Genocide case against Israel: Who were the Amalek, whose mention by Netanyahu came up at the ICJ

Netanyahu had said, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember”, as Israeli forces prepared to launch an assault on Gaza.

Who were the Amalek? And how have Israeli politicians used their story to justify Israel’s violence against Palestinians?

‘Attackers of the children of Israel’

The Amalekites, descendants of Amalek, were an ancient biblical nation who, according to the Hebrew Bible, were the first to attack the children of Israel (the Jewish people) after their escape from Egypt into Sinai.

The Book of Exodus, the second book of the Torah, says: “Then came Amalek and fought with Israel in Rephidim” (Exodus 17:8).

The Book of Deuteronomy, the Torah’s fifth book, is a bit more detailed: “Remember what Amalek did to thee by the way, when you were come out of Egypt: how he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, all that were feeble in thy rear, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God” (Deut 25:17-18).

Biblical justification for collective punishment

According to the Hebrew Bible, the “deeds” of the Amalek beget what scholars have characterised as “collective punishment.”

The Torah imposes two obligations on the Jewish people with regards to the Amalek: “Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget” (Deut 25:19). In Exodus (17:14), God himself participates in the Amalek’s total destruction.

Moreover, King Saul, the first monarch of the United Kingdom of Israel, is instructed by Prophet Samuel to annihilate Amalek: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (1 Sam 15:3).

Importantly, Saul would kill every Amalek but spare the king, who would keep the tribe of Amaleks alive. Many generations later, Haman, one of his descendants, once again develops a plot to kill all the Jews. As Joshua Shanes, a professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston, explained in the magazine Mother Jones: “The lesson, when read literally, is clear: Saul’s failure to kill every Amalekite posed an existential threat to the Jewish people.”

‘Other as Amalek’

Sociologist Gerald Cromer points out that throughout history, Rabbinic scholars have gone to great lengths to point out the depths of the Amalek’s depravity — with the Amalek thus regarded as the apogee of evil in Jewish tradition. (‘Amalek as Other, Other as Amalek: Interpreting a Violent Biblical Narrative’ in Qualitative Sociology Vol. 24, No. 2, 2001).

“In a parallel development, however, rabbis and laymen alike have used the term to refer to other nations and groups that allegedly threaten the continued existence of the Jewish people,” he wrote.

This is where Netanyahu’s invocation of the Amalek comes in. It not only evokes collective memories of historical persecution, it also justifies brutal, collective reprisals. In fact there is a whole history of the invocation of Amalek to justify violence against Palestinians.

For instance, In 1994, New York-born Israeli extremist Bharuch Goldstein gunned down at least 29 unarmed Palestinians, out of the belief that Palestinians were the Amalekites. Today, Goldstein’s tomb is a kind of pilgrimage for the Israeli far-right, with Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s current minister of national security, a self-professed ‘fan’.

As Robert Eisen writes in his book, The Peace and Violence of Judaism (2011), “… serious and troubling is that in the modern period Jews have regained political power, and the propensity of right-wing Israeli settlers to identify the Palestinians with Amalekites has sometimes had deadly consequences.”