Frank Talk on Israel

It is probably time to stop talking pretty to Israel and its supporters in a supposed spirit of biblical ecumenicity.

We (progressive Christians) are glad to share the Hebrew scriptures with Judaism as sacred story, but obviously we do not draw all the same inferences from them or use them in the same way.

In particular, we are not inclined to deploy certain texts of the Hebrew Bible to legitimate Israel’s claim to the land of Palestine as a divine inheritance.

Years ago, I was standing at a hotel pissoir alongside a prominent Ottawa rabbi. We had been attending a meeting about Palestine. He said to me, “why do you focus on Israel in your accusations about injustice to the Palestinians when you have such egregious cases of bad treatment of the indigenous peoples right under your nose in Canada?”

He had unwittingly indicted the Israeli victimization of the existing inhabitants of Palestine by their dispossession from their land and eviction from their homes by Israeli forces. It is true that, historically, Canadian treatment of the First Nations has been cruel, racist and unjust and these problems are far from solved. But we now recognize that wrong, and struggle (however ineptly) to make amends. The Israeli government continues to operate with a settler policy that sees the Palestinian plight grow ever worse from year to year, especially under the domination of the American fundamentalist-Orthodox takeover of the West Bank.

We know enough to know that Canadian and Israeli settler dispossession of original populations is morally cut from the same cloth. One hopes, however, that the Canadian striving towards a just and right relation will bear the intended fruit.

In any case, the dominant Zionist movement’s ambition from the early days was a nationalistic proposal that sought (as was said) to be as French as France is French and as English as England is English. The present point is that Israel is a state and we have to start treating it as a state and not as a religious entity that merits exceptional treatment because of its alleged divine foundation and purpose.

The new country of Israel, which emerged as such in 1948, has shown itself to be in many ways a brutal settler society. A settler goes into the land and conquers resident populations, not just to plunder resources but to take over the land and settle in it. Someone’s home is turned into someone else’s in virtue of conquest. This settler colonialism has been, and continues to be, the model for Israel’s behaviour in Palestine.

But this still begs the question: While we set our own moral house in order, why is our hungering and thirsting for righteousness focused so heavily on Israeli violation of human rights? Why not Yemen or Myanmar?

The answer is, in part, what I am provocatively calling the Protestant Zionism of our Sunday school formation. I am taking a risk here that I shall be confused with the English Zionists like Palmerston and Balfour (of the infamous Balfour Declaration) who worked for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, understood by Zionist negotiators to mean an Israeli state. What I now have in mind is an idea proposed by another United Church minister: The Protestant sentiment of piety towards the land of Palestine. When my wife Peggy and I first went to the Middle East in 1955 we sometimes told friends and family we were going to “Palestine,” but more frequently said “the Holy Land.” We had been raised to sing “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem,” “Once in Royal David’s City,” “Into the City I’d Follow the Children’s Band” and so on. Through our hymns and Bible stories we had a special feeling for the geography of Palestine.

And who, in the mainline churches, can forget the wannabe shepherds who watched over their flocks by night in the Sunday school tableaux of the nativity? The point is that Canadian Christians’ special attachment to Palestine is entirely psychologically intelligible. We may not know where Myanmar is but we know the location of Palestine. Although we connect those place names to a far distant Israelite past, it is the familiarity of these names and places that draws us to resonate with current circumstances of dispossession and expulsion perhaps more than other places that don’t feature in our spiritual formation.

Peggy and I were in Palestine more or less as what I called above Protestant Zionists. A central fact in the transformation of our perspective was our encounter with the black tents of the Palestinian refugees. What a mistake! No one had told us about that. Palestine was not, as Jewish political Zionists had told us, “a land without people for people without land” (as I remember hearing it). Seeing those tents, and all those displaced people, began the awakening of sympathy towards Palestinians. This caused our critics to label us as not only anti-Zionist (a Jew can be that) but racist anti-Semites. This is the same dynamic that caused Canadian political Zionists who support the settler regime in Palestine to brand the United Church of Canada as anti-Semitic, due to its support for Palestine rights.

There is also the question of responsibility. In some china shops, you will see a notice “if you break it you own it.” While it is true that Canadians were bit players in the British imperial program, we nevertheless reverberated to our membership in the British empire (French Canadians notably excepted). I remember as a school child, 85 years ago, singing with gusto of great classical military heroes – Alexander, Hercules, Hector, Lysander – who could not compare with the British Grenadiers. “Britain shall conquer, her ships rule the waves, her standard be justice, her watchword ‘be brave.’”

But this imperial ambition was already in trouble in 1917, the year of the Balfour Declaration, when Britain pledged to work, with conditions, for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The question of responsibility is compounded by the role of Canadians like Ivan Rand and Lester Pearson who in the attempt to deal with the Palestine conflict drew up the partition maps allocating disproportionate areas to the Zionists and Palestinians. Maybe that was the best that could be done at the time. My point is that Canadians are implicated in the human tragedy that beset the Palestinians.

In passing we may note that the possibility of partition may no longer exist. Israel, de facto, exercises sovereignty over all the territory including that west of the Jordan River.