Written by: James van den Heever, Anglican Church
Article source: Supplied
This article is part 2 in a 4-part series. Click here to read part 1.
In the first part of my series on moving “Towards a genuinely Christian position on Israel and the conflict in Palestine” I argued that the sincere Christian should approach the Israel/Palestine question through a number of lenses, the first being judgment and the Day of Judgment. The second lens is equally important: The Garden of Eden and Original Sin.
One of the many implications of the Christian interpretation of the Garden of Eden story in Genesis is that actions taken at the beginning of human history have had consequences that run through the ages, and continue to run.
The Garden of Eden story implies the intergenerational consequences of our actions, unless we find a way to break the cycle. In Christian terms, this would mean receiving forgiveness through grace, but in worldly terms it would mean acknowledging the past and consciously working to rectify its injustices. This, in turn, means acknowledging what we did to create the present situation and are doing to perpetuate it.
The preceding discussion provides a useful starting point for the important task of establishing what the Christian position on the Israel-Palestine question should be.
The Christian notion of judgment means we should recognise that we will be held to the same standards as we use when judging, and we all fall short of the perfection embodied in Christ, and so are likely to be judged wanting before God.
All in all, we will rely on God’s compassion and understanding to obtain a favorable judgment.
There is no doubt that the Palestinian people find themselves in an uncomfortable position both in Gaza and in the territories of the West Bank. But in the spirit of making judgements wisely, as Christians we should be suspicious of the media narrative that this is solely the result of aggressive and illegal action by the Israelis. Even if one accepts that many of the acts perpetrated by the Israeli state in the recent past seem prima facie worthy of condemnation, it is incumbent on Christians to take into account how the situation arose, for the state of Israel did not suddenly decide one day to go rogue.
As is so often the case, to understand the present one needs to examine the beginning of the story, much as one consults the Garden of Eden story to begin understanding why the world is as it is today.
The basic facts are that after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, the British were given a mandate to govern the areas now covered by Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan. This area had, for many centuries, been ruled by the Ottomans and before them the Byzantines and Romans. The area was primarily inhabited by Arabs and a significant number of Jews.
It seems clear that no sense of Palestinian nationhood existed until the Jewish diaspora began agitating for a Jewish homeland in their ancient heartland. The local Arabs took fright, greatly stimulated by their co-religionists in the neighboring countries, thus giving birth to the cause for a Palestinian polity encompassing the whole of what is now Israel and Palestine.
Both sides began to put pressure on the British to accede to their demands, and it has to be said that the latter’s tendency was to support the Arab cause. It is a matter of historical record that the Arabs saw in the rising power of Nazism the birth of a philosophy that supported their rejection of any Jewish claims to self-determination, and harmonized with a persistent anti-Semitism.
For example, in 1935 when Adolf Hitler promulgated the Nuremberg Race Laws, which would ultimately lead to the Holocaust, the Arab world as a whole was fulsome in its praise of the Fuhrer’s approach to “the Jewish Problem”. The leader and the Palestinian Arabs, the Mufti of Jerusalem, went one better, visiting Germany in 1941 to persuade the Nazis to extend their anti-Jewish programme to the Middle East. Hitler paid the Mufti 750 000 Reichsmark a month to foment a jihad in Palestine. Yugoslavia tried to have the Mufti indicted for war crimes for his role in recruiting 20 000 Muslims to volunteer for the SS. These volunteers participated in the killing of Jews in Croatia and Hungary. The Mufti escaped from French custody and continued his battle against Jewry from Cairo and Beirut until his death in 1974.
Given this level of hostility, the British concluded that partition would be the only way to accommodate both groups, but various schemes to get agreement on borders before 1945 came to nothing. After the Second World War and the revelations about the true extent of the Holocaust, it became clear that the demand for a Jewish homeland was a matter of the public good. The United Nations also concluded that partition was the only viable option, and again the solution was rejected by the Palestinians and the Arab world more generally. However, the Jews seized the moment and formed Israel, which almost immediately found itself under attack by the local Arabs, the proto-Palestinians, and then by the armies of five surrounding Arab states. Against all odds, the nascent Jewish state beat off their aggressors.
Israel subsequently suffered from a further six unprovoked attacks from neighboring Muslim countries, with support from the inhabitants of the territories earmarked by the UN for the putative Palestinian state — Gaza and the West Bank.
An important fact is that at its formation, Israel chose not to make any reference to borders as David Ben-Gurion, the President, believed the coming war would establish them. After the war, Israel only recognised armistice lines, maintaining that final borders would have to be established by peace treaties between the combatants. In subsequent years, despite its best efforts, Israel has never managed to negotiate a peace with the Palestinians and consequently the borders of the state remain subject to the vicissitudes of war.
In short, Israel has had a number of wars forced on it repeatedly, and it occupies the West Bank territories only because, against all the odds, it survived these repeated attacks. Given its precarious position as a minute state surrounded by powerful and hostile countries, it has every right to insist that it will only relinquish this territory when it can do so to a properly constituted and representative authority committed to peace, and to negotiating in good faith.
Given all these facts, it is unthinkable that the Church of Christ should take so firmly the side of one party, and even less explicable that it would ally itself with an anti-semitic organisation like BDS, which is widely viewed as a terrorist organisation itself.
In Part 3, we consider the apartheid libel and how the current narrative actually disadvantages the people of Palestine.
This article is part 2 in a 4-part series. Click here to read part 3.
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Date published: 09/09/2023
Feature image: Image for illustrative purposes only. Artwork from pixabay.com
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