Propositions Related to Israel and Palestine
In this contribution to Harold Heie’s wonderful Alternative Political Conversations series, I will seek to distill what I think I believe about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a series of propositions. These are drawn from my study of the region as well as one lengthy visit. They are of course provisional and subject to correction.
#1 The Israeli-Palestinian situation is the most complex political, moral, and foreign policy problem in the world today from a US Christian perspective.
#2 The United States plays a uniquely important role in relating to that problem, more than any other single nation in the world.
#3 The evangelical Christian community in the United States plays a uniquely important role in shaping United States foreign policy in relation to this problem, perhaps a more important role than on any other foreign policy challenge.
#4 Israel was born as a modern state as a result of longstanding efforts on the part of the Jewish Zionist movement, sympathy for that movement from Great Britain and the United States, a need for a refuge for Jewish Holocaust survivors, a deep sense of guilt for doing so little to prevent the Holocaust or save its victims, and the dogged efforts of Jews to establish a state and prevent it from being strangled in the cradle in 1948.
#5 The birth of the modern state of Israel was simultaneously a great accomplishment for the Jewish people and a great tragedy for the local Palestinian population. The seeds of the 64-year Israeli-Palestinian conflict were sown in 1948, not just with the events that occurred, but through the symbolic reality that Israeli Jews celebrate what Arabs and Palestinians consider a great catastrophe. What is “sign” to one population is “countersign” to the other.
#6 Both the Israeli and Palestinian populations contain absolutists and pragmatists. That is, one can find among both Israelis and Palestinians elements that yearn for total occupation of every square inch of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. But one can also find pragmatists, who have come to terms with the need to share the land between the two populations.
#7 Israel today has the misfortune of being led by a governing coalition that contains a too sizable representation of the absolutists and not enough of the pragmatists.
#8 Israel’s population appears to be slowly swelling with absolutists, many imported from the United States, religiously motivated, and coming to join the settler population in the occupied territories. These developments are looked upon with alarm by many thoughtful Israeli pragmatists and peacemakers.
#9 Palestinians have responded to the undesired seizing of what had once been their land (now Israel), and continued occupation of what still is their land (West Bank), by a variety of forms of resistance, all of which are predictable under the circumstances and many of which have been brutal, deadly, and immoral.
#10 My visits with Palestinians in 2011 led me to believe that their leaders are confident that they have the moral high ground at this time, that they are gaining international favor, that their cause is progressing, that they can make progress using nonviolent resistance, and that the worst thing they could do at this time would be to return to violence.
#11 The United States has at times played a profoundly constructive role by discouraging Israeli and Palestinian absolutists and encouraging pragmatism and peacemaking. The administrations of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were especially notable in this regard, but it has been the overall posture of the US government.
#12 However, as Israeli settlement and occupation policies have worsened–into steady defiance of international law and steady mistreatment of Palestinians–the United States has not altered its posture sufficiently. This means that our posture gradually has slipped from the steady mooring of justice and has become distorted in a direction that leaves us out of touch with most international opinion as well as with the realities on the ground.
#13 Religiously fueled Christian absolutism in the United States has contributed profoundly to this problem. End-times dispensationalism together with a broader misunderstanding of what it really means to “love God’s chosen people” have distorted conservative evangelical Christian thinking which thus has contributed to distorting US foreign policy.
#14 A growing minority of evangelical Christians has in recent years become increasingly uneasy with the situation in Israel and Palestine; lost confidence in the current Israeli political leadership; grown alarmed at the distortion of Judaism we have encountered in some extremist Zionist settlers; met and come to care about Palestinians (including Christians) and their suffering; and moved toward a posture of resistance to both US foreign policy in the region and right-wing Christian Zionism.
#15 I am one of the resisters discussed in #14.
Succinctly and well put, David. A number of other points could be added, but you have more or less summed up the issues for Christians. The one thing I would add is that while America may have a critical role to play, the Palestinians, in particular, no longer trust America to be an honest broker, so are increasingly turning to other sources for help. And, yes, American Christians, particularly evangelicals, bear some of the responsibility for this dismal state of affairs – supporting injustice in the name of Christ.
Succinctly and well put, David. A number of other points could be added, but you have more or less summed up the issues for Christians. The one thing I would add is that while America may have a critical role to play, the Palestinians, in particular, no longer trust America to be an honest broker, so are increasingly turning to other sources for help. And, yes, American Christians, particularly evangelicals, bear some of the responsibility for this dismal state of affairs – supporting injustice in the name of Christ.
Succinctly and well put, David. A number of other points could be added, but you have more or less summed up the issues for Christians. The one thing I would add is that while America may have a critical role to play, the Palestinians, in particular, no longer trust America to be an honest broker, so are increasingly turning to other sources for help. And, yes, American Christians, particularly evangelicals, bear some of the responsibility for this dismal state of affairs – supporting injustice in the name of Christ.
Amen! And the situation is made far worse by the fact that those extremist Israelis possess and threaten to use nuclear weapons!
Amen! And the situation is made far worse by the fact that those extremist Israelis possess and threaten to use nuclear weapons!
Amen! And the situation is made far worse by the fact that those extremist Israelis possess and threaten to use nuclear weapons!
If one considers the size of the land of Israel, and the violence surrounding them, how many of us would be willing to risk our children's safety by allowing more rockets closer?
In my reading about the history of Israel, most of the land was actually purchased from the owners. Would you willingly give up your purchased property to former owners?
Other property was obtained in wars; should the USA give Texas, etc. back to Mexico, or all the central states to the native tribes?
Try to put yourself in the place of the people of Israel.
Why do not the surrounding Arab countries welcome and give land to the Palestinians?
There is lots more land there and the common language and religion (of most, of course, the Christians are suffering in all of these, including Israel)
If one considers the size of the land of Israel, and the violence surrounding them, how many of us would be willing to risk our children's safety by allowing more rockets closer?
In my reading about the history of Israel, most of the land was actually purchased from the owners. Would you willingly give up your purchased property to former owners?
Other property was obtained in wars; should the USA give Texas, etc. back to Mexico, or all the central states to the native tribes?
Try to put yourself in the place of the people of Israel.
Why do not the surrounding Arab countries welcome and give land to the Palestinians?
There is lots more land there and the common language and religion (of most, of course, the Christians are suffering in all of these, including Israel)
If one considers the size of the land of Israel, and the violence surrounding them, how many of us would be willing to risk our children's safety by allowing more rockets closer?
In my reading about the history of Israel, most of the land was actually purchased from the owners. Would you willingly give up your purchased property to former owners?
Other property was obtained in wars; should the USA give Texas, etc. back to Mexico, or all the central states to the native tribes?
Try to put yourself in the place of the people of Israel.
Why do not the surrounding Arab countries welcome and give land to the Palestinians?
There is lots more land there and the common language and religion (of most, of course, the Christians are suffering in all of these, including Israel)
Yachal:
While I certainly understand the position you are taking here given the perceptions upon which you base your assumptions, I need to challenge those assumptions.
Several things need to be said:
1) Your assumption that "most of the land was purchased from the owners" is not actually true. When the land was partitioned in '47 the actual purchased ownership was 6%. It would have been even less had the absentee owners come to understand the reason why European Jews were buying the land, which was not to be part of what the Arabs assumed would be an independent Palestine. When they learned that the intention was to create a separate Jewish state where the current residents would be relegated to second class citizenship, the sales ended.
The examples you give of "property obtained in war" goes back to the colonial era when western countries believed they had the right to take whatever land they chose to take by conquest. Israel was created in a time when the colonial project was being dismantled. By this same reasoning, Iraq should have been allowed to keep Kuwait as they obtained it through invasion. International law since WW II is very clear that territory obtained this way cannot be kept.
As for why the surrounding Arab countries shouldn't simply give land to the Palestinians, the simple answer is that the land that Israel took from them and continues to take from them is their home. For the same reason that any people displaced from their home wish to return to the land of their birth and ancestry, so the Palestinians have no desire to live elsewhere. The assumption behind this is, in fact, tainted with a kind of prejudice that assumes that Arabs are all alike, and can therefore live anywhere.
This could, in fact, be turned around to ask why European Jews can't return to their homes. Those who founded the state of Israel were Hungarians and Poles and Russians. Why do they have more right to live in this territory than those who were living there in many cases for generations. And now many of those who are living in the illegal settlements, in homes built in land stolen from Palestinians are Americans who have dual citizenship. Why do they have more right to this land than the people who were farming it? The argument, in other words, can be turned around to make an opposite case.
But all of this is less important than the assumption that Israel should be allowed to take as much land as she chooses because her neighbors are violent. Is it possible that this violence would cease if Israel made legitimate and costly steps towards peace by dismantling the settlements and retreating behind the green line? When Oslo was first negotiated, giving Palestinians the hope of a separate state for the first time, the violence dropped considerably. There were no suicide bombings. Then when it became clear that Israel was going to continue to take land for settlements (more settlements were built post-Oslo than pre-Oslo), the intifada began.
From the perspective of Palestinians who have seen their land taken, their hopes dashed, their lives dominated by an oppressive occupation that has cut the little land they have left into apartheid-like cantons, your arguments have very little weight.
Yachal:
While I certainly understand the position you are taking here given the perceptions upon which you base your assumptions, I need to challenge those assumptions.
Several things need to be said:
1) Your assumption that "most of the land was purchased from the owners" is not actually true. When the land was partitioned in '47 the actual purchased ownership was 6%. It would have been even less had the absentee owners come to understand the reason why European Jews were buying the land, which was not to be part of what the Arabs assumed would be an independent Palestine. When they learned that the intention was to create a separate Jewish state where the current residents would be relegated to second class citizenship, the sales ended.
The examples you give of "property obtained in war" goes back to the colonial era when western countries believed they had the right to take whatever land they chose to take by conquest. Israel was created in a time when the colonial project was being dismantled. By this same reasoning, Iraq should have been allowed to keep Kuwait as they obtained it through invasion. International law since WW II is very clear that territory obtained this way cannot be kept.
As for why the surrounding Arab countries shouldn't simply give land to the Palestinians, the simple answer is that the land that Israel took from them and continues to take from them is their home. For the same reason that any people displaced from their home wish to return to the land of their birth and ancestry, so the Palestinians have no desire to live elsewhere. The assumption behind this is, in fact, tainted with a kind of prejudice that assumes that Arabs are all alike, and can therefore live anywhere.
This could, in fact, be turned around to ask why European Jews can't return to their homes. Those who founded the state of Israel were Hungarians and Poles and Russians. Why do they have more right to live in this territory than those who were living there in many cases for generations. And now many of those who are living in the illegal settlements, in homes built in land stolen from Palestinians are Americans who have dual citizenship. Why do they have more right to this land than the people who were farming it? The argument, in other words, can be turned around to make an opposite case.
But all of this is less important than the assumption that Israel should be allowed to take as much land as she chooses because her neighbors are violent. Is it possible that this violence would cease if Israel made legitimate and costly steps towards peace by dismantling the settlements and retreating behind the green line? When Oslo was first negotiated, giving Palestinians the hope of a separate state for the first time, the violence dropped considerably. There were no suicide bombings. Then when it became clear that Israel was going to continue to take land for settlements (more settlements were built post-Oslo than pre-Oslo), the intifada began.
From the perspective of Palestinians who have seen their land taken, their hopes dashed, their lives dominated by an oppressive occupation that has cut the little land they have left into apartheid-like cantons, your arguments have very little weight.
Yachal:
While I certainly understand the position you are taking here given the perceptions upon which you base your assumptions, I need to challenge those assumptions.
Several things need to be said:
1) Your assumption that "most of the land was purchased from the owners" is not actually true. When the land was partitioned in '47 the actual purchased ownership was 6%. It would have been even less had the absentee owners come to understand the reason why European Jews were buying the land, which was not to be part of what the Arabs assumed would be an independent Palestine. When they learned that the intention was to create a separate Jewish state where the current residents would be relegated to second class citizenship, the sales ended.
The examples you give of "property obtained in war" goes back to the colonial era when western countries believed they had the right to take whatever land they chose to take by conquest. Israel was created in a time when the colonial project was being dismantled. By this same reasoning, Iraq should have been allowed to keep Kuwait as they obtained it through invasion. International law since WW II is very clear that territory obtained this way cannot be kept.
As for why the surrounding Arab countries shouldn't simply give land to the Palestinians, the simple answer is that the land that Israel took from them and continues to take from them is their home. For the same reason that any people displaced from their home wish to return to the land of their birth and ancestry, so the Palestinians have no desire to live elsewhere. The assumption behind this is, in fact, tainted with a kind of prejudice that assumes that Arabs are all alike, and can therefore live anywhere.
This could, in fact, be turned around to ask why European Jews can't return to their homes. Those who founded the state of Israel were Hungarians and Poles and Russians. Why do they have more right to live in this territory than those who were living there in many cases for generations. And now many of those who are living in the illegal settlements, in homes built in land stolen from Palestinians are Americans who have dual citizenship. Why do they have more right to this land than the people who were farming it? The argument, in other words, can be turned around to make an opposite case.
But all of this is less important than the assumption that Israel should be allowed to take as much land as she chooses because her neighbors are violent. Is it possible that this violence would cease if Israel made legitimate and costly steps towards peace by dismantling the settlements and retreating behind the green line? When Oslo was first negotiated, giving Palestinians the hope of a separate state for the first time, the violence dropped considerably. There were no suicide bombings. Then when it became clear that Israel was going to continue to take land for settlements (more settlements were built post-Oslo than pre-Oslo), the intifada began.
From the perspective of Palestinians who have seen their land taken, their hopes dashed, their lives dominated by an oppressive occupation that has cut the little land they have left into apartheid-like cantons, your arguments have very little weight.