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4/15/2002 (22:52) |
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A CATHOLIC VIEWS ZIONISM
AND THE STATE OF ISRAEL - Part I
Part I - Part II - Part III
by Rev. Thomas F. Stransky, Paulist
Rector of Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies, Jerusalem.
I had first experienced the Holy Land in 1963, 35 years ago. But only for the past eleven years have I been daily living here and sharing the Israeli and Palestinian emotional whiplashes — during the Palestinian intifada (uprising) of hurled stones, rubber bullets and 'the breaking of bones'; during the Persian Gulf War with nightly overflights of deadly skud missiles from Iraq, and our always carried gas masks; during the post-war increase in the strategic building of new settlements and access roads on confiscated Palestinian family lands in the West Bank; during the brief over-optimistic era of the Israeli/Palestinian National Authority post-Oslo peace accords, including the wounding of Israel’s soul with Yitzhak Rabin who had fought on the battle lines of five wars, yet lost his life because he even more bravely championed peace; the surprise of the May 1995 elections when Benjamin Netanyahu’s anti-Oslo platform, winning by a margin of only 20,000 votes, brought in a new coalition government, and soon the fragile peace-process was spiraling downwards; during the trauma, the rage and frustration caused by the terrorist bombings, the shredded corpses and bloodied wounded of the innocent on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; the retaliatory closures of the Territories and thousands of innocent Palestinian workers unemployed; and then a bungled attempt of Mossad secret agents to assassinate a Hamas leader, Khaled Mashaal, in the capital of Jordan, whose king may still be the only true Middle East friend Israel has, but now very suspicious of its prime minister.
Indeed, some events rush at such a dizzying pace that even veteran analysts find it difficult to formulate a coherent interpretation before sudden new events demand a total reassessment. It is as if in this long-running drama, the Great Producer decides that the old script was going nowhere too fast, and he orders his writers to revise the story while the same central characters still remain on the stage.
Yes, I live in one Land, blessed and cursed. The Land bears two confronting histories, two peoples and cultures, the three faith-communities of Abraham, several ideologies, many conflicting sides on each side, and so many ethnic and religious prejudices. Euphoric dreams mingle with the worst of nightmares, milk and honey with blood and tears. And in recent months, too many shrugs of fatalism. We live daily with death too close to us.
As the Rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, I reside with Christian scholars, parish clergy, religion teachers, and other church workers from many countries, cultures and church traditions. They come to Tantur for three to eight months to experience an international, intercultural and ecumenical community of study and prayer, in living dialogue with the local Christians, Jews and Muslims of Israel and of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza.
Tantur rest on a hilltop exactly on the border and its military checkpoint between southern Jerusalem of Israel, and Bethlehem of the West Bank. Neutral but not indifferent, Tantur has become one of the very few oases of sane discourse in the troubled Land. Here meet Palestinians and Israelis, Jew and Arab; religious or not too religious; educated or not so educated; men and women; young and old. Despite the odds, the Tantur environment tries to help such local people search for and discover in each other the human face and heart.
Off the Tantur campus, I oscillate my working and recreational time between Jews and Christian and Muslim Palestinians. I am humbly privileged to share their trust and friendship in their own environments where there need be no coverup for frank conversation, open expression of fears and hopes, angers and bewilderments. But I am neither Jew nor Arab. Sp please understand that I dare not claim to speak in their names. I can only articulate my own limited experiences and reflections on political Zionism and the State of Israel ... not in angelic fantasy, but in the ambiguous reality of now.
I try to share with you as a Catholic of the local church of Jerusalem who tries to be faithful to the Vatican II Church in all of its demands: 'the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men and women of our times, especially those who are poor and afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ' (Gaudium et spes, n.i). For me, this means: the legitimate aspirations of the Jewish people — in Israel and in the diaspora, of the Palestinians — whether Christian or Muslim, the defense and promotion of human rights — especially to justice, security and peace, the ethical use of political, economic and social power in its manipulative misuse -- in particular by using God as a self-serving idol, and religion as a weapon for pathological justifications of such power ... or powerlessness.
The development of political Zionism over one hundred years, and of Israel for five decades, easily leads to ideological and historical generalizations. Especially during the past ten years, Jewish and other historians are revising this century-long development. They are uncovering new facts, nuances myths, and rearranging former syntheses. And as historians are wont to do, they hotly argue over who has the story correct. All of them should heed the warning of the historian Walter Raleigh: 'any writer of modern history who treads too closely on the heels of events may get his or her teeth knocked out.' Perhaps more pertinent is the answer of Mao’s successor in communist China when asked what he thought of the 18th century French Revolution: 'It’s too early to tell.'
Two years ago commemorated the one-hundredth anniversary of Theodore Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, literally The Jews’ State but translated as The Jewish State with its subtitle: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question [Vienna, February 1896]. In 1896, this 34 year-old Viennese journalist, in Isaiah Friedman’s phrase — 'a statesman-prophet in a hurry', judged that anti-Semitism was incurable, and that in the new era of nation-states, unless a mass exodus of European Jews took place, persecution and pogroms would overwhelm them. 'Juden raus' — 'Jews out.' The nightmarish specter called for a radical solution that would 'normalize' the Jewish homeland in the Palestine of the Ottoman [or Turkish] Empire into a political movement, a force of collective survival to be reckoned with in diplomatic negotiations and financial organization.
Although a fellow Viennese publicist, Nathan Birnbaum, had coined the term Zionism in 1890, and Moses Hess had anticipated the ideas for a Jewish state in his Rome and Jerusalem (1862), the first international Congress by the Zionist name, in Basle, 1897, initiated the organized political movement. It adopted the program: 'Zionism strives to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law (offentlich-rechtlich)'. Among the means: 'the promotion, on suitable lines of the settlement of Palestine by Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and tradesmen' and 'steps toward securing the consent of governments which is necessary to attain the aim of Zionism.'
The movement as Zionism initially built on the idealism that drew strongly on modern revolutionary ideals of democracy, socialism, romantic utopianism and ethnocentric nationalism. The Zionist political methods had much in common with other nationalist movements, and would exploit the self-interests of the European Great Powers, in particular Great Britain which judged a friendly beholden Jewish presence in Palestine as a means to destabilize the Ottoman empire. The movement drew only weakly on ancient religious visions of a messianic return to the biblical homeland. In fact, with his secular rationalist convictions, Herzl and most of his followers, refused recourse to any divine justification for the nationalist movement — which led most leading rabbis to spurn or keep a holy distance from it.
The Vatican was not aloofly indifferent. The papacy of Leo XIII (1878-1903) was still reacting to the loss of the papal states, the secularization and political liberalism of European nations, and the principal errors of the age: socialism, communism and nihilism (confer his first encyclical: Quod apostolici muneris, Dec. 1878).
Shortly after the 1897 Basle Conference, the semi-official Vatican periodical (edited by the Jesuits) Civilta Cattolica gave its biblical-theological judgement on political Zionism: '1827 years have passed since the prediction of Jesus of Nazareth was fulfilled ... that [after the destruction of Jerusalem] the Jews would be led away to be slaves among all the nations and that they would remain in the dispersion [diaspora, galut] until the end of the world.' The Jews should not be permitted to return to Palestine with sovereignty: 'According to the Sacred Scriptures, the Jewish people must always live dispersed and vagabondo [vagrant, wandering] among the other nations, so that they may render witness to Christ not only by the Scriptures ... but by their very existence' (italics mine).
Despite this negative, scornful judgement in Rome, Theodore Herzl hoped for direct papal goodwill and support for the Zionist dream and program. In late January 1904, after the sixth Zionist Congress (August, 1903) and six months before his death (July 3), Herzl travelled to Rome, and crossed the Tiber to the Vatican.
Herzl first met the Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry del Val (Jan. 22). According to Herzl’s private diary notes, the Cardinal replied that 'the history of Israel is our own history, it is our foundation. But in order that we should come out for the Jewish people in the way that you desire, they should first have to accept conversion.' Three days later Herzl met Pope Pius X (Jan. 25 — a public holiday in Rome celebrating the Conversion of St. Paul!). Again from Herzl’s diary: the Pope replied to Herzl’s outline of the Jewish Return: 'We are unable to favor this movement. We cannot prevent the Jews going to Jerusalem, but we could never sanction it ... The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.'
That was in 1904. Most likely the Zionist movement would have fallen apart but for a succession of events which neither Herzl nor anyone else could foresee: World War I, the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the British conquest of Palestine and its being placed by the League of Nations under the British Mandate (1922), and the 1924 immigration quotas by the American government. The British would try to be loyal to the pledge of the 1917 Balfour Declaration: 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.'
In the Vatican, Pius X’s theological underpinnings for the opposition to political Zionism were still intact. In 1922, the Civilta Cattolica complained. The Zionists returning to Palestine had 'forgotten that more that 1,800 years had passed since their faith, smitten by the divine malediction, or if this sounds unpleasant, subjugated by a hand stronger than theirs, were expelled and dispersed over the whole earth.'
So applies that Christian anti-Semitic tradition of divine punishment of the Jews, for the killing and rejection of Jesus the Messiah, Lord and Savior. The Jews have forsaken all rights to God’s promises, and thus to Eretz Yisrael, the biblical land of Israel. They should continue to wander the earth, as did Cain, to be vagabondi. God providentially sustains the dispersed existence of the Jews, in order to remind Catholics of the blessings of God to the New Covenant which has completely replaced the Old Covenant. The synagogue kneels before the new Qahal identified as the Roman Catholic Church, whatever numbers and power the Jews may have, in Palestine or elsewhere.
One reads these texts of what Jules Isaac had called Christian contempt (mepris) in the light of Pope John Paul’s address (Oct. 30, 1997) at the Vatican symposium on the Christian roots of anti-Semitism: '... the wrong and unjust interpretations of the New Testament relating to the Jewish people and their supposed guilt [in Christ’s death] circulated for too long, engendering sentiments of hostility toward this people.'
The Zionist movement as political reached its enfleshment in the 1948 creation of the sovereign State of Israel. The Jews commemorate 1948 The Year of Independence; the Arabs call it The Year of the Great Catastrophe (Al-Nakba). The Zionist catchy phrase: 'A people without a Land to a Land without a people' had a basic flaw. A 100 years ago, besides a minority of about 75,000 Jews, the majority already on that small piece of real estate were about 600,000 Arabs. Competing utopias collapse in the face of borders and neighbors. And so for a century, the bloody conflict has been raging between Jews and their immediate neighbors, the Palestinians, and other Arabs of the surrounding nations.
For the last 50 years, the Jews have their sovereign Israel, and control its governance. After more that 1900 years, this majority status is new for them, as new is the power they wield over themselves and the goyim minorities within its borders, and over the two million neighboring Palestinians under Israeli military occupation. Yet the Jewish majority is all too conscious of being a national, ethnic and religious minority in the Middle East. The Jews desire to be at least tolerated, if not equally respected, yet not at the expense of their own identity and 'particularity' as a Jewish people in its own State, and even more so, never, never at the cost of its own national security.
In 50 years the new State never enjoyed the luxury of floating on the world’s margins until it could enjoy a child’s quiet innocence, then endure the minor growing pains of trial-and-error adolescence, then become politically mature with a seasoned democratic tradition. Israel never had an innocence to lose. Military and political power means visible responsibility, and that inevitably means making mistakes, often stupid ones. No other State in the Middle East has faced both constant threats to its very existence and constant criticisms for actions against such threats.
On the one hand, in a peculiar type of anti-Semitism, some western Christians claim to respect and defend the Jews, but they cringe at Israeli mistakes and downright sins, or they prefer to ignore them or to blame the Arabs for the obvious imperfections. These Christians look back wistfully upon what they idealize as the perfect morality and exemplary religiosity of the Jews as long as Jews were meek and passive, persecuted and defenseless. Or Christians hold the Jews to a far higher moral standard of nationhood than any other State in the world. On the other hand, in a peculiar type of anti-Gentile racism, some Israeli Jews compensate by openly playing out ethnic and religious superiority complexes vis-a-vis their Arab neighbors — Christian or Muslim.
The reflex is familiar: build oneself up by tearing the others down. One does this by controlling the memories of both. In the Holy Land and elsewhere in the semitic Middle East, memory so dominates that centuries do not succeed one another, they co-exist. All-hungry history consumes the present, and dulls the imagination and its appetite for dreams of the future. Look at my own experience in the immediate context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Whether at Palestinian and Jewish family dinner tables, or in academic rooms of Israeli or Palestinian universities, or at Tantur, I hear the ever-interrupting imperative which frustrates future projections: 'But remember!'
Time collapses, as if last month, last week, yesterday occurred the devastating Persian (present-day Iranian) invasion of 614 AD; the western Christian Crusades in the 1100's; Salah al-Din’s Egyptian Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187; the Ottoman takeover in 1517; the British victories and occupation in 1917; the Palestinian slaughter of the Jews in Hebron in 1929 and nearby Kfar Etzion in 1936; the April 1948 premeditated massacre of Palestinian women and children of Deir Yassin by the Irgun and the Stern Gang, then led by future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir; between 1948-67, the Israeli take-over of thousands of Arab homes in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Beit Se’an, Haifa and elsewhere, even the destruction of over 400 villages never to be rebuilt; the thousands of Palestinians becoming fleeing permanent refugees into the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan; Jordan’s deliberate destruction of Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter, including 52 synagogues, and Jordan’s denial of the Jews even to enter the Old City and pray at the 'Wailing' Wall; the 1972 killing of Israeli athletes at the Olympic games in Munich; Baruch Goldstein’s machine-gunning Muslims at prayer in Hebron’s Machpela cave of the Tombs of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in February 1994; a few months late, the blowing uup of a bus full of innocent Jews on the main-street of Tel Aviv; the January 1996 Israeli secret service murder of the elusive Hamas chief 'Engineer' Yehha Ayyach; and in retaliation a month later, suicide-carriers of smart bombs, recruited by the militant wing of Hamas (Ezzedin Al-Qassem) demolish public buses in Jerusalem, in Ashkelon, and in Tel Aviv, more bombings ; and finally, most recently, the bombing at the marketplace in New Jerusalem. All these event co-exist in that commanding phrase: 'Remember!'
What breeds distrust of the future is this strong memory of selective past events which are the true and false memory-myths at the core of religious, ethnic, and national self-perceptions, self-identity, and self-dignity. That is why in the diffusion of historical data and of images and myths which reinforce the past are so powerful in all forms of literature, theater, cinema, printed media, textbooks and educational materials. Whoever controls the data and images, analysis and interpretation, wields power equal to military might. Quasi-wars center around who controls history and memory, including the history of political Zionism, and the foundational myths of the State of Israel. Truth is usually the first casualty, and exaggerated statistics, fragmented narratives, and selective indignations become false intimidations which are, in the word of W. A. Auden, 'like a frost that halts the flood of thinking.'
To replace the true myths with false myths is to touch far more that cold truth. 'Tread softly,' the poet whispers, 'for you tread on my dreams.' Thus, the understandable reaction of those when others deny the history of their central myths of identity.
On the one hand, an example on the Jewish side: the Holocaust (or Shoah) in Europe and the emergence of the State of Israel enter as two inseparable events in the modern self-definition of the Jewish people, everywhere. So destroy that identity by these claims: the Shoah was a 'minor event', or even a 'hoax' which the Jews have exaggerated to give credible legitimacy to the State of Israel. Or: the desire of Jews to return to their historic homeland is of recent 20th century vintage, and 'next year Jerusalem' was but a lackadaisical prayer muttered in a few Easter European shtetls. Or: Jews are and should be at home everywhere else but in Israel, where in the Middle East, they are only temporary unwelcomed 'colonialists' or unwanted 'tourists'.
On the other hand, an example on the Palestinian side. Destroy their identity by this claim: all Palestinians are only recent employment-hungry arrivals in the once barren backwater of the Ottoman Empire, quasi-nomads whose deepest longings and true home is anywhere in the Arab world but Palestine. Or as one prominent Israeli recently pronounced, the so-called Palestinians are a 'fictitious people with fictitious claims.'
The Tantur bus-driver is of the Siniora clan. Around 1140 AD, a few Siniora Crusaders came from Naples to Palestine. They did not return to Italy. They married local women, and over 950 years have become completely Arabized on their own family lands in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. They stubbornly remained Latin Catholics in faith and practice, as do other Italian Crusader-originated clans which I know, such as the Quanavati (Venice) and Katan (Catania). Members of these clans resent being called homeless newcomers who long for the Bay of Naples, Venice, and Reggio Calabria.
With these frequently hear examples, each tries to confiscate the memory of the other, to prevent the other from expressing its own view of how it has lived and remembers its history. 'Only our history is the history.' So often the confiscation of the other’s histories leaves us with opposites: 'Israel born in sin' or 'Israel conceived immaculate'; every murdered Palestinian resister to Israeli military occupation is a guilty terrorist, or a holy martyr; clean divine hands fight dirty demonic hands; all the justice and humane acts on one side, all the injustice and inhuman acts on the other; 'good guys' verses 'bad guys' — a Holy Land replay of the classic American western film.
One has to decide: either remain captured by distorted, selective and one-sided memory until Jews and Palestinians together sort out and accept the objective story of the Holy Land, which is one of the most complicated, messy segments of the 20th century; or become liberated from the past by common compassion on a common history, and by the shared imagination which can project the realistic common future. In this 'hang loose' way about the past, I suggest, can the future become not what the future used to be? If one can confirm future peace with justice only after all past injustices have been perfectly righted and retributed, there will never be even a half-loaf peace-of -sorts.
Here is the Holy Land, if one can confirm future peace with justice only after all past injuries have been perfectly righted and retributed, there will never be even a half-loaf peace-of-sorts.
What is considered absolute justice by one side means total injustice on the other side. Only a political compromise, inevitably resented as 'unjust' by some Israelis and some Palestinians, can be a correct or 'just' solution, as it will take into account not impossible dreams but the minimum legitimate, sometimes competing vital national interests of both Israelis and Palestinians. Such an attitudinal acceptance will be critical in the final negotiations over the return of Palestinian refugees in family reunification; the number, location, and status of Jewish settlements in Gaza, Samaria and Judea; the compensation for confiscated Arab homes; and the final status of governance in Jerusalem.
Whatever the mutual acceptable final settlement determines, the political peace dividend for Israelis and Palestinians is not love — warm or cold, but normalization of a network of those routine relations which characterize peace between most States, most of the time, in most of the world. But the non-political, the 'winning of hearts', can be resolved only in a relentless, slow process, not by a stop watch. 'Unlike war, peace is always a tormenting victory of one’s own self' (Eli Sanbar).
One already sees the beginnings of seized opportunities of reconciliation through purifying common history and healing collective memories: the initial willingness to admit that the long conflict is between two victims; to listen to the Other’s stories; to internalize the Other’s tragedies; and to recognize the role of those tragedies in shaping the national identity of each people. Can one ever dance on the graves of the Other’s misery? Thus, in the mutual recognition of each other’s wounds and sufferings and vulnerability grows the gradual recognition of each other’s national
Unstoppable progress? Or inevitable regression? History is never a slave to logic, or to dreams, or to predictability. Should one settle, with Hamlet’s question: 'rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?' In the Middle East, the only predictable is the unpredictable. During the intifada one heard: 'the day you see Palestinian autonomy is the day you see a black president in South Africa.' Three years ago: ' now that there is peace with the Kingdom of Jordan, Israel will find the same smooth path with the Palestinian National Authority.' At that time Yitzak Rabin and his successor Shimon Perez were the truth-loving, vision-possessed leaders of their people through the valleys of death. Now too many are calling the duet misleaders who, for the editors of the Jerusalem Post, 'managed to turn a wise, scarred nation which should have known better into a jelly of gullibility.'
In September of 1997, Martin Indyck, American assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, addressed his last speech , as U.S. ambassador to Israel, to the Council for Peace and Security — a group largely made up of former Israeli generals. He lamented that his great hope when he arrived in Israel after the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn, 'seems to have been dashed on the rocks ... The dream of peace has turned into a nightmare' (Inter. Herald Tribune, Sept. 26, 1997).
True or false? Never say 'never'. This axiom makes one cautious of being naively euphoric or cynically fatalistic.
Religion is interwoven in this process, both negatively and positively. Douglas Johnson and other political scientists illustrate in Religion, the Mission Dimension of Statecraft that the foreign policies of the United States and Western European nations have so misread the importance of religion in the national policies and international behavior of Middle Eastern countries, including Israel, that incorrect analyses and erroneous responses have proven quite costly. No other area of the world demonstrates more clearly the fallacy that religion is a declining influence in society, a withering distraction from the really important decisions in life.
In the Middle East, religion has never become a private affair, removed from the public square. One cannot isolate purely religious motivations and sensibilities from the political, cultural and ethnic elements. Piety quickly moves into politics, politics into piety. And this political religion and religious politics has many conflicting cultural, social and economic expressions. Furthermore, there is a taken-for-granted almost theocratic working relation between Arab state and mosque, Israel and synagogue — certainly no 'neutral secular State' as in Western consciousness and civil law. To be inclusive of religious minorities is to tolerate them as the lesser of two evils.
The local day-to-day experiences of Christians and Muslims and Jews are unique. Only in the Holy Land does a very small christian minority live with those of the two other monotheistic faiths, both in a majority. Local Christians have always been a small minority in Palestine, except for the Byzantine period from the mid-400's until the Persian invasion in 614 and Muslim conquest in 638. Even the 12th century temporary conquest by western crusaders did not produce an indigenous Christian majority.
Look at present rough population numbers. According to the latest official statistics released at Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year in September, 1997), Israel itself embraces 5,863,000 people — a million and a quarter more than when I arrived ten years ago, primarily because of the sudden influx of over 650,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Of the total, 4.7 million are Jews. Non-Jews or Arabs number around 17 per cent: 872,000 Muslims (14%), 100,000 Druze (1.7%), and 180,000 Christians (about 2%). Over 80% of these Christians are of the Eastern church traditions. The largest of the Orthodox Churches, i.e. not in full communion with the Catholic, is the Greek Orthodox, the Syrian, the Armenian, the Coptic (Egyptian), and the Ethiopian. Of the six churches in full communion with the bishop of Rome, the largest is the Greek Catholic or Melchite, then the Latins, then the Maronite, the Syrian, the Coptic and the Armenian. The largest Protestant church is the Anglican, about 2,100 adherents; followed by the Lutheran, about 1,200 members.
Unknown are the number of committed Christians among the 125,000 legal and 150,000 illegal foreign workers from Asia (Thailand, Philippines, Sri Lanka), West and East Africa, and Romania. Unknown is the number os those Christians already married to Jews of Ethiopia and of the former USSR before the families immigrated to Israel during the past decade. And unknown are the scattered small groups of Messianic Jews who profess explicit Christian faith, probably three or four thousand.
The majority of Israeli Christians live in northern coastal towns and in Galilee. All of the large post-’48 and post-‘68 development towns, such as the Negev, have no Christians.
Of the estimated 2,250,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, only 35,000 are Christians; 85% of them live in three neighboring towns just over the southern border of Israel — Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahur, and north of Jerusalem, in Ramallah and its environs. In 1948, Bethlehem boasted 6,000 Christians our of 8,000. Today, it is 12,000 out of 50,000; the 38,000 are Muslims. Ramallah in 1948 was almost entirely Christian: 6,000 inhabitants. Today, there are only 10,000 Christians our of 40,000. The rest are Muslim.
Thus, with over 8,000,000 people in the Holy Land today, only about 210,000 are Christians.
What heightens fears, if not induces despair among local Christians is their possibly becoming disappearing facts on the ground, withering signs of continuous Christian presence and witness in its Holy Land cradle. Holy places with the 'living stones' of local Christians? Only museums and archeological curiosities, as in today’s Turkey and Tunisia?
In Jerusalem itself, with a total population of 600,000, reside about 10,000 Christians, one-third of the total at Israel’s founding in 1948 when the City had about 100,000 Jews and 40,000 Muslims. The Greek Orthodox, the largest community in Jerusalem, has dropped from 21,000 members in 1948, to about 14,000 in 1967, and now number around 3,000. The Anglican church has as many members in the entire Holy Land as boasted its Haifa parish in the pre-1967 years, before they became forced refugees in Jordan and elsewhere. Before the State of Israel, Christians in Nazareth totaled 6,00 out of 8,000. Today, it is 25,000 out of 50,000. This most Christian city in northern Israel increased not only because of the birthrate but also because of the influx of people from cities and villages, such as Beit She’an, whose Arab populations had been forced to leave and most of the Christians settled in the Nazareth area.
True, all Christians in the Middle East form small minorities which face political instabilities and more radical Islamic pressures, and the resulting lure is emigration. Since the late last century, there had been a steady outflow of Palestinian Christians. But the pace of emigration has dramatically increased with their leaving their homes in the 1948 and the 1967 wars and becoming refugees elsewhere. The percentage is sharply higher during and after the recent intifada, which erupted in December, 1987. Why this weakening will to remain? One claims: governmental/ military decisions concerning jobs, the confiscation of family lands and the lack of housing; the frequent closing for long periods of schools and universities; being treated as foreigners in their own land, where for 30 years, during their entire lives, they have been at the receiving end of Israeli policies decided over their heads and without their consent.
Thse Christians who are most likely to emigrate are the well-educated young — high-school and university age, about twice the rate of Muslims. These young adults normally would comprise future leadership in the Christian communities and be among the professionals in a self-ruled homeland. Thus, the hemorrhage of emigration is a leadership drain, without any certainty of a plug to stop the outflow. How many now abroad will return permanently once Palestine has its rightful autonomy will depend more on steady economic viability than on new freedoms.
For centuries Christians and Jews in Palestine had been living together in their shared Holy Land as two minority religious families amid the Muslims. Ottoman laws protected Christians and Jews because they also were 'peoples of the Book', that is, not infidels but believers in the same One Revealing God who guides human beings in their histories of searching, finding, following the divine will. But these 'protected groups' (dhimmi) enjoyed only second-class citizenship, because they were not full believers as God wills but only on the way to becoming so; that is, to becoming Muslims.
With this civil protection and status, both Jews and Christians strived with remarkable stubbornness to survive in fidelity to their faiths, in comparative harmony with each other. In fact, Palestinian Christians claim to understand those Sephardi Jews, from the former Ottoman Empire and northern Africa who sought refuge in Israel, far better than these Jews are understood by most other Askenasi Israelis who arrived from Europe, North and South America, South Africa, and the former USSR.
Also far better than do most Jews, Christians well know and understand fellow Palestinians who are Muslims, for they daily live communally with them as neighbors. The general culture — its art and architecture, music and literature, conventions of courtesy and hospitality, day-to-day vocabulary, is so deeply Islamicized that one hears the declaration: 'I am Christian by faith, Muslim by culture.'
The 30 years of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has heightened the Palestinian ethnic and political identity. This includes those Israeli citizens who are Arabs, because of their extended family ties across borders and their ethnic identification with the under-dog; for this reason they are not quite trusted by fellow citizens who are Jews. Thus, it is no surprise that I hear more often: 'We Palestinians' rather than 'We Israeli Arabs.' And on the West Bank and in Gaza, I hear 'We Christian Palestinians' in solidarity with other Palestinians who are Muslims, more than 'We Palestinian Christians' who are not Muslims.
What has primarily brought Muslims and Christians together is precisely their ethnic identity and perceived powerlessness vis-a-vis the Jewish people who firmly wields the power of the land. Even the Muslims and Christians who now participate in forums of religious dialogue between themselves initiated the contacts after the intifada had become more than a disorganized temporary episode.
Christians and Muslims whether within or outside Israeli borders, acknowledge tensions between themselves, but together they are hypersensitive to perceived manipulation of those tensions by Israeli governmental, military or media pressure, in order to divide Christians and Muslims as Palestinians and to break their political and communal identity as one people, or even to strengthen divisions among the Christian churches.
Nevertheless, since the peace process had begun and Gaza, Jericho and six other major West Bank cities have become autonomous, one already hears the shift of noun and adjective to: 'We Palestinian Christians.' They are beginning to worry about their civic status and de facto condition as Christians within a future Palestinian State. Already in the 19th century of the Ottoman Middle East, before the World War I victors carved up the region into new nations, Middle Eastern Christian intelligensia had been pressing for nation-states. They judged a western-style modern nation-state to be the one instrument that could create a secular identity and that in law and in practice would allow Christians to be fully equal with Muslims.
Palestinians as Christians now ask: despite the political promises from Arafat, over the long haul, will there indeed be a juridic separation of the Palestinian State and mosque, equal civil rights to religious freedom, and de facto non-religious discrimination in governmental and private sector employment, financial allotments for new housing and for schools, and equitable sharing of political power?
In the last three years, Christians feel caught between two waves — the growing fundamentalism of their Muslim neighbors, and the growing political power of Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy. Both these Jews and these Muslims view Christians with suspicion and hostility, and tolerate only a minimal Christian presence to avoit Western censure, and to support the pilgrim industry.
I turn to the Islamic world. As protagonists such as Edward Said warn, I am well aware of the danger of forcing — and this misrepresenting and falsifying — cultures and peoples and sub-worlds into separate and distinct breeds of essences, especially if the neatness produces such artificial beasts called 'The West', 'The Near East', 'The Islamic World.'
Analysts find it difficult to agree on the causes and institutionalizations of present tensions within the Islamic communities in Egypt and North Africa, in Turkey and the Middle East, and in the Holy Land. All agree that these tensions and conflicts are struggles over the very understanding of Islam. Many are the attempts to rediscover a heightened sense of religious ethnic identity in the face of encroaching Western secular ideas and patterns of behavior. You can call it an Islamic revival or resurgence, or a political return of the religious right, or a radical restoration of a Goden Age, or a renewed disciplined commitment to the fundamentals of God’s will as expressed in the Qur’an. And you can interpret the scene as a swelling thunder-cloud or an enlarging break of sunshine. In any case, it’s piety in politics, and politics in piety, and the extremist combination seriously threatens the peace process, and will threaten whatever be the ongoing condition of its resolution.
The Islamic ultra-religious right ties to constrain the leadership of Arafat’s Palestinian National Authority. It insists that God had given the entire Land, which includes intrusive Israel, as an Islamic religious trust or endowment (waqf) for all Muslim generations until the day of judgement. Relinquishing any part of this all-encompassing Palestine by hard-headed pragmatic bargaining for the sake of so-called peace is a selfish act of treason against past, present, and future Muslim generations, and worse, it is an arrogant disobedient act of blasphemy against Allah. God decides, man accepts. There is only one way (al-hal-wahid). No compromise. 'Islam,' after all means 'submission.'
These radical restorationists are holy-Islamic warriors (mugahdun) who sanction intimidations, violence and terrorism against both Israeli Jews and fellow Palestinians. Their high profile causes anxiety for the large but less vocal majority of Muslims — those moderate, caring Palestinians who, in my experience, humbly give daily witness to the gentle side of Islam, in relations between themselves, and with their Christian and even Jewish neighbors.
Since 1948, after centuries of adjusted living among a Muslim majority in the Land, Christians find a second majority — the Jewish, in a Jewish State, politically self-determined.
But self-determination leads to the debate about the elusive self that is to be determined. The process still goes on in Israel after 50 years of reflective experience and introspection.
Questions ever recur. 'What is Zionism?', 'What is Israel?', 'How does Israel survive?', 'How does the State relate to Jews who live elsewhere, especially those who have no intent to leave their countries to make the aliya to Israel?' 'In a democratic state, how are the Jews to relate to fellow citizens who are not Jews?' These questions haunt the Jewish people and find conflicting answers within Israeli society — in what Hillel Neuer calls 'the abyss of civil strife' ever since the PNA/Israel peace accords of Oslo I and II and their partial implementations. These very visible ideological and religious crises breed political radicalizations.
Claims and counter-claims feed Jewish religious fundamentalists. A crude summary: These Religious Jews believe that Eretz Yisrael is the visible expression of the faithful God who wills by covenant the permanence of the Jewish people [klal], whether Jews live in Israel or elsewhere. Israel 'is the beginning of the flowering of messianic redemption [resheet tzmihat geulateimu]'. God commands the Jews to be the people of the entire Eretz Ysrael and to settle that entire land, and thus anticipate God’s blessing for all humankind — 'a light to the nations.'
The spectacular Israeli victory of the Six Day War in June 1967 returned to Jewish control the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria — precisely what are now the West Bank territories. In faith, this almost miraculous act unfolded one more step in the process of God’s redemption of the divinely chosen Jewish people, in a Jewish nation which God does not intend to be, as secular Zionists had always hoped: 'goy kekhol hagoyim' — a nation like other nations. Some extremists even claim that God wants Palestinians off the Land. God’s gift is only to the Jews, and only Jews should enjoy it. They quote one of their favorite biblical verses — from the Book of Numbers: 'the people that dwells alone, and that will not be counted among the nations' (Num. 23:9).
Thus, the disposition of Judea and Samaria — an autonomous Palestinian entity, even another State, with a dismantling of several Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria — is explicitly a religious question: is God’s process of Redemption to go forward to its glorious conclusion? Or is God to be mocked, and the process to be tragically delayed or even halted by the decisions of Jewish government leaders?
So an extreme answer was obscenely enfleshed. Among those same religious Jews who regarded the sabra Yitzhak Rabin a new Joshua when he had conquered Judea and Samaria in 1967 as the divinely blessed military commanding general, are those who three years ago had begun to call him a crypto-Canaanite, a neo-Nazi traitor of the Jewish people. Two years ago (Nov. 4, 1997), one of them, Yigal Amin, believed that he had the divine right and the duty to fire a dum-dum bullet into the heart of Rabin, the fellow Jew who shook hands with Arafat, and was leading the Jewish State out of its God-given patrimony into national suicide.
Rabin, saint? Or Satan? Amin, saint or Satan? Bar-Ilan University released a survey, led by clinical psychologist David Green, on the reactions of Israeli teenagers (14-18), religious and secular, to the prime minister’s assassination. 27% of religious youth approved the murder and even identified with Yigal Amin. Only 4% of secular teenagers supported the assassination. Secular youth condemned, while the religious felt a sense of relief. The religious feared the peace process, the secular its uncertainty. Dr. Green concludes that 'the traumatic event did not bring hearts closer, perhaps the contrary.' In fact the murder seems to have driven more wedges between the religious and the secular youth [Ha’aretz, Oct. 28, 1997].
Independent from the secular and/or religious interpretation of the peace process is the internal tension over the societal implications of the question 'Who is a Jew?' and its sub-questions: What and who is a religious Jew?
At the establishment of Israel its founders needed a legal national status for Judaism. Otherwise Jews who would immigrate to the new State could easily identify themselves primarily by their original nationalities or political convictions. Judaism would be the primary common bond of Israelis. And common would be the rites of passage to full legal status within Israel. For this the State, by consensus, gave the legal authority to the Orthodox and to their interpretations of the halacha or rabbinic law.
But in the last decade the question appeared on the political and legal agenda: Can Israel be hospitable to those other religious traditions of Judaism which are a small minority in the State but very much overshadowing the Orthodox in the rest of the world — the Conservative and the Reform? Can their rabbis in Israel also be legal interpreters and practitioners of the Jewish faith?
These issues surfaced with a roar in recent weeks over the possible Supreme Court and Knesset legislation, called 'the conversion bill.' Is or is not a Gentile whose process of conversion is conducted in Israel by a Reform or Conservative rabbi a real Jew in Israel? Can or cannot a Reform or Conservative rabbi be on a religious council or court, even if the person be voted in by the local Jewish community? [You may not know that the State does not recognize marriages which a non-Orthodox rabbi performs in Israel, but it does recognize them if performed outside Israel, say, in nearby Cyprus,]
The rhetoric is obscenely heated. At an Ultra-Orthodox Shas political rally, Rabbi Yissacher Dov Rokach foresaw the future split within the Jewish people between 'the believers in God and Torah, and the heretics who hate the Torah and Commandments.' And Moshe Gafni, of the United Torah party, refused to sit in the same Knesset Law and Justice committee room with a few Conservative and Reform leaders, because the gesture would be 'like watching a Torah being burned' [Jer. Report, July 10, 1997]. They are 'not Jews', 'not Zionists', but only 'conditional Zionists.' Christians enter the rhetoric indirectly. The Reform and Conservative adherents 'are worse than Jesus.'
Furthermore, are non-religious or non-observant Jews truly Israelis, even if they compose some 80% of Israel society? What is religious freedom for such Jews in their democratic State; that is, freedom from civil coercion to be Orthodox-observant in such gutsy issues as marriage, divorce and remarriage, burial, Sabbath observances, kosher foods? The list is longer.
These questions combine the general issue of Jewish unifying identity in Israel and in diaspora and the specific issue of religious identity in Israel. Claim the haredim of the religious parties: the way back to unity within the Jewish people is through the halacha — one standard for conversion, for marriage, for all details of Jewish religious life. Claims the other side: the public wants that freedom of choice which Jews already enjoy elsewhere, e.g. the United States. The new legislation would be 'the open shot in a civil war within the Jewish people' (Avraham Burg, Jewish Agency chairman). Or as blunt-speaking President Ezer Weizman sums up the debate: 'The last thing we need for the nation is to be split severely over an issue of religious tradition' [Ha’aretz, Oct. 29, 1997].
I place the entire list of issues, including the almost stalemate peace-process, at what Gertrude Himmelfarb calls 'the dark and bloody crossroad where nationalism, politics and religion meet.' The crisis of religious faith in Israel is precisely at this crossroad. Most Israeli Jews affirm their religious and ethical heritage while they dissociate themselves from the political manifestations of the religious establishment. Given political and demographic trends, no major party can form a stable government without a coalition that includes a haredi or religious party. With a present coalition of 23 votes of the Knesset’s 120, these religious political parties can easily hold an Israel coalition government hostage to their demands,, and the demands now extend beyond the unequal subsidies to yeshivas and public enforcement of the Sabbath and dietary observances.
The crisis of religion, then, is more than the acknowledged corrosion of faith through secularisms which ignore or deny the Transcendent. It is a crisis about the positive and negative influences which religion wields in Israeli daily life; in particular the negative images religious parties create among Muslims and Christians, and among so many turned-off young Israeli-born Jews.
In this charged atmosphere Christians have cause for concern. Just a year ago, a poll taken by the Zionist Council in Israel revealed that two-thirds of Israelis believe that relations between religious and secular will only get worse (Jer. Post, Oct. 27, 1997). Most Israeli analysts foresee that once in the Middle East there be a peace-of-sorts, that is, a politically institutionalized tolerated co-existence with assured security, a then more inward-looking Israel will unleash new priorities in internal conflicts among Israeli Jews. Some woefully predict a much more open Kulturkampf, an inevitable cultural war which breaks apart the present fragile status quo between the minority religious establishment and the not-so-religious and secular majority.
Local Christians will watch this new struggle. From the sidelines they wil be cheering on the secular wrestlers against their religious opponents, for the same reason they will support in a similar struggle those groups among the Islamic majority which press for the new Palestinian State to be secular. Is not this dynamic similar to what forged political stances of Jews when they welcomed completely secular States in Europe and North America? They supported anti-religious, anti-church French revolutionaries in the 18th century, and preferred the anti-clerical governments in a few Latin American governments. They rejoiced in the mid-19th century collapse of the papal states. [It was Garabaldi, not a pope, who canceled the restrictive laws which had confined Jews in the last ghetto in western Europe — in Rome]. Italian Jews voted Communist over and against the strongly Vatican-influenced Christian Democratic party in the decades following World War II, and in coalition with Italian Protestants, Jews pressed for a more tolerant Concordat of religious freedom and equality in a pluralistic Italy.
Modern history demonstrates that when a church [read: a religious community] is wedded to secular power, in the long run religion and faith are the losers. Is Israel an exception? Or is the historian Clarence Lasby on target: the problem with history is not that people do not learn its lessons, but that they learn its wrong lessons?
In the Holy Land, local Christians are aware of this Jewish crisis at the crossroads, and the outcome will effect their own present and future. Images dominate, not always supported by objective and nuanced descriptions. Here is the image which Christians have of Jewish power: The more religious are Israeli Jews, the more they seem to accept or foster anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian political, even racist positions, even more so during the peace process of the Likud coalition government. Or: the more religious the Zionist, the more deafness to the sane religious aspirations of others, even those fellow citizens who are goyim, the Israeli Christians and Muslims.
And the other half of the image which Christians have of Jewish power is this: the more Israeli Jews are non-observant, more secular, even anti-religious or at least anti-religious establishment, the more so many of them at least are willing to listen to Israeli Arabs, whether Muslim or Christian, and to West Bank Palestinians who ask for equal recognition and treatment. Without a religious ideology, Jews seem more to support the realpolitik of the peace process: a negotiated compromise, where converge the present and future self-interests of security and justice of both an established Israel and a rooted Palestinian reality.
In Shmuel Goldin’s strong phrase, has the religious right 'hijacked' Religious Zionism? The Rabin assassination has given some Religious Zionists an opportunity to correct the distortions which have shaped its religious political vision since the Six Day War of 1967. Emerging in Israel’s public arena are those religious Jews who in their Orthodox tradition wrestle with the obligations and responsibilities to be peace-makers or reconcilers within the Jewish community, whether religious or not, and with their non-Jewish neighbors; such groups as Os VaShalom and the Center for Religious Tolerance.
Unlike past Jewish periods, the Torah and Halacha no longer define the collective or individual convictions of the majority of the Jewish people, in Israel or elsewhere. This normative consensus of classical Judaism has eroded, and in its place, Jewish evolving self-understanding and commitment, Jewish unity and accountability are found in the experience of being a family: 'people' and 'memory', 'history' and 'shared suffering' — a family experience reinforced by the establishment of the State of Israel, a common historical home which gave Jews everywhere 'a new sense of public dignity and recognition, a new voice in which to express their collective concerns and aspirations.'
So the question: would this world-wide family consciousness be strengthened, for example, if the State of Israel were to decide that the religious convictions of Reform and Conservative Judaism is kosher in the diaspora, but treif in the Jewish homeland?p>
These Orthodox Zionists, such as my colleague and philosopher Rabbi David Hartman, call 'a total failure' the use of the legislative power of the Knesset to imbue society with the Judaic religious spirit. In fact, the method has 'alienated Jews from Judaism, reinforcing the stereotype of religious as a self-serving, coercive force, oblivious to human rights and the value of freedom of conscience... Without personal identification and respect, no amount of legislation can affect how Jews think and feel about Judaism... The future of religious Zionism depends on separating religion from politics, on allowing the Torah to compete freely in the marketplace of ideas.' Keep Israel’s legislative authority outside of the debate.
As religious leaders in the West are to their dismay realizing, you cannot use legal language to coerce people who do not share your authoritative premises, presuppositions and prescriptions. Religious education is more influential than religious politics.
More profoundly, in Israel I hear echoes of the debate at Vatican Council II, but not in its precise terms. Does truth have rights, and error none, so that if the truth of the Church is twinned with political power, the state is responsible to suppress erroneous non-Catholic religious communities? Or do the human person and communities have innate rights, even if judged religiously erroneous? That is, because of this truth about the human person, the Church should respect and foster the right of the person and of communities to civil religious freedom, forming no coercion to act against conscience or prevention from expressing belief in teaching and religious rites, or even from expressing un-belief. The Vatican II church tries to live by the latter conviction.
Precisely because of their being so steeped in the Jewish tradition, this articulate minority of religious Zionists call for a change in the exclusive religious focus on Jewish sovereign control over the whole Land of Israel; that is, the present State plus Samaria and Judea (some add, Gaza). These Zionists insist that attempts at reconciliation with the Arab world, without endangering Israel’s security, 'is not a repudiation of the Torah, but an affirmation of God’s covenantal call to Israel to bear witness to the ideals of justice and the sacredness of human life' (D. Hartman). This enfleshes one of the names of God, according to the Talmud: Shalom, Peace.
In the Holy Land we local Christians see in the press, in some school texts, and on the streets what I call anti-crossism — a Jewish fear, or caricatured disdain of Christians. Much of this understandably has been engendered by the anti-Jewish persecutions and houndings in the West, and now perhaps is unconscious retaliation taken out on the local Christians. At the same time, many Israeli Jews, including religious, are not only conscious of this offended dignity of local Christians, but they anguish how they can better influence their fellow Jews to cut down unwarranted anti-christian prejudices and unjust acts of religious discrimination. As Jews they are deeply committed not to do to Christians in Israel what Christians elsewhere and for centuries had done to them!
Nevertheless, the indigenous Christian minority responds: 'We have enough problems without bearing false projections which some Jews may have because of their experience with Christians elsewhere.' Two examples: anti-semitism and the Holocaust (Shoah).
Anti-semitism as a term confuses the Palestinians. They also are Semites. They regard the Jews as their 'cousins'. In fact, they call anti-semitic those generalized caricatures which Jews have of other Semites who are neighboring Arabs.
I detect in the Western world that more inclusive anti-all-Semites in attitudes and stances of prejudice. A crude summary: 'Arabs and Jews in the Middle East have always been a strange lot. Always quarreling, if not warring with one another, over-emotional if not fanatical and arrogant, seldom really meaning what they say. And let’s be frank, over-sexed. Of course not like us Americans. But alas, the Middle East has the oil and trade-routes, so we need to enter into the frays, even with heavy finance, until we don’t have to rely on that oil supply, those harbors and airports. Then we can leave the Arabs and Jews to themselves and their tribal religions.'
The second example, the Holocaust in the Nazi-Europe of World War II. Horrifyingly unique though the Shoah was, and whatever Western Christian responsibility there was and guilt there should be, Palestinian Christians do not regard the genocide of six million European Jews as of their own direct or indirect making.
If such an obscene event is objectively unique in its horror, subjectively other peoples have had experiences of imposed sufferings, inflicted wrongs and perceived injustices which in fact also shape their self-identity. The Jewish experience and living memory of the Holocaust cannot strip away another people’s memory and experience. So for the Palestinians today. A central event for their self-identity is the sum of their own sufferings and humiliations — the 1948 and post-1967 uprootings with massive numbers of refugees, prison detention without trial, collective punishments, confiscation of family lands, and denials of several basic human rights as a people — too much of this under that all-too-frequent guise from too many governments — 'national security.'
So local Christians ask the Jews: 'Because the Holocaust experience has rightly seared your memory and should also be part of ours, must you protect yourselves with an ethics of survival at any cost, that is, also at our expense, even by your denial of our won history in this same land? Or is there not an ethics of solidarity based on your won history of suffering and humiliation: tying your destiny to all other insecure minority peoples, including us Palestinians, your neighbors?' But understandably for the Jews, an ethics of solidarity functions only when there is also an assurance of Israel’s survival and the security of its citizens vis-avis not only Palestinian neighbors but also Syrians, Iraqis, Saudis and Iranians. As the Israeli philosopher and Holocaust survivor, Emil Fackenheim, often remarks: 'We Jews are commanded to survive, lest we hand Hitler a posthumous victory.'
In the crisis over who has rights in the Holy Land, what about the religious faith of Palestinian Christians, whether Israelis or not? For the Christians the Land is their watan, their homeland. For centuries they are born and live upon it, cultivate it, and bury their dead under it. It is the land which God, in the divine wisdom of ordinary providence, has chosen to give them, and others who live there, as stewards of the land, in the same way — they say — as God has given you your watan — the United States, and God requires your responsibility to be good stewards of America and of all the peoples who live there.
Furthermore, in God’s providence Palestinian Christians live in the same watan of Jesus. Here he was born, walked, preached and healed, suffered, died and was resurrected. They experience and cherish the Land as 'the fifth gospel.' They are very much at home with the biblical events, stories and parables, their landscapes, their contexts. For Christians, Jerusalem continues to be, in the fourth century expression, both 'the Mother Church' and 'the Mother of all churches.' The Mater ecclesiarum is not Geneva, not Canterbury, not Wittenberg, not Constantinople, not Rome.
This consciousness of standing faithfully on the shoulders of almost two millennia of fellow Christians of the Mother Church fosters their primary identity. Dating from the 330's, the Nativity basilica in Bethlehem is the oldest Christian building anywhere, but it continues to be the active parish church of living Christian communities, more than a site for hurried foreign pilgrims.
The reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in their historic homeland had not changed this special attachment of local Christians to their watan. Cultural and religious co-ownership is beyond the strictly legal. No law can wipe away the facts.
In the context of the last conflictual decades, Palestinian Christians are ever conscious of biblical passages and interpretations about God’s love and choices which seem to contradict God’s equal care for all peoples in one Land. Passages that confirm God’s steadfast love for the Jews cause anguishing doubts among Palestinian Christians about the same love of the same God for them.
In his pastoral letter (November, 1993) on how to read and live the Bible in the Land of the Bible, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Nazareth-born Michel Sabbah, frankly mentions that some Christians are 'exasperated by the abuse of the Bible in the present conflict. They have begun to declare that the Bible or the Old Testament is nothing more than a simple history put together by the ancestors of the Jewish people.' Yet, the patriarch insists that in Christian faith the First and Second Testaments form a single Book which contains the whole of divine revelation for the salvation of humankind, including the peoples of the Holy Land today. 'In his goodness and wisdom, God chose to reveal himself and to make known to us the hidden purposes of his will (Eph. 1:9).
Christians rebel against those interpretations of biblical promises which claim that the same land has always been divinely and preferentially given solely to the Jewish people which is represented by that State of Israel which Palestinians have experienced for 50 years. Is the biblical 'Israel' equivalent to this modern State? In the words of an influential rabbi, God is the 'Guardian of this State and all its claims for itself'. The Christian asks, 'Do God’s claims include your claims against us non-Jews? Does your possession of the Land dispossess us?'
Religious Jews believe the land of Israel anticipates God’s blessing for all humankind. Local Christians ask: 'Should not that blessing include their closest non-Jewish neighbors, within Israel and in the Territories? Is not this same Land for the Jews, Christians and Muslims, our common watan, our shared homeland?'
If not, and this be the will of God, then what kind of God is this? Thus the Palestinian Anglican pastor-theologian, Naim A’teek, insists, 'The whole issue of the Land must begin with a discussion on the nature of God.'
Christians in power know to their shame how chosenness had been misused in their conduct towards the powerless Jews in their midst. By chosenness God intends to bring out the best in one by the call for selfless responsibility towards the neighbor. Alas, it too often brings out the worst. A faith’s assurance in chosenness stands in direct relation to a faith’s demand of accountability. Ethical demands are central to election and to law. The Exodus — the freedom from slavery by others — led to Mt. Sinai — the freedom for generous obedience of divine commands that lead us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Many Israeli Jews, religious or not, admit to their never-ending suspicion of, or distrust in the goyim or the rest of humanity, and for many religious Jews certain biblical passages reinforce their own implacability against the neighboring Palestinians, who by being goyim will always be a threat.
The experienced crisis of the Bible among Palestinian Christians thus leads to a crisis in their theology about the Jewish people as a whole, who that people continues to be, and what is the relation between the Church and the Jewish people.
I hear these biblical passages in monologues of Christians and of Jews about the other. So I confess to an ever-throbbing pain. As Monsignor Oesterreicher was graced, so was I by the first-hand experience of the decision of the Catholic church at the Second Vatican Council. Nostra Aetate was an irrevocable act, a hesbon ha-nefesh, a reconsideration of soul which began to shift 1,900 years of relationship between Catholics and Jews, and to open locks that had been jammed for centuries.
I am a Catholic who is whole-heartedly committed to the turn-abouts in my church’s self-understanding of its relation to the Jewish people, and to Islam. Now during my twilight years in my final watan, I experience that the conflictual context in the Land is feeding remnants of the classical anti-Judaism in both the Western and the Eastern Christian traditions which Nostra Aetate has declared against biblical teaching: in divine punishment, the Jews should continue to wander the earth forever, and not enjoy the gift of a restored homeland; and with the complete replacement of the Old Covenant by the New, the synagogue kneels before the church, whatever numbers and power the Jews may have, in Israel or elsewhere. [Remember, most of the Middle East Christians are not of churches which had a Vatican II 'rethinking'].
Often the dialogue consists of disparate monologues. Both Jews and Christians — now I add, Muslims in the West — find it so difficult to listen before speaking or so easy to judge the others, even their intentions, before allowing them truly to state the essential traits, traditions and experiences by which they define themselves and make their decisions.
In North and South America, in Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, the dialogue partners are aware of the contect: Christian majorities vis-a-vis Jewish minorities. But the reverse is the unique context of the Holy Land — a large Jewish majority vis-a-vis a small Christian minority. Here the Jewish/Christian religious dialogue is almost exclusively between small groups of foreign Christians like myself and the olim, those Israeli Jews who have come from Western contexts.
Most Palestinian Christian clergy and laity absent themselves from almost any religious dialogues with Jews. They tell me: 'There may be other legitimate, indeed necessary priorities on the agenda in the West, but here we drink from our own cisterns, and the Palestinian political problem is a non-negotiable basic referent in any religious dialogue': the interpretation of biblical history and of present 'facts on the ground'; the nature of the sanctity of the Land and who share in its blessings; the rights and responsibilities of all human persons on the Land, all created in the image of the same God; and the mutual religious significance of Jerusalem, as the holy city which all the children of Abraham should share equally, also politically.
To leave these urgent subjects off the table of dialogue would in itself be using what’s on the table as proof that all is well, the status quo is normal, the partners are equal, and that neighborly behavior implies that a true neighborhood already exists.
This is a harsh way of setting up an impasse: just as things spiritual can nullify the political, so the political can nullify the spiritual. But such an impasse, at least objectively, will slowly disappear if there be peace-of-sorts, justice-of-sorts, equal-to-equal partnership. Yet patriarch Michel Sabbah insists: one has to begin walking across the bridge of indigenous Christian-Jewish-Muslim dialogue, even if there be awkward, embarrassing stumblings. The crisis is actual, decisions to be made, opportunities for reconciliations to be seized.
Already conversations on such subjects are beginning to take place among Jews and Palestinians, Christian and Muslim. At institutes like Tantur, or through departments of Israeli and Palestinian universities, or through organizations such as the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, the Inter-Faith Association, the Israeli Palestinian Center for research and Information; in Bethlehem, the Al-Liqa Center of Christians and Muslims; and perhaps most fruitfully, through women’s groups. Green grass is growing through the asphalt.
When there be true equality among all the partners of the dialogue, when they are truly neighbors, then I foresee a wider participation on the local level and in the local context. Together indigenous Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims, should face up to specific challenges that affect the common good: the enhancement of family life, from the youngest child to the aged; the respect for the rights of the unborn and the dying; the increase of drug addiction and related crimes; the promotion of ethical values among doctors, staffs and students in nursing schools, hospitals and other medical-care institutes.
Perhaps most critical is a common evaluation of educational materials, such as textbooks and teacher manuals. How objectively are the Jews imaged in Arab classrooms, and the Christians and Muslims in Jewish? A two-year research project of Tantur and the Truman Institute of Hebrew University (Jerusalem), at its half-way point, is revealing that Israeli Jewish materials are replete with caricatures and falsehoods about Christians.
The former Israeli government was admirably sensitive to Roman Catholic claims in the negotiations which led to the Agreement between the Vatican and Israel (Dec. 30, 1993). And lest one narrowly interprets this agreement as Catholic oneupmanship by affirming exclusively Catholic claims, one year later (De. 8, 1994), the Catholic and all other heads of the local Churches in Jerusalem detailed the same claims in their joint-statement. Christians have few votes to deliver. They seek political influence not to dominate but only to survive through civil recognition of their inherent and historical rights as religious communities and as individuals, and through representation lest those recognized rights be ignored or violated,
Christian claims include more than full freedom of access to the holy sites. They embrace the same inherent fundamental human rights which all citizens, religious or not, should enjoy as individuals and communities: freedom of conscience and of worship; the carrying out of religious, education, medical and other duties of charity; the ownership of their own institutions, churches and shrines, and their own selected personnel to operate them. Much of this is but detailing the principles of Israel’s Declaration of religion, race or sex'; 'freedom of religion, conscience, education and culture.'
Frankly, most local Christians seldom talk about their holy sites but lament over experienced discriminations both because they are Christians, but also because they are non-Jews. Beyond patriotic rhetoric, the measure of democracy, anywhere, is the equitable ways by which the majority relates to the minorities. Does the Jewish majority accept the working principle that Israel’s tax-paying Arab citizens have a right to an equitable share in the common resources? For example, unlike all Jewish sections of Jerusalem, in most Arab sectors one faces unpaved streets, infrequent garbage pickups, inadequate water lines, lesser school subsidies and withheld building permits.
I conclude with Jerusalem, the city of so many mirrors. The Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict, in all its dimensions, is realized, condensed and symbolized in Jerusalem. It is blessed and cursed by its religious, political and military history, and by present divergent, indeed conflicting claims to the City’s future by cousins who vie for their heritage. It’s so hard to think rationally about Jerusalem, because the feelings also count, and they often dominate. Political perceptions are shaped by flawed reason and half-blind passion. They clothe naked facts. Jerusalem symbolizes more than the geographical fact, for 'the political imagination often invents its own geography' (Amos Elon).
Is Jerusalem in Meron Benevisti’s cynical phrase, 'an enigma without a solution'? The reality of Jerusalem is not neat, nor will the political solution be neat. Perhaps the initial solution should not be too detailed in finalities and allow an evolving process itself to be the solution.
'Jerusalem will never be divided' is a future hope. The city is already de facto divided. The question is, can it ever be united? West Jerusalem, bereft of Arabs, remains in advantageous isolation; it never had been the object of urban planning for new Arab or mixed (Jewish/Arab) neighborhoods. And East Jerusalem is intentionally divided by Bantustan-styles physical enclaves of Jews and of Arabs. The city is already divided by psychological walls, a cultural web of mutual antagonisms and fears. These walls have become far more divisive that a Berlin Wall, a Gaza fence, or a border checkpoint.
Can Jews, Palestinians and other residents, together for the common good of Jerusalem, allow the city to become more human, to respect and rejoice in our ethnic, religious and human diversities?
Historically, successive exclusive governing claims for Jerusalem by those in political power never 'worked', even when (alas, not always) governors had granted limited guarantees and protected status to the minorities. Can an exception realistically 'work' by the dominant Israeli claim: 'Jerusalem should remain the unified and eternal capital of the States of Israel, under the absolute sovereignty of Israel alone'? This is a slogan. Is it a solution? Equally a slogan: 'East Jerusalem (including the Old City) should be solely Palestinian-ruled'. Is it a solution?
Israeli/Palestinian shared authority in Jerusalem and limited sovereignties over it — whether territorial, functional or both — would be by pragmatic political compromise, which takes into account, not impossible dreams, but at least the minimum legitimate, sometimes competing vital national and religious interests of both Israeli and Palestinians.
If there be a pragmatic compromise which results in a tolerated co-existence between Israel and the new Palestinian State, but if Israel and Palestine would not compromise over Jerusalem, I fear the Holy City would become the only place in the Land which will be cursed by increased divisions, unholy tensions, indeed, recurring violence.
Earthly Jerusalem is more than a provincial city. It bears a universal character and evokes a unique religious dimension of the human, as Florence evokes in art, Zurich in business, Oxford in intellectual culture, and Salzburg in music. Earthly Jerusalem mirrors the meeting place between God and the human, the eternal and history, in particular for the children of Abraham — Jews, Christians and Muslims. This historical religious vocation of Jerusalem is to be a peaceful meeting place or shared living room, not a battlefield, not a house of locked room.
The city often mirrors too much of politicized religion, too little of authentic faith. Aberrations of piety move quickly into the political arena, and politics corrupts the pieties. The religious dreams of one become the nightmares of the others. 'The claustrophobic geography of the Old City is an apt metaphor for the cramped ideological space in which Judaism, Christianity and Islam interact ... The basic problem is not space, but control' (David Hartman).
With realism, the 'Jerusalem' that the Christian leaders join the Vatican (and others) in proposing for the walled Old City, is a special juridical and political statue, stable and permanent, which the international community guarantees: 'Jerusalem is too precious to be dependent solely on municipal or national political authorities, whoever they may be.' This plea is based on distrust of future decisions of those who have the power and the coffers. The demographic trends of Jerusalem will continue without surprising shifts. The religious Jews will predominate. Most of them will obediently vote in municipal elections. The city’s government will continue to be a fragile coalition which includes religious parties with political clout. One can realistically suspect they will not be overly sensitive to the needs of Muslims and Christians. Likewise on the Palestinian side. It will always be an Islamic majority. It could happen that Muslim extremists would be in a position of coalition-power which threaten the Christian minority with de facto discriminations.
In the Israeli/Palestinian conflict seeking resolution, Jerusalem mirrors the paradox of politics as the art of the possible. The first step of institutionized political equity allows for the further, far more critical, steps in creating an environment where it becomes easier to depoliticize human existence; that is, not to reduce persons and human communities to their political and ethnic dimension. Human beings and human communities are wonderfully complex and mysterious, not mere digits on any computer, esepecially the political counter and the passport surveyor. Religious faith asserts that the human is not limited to what makes immediate political sense.
The political can condition but not dictate the non-political. The slow, relentless process of 'the winning of hearts' will never be 'final,' but it can move beyond initial coexistence. Coexistence means that one only tolerates the other as the lesser of two evils. If not enemies, they still remain strangers to each other. Not quite truly human, is it?
Jews, Christians and Muslims in the same Holy Land — a unique context for a unique living dialogue for these children of Abraham who in their own ways are to be obedient to God’s common call through Abraham: 'to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just' (Gen. 18:19). The three partners share in the same religious crisis created by the conflict and its hesitant resolutions of peace and security. In all three 'religions of the Book,' the duet that must be safeguarded and protected from distortion is God above all, and the human being, his or her dignity and destiny. The primary appeal is: Let God be God! Let the human be human!
The histories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are strewn with the horror of evil executed in the name of God and God’s revealed truth. Too often and too consistently the worst in ourselves, our sinfulness, our sickness, our pathologies are transferred to God for divine sanction and approval, and masquerade with 'The anack, or the Bible, or the Qu’ran, tell us so', 'So speaks the Lord', 'Here-we-stand, we-can-do-no-other.' The word of God is taken away from God. One smells what Paul Tillich calls 'the demonization of the holy.' God, God’s holiness, God’s truth become replaced by a panoply of idols shaped in the worst image of ourselves. Too many gods. The one God is not allowed to be the One God. Let God be God!
Not only does one violate the all-holy God, but one is reducing the mysterious human to many political digits or worse, demonizing the Other in order to relieve guilt in violence against that Other. Rabbi Abram Heschel confessed: 'One is embarrassed to be called religious in the face of religion’s failure to keep alive the true image of God in the face of man.'
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do not merely tell God’s love for the human person as the central key to life and history. They stand and fall on their fundamental claim that, therefore, the human being, an ikon of God, is of ultimate and absolute value. In this faith-conviction are the deepest origins of understanding human rights. Let the human be human!
Thus, one calls for the liberation of Jewish, Christian and Muslim theology and spirituality from those falsifying versions which justify the structures and wielders of abusive and destructive power wherever and by whomever; and which deny social justice and the defense/promotion of personal and collective human rights for all peoples, all classes, all religions in the Holy Land.
At the same time, one cannot reduce human beings to even their legitimate political/economic rights, or worse, to their becoming units of a political class, whether it be the powerful or the subjects of that power. This 'politicalization of existence' (John Paul II) misunderstands the foundational meaning of the Bible and the Qur’an: the reign of God and the transcendence of the person. It begins to sacralize politics, and to de-sacralize the human person. Faith is betrayed, religion becomes one more political ideology in the overcrowded pot.
In the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths, the center of God’s revealed Good News is this: shalom, salaam, the peace — the unearned gift of a merciful, compassionate God; in the words of Pope Paul VI, 'the liberation from everything that oppresses man, above all, liberation from sin and the Evil One, in the joy of knowing and loving God and being known and loved by God, of being turned over to God.' Into God’s hands we commend our spirit.
This is why all human freedom, every authentic expression of liberation, is at its root religious freedom: the right and duty of individuals and religious communities to move toward God by doing the truth in charity. The First Commandment from Sinai remains the first.
Conclusion
I end with a personal note. Another pioneering pugnator veritatis (Fighter for Truth) in Catholic/Jewish relations, the layman from Scotland, Malcom Hay, who died in 1962, on the eve of the Vatican Council, wrote: 'In this world we are not meant to see the truth triumph, but only to fight for it.' May I add the instruction of Rabbi Tarfon shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple in 70 AD: 'The work is great, ... and the Master is urgent ... It is not our duty to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from doing it' (Avot 2.15).
In November 1965, two weeks after the promulgation of Nostra Aetate, I was working with the French theologian Rene Laurentin on the history of the text, with commentary, for a Paulist Press edition. I now suspect this more seasoned priest detected too much triumphalism in my joyous reaction to the council text, too much comfort in my youthful, naive eyes to the future. He simply asked if I had remembered the last page of The Plague by Albert Camus. No, but I looked it up immediately:
'As Rieux listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, he remembered that such joy could always be imperiled. He knew that those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when it would rouse up its rats again, and send them forth to die in a happy city.'
Indeed, thirty three years ago, I learned from Camus that with the promulgation of Nosta Aetate, Catholics, indeed all Christians, should go ahead, fight for the truth, but be more vigilant than ever. We are not free to desist from doing the 'great work'.
Note: If you are interested in other articles written by the author, please check: 'Crisis of Religion in the Holy Land’, America (April 27, 1996); Openings for Reconciliation in the Holy Land Today, the Malcolm Hay Memorial Lecture at Aberdeen University (Aberdeen University Press, 1996); 'Civil Rights to Religious Freedom, Christian Claims', in Religion and State in Israeli and Palestinian Society (Jerusalem: IPCRI, 1996); 'Can Jerusalem Become More Human?', Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture (Autumn, 1996).
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