THE DANGER OF ISRAELISM

-by Ximalli

In the 1990's a rapper by the name of Too Short wrote in one of his songs, “Why do you want be like someone else, all you gotta do is just be yourself... Never be ashamed of what you are, proud to be black stand tall and hard.”  Growing up I was shaped by that kind of music, a thread of consciousness that pointed me towards loving who and what I was. Living in a world that tells us that who we are is not good enough, people always struggle to find their identity, and often reject their own cultural heritage replacing it with other cultures that they deem superior to their own. One such case is the belief of Israelism.

A “ism” is defined as a “distinctive practice, system, or philosophy.”  The belief of “Israelism” is the belief that a certain group of people are either direct lineal descendants or spiritual descendants of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. By claiming they are “descendants” they claim the promises of the god of the Bible that Israel is the blessed people of god and will inherit the earth.

According to the Bible as written in the book of Genesis, Israel was the favored son of Jacob. The patriarchal and ordained lineage was Abraham, Issac, Jacob (Israel). Jacob was said to have literally wrestled with a physical manifestation of god and was renamed Israel. His 12 sons had families and each of those families became one of the 12 tribes of Israel. According to the Bible god promised to “marry” the 12 tribes, (collectively known as “Israel”) and were given promises of being god's special people, the love of god’s heart, the blessed people of god, and the ones who will inherit the earth and be saved from destruction. Subsequently god instructed Israel to completely destroy the 12 original tribes of Canaan and another people called the Philistines (ancestors of the Palestinians), and take all their land as an inheritance. Their specific instructions were to invade Canaan destroy all their buildings, burn all their crops, kill all their cattle, pillage all their gold, and kill every child, woman, and man, sparing none. They failed to completely destroy the Philistines which is why they are still committing genocide against the Palestinians until this day. The Canaanites were wiped off the face of the earth.

Fast forward about 1500 years after the arrival of a Carpenter named Jesus Ben-Joseph. His followers known as Christians were the first who claimed that the promises of Israel belonged to them. This was primarily because the first Christians were actual Israelites. As non-Israelites (gentiles) joined the church they claimed that those gentiles were “spiritual Israelites” and the promises of love, blessings, and protection were extended to everyone that made up the this new body of the so-called Messiah, the church. Since then Christianity has grown all over the world, mostly through forced conversion at the point of a blade and slavery. Those people who were “colonized” by Christianity were forcefully stripped of their cultural identity and spiritual beliefs and being left with no other option have adopted different versions of Israelism.

Presently there are hundreds of sects of Israelism, Christianity being the main one. Some notably large and more vocal groups are British Israelites, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and recently we have seen a group invading activist circles called  Black Judaism (A.K.A. Hebrew Israelism). Their theological claims are based on what is called psuedo-archaeology (fake archaeology), because little to no evidence exists that would substantiate the claims of any of these groups. They fabricate historical records and archaeological discoveries to weave together a complex and often confusing belief system.

The danger of Israelism can vary as far as the fanaticism of the membership will take it. It can be a simple as affecting an individual, to mass genocide of entire groups of people. On one side of the spectrum British Israelism birthed the idea of Manifest Destiny, the belief that god ordained the White race to inherit the earth as god's special people and that led to the genocide of over 100 million Native Americans, the theft of their lands, the slavery of African people, and the creation of the United States of America. All built on lies. We see that belief still alive today encapsulated in the idea of American Exceptionalism. On the other side of the spectrum there are individuals living in a state of denial and fantasy. This can create a whole multitude of mental and emotional problems in people that can lead to erratic thinking, delusional attitudes, depression, to violent behavior.

The mind is a very powerful thing, if a person can control your mind they can make you do anything. Often we see televangelists on TV manipulating the Old Testament texts to milk their thousands of usually poor followers to give them all their money. Because they claim the Old Testament promises that if Israel gives 10 percent of their wealth to the Temple they would be blessed and would receive 100 times more in return. Those followers live on a budget with little to spare and they are told every day that they must give more and more in order to be blessed. They feed on the desperation of the poor and manipulate them to believe lies to fleece them for billions every year. We have seen that kind of mind control on groups of followers being told they must drink a cup of magical kool-aid, or in the hands of someone like Hitler. The end results are always disastrous.  You cannot play with fire and not be burned.

The Old Testament was written 2500-3500 years ago by and for a group of people claiming that their group was somehow superior to every other group of people. That is definition of racism which is “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that ONE’S OWN RACE IS SUPERIOR.” That led to Israel committing genocide on hundreds of thousands of people and until this day they are engaged in genocide against the Palestinians. Hundreds of millions, if not billions of people all over the world have been killed because of  these beliefs. All of that is based on lies. So much suffering, so much bloodshed and for what? So that we can all be sheep, slaves in our minds, and just literal slaves.

The United Nations has defined Genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."  This works hand in hand with Cultural Genocide defined as “the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a people or nation for political, military, religious, ideological, ethnic or racial reasons.” Believers in Israelism, from earlier Israelites to the various Christian sects, have engaged in engaged in Genocide all over the world for thousands of years.

Recently I engaged in a conversation with a co-worker who attested that he as a Black man was a descendant of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. He was proud of learning Hebrew, dressing in a tunic, and practicing Old Testament traditions. This is a symptom of Cultural Genocide. As a Black man in America he has been robbed of his cultural identity, his rich history that goes back for tens of thousands of years, and his people’s spiritual beliefs that speak to his existence and define his humanity. Likewise, Native Americans from both continents were forced into accepting Christianity (Western Civilization and traditions), given “Christian names”, and speaking “Christian languages” (European). By doing these things it erases who we are as people and are lost in the “melting pot” of Western Civilization. It is easier for us to be colonized and controlled if we forget who we are and where we come from.

There is a solution beyond burning every copy of that book, and that is learning who we are and loving that. The simplest solution is always the hardest though because it involves us facing reality. It is very much like that part in the Matrix movie where Neo is asked to choose to between the red and blue pill. Most people would prefer to live in a fantasy world. It's what they know, what is easy. When you choose to take a hard look at your life you will realize that you will have to make difficult decisions. Because the mind is so powerful, challenging and changing your world view can possibly be very destructive. Some people spiral out of control when their “world view” is challenged, others take their own lives, but for those who are strong enough to withstand the storms, they emerge from that cage that they lived imprisoned in with a new purpose, a new life. We can emerge as a child newly born into a world, no longer constrained by the chains of a fake religious belief system and all the colonization and slavery that comes with it!