ISRAEL: Whose Promised Land?
The violent Al-Aqsa Intifada began on September
29th, 2000. That's the day after
Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, went to
the Haram Al-Sharif, the Temple
Mount, with about a thousand soldiers. That
passed more or less without
incident, surprisingly. But the next day, which
was Friday, there was a huge
army presence as people left the mosque after
prayers; there was some stone
throwing and immediate shooting by the Israeli
army and Border Patrol, which
left about a half a dozen Palestinians dead and
over a hundred wounded.
That's September 29th. On October 1st, Israeli
military helicopters,
actually US military helicopters with Israeli
pilots, sharply escalated the
violence, killing two Palestinians in Gaza. On
October 2nd, military
helicopters killed 10 people in Gaza, wounded
35. On October 3rd,
helicopters were attacking apartment complexes
and other civilian targets.
And so it continued. By early November, the
helicopters were being used for
targeted political assassinations...
HISTORY
For an excellent brief history of the region
please see:
Views Of The Future
A Jewish peace activist (name unknown) writes:
'The first challenge, then, is to extract
acknowledgement from Israel for what it did to
the Palestinian people. The
root cause of the Palestine-Israel conflict is
clear. During the 1948 war,
750,000 Palestinians fled in terror or were
expelled from their
ancestral homeland and turned into refugees.
The state of Israel then
refused to allow them to return and either
destroyed their villages entirely
or expropriated their land, orchards, houses,
businesses and personal
possessions for the use of the Jewish
population. This was the birth of the
state of Israel. We know it is hard to accept
emotionally, but in this case
the Jewish people are in the wrong. We took
most of Palestine by force from
the Arabs and blamed the victims for resisting
their dispossession. The
Israeli government could solve the
Palestine/Israel crisis tomorrow. It
actually would be in the best interests of its
citizens to do so because
random acts of terrorism against Israelis would
cease if Palestinian demands
for a viable, independent state were accepted
and compensation for Arab
losses made.'
A CHRISTIAN APPROACH?
Christians and Jews range right across the
left-right spectrum in terms of
their understanding of the Israel/Paelstine
problem. Broadly:
1. MOST JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN
EVANGELICAL/FUNDAMENTALIST 'RIGHT'.
Benjamin Netanyahu gave an interview on CNN and
was asked about Israel's
occupation of Arab lands. His response was
'It's our land.'
The following is a summary of the Jewish and
Christian evangelical/fundamentalist perspective:
1. Nationhood and Jerusalem. Israel became a
nation in 1312 B.C.E., two thousand years before the rise of Islam.
2. Arab refugees in Israel began identifying
themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the
establishment of the modern State of Israel.
3. Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 B.C.E.,
the Jews have had dominion over the land for one thousand years with a
continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.
4. The only Arab dominion since the conquest in
635 C.E. lasted no more than 22 years.
5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the
Jewish capital. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim
entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make
it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.
6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in
Tanach, the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the
Koran.
7. King David founded the city of Jerusalem.
Mohammed never came to Jerusalem.
8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Muslims pray
with their backs toward Jerusalem.
9. Arab and Jewish Refugees: In 1948 the Arab
refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the
land of Jews. Sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.
10. The Jewish refugees were forced to flee
from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.
11. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel
in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from
Arab lands is estimated to be the same.
12. Arab refugees were INTENTIONALLY not
absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast
Arab territory. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is
the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated
into their own peoples'
lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed
into Israel, a country no larger than the U. S. state of New Jersey.
13. The Arab - Israeli Conflict: The Arabs are
represented by eight separate nations, not including the Palestinians. There is
only one Jewish nation. The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost.
Israel defended itself each time and won.
15. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites
were desecrated and the Jews were denied access to places of worship. Under
Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made
accessible to people of all faiths.
16. The U.N. Record on Israel and the Arabs: of
the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed
against Israel.
17. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions
voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel.
18. The U.N was silent while 58 Jerusalem
Synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians.
19. The U.N. was silent while the Jordanians
systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.
20. The U.N. was silent while the Jordanians
enforced an apartheid-like policy of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple
Mount and the Western Wall.
Yasser Arafat regarded Zionism as a way of
making Palestinians pay for the Holocaust. The 'leader of the Palestinian
people' stated the purpose of his life, just a decade after he established Al
Fatah, the predecessor of the PLO (and incidentally, this was many years before
Israel conquered Arab
lands): 'The end of Israel is the goal of our
struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation,' he explained to
the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1972. 'We don't want peace. We want
war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else.'
2. CHRISTIAN 'LEFT' (MAINLINE CHURCHES/WORLD COUNCIL
OF CHURCHES):
One of the problems in this debate is that most
Jews and right-wing Christians are not listening to the Palestinians -
particularly Palestinian Christians. I would strongly recommend Elias Chacour's
book Blood Brothers for a Christian Palestinian
perspective on all this...
Here's a representative perspective of the
'Christian left', from Desmond Tutu:
'In our struggle against apartheid, the great
supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side
of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression
and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a
Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure
borders.
'What is not so understandable, not justified,
is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I've been very
deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what
happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the
Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white
police officers prevented us from moving about. On one of my visits to the Holy
Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear
tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish
settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the
Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?
'I have experienced Palestinians pointing to
what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with
Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He
pointed and said: "Our home was over there. We were driven out of our
home; it is now occupied by
Israeli Jews."
'My heart aches. I say why are our memories so
short? Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have
they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own
history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble
religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the
downtrodden? Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing
another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We
condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young
minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in
the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.
The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will
not provide the security and peace Israelis
want; it will only intensify the hatred.
'Israel has three options: revert to the
previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or - I hope - to
strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied
territories, and the
establishment of a viable Palestinian state on
those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure borders.
'We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful
transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the
same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely
it can come to the Holy Land?
'My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to
say: "I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I
am anti- injustice, anti-oppression."
'But you know as well as I do that, somehow,
the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it
is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not
semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group... People
are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish
lobby is powerful - very powerful.
'Well, so what? For goodness’ sake, this is
God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very
powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet,
Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.
Injustice and oppression
will never prevail. Those who are powerful have
to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your
treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God
passes judgment. We should put out a clarion call to the government of the
people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace
based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve
this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to live
amicably together as sisters and brothers.'
Desmond Tutu is the former Anglican Archbishop
of Cape Town
Many Jews resonate with this approach as well.
As I write this a news item says more than 320 members of the Israeli Defense
Forces have signed a pledge refusing 'to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate
an entire people' through 'missions of occupation and oppression' against
Palestinians. Though these 'refuseniks' consider the military defense of the
State of Israel to be legitimate, the signers have denounced 'commands and
directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and that
had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people.'
Yesh Gvul, a support organization for refuseniks, says these soldiers accept
the legal consequences of their action as part of a history of effective
resistance. Yesh Gvul credits the imprisonment of 168 soldiers during the 1982
invasion of Lebanon and 200 jailed for refusing to combat the 1987 intifada
with helping to curtail those military campaigns.
~~~
IS THERE ANOTHER - CHRISTIAN - WAY?
The persecution of the Jews for centuries in
Europe was the worst of many stains on the European record, and the Zionists'
desire for a place of sanctuary is certainly understandable
HARDLINERS - the religious and political right
- tend to emphasize the promises of Yahweh to Israel and 'realpolitik'.
Their text: Deuteronomy 11: 23-24: 'The Lord
will drive out all these nations before you... Your territory shall extend from
the wilderness to the Lebanon, and from the river Euphrates, to the Western
Sea.'
Their philosophy: The only way to root out
terrorism is by force, not love and gentle persuasion.
Their attitude: demonize the Palestinians.
'Who won the wars?' they ask. The average
Israeli on the street would say: 'It's not our fault, they started the war,
they haven't recognised our right to exist, they don't want to live in peace
with us anyway - so I would be crazy to invite somebody who might join Hamas to
come and live down the road
from me. What's more, they started the war, we
won it, and that's that.'
Israel is strong - it is the fifth largest
military power in the world, is economically dominant, deep in leadership
cadres, healthy in civil society and
culture. But the Israelis don't seem to know they're strong. They still believe
they are victims. As long as you believe you're a victim, you are not
accountable. As victims, Israelis believe they must defend themselves whatever
the cost, whatever the consequences.
Back to right-wing Christians. One Middle
Eastern Christian leader wrote: 'Most visitors who come to the Holy Land for
the primary reason of "walking where Jesus walked" have never been
victims of torture, oppression, unjust imprisonment, or physical deprivation.
From their more comfortable lives,
they may not be as sensitive to Jesus' marching
orders in Luke 4 to "preach good news to the poor...and release to the
oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." This is a vacation,
after all, not a "mission trip." Many who come believe in a
near-heretical apocalyptic theology nurtured by the "late great"
prophetic literature that declares that the secular state of Israel is the long
awaited pre-messianic event. The vast majority of those who come are traveling
with tour agencies or guides trained and
supervised by the Israeli government. As a
result Arab Muslims and Christians alike are often denigrated as violent,
dirty, and criminally inclined people whose neighborhoods should be avoided.
And many visitors come with fully arranged schedules and are afraid to reach out
to local believers, to worship with them, or to see their reality-especially
since many congregations are in the "dangerous" West Bank and Gaza
Strip.'
The truth is, these visits are rarely dangerous
physically, but they can cause troubling spiritual challenges to misperceptions
and prejudices. When visitors observe injustice and align themselves with the
poor and
oppressed - when the scales come off the eyes
of pilgrims - the result can be painful internal and doctrinal adjustments, but
also a deepened spiritual sensitivity. As one of our pilgrim friends, Rev.
Katherine Kallis from Boston, said, "The experience with Palestinians
sandpapered my heart. I will never be the same."
SOFTLINERS (is that a word?) - the religious and political left – say violence
usually breeds more violence. Negotiation is the only way to solve conflicts.
Martyrs only produce more martyrs.
Gandhi (yes, Gandhi!) offered some wisdom for
us here when he said 'If a lunatic is loose in the village and threatening
people, you first deal with the lunatic, and then the lunacy.'
Peace is preferable to war. But it's not an
absolute value. And so we must always ask, "What kind of peace?" If
Hitler had conquered the world there would be peace but not the kind we would
like to see.
Most observers agree that the role of the U.S.
and the U.N. crucial if the Palestinian/Israeli impasse is to be resolved. The
Gulf region has the major energy resources in the world: whoever controls that
region not only has access to enormous wealth; the control of energy resources
is an extremely powerful lever in
world affairs. But Palestinians have no wealth
or power.
Someone has said: if the secretary-general of
the UN or the president of the US lived in a back alley of Gaza for a month the
whole problem would have been solved a few decades ago...
Here are some of the essential components of a
viable peace for Israel/Palestine:
1. Justice. 'No peace without justice; no
justice without truth'. 'The first
challenge, then, is to extract acknowledgement from Israel for what it did to
us... But then, I believe, we must also hold out the possibility of some form
of coexistence in which a new and better life, free of ethnocentrism and
religious intolerance, could be available...If we present our claims about the
past as ushering in a form of mutuality and coexistence in the future, a
long-term positive echo on the Israeli and Western side will reverberate.' (Edward
Said in "The Progressive", March 1998).
Here's something from Jews for Justice: 'The
root cause of the Palestine-Israel conflict is clear. During the 1948 war,
750,000 Palestinians fled in terror or were actively expelled from their
ancestral homeland and turned into refugees. The state of Israel then refused
to allow them to return and either destroyed their villages entirely or
expropriated their land, orchards, houses, businesses and personal possessions
for the use of the Jewish population. This was the birth of the state of
Israel. We know it is hard to accept emotionally, but in this case the Jewish
people are in the wrong. We took most of Palestine by force from the Arabs and blamed
the victims for resisting their dispossession.’
The matter of justice raises another issue. A
people can only cope with so much humiliation, until they say, 'This far and no
further'. Jim Wallis: The Israeli policy is called closure. Everything gets
closed down in the West Bank and Gaza, and Palestinians are not allowed to move
freely-to go to school, to work, or even to visit family. All Palestinians are
required to have permits and pass through interminable checkpoints. Our group
was stopped at every checkpoint, even though we were an international
delegation in large buses. We had some clout and were no threat to the
Israelis, and they still held us up for hours. If you are a Palestinian, you
wait. And you wait. I heard many stories - for example, of a woman in labor,
stopped at a checkpoint on the way to the hospital. She was forced to deliver
her baby in
the back seat of her car, waiting at the
checkpoint. The soldiers ordered her outside the car, where she collapsed on
the ground in utter exhaustion, with the umbilical cord still attaching her to
her baby, while Israeli soldiers laughed. In July, another baby born at an
Israeli checkpoint died before reaching the hospital. These women experienced
the extreme of the type of indignities visited on Palestinians every day...
There is no "symmetry" in the violence of the Middle East today.
Israeli violence is enormously disproportionate to Palestinian violence. That includes
the violence of the settlements and closure policies themselves and the Israeli
military practices, especially in their retaliation against Palestinian
attacks. Despite this lack of proportionality, there is no moral or strategic
justification for the Palestinian violence in response to Israeli domination,
especially when it targets civilians. No argument, even lack of symmetry, will
suffice.
2. Love of Enemies. This is not a very Jewish,
(or Arab) virtue. See Leviticus 19:17,
18: 'You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin... You shall not take
vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your
neighbour as yourself.' Deuteronomy 10: 18,19: 'The Lord executes justice for
the orphan and the widow, and loves the stranger, providing them food and
clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land
of Egypt.' Leviticus 19: 33,34: 'When an alien
resides with you in your land, you shall not
oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the
citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in
the land of Egypt.' So love in the Jewish Scriptures is limited to one's kin
and the 'agreeable alien'.
3. Forgiveness. Forgiveness is not a
traditional value in world affairs. The concept is foreign to most secular
political philosophies and peripheral at best to Christian theories of the
common good and a just war. Among 20th-century philosophers, the German-Jewish
refugee Hanna Arendt stood out. Writing after the Holocaust, she saw
forgiveness as one of two human capacities that make it possible to alter the
political future. The other is the ability to enter into covenants. Forgiveness
surfaced after the grisly
nightmare of apartheid in South Africa, when then-president
Nelson Mandela awakened many to a reality expressed later in the title of
Archbishop Desmond Tutu's 1999 book, No
Future Without Forgiveness. In Northern Ireland, many Catholics and
Protestants have been able to imagine a
different future through public acts of mutual
repentance and forgiveness. In Cambodia, Buddhist primate Moha Ghosananda has
struggled to release people from a paralyzing past by envisioning a future of
forgiveness. He calls for selectively forgiving Khmer Rouge leaders who have
repented and
renounced violence after perpetrating that
nation's unspeakable genocide. In his unequaled work, An Ethic for Enemies, Donald W. Shriver defines forgiveness as an
"act that joins moral truth, forbearance, empathy and commitment to repair
a fractured human relation."
4. Compassion. Something akin to the Marshall
Plan would have to be mobilized if the Palestinians are to enjoy a viable
homeland and lifestyle.
5. The cycle of violence must be stopped - from
both sides.
6. The Right to Exist. Both sides have a
responsibility here. The Palestinians and the Arab states must affirm the right
of the State of Israel to exist within secure borders (UN 242). And the
Palestinian people
need a sovereign, uncontested, independent
state of their own. This is a matter of justice and practicality. They also
demand territorial integrity and contiguity... Any further dissection of
Palestinian territory would make it politically and economically impossible to
maintain a state...There can be no civilian pockets under Israeli rule on
Palestinian land... The Palestinians
want a sovereign capital in Jerusalem. East Jerusalem is Palestine's
historical, spiritual and commercial heart.
7. Occupation. The Palestinians are suspicious
of any attempts to maintain an Israeli presence in territories occupied in
1967. The territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority is dispersed and
intersected by 144 Israeli civilian and
military installations, diminishing the viability of that administration's
control. The settlements are seen as an instrument of the ongoing occupation,
the aim of which is to divide any future Palestinian state into noncontiguous
portions.
8. International Help. The establishment of an
international peacekeeping force, agreed upon by Israel and the Palestinian
Authority, would be needed to oversee the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank
and Gaza and maintain order until a peace agreement can be fully implemented.
9. Israeli Settlements. Part of any agreement
would need to include the cessation of the building of new Israeli settlements
and of the expansion of existing settlements in the West Bank and Gaza;
abandonment, dismantling, or other disposition of settlements that negate the
geographic integrity of a
viable Palestinian state.
10. The Right of Return. This is a crucial
matter of justice and fairness for refugees... As a matter of principle, the
Palestinians want all the refugees to be granted the right of return to the
land they or their
families left behind during the war which
accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948, and the Six Day war in 1967. They
have several UN resolutions – and plenty of powerful media images of miserable
conditions in some of the refugee camps - on their side. The Israelis will find this hard. The
Israeli right and left disagree about most of
the key issues in the peace process, but there's one thing they're united on:
allowing three million Palestinian refugees to move into the suburbs of Tel
Aviv or the port of Haifa would be tantamount to national suicide. The future
of the Palestinian refugees living in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, as well as the
West Bank and Gaza, is one of the biggest obstacles to a peace deal between
Israel and the Palestinians.
Israeli academics argue that just as many Jews
were thrown out of Arab countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and these
people aren't demanding compensation. And: tens of millions of people have been
displaced throughout history, but no other country has ever been forced to take
such a large number back. As one writer reminds the Americans: 'American
Indians continue to live in squalid camps on the occupied West Bank of the Mississippi.' One and a half million refugees live in
Jordan, where they
have been granted citizenship and have become
well-integrated - even the Prime Minister is technically a Palestinian refugee.
Another 1.3 million live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, mostly now under
Palestinian control. The real problem is the 300,000 in Syria and 350,000 in
Lebanon who have lived in camps for decades and have neither citizenship nor
the right to work.
11. Jerusalem. In principle Jerusalem has to be
shared by two peoples and three faiths. How this is to be done in practice, is
perhaps the most complex issue of all.
12. Water. Futurologists tell us that wars in
the next couple of centuries will not be fought over land or oil but water.
This is a very complex issue as well. Palestinian farmers accuse the Israelis
of discriminating against them in terms of their access to water.
13. Nuclear weapons. Some sort of U.N.
supervision of Israel's nuclear stockpile would be desirable.
DISCUSS:
- Re Gandhi's quote about
lunacy: What if the lunatic is a country's ruler? What should we have done
with Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Papa Doc Duvalier, Milosevic - not to mention Hitler
and Stalin before them? Many Christian leaders during World War II - like
Dietrich Bonhoeffer - tried the soft line with Hitler and reluctantly came
to the conclusion that Hitler had to be killed to prevent millions more
dying...
- Then discuss French
theologian Jacques Ellul's decision to support the resistance movement
against Nazism by appealing to the "necessity of violence" but
didn't call such recourse "Christian." Gandhi said that nonviolent
resistance is the best thing, but that violent resistance to evil is
better than no resistance at all.
- 'We must hold out the
possibility of some form of coexistence in which a new and better life,
free of ethnocentrism and religious intolerance, could be available... If
we present our claims about the past as ushering in a form of mutuality
and coexistence in the future, a long-term positive echo on the Israeli
and Western side will reverberate.' (Edward Said). Too idealistic?
- 'Love in the Jewish
Scriptures is limited to one's kin and the “agreeable alien”.' How does
this compare with Jesus' attitude towards loving enemies?
- Why do some of the earth's
peoples find it so hard to forget history and forgive?
- Suggest that one of your
group read Elias Chacour's book 'Blood Brothers' and present a synopsis of
it to the group. Plenty to discuss there!
- Another suggestion: get
someone to Google Sojourners
magazine; put 'Israel' into the Sojourners search, and print out some of
the articles there.
~~~
Sources:
Forgiveness in Conflict Resolution:
B'Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for
Human Rights in the Occupied
Jihad in Islam: Is Islam Peaceful or Militant?
Joint statements and actions from the
patriarchs and heads of churches in Jerusalem:
Rowland Croucher, May 2002
Revised June 2014
