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| Volume XIII, Fall 2006, Number 3 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Biblical Interpretation and Middle East Policy: The Promised Land, America, and Israel 1917-2002by Irvine H. Anderson. University Press of Florida, 2005. 187 pages. $39.95, hardcover.
Robert Brenton Betts
Professor, University of Balamand, Lebanon
These two recent studies of different aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict neatly complement each other. The first, a concise overview of the struggle between Zionism and the indigenous inhabitants its followers have sought to displace, written by a former Australian ambassador to Israel and a noted journalist, takes a very hard, undiplomatic look at Jewish claims on behalf of their young state and its six decades of relentless oppression of the native Palestinian population. The second attempts to explain the roots of Christian support in England for a Jewish state in Palestine, and in America for its establishment and continued existence.
Ambassador Rodgers readily admits that the Palestinians are as guilty of terrorist acts as their oppressors (it was Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, among others, who first applied the term “terrorist” to Menachem Begin's “Freedom Party” in a letter to The New York Times following the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948, p. 55), but there is no doubt in his mind who were the initial provocateurs. The result has been a deadly stalemate. For Israel, “As long as there is violence, there will be occupation;” for Palestinians, “As long as there is occupation there will be violence” (p. 75).
Does the author harbor any real hope for peace in the short run? Not really. Quite correctly, he understands that the Israelis fear peace more than ongoing strife. As long as there is no peace settlement, there is always the hope however slim, that the full aim of Zionism — an exclusively Jewish state extending from the Nile to the Euphrates can be achieved. There is always the chance that the Palestinian population — which already equals the number of Jewish Israelis in the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine when you subtract the million or so Jews who have left Israel for New York and other points West but maintain the fiction of Israeli residence by returning once every four years — can be “transferred,” to use the current Zionist euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Former “revisionist” historian Benny Morris, who exposed the truth behind the first wave of Palestinian expulsion in 1948-49, now contemplates the neccessity of expelling 4.5 million Palestinians to Jordan, including the 1.2 million who have enjoyed Israeli citizenship since the founding of the state. There is, moreover, always the hope for such people that, while the world is preoccupied with a major political upheaval elsewhere at some time in the future, the Israelis can solve the Palestinian problem once and for all. It might have been done, say some in retrospect, following the 1967 War against Egypt, Jordan and Syria, when some 300,000 Palestinians, mostly from refugee camps in the Jordan Valley, were forced to leave. Why not the rest?
As appalling as this prospect may appear, many Israelis secretly hope for this desperate opportunity, and for them any final peace settlement would rule it out. The opposite side of the coin is the Palestinian demand for the “right of return” for the some four million of their fellow countrymen in diaspora. Not all would take advantage of the possibility, but even if only a third did, “it would destroy Israel as a Jewish state” (p. 105). Yet UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed in December 1948, affirmed this very right for those who wished to do so, and compensatory payments for loss of property for those who did not.
The Israelis are clearly fearful of the future, even without the specter of exiled Palestinians returning from abroad or, perhaps worse, having to pay out large sums of money for the land stolen from those who might not choose to come home. In the Zionist view, “This land is my land; your land is my land,” as Rodgers tersely heads Chapter 3 of his book. Immigration of Jews from abroad (58 percent of world Jewry still lives outside Israel) has all but dried up (only 23,000 arrived in 2003), and many of the million or so Soviet Jews who came after the 1989 collapse of Communism are moving on to Canada, the United States and Europe (p. 91). The threat of terrorism is, therefore, the best refuge of most Israeli politicians, and here there is no difference between Peres and Netanyahu. It enables the government to exaggerate the real threat to its immediate security, build walls to keep out “the natives,” and beg Uncle Sam for yet more billions of dollars. In actual fact, the number of Israelis killed by “terrorism” is a tiny fraction of those dying every day as the result of other examples of "misadventure.” Between 1967 and 1978, as an example, 9,424 Israeli civilians died in such circumstances. Of these, 66.9 percent were from automobile crashes, 19.6 percent from labor accidents and 10.6 percent from criminal violence. Terrorism counted for only 272 deaths, or a mere 2.9 percent of the total (p. 57). Admittedly, these numbers have risen since the second intifada began, but they are still low in comparison with other causes of death.
But what of the long run? Rodgers cites an interesting exhange of ideas in Commentary between its former editor Norman Podhoretz and a Silicon Valley multimillionaire, Ron Unz, in the wake of the Twin Towers bombing on September 11, 2001. Podhoretz held out no hope for any peaceful solution to the problem any time soon, stating that Israel's only realistic choice was to “hold tight.” Unz, on the contrary, expected “Israel's trajectory to follow the temporary Crusader Kingdoms, surviving for 70 or 80 years following its 1948 establishment, then collapsing under continual Muslim pressure and flagging ideological commitment” (pp. 120-21). The latter is probably the greatest threat to the Zionist experiment. The continuous pressure to keep up one’s guard, live in constant fear, and require sons and daughters to risk their lives in the armed forces on a regular basis can eventually bring enough people to conclude that it isn't worth it, when living in Europe and the Americas is a readily available option.
No one could have predicted the sudden and peaceful collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989. Perhaps we will wake up one morning to discover that Israel, as we know it, no longer exists. Many people, especially in Europe, would breathe a sigh of relief. Until then, however, the two opposing sides, as Rodgers despairingly concludes, continue “to play games with each other, and indeed, with us all. They accept the principle of peacemaking but not the compromises, physical and mental, needed to achieve this, always conveniently blaming the other. Their conflict and the struggle to divide the tiny land they both call home will go on. And it will go on making our world a nasty and dangerous place” (p. 129). Rodgers's style is blunt and, not surprisingly, journalistic, but his message is clear. The creation of Israel was a mistake, and we're still paying for it.
In order to help us understand why the United States seems unable or unwilling to force a peaceful settlement on its ally Israel, thus squashing Zionist hopes of some day, somehow against all odds, achieving the dream of a Greater Israel, Irvine Anderson has compiled a useful compendium of the sources and strengths of Christian Zionism in America, and to a lesser extent, in England. There the original green light for a Jewish homeland in Palestine was given to the Zionists by British Foreign Secretary A. J. Balfour in a letter to Lord Rothschild on November 2, 1917. Support for its aims came immediately from Britain's large non-conformist Christian population (Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists and Congregationalists) and not long after from similar (and much more numerous) American Protestant groups. Only the Church of England expressed reservations at the time. “Palestine may mean much to the Jew,” editorialized The Church Times, the unofficial mouthpiece of the Anglican Church, on November 16, 1917, “as the land whence he has been driven; but it means infinitely more to the Christian, as the Holy Land, the setting of that life in which he reposes all his hopes. . . . It must be an absolute condition that the Holy Places remain in Christian hands” (p. 64), a position it, the Episcopal Church in America, and other member churches of the Anglican Communion worldwide have continued, more or less, to espouse. The Catholic and Orthodox Churches took an even dimmer view of the prospect of a Jewish state in the Holy Land, but neither had much political clout either in England or the United States at the time.
It was the Protestant Sunday School movement that, according to Anderson, provided the Zionists with their largest group of non-Jewish allies, without whom it is unlikely they would have succeeded in their goal of Israeli statehood. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, generations of British and American children have been inculcated with Old Testament stories, particularly from the Book of Genesis, which relate the granting by God of Palestine (and more) to the Jews as the Promised Land for his Chosen People. This, coupled with the Armageddon theology propagated by the Dispensational Pre-millennial Movement, which sees in the return of the Jews to the Holy Land a necessary precondition to the Parousia, or Second Coming of Christ, has taken deep root in the Fundamentalist Evangeical Protestant churches in America. Their membership is perhaps 20 percent of the U.S. population, and they were a key force in the election of President Bush in both 2000 and 2004.
Ironically, some of the original strong Christian supporters of Zionism — the Presbyterians and the Methodists, followed by the Evangelical Lutherans and, rather surprisingly, the Mormons — have become some of Israel’s strongest critics, along with the small but highly regarded peace churches such as the Quakers, the Church of the Brethren and the Mennonites. The Roman Catholics, by far America's largest single Christian church (61.2 million in 1998 vs. only 15.7 for the second-biggest group, the Southern Baptists [p. 38]), have also become increasingly critical, taking their cue from the late Pope John Paul II, who stated in 1987, “This right to a homeland also applies to the Palestinian people, so many of whom remain homeless and refugees” (p. 107). But for the growing number of Evangelical Christian groups, particularly those who fall outside the mainstream established Protestant churches like the Assemblies of God, the Pentacostalists and other more recent television-based groups, Israel's existence cannot be questioned. Their leaders range from Pat Robertson, who proclaimed that Ariel Sharon's stroke was a sign of God's disfavor with the forced removal of Jewish squatters from Gaza, through Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker (the latter two having ended up in prison), to Palestine's own Benny Hinn, a renegade Greek Orthodox refugee from Jaffa, and a host of lesser lights who dance to the Zionist tune on coast-to-coast television.
Irvine’s work is thoroughly researched and full of interesting insights into the workings of the Fundamentalist Christian mind and the nature of Evangelical beliefs. The Israelis and their Jewish American supporters have been quick to capitalize on this large bloc of support, though many of these churches (like the Southern Baptists) call for converting Jews or hope to expedite the mass conversions promised by the Book of Revelation in the Last Days. Their combined influence has been particularly powerful in Congress, where opposition to blanket support for Israel is almost guaranteed to be branded antisemitic.
For all its academic grounding and clear writing, Anderson’s book is by no means a thorough treatment of the potentially vast subject he addresses, as he himself would be the first to admit. Much remains to be written. He also tends to bend over backward to give the Christian Zionists the benefit of the doubt, perhaps because he obviously does not agree with them across the board. Still, it would not have been out of place to cite some Christian critics of their dubious theology and perhaps point out New Testament texts such as Matthew 22:34 and Hebrews 8:13. In the first, Christ says that no man knows when the Parousia will occur, “not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.” Yet we have tin-pot preachers telling us that we will see the second coming in our lifetime (and 36 percent of Americans believe them). Do they claim to know more than Christ? If so, isn't this blasphemy? In the second, God’s Covenant with Abraham, which promised his descendants Palestine, is declared “obsolete” (“by calling this covenant [with the followers of Christ] ‘new,’ he has made the first obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear”). Nevertheless, the author has done the world a service by explaining why so many Americans today are predisposed to support Israel, often blindly and against the interests of their fellow Christians in Palestine.
The British nonconformists, to their credit, had some of the scales removed from their eyes early on. The vicious murders of British officials, soldiers and civilians in Palestine in the wake of the Mandate began the process. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin declared at the time that “it was a dreadful thing that Jews should be killing British soldiers who had fought their battles for them against Germany” (p. 91). Today there is little support for Israel from British public opinion, and the rapid decline in Church membership and attendance in England since World War II has probably contributed to this. In the United States, half the population still attends church regularly and, according to Anderson, 66 percent of Americans believe that Christ will return to earth at some time, 36 percent, as mentioned above, in their own lifetime (p. 104).
Surprisingly absent from Anderson's study is the Pollard spy case, which could be cited as an example of the blind American Evangelical Christian support for Israel in the face of blatant provocations. Anderson makes no mention of this celebrated act of treason or of the fact that Congress, to its rare credit, passed two resolutions in January 1999 calling for his sentence not to be shortened or for him to be pardoned (see Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2006, p. 6). Apart from this oversight, I have only one minor criticism: the figure given for religious membership in ‘England, Scotland and Wales” in 1900 (p. 36, fn. 22, text on p. 146), and his conclusion that more people in these areas of the British Isles belonged to nonconformist churches than the Established Church of England. Most of those listed as Presbyterian would have been members of the Established Church of Scotland, therefore, not nonconformist (the Queen becomes a Presbyterian when she visits Balmoral). English nonconformist Presbyterians were always few. Also, given the large numbers of Roman Catholics listed, these figures must include Ireland, which in 1900 was still part of Great Britain.
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