On Israel and the
Palestinians
There has been a difficult issue in American political life
for a long time. Of course there have been lots of difficult issues in American
political life for a long time, but there’s one in particular that I want to discuss
here. It’s making the news these days because when Representative Ilhan Omar
(D-Minn.), a Muslim, raises questions about how Israel treats the Palestinians and
how Jewish American lobbying affects American policy other American
politicians, mostly conservatives, accuse her of anti-Semitism. The issue is this:
Can one be critical of the policies of the state of Israel, including
disagreeing with those who support those policies, without being anti-Semitic?
I am convinced that the answer is yes, but in our American political life today
it often seems that the answer is no. So I want here to consider this issue:
Can one criticize Israel, in particular Israeli policies toward the
Palestinians, without being anti-Semitic?
The modern state of Israel was founded in 1948. I won’t
retrace the entire history of Israel here. After all, it goes back over three
thousand years. For our purposes we need only go back to 1896 when an
Austrian-Hungarian journalist named Theodor Herzl published his book Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State. Herzl’s book marked the beginning of the modern
Zionist movement aimed at creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Then in 1917
British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration, which
stated that Britain intended the creation of that Jewish state in Palestine. In
1922 the League of Nations granted Great Britain a mandate over Palestine that
included the aim of the Balfour Declaration on the creation of a Jewish state.
All of these events took place against a background of
virulent anti-Judaism in Europe, before 1917 especially but hardly exclusively
in Russia. The population of Palestine at the time was largely Arab and Muslim.
There was some significant Jewish immigration into the area in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, but Palestine was still the home mostly of
Muslim Arabs.
The rise of Nazism and related fascist movements in Europe
in the 1930s led to a significant increase in Jewish immigration to Palestine,
and of course the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust both increased
immigration and heightened awareness in Europe and North America of the need
for Jewish people to be safe from Gentile persecution and murder. By the end of
World War II Jews made up about one third of the population of Palestine. After
World War II Jewish militias in Palestine engaged in an armed struggle which
included what looked like acts of terrorism against British rule. On July 22,
1946, for example, armed Jews attacked the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which
housed British governmental and military agencies. Nearly one hundred people
were killed and many more were wounded. The British announced that they would
withdraw from Palestine, saying they were unable to find a solution to the
conflicting aims and interests of the Arabs and the Jews there that both sides
would accept. In 1947 the United Nations proposed a plan of partition of
Palestine with an independent Arab state, an independent Jewish state, and Jerusalem
as essentially an international city ruled by neither. The Jewish leaders in
Palestine accepted the proposal. The Arab leaders did not. They vowed to resist
implementation of the UN’s plan or any other plan of partition. On May 18,
1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, declared
the creation of the State of Israel in “Eretz-Israel,” the land of Israel. Ben-Gurion’s
declaration was not more specific than that with regard to the borders of the
new state of Israel.
War with neighboring and other Arab nations began almost
immediately. Eventually a truce was reached, but something like seven hundred
thousand Palestinian Arabs had either been displaced by the Israeli military or
had fled to avoid the Israeli military. Many of them wound up in refugee camps
in the territory known as the West Bank (the west bank of the Jordan river)
that at the time belonged to Jordan or in Jordan itself. Conflict between
Israel and neighboring Arab states continued. Most significantly for our
purposes in 1967 after another war with neighboring Arabs Israel occupied the
West Bank that had belonged to Jordan and the Gaza Strip that had been occupied
by Egypt. Those hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who were displaced
or their families have never been returned to the homes they or their families
occupied before 1948, then lost.
Most Americans tend to look at Israeli/Palestinian issues
from the Israeli perspective. That may be because there are more American Jews
than there are American Muslims. Or it may be a consequence of the horror we
all feel over the Holocaust. Whatever the reason Americans tend to understand
the Israeli side of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict better than they
understand the Palestinian side. The Israeli perspective says that the land
called Palestine is the ancient homeland of the Jews. It is where the Jewish
people lived for centuries. It is where Jewish faith developed. Religious
Israelis say the land belongs to the Jews because God gave it to them. They can
and do cite various passages from Hebrew scripture to that effect. The land
that had been ancient Israel ceased to be inhabited primarily by Jews after the
Romans crushed various Jewish rebellions in the first and second centuries CE.
The Jews became dispersed into the Jewish diaspora. There were Jewish
communities throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. Palestine became
predominately Arab with the rise of Islam and the Arabic Caliphate beginning in
the seventh century CE. Yet Jewish people always looked to Palestine as the
homeland of the Jewish faith.
Then we come to horrors of European anti-Judaism that was always
there but that led up to and produced the Holocaust. Under Adolph Hitler the
Germans tried quite intentionally to eliminate European Jewry by killing all
European Jews. They went a long way toward accomplishing that despicable,
diabolical goal. The suffering of the Jewish people in the Holocaust was worse
than anything anyone could even imagine before it happened. The pictures of the
Nazi forced labor and death camps that came out after World War II and the
stories that went with them were so horrendous that western people who at worst
had been strongly anti-Semitic and at best had never given Jews much thought
started to understand that something had to be done for the Jews. Perhaps the
tragedy of the Holocaust could never be made right, but the western nations
that had defeated the Nazis could help assure that it never happened again. One
way to do that was to create a Jewish homeland outside of Europe. Palestine was
the obvious place to do that. It was Judaism’s ancient home. It was home to a
significant number of Jews, though they were still a minority of the population
after World War II. Most Americans and other western people knew little or
nothing of the Arabs who lived there. Palestine had been predominately Arab for
centuries, but it was relatively easy for us to ignore them and their claims to
the land. Creation and preservation of a Jewish state in Palestine became a
widely accepted goal in western Europe and the United States. Significant
Jewish voices in the US have spoken strongly of the need for a safe and secure
state of Israel ever since that state was created in 1948. American Jews have
supported politicians who also stood for that safe and secure Jewish state. Support
for Israel quite regardless of what Israel was doing became a keystone of
American politics.
The actions of the Israeli government in recent times have
caused many of us to object to those actions and to call for justice for the
Palestinians. Israel gave up occupation of the Gaza Strip some years ago, but
it has blockaded Gaza and attacked it often, usually in response to attacks on
Israel from Gaza. Today Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on
earth and one of the poorest. Unemployment is very high, and the situation must
seem hopeless to most Gaza residents.
After Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 it began to
allow if not outright support the creation of Jewish settlements in that Arab
land that had not been recognized as part of Israel at the creation of the
Israeli state. Those settlements are illegal under international law. They appear
to represent an attempt by the Israeli government to turn the West Bank or at
least significant parts of it Jewish. That the Israeli government authorizes
and supports those settlements is one of many Americans’ major objections to
Israeli policy.
The Israeli government oppresses Palestinian Arabs in other
ways as well. It has built a barrier separating much of the West Bank from
Israel proper, saying that the wall is necessary for security purposes. The
wall sometimes blocks Palestinians from access to agricultural land that
belongs to them and on which they depended for their livelihood. Many residents
of the West Bank work in Israel. The Israeli government operates armed access
points through which these people must pass every day to get to and from work.
Again Israel says that these check points are necessary for security purposes.
The Israeli government has made life very difficult for
great many Palestinian Arabs. Moreover, every time some rogue Palestinian
forces attack Israel, Israel responds with massive military force. These
actions create a perpetual cycle of violence that is harmful to both
Palestinians and Israelis. Neither side is prepared to take a risk for peace by
stopping the violence. Israel is, of course, the dominant party in the
Israeli/Palestinian relationship. Many of us believe that Israel’s dominant
status in the relationship puts the onus on them to stop the violence. So far
they have shown no inclination to do it.
So many of us Americans today have serious objections to Israeli
policies toward the Palestinian Arabs. Those policies strike us as unjust,
violent, and oppressive. Some Jewish folk in the US and in Israel share those
objections. We call for Israel to modify its policies so that they are less
oppressive of the Palestinians and more conducive to peace in the region.
Do those objections make us anti-Semitic? No, I am convinced
that they don’t. Objecting to policies of the Israeli government makes one
anti-Semitic only if one equates those policies with the Jewish people and the
Jewish faith. I and most Americans who object to the way Israel treats the
Palestinians do make that equation. Israeli governmental policies are not the
same thing as the Jewish people. They are not the same thing as the great
Jewish faith. Yes, some Israelis ground some of those policies in the passages
in the Hebrew Bible that say Israel’s God gave all of Canaan, including what
today we call the West Bank, to the Jews.[1]
Yet surely basing contemporary political and military policies on scripture
passages that are well over two thousand years old is hardly justifiable. Moreover,
even if one believes that the Israelis have an exclusive, divinely given right
to the land, that does not necessarily give them the right to oppress other
people whose ancestors have lived on the land for well over one thousand years.
Judaism, like Christianity and Islam, believes that God is a God of justice.
Not justice for one people only but for all people. There simply is no
justifiable religious reason for current Israeli policy toward the
Palestinians.
Now let me speak more personally. Many people have heard me
say that I love the Jewish faith. I’m an ordained Christian pastor, and that
means that Judaism’s scripture is my scripture too. Jesus of Nazareth, the One
I claim as Lord and Savior, was a Jew. He lived, taught, and died entirely
within his Jewish context. I consider myself to be a lover of Jewish faith and
Jewish culture. My Christian faith is incomprehensible apart from Judaism. I
have known and worked with many Jewish people over the years. I have stood up
against any discrimination against them, and I always will. My Christian faith
is guilty of a powerfully sinful history of anti-Semitism. There is a direct
line historically from some of the verses in the Christian Gospels to the
Holocaust.[2]
Anti-Semitism is something of which my faith tradition must repent. We must do
everything we can to atone for the diabolical way our ancestors in the faith mistreated,
oppressed, and killed the Jews.
None of which means that we must quietly accept or support
policies by the Israeli government that are unjust and oppressive toward
Palestinian people. Just as we must reject and condemn the terrible history of
Christian anti-Semitism, so we must reject and condemn unjust and oppressive
policies against any people no matter who is engaging in them. Today the
Israeli government is engaging in such unacceptable policies toward the
Palestinians, whose ancestral land Israel now occupies. Anti-Semitism,
Christian or otherwise, is morally reprehensible and utterly unacceptable.
Sadly, so are some of Israel’s current policies. May we continue to love and
support our Jewish brothers and sisters as we do what we can to bring about a
more just and peaceful world for both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
[1]
The Gaza Strip, by the way, was never part of ancient Israel. For much of
ancient Hebrew history it was the home territory of the Philistines, a Gentile
people with whom Israel was often at war. It is therefore not surprising that
the Gaza Strip is the one part of the Palestinian territory that Israel once
occupied from which it has withdrawn. Also, Hebrew scripture is at least on
occasion ambiguous about just to whom God gave Canaan. Genesis 15:18, for
example, has God say to Abram (Abraham) “To your descendants I give this land….”
The Jews of course identify themselves as descendants of Abraham, but so do the
Arabs. The Jews trace their lineage back to Abraham through Abraham’s son
Isaac. The Arabs trace their lineage back to Abraham through Abraham’s
firstborn son Ishmael. This verse at least seems to give the Arabs as much of a
divine claim to the land of Israel as the Jews have.
[2] A
good example is Matthew 27:25, which has the Jewish people say in response to
Pontius Pilate saying he is innocent of Jesus’ blood “His blood be on us and on
our children.” Tragically, Christians have used that and other hateful verses
from Christian scripture to justify hatred of Jewish people. I have and always
will refuse to read Matthew 27:25 in worship. We Christians must reject and
condemn that verse and other slike it our holy books.
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