Colonialism and the State of Israel

I am not the first person to put these words together in this way. And, when I raise this topic, I am not talking about imperialist powers of previous millennia and their actions in this area. I am writing about the last 150 years.

Let me be brief and to the point when it comes to the history part. In 1917, Palestine, as it has been called since at least AD 135, was under the rule of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. It was losing its grip and the European powers were muscling into the area. Britain obtained a mandate to rule the area. There was some increase in agriculture and manufacturing on their watch. The Palestinians who had been there, some from before Israel ever entered the land in Abraham’s day, with more joining their ranks during successive empires in the last millennium before Christ, saw their numbers swelled by Arabs moving in from surrounding nations to take advantage of increased employment opportunities. Muslims were in the majority but there were many Christians, tracing their faith heritage to Christ’s time. Starting in the late 19^th century, the small number of Jews who had made their way back to the land since Rome expelled them in the first century, were joined by increasing numbers of immigrants, mostly from Europe. This led to unrest between them and the Palestinians to the point where Britain tried to stem the flow of Jewish immigrants, but not very successfully.

Then, in 1948, Jewish Zionist visionaries and their armed supporters were granted statehood by the United Nations over a strictly demarcated limited portion of the land the Jews claimed in their biblical heyday, including division of Jerusalem itself. The fledgling nation of Jordan was given power over the non-Israeli portion of Palestine, including East Jerusalem.

Here is where we can see the parallels to what the Israelis have done over the last 150 years to what colonial powers have done throughout history, including Britain, Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, Belgium and others. Now, I must grant right from the outset, that the historical circumstances are somewhat different. In the case of European colonials, they were entering into territories where they had not lived before. Here, we have the Jews wanting to return to a land they claimed as theirs going back to a couple of millennia BC. However, the behaviours, the patterns of activities, are very much the same.

As with European powers, Israel began occupying the land, or re-occupying if you will. Likewise, when their moves were met with resistance by the local Palestinians and their allies, they were suppressed, often brutally, with military might. Israel took control of ever more land and ever more facets of life of the previous inhabitants and their descendants. To try to solidify their claims, they adopted an age-old tactic of the victors – rewriting history. Right from the outset, one of the Zionist slogans was, “A land without people, for a people without land.” This was in spite of their being somewhere in the neighbourhood of at least 750,000 Palestinians in some 900 villages spread over this small tract of land, not to mention Jerusalem, Haifa and other growing centres. To this day, pro-Israel writers try to deny Palestinian claims to the land by emphasizing Israel’s historical claims and denying those of the Palestinians, minimizing the duration of Palestinian occupancy and numbers at every turn.

In North America and Southern Africa, there were systems of racial separation for centuries. The conquered were forced to live in reserves or homelands. In Israel and Palestine, they are called refugee camps. The impact is the same. The Palestinians who live in Israel are called Arabs, an attempt by Israel to identify them with their Arab neighbours, as if to say, that is where they came from, that is who they are, and that is where they should be. They don’t refer to Palestinians, so as not to give that name credibility.  The Palestinians who live in Israel are second class citizens in many ways. Israel likes to claim they are the only democracy in the Middle East, with voting rights given to Palestinians living in their boundaries, with their being represented in Parliament by elected members. However, even these are restricted and often jailed on slim pretenses, rendering much of their representation powerless.

Colonial powers have often tried to assimilate their subjects to their way of life. Israel is not even that beneficent, if you can say that about the attempts of the European powers in the past. Israel’s ultimate aim is to push all the Palestinians out and claim all the land given to Palestine in 1948 for themselves and the Jews. Their tactics and pronouncements have demonstrated that ever since the Zionist forces began to make inroads into the land, even before 1948.

The record of the colonial powers in the Americas and the third world has been far from exemplary. However, over time, practically all of the former colonies have regained their independence. In the Americas, this has not meant the indigenous populations gained control. It only meant the settlers and their descendants established their own governments in the former colonies. The ‘natives’ are still largely under the thumbs of the settlers. Well, that is still certainly the case in Israel. In other former colonies though, there has been an increasing awareness of past injustices and attempts begun to right them. To be sure, there are many Jews in Israel and in the Jewish Diaspora who think in those ways too. However, until those elements ever get to form the government, things continue to look pretty bleak for the Palestinians. Indeed, for a variety of selfish reasons of their own, the Western powers continue to support Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, especially the United States. Until they see the injustices they are supporting in the so-called Holy Land, there will be no peace there. For a Christian like myself, the real tragedy here is that far too many so-called Christians blindly support their governments, abandoning their Christian brothers and sisters and forgetting all about Jesus’ and the Prophets’ teachings about love and justice. We continue to hope and pray for change. What else can we do about it? I leave that question to you, dear reader.

CHRISTIANS IN THE HOLY LAND

When I write about the Holy Land I am referring to that strip of land largely between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, from the southern border of Lebanon and western border of Syria extending south to the Gulf of Aqaba and the border with Egypt and Jordan, including a little of Jordan east of the river and Dead Sea.

When I write of Christians here, one could refer to them in two ways – those of the past and those of the present.

Christians, of course, have been here from the beginning. The first ones were of Jewish background, as was Jesus. I am not sure whether any of their descendants remained after Rome was done with the Jews in AD 135. However, there are Palestinians who appear to trace their origins to those beginning days. Interestingly, some of these seem to have maintained the same non-violent way of life all along that our Lord demonstrated during his time on earth. Just the same, their life has never been that easy. There was persecution from the Jews, then from Rome. When Rome adopted Christianity as the state religion in the 4^th century, the new Christians began to come and assert their authority in these lands, building churches at holy sites and controlling access. Then, in the 7^th century, the Muslims came. There was not always persecution during Muslim times. Much of the time the two faiths lived a peaceful coexistence. When the Crusaders surfaced from the 11^th to 13 centuries, things did not always go well for local Christians either. The European invaders really respected no one. Since they were especially after the Muslims, and understood to be Christians, there was sometimes negative fallout for the local Christians from their Muslim neighbours because of Crusader action. Subsequently, things went back more to the status quo under the ongoing Muslim domination until the first half of the 20th century. Clashes with newly arriving Jews began to occur.

Then, there was what the Palestinians call ‘the Catastrophe,’ the Naqba. In many instances the Jewish terrorists who spread through the countryside in anticipation of the formation of the Jewish state and immediately after, in their campaign to force the Palestinians out to make way for Jewish settlers, did not discriminate between Muslim and Christian occupants of the land. Thus, Christians and Muslims equally suffered everything from being massacred in some instances to having their homes destroyed in many cases. If their homes were left standing, they were still forced out, or ran in fear. Some 450-500 villages of 900 or more were ‘depopulated’ in these ways by the end of 1948, creating some 750,000 refugees, most in neighbouring Lebanon and Jordan. When Israel drove Jordan and Egypt out of the West Bank and Gaza respectively, a further 460,00 souls were made refugees. To be sure, a minority of these were Christian, but the same fate befell them as their majority Muslim compatriots, not to mention the much smaller Druze and Samaritan minorities.

Presently, the Christian population in Palestine is unfortunately declining. It is not, as some would like to have you believe, because of persecution by Muslims. It is more because of oppression from the Israelis. So, whereas in the past we talked of a Jewish Diaspora, now we have a large Palestinian Diaspora. In fact, there are many more Palestinians abroad than in the Middle East. According to the UN, in 2010 there were nearly 790,000 refugees in the West Bank, over a million in Gaza and close to 2.9 million in surrounding Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. This does not include the hundreds of thousands living abroad. And, just as with many of those displaced Jews who yearned for their ‘promised land,’ many of these Palestinians would love to return home. Indeed, at one time they were promised they could do so. Many still clutch the keys to their homes. However, that promise is going on 70 years old and there is no sign of it being fulfilled any time soon. Nor have they ever been compensated for their losses.

One source [Sabeel 2011, Contemporary Way of the Cross] states that 9% of Arabs in Israel are Christian, making up only 2% of the overall population of the country. Most of these are Orthodox, members of the Melkite Church. Melkite refers to ‘royal’ and indicates that this church remained loyal to the Byzantine Monarch when there was a split in the church. A sizeable portion are either Roman Catholic, Lutheran or Anglican. In Israel itself, there is also a small faction of Christians, some of whom are Messianic Jews.

There is a division amongst the Christians in terms of their understanding of the place of the Jews in God’s plan, just as there is in The West. However, here it is basically only a small portion of Messianic Jews who subscribe to the Zionist understanding, contrary to the large numbers who do so in The west. The majority of Christians, especially the Palestinians, only see Zionism as a source of trauma and oppression. They have difficulty understanding how the Church in The West can swallow the Zionist narrative and abandon them to the mercy of the Israeli forces, government, courts and bureaucracy.  So, what, fellow believers in The West, is our response?

A Brief Introduction to the Problems with Zionism

I am a Christian, and as such, quite familiar with the Jewish Scriptures, which Christians refer to as the Old Testament. Therefore, I am well-acquainted with God's calls to Abraham and his descendants, and the covenants and promises he made to them. The most important of these are that God would make of Abraham's descendants a great people and that he would give them the area of land we sometimes refer to as The Holy Land as their home. He would make them a light and a blessing to the nations and because of them all nations would be blessed. This seems to be where many Christians in the last century or so stop in their understanding of the Jewish people and their place in history. This has thus become a particularly thorny and sometimes divisive issue between some Christians and between  some Christians and Jews, particularly in the last 125 years or so.

This is because it has been during this time that certain individuals gained influence for their belief that Jews should still be in the lands now known as Israel and Palestine, a belief that came to be known as Zionism, as Jerusalem, the putative capital, is seen by some as being on Mt. Zion. This was initially a political agenda but when its proponents got some of the Christians on board, thanks to a contemporaneous reinterpretation of Scripture to support their beliefs, Zionism was augmented by Christian Zionism.  

This relatively recent understanding of the history of God's people within certain more conservative  or fundamentalistic branches of the Christian church sees Israel's living in this land as a necessary prerequisite for the end of history as we know it and the dawning of God's new heaven and earth. This led people of this persuasion to promote and support Israel's becoming a nation. When this happened in 1948, almost 2000 years after Israel's defeat by the Romans around AD 70, these Christian Zionists, as they have come to be called, were elated. The passage of time and some subsequent aspects of history such as what the early Israeli settlers and their Army did to the Palestinian occupants of the land at the time dampened the enthusiasm for this cause somewhat. However, when Arab nations attacked Israel in 1967 to support the Palestinian cause, and Israel handily won the famous so-called “Six-Day War” against them,” Zionism received a great boost. This thinking has continued to be fueled ever since, particularly with the ongoing and recently increasing hostilities of increasingly radicalized Muslims and the predominantly Muslim nations around Israel in the last 30 years or so.

There are a couple of points that we need to remember at this time. The first is that these promises of God to Abraham's descendants, the covenant, were always conditional. That is, there is an ‘if’ attached. This is not spelled out in every instance in which some of these promises are mentioned in the Bible and those texts are then often then misused in such a way as to make the reader forget the conditions. The condition was acceptance and belief in the one God and obedience to God's commands. We know even from their own Scriptures how many times the Jews were punished by the God the true Jews worship for their disobedience to God and the conditions of the covenant from the time they left Egypt, known as The Exodus, when the first Passover was instituted, until the great exile of 587 BC to Babylon. The Old Testament Scriptures were closed shortly after that time, so there is no such accepted and canonical authoritative source to evaluate subsequent historical events that have affected the Jewish people, e.g. the Roman defeat mentioned above, the Holocaust of World War II and even the current events mentioned above.

However, if we apply the same expectations with respect to the covenant that were repeated over and over again in the Old Testament, I think it is quite clear to see that they are certainly not being kept today. As a Christian, who believes in the same God and shares part of the same Scriptures as the Jewish people, from whence comes our Lord and Savior, I love the Jewish people. One has to look at their successes in spite of the odds against them over time and see how successful in many ways they are, as the world judges it. This makes one still wonder about their status as Chosen People, given their stature in the world. But given what follows, I think we have to leave that to God at this point and not to this detailed time-framed understanding of history that has come out of some branches of The Church since the late 19th century, known to some as ‘dispensationalism.’

The point that I want to remind some readers of, which I know is very contentious for many, is that the Christian church, by and large, and officially, seems to have taken the view spelled out by New Testament writers such as The Apostle Paul in Romans. This understanding was that, based on the teachings of Jesus and New Testament writers, Abraham's status and being the recipient of the covenant with all of its promises, including conditions, was because of his faith and that all of those who have the same faith in God, are also equally part of God's people. Essentially, the view was that The Church, whether Jew or Gentile, to use the New Testament Language, now embodied The People of God and the same promises that were given to the Jews in the Old Testament are given to The Church.

Indeed, The Apostle Paul, being a devout Jew, anguished greatly over this whole affair, as we can see especially in chapters 9-11 of Romans. However, even though he appeared to be unable to let go of the idea that God still had a special affinity for the Jews and a special place for them in the outcome of history, he settled with that on “the back burner,” as it were. This is a question that to some extent though has continued to challenge many in the church ever since. Of course, for those who espoused Zionism in the late 19th century and subsequently, there is no trouble for them. This is because they would appear to interpret the Old Testament as being equally applicable in all of its "inerrant and literal" presentation, as they would say, as to what the New Testament says. This is not how The Church over most of its history and in most of its branches understood the Bible and certainly not how Anabaptists/Mennonites have historically understood the Bible. We believe that Jesus was the ultimate representation of God and transmitter of his teachings and values and therefore try to look at the Old Testament as it appears that Jesus did. As I suggested above, this has historically been taken to mean that the promises of the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants may no longer be as literally applicable as they were prior to Jesus' coming. It is not as clear at all, based on the New Testament, what the place of the Jews now is in God’s plans, if they are not Christian, as it appears to be to the Zionists, if you still interpret the Old Testament with equal weight to the new.

The Zionists like to criticize the Christians who do not espouse their views as being anti-Jew, anti-Semitic. They accuse them of being guilty of ‘replacement theology.’ Actually, the accused are just continuing to believe what the Church has understood the Bible as a whole to say since the time of Jesus. They have not adopted any new theology. The Zionists have just given traditional orthodox beliefs a new name to look as though the non-Zionists are erring and have adopted something new. This is not necessarily the case. We non-Zionist Christians are just opposed to the injustices and propaganda they perpetrate and how they let themselves be used by the Israeli state for its own purposes. We should remember that not all of the Jews in Israel even support their own government's anti-Palestinian policies. We non-Zionist Christians are just trying to  point out to our brothers and sisters that they err, often unknowingly, in being drawn into a propaganda war against Palestinians, both Christians and Muslims, in the name of their interpretation of Scripture, or for their political ends. That leads me to another blog instalment about the importance of names and words used in this area. Come back for that another day.