstituting” Sanhedrin? There is only one answer: because they don’t want the responsibility. For centuries they created halacha, which arrogated immense powers to Sanhedrin, essentially shaping a Jewish state as a theocracy, and a rather bureaucratic one at that. Frankly, they never expected their envisioned state to take shape. Now that a state is there, the rabbis shrink from practicing what they preached —disallowing Christians (and surely pagans) from this land, demolishing foreign sanctuaries, sentencing people to death for Shabbat violations, and sanctioning the genocide of our Arab enemies. Above all, they are afraid of confronting the atheist Jewish establishment that subsidizes them. A Sanhderin would have no option but to crack down on most MKs and order the execution of the Peace Now members on malshin (informant) and rodef (murderous stalker) charges.

The problem is, halacha does not require Sanhedrin to pass such sentences. Every qualified rabbi has an individual obligation to pronounce death sentences on Jewish traitors who endanger the community. Every rabbi—indeed, every Jew—is banned from following the majority to evil and commanded to expunge evil from our midst. Killing may seem odd to liberals, but our Jewish priests were commanded to immerse their fingers in sacrificial blood to purify the community.

But of course, it is much easier to lament the absence of Sanhedrin than to go out and kill those who have to be killed.

Sadducees—the Temple priests and fierce opponents of rabbis—only accepted the Torah as divine; by some accounts they rejected even Deuteronomy. The Essenes, an old—possibly the oldest—ultra-fundamentalist sect took considerable liberties with prophetic texts. Only pharisaic rabbis pushed the entire Tanakh into the canon.

The move should have led to the radicalization of Judaism, because the historical writings are really militant. If they are a legal guide for us on par with the Torah, then Jews must follow King David’s precepts, such as washing our feet in the blood of the wicked. Rabbis, the leftists in ancient Jewish religious establishment, took a typically leftist approach: if facts contradict the theory, to hell with the facts. They just ignored the historical political examples.

A bigger problem appeared with the prophets. The priests did not recognize them as such for a reason: in Torah law, a prophet is recognized when his prophecies are fulfilled. If he prophecies something which does not happen, he is liar at best. The prophecies must be clear, commonly intelligible—basically, they must be verifiable. Tanakhic prophecies do not pass that test. Even if we ignore biblical minimalists who argue that some prophecies actually described past events, by far the majority of prophecies relate to the end of days. They have not been verified, and in the Torah’s legal system, cannot be called prophecies.

Now, the Tanakhic prophecies may well be true, and indeed we have observed them being fulfilled all around us in the past few decades, but their canonization was baseless, a matter of arbitrary belief.

The canonization was a tremendous disservice to Jewish people because it divided our history into two periods: with prophets and without them. That is entirely mistaken. There were prophets with us all the time. Well before the major prophets, Tanakh speaks matter-of-factly about “sons of prophets,” apparently in large numbers. Even Hagar the pagan concubine was a prophetess, as she met an angel. Common Israelites such as Samson’s father Manoah encountered prophetic visions. Prophecy was common.

And it remained common past the Tanakhic times. Scores of rabbinical and Kabbalah scholars as well as devout Jews had verifiable prophetic revelations. In our time, verifiable prophecy abounds, Bava Salia and Rav Kaduri being some of the obvious examples. When Naser, Rabin, and Sharon died within days of being cursed, there was little room left for doubt; a prominent atheist named Ben Gurion remarked that in this land utter realists have to believe in miracles.

Rabbis postulated themselves as the sole interpreters of law after the prophetic window closed. But it did not. Nor, in a sense, has it ever been there. We learn nothing of practical importance from Isaiah’s writings. Nor can we be sure that Ezekiel Temple’s description is an accurate prophecy rather than delusional mumbo-jumbo which would lead us to construct an impractically small building.
There is no transcendental gap between our times and those of the patriarchs. We are similar: Judah, who habitually befriended road prostitutes, would feel himself at home in North Tel Aviv bars. Prophecy is similar: a lot of practically significant revelations which would never make it into the annals, clear divine answer to certain supplications, and many attempts at claiming unverifiable end-of-times mega-prophecies.

There is no need to wait for every oddity the prophets have described. Honest rabbis recognized that tacitly. Rambam, for example, relegated the “lion will lie down with the lamb” prophecy to mere metaphor.

One, we have prophecy with us: God did not leave his people. Two, we don’t need major prophecy: the Torah is neither high in the heaven, nor deep in the sea; it is with us, clear and mandatory.

God did his part of the deal: we are gathered from all corners of earth into the Land of Israel and have defeated our enemies against all odds. We must follow through with our part: annex our land, expel our enemies, and build the Temple. God might not descend into the non-existent Ark, but our life would surely be more comfortable.

They say, “If the Torah is not divine letter-for-letter, then how we know what to do?” How did the Hebrews know before Moses told them? How did the Sadducees live while rejecting Deuteronomy? We test conjectures, live normal lives, respect tradition, and assess the writings critically.

Moses judged the people well before he received the Torah. On Jethro’s urging, Moses wrote down the law and passed it to the elders. The Torah itself is clear that a significant portion of Jewish law is not divine.

People observe secular laws because they are enforceable and basically authoritative. Secular laws are promulgated because they are thought beneficial for the nation. Likewise, religious laws dating back to the priests are good enough if Israel cares to enforce them.

Theological issues need not determine our present. Strictly speaking, the Torah does not prohibit intermarriage. Rather, we refuse assimilation because everybody demands it of us; because the world tried to convert, annihilate, and expunge us; because of the stakes, pogroms, and gas chambers; because of the countless Jews burned, torn, and gassed; and because of the thousands of years we kept repeating, “The next year, in Jerusalem!”

Another instance of reiteration bears on the current events. Before Joshua crossed the Jordan, God commanded him to be “strong and courageous”—thrice. Grammatically, it is the strongest repetition in the Tanakh: be strong and courageous, only be strong and courageous, haven’t I commanded you to be strong and courageous? Add Moses’ similar injunctions in Deut31 to make it seven repetitions. This is puzzling. Joshua saw all the miracles together with Moses. He spent decades in Moshe’s tent and knew everything his teacher knew; in the Scripture’s words, “the book of Torah did not depart from his mouth.” Now God speaks directly to Joshua, and what can we expect—that he could be insufficiently courageous? God just promised him all the help in the world, leaving little need for courage.

A better translation is, “Cling strongly and be firm.” The people were enjoined to cling to God lest they be frightened (Deut31:6, Joshua 1:9), but for Joshua the command meant something entirely different, “to observe to do according to all the law.” Are we to imagine that Joshua would violate the laws of the Torah, that he would eat non-kosher meat or sacrifice to other deities? Surely not.

Joshua, like any normal person, had a problem with the commandment at hand: “destroy these nations from before you, and you shall dispossess them.”

Think of the sequence: “And the LORD will deliver them up before you, and you shall do unto them according unto all the commandments which I have commanded you,” and only then, “Be strong and of good courage, fear not, nor be affrighted at them.” The enemy will be delivered into Jewish hands first, and then the Jews should not be frightened. This is not about being frightened by a mighty enemy before or during combat: the enemy is already rounded up. Jews must not be afraid to do what God has commanded us: “destroy these nations.” This is why Joshua’s firmness is connected with “you shall cause this people to inherit the land.” The only way to dispossess others and inherit the land is to kill them.

The Scripture does not call the land “theirs,” but speaks of inheritance: Jews receive the land which was promised to Jacob. The land became legally his at the time of the promise; he did not just take possession of it. Thus, the enemy nations must be dispossessed of the land they hold illegally.

The commandment looked harsh to contemporaries, not only to us. And so Joshua is enjoined to execute every Jew who refuse to carry out this commandment (Joshua 1:18). Yes, Judaism is about observing commandments; it is not about human morality or worse, moralism.

Deut31:5 contains the most astonishing statement, “you shall do unto them according to all the commandments which I have commanded you.” The commandment to kill our enemies equals all other commandments combined.

Because it is common sense.

Joshua was probably the greatest Jewish leader, at once a prophet and a warrior. Listen to what the Scripture says of him: “He blessed them, and spoke to them saying, ‘Return with very much wealth unto your tents, and with very much cattle, silver, gold, brass, iron, and clothes. Divide the spoil of your enemies…’” (Joshua 22:8) That was the prophet’s blessing for Jews!

And this was Jewish peace: “And the Lord gave them rest around them… the Lord delivered all their enemies into their hand. There failed not a single good thing which the Lord promised to the house of Israel” (Joshua 21:42-43). Jews were able to rest not by signing peace treaties, which were well known at the time, but by killing their enemies―and the prophet calls the wholesale slaughter of native populations a good thing!

Jewish worship has always taken second place to nationalism. When the trans-Jordan tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh built an altar to God, other Israelites prepared for a war against them. What wrong would it be if God were worshipped on two altars rather than one? Enough Levites lived on the East Bank to man the new altar. Yet, the centralization of Jewish worship―which unifed the nation―was deemed more important than the abundance of sacrifices.

Looking at the commandments, we see that they were addressed to Bedouins: the ruthless people who tended to avenge a murder on their own rather than rely on communal justice, who were full of sexual urges (and acted upon them), who would prefer to kill a robber rather than get a fine from him. Consider it: the priests, the most humane of them all, behaved like modern-day butchers. What would you think of your rabbi dabbing his fingers in animal blood or sprinkling it around? If that seems distasteful to you, consider how distasteful the true Jews, those who were given the Torah, would have found your habits and yourself.

Rabbis, when they were real rabbis, maintained that Jews must kill all the inhabitants of the Promised Land during the invasion. Joshua bin Nun allegedly sent three letters to the Canaanite nations before the invasion: Whoever wants to leave, leave; whoever wants to make a treaty of tribute and servitude, make the treaty; whoever wants to fight, fight.

How come? On the face of it, the Torah promises to evict the natives rather than exterminate them. Moreover, it is God who will do the expelling (Exodus 23:27). The last misconception is simple: wherever the Torah speaks of God doing something, it means him working through human agents. Only on a handful of occasions did God resort to outright miracles, and every time they were very short. Thus, God expelling the natives means that he will empower the Jews to do his bidding. That is like the events of 1948: God made Stalin supply us with weapons, but the Jews had to pull the triggers themselves.

The promise of eviction touches on the fundamental question of free will. At every junction, the choice can only be made once; there is no Replay option. God gave the natives the relatively easy choice of moving out, but it was up to them to accept or reject it. Just as in 1948, the natives had to vacate their villages in good order so that Jews could take them over. They couldn’t even take their idols with them, as Jews are commanded to destroy those traces of foreign worship (v.24). Is that just? Definitely. Not in your common sense of human morality, but in the ultimate sense: whatever God has pronounced is just. Genocide, thus, can also be just.

At the time of Deuteronomy, just as they did 3,000 years later, the natives exercised their free will: they said, No. Pharaoh responded similarly to God’s demand to release the Jews; God took away his free will by hardening his heart, so that the pharaoh could suffer the punishment for his prior offenses. The Canaanite nations, on the on the other hand, exercised their free will unhindered, and the time has come for them to suffer the consequences.

“Only from the towns of the nations which Lord your God gives you for inheritance, you shall leave none alive. But you shall cease, cease them” (Deut20:16-17). The commandment can be interpreted in a minimally bloodthirsty manner: evicting the natives leaves none of them alive in our towns and ceases their existence in the land God promised to us. Such a relatively peaceful interpretation, however, flies in the face of the context.

Jewish law distinguishes between two kinds of war: obligatory and voluntary. The obligatory war is fought to conquer the Promised Land and defend it from any enemy, even one who offers a land-for-peace deal (like the Amonites) or merely demands straw and hay. The voluntary war is fought for expansion of the boundaries of the Promised Land. The earlier verses deal with a voluntary war: much of the population, notably newlyweds and cowards, are exempted from military service. Now the Torah spells out the consequences of the enemy’s freedom of choice clearly. He can accept the Jewish offer of peace or fight. The peace deal that normal Jews offered to our enemies would have sent your Temple rabbi running for the Criminal Court in Hague: the surrendering inhabitants had to accept “tribute and servitude.” They could, however, continue pagan worship because these things happened away from the Promised Land; contrary to the liberal tikkun olam nonsense, Jews did not intend to serve as a beacon to nations who could persist in their pagan filth. The Exodus 20:24 commandment to extirpate foreign worship only applies to the Promised Land, not to the entire territory conquered by Jews.

The enemy can also reject the rather illiberal Jewish peace initiative. Upon respecting his freedom of choice, Jews are commanded to slay all adult males and take women and children captive (Deut20:14). Here lies a concept of immense importance: they are not enemies spared out of humanitarian concern, but as a harmless trophy. The defeated enemy’s women and children suddenly became rootless and can be safely assimilated into the Jewish nation. As Moses, the humblest of all people, told Jewish soldiers, “But leave alive for yourself all female children who did not know a man.” (Num31:18) Enemy women and children can be left alive only insofar as they can be distributed among the conquerors, albeit on relatively humane terms of treatment.

Obligatory wars are fought on divine command to purify the land; those wars are critical to Israeli nationhood and religious objectives. Obligatory war has to be harsher on Israel’s enemies than a voluntary war. If all the adult males are killed in voluntary wars, then that is all the more reason for them to be killed—rather than merely evicted—in obligatory wars. Once they have refused the divine command to flee before the Jews, they lose the benefit of the divine offer which allowed them to stay alive. God is merciful to his creatures: the natives are killed so that they don’t compound their sin of opposing God and his people.

Many rabbis take refuge in the list of nations to be exterminated: the Torah lists seven of them, none of which exists today, though some Palestinians claim descent from the Canaanites. Palestinian Arabs, who refused to vacate the divinely established Jewish state, need not be exterminated according to this logic. As a human being educated in atheistic morality, I would be greatly relieved had it really been so. Unfortunately, the list of nations is clearly illustrative. In those days, nations did not exist. People thought on the level of kingdoms, towns, and clans. It is extremely unlikely that any town’s population considered themselves, for example, Canaanites. Deut20:16 is clear: “From the towns of those people which God your Lord gives you for inheritance, leave none alive.” If we constrain this verse to the long-gone nations, then we have to assume that today God gave us no land at all. Indeed, we’re commanded throughout the Torah to take the land of “those nations”—six or seven of them. If the nations don’t exist, Jews have no religious right to take over the land. Nevertheless, the Torah commands us to return from Exile and take over this land (Deut30:5). Thus, the list of particular nations is expendable; Jews must take the towns in the Promised Land from whatever nations happen to have settled them at the time. And when we take the towns, the exterminatory commandment of Deut20:16 kicks in.

Machiavelli agrees: exterminating the natives is the only way for a conqueror to establish himself in the land. If he does not follow the cruel logic of conquest, the natives would become “thorns in his side,” which the Palestinian population has indeed become to Israel.

The Palestinians exercised their freedom of choice in 1948 when they fought the Jewish state. There is no room, accordingly, for the peace process. And in case you think that the Torah is out of sync with modern realities, ask the Native Indians who were exterminated by good Christians arriving from Europe.

Some unthinking Orthodox rabbis recently joined the ranks of interfaith pundits. Like the Reform ignoramuses, they call for interfaith dialogue and respect for other religions. I wonder, how are we supposed to respect what we consider manifestly wrong?

Every day every religious Jew thanks God for being unlike other people who worship idols and the things bereft of meaning. The prayer’s statement is unqualified: we thank God for being unlike all people rather than some of them. Every classical commentator who expounded on the matter stated that trinity is contrary to unity. Though some find monotheism and abstract deism even in Hinduism, the sages clearly considered every other religion idolatry. A Jewish textbook on idolatry is called tellingly, Avodah Zarah—foreign worship. Clearly the sages considered any other form of worship idolatry; even more, every other religion is considered idolatrous.

Such an approach is well rooted in the Torah. A paramount case of Jewish idolatry is the golden calf incident. The Torah is adamant that the Hebrews did not seek another god then, but merely asked for a divine intermediary to replace Moses, who was thought to be lost. Thus, a golden intermediary constitutes idolatry. Even more, a free-will intermediary such as Jesus or Buddha is idolatrous to Jews. Even more, someone who is claimed to share in the divine attributes or hypostases both denies God’s unity and incorporeality, and establishes himself as an idol.

Any other reading makes a joke of the numerous biblical warnings against idolatry. The ancient Greeks were not so stupid as to believe that their statues were actually deities; they thought of their idols as representations of true deities. How is that different from statues and icons of Jesus? Yet Jewish scriptures condemn Hellenic and other idols beyond doubt. In Sumer, god the founder created both the world and other deities; likewise in Greek myths. How is that different from Christian and Buddhist monotheism?

We respect people for conformity to our values, not to theirs. A Polynesian cannibal might be a wonderful cook, but we don’t respect his skill in making steaks from his mother-in-law. Christians might be wonderfully correct in their own system of values—but not in ours. We Jews believe we know the truth. That might seem arrogant, but faith is uncompromising by nature.

I don’t presume to teach Christians or Buddhists, but merely to point out the fundamental dishonesty of the modern rabbinical establishment.

Two delusions plague the minds of Jews, even those generally knowledgeable of the Torah: that the commandment to cleanse the Promised Land of its natives applies to the seven ancient nations only, and that they only have to be expelled. The truth is, the commandment tells us to cleanse away any natives, and once they have raised their weapons against Jews they must be exterminated. Many people may not like that, but that is Judaism, like it or not, and everything on the matter can be learned from the opening chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy.

On the surface, Exodus 34:11 says that God will do all the dirty work, “Lo, I’m expelling [the six Canaanite nations] from before you.” Well, the Torah is more religious than us: it attributes all actions to God, whether performed by him directly or through human agents. So Deuteronomy 1:8 clarifies, “Look, I gave you this land, come and conquer it.” God did his part on the grand scale, by spiritually allocating this land to Jews, but we must act in the physical realm.

Jews have no choice in the matter: they must obey the divine command. In the scouts’ episode, Jews refused to enter the Promised Land, fearing the associated fighting. It is a matter of conjecture whether they were punished by staying forty years in Sinai, or allowed to live comfortable lives in Sinai according to their wishes. Whether as punishment or rehabilitation after slavery, they were barred from the Promised Land. God did not differentiate between good and bad Jews: Moses, too, was barred from entering Canaan, and died shortly before the invasion. The shepherd shares his flock’s fate. The concept is of great importance: Jews are chosen and have no right to refuse. In the short term, they can exercise free will and suffer for that, but the next generation will follow the divine orders. Executing the divine will later rather than sooner only increases hardships: after forty years of wanderings in Sinai, Jews became affluent (Deut2:7), and therefore less suitable to warfare than their parents.

Zeal matters. Not only in the account of Pinchas, whose descendants received an eternal blessing of peace for his murder of a high-society interfaith family, but closer to our discussion, too. In Deut2:19, God explicitly bans Jews from taking over the land of Amonites, the descendants of Lot. Nevertheless, Jews eventually ran it over and annexed it to the State of God. Centuries later, the Amonites asked for their land back in return for peace. Not a fan of land-for-peace deals, Judge Yiphtah refused to abandon the “towns of our God,” went to war, and with divine help won. Thousands of years before Stephen Decatur, God viewed the Jews as “my people, right or wrong.” In sticking to the right, Jews need not fear being carried away by their zeal.

Jews must act preemptively, unprovoked, even against peaceful natives. Deut2:24, “Look, I gave Sihon, the king of Heshbon the Amorite, and his land into your hand—start the conquest. And launch a military campaign against him.” The land was unquestionably Sihon’s; God confirmed it to be his land. The Amorites may not have been righteous, but they were right in the civil sense. In the Jewish war to conquer the Promised Land civil matters are unimportant. European settlers in America, too, ignored civil rights when they dispossessed and eliminated the Native Indians. Most states were formed in such a fashion. The Jews must start a war: the Torah has no qualms that they are offenders of peace.

The lesson is tremendous: in the quest for the Promised Land, Jews must disregard every civic notion: breach peace, evict the rightful owners of the land, and kill them. Perhaps the times have changed, and what was normal for the ancients is hateful today? Wrong. Not only does the continuation of the Torah, given thousands years ago, presume that its object, a society, remains the same, but murder was always murder. We need not dwell on Greek tragedies extolling virtues similar to the modern leftist press. Consider Numbers 31:15, in which Moses, “the humblest of all men,” fumes at the Jewish militia returning from a campaign against the Midians, “Did you leave females alive?” The Jews were perfectly able to recognize the killing of prisoners, especially women and children, as murder, so they left them alive—but Moshe overrode them. Acting on the divine authority (v.2), he instructed Jews, including the Levitical priests, to murder male children and widowed women (v.17).

The Rabbis taught: when someone extols the divine mercy expressed in the commandment to avoid killing the bird while taking eggs from its nest, we shut him up. If he extols the commandments as merciful, what would he do when faced with a horribly cruel, exterminatory commandment? All commandments are of absolute authority, all are closed to questioning, and all are above human morality.

Back to Sihon. Moses had no trouble relying on the divine commission (v.26). He entreated Sihon to give the Jews the right of peaceful passage, which the Jews needed in order to attack unsuspecting Heshbonites. Not being stupid, Sihon refused, giving Moses the excuse he needed to attack him. God approved of Moses’ artful plan, for he “hardened the heart of Sihon,” making him refuse Moses’ fake offer of peace (v.30).

And here the exile option ends. After Sihon went to battle with the invading Jews (v.32), Moses relates proudly, they exterminated men, women, and children in all of his towns, leaving not a single human being alive (v.34). Lest we think that that was an exception, the Torah continues with a similar account of King Og of Bashan (3:6). Here, God uses the genocide in Heshbon as a proper example: “Do unto him like you have done to Sihon.” (3:2)

Needless to say, Jews robbed their enemies (3:7), which is why the occasional IDF investigations of marauders are so ridiculous—Jewish soldiers are religiously entitled to the booty, it is not up to us to decide.

A big question is, why did God harden the hearts of the natives so that they opposed us and we had to exterminate rather than expel them? Probably for the same reason he hardened Pharaoh’s heart: to punish him for previous transgressions. The difference between exile and extermination reveals the straightforward divine logic of “my people, right or wrong”: after a nation takes up arms against his people, it loses the divine entitlement to life. Moses recognized that logic when exhorting Yehoshua bin Nun: “You see what Lord your God did to those two kings… Lord your God, he fights the battle for you” (3:21-22). Atheist Jews might find respite in the fact that they are not alone: Krishna said similar things to Arjuna before the battle in which Arjuna had to kill a multitude of his relatives; so much for pacifist Hinduism.

In the same verse, the Torah bridges the gap between past and present, “The same things God will do to all kingdoms where you come.”