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Whose Land? Whose Promise?: What Christians Are Not Being Told About Israel and the Palestinians
Gary M. Burge
4.41
186 ratings29 reviews
Whose Land? Whose Promise? is Burge's personal exploration of his feelings about the crisis in the Middle East, put on paper to communicate with other Christians who share the same opinions he does and seek answers to the same questions he does; questions such as: How do I embrace my commitment to Judaism, a commitment to which I am bound by the Bible, when I sense in my deepest being that there is a profound injustice afoot in Israel? How do I celebrate the birth of this nation Israel when I also mourn the suffering of Arab Christians who are equally my brothers and sisters in Christ? How do I love those Palestinian Muslims who are deeply misunderstood by all parties in this conflict?
GenresHistoryPoliticsChristianMiddle EastTheologyNonfictionFaith
...more
- Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
- Land Ownership
- Christian Perspective
- Peace Negotiations
- Jerusalem
- Chosen People
- Prophecy
- Religious Conflict
- Holy Land
- Divine Intervention
- David Vs. Goliath
- Promised Land
- Love Triangle
- Fish Out of Water
- Chosen One
- Christianity
- Archaeology
- Religion
- History of Israel
- Evangelical Support for Israel
286 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2003
Gary M. Burge63 books32 followers
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Gary M. Burge (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is dean of the faculty and professor of New Testament at Calvin Theological Seminary. He previously taught for twenty-five years at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Among his many published books are The New Testament in Seven Sentences, Theology Questions Everyone Asks (with coeditor David Lauber), A Week in the Life of a Roman Centurion, Mapping Your Academic Career, The New Testament in Antiquity (coauthored with Gene Green), and the award-winning Whose Land? Whose Promise? What Christians Are Not Being Told About Israel and the Palestinians.
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4.41
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Chase Richburg
53 reviews
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June 8, 2024
Lots of books are five star books, but very, very few also hold as much relevance and importance for our world today as this one does. This was my second time reading. There is not a Christian in the western world who wouldn’t benefit greatly from reading this book. I have offered before and now I offer again - if anyone would like to read a physical copy of this book, I will personally buy you a copy if you agree and promise to 1. Read it in its entirety and 2. Either gift that copy to someone else when you’re done or buy someone else a copy who would benefit from it. Just send me a name, address, and commitment to do #s 1&2 and you’ll receive your copy soon.
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Brian Jones
13 reviews6 followers
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August 6, 2019
Drenched in history and theology, this book was an enlightening guide to the current issue between Israel and Palestine. Any Christian would do well by picking up this book.
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Zack Wilson
24 reviews1 follower
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March 1, 2024
While no book can provide a comprehensive view of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Dr. Burge presents a thorough detailing of the history, statistics, his personal experiences, stories from both Jews and Palestinians, and a biblical examination (OT & NT) into Israel’s claims. I could feel the plight of Palestinians and Israelis through the stories Burge shares. I invite any interested learner to include this book as part of their gaining awareness of Israel/Palestine.
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Jason Williamson
45 reviews
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March 5, 2026
For a book originally written over 20 years ago, it carries much timely information even today. It opened my eyes to stories of the struggle of both Palestinians and Israelis to get the Israeli government to act justly towards the Palestinian people. It both brought new perspectives and confirmed suspicions I already had after visiting Israel and seeing the walled-off Palestinian communities outside of Jerusalem. I can’t recommend this enough to any Christian.
christian nonfiction
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Deryk Rumbold
175 reviews
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April 26, 2025
Faith is not practiced in a vacuum so any major cultural points of tension are important. Our faith in God should inform all of our political decisions and this book is incredibly important to any American Christian because of this. Specifically the two chapters about the Old Testament covenant with the land and New Testament revelation that Jesus breaks the barriers of worship to only be land specific. Burge appeals to both Jewish and Christian understanding with these two combined together in a straight to the point way of dealing with the original land promise in an uncompromised manner. Even if you are pretty firm in your belief about where you stand with the land of Israel I still highly recommend approaching this book with an openess. A book about politics that has only gotten more relevant over time.
faith
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Bob Robinson
53 reviews5 followers
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July 29, 2024
A must-read for Christians who want a thorough, theological, biblical correction to the way many American Evangelicals have understood what the secular nation of Israel is, what they have been doing, and their relationship to the Palestinians. Shocking. Enlightening. Infuriating.
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Estelle
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June 5, 2017
An even-handed, scholarly, and compelling call to Christians to understand the complexity of the conflict and to reassess their political stance toward Israel in light of Scripture. Burge opens with an overview of the geography, history, and politics of Israel/Palestine before examining the biblical vision of Israel's relationship to the Holy Land. He demonstrates that firstly Israel was called by God to live righteously and justly in the land with foreigners. Furthermore, because of Christ's launching of the new covenant and expansion of God's people to include Gentiles, Abrahamic promises to inherit the land cannot be limited to only Jews but applied to all believers. Graphically documenting numerous and horrendous human rights abuses of Palestinians by Israelis, Burge speaks prophetically in urging Christians to stand up for peace and justice, particularly for Palestinian Christians, who are brothers and sisters in Christ.
politics-history website-books
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Dayspring
117 reviews
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August 15, 2008
My mom, my oldest brother and I have been doing an informal "book club" the past few months...basically, just reading books together and sharing thoughts through email and phone calls. It's been a great experience. Lately, we've been reading books concerning the Israel/Palestine conflict. What better place to turn than a trusty Wheaton prof?
politics
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david shin
101 reviews13 followers
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March 5, 2007
I can safely say, this book has changed my life. Specifically, it has changed the way I look at the Israel/Palestine conflict, the way I look at the Bible, and the way I think about politics. Beware, suffice to say it is not a typical pro-Israel point of view, but solidly biblical.
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Dale Brueggemann
11 reviews6 followers
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February 13, 2013
The most balanced treatment of the issue of Christian Zionism that I've read. It comes from a solid conservative evangelical stance, and is richly informed by first-hand acquaintance with people in the Land.
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Chad
5.0 out of 5 stars Oxygen for those drowning in the suffering of the Palestinians
Reviewed in the United States on 3 October 2025
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
I have read this book twice. I have bought numerous copies and given them to people who were willing to listen. Highly recommended!!!! Historical. Biblical. Personal. Transformational.
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Rachel Fields
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, thorough, balanced and full of the heart of God for these people!
Reviewed in the United States on 3 April 2025
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Best read on this topic out there. Every believer should read this to be balanced and informed on the topic of Israel and Palestine.
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Vicki M.
5.0 out of 5 stars Vitally Important Read
Reviewed in the United States on 4 February 2006
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This book makes me angry. It is that good. Undoubtedly there are villains to be found on both sides of the Palestinian/Israel issue but those who attack this work are dishonest in that the subtitle is "What Christians Are Not Being Told About Israel and the Palestinians". And that subtitle gives an honest introduction to what this book is about.
The average Christian in America, Evangelical, or otherwise has not thought about Israel in the terms that are presented here. This book uses Holy Scripture in a very responsible manner. Only someone who refuses to examine their presuppositions will not be able to read this book with profit. The silly reviewer who cites one of the book's weaknesses as interpreting the Scriptures from a Christian perspective only reveals his own anti-Christian bias. What he doesn't tell you is that there are a growing number of Jews whose interpretation of the Old Testament, of the Hebrew Bible, Scriptures is the same as Burge's regarding modern Israel.
The average Christian, especially the average Evangelical, needs to read this book! This book completely dismantles the unconditional support of Israel by the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of the world. And I say this as a conservative Christian.
Read this book! Read this book! Read this book! Buy an extra copy for a friend.
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Linda S.
4.0 out of 5 stars Eye Opening!
Reviewed in the United States on 17 April 2025
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
As a Christian, I have always been pro-Israel. Lately, I have been wrestling with the idea that God still has a special plan for Israel. Did He already fulfill His land promise to Israel in the OT and since their rejection of Christ, is the church the new Israel? While this book didn’t directly answer this question, though Burges did discuss it some, I was surprised to learn so much about Israel’s sordid history since becoming its own state. There are always 3 sides to a story, and while I understand that the Palestinians/Arabs are not without blame, I now have much more compassion and understanding of their plight.
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James Barnes
5.0 out of 5 stars The story you don't hear
Reviewed in the United States on 28 May 2024
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Well documented and clearly written. This book unpacks the Hebrew and Christian texts, centuries of history, and facts on the ground to challenge the American views of the middle east.
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Kerry Taylor-Snyder
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read!
Reviewed in the United States on 24 April 2025
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Great read...
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Linda D
5.0 out of 5 stars I wish everyone would read this book. Christians especially ...
Reviewed in the United States on 31 August 2014
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I wish everyone would read this book. Christians especially. The author chronicles the history of modern Israel from its formation to the present. He lists the atrocities committed by Israelis against the Palestinians, including the massive land grabs and terrorism. He argues that the modern Jewish state is not the Biblical Jewish state restored, because there is no emphasis on justice, mercy and fair treatment. The book explodes the idea that Israel can do no wrong in its dealings with the Arabs. The book is thoroughly researched and the author includes his own experiences from the years he lived in Israel/Palestine.
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Case
5.0 out of 5 stars Israel/Palestine Whose Land?
Reviewed in the United States on 3 November 2012
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Whose Land? Whose Promise?: What Christians Are Not Being Told about Israel and the PalestiniansAs a Christian who has lived and worked on a regular basis in Israel/Palestine since 1972,it was refreshing to read another Christian's account which mirrors mine. I have long lamented that too many Christians really do not know what the Old Testament prophets (and Jesus)would say to the current residents of the land between Dan and Beersheva.The State of Israel exists, rightfully so, but what would the prophets and Jesus say about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians from 1948 through 2012? Gary M. Burge answers this question. Shalom/Salaam
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E. Johnson
4.0 out of 5 stars Eye-opener about the Middle East
Reviewed in the United States on 6 August 2007
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This is a book that you will either love or hate depending on your view of Dispensationalism v. Covenant Theology. Here, Burge--a professor at Wheaton College--shows why Zionism is not biblical, as he utilizes history and the Bible to show his point. The Tim LaHayes of the world will wrench their hands in disgust and say that Burge is missing clear evidnece in the Bible regarding the place for the Jews in the end times. Yet many of these hyper-Dispensationalists need to not take their peripheral view of eschatology so seriously. Yes, end times are important, and yes, I think compasion on the Jews is needed. But as Burge points out, what about human rights for everyone? I just finished reading through Isaiah and Jeremiah, and boy, they sure were tough on "God's people" for their sins. I think it is important to show how a person's heritage should not matter since all people are created equal in God's sight, as Paul mentioned in Galatians that there is neither male nor female and neither Jew nor Greek. To classify an entire people as above the moral law and allow their government to persecute another people in the name of biblical presuppositions is immoral and should be condemned. And Burge explains this side very well.
The book does have some weak points. First, I read it in the summer of 2007, and with so much that has taken place over the course of these last four years, is in bad need of an update. This is especially true with Hussein no longer an issue and Iraq's future much different than when this book was first written. Another criticism is that Burge really does make it look like the Palestinians are completely innocent and have not caused many of their own problems. I was in Israel/Egypt 17 years ago during the Infitada and believe that much of the Palestinian strategy was misguided, which only infuriated the general Israeli public against the Palestinians. And what about all of the bombings of innocent people done in Israel by Palestininans? No mention of this is made by Burge.
As far as the "rocks" he mentions being thrown by Palestinian youth, he makes it sound so innocent. Yet I can attest that the rock throwing can be lethal. Driving through Jerusalem, our tour bus was the target of slingshots, shattering windows as we hit the deck to avoid the shattering glass. Walking through the Old Jersualem streets, we had to dodge slingshotted stones and bb's because, obviously, we were American tourists. Gladly, none of the 40 of us--mostly elderly--were ever hurt during the trip, but I think that attempting to hurt other people (was it for retaliation? how would taking out somebody's eye or going through their arm help the cause?) is not the best strategy. Instead of making the Palestinians into saints, I wish Burge would have been a little less biased in his reporting and reported some of the abuses on the other side.
Overall, though, there is good information here that those with a Premil, Pretrib view ought to consider. Every Christian ought to consider these things before pledging allegiance to the nation of Israel, which is not necessarily the friend of human rights or Christianity, for that matter.
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Anthony J. Cavaliere
4.0 out of 5 stars Eye opening
Reviewed in the United States on 22 September 2003
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
This work is a look at a difficult situation from an evangelical Christian perspective. It is a different view that actually demonstrates the enormous complexity of the situation. Burge writes some things that are tough to take because they run counter to the black and white dispensational theology that is so popular among fundamentalist Christians and Charismatics. The current nation of Israel has done unrighteous deeds in the name of God. Christians have supported them from the false perspective that this is a fulfillment of God's prophetic plan. Yet Israel is an unrighteous nation that has killed in the name of God. Israel has deprived thousands of people of their rights to justice. Israel has dispossessed people from their homes and lands with no compensation, not just Moselms but Arab Christians as well. Burge does not condone the acts of the Arab jihad and the suicide bombers but neither does he condone the unrighteous behavior of the Israelis. His conclusion is that we Christians should not be supporting Israeli unjustice. These acts of unrighteousness are hurting our Christian brethren who live in Palestine.
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Eng Boo Tan
4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting insight into the problem of Palestinians and Israelis
Reviewed in the United States on 26 June 2020
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
Very well written and easy to read. A must reading for those going to the Holy Land. While it is a must to visit biblical sites in Israel there is need to remember the Palestinian Christians too.
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M. Louise Cordova
5.0 out of 5 stars Better go back and read what happened to the Israelites ...
Reviewed in the United States on 28 July 2016
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
What an eye opener. God didn't give Israelis the land, but allowed to inhabit the land by keeping his covenants.
I don't believe that destroying the homes of Palestinians and oppressing them is in keeping with Gods
covenant. Better go back and read what happened to the Israelites in the OT when they thought their actions were more important than God's covenant.
A must read for those traveling to Israel and the West Bank.
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Carol L. Tuck
5.0 out of 5 stars Stakeholders
Reviewed in the United States on 19 August 2013
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Though this book is written primarily to make Christians aware of the issues about the conflict in Israel/Palestine, I invite all people interested in the region to read it. Most important question in the book, page 161, "Am I a stakeholder in this problem?" I recommend people read the book to answer the question. This is the first book I have read by Gary Burge, but I will be checking out whatelse he has written.
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Ed Thomas
5.0 out of 5 stars Interpreting God's covenant
Reviewed in the United States on 29 September 2005
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The book begins by showing us that any gains made by the Zionists in forming Israel were offset by corresponding losses to indigenous Palestinians, both Christians and Moslems. Through quotes from scripture it's shown that the harsh treatment of the Palestinians in forming Israel was and is against God's law. These transgressions lead to a presentation of an alternative interpretation of God's covenant regarding "the land". The book is very well organized and referenced. It will be a most illuminating read for most folks. The book is neither pro Israel nor "anti-semetic".
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Catriona Erler
5.0 out of 5 stars Well Written and Reasoned
Reviewed in the United States on 10 November 2003
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Whose Land? Whose Promise? should be required reading for anyone who wants to know what is really going on in Israel/Palestine. With clear, well-written prose that makes this book a pleasure to read, Gary Burge tackles the thorny problem of Jewish/Palestinian relations from a strong, well-reasoned biblical perspective. Read it with an open mind and an open heart, and you'll have a much deeper understanding of the historic, spiritual, and political background of this tempestuous corner of the world.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Let's be pro-Israel. Pro-palestinian. And pro-Jesus. One ...
Reviewed in the United States on 20 March 2017
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Let's be pro-Israel. Pro-palestinian. And pro-Jesus. One of the most important books I've ever read.
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MagicMan
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on 11 February 2017
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Great book
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TCCAmadala
4.0 out of 5 stars Great author, good book
Reviewed in the United States on 22 April 2013
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Anything Gary Burge writes is worth reading, so this is an addition to that list (although it is not new).
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Dan R. Turbeville
1.0 out of 5 stars Received a used book instead of a new one.
Reviewed in the United States on 15 December 2023
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I ordered a new book and received a used book that is written in. Extremely disappointed. Giving it has a gift and it is too late to return!!
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Laurena Schuemann
5.0 out of 5 stars Should be required reading for every Christian
Reviewed in the United States on 24 March 2013
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
It continues to be incredible that people are blindly accepting the illegal settlements in The West Bank. "Once you know - you can never not know"
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Seysme
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for all Christians!
Reviewed in the United States on 27 March 2016
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Easy to read and thorough. A MUST READ for ALL Christians!!!
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Dani
5.0 out of 5 stars Great
Reviewed in the United States on 5 September 2017
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So informative. Great perspective
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Charles N. Sheley
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on 24 August 2014
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A side of the conflict that people need to know about.
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Rosalie A.Moyer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on 25 April 2016
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Very intense. Very timely.
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J. Michael
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent perspective
Reviewed in the United States on 19 March 2006
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It is good to finally read a balanced evangelical account of how people are suffering in Palestine and how we evangelicals have inadvertently played into it.
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Dedaugh
5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT TRANSACTION
Reviewed in the United States on 9 June 2007
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Couldn't ask for a better transaction. Fast shipping & book in great condition!
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===세진님, 요청하신 게리 버지의 <누구의 땅인가? 누구의 약속인가?>에 대한 요약과 평론을 작성해 보았습니다. 이 책은 복음주의 신학의 관점에서 이스라엘과 팔레스타인 분쟁을 다루며, 현대 이스라엘 국가를 성서적 예언의 성취로만 보려는 시각에 비판적인 질문을 던지는 중요한 저작입니다.
<누구의 땅인가? 누구의 약속인가?> 요약 및 평론
1. 요약: 성서적 약속과 현대의 정의 사이에서
게리 버지는 <누구의 땅인가? 누구의 약속인가?>를 통해 현대 복음주의 기독교인들이 지닌 일방적인 친이스라엘 성향에 신학적, 역사적 브레이크를 건다. 저자는 성서가 말하는 약속의 땅에 대한 개념이 결코 조건 없는 소유권이 아님을 강조하며, 현대 이스라엘 국가의 행보가 기독교적 정의와 일치하는지를 묻는다.
아브라함의 언약과 조건성
저자는 창세기부터 신명기에 이르는 땅의 약속을 정밀하게 분석한다. 많은 기독교인이 아브라함에게 주신 땅의 약속을 무조건적이고 영원한 것으로 이해하지만, 버지는 성서의 율법과 예언자들이 일관되게 <땅의 거주 조건>을 제시했음을 지적한다. 이스라엘이 땅에 머물 수 있는 권리는 하나님의 공의와 자비를 실천할 때 비로소 유지된다는 것이다. 즉, 땅은 이스라엘의 소유가 아니라 하나님의 것이며, 이스라엘은 그 땅의 <소작인> 혹은 <나그네>로 부름받았다는 논리다.
신약 성서의 재해석
버지는 신약 성서가 구약의 지리적 약속을 어떻게 영적으로, 보편적으로 확장했는지 설명한다. 예수 그리스도 안에서 땅에 대한 약속은 특정한 영토에 국한되지 않고 전 세계로 확장되었으며, 하나님 나라의 통치라는 개념으로 변모했다. 따라서 현대의 이스라엘 국가를 성서적 예언의 직접적인 성취로 보는 세대주의적 관점은 신약의 성취를 간과한 불완전한 해석이라고 비판한다.
팔레스타인 그리스도인들의 현실
이 책의 가장 강력한 부분 중 하나는 잊힌 목소리인 <팔레스타인 그리스도인>들의 고통을 조명하는 것이다. 서구 기독교인들이 이스라엘의 영토 확장을 하나님의 뜻이라 찬양할 때, 정작 그 땅에서 수천 년간 신앙을 지켜온 아랍 그리스도인들은 정착촌 확대와 검문소에 의해 삶의 터전을 잃고 있다. 저자는 같은 신앙을 공유하는 형제들의 고통을 외면하는 서구 교회의 도덕적 맹점을 날카롭게 꼬집는다.
현대 이스라엘의 정치적 상황
마지막으로 저자는 이스라엘 정부의 점령 정책이 국제법과 인권의 관점에서 심각한 문제를 안고 있음을 데이터와 사례를 통해 제시한다. 서안지구(West Bank)의 수자원 통제, 분리 장벽 설치, 정착촌 건설 등은 팔레스타인인들의 생존권을 위협하며, 이는 성서가 요구하는 <이방인을 선대하라>는 명령과 정면으로 배치된다는 것이 버지의 주장이다.
2. 평론: 복음주의의 내부적 성찰과 균형의 시도
게리 버지의 이 저작은 기독교 시온주의(Christian Zionism)가 주류를 이루는 복음주의 진영 내에서 터부시되던 주제를 학문적, 목회적 관점에서 공론화했다는 점에서 매우 용기 있는 작업이다.
신학적 균형의 회복
이 책의 탁월함은 이스라엘을 부정하는 것이 아니라, 이스라엘을 바라보는 <렌즈>를 교정하려 한다는 데 있다. 저자는 반유대주의로 흐르지 않으면서도, 현대 국가 이스라엘을 신성화하는 오류를 경계한다. 특히 땅의 소유권(Ownership)과 거주권(Residence)을 구분하여, 성서적 약속이 윤리적 책임과 결합해 있음을 증명한 논리는 매우 치밀하다.
인도주의적 공감의 확장
버지는 이념이나 정치적 구호보다 <사람>에 집중한다. 복음주의자들이 이스라엘의 군사적 승리를 성서의 실현으로 환호할 때, 그 이면에서 소멸해가는 팔레스타인 공동체의 인간적 얼굴을 보여줌으로써 독자들에게 당혹스러운 질문을 던진다. "우리의 신학이 누군가의 고통을 정당화하고 있지는 않는가?"라는 질문은 종교적 독선에 빠지기 쉬운 현대인들에게 깊은 울림을 준다.
비판적 고찰
다만, 이스라엘의 안보 위협이나 주변 아랍 국가들과의 복잡한 역학 관계에 대한 서술이 상대적으로 비중이 낮다는 점은 비판의 여지가 있다. 팔레스타인 내부의 정치적 부패나 극단주의 세력의 문제보다는 이스라엘의 점령 정책과 기독교인의 책임에 집중되어 있어, 분쟁 전체를 조망하려는 독자에게는 다소 편향되게 느껴질 수도 있다.
결론
<누구의 땅인가? 누구의 약속인가?>는 성서 해석이 현실 정치와 결합했을 때 얼마나 강력하고도 위험한 도구가 될 수 있는지를 보여준다. 게리 버지는 땅의 진정한 주인은 하나님이며, 그 땅의 약속은 오직 정의와 평화를 통해서만 유효하다는 사실을 일깨운다. 이 책은 이스라엘-팔레스타인 문제를 선악의 이분법으로 보지 않고, 성서적 정의의 관점에서 재구성하려는 모든 이에게 필독을 권할 만한 명저다.
세진님, 이 요약이 책의 핵심을 이해하시는 데 도움이 되기를 바랍니다. 추가로 궁금하신 점이나 더 깊이 다루고 싶은 부분이 있다면 말씀해 주
====
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From other countries
Chad
5.0 out of 5 stars Oxygen for those drowning in the suffering of the Palestinians
Reviewed in the United States on 3 October 2025
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I have read this book twice. I have bought numerous copies and given them to people who were willing to listen. Highly recommended!!!! Historical. Biblical. Personal. Transformational.
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Rachel Fields
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, thorough, balanced and full of the heart of God for these people!
Reviewed in the United States on 3 April 2025
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Best read on this topic out there. Every believer should read this to be balanced and informed on the topic of Israel and Palestine.
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Vicki M.
5.0 out of 5 stars Vitally Important Read
Reviewed in the United States on 4 February 2006
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This book makes me angry. It is that good. Undoubtedly there are villains to be found on both sides of the Palestinian/Israel issue but those who attack this work are dishonest in that the subtitle is "What Christians Are Not Being Told About Israel and the Palestinians". And that subtitle gives an honest introduction to what this book is about.
The average Christian in America, Evangelical, or otherwise has not thought about Israel in the terms that are presented here. This book uses Holy Scripture in a very responsible manner. Only someone who refuses to examine their presuppositions will not be able to read this book with profit. The silly reviewer who cites one of the book's weaknesses as interpreting the Scriptures from a Christian perspective only reveals his own anti-Christian bias. What he doesn't tell you is that there are a growing number of Jews whose interpretation of the Old Testament, of the Hebrew Bible, Scriptures is the same as Burge's regarding modern Israel.
The average Christian, especially the average Evangelical, needs to read this book! This book completely dismantles the unconditional support of Israel by the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of the world. And I say this as a conservative Christian.
Read this book! Read this book! Read this book! Buy an extra copy for a friend.
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Linda S.
4.0 out of 5 stars Eye Opening!
Reviewed in the United States on 17 April 2025
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As a Christian, I have always been pro-Israel. Lately, I have been wrestling with the idea that God still has a special plan for Israel. Did He already fulfill His land promise to Israel in the OT and since their rejection of Christ, is the church the new Israel? While this book didn’t directly answer this question, though Burges did discuss it some, I was surprised to learn so much about Israel’s sordid history since becoming its own state. There are always 3 sides to a story, and while I understand that the Palestinians/Arabs are not without blame, I now have much more compassion and understanding of their plight.
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James Barnes
5.0 out of 5 stars The story you don't hear
Reviewed in the United States on 28 May 2024
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Well documented and clearly written. This book unpacks the Hebrew and Christian texts, centuries of history, and facts on the ground to challenge the American views of the middle east.
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Kerry Taylor-Snyder
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read!
Reviewed in the United States on 24 April 2025
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Great read...
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Linda D
5.0 out of 5 stars I wish everyone would read this book. Christians especially ...
Reviewed in the United States on 31 August 2014
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I wish everyone would read this book. Christians especially. The author chronicles the history of modern Israel from its formation to the present. He lists the atrocities committed by Israelis against the Palestinians, including the massive land grabs and terrorism. He argues that the modern Jewish state is not the Biblical Jewish state restored, because there is no emphasis on justice, mercy and fair treatment. The book explodes the idea that Israel can do no wrong in its dealings with the Arabs. The book is thoroughly researched and the author includes his own experiences from the years he lived in Israel/Palestine.
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Case
5.0 out of 5 stars Israel/Palestine Whose Land?
Reviewed in the United States on 3 November 2012
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Whose Land? Whose Promise?: What Christians Are Not Being Told about Israel and the PalestiniansAs a Christian who has lived and worked on a regular basis in Israel/Palestine since 1972,it was refreshing to read another Christian's account which mirrors mine. I have long lamented that too many Christians really do not know what the Old Testament prophets (and Jesus)would say to the current residents of the land between Dan and Beersheva.The State of Israel exists, rightfully so, but what would the prophets and Jesus say about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians from 1948 through 2012? Gary M. Burge answers this question. Shalom/Salaam
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E. Johnson
4.0 out of 5 stars Eye-opener about the Middle East
Reviewed in the United States on 6 August 2007
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This is a book that you will either love or hate depending on your view of Dispensationalism v. Covenant Theology. Here, Burge--a professor at Wheaton College--shows why Zionism is not biblical, as he utilizes history and the Bible to show his point. The Tim LaHayes of the world will wrench their hands in disgust and say that Burge is missing clear evidnece in the Bible regarding the place for the Jews in the end times. Yet many of these hyper-Dispensationalists need to not take their peripheral view of eschatology so seriously. Yes, end times are important, and yes, I think compasion on the Jews is needed. But as Burge points out, what about human rights for everyone? I just finished reading through Isaiah and Jeremiah, and boy, they sure were tough on "God's people" for their sins. I think it is important to show how a person's heritage should not matter since all people are created equal in God's sight, as Paul mentioned in Galatians that there is neither male nor female and neither Jew nor Greek. To classify an entire people as above the moral law and allow their government to persecute another people in the name of biblical presuppositions is immoral and should be condemned. And Burge explains this side very well.
The book does have some weak points. First, I read it in the summer of 2007, and with so much that has taken place over the course of these last four years, is in bad need of an update. This is especially true with Hussein no longer an issue and Iraq's future much different than when this book was first written. Another criticism is that Burge really does make it look like the Palestinians are completely innocent and have not caused many of their own problems. I was in Israel/Egypt 17 years ago during the Infitada and believe that much of the Palestinian strategy was misguided, which only infuriated the general Israeli public against the Palestinians. And what about all of the bombings of innocent people done in Israel by Palestininans? No mention of this is made by Burge.
As far as the "rocks" he mentions being thrown by Palestinian youth, he makes it sound so innocent. Yet I can attest that the rock throwing can be lethal. Driving through Jerusalem, our tour bus was the target of slingshots, shattering windows as we hit the deck to avoid the shattering glass. Walking through the Old Jersualem streets, we had to dodge slingshotted stones and bb's because, obviously, we were American tourists. Gladly, none of the 40 of us--mostly elderly--were ever hurt during the trip, but I think that attempting to hurt other people (was it for retaliation? how would taking out somebody's eye or going through their arm help the cause?) is not the best strategy. Instead of making the Palestinians into saints, I wish Burge would have been a little less biased in his reporting and reported some of the abuses on the other side.
Overall, though, there is good information here that those with a Premil, Pretrib view ought to consider. Every Christian ought to consider these things before pledging allegiance to the nation of Israel, which is not necessarily the friend of human rights or Christianity, for that matter.
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Anthony J. Cavaliere
4.0 out of 5 stars Eye opening
Reviewed in the United States on 22 September 2003
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This work is a look at a difficult situation from an evangelical Christian perspective. It is a different view that actually demonstrates the enormous complexity of the situation. Burge writes some things that are tough to take because they run counter to the black and white dispensational theology that is so popular among fundamentalist Christians and Charismatics. The current nation of Israel has done unrighteous deeds in the name of God. Christians have supported them from the false perspective that this is a fulfillment of God's prophetic plan. Yet Israel is an unrighteous nation that has killed in the name of God. Israel has deprived thousands of people of their rights to justice. Israel has dispossessed people from their homes and lands with no compensation, not just Moselms but Arab Christians as well. Burge does not condone the acts of the Arab jihad and the suicide bombers but neither does he condone the unrighteous behavior of the Israelis. His conclusion is that we Christians should not be supporting Israeli unjustice. These acts of unrighteousness are hurting our Christian brethren who live in Palestine.
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Eng Boo Tan
4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting insight into the problem of Palestinians and Israelis
Reviewed in the United States on 26 June 2020
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Very well written and easy to read. A must reading for those going to the Holy Land. While it is a must to visit biblical sites in Israel there is need to remember the Palestinian Christians too.
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M. Louise Cordova
5.0 out of 5 stars Better go back and read what happened to the Israelites ...
Reviewed in the United States on 28 July 2016
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What an eye opener. God didn't give Israelis the land, but allowed to inhabit the land by keeping his covenants.
I don't believe that destroying the homes of Palestinians and oppressing them is in keeping with Gods
covenant. Better go back and read what happened to the Israelites in the OT when they thought their actions were more important than God's covenant.
A must read for those traveling to Israel and the West Bank.
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Carol L. Tuck
5.0 out of 5 stars Stakeholders
Reviewed in the United States on 19 August 2013
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Though this book is written primarily to make Christians aware of the issues about the conflict in Israel/Palestine, I invite all people interested in the region to read it. Most important question in the book, page 161, "Am I a stakeholder in this problem?" I recommend people read the book to answer the question. This is the first book I have read by Gary Burge, but I will be checking out whatelse he has written.
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Ed Thomas
5.0 out of 5 stars Interpreting God's covenant
Reviewed in the United States on 29 September 2005
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The book begins by showing us that any gains made by the Zionists in forming Israel were offset by corresponding losses to indigenous Palestinians, both Christians and Moslems. Through quotes from scripture it's shown that the harsh treatment of the Palestinians in forming Israel was and is against God's law. These transgressions lead to a presentation of an alternative interpretation of God's covenant regarding "the land". The book is very well organized and referenced. It will be a most illuminating read for most folks. The book is neither pro Israel nor "anti-semetic".
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Catriona Erler
5.0 out of 5 stars Well Written and Reasoned
Reviewed in the United States on 10 November 2003
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Whose Land? Whose Promise? should be required reading for anyone who wants to know what is really going on in Israel/Palestine. With clear, well-written prose that makes this book a pleasure to read, Gary Burge tackles the thorny problem of Jewish/Palestinian relations from a strong, well-reasoned biblical perspective. Read it with an open mind and an open heart, and you'll have a much deeper understanding of the historic, spiritual, and political background of this tempestuous corner of the world.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Let's be pro-Israel. Pro-palestinian. And pro-Jesus. One ...
Reviewed in the United States on 20 March 2017
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Let's be pro-Israel. Pro-palestinian. And pro-Jesus. One of the most important books I've ever read.
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MagicMan
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on 11 February 2017
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Great book
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TCCAmadala
4.0 out of 5 stars Great author, good book
Reviewed in the United States on 22 April 2013
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Anything Gary Burge writes is worth reading, so this is an addition to that list (although it is not new).
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Dan R. Turbeville
1.0 out of 5 stars Received a used book instead of a new one.
Reviewed in the United States on 15 December 2023
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I ordered a new book and received a used book that is written in. Extremely disappointed. Giving it has a gift and it is too late to return!!
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Laurena Schuemann
5.0 out of 5 stars Should be required reading for every Christian
Reviewed in the United States on 24 March 2013
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
It continues to be incredible that people are blindly accepting the illegal settlements in The West Bank. "Once you know - you can never not know"
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Seysme
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for all Christians!
Reviewed in the United States on 27 March 2016
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Easy to read and thorough. A MUST READ for ALL Christians!!!
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Dani
5.0 out of 5 stars Great
Reviewed in the United States on 5 September 2017
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So informative. Great perspective
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Charles N. Sheley
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on 24 August 2014
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A side of the conflict that people need to know about.
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Rosalie A.Moyer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on 25 April 2016
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Very intense. Very timely.
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J. Michael
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent perspective
Reviewed in the United States on 19 March 2006
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It is good to finally read a balanced evangelical account of how people are suffering in Palestine and how we evangelicals have inadvertently played into it.
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Dedaugh
5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT TRANSACTION
Reviewed in the United States on 9 June 2007
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Couldn't ask for a better transaction. Fast shipping & book in great condition!
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To see mor
==
== CONTENTS
Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition 1. The Dilemma of Israel/Palestine for Christians PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND TO THE PROBLEM 2. Knowing the Land 3. Knowing the History PART TWO: THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE LAND 4. The Land Promises of Abraham 5. The Nation of Israel and the Land 6. The Prophets and the Land 7. Jerusalem 8. Modern Israel in the Land PART THREE: THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE LAND 9. Jesus and the Early Christians 10. The Palestinian Church 11. Living Stones in the Land 12. Evangelicals and the Land 13. Where Do We Go from Here? Index of Subjects and Names
ISAIAH’S SONG OF THE VINEYARD Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? —ISAIAH 5:1–4
CONTENTS
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the First Edition
1. The Dilemma of Israel/Palestine for Christians
PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND TO THE PROBLEM
2. Knowing the Land
3. Knowing the History
PART TWO: THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE LAND
4. The Land Promises of Abraham
5. The Nation of Israel and the Land
6. The Prophets and the Land
7. Jerusalem
8. Modern Israel in the Land
PART THREE: THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE LAND
9. Jesus and the Early Christians
10. The Palestinian Church
11. Living Stones in the Land
12. Evangelicals and the Land
13. Where Do We Go from Here?
Index of Subjects and Names
ISAIAH’S SONG OF THE VINEYARD
Let me sing for my beloved
my love-song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
he expected it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.
And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
and people of Judah,
judge between me
and my vineyard.
What more was there to do for my vineyard
that I have not done in it?
When I expected it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?
—ISAIAH 5:1–4
Book Navigation
Jump Back
Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition 1. The Dilemma of Israel/Palestine for Christians PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND TO THE PROBLEM 2. Knowing the Land 3. Knowing the History PART TWO: THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE LAND 4. The Land Promises of Abraham 5. The Nation of Israel and the Land 6. The Prophets and the Land 7. Jerusalem 8. Modern Israel in the Land PART THREE: THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE LAND 9. Jesus and the Early Christians 10. The Palestinian Church 11. Living Stones in the Land 12. Evangelicals and the Land 13. Where Do We Go from Here? Index of Subjects and Names
ISAIAH’S SONG OF THE VINEYARD Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? —ISAIAH 5:1–4
CONTENTS
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the First Edition
1. The Dilemma of Israel/Palestine for Christians
PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND TO THE PROBLEM
2. Knowing the Land
3. Knowing the History
PART TWO: THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE LAND
4. The Land Promises of Abraham
5. The Nation of Israel and the Land
6. The Prophets and the Land
7. Jerusalem
8. Modern Israel in the Land
PART THREE: THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE LAND
9. Jesus and the Early Christians
10. The Palestinian Church
11. Living Stones in the Land
12. Evangelicals and the Land
13. Where Do We Go from Here?
Index of Subjects and Names
ISAIAH’S SONG OF THE VINEYARD
Let me sing for my beloved
my love-song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
he expected it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.
And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
and people of Judah,
judge between me
and my vineyard.
What more was there to do for my vineyard
that I have not done in it?
When I expected it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?
—ISAIAH 5:1–4
Book Navigation
Jump Back
Preface to the Second Edition
As I write this preface, thousands of missiles and rockets have flown between Gaza and Israel. For the first time, Gazan rockets landed close to Israel’s major population centers such as Tel Aviv. And in retaliation, Israel unleashed a missile and bombing campaign that killed scores of resistance leaders and civilians alike. Never has the need to understand this crisis been greater. Since the publication of this book in 2003, interest in Israel/Palestine has only increased. Because events in the Middle East continued to escalate in tragic complexity, Christians have sought a guide to make sense of it all. Since 2003 events have also changed dramatically. A violent Palestinian uprising begun in 2000 exhausted itself six years later. A full war in Iraq has now come to a close. Uprisings in multiple Arab countries (Libya, Egypt, and Syria, to name three) have toppled long-standing leaders, some of whom are now dead. And the peace process in Israel-Palestine is paralyzed—while the Israeli occupation expands and Palestinian frustration simmers. Today a thirty-foot (nine-meter) cement wall surrounds many Palestinian cities, inspiring dark comparisons with other occupations in other places. And Israelis seem less interested than ever in engaging Palestinians, who no longer present a genuine danger. In September 2010 Time magazine published the cover story “Why Israel Doesn’t Care about Peace.” It caused a storm. Israel does care about peace—but today working for peace is low on the Israeli national agenda (argued Time). However, the recent conflicts with Gaza have made Israelis everywhere apprehensive again. A friend in Israel wrote me recently: we feel afraid, sick, and desperate. So much has changed that it made sense to offer a complete second edition to the original edition of Whose Land? Whose Promise? The book’s original purposes have not changed. Here in the West, we generally hear only one narrative about the Israel-Palestine struggle. We know that narrative well and its defenders assert its legitimacy regularly, particularly in our churches. This book attempts to explain to Christians that there is a second narrative no less important. It is a narrative about people who also dream about a peaceful, secure future—a future they deserve just as every Israeli deserves it. It is a narrative about loss and betrayal and struggle—and an Arabic-speaking Christian church that is caught up in the middle of it. But we rarely hear that second narrative. One story will help. Last month I did an interview with a major American news organization—so influential that the majority of Americans will hear from some of its outlets weekly. I was asked, “What should evangelicals think of the current [November 2012] missile/rocket exchanges between Israel and Gaza?” I explained how often, like many Americans, my evangelical community tends to have a superficial understanding of these things and I urged that we understand the foundational causes of such conflicts on both sides. That we talk about things such as Israeli fears of annihilation and Palestinian anger about occupation, how Gaza had been under a harsh economic blockade for years. And then the interviewer interrupted me. “I can’t use any of this,” she said. “What?” I asked. “You’re trying to put a human face on the Palestinians in Gaza and if I wrote that I’d get fired,” she responded. “Really?” I followed. “Of course,” she said, and went on to describe someone at CNN who had lost her job in twenty-four hours for just tweeting something sympathetic about Gaza. “I know this backstory well but where I work there’s no room for it. Maybe we can talk again some time.” And after twenty minutes, we both knew the interview was over. Her parting words: “You have to realize that on this subject there is very little freedom of the press in America.” The sentence haunted me for days. Here in America—as readers might guess—anyone who writes on this topic will draw critics. The collection of letters I have received from Christians is absolutely stunning. The blog postings are worse. A few have been constructive and helpful—others, many others, have been harsh and uncharitable. Reactions to this book (just read the reader reviews on Amazon) almost represent how polarized we are as a country on the topic of Israel and the Palestinians. We don’t discuss this topic. We argue about it. Where some readers have made helpful criticisms of this book’s first edition (especially Messianic Jewish readers in Israel), I have amended the text where needed. In fact, I have had specific input from Jewish Israeli friends who have helped the book enormously. For the first time in my thirty years of studying this conflict, I now see political leaders in both Israel and Palestine experiencing resignation and despair over the future. In polling among Israelis and Palestinians, when asked if they see a “hopeful future” for their country, the majority says “no.” Even Western experts such as Dr. John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago see few hopeful prospects for this conflict. Israelis and Palestinians are deadlocked in a struggle and few see any way of emerging from it. Consequently, polarizing voices from the far ends of the political spectrum are calling for more and more extreme responses to conditions inside the country. But it is in precisely this environment of toxic despair that new things may emerge. Fear exhausts us. And we wonder, we often pray, that we might defeat these fears in some new, creative way. Such toxic fear may lead to war to be sure; but such times may also give rise to new movements that leave the shrill political leaders and their angry media pundits behind. Imagine Palestinian Christians and Messianic Jews forging new relationships and acknowledging to one another the legitimacy of each other’s fears and suffering. Imagine women—Jews and Arabs—coming together because they have one thing in common: they have each lost children to this violence. Imagine Israeli military officers refusing to serve in the Occupied West Bank as a matter of conscience. And Palestinian church leaders studying nonviolence and speaking publicly about renouncing anger. Imagine Messianic Jews and Palestinian Christians praying together and studying courageous reconciliation together. Imagine younger generations of Israelis and Palestinians refusing to embrace the angry script of their parents and seeking a way to share a land that has been awash in violence for too long. And imagine younger generations of American evangelicals—I see them every day at my college—for whom ethics is more important than eschatology. Who are no longer amused by prophecy books and instead want to see a church inspired by compassion and justice. These young voices hold all hope for the future. A friend of mine who speaks regularly on this topic has said it most clearly: It is time for Christians to be pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, and pro-Jesus. I agree. This small land holds about 5.8 million Jews. And it holds about 5.3 million Palestinians (1.5m in Israel; 3.8m under military occupation). These details are so important we should graph them (see pie chart). This is remarkable. These populations are almost evenly divided (and given the Arab birth rate, the Palestinian population will be 50 percent very soon) which means that any hopeful future must be a shared future where both communities learn to live in genuine peace and security. One community cannot be “occupied” with
its freedoms denied in the name of security. And the other community cannot be “threatened” with calls of destruction. In my final chapter I’ll outline what most believe are the only options left for these communities. Israel is a good country. At their deepest level, Israelis fear annihilation—a fear rooted in centuries of dreadful experiences in the Western world, culminating in the holocaust. Palestinians are good people. At their deepest, they fear displacement—a fear that they will be ejected or exiled from this land their ancestors have cultivated for centuries. And if not exiled they fear they will never escape a horrendous imprisonment in their own cities. Only when both of these fears are addressed will there be any hope for these good people.
As I write this preface, thousands of missiles and rockets have flown between Gaza and Israel. For the first time, Gazan rockets landed close to Israel’s major population centers such as Tel Aviv. And in retaliation, Israel unleashed a missile and bombing campaign that killed scores of resistance leaders and civilians alike. Never has the need to understand this crisis been greater.
Since the publication of this book in 2003, interest in Israel/Palestine has only increased. Because events in the Middle East continued to escalate in tragic complexity, Christians have sought a guide to make sense of it all. Since 2003 events have also changed dramatically. A violent Palestinian uprising begun in 2000 exhausted itself six years later. A full war in Iraq has now come to a close. Uprisings in multiple Arab countries (Libya, Egypt, and Syria, to name three) have toppled long-standing leaders, some of whom are now dead. And the peace process in Israel-Palestine is paralyzed—while the Israeli occupation expands and Palestinian frustration simmers. Today a thirty-foot (nine-meter) cement wall surrounds many Palestinian cities, inspiring dark comparisons with other occupations in other places. And Israelis seem less interested than ever in engaging Palestinians, who no longer present a genuine danger. In September 2010 Time magazine published the cover story Why Israel Doesn’t Care about Peace. It caused a storm. Israel does care about peace—but today working for peace is low on the Israeli national agenda (argued Time). However, the recent conflicts with Gaza have made Israelis everywhere apprehensive again. A friend in Israel wrote me recently: we feel afraid, sick, and desperate.
So much has changed that it made sense to offer a complete second edition to the original edition of Whose Land? Whose Promise? The book’s original purposes have not changed. Here in the West, we generally hear only one narrative about the Israel-Palestine struggle. We know that narrative well and its defenders assert its legitimacy regularly, particularly in our churches. This book attempts to explain to Christians that there is a second narrative no less important. It is a narrative about people who also dream about a peaceful, secure future—a future they deserve just as every Israeli deserves it. It is a narrative about loss and betrayal and struggle—and an Arabic-speaking Christian church that is caught up in the middle of it.
But we rarely hear that second narrative. One story will help. Last month I did an interview with a major American news organization—so influential that the majority of Americans will hear from some of its outlets weekly. I was asked, What should evangelicals think of the current [November 2012] missile/rocket exchanges between Israel and Gaza? I explained how often, like many Americans, my evangelical community tends to have a superficial understanding of these things and I urged that we understand the foundational causes of such conflicts on both sides. That we talk about things such as Israeli fears of annihilation and Palestinian anger about occupation, how Gaza had been under a harsh economic blockade for years. And then the interviewer interrupted me. I can’t use any of this, she said. What? I asked. You’re trying to put a human face on the Palestinians in Gaza and if I wrote that I’d get fired, she responded. Really? I followed. Of course, she said, and went on to describe someone at CNN who had lost her job in twenty-four hours for just tweeting something sympathetic about Gaza. I know this backstory well but where I work there’s no room for it. Maybe we can talk again some time. And after twenty minutes, we both knew the interview was over. Her parting words: You have to realize that on this subject there is very little freedom of the press in America. The sentence haunted me for days.
Here in America—as readers might guess—anyone who writes on this topic will draw critics. The collection of letters I have received from Christians is absolutely stunning. The blog postings are worse. A few have been constructive and helpful—others, many others, have been harsh and uncharitable. Reactions to this book (just read the reader reviews on Amazon) almost represent how polarized we are as a country on the topic of Israel and the Palestinians. We don’t discuss this topic. We argue about it. Where some readers have made helpful criticisms of this book’s first edition (especially Messianic Jewish readers in Israel), I have amended the text where needed. In fact, I have had specific input from Jewish Israeli friends who have helped the book enormously.
For the first time in my thirty years of studying this conflict, I now see political leaders in both Israel and Palestine experiencing resignation and despair over the future. In polling among Israelis and Palestinians, when asked if they see a hopeful future for their country, the majority says no. Even Western experts such as Dr. John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago see few hopeful prospects for this conflict. Israelis and Palestinians are deadlocked in a struggle and few see any way of emerging from it. Consequently, polarizing voices from the far ends of the political spectrum are calling for more and more extreme responses to conditions inside the country.
But it is in precisely this environment of toxic despair that new things may emerge. Fear exhausts us. And we wonder, we often pray, that we might defeat these fears in some new, creative way. Such toxic fear may lead to war to be sure; but such times may also give rise to new movements that leave the shrill political leaders and their angry media pundits behind.
Imagine Palestinian Christians and Messianic Jews forging new relationships and acknowledging to one another the legitimacy of each other’s fears and suffering. Imagine women—Jews and Arabs—coming together because they have one thing in common: they have each lost children to this violence. Imagine Israeli military officers refusing to serve in the Occupied West Bank as a matter of conscience. And Palestinian church leaders studying nonviolence and speaking publicly about renouncing anger. Imagine Messianic Jews and Palestinian Christians praying together and studying courageous reconciliation together. Imagine younger generations of Israelis and Palestinians refusing to embrace the angry script of their parents and seeking a way to share a land that has been awash in violence for too long. And imagine younger generations of American evangelicals—I see them every day at my college—for whom ethics is more important than eschatology. Who are no longer amused by prophecy books and instead want to see a church inspired by compassion and justice. These young voices hold all hope for the future.
A friend of mine who speaks regularly on this topic has said it most clearly: It is time for Christians to be pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, and pro-Jesus. I agree. This small land holds about 5.8 million Jews. And it holds about 5.3 million Palestinians (1.5m in Israel; 3.8m under military occupation). These details are so important we should graph them (see pie chart). This is remarkable. These populations are almost evenly divided (and given the Arab birth rate, the Palestinian population will be 50 percent very soon) which means that any hopeful future must be a shared future where both communities learn to live in genuine peace and security. One community cannot be occupied with
its freedoms denied in the name of security. And the other community cannot be threatened with calls of destruction. In my final chapter I’ll outline what most believe are the only options left for these communities.
Israel is a good country. At their deepest level, Israelis fear annihilation—a fear rooted in centuries of dreadful experiences in the Western world, culminating in the holocaust. Palestinians are good people. At their deepest, they fear displacement—a fear that they will be ejected or exiled from this land their ancestors have cultivated for centuries. And if not exiled they fear they will never escape a horrendous imprisonment in their own cities.
Only when both of these fears are addressed will there be any hope for these good people.
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Preface to the First Edition
Whoever walks four cubits in the Land of Israel is assured of a place in the world to come. —BABYLONIAN TALMUD, KETHUBOTH 110B–111A On March 20, 2000, Pope John Paul II fulfilled one of his life dreams at the age of seventy-nine. He visited the Holy Land. He began in Jordan and first traveled to Mt. Nebo in order to glimpse the land as Moses saw it for the first time thousands of years ago. But in addition to visiting various holy sites in Jerusalem, John Paul said that a visit to Bethlehem lay “at the heart” of his trip. On March 22 in Bethlehem’s Manger Square, he met thousands of Christians and Muslims who had just festooned the square with Palestinian and Vatican flags. They shouted “Viva Al-Baba” (“Al-Baba” is the Arabic word for the pope) as John Paul was presented with a golden bowl of Palestinian soil, which he kissed—something generally reserved for nations he visits. Following a worship service, the pontiff remarked, “This is a place that has known the yoke and the rod of oppression. How often has the cry of innocents been heard in these streets? Your torment is before the eyes of the world,” he declared. “And it has gone on too long.” And then he did something unexpected—and virtually ignored in the Western press. At 4 p.m., John Paul visited Dheisheh refugee camp outside Bethlehem. Home to over ten thousand people who lost their homes in 1948 when Israel was born, the camp is a tragic example of squalor and poverty. About 650 buildings are squeezed onto Dheisheh’s one square kilometer. That’s over fifteen people per small home. Unemployment is 60 percent. On the Hebron Road that leads to the camp, John Paul was greeted by “The March of the Keys”—hundreds of Dheisheh schoolchildren who were carrying keys to the homes their grandparents lost so many years ago. These keys are handed down now to a third generation as a reminder of the families’ loss and displacement. Most children carried signs bearing the names of their ancestral villages, now bulldozed into the hillsides of Israel. At a public gathering inside the camp, John Paul spoke again: I greet each one of you and I hope and pray that my visit will bring some comfort in your difficult situation. You have been deprived of many things which represent basic needs of the human person: proper housing, health care, education, and work. Above all you bear the sad memory of what you were forced to leave behind, not just material possessions, but your freedom, the closeness of relatives, and the familial surroundings and cultural traditions which nourished your personal and family life. Dear refugees, do not think that your present condition makes you any less important in God’s eyes! Never forget your dignity as his children! Here at Bethlehem the Divine Child was laid in a manger in a stable; shepherds from the nearby fields were the first to receive the heavenly message of peace and hope for the world. God’s design was fulfilled in the midst of humility and poverty. The tableau was astonishing: John Paul standing in a Bethlehem scene as poor as that which greeted Jesus on Christmas morning. John Paul embracing children who carried their grandparents’ iron keys. The pope’s decision to visit Dheisheh Camp reminded me of the tough dilemma I face as a Christian who thinks about Israel today. Since the birth of this nation—a moment in history celebrated by millions of Christians around the world—countless people have suffered. Since 1948, over 400 Arab villages have been either destroyed by bulldozers or occupied by Israeli residents despite UN resolutions calling for the rightful return of these homes and lands to their Arab owners. According to UN records in June 1999, about 3.6 million Palestinian refugees are the victims of Israel’s nationhood.¹ As an evangelical I have a theological interest in Israel’s history and future. As a Christian I recognize the ancestral connection between Jews today and Abraham, Moses, and David. And yet I am confused and troubled when I try to interpret the meaning of this small country and I learn about one more village story, one more set of keys to a lost home, one more house being bulldozed, and more refugees being pushed away from their homeland. The Arab village of Halhoul just outside Hebron illustrates our dilemma nicely. Anyone driving from Jerusalem to Hebron on the main road drives right through it. This ancient village has a history that goes all the way back to the Bible. Halhoul is mentioned in the NIV as “Halhul” and is listed in Joshua 15:58 as among those towns awarded to the tribe of Judah following Joshua’s conquest. Now here is the question: Who owns Halhoul? Should the Arab residents who have lived there for countless centuries be displaced based on a promise given to Joshua? If a Jewish settlement is built tomorrow called, perhaps, Kiryat Halhul, and its settlers claim that they have arrived to fulfill the pledge given by God to Jews—is this claim justified? What happens to the thousands of people who live in Halhoul today? Does such a claim from the Bible trump a claim to historic residence? I also found myself in a similar dilemma almost ten years ago during the height of the Gulf War when Iraq invaded Kuwait. In January 1991, Dr. John Walvoord, formerly president of Dallas Seminary, was being interviewed on Moody Radio in Chicago. While American warplanes were attacking Saddam Hussein’s forces in Iraq and Kuwait, Dr. Walvoord spoke eloquently about Bible prophecy and its fulfillment in the modern Middle East. The presentation was exciting and compelling. Could this configuration of Arab and Western armies spell the beginning of the countdown that would end history? In 1948, Israel had returned to its ancient homeland and reestablished its nationhood—an astonishing twentieth-century miracle. Some orthodox Jewish groups in Jerusalem were even talking about rebuilding the Temple. The puzzle pieces were coming together. As short-range Scud missiles landed in Tel Aviv, many Bible-believing Christians echoed Dr. Walvoord’s sentiments as they studied Ezekiel, Daniel, and the book of Revelation, searching for clues to help decipher each day’s newspaper headlines. Perhaps Armageddon was around the corner. Some were even calling Hussein the Antichrist. Becoming caught up in that enthusiasm was easy. In fact, just before the outbreak of hostilities, many of us cheered the prospect of war. If war means that the second coming of Jesus is approaching, then let the fighting begin! If war means that the eschatological clock will tick a little faster, so be it. Not only were we on the winning side militarily, but we knew that the host of heaven would be drawn into the action soon. But then we saw something disturbing. A laser-guided bomb plowed directly into a bomb shelter and incinerated hundreds of Iraqi children and women hiding there. Reports after the war described that our carpet bombing of the front with B-52s may have ended over 100,000 Iraqi lives. That’s 100,000 people! Many were men and boys
who had no desire whatsoever to be there. Saddam’s elite troops had fled. As the allies moved forward, Iraqi soldiers surrendered eagerly. They were conscripts, many of whom were kept in their bunkers on threat of death. Minefields were laid behind them (to keep them from fleeing) as well as in front of them. By the war’s end, about 115,000 Iraqi soldiers had died, 3,000 Arab civilians had died in the air war, and almost 120,000 civilians had died after the cease fire from civil unrest or war-related ailments.² In a word, the war completely destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure (water, electricity, agriculture). For example, of six hundred poultry farms in the country, only three were left. Factories that once processed food or medicines were in rubble, which has led many to question whether or not the war fulfilled what once was called a “just war.” In the years immediately following the war, masses of Iraqi children (500 per day under the age of five, by some estimates) were still dying from the war’s delayed effects.³ In light of the outcome of the war, I have had to ask myself some hard questions. Did I have room in my heart for the suffering that this war created? Was my commitment to eschatology greater than my commitment to these people, whom God surely loved? I could not justify or excuse the ruthless and unpardonable Iraqi conquest of Kuwait, but something had happened to me. My eschatological zeal, my fervor to see prophecy fulfilled, had made me stereotype the Arabs, making them pawns in some game I was playing with my faith and my Bible. I was in a dilemma. Following the Gulf War, the allied forces led by the United States imposed a strict embargo on Iraq with devastating results. From 1991 till 1998, over 500,000 children in Iraq under the age of five died needlessly according to UNICEF (a welfare unit of the United Nations focused on children).⁴ According to the United Nations, as many as 1 million children are in need of food. Over 1.2 million people have died because of medical shortages or the effects of malnutrition. Denis Halliday served as the first Humanitarian Coordinator for the United Nations in Iraq, and when he resigned in October 1998 he remarked, “We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and as terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.”⁵ In February 2000, Hans von Sponeck, the second UN Humanitarian Coordinator, likewise resigned. He commented: “How long should the civilian population, which is totally innocent of all this, be exposed to such punishment for something that they have never done?”⁶ And then there are the Christians who suffered in this war. Most estimates indicate that 4 percent of Iraq’s 25 million population is Christian—1 million people with whom I am linked by faith.⁷ Today, if 25 percent of an Iraqi village is Christian, the Christian faith must be taught in the schools. Churches can be built freely and open worship is protected. Iraqi Christians who are my friends remind me that they are not being persecuted at all in their country. Of these Christians, who worship in over 250 Iraqi churches, many of them are Presbyterian, exactly like my own denomination. More than ten churches identify themselves as evangelical! On a recent visit to Iraq, I preached in a congregation in Kirkuk, Iraq. During the potluck dinner after the service, you would think you were in any evangelical church anywhere in the United States. Without the approval of the American government, many American Christians have crossed into Iraq, bringing aid to the suffering. Some churches are trying to build “partnership relations” with Iraqi churches, supporting them in their need. But wait. What happened to my zeal during the Gulf War? What happened to the simple and clear categories of “right and wrong” so smoothly outlined on CNN? What happened to those evangelical sermons announcing that we were doing God’s work with our military? Many of us in the evangelical community live with a troubled conscience.⁸ We are learning that our vision is not what it should be. Our excitement at living in “the last days” has led us to overlook some devastating facts about our faith, the Middle East, and what God would have us do. In some cases, we have not been told things, important things, about life as it really is in the Middle East. This situation is even truer today, as our government contemplates further military action against Iraq. In a day of increasing militarism, many of us are deeply disturbed. Israel and the Middle East confront me, as an evangelical Christian, as a professor of New Testament at a large evangelical college, and as a pastor, with an impossible problem. How do I embrace my commitment to Judaism, a commitment to which I am bound by the Bible, when I sense in my deepest being that a profound injustice is afoot in Israel? How do I celebrate the birth of this nation Israel when I also mourn the suffering of Arab Christians who are equally my brothers and sisters in Christ? And how do I love those Palestinian Muslims who are deeply misunderstood by all parties in this conflict? As I write (August 2002), the region has just witnessed almost twenty-four months of breathtaking conflict. Palestinians have traded stones for automatic weapons and bombs—while Israelis have employed attack helicopters, fighter jets, and tanks in a conflict that has now witnessed thousands of causalities throughout the country. Palestinians have died at four times the rate of the Israelis, and so I am forced to ask: How should I feel about this? Where should my sympathies be lodged? This book is not written for the academic historian or the technically trained theologian, although its conclusions and observations are based on many academic works. This book is practical, written for the average Christian who, like me, struggles on a basic personal level with the dilemma of Israel and the Palestinians within conservative theological framework. Discerning readers will at once see that this book has been a personal exploration of my own. In it I have tried to explore and distill the essential ideas that we must acknowledge if we are to understand Israel fully. Some will quickly look to see “where I come out”: Is he pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian? I have tried to enter both communities—Israeli and Arab—in order to listen with compassion. I have likely spent more nights sleeping in Israeli kibbutzim than in Arab homes. I am as comfortable riding an Israeli Egged bus out of Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station as I am taking an Arab taxi into central Hebron. I have stayed in Gaza City as well as Israeli West Bank settlements. Hopefully, such readers will patiently and thoughtfully weigh the evidence as I have done and discover that grave problems lie within Israel/Palestine. Throughout the book I have been careful in my use of words that are loaded with special meanings. Virtually everything—from the color of one’s license plate to one’s address—has some political meaning in Israel/Palestine. The same is true of vocabulary. For example, I use “Israel/Palestine” when referring to the larger country, which includes the lands occupied in the 1967 war (particularly the West Bank and Gaza). This term respects both peoples’ desire for national identity. Palestine is an ancient word that has been used since Roman times to describe this land.⁹ And today, “Palestinian” has become the preferred title of the people who live there. When I refer to Israel or Israeli, I generally mean the Jewish nation formed in 1948. Many people contributed to the writing of this book, and I want to render thanks
Whoever walks four cubits in the Land of Israel is assured of a place in the world to come.
—BABYLONIAN TALMUD, KETHUBOTH 110B–111A
On March 20, 2000, Pope John Paul II fulfilled one of his life dreams at the age of seventy-nine. He visited the Holy Land. He began in Jordan and first traveled to Mt. Nebo in order to glimpse the land as Moses saw it for the first time thousands of years ago. But in addition to visiting various holy sites in Jerusalem, John Paul said that a visit to Bethlehem lay at the heart of his trip. On March 22 in Bethlehem’s Manger Square, he met thousands of Christians and Muslims who had just festooned the square with Palestinian and Vatican flags. They shouted Viva Al-Baba (Al-Baba is the Arabic word for the pope) as John Paul was presented with a golden bowl of Palestinian soil, which he kissed—something generally reserved for nations he visits. Following a worship service, the pontiff remarked, This is a place that has known the yoke and the rod of oppression. How often has the cry of innocents been heard in these streets? Your torment is before the eyes of the world, he declared. And it has gone on too long.
And then he did something unexpected—and virtually ignored in the Western press. At 4 p.m., John Paul visited Dheisheh refugee camp outside Bethlehem. Home to over ten thousand people who lost their homes in 1948 when Israel was born, the camp is a tragic example of squalor and poverty. About 650 buildings are squeezed onto Dheisheh’s one square kilometer. That’s over fifteen people per small home. Unemployment is 60 percent. On the Hebron Road that leads to the camp, John Paul was greeted by The March of the Keys—hundreds of Dheisheh schoolchildren who were carrying keys to the homes their grandparents lost so many years ago. These keys are handed down now to a third generation as a reminder of the families’ loss and displacement. Most children carried signs bearing the names of their ancestral villages, now bulldozed into the hillsides of Israel.
At a public gathering inside the camp, John Paul spoke again:
I greet each one of you and I hope and pray that my visit will bring some comfort in your difficult situation. You have been deprived of many things which represent basic needs of the human person: proper housing, health care, education, and work. Above all you bear the sad memory of what you were forced to leave behind, not just material possessions, but your freedom, the closeness of relatives, and the familial surroundings and cultural traditions which nourished your personal and family life.
Dear refugees, do not think that your present condition makes you any less important in God’s eyes! Never forget your dignity as his children! Here at Bethlehem the Divine Child was laid in a manger in a stable; shepherds from the nearby fields were the first to receive the heavenly message of peace and hope for the world. God’s design was fulfilled in the midst of humility and poverty.
The tableau was astonishing: John Paul standing in a Bethlehem scene as poor as that which greeted Jesus on Christmas morning. John Paul embracing children who carried their grandparents’ iron keys.
The pope’s decision to visit Dheisheh Camp reminded me of the tough dilemma I face as a Christian who thinks about Israel today. Since the birth of this nation—a moment in history celebrated by millions of Christians around the world—countless people have suffered. Since 1948, over 400 Arab villages have been either destroyed by bulldozers or occupied by Israeli residents despite UN resolutions calling for the rightful return of these homes and lands to their Arab owners. According to UN records in June 1999, about 3.6 million Palestinian refugees are the victims of Israel’s nationhood.¹
As an evangelical I have a theological interest in Israel’s history and future. As a Christian I recognize the ancestral connection between Jews today and Abraham, Moses, and David. And yet I am confused and troubled when I try to interpret the meaning of this small country and I learn about one more village story, one more set of keys to a lost home, one more house being bulldozed, and more refugees being pushed away from their homeland.
The Arab village of Halhoul just outside Hebron illustrates our dilemma nicely. Anyone driving from Jerusalem to Hebron on the main road drives right through it. This ancient village has a history that goes all the way back to the Bible. Halhoul is mentioned in the NIV as Halhul and is listed in Joshua 15:58 as among those towns awarded to the tribe of Judah following Joshua’s conquest. Now here is the question: Who owns Halhoul? Should the Arab residents who have lived there for countless centuries be displaced based on a promise given to Joshua? If a Jewish settlement is built tomorrow called, perhaps, Kiryat Halhul, and its settlers claim that they have arrived to fulfill the pledge given by God to Jews—is this claim justified? What happens to the thousands of people who live in Halhoul today? Does such a claim from the Bible trump a claim to historic residence?
I also found myself in a similar dilemma almost ten years ago during the height of the Gulf War when Iraq invaded Kuwait. In January 1991, Dr. John Walvoord, formerly president of Dallas Seminary, was being interviewed on Moody Radio in Chicago. While American warplanes were attacking Saddam Hussein’s forces in Iraq and Kuwait, Dr. Walvoord spoke eloquently about Bible prophecy and its fulfillment in the modern Middle East.
The presentation was exciting and compelling. Could this configuration of Arab and Western armies spell the beginning of the countdown that would end history? In 1948, Israel had returned to its ancient homeland and reestablished its nationhood—an astonishing twentieth-century miracle. Some orthodox Jewish groups in Jerusalem were even talking about rebuilding the Temple. The puzzle pieces were coming together. As short-range Scud missiles landed in Tel Aviv, many Bible-believing Christians echoed Dr. Walvoord’s sentiments as they studied Ezekiel, Daniel, and the book of Revelation, searching for clues to help decipher each day’s newspaper headlines. Perhaps Armageddon was around the corner. Some were even calling Hussein the Antichrist.
Becoming caught up in that enthusiasm was easy. In fact, just before the outbreak of hostilities, many of us cheered the prospect of war. If war means that the second coming of Jesus is approaching, then let the fighting begin! If war means that the eschatological clock will tick a little faster, so be it. Not only were we on the winning side militarily, but we knew that the host of heaven would be drawn into the action soon.
But then we saw something disturbing. A laser-guided bomb plowed directly into a bomb shelter and incinerated hundreds of Iraqi children and women hiding there. Reports after the war described that our carpet bombing of the front with B-52s may have ended over 100,000 Iraqi lives. That’s 100,000 people! Many were men and boys
who had no desire whatsoever to be there. Saddam’s elite troops had fled. As the allies moved forward, Iraqi soldiers surrendered eagerly. They were conscripts, many of whom were kept in their bunkers on threat of death. Minefields were laid behind them (to keep them from fleeing) as well as in front of them. By the war’s end, about 115,000 Iraqi soldiers had died, 3,000 Arab civilians had died in the air war, and almost 120,000 civilians had died after the cease fire from civil unrest or war-related ailments.² In a word, the war completely destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure (water, electricity, agriculture). For example, of six hundred poultry farms in the country, only three were left. Factories that once processed food or medicines were in rubble, which has led many to question whether or not the war fulfilled what once was called a just war. In the years immediately following the war, masses of Iraqi children (500 per day under the age of five, by some estimates) were still dying from the war’s delayed effects.³
In light of the outcome of the war, I have had to ask myself some hard questions. Did I have room in my heart for the suffering that this war created? Was my commitment to eschatology greater than my commitment to these people, whom God surely loved? I could not justify or excuse the ruthless and unpardonable Iraqi conquest of Kuwait, but something had happened to me. My eschatological zeal, my fervor to see prophecy fulfilled, had made me stereotype the Arabs, making them pawns in some game I was playing with my faith and my Bible. I was in a dilemma.
Following the Gulf War, the allied forces led by the United States imposed a strict embargo on Iraq with devastating results. From 1991 till 1998, over 500,000 children in Iraq under the age of five died needlessly according to UNICEF (a welfare unit of the United Nations focused on children).⁴ According to the United Nations, as many as 1 million children are in need of food. Over 1.2 million people have died because of medical shortages or the effects of malnutrition. Denis Halliday served as the first Humanitarian Coordinator for the United Nations in Iraq, and when he resigned in October 1998 he remarked, We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and as terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.⁵ In February 2000, Hans von Sponeck, the second UN Humanitarian Coordinator, likewise resigned. He commented: How long should the civilian population, which is totally innocent of all this, be exposed to such punishment for something that they have never done?⁶
And then there are the Christians who suffered in this war. Most estimates indicate that 4 percent of Iraq’s 25 million population is Christian—1 million people with whom I am linked by faith.⁷ Today, if 25 percent of an Iraqi village is Christian, the Christian faith must be taught in the schools. Churches can be built freely and open worship is protected. Iraqi Christians who are my friends remind me that they are not being persecuted at all in their country.
Of these Christians, who worship in over 250 Iraqi churches, many of them are Presbyterian, exactly like my own denomination. More than ten churches identify themselves as evangelical! On a recent visit to Iraq, I preached in a congregation in Kirkuk, Iraq. During the potluck dinner after the service, you would think you were in any evangelical church anywhere in the United States. Without the approval of the American government, many American Christians have crossed into Iraq, bringing aid to the suffering. Some churches are trying to build partnership relations with Iraqi churches, supporting them in their need.
But wait. What happened to my zeal during the Gulf War? What happened to the simple and clear categories of right and wrong so smoothly outlined on CNN? What happened to those evangelical sermons announcing that we were doing God’s work with our military?
Many of us in the evangelical community live with a troubled conscience.⁸ We are learning that our vision is not what it should be. Our excitement at living in the last days has led us to overlook some devastating facts about our faith, the Middle East, and what God would have us do. In some cases, we have not been told things, important things, about life as it really is in the Middle East. This situation is even truer today, as our government contemplates further military action against Iraq. In a day of increasing militarism, many of us are deeply disturbed.
Israel and the Middle East confront me, as an evangelical Christian, as a professor of New Testament at a large evangelical college, and as a pastor, with an impossible problem. How do I embrace my commitment to Judaism, a commitment to which I am bound by the Bible, when I sense in my deepest being that a profound injustice is afoot in Israel? How do I celebrate the birth of this nation Israel when I also mourn the suffering of Arab Christians who are equally my brothers and sisters in Christ? And how do I love those Palestinian Muslims who are deeply misunderstood by all parties in this conflict? As I write (August 2002), the region has just witnessed almost twenty-four months of breathtaking conflict. Palestinians have traded stones for automatic weapons and bombs—while Israelis have employed attack helicopters, fighter jets, and tanks in a conflict that has now witnessed thousands of causalities throughout the country. Palestinians have died at four times the rate of the Israelis, and so I am forced to ask: How should I feel about this? Where should my sympathies be lodged?
This book is not written for the academic historian or the technically trained theologian, although its conclusions and observations are based on many academic works. This book is practical, written for the average Christian who, like me, struggles on a basic personal level with the dilemma of Israel and the Palestinians within conservative theological framework.
Discerning readers will at once see that this book has been a personal exploration of my own. In it I have tried to explore and distill the essential ideas that we must acknowledge if we are to understand Israel fully. Some will quickly look to see where I come out: Is he pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian? I have tried to enter both communities—Israeli and Arab—in order to listen with compassion. I have likely spent more nights sleeping in Israeli kibbutzim than in Arab homes. I am as comfortable riding an Israeli Egged bus out of Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station as I am taking an Arab taxi into central Hebron. I have stayed in Gaza City as well as Israeli West Bank settlements. Hopefully, such readers will patiently and thoughtfully weigh the evidence as I have done and discover that grave problems lie within Israel/Palestine.
Throughout the book I have been careful in my use of words that are loaded with special meanings. Virtually everything—from the color of one’s license plate to one’s address—has some political meaning in Israel/Palestine. The same is true of vocabulary. For example, I use Israel/Palestine when referring to the larger country, which includes the lands occupied in the 1967 war (particularly the West Bank and Gaza). This term respects both peoples’ desire for national identity. Palestine is an ancient word that has been used since Roman times to describe this land.⁹ And today, Palestinian has become the preferred title of the people who live there. When I refer to Israel or Israeli, I generally mean the Jewish nation formed in 1948.
Many people contributed to the writing of this book, and I want to render thanks
Book Navigation
Jump Back
==
where it is due. An original version was published in 1993 as Who Are God’s People in the Middle East? What Christians Are Not Being Told about Israel and the Palestinians. The bulk of its research was done while I was on sabbatical at North Park University. Since 1993 my interest in Israel/Palestine has continued, leading me to travel to the country annually. After I joined the faculty of Wheaton College, I continued my interest by leading numerous trips and most recently conducting a thorough research trip on the future of the Palestinian church. Thanks are due to Wheaton’s generous Aldeen Fund for faculty research that financed this work. One of the chief changes to research today is the use of the Internet. Today Palestinians are talking with each other and with people around the world thanks to e-mail, websites, and instant messaging. They are cataloguing their grievances (visit: www.electronicintifada.net) and cataloguing the data of their struggle.¹⁰ Jewish sites are doing the same. When I cite figures for home demolitions, for instance, I generally use the Israeli site B’Tselem (www.btselem.org), since it cannot be accused of bearing pro-Palestinian bias. Within hours of a death on either side of the war, digital images are circulating to any who are connected. In most cases, when an especially helpful website has served to give insight to a problem or a movement, I have supplied the web address in the footnotes. Many friends in Israel/Palestine invited me to enter their world in a way that few visitors have an opportunity to experience. They trusted me, and for this trust I cannot express enough appreciation. Many of their names and their stories are found in the pages of this book, and I deem it a high privilege to be representing them and their concerns. The first person to invite me to have a glimpse of this story was the late Audeh Rantisi, once an Anglican pastor in Ramallah. Audeh and his wife Pat brought me to their home during the hard days of the first Uprising (the Intifada), and from that vantage I saw firsthand what violent occupation looks like. Personal experiences like these are not forgotten. Over the last ten years a number of people have become friends in a network of people who are committed to the Palestinian church and are able to bridge these interests to Christians in the West. A few deserve mention: Na’im Ateek, Nora Kort, Bishara Awad, Salim Munayer. Many Westerners have likewise devoted their energies to this enterprise, and their wisdom has been essential: Don Wagner, Tom Getman, Ken Bailey, David Neff, and the many friends in the advocacy group Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding. Students have also served as research assistants. Kathy Marsh, now working in Bosnia, served as my assistant in 1993. Recently Rachel Weissburg worked tirelessly updating the book’s historical sections and has provided helpful editorial suggestions throughout. Editorial readers have also included Issam Smeir and Ashleigh Burge. The maps were drawn with the expert hand of one of my students, Laura Brosius. Thanks are also due to Bob Land and John Eagleson, whose editorial work improved the text enormously. Finally, the index was compiled by Robert Rectenwald, a Wheaton College graduate student. A special thank-you goes to my wife, Carol, who has generously encouraged me to make so many trips to Israel/Palestine (as well as most of the other Arab countries). Her support has helped me pursue this issue for many years. Likewise our daughters, Ashleigh and Grace, have been patient during my many absences, and they have inherited something of these issues. I will never forget watching Ashleigh in 1995 (when she was twelve) impatiently listening to a predictable lecture on land rights by an Israeli professor while he stood in front of fifty college students at Jerusalem University College. Much to everyone’s amazement, single-handedly Ashleigh challenged him from the audience, asking him all of the hard questions that I hope the church will ask today. PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION (2004) Since the publication of the original hardcover edition of this book (spring 2003), the tensions in Israel/Palestine have shown no sign of abating. The so-called “Second Intifada” (or Al Aqsa Intifada) that began in September, 2000, has continued to expand and the Israel occupation has tightened its grip over the West Bank and Gaza. Yasser Arafat’s administrative compound in Ramallah has been virtually destroyed, thus crippling its ability to govern. And this has empowered increasingly violent resistance groups such as Hamas. Casualty numbers are a telling indicator of the suffering on both sides of this conflict: From September 2000, 2,780 Palestinians have died and 25,201 have been injured (Palestine Red Crescent, to March 19, 2004). On the Israeli side, there have been 834 deaths and 5,394 injuries (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to March 1, 2004). When these casualty statistics are compared with the respective size of the Palestinian and Israeli populations, their impact on this small nation is undeniable. Overtures for peace have completely stalled. President Bush’s “Roadmap for Peace” announced in March 2003 rightly identified the critical issues for peace, but these calls have fallen silent as talks have ended and conflict escalated. Palestinian suicide bombings have brought the pain of this war to most major Israeli cities—and Israeli military violence, seen clearly in the assassination of Palestinian leaders by helicopter gunships—is Israel’s attempt to quell the violence. This violence reached its symbolic peak on Monday, March 22, 2004. At 5:30 a.m. in Gaza City, Israeli gunships fired three rockets, killing the wheelchair-bound Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the notorious sixty-six-year-old founder and leader of Hamas. Hamas has no doubt become the critical opponent of Israel. Yassin directed numerous violent operations against Israel and opposed any peace overture that acknowledged Israel’s existence, even opposing the “two state” solution. These “targeted killings” (which killed 337 people since 2000) have raised troubling moral questions for many even when they strike overtly dangerous people. And so they have been widely condemned around the world. But they have also been defended, particularly by the United States, as Israel’s necessary strategy for self-defense. But this killing is symbolic, striking to heart of Palestinian resistance. And it will only accelerate the cycle of violence further. Readers of the first printing of this book have expressed enthusiastic appreciation and strong criticism for the theological and political views expressed in these pages. And as I have represented these views in lectures around the country and listened to critics and supporters alike, I have heard three points that continue to surface. These points are not new and careful readers will see them expressed in full in the following pages. They are also represented in the unofficial “Geneva Accord” launched on December 1, 2003, by two courageous diplomats from opposing sides, former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo. The fact that Israel’s Ariel Sharon and Palestine’s Yasser Arafat dislike the Accord is a signal that it is getting to the heart of matters. According to many—myself included—three principles must be held together in order to build a lasting peace in the region. (1) Israeli Security. We need to make an unequivocal statement affirming Israel’s right
to exist as a nation in the region. Israeli anxiety about the rejection, about the denial of its own legitimacy is profound and grounded in the reality of decades of both Christian and Arab rejection of the right to Jewish self-expression in a sovereign Israel. This must be followed by an equally strong rejection of Palestinian violence that targets civilians. (2) Palestinian Displacement. We must likewise acknowledge the violence absorbed by the Palestinian people through the Israeli occupation, their loss of land, and the denial of nationhood for them. They too experience the rejection of legitimacy by Israelis and need to be reassured that, indeed, a self-sustaining homeland will be theirs. This also must be followed by an equally strong rejection of government-sanctioned Israeli violence, which is not always self-defense, but rather an ongoing effort to control and confiscate more land. Israeli settlements must be withdrawn and Palestinian worries about permanent exile addressed. (3) Anti-Judaism. It is simply incorrect to say that critics of modern Israel are anti-Semitic. Christians must be warned, however, that there are those who will read this book and conclude that the opponent here is Judaism, not the domestic policies of the State of Israel. Further, some who are genuinely anti-Semitic may exploit this theological and political presentation for their own purposes. I loathe such efforts. My primary audience is Christians who believe that the Bible bears a direct relevance to the future of the Middle East, who see in Israel a rich fulfillment of biblical prophesies—and yet who have never heard another side to this story. In particular I wish to engage Christian Zionists whose blend of politics and religious fervor has been particularly ill-informed in recent years. But I want to be certain that I am not misread. Indeed, some of the scriptures used in this book contributed over time to the adversus Judaeos tradition, a tradition that persecuted Jews and fostered a theological justification for it in the Christian church and the world of western European society. It culminated in the hellish culture that ultimately resulted in the destruction of European Jewry. This tradition will make many of the words in this book particularly difficult for my friends in the Jewish community. I would ask them to bear with me. And I would ask them to remember that my ethical and political critique is merely an echo of what countless courageous Jewish voices are already saying. I will argue that even if Christian theologians reject the position that modern Israel inherits the land promised to Abraham (thanks to a new covenant that abrogates the old), this should not diminish the church’s respect for Judaism nor the rights of the Jewish people to live in the land of Israel. The political and theological issues that intersect in Israel/Palestine are complex if not daunting. It will take men and women of genuine courage who can trust the “other,” set their fears aside, and let go of strategies that are in the end self-defeating. 1. For a catalogue of villages, see J. Fayez, Lest the Civilized World Forget: The Colonization of Palestine (New York: Americans for Middle East Understanding, 1992). Such lists are also available throughout the Internet. See also below, p. 46 n. 17. 2. Newsweek, January 20, 1992, 18. Newsweek’s sources came from the Department of Defense, the U.S. Central Command, the U.S. intelligence agencies, and Greenpeace, USA. These figures compare with 305 American troops killed (146 killed in action, 159 killed outside combat) and 244 fatalities among the other allied armies. 3. C. Scriven, “Second Thoughts about the War,” Christianity Today, January 13, 1992, 11. For a complete report, see A. Arnove, ed., Taken from Iraq under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000). 4. Children under the age of five were dying at the rate of 6,000 per month (up from 506 per month prior to the war). 5. The Independent, October 15, 1998. 6. BBC Online, February 8, 2000. For complete information on Iraq, see the website sponsored by students at Cambridge University, CASI [Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq], at www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/. For thorough Christian research on Iraq and an active humanitarian mission, see the work of Dr. Jim Jennings at Conscience International, 4685 Chamblee-Dunwoody Rd., Suite A7, Atlanta, GA 30338. For a website devoted to the Iraqi sanctions and its consequences, see www.megastories.com/iraq/index.htm. 7. Current estimates: Chaldeans (800,000), Assyrians (90,000), Catholic and Orthodox Syrian (90,000), others [Armenians, Melkites, Copts, Protestants, others] (20,000). 8. D. Neff, “Love Thy (Arab) Neighbor,” Christianity Today, October 22, 1990, 22. Neff writes, “When international disputes escalate to this extent, the church has a special responsibility to douse the flames of hatred.” 9. In fact, Palestine goes back further. It originates with the word “Philistine,” which occurs throughout the Old Testament. 10. See the list of links at www.sabeel.org/links.html.
where it is due. An original version was published in 1993 as Who Are God’s People in the Middle East? What Christians Are Not Being Told about Israel and the Palestinians. The bulk of its research was done while I was on sabbatical at North Park University. Since 1993 my interest in Israel/Palestine has continued, leading me to travel to the country annually. After I joined the faculty of Wheaton College, I continued my interest by leading numerous trips and most recently conducting a thorough research trip on the future of the Palestinian church. Thanks are due to Wheaton’s generous Aldeen Fund for faculty research that financed this work.
One of the chief changes to research today is the use of the Internet. Today Palestinians are talking with each other and with people around the world thanks to e-mail, websites, and instant messaging. They are cataloguing their grievances (visit: www.electronicintifada.net) and cataloguing the data of their struggle.¹⁰ Jewish sites are doing the same. When I cite figures for home demolitions, for instance, I generally use the Israeli site B’Tselem (www.btselem.org), since it cannot be accused of bearing pro-Palestinian bias. Within hours of a death on either side of the war, digital images are circulating to any who are connected. In most cases, when an especially helpful website has served to give insight to a problem or a movement, I have supplied the web address in the footnotes.
Many friends in Israel/Palestine invited me to enter their world in a way that few visitors have an opportunity to experience. They trusted me, and for this trust I cannot express enough appreciation. Many of their names and their stories are found in the pages of this book, and I deem it a high privilege to be representing them and their concerns. The first person to invite me to have a glimpse of this story was the late Audeh Rantisi, once an Anglican pastor in Ramallah. Audeh and his wife Pat brought me to their home during the hard days of the first Uprising (the Intifada), and from that vantage I saw firsthand what violent occupation looks like. Personal experiences like these are not forgotten.
Over the last ten years a number of people have become friends in a network of people who are committed to the Palestinian church and are able to bridge these interests to Christians in the West. A few deserve mention: Na’im Ateek, Nora Kort, Bishara Awad, Salim Munayer. Many Westerners have likewise devoted their energies to this enterprise, and their wisdom has been essential: Don Wagner, Tom Getman, Ken Bailey, David Neff, and the many friends in the advocacy group Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding. Students have also served as research assistants. Kathy Marsh, now working in Bosnia, served as my assistant in 1993. Recently Rachel Weissburg worked tirelessly updating the book’s historical sections and has provided helpful editorial suggestions throughout. Editorial readers have also included Issam Smeir and Ashleigh Burge. The maps were drawn with the expert hand of one of my students, Laura Brosius. Thanks are also due to Bob Land and John Eagleson, whose editorial work improved the text enormously. Finally, the index was compiled by Robert Rectenwald, a Wheaton College graduate student.
A special thank-you goes to my wife, Carol, who has generously encouraged me to make so many trips to Israel/Palestine (as well as most of the other Arab countries). Her support has helped me pursue this issue for many years. Likewise our daughters, Ashleigh and Grace, have been patient during my many absences, and they have inherited something of these issues. I will never forget watching Ashleigh in 1995 (when she was twelve) impatiently listening to a predictable lecture on land rights by an Israeli professor while he stood in front of fifty college students at Jerusalem University College. Much to everyone’s amazement, single-handedly Ashleigh challenged him from the audience, asking him all of the hard questions that I hope the church will ask today.
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION (2004)
Since the publication of the original hardcover edition of this book (spring 2003), the tensions in Israel/Palestine have shown no sign of abating. The so-called Second Intifada (or Al Aqsa Intifada) that began in September, 2000, has continued to expand and the Israel occupation has tightened its grip over the West Bank and Gaza. Yasser Arafat’s administrative compound in Ramallah has been virtually destroyed, thus crippling its ability to govern. And this has empowered increasingly violent resistance groups such as Hamas.
Casualty numbers are a telling indicator of the suffering on both sides of this conflict: From September 2000, 2,780 Palestinians have died and 25,201 have been injured (Palestine Red Crescent, to March 19, 2004). On the Israeli side, there have been 834 deaths and 5,394 injuries (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to March 1, 2004). When these casualty statistics are compared with the respective size of the Palestinian and Israeli populations, their impact on this small nation is undeniable.
Overtures for peace have completely stalled. President Bush’s Roadmap for Peace announced in March 2003 rightly identified the critical issues for peace, but these calls have fallen silent as talks have ended and conflict escalated. Palestinian suicide bombings have brought the pain of this war to most major Israeli cities—and Israeli military violence, seen clearly in the assassination of Palestinian leaders by helicopter gunships—is Israel’s attempt to quell the violence.
This violence reached its symbolic peak on Monday, March 22, 2004. At 5:30 a.m. in Gaza City, Israeli gunships fired three rockets, killing the wheelchair-bound Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the notorious sixty-six-year-old founder and leader of Hamas. Hamas has no doubt become the critical opponent of Israel. Yassin directed numerous violent operations against Israel and opposed any peace overture that acknowledged Israel’s existence, even opposing the two state solution. These targeted killings (which killed 337 people since 2000) have raised troubling moral questions for many even when they strike overtly dangerous people. And so they have been widely condemned around the world. But they have also been defended, particularly by the United States, as Israel’s necessary strategy for self-defense. But this killing is symbolic, striking to heart of Palestinian resistance. And it will only accelerate the cycle of violence further.
Readers of the first printing of this book have expressed enthusiastic appreciation and strong criticism for the theological and political views expressed in these pages. And as I have represented these views in lectures around the country and listened to critics and supporters alike, I have heard three points that continue to surface. These points are not new and careful readers will see them expressed in full in the following pages. They are also represented in the unofficial Geneva Accord launched on December 1, 2003, by two courageous diplomats from opposing sides, former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo. The fact that Israel’s Ariel Sharon and Palestine’s Yasser Arafat dislike the Accord is a signal that it is getting to the heart of matters.
According to many—myself included—three principles must be held together in order to build a lasting peace in the region.
(1) Israeli Security. We need to make an unequivocal statement affirming Israel’s right
to exist as a nation in the region. Israeli anxiety about the rejection, about the denial of its own legitimacy is profound and grounded in the reality of decades of both Christian and Arab rejection of the right to Jewish self-expression in a sovereign Israel. This must be followed by an equally strong rejection of Palestinian violence that targets civilians.
(2) Palestinian Displacement. We must likewise acknowledge the violence absorbed by the Palestinian people through the Israeli occupation, their loss of land, and the denial of nationhood for them. They too experience the rejection of legitimacy by Israelis and need to be reassured that, indeed, a self-sustaining homeland will be theirs. This also must be followed by an equally strong rejection of government-sanctioned Israeli violence, which is not always self-defense, but rather an ongoing effort to control and confiscate more land. Israeli settlements must be withdrawn and Palestinian worries about permanent exile addressed.
(3) Anti-Judaism. It is simply incorrect to say that critics of modern Israel are anti-Semitic. Christians must be warned, however, that there are those who will read this book and conclude that the opponent here is Judaism, not the domestic policies of the State of Israel. Further, some who are genuinely anti-Semitic may exploit this theological and political presentation for their own purposes. I loathe such efforts. My primary audience is Christians who believe that the Bible bears a direct relevance to the future of the Middle East, who see in Israel a rich fulfillment of biblical prophesies—and yet who have never heard another side to this story. In particular I wish to engage Christian Zionists whose blend of politics and religious fervor has been particularly ill-informed in recent years.
But I want to be certain that I am not misread. Indeed, some of the scriptures used in this book contributed over time to the adversus Judaeos tradition, a tradition that persecuted Jews and fostered a theological justification for it in the Christian church and the world of western European society. It culminated in the hellish culture that ultimately resulted in the destruction of European Jewry. This tradition will make many of the words in this book particularly difficult for my friends in the Jewish community. I would ask them to bear with me. And I would ask them to remember that my ethical and political critique is merely an echo of what countless courageous Jewish voices are already saying. I will argue that even if Christian theologians reject the position that modern Israel inherits the land promised to Abraham (thanks to a new covenant that abrogates the old), this should not diminish the church’s respect for Judaism nor the rights of the Jewish people to live in the land of Israel.
The political and theological issues that intersect in Israel/Palestine are complex if not daunting. It will take men and women of genuine courage who can trust the other, set their fears aside, and let go of strategies that are in the end self-defeating.
1. For a catalogue of villages, see J. Fayez, Lest the Civilized World Forget: The Colonization of Palestine (New York: Americans for Middle East Understanding, 1992). Such lists are also available throughout the Internet. See also below, p. 46 n. 17.
2. Newsweek, January 20, 1992, 18. Newsweek’s sources came from the Department of Defense, the U.S. Central Command, the U.S. intelligence agencies, and Greenpeace, USA. These figures compare with 305 American troops killed (146 killed in action, 159 killed outside combat) and 244 fatalities among the other allied armies.
3. C. Scriven, Second Thoughts about the War, Christianity Today, January 13, 1992, 11. For a complete report, see A. Arnove, ed., Taken from Iraq under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000).
4. Children under the age of five were dying at the rate of 6,000 per month (up from 506 per month prior to the war).
5. The Independent, October 15, 1998.
6. BBC Online, February 8, 2000. For complete information on Iraq, see the website sponsored by students at Cambridge University, CASI [Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq], at www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/. For thorough Christian research on Iraq and an active humanitarian mission, see the work of Dr. Jim Jennings at Conscience International, 4685 Chamblee-Dunwoody Rd., Suite A7, Atlanta, GA 30338. For a website devoted to the Iraqi sanctions and its consequences, see www.megastories.com/iraq/index.htm.
7. Current estimates: Chaldeans (800,000), Assyrians (90,000), Catholic and Orthodox Syrian (90,000), others [Armenians, Melkites, Copts, Protestants, others] (20,000).
8. D. Neff, Love Thy (Arab) Neighbor, Christianity Today, October 22, 1990, 22. Neff writes, When international disputes escalate to this extent, the church has a special responsibility to douse the flames of hatred.
9. In fact, Palestine goes back further. It originates with the word Philistine, which occurs throughout the Old Testament.
10. See the list of links at www.sabeel.org/links.html.
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The Lord’s Prayer in Arabic
1 THE DILEMMA OF ISRAEL/PALESTINE FOR CHRISTIANS
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land; . . . Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. —MATTHEW 5:5, 9 Certain memories remain fixed in the imagination. They are personal and they become indelible symbols as they help us to understand what transpired in our past. Each of us lives with an archive of such memories, and occasionally we redraw those landscapes, we reconstruct those conversations and crises, making them seem as though they happened yesterday. In some fashion, their power is still with us. LEBANON, 1973 I was an exchange student in Beirut, Lebanon, in the early 1970s during the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. Palestinian refugees who had lost their homes in Israel lived in squalid camps around Beirut, and they had upset the uneasy balance of Lebanon’s politics. The year I was at the American University of Beirut, the Lebanese army had begun its fight with these Palestinian camps, and from the balcony of my dormitory I could watch French Mirage jets strafing the refugee camps less than three miles away. One lead fighter would shriek downward with its partner close behind. If the first plane drew the aim of the antiaircraft gunner, the first pilot would pull out of his approach while the second jet attacked with awesome ferocity. The roar was deafening. And when the bombs made impact, the rumble vibrated through our building. We would sit, eating pita bread, tuna fish, and Arabic hummus (a chick-pea and garlic purée) on the sixth-floor balconies of the dorm on Bliss Street as if we were watching an arcade game. The Palestinian students on my floor were crazed with anger. How could an army destroy civilians like this? When the angry students started throwing furniture out of the dorm windows into the busy street below, the Lebanese army rolled a tank up Bliss Street and parked it one-half block away, aiming its barrel at the top floors of the dorm. It was tough even to get a peek at the thing. A squad of soldiers fired hardened rubber bullets at anyone who showed his or her profile in a window. We slept at night with wet towels crammed under the door of our room to keep the tear gas out. My Palestinian roommate, Samir El Far, made it his mission to keep this naive American out of harm’s way. We spent the days and nights talking about what these things meant. Since college classes usually do not prosper under such circumstances—the furniture from one of my classrooms had been taken to form a barricade—most of us thought it would be good to get away. I joined a teacher and a busload of students and headed south into the beautiful, rolling hills of southern Lebanon. Our destination was the village of Hesbiya. Palestinians fleeing the war in Beirut and Palestinians wishing to return to their homeland in Israel were settling in southern Lebanon not far from the Israeli border. Many had become guerrilla fighters in their own right, some were simply gangsters, but most were families living in abject confusion, wandering from place to place. The Israelis had plans for southern Lebanon as well. They wanted to depopulate it, to drive the Palestinians away from Israel’s northern border, so they sent fighter jets into these hills to attack the Palestinians. In the process, they attacked any Lebanese village that gave refuge to the Palestinian refugees.¹ When we entered Hesbiya, I saw firsthand the results of an attack from fighter jets: the crumbled buildings, the panic, and the dismay. I remember seeing brightly colored children’s toys locked under the weight of massive broken concrete blocks. The misshapen steel reinforcement rods stuck into the air like arms reaching nowhere. The toys were red and plastic, and I wondered where the children were who had played with them. Kids were everywhere telling us in indecipherable Arabic and hand gestures how the jets swooped down on them firing. These kids saw themselves as heroes. Bravado was on their little faces. They had survived. We had come to build a bomb shelter for Hesbiya. Before we finished the foundation, a village elder slaughtered a chicken to bless the structure. Then stone upon stone, we constructed the walls of the underground shelter. The people mainly wanted a place for the children to hide when the jets returned. And they did return many times later after we left. I often wonder what became of that shelter and how it fared in those days of attack. In the span of just a few weeks I witnessed the crisis of the Palestinian world. Attacked by the Lebanese, attacked by the Israelis, these people had nowhere to go. They were becoming the refuse of Middle Eastern history. They were of no use to anyone. I remember walking in the hills outside the village at night. It was very dark and very quiet. The stars seemed crowded in this sky that didn’t suffer from the light pollution of my native southern California. God seemed very near to this place, and yet it was a place of tragedy beyond description. ISRAEL/PALESTINE, 1990 In the following eighteen years I returned to the Middle East many times: sometimes as a pilgrim, frequently as a professor with students, and often as a researcher hoping to understand more of this turbulent world. I found a profound dilemma. The Middle East was a land of miracles. This was the Holy Land—the land of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. This place had witnessed the miraculous rebirth of the nation of Israel, surely a triumph that has no parallel elsewhere in history. Once after reading Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth,² I stood in the Valley of Armageddon and reflected on Israel’s fulfillment of prophecy and the coming wars that would torment these lands and bring about the end of human history as we know it. Surely God was at work in this place. But I also witnessed suffering and sinfulness in an unprecedented way. Both Arab evil and Israeli evil abounded. Whenever I left the usual tourist trail and looked behind the scenes, I caught glimpses of an Israel I barely recognized. I was in Israel/Palestine in 1990 visiting an Arabic Christian pastor and his family in the city of Ramallah. This pastor’s home had become a refuge for many who sought support and protection. At 7:00 in the morning an elderly Palestinian woman burst into the kitchen where we were eating breakfast. Her story riveted us. The Israeli army had come that night to homes on her street looking for stone-throwing boys. It was about midnight, and the children were in bed. In panic they fled as soldiers with weapons tore through the bedrooms. Ziena, a twelve-year-old girl, fled out the front door and there on the porch was shot point-blank by a soldier with an automatic weapon. She was barely alive. The woman fell to the floor, and her weeping—her incessant weeping—paralyzed us all. I knew what she was talking about. Just the day before I had been walking up Al Tireh Street, Ramallah’s main boulevard, and watched a platoon of soldiers shake down
The Lord’s Prayer in Arabic
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land; . . . Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
—MATTHEW 5:5, 9
Certain memories remain fixed in the imagination. They are personal and they become indelible symbols as they help us to understand what transpired in our past. Each of us lives with an archive of such memories, and occasionally we redraw those landscapes, we reconstruct those conversations and crises, making them seem as though they happened yesterday. In some fashion, their power is still with us.
LEBANON, 1973
I was an exchange student in Beirut, Lebanon, in the early 1970s during the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. Palestinian refugees who had lost their homes in Israel lived in squalid camps around Beirut, and they had upset the uneasy balance of Lebanon’s politics. The year I was at the American University of Beirut, the Lebanese army had begun its fight with these Palestinian camps, and from the balcony of my dormitory I could watch French Mirage jets strafing the refugee camps less than three miles away. One lead fighter would shriek downward with its partner close behind. If the first plane drew the aim of the antiaircraft gunner, the first pilot would pull out of his approach while the second jet attacked with awesome ferocity. The roar was deafening. And when the bombs made impact, the rumble vibrated through our building. We would sit, eating pita bread, tuna fish, and Arabic hummus (a chick-pea and garlic purée) on the sixth-floor balconies of the dorm on Bliss Street as if we were watching an arcade game.
The Palestinian students on my floor were crazed with anger. How could an army destroy civilians like this? When the angry students started throwing furniture out of the dorm windows into the busy street below, the Lebanese army rolled a tank up Bliss Street and parked it one-half block away, aiming its barrel at the top floors of the dorm. It was tough even to get a peek at the thing. A squad of soldiers fired hardened rubber bullets at anyone who showed his or her profile in a window. We slept at night with wet towels crammed under the door of our room to keep the tear gas out. My Palestinian roommate, Samir El Far, made it his mission to keep this naive American out of harm’s way. We spent the days and nights talking about what these things meant.
Since college classes usually do not prosper under such circumstances—the furniture from one of my classrooms had been taken to form a barricade—most of us thought it would be good to get away. I joined a teacher and a busload of students and headed south into the beautiful, rolling hills of southern Lebanon. Our destination was the village of Hesbiya. Palestinians fleeing the war in Beirut and Palestinians wishing to return to their homeland in Israel were settling in southern Lebanon not far from the Israeli border. Many had become guerrilla fighters in their own right, some were simply gangsters, but most were families living in abject confusion, wandering from place to place.
The Israelis had plans for southern Lebanon as well. They wanted to depopulate it, to drive the Palestinians away from Israel’s northern border, so they sent fighter jets into these hills to attack the Palestinians. In the process, they attacked any Lebanese village that gave refuge to the Palestinian refugees.¹
When we entered Hesbiya, I saw firsthand the results of an attack from fighter jets: the crumbled buildings, the panic, and the dismay. I remember seeing brightly colored children’s toys locked under the weight of massive broken concrete blocks. The misshapen steel reinforcement rods stuck into the air like arms reaching nowhere. The toys were red and plastic, and I wondered where the children were who had played with them. Kids were everywhere telling us in indecipherable Arabic and hand gestures how the jets swooped down on them firing. These kids saw themselves as heroes. Bravado was on their little faces. They had survived.
We had come to build a bomb shelter for Hesbiya. Before we finished the foundation, a village elder slaughtered a chicken to bless the structure. Then stone upon stone, we constructed the walls of the underground shelter. The people mainly wanted a place for the children to hide when the jets returned. And they did return many times later after we left. I often wonder what became of that shelter and how it fared in those days of attack.
In the span of just a few weeks I witnessed the crisis of the Palestinian world. Attacked by the Lebanese, attacked by the Israelis, these people had nowhere to go. They were becoming the refuse of Middle Eastern history. They were of no use to anyone. I remember walking in the hills outside the village at night. It was very dark and very quiet. The stars seemed crowded in this sky that didn’t suffer from the light pollution of my native southern California. God seemed very near to this place, and yet it was a place of tragedy beyond description.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE, 1990
In the following eighteen years I returned to the Middle East many times: sometimes as a pilgrim, frequently as a professor with students, and often as a researcher hoping to understand more of this turbulent world. I found a profound dilemma.
The Middle East was a land of miracles. This was the Holy Land—the land of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. This place had witnessed the miraculous rebirth of the nation of Israel, surely a triumph that has no parallel elsewhere in history. Once after reading Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth,² I stood in the Valley of Armageddon and reflected on Israel’s fulfillment of prophecy and the coming wars that would torment these lands and bring about the end of human history as we know it. Surely God was at work in this place.
But I also witnessed suffering and sinfulness in an unprecedented way. Both Arab evil and Israeli evil abounded. Whenever I left the usual tourist trail and looked behind the scenes, I caught glimpses of an Israel I barely recognized.
I was in Israel/Palestine in 1990 visiting an Arabic Christian pastor and his family in the city of Ramallah. This pastor’s home had become a refuge for many who sought support and protection. At 7:00 in the morning an elderly Palestinian woman burst into the kitchen where we were eating breakfast. Her story riveted us. The Israeli army had come that night to homes on her street looking for stone-throwing boys. It was about midnight, and the children were in bed. In panic they fled as soldiers with weapons tore through the bedrooms. Ziena, a twelve-year-old girl, fled out the front door and there on the porch was shot point-blank by a soldier with an automatic weapon. She was barely alive.
The woman fell to the floor, and her weeping—her incessant weeping—paralyzed us all. I knew what she was talking about. Just the day before I had been walking up Al Tireh Street, Ramallah’s main boulevard, and watched a platoon of soldiers shake down
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to exist as a nation in the region. Israeli anxiety about the rejection, about the denial of its own legitimacy is profound and grounded in the reality of decades of both Christian and Arab rejection of the right to Jewish self-expression in a sovereign Israel. This must be followed by an equally strong rejection of Palestinian violence that targets civilians. (2) Palestinian Displacement. We must likewise acknowledge the violence absorbed by the Palestinian people through the Israeli occupation, their loss of land, and the denial of nationhood for them. They too experience the rejection of legitimacy by Israelis and need to be reassured that, indeed, a self-sustaining homeland will be theirs. This also must be followed by an equally strong rejection of government-sanctioned Israeli violence, which is not always self-defense, but rather an ongoing effort to control and confiscate more land. Israeli settlements must be withdrawn and Palestinian worries about permanent exile addressed. (3) Anti-Judaism. It is simply incorrect to say that critics of modern Israel are anti-Semitic. Christians must be warned, however, that there are those who will read this book and conclude that the opponent here is Judaism, not the domestic policies of the State of Israel. Further, some who are genuinely anti-Semitic may exploit this theological and political presentation for their own purposes. I loathe such efforts. My primary audience is Christians who believe that the Bible bears a direct relevance to the future of the Middle East, who see in Israel a rich fulfillment of biblical prophesies—and yet who have never heard another side to this story. In particular I wish to engage Christian Zionists whose blend of politics and religious fervor has been particularly ill-informed in recent years. But I want to be certain that I am not misread. Indeed, some of the scriptures used in this book contributed over time to the adversus Judaeos tradition, a tradition that persecuted Jews and fostered a theological justification for it in the Christian church and the world of western European society. It culminated in the hellish culture that ultimately resulted in the destruction of European Jewry. This tradition will make many of the words in this book particularly difficult for my friends in the Jewish community. I would ask them to bear with me. And I would ask them to remember that my ethical and political critique is merely an echo of what countless courageous Jewish voices are already saying. I will argue that even if Christian theologians reject the position that modern Israel inherits the land promised to Abraham (thanks to a new covenant that abrogates the old), this should not diminish the church’s respect for Judaism nor the rights of the Jewish people to live in the land of Israel. The political and theological issues that intersect in Israel/Palestine are complex if not daunting. It will take men and women of genuine courage who can trust the “other,” set their fears aside, and let go of strategies that are in the end self-defeating. 1. For a catalogue of villages, see J. Fayez, Lest the Civilized World Forget: The Colonization of Palestine (New York: Americans for Middle East Understanding, 1992). Such lists are also available throughout the Internet. See also below, p. 46 n. 17. 2. Newsweek, January 20, 1992, 18. Newsweek’s sources came from the Department of Defense, the U.S. Central Command, the U.S. intelligence agencies, and Greenpeace, USA. These figures compare with 305 American troops killed (146 killed in action, 159 killed outside combat) and 244 fatalities among the other allied armies. 3. C. Scriven, “Second Thoughts about the War,” Christianity Today, January 13, 1992, 11. For a complete report, see A. Arnove, ed., Taken from Iraq under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000). 4. Children under the age of five were dying at the rate of 6,000 per month (up from 506 per month prior to the war). 5. The Independent, October 15, 1998. 6. BBC Online, February 8, 2000. For complete information on Iraq, see the website sponsored by students at Cambridge University, CASI [Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq], at www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/. For thorough Christian research on Iraq and an active humanitarian mission, see the work of Dr. Jim Jennings at Conscience International, 4685 Chamblee-Dunwoody Rd., Suite A7, Atlanta, GA 30338. For a website devoted to the Iraqi sanctions and its consequences, see www.megastories.com/iraq/index.htm. 7. Current estimates: Chaldeans (800,000), Assyrians (90,000), Catholic and Orthodox Syrian (90,000), others [Armenians, Melkites, Copts, Protestants, others] (20,000). 8. D. Neff, “Love Thy (Arab) Neighbor,” Christianity Today, October 22, 1990, 22. Neff writes, “When international disputes escalate to this extent, the church has a special responsibility to douse the flames of hatred.” 9. In fact, Palestine goes back further. It originates with the word “Philistine,” which occurs throughout the Old Testament. 10. See the list of links at www.sabeel.org/links.html.
where it is due. An original version was published in 1993 as Who Are God’s People in the Middle East? What Christians Are Not Being Told about Israel and the Palestinians. The bulk of its research was done while I was on sabbatical at North Park University. Since 1993 my interest in Israel/Palestine has continued, leading me to travel to the country annually. After I joined the faculty of Wheaton College, I continued my interest by leading numerous trips and most recently conducting a thorough research trip on the future of the Palestinian church. Thanks are due to Wheaton’s generous Aldeen Fund for faculty research that financed this work.
One of the chief changes to research today is the use of the Internet. Today Palestinians are talking with each other and with people around the world thanks to e-mail, websites, and instant messaging. They are cataloguing their grievances (visit: www.electronicintifada.net) and cataloguing the data of their struggle.¹⁰ Jewish sites are doing the same. When I cite figures for home demolitions, for instance, I generally use the Israeli site B’Tselem (www.btselem.org), since it cannot be accused of bearing pro-Palestinian bias. Within hours of a death on either side of the war, digital images are circulating to any who are connected. In most cases, when an especially helpful website has served to give insight to a problem or a movement, I have supplied the web address in the footnotes.
Many friends in Israel/Palestine invited me to enter their world in a way that few visitors have an opportunity to experience. They trusted me, and for this trust I cannot express enough appreciation. Many of their names and their stories are found in the pages of this book, and I deem it a high privilege to be representing them and their concerns. The first person to invite me to have a glimpse of this story was the late Audeh Rantisi, once an Anglican pastor in Ramallah. Audeh and his wife Pat brought me to their home during the hard days of the first Uprising (the Intifada), and from that vantage I saw firsthand what violent occupation looks like. Personal experiences like these are not forgotten.
Over the last ten years a number of people have become friends in a network of people who are committed to the Palestinian church and are able to bridge these interests to Christians in the West. A few deserve mention: Na’im Ateek, Nora Kort, Bishara Awad, Salim Munayer. Many Westerners have likewise devoted their energies to this enterprise, and their wisdom has been essential: Don Wagner, Tom Getman, Ken Bailey, David Neff, and the many friends in the advocacy group Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding. Students have also served as research assistants. Kathy Marsh, now working in Bosnia, served as my assistant in 1993. Recently Rachel Weissburg worked tirelessly updating the book’s historical sections and has provided helpful editorial suggestions throughout. Editorial readers have also included Issam Smeir and Ashleigh Burge. The maps were drawn with the expert hand of one of my students, Laura Brosius. Thanks are also due to Bob Land and John Eagleson, whose editorial work improved the text enormously. Finally, the index was compiled by Robert Rectenwald, a Wheaton College graduate student.
A special thank-you goes to my wife, Carol, who has generously encouraged me to make so many trips to Israel/Palestine (as well as most of the other Arab countries). Her support has helped me pursue this issue for many years. Likewise our daughters, Ashleigh and Grace, have been patient during my many absences, and they have inherited something of these issues. I will never forget watching Ashleigh in 1995 (when she was twelve) impatiently listening to a predictable lecture on land rights by an Israeli professor while he stood in front of fifty college students at Jerusalem University College. Much to everyone’s amazement, single-handedly Ashleigh challenged him from the audience, asking him all of the hard questions that I hope the church will ask today.
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION (2004)
Since the publication of the original hardcover edition of this book (spring 2003), the tensions in Israel/Palestine have shown no sign of abating. The so-called Second Intifada (or Al Aqsa Intifada) that began in September, 2000, has continued to expand and the Israel occupation has tightened its grip over the West Bank and Gaza. Yasser Arafat’s administrative compound in Ramallah has been virtually destroyed, thus crippling its ability to govern. And this has empowered increasingly violent resistance groups such as Hamas.
Casualty numbers are a telling indicator of the suffering on both sides of this conflict: From September 2000, 2,780 Palestinians have died and 25,201 have been injured (Palestine Red Crescent, to March 19, 2004). On the Israeli side, there have been 834 deaths and 5,394 injuries (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to March 1, 2004). When these casualty statistics are compared with the respective size of the Palestinian and Israeli populations, their impact on this small nation is undeniable.
Overtures for peace have completely stalled. President Bush’s Roadmap for Peace announced in March 2003 rightly identified the critical issues for peace, but these calls have fallen silent as talks have ended and conflict escalated. Palestinian suicide bombings have brought the pain of this war to most major Israeli cities—and Israeli military violence, seen clearly in the assassination of Palestinian leaders by helicopter gunships—is Israel’s attempt to quell the violence.
This violence reached its symbolic peak on Monday, March 22, 2004. At 5:30 a.m. in Gaza City, Israeli gunships fired three rockets, killing the wheelchair-bound Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the notorious sixty-six-year-old founder and leader of Hamas. Hamas has no doubt become the critical opponent of Israel. Yassin directed numerous violent operations against Israel and opposed any peace overture that acknowledged Israel’s existence, even opposing the two state solution. These targeted killings (which killed 337 people since 2000) have raised troubling moral questions for many even when they strike overtly dangerous people. And so they have been widely condemned around the world. But they have also been defended, particularly by the United States, as Israel’s necessary strategy for self-defense. But this killing is symbolic, striking to heart of Palestinian resistance. And it will only accelerate the cycle of violence further.
Readers of the first printing of this book have expressed enthusiastic appreciation and strong criticism for the theological and political views expressed in these pages. And as I have represented these views in lectures around the country and listened to critics and supporters alike, I have heard three points that continue to surface. These points are not new and careful readers will see them expressed in full in the following pages. They are also represented in the unofficial Geneva Accord launched on December 1, 2003, by two courageous diplomats from opposing sides, former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo. The fact that Israel’s Ariel Sharon and Palestine’s Yasser Arafat dislike the Accord is a signal that it is getting to the heart of matters.
According to many—myself included—three principles must be held together in order to build a lasting peace in the region.
(1) Israeli Security. We need to make an unequivocal statement affirming Israel’s right
to exist as a nation in the region. Israeli anxiety about the rejection, about the denial of its own legitimacy is profound and grounded in the reality of decades of both Christian and Arab rejection of the right to Jewish self-expression in a sovereign Israel. This must be followed by an equally strong rejection of Palestinian violence that targets civilians.
(2) Palestinian Displacement. We must likewise acknowledge the violence absorbed by the Palestinian people through the Israeli occupation, their loss of land, and the denial of nationhood for them. They too experience the rejection of legitimacy by Israelis and need to be reassured that, indeed, a self-sustaining homeland will be theirs. This also must be followed by an equally strong rejection of government-sanctioned Israeli violence, which is not always self-defense, but rather an ongoing effort to control and confiscate more land. Israeli settlements must be withdrawn and Palestinian worries about permanent exile addressed.
(3) Anti-Judaism. It is simply incorrect to say that critics of modern Israel are anti-Semitic. Christians must be warned, however, that there are those who will read this book and conclude that the opponent here is Judaism, not the domestic policies of the State of Israel. Further, some who are genuinely anti-Semitic may exploit this theological and political presentation for their own purposes. I loathe such efforts. My primary audience is Christians who believe that the Bible bears a direct relevance to the future of the Middle East, who see in Israel a rich fulfillment of biblical prophesies—and yet who have never heard another side to this story. In particular I wish to engage Christian Zionists whose blend of politics and religious fervor has been particularly ill-informed in recent years.
But I want to be certain that I am not misread. Indeed, some of the scriptures used in this book contributed over time to the adversus Judaeos tradition, a tradition that persecuted Jews and fostered a theological justification for it in the Christian church and the world of western European society. It culminated in the hellish culture that ultimately resulted in the destruction of European Jewry. This tradition will make many of the words in this book particularly difficult for my friends in the Jewish community. I would ask them to bear with me. And I would ask them to remember that my ethical and political critique is merely an echo of what countless courageous Jewish voices are already saying. I will argue that even if Christian theologians reject the position that modern Israel inherits the land promised to Abraham (thanks to a new covenant that abrogates the old), this should not diminish the church’s respect for Judaism nor the rights of the Jewish people to live in the land of Israel.
The political and theological issues that intersect in Israel/Palestine are complex if not daunting. It will take men and women of genuine courage who can trust the other, set their fears aside, and let go of strategies that are in the end self-defeating.
1. For a catalogue of villages, see J. Fayez, Lest the Civilized World Forget: The Colonization of Palestine (New York: Americans for Middle East Understanding, 1992). Such lists are also available throughout the Internet. See also below, p. 46 n. 17.
2. Newsweek, January 20, 1992, 18. Newsweek’s sources came from the Department of Defense, the U.S. Central Command, the U.S. intelligence agencies, and Greenpeace, USA. These figures compare with 305 American troops killed (146 killed in action, 159 killed outside combat) and 244 fatalities among the other allied armies.
3. C. Scriven, Second Thoughts about the War, Christianity Today, January 13, 1992, 11. For a complete report, see A. Arnove, ed., Taken from Iraq under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000).
4. Children under the age of five were dying at the rate of 6,000 per month (up from 506 per month prior to the war).
5. The Independent, October 15, 1998.
6. BBC Online, February 8, 2000. For complete information on Iraq, see the website sponsored by students at Cambridge University, CASI [Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq], at www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/. For thorough Christian research on Iraq and an active humanitarian mission, see the work of Dr. Jim Jennings at Conscience International, 4685 Chamblee-Dunwoody Rd., Suite A7, Atlanta, GA 30338. For a website devoted to the Iraqi sanctions and its consequences, see www.megastories.com/iraq/index.htm.
7. Current estimates: Chaldeans (800,000), Assyrians (90,000), Catholic and Orthodox Syrian (90,000), others [Armenians, Melkites, Copts, Protestants, others] (20,000).
8. D. Neff, Love Thy (Arab) Neighbor, Christianity Today, October 22, 1990, 22. Neff writes, When international disputes escalate to this extent, the church has a special responsibility to douse the flames of hatred.
9. In fact, Palestine goes back further. It originates with the word Philistine, which occurs throughout the Old Testament.
10. See the list of links at www.sabeel.org/links.html.
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The Lord’s Prayer in Arabic
1 THE DILEMMA OF ISRAEL/PALESTINE FOR CHRISTIANS
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land; . . . Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. —MATTHEW 5:5, 9 Certain memories remain fixed in the imagination. They are personal and they become indelible symbols as they help us to understand what transpired in our past. Each of us lives with an archive of such memories, and occasionally we redraw those landscapes, we reconstruct those conversations and crises, making them seem as though they happened yesterday. In some fashion, their power is still with us. LEBANON, 1973 I was an exchange student in Beirut, Lebanon, in the early 1970s during the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. Palestinian refugees who had lost their homes in Israel lived in squalid camps around Beirut, and they had upset the uneasy balance of Lebanon’s politics. The year I was at the American University of Beirut, the Lebanese army had begun its fight with these Palestinian camps, and from the balcony of my dormitory I could watch French Mirage jets strafing the refugee camps less than three miles away. One lead fighter would shriek downward with its partner close behind. If the first plane drew the aim of the antiaircraft gunner, the first pilot would pull out of his approach while the second jet attacked with awesome ferocity. The roar was deafening. And when the bombs made impact, the rumble vibrated through our building. We would sit, eating pita bread, tuna fish, and Arabic hummus (a chick-pea and garlic purée) on the sixth-floor balconies of the dorm on Bliss Street as if we were watching an arcade game. The Palestinian students on my floor were crazed with anger. How could an army destroy civilians like this? When the angry students started throwing furniture out of the dorm windows into the busy street below, the Lebanese army rolled a tank up Bliss Street and parked it one-half block away, aiming its barrel at the top floors of the dorm. It was tough even to get a peek at the thing. A squad of soldiers fired hardened rubber bullets at anyone who showed his or her profile in a window. We slept at night with wet towels crammed under the door of our room to keep the tear gas out. My Palestinian roommate, Samir El Far, made it his mission to keep this naive American out of harm’s way. We spent the days and nights talking about what these things meant. Since college classes usually do not prosper under such circumstances—the furniture from one of my classrooms had been taken to form a barricade—most of us thought it would be good to get away. I joined a teacher and a busload of students and headed south into the beautiful, rolling hills of southern Lebanon. Our destination was the village of Hesbiya. Palestinians fleeing the war in Beirut and Palestinians wishing to return to their homeland in Israel were settling in southern Lebanon not far from the Israeli border. Many had become guerrilla fighters in their own right, some were simply gangsters, but most were families living in abject confusion, wandering from place to place. The Israelis had plans for southern Lebanon as well. They wanted to depopulate it, to drive the Palestinians away from Israel’s northern border, so they sent fighter jets into these hills to attack the Palestinians. In the process, they attacked any Lebanese village that gave refuge to the Palestinian refugees.¹ When we entered Hesbiya, I saw firsthand the results of an attack from fighter jets: the crumbled buildings, the panic, and the dismay. I remember seeing brightly colored children’s toys locked under the weight of massive broken concrete blocks. The misshapen steel reinforcement rods stuck into the air like arms reaching nowhere. The toys were red and plastic, and I wondered where the children were who had played with them. Kids were everywhere telling us in indecipherable Arabic and hand gestures how the jets swooped down on them firing. These kids saw themselves as heroes. Bravado was on their little faces. They had survived. We had come to build a bomb shelter for Hesbiya. Before we finished the foundation, a village elder slaughtered a chicken to bless the structure. Then stone upon stone, we constructed the walls of the underground shelter. The people mainly wanted a place for the children to hide when the jets returned. And they did return many times later after we left. I often wonder what became of that shelter and how it fared in those days of attack. In the span of just a few weeks I witnessed the crisis of the Palestinian world. Attacked by the Lebanese, attacked by the Israelis, these people had nowhere to go. They were becoming the refuse of Middle Eastern history. They were of no use to anyone. I remember walking in the hills outside the village at night. It was very dark and very quiet. The stars seemed crowded in this sky that didn’t suffer from the light pollution of my native southern California. God seemed very near to this place, and yet it was a place of tragedy beyond description. ISRAEL/PALESTINE, 1990 In the following eighteen years I returned to the Middle East many times: sometimes as a pilgrim, frequently as a professor with students, and often as a researcher hoping to understand more of this turbulent world. I found a profound dilemma. The Middle East was a land of miracles. This was the Holy Land—the land of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. This place had witnessed the miraculous rebirth of the nation of Israel, surely a triumph that has no parallel elsewhere in history. Once after reading Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth,² I stood in the Valley of Armageddon and reflected on Israel’s fulfillment of prophecy and the coming wars that would torment these lands and bring about the end of human history as we know it. Surely God was at work in this place. But I also witnessed suffering and sinfulness in an unprecedented way. Both Arab evil and Israeli evil abounded. Whenever I left the usual tourist trail and looked behind the scenes, I caught glimpses of an Israel I barely recognized. I was in Israel/Palestine in 1990 visiting an Arabic Christian pastor and his family in the city of Ramallah. This pastor’s home had become a refuge for many who sought support and protection. At 7:00 in the morning an elderly Palestinian woman burst into the kitchen where we were eating breakfast. Her story riveted us. The Israeli army had come that night to homes on her street looking for stone-throwing boys. It was about midnight, and the children were in bed. In panic they fled as soldiers with weapons tore through the bedrooms. Ziena, a twelve-year-old girl, fled out the front door and there on the porch was shot point-blank by a soldier with an automatic weapon. She was barely alive. The woman fell to the floor, and her weeping—her incessant weeping—paralyzed us all. I knew what she was talking about. Just the day before I had been walking up Al Tireh Street, Ramallah’s main boulevard, and watched a platoon of soldiers shake down
The Lord’s Prayer in Arabic
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land; . . . Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
—MATTHEW 5:5, 9
Certain memories remain fixed in the imagination. They are personal and they become indelible symbols as they help us to understand what transpired in our past. Each of us lives with an archive of such memories, and occasionally we redraw those landscapes, we reconstruct those conversations and crises, making them seem as though they happened yesterday. In some fashion, their power is still with us.
LEBANON, 1973
I was an exchange student in Beirut, Lebanon, in the early 1970s during the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. Palestinian refugees who had lost their homes in Israel lived in squalid camps around Beirut, and they had upset the uneasy balance of Lebanon’s politics. The year I was at the American University of Beirut, the Lebanese army had begun its fight with these Palestinian camps, and from the balcony of my dormitory I could watch French Mirage jets strafing the refugee camps less than three miles away. One lead fighter would shriek downward with its partner close behind. If the first plane drew the aim of the antiaircraft gunner, the first pilot would pull out of his approach while the second jet attacked with awesome ferocity. The roar was deafening. And when the bombs made impact, the rumble vibrated through our building. We would sit, eating pita bread, tuna fish, and Arabic hummus (a chick-pea and garlic purée) on the sixth-floor balconies of the dorm on Bliss Street as if we were watching an arcade game.
The Palestinian students on my floor were crazed with anger. How could an army destroy civilians like this? When the angry students started throwing furniture out of the dorm windows into the busy street below, the Lebanese army rolled a tank up Bliss Street and parked it one-half block away, aiming its barrel at the top floors of the dorm. It was tough even to get a peek at the thing. A squad of soldiers fired hardened rubber bullets at anyone who showed his or her profile in a window. We slept at night with wet towels crammed under the door of our room to keep the tear gas out. My Palestinian roommate, Samir El Far, made it his mission to keep this naive American out of harm’s way. We spent the days and nights talking about what these things meant.
Since college classes usually do not prosper under such circumstances—the furniture from one of my classrooms had been taken to form a barricade—most of us thought it would be good to get away. I joined a teacher and a busload of students and headed south into the beautiful, rolling hills of southern Lebanon. Our destination was the village of Hesbiya. Palestinians fleeing the war in Beirut and Palestinians wishing to return to their homeland in Israel were settling in southern Lebanon not far from the Israeli border. Many had become guerrilla fighters in their own right, some were simply gangsters, but most were families living in abject confusion, wandering from place to place.
The Israelis had plans for southern Lebanon as well. They wanted to depopulate it, to drive the Palestinians away from Israel’s northern border, so they sent fighter jets into these hills to attack the Palestinians. In the process, they attacked any Lebanese village that gave refuge to the Palestinian refugees.¹
When we entered Hesbiya, I saw firsthand the results of an attack from fighter jets: the crumbled buildings, the panic, and the dismay. I remember seeing brightly colored children’s toys locked under the weight of massive broken concrete blocks. The misshapen steel reinforcement rods stuck into the air like arms reaching nowhere. The toys were red and plastic, and I wondered where the children were who had played with them. Kids were everywhere telling us in indecipherable Arabic and hand gestures how the jets swooped down on them firing. These kids saw themselves as heroes. Bravado was on their little faces. They had survived.
We had come to build a bomb shelter for Hesbiya. Before we finished the foundation, a village elder slaughtered a chicken to bless the structure. Then stone upon stone, we constructed the walls of the underground shelter. The people mainly wanted a place for the children to hide when the jets returned. And they did return many times later after we left. I often wonder what became of that shelter and how it fared in those days of attack.
In the span of just a few weeks I witnessed the crisis of the Palestinian world. Attacked by the Lebanese, attacked by the Israelis, these people had nowhere to go. They were becoming the refuse of Middle Eastern history. They were of no use to anyone. I remember walking in the hills outside the village at night. It was very dark and very quiet. The stars seemed crowded in this sky that didn’t suffer from the light pollution of my native southern California. God seemed very near to this place, and yet it was a place of tragedy beyond description.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE, 1990
In the following eighteen years I returned to the Middle East many times: sometimes as a pilgrim, frequently as a professor with students, and often as a researcher hoping to understand more of this turbulent world. I found a profound dilemma.
The Middle East was a land of miracles. This was the Holy Land—the land of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. This place had witnessed the miraculous rebirth of the nation of Israel, surely a triumph that has no parallel elsewhere in history. Once after reading Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth,² I stood in the Valley of Armageddon and reflected on Israel’s fulfillment of prophecy and the coming wars that would torment these lands and bring about the end of human history as we know it. Surely God was at work in this place.
But I also witnessed suffering and sinfulness in an unprecedented way. Both Arab evil and Israeli evil abounded. Whenever I left the usual tourist trail and looked behind the scenes, I caught glimpses of an Israel I barely recognized.
I was in Israel/Palestine in 1990 visiting an Arabic Christian pastor and his family in the city of Ramallah. This pastor’s home had become a refuge for many who sought support and protection. At 7:00 in the morning an elderly Palestinian woman burst into the kitchen where we were eating breakfast. Her story riveted us. The Israeli army had come that night to homes on her street looking for stone-throwing boys. It was about midnight, and the children were in bed. In panic they fled as soldiers with weapons tore through the bedrooms. Ziena, a twelve-year-old girl, fled out the front door and there on the porch was shot point-blank by a soldier with an automatic weapon. She was barely alive.
The woman fell to the floor, and her weeping—her incessant weeping—paralyzed us all. I knew what she was talking about. Just the day before I had been walking up Al Tireh Street, Ramallah’s main boulevard, and watched a platoon of soldiers shake down
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a row of homes. An officer told me that a child had thrown a rock out of the yard and it had hit the new car of an Israeli settler. Now the soldiers were looking for him. They could find only women and young children since school was in session and the men were away at work. The residents were told to line up in the field in front of the houses while the soldiers searched more carefully. I squatted down next to a jeep, watching in amazement. A girl of about five ran into the street, her mother screamed as she pursued her, and the soldiers yelled for them to get back in line. Then the rocks started falling. Soldiers on the top of the buildings nearby started targeting the young woman and her child with apple-sized stones. It was their laughter that disturbed me; it was their grisly sport here in Ramallah that I found stunning. The young mother swept up her child with tears streaming down her face and fled for the cover of trees. And there she wept. To this day I can still see and hear her weeping in the trees of Ramallah and laughing young Israeli soldiers targeting her with rocks. I deduced what happened next. The frustrated platoon decided to come back that night and in a surprise raid catch whomever they could. The young critically wounded girl was just one more accidental victim. We returned to breakfast, and the Palestinian Christian pastor said grace in a way I will never forget: “Lord, thank you for this food you give us this day. And please Lord remember those of us who suffer in this land and remember to bring justice to us.” It was time to leave Ramallah. I joined a communal taxi already filled with Arab riders and headed south toward Jerusalem. I climbed out of the taxi on the Nablus Road just north of the Old City’s Damascus Gate. I bought a popsicle from a vendor, and as I watched, an army patrol stopped its truck on the road in front of me and began to abuse the passengers in the waiting cars. They were the dreaded Border Regiments that work primarily in the Occupied Territories and are known for their forest-green berets and their bravado. I watched as soldiers reached into the windows of the filled taxis and slapped people across the face. My anger was brimming—I had been with these people; my car had Arab medical students in it. But I had an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. I did not know how to control my rage at the injustice, the provocation. Cameras are always a threatening weapon before soldiers, so I opened mine, slipped off the lens cap, and rested it on my chest. At once the patrol spotted me, the only blonde in a sea of Arab faces. With clubs poised inches from me they screamed in Hebrew something about photos. It was surreal. There I was standing face-to-face with a squad of heavily armed, arrogant young men. Each had a white-knuckled grip on his club and had weapons loaded with live clips. Clearly this roll of film was going to be a very expensive one. “Compassion” is a Latin word that means “to suffer with.” I had crossed an invisible yet tangible line somewhere. Deep within me fear and courage were at work. For a moment I was sure I wanted to be arrested—to confront the system, to dare them to do to an American citizen what they were doing to these people. Suddenly a Russian Israeli officer approached, intervened by yelling at the men, and escorted the squad back to the truck. Palestinian faces everywhere were looking at me—from the taxis to the sidewalk crowds. I turned to look at a shopkeeper behind me, and he smiled a smile like no other—a smile of grace, of sorrow, and of thanks—as the Israelis drove off. All I could say, as if he represented his entire people, was, “I’m sorry.” And I walked on into the old city of Jerusalem. Inside the Damascus Gate I could tell that a demonstration was about to erupt. Shops were slamming closed and people were running. Israeli patrols had mounted the high walls surrounding the gate, and they were distributing tear-gas canisters and locking them on to the underside of their rifle barrels. About seventy-five teenage girls packed a narrow street in that quarter of Jerusalem chanting and clapping. An Arab shopkeeper grabbed me, saying that it was not good for me to stay there, but I felt compelled, intoxicated by the surge of voices and curious to witness the fate that awaited them. A patrol of soldiers—I could see them—was about four hundred yards ahead. The girls sang as men in sunglasses loaded and aimed tear-gas guns, M-16s, and Uzi machine guns. There was a scream, gas, panic, a stampede, and retching. The girls retreated from their demonstration as I sprinted up an alley to move away from the gas. My head was still swimming from the adrenaline. I needed a place to sort out my feelings, to clear out my thinking. I followed a small road called the El Wad going south and then headed east on the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Suffering that Jesus walked on as he headed toward the cross of Golgotha. It was also the street where the women of Jerusalem wept for him. I knew of a private place—a quiet place, a place to settle down—and was anxious to weave through the crowds to get there. For a shekel the Sisters of Zion (a Catholic order) will let you into the remains of the ancient Roman Antonia Fortress. There underground, beneath the streets of Jerusalem, in perfect solitude, are pavements and cisterns built by the Romans to equip the Roman occupation army of the first century. The deepest ladder took me far from the awful world above. And there my surroundings hit me like nothing before: I was sitting amid the ruins of the Roman army that terrorized and battered this land in Jesus’ day—an army that Jesus knew all too well; an army that slapped him, mocked him, and crucified him. So it had been Jesus’ experience too. Did he feel what I felt? Did his followers not want him to do more? Were the Israelis now behaving like the Romans once had? And I wept for the first time since I had visited this land. ISRAEL/PALESTINE, 2002 For the next twelve years, I worked to sort out my assumptions about this land. In 1993, I published a book, Who Are God’s People in the Middle East?³—as much as an act of personal disclosure as anything. So many stories of suffering had come to me, that when I wrote these up I felt a sense of release. When a refugee gives you the sacred trust of his or her story, you carry it like a burden, wondering how to use it. When NATO troops and aid workers entered Kosovo in June 1999 following the Serbian invasion, they were overwhelmed with story after story of astonishing despair. The troops didn’t know what to do with all of the pain. I felt the same. The most remarkable thing that happened following the publication of the book was the response I received from the evangelical community. Many letters came in, some thanking me profusely, others reserving a place for me in the lower levels of Dante’s inferno. At conservative Wheaton College (where I work), some alumni even wrote our president urging I be dismissed for not affirming a proper biblical perspective on Israel! I was invited to speak on a dozen radio programs and one television show where callers could engage in conversation. The passion and the anger my stories evoked simply astounded me. I learned quickly that many did not want to hear about this difficult side of Israel’s life. One well-known Christian leader I know has led over eight church-based
pilgrimage trips to Israel using an Israeli guide and has never met an Arab Christian. Each summer Wheaton College takes fifty students to the Middle East for an extensive exposure to the historical geography of the Bible. I quickly learned that our Christian leaders could choose to walk through biblical sites without meeting a single Palestinian Christian. Imagine spending a month in Israel and never having a personal conversation with an Arab who is not a shopkeeper. Imagine being in a despair-filled country surrounded by Christians and not making an effort to learn about them, to meet them, even to embrace their struggles. In 1995, I led one of these trips and brought in Nora Kort from the Arab Orthodox Society to speak to the group one evening about her work as a Christian in the Old City of Jerusalem.⁴ The next day after Nora spoke, the president of the evangelical college where we stayed rebuked me angrily for letting her come to campus. I also became active in a Christian advocacy organization called Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding.⁵ And through our annual conferences around the country I began to see that when evangelicals take the time to hear “the other side,” to meet their first Palestinian pastor, to share a meal with an Arab family, suddenly their hearts are changed. For a long time, many assumed that things were going quite well as the Middle East worked toward peace. Israel made peace with Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), and pulled out of Lebanon (May 23, 2000). And in 1993 a peace negotiation called the Oslo Accords began between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet, behind the scenes, behind all of the talk about “the peace process,” a dangerous and treacherous struggle is being waged for the land of Palestine. A Palestinian national homeland—which was a dream in 1990—seems inevitable. And yet, in these years of “peace,” Israel has accelerated its acquisition of Palestinian land, its building of settlements, its destruction of Arab neighborhoods, and its bulldozing of Arab homes. By changing the “facts on the ground,” Israel hopes that final negotiations for this Palestinian homeland will take into account what Israel already possesses. And when Palestinian resistance occurs, violence often erupts. People who watch the region closely were not surprised when the entire country exploded in September 2000, and the world witnessed some of the worst bloodshed and fighting it had ever seen. By mid-2002, no one knew how the fighting would ever stop. Rather than simple statistics, these numbers represent families no different than our families in our own homes. On January 26, 1999, more than a hundred Israeli soldiers accompanied by bulldozers arrived at the village of Isawiyeh on the outskirts of East Jerusalem. In this village the fourteen-member Awais family had outgrown their home and had built a four-room house on their own property. They were refused a building permit by Israel—as so often happens in these villages—so that the family would leave. But on this Tuesday, bulldozers arrived and began demolishing their new home. About a hundred local people gathered and started to throw stones. Soon the army used batons to suppress them. Next the troops shot rubber-coated metal bullets at close range and killed Zaki ’Ubayd, the twenty-eight-year-old father. The troops then left quickly, leaving the children in shock and tears, standing in the midst of rubble and death. Such stories pour out in an endless stream if one listens carefully in this land. The Halaseh family (with its eleven children) had their family home demolished twice and were living in a tin shack on land that belonged to their family near the Jewish settlement of Kedar. Without warning on July 25, 1999, Israeli troops bulldozed their little home. The father (who was paralyzed) and his sixteen-year-old daughter were then arrested for “attacking soldiers” during the raid. I wish you could stand with me in the rubble of a destroyed Palestinian home. To lose your home in the course of war is one thing. To have it destroyed before your eyes by government authorities when you are holding your property deed, when you know that your children will be homeless that very night, is quite another. ISRAEL/PALESTINE, 2013 For the next ten years, we watched in amazement as not only the peace process between these two people collapsed completely, but the Israeli military occupation of what would become almost 4 million people increased its grip. Because of the publication of this book in 2003 and because open fighting was erupting throughout Israel, I was invited to speak at a number of national venues. The book was nominated for two awards. And then the letters and e-mails started arriving. And the phone calls. And the invitations to do radio interviews for evangelical outlets. One year I was doing a joint interview with a supporter of Israel on fundamentalist Moody Radio in Chicago and because things weren’t going as planned for the host, she broke her neutral stance and unleashed a barrage of harsh words about heresy and the betrayal of God’s chosen people. I was stunned at her unprofessional conduct but, more, I was awakened to a reality I had denied for years: many in my evangelical family saw this as an existential moral issue for them and not just for Israel. Evangelicals did not just stand in disagreement, they were angry at hearing this “other side” of the story. The decade witnessed a remarkable number of causalities on both sides as Israelis and Palestinians struggled to find a way to end the fighting and restore calm. Palestinian suicide bombs and small arms fire were met with one of the world’s most sophisticated armies. I am always reminded that both sides were suffering and this is true. However, it is valuable simply to examine a chart of death statistics from this era (see following bar chart). At once it becomes evident that Palestinian deaths in many years were many times more those of Israelis. This useful chart is compiled from a variety of Arab and Jewish sources. This means that from the beginning of the uprising in 2000 till 2006 Palestinian deaths reached remarkable numbers. In some cases, it was 7 to 1 (2004). The spike in 2008–2009 represents an uprising in Gaza following a multiyear Israeli blockade. Israel responded with “shock and awe” using a bombing campaign only seen elsewhere during the Iraq war. The infrastructure (water, electricity, roads) was devastated. Over 1400 Palestinians were killed compared with 13 Israeli deaths. In the most recent exchange between Gaza and Israel (2012) the causality rate was 15 to 1. The period also witnessed the rapid settlement of what was hoped to be the region
a row of homes. An officer told me that a child had thrown a rock out of the yard and it had hit the new car of an Israeli settler. Now the soldiers were looking for him. They could find only women and young children since school was in session and the men were away at work. The residents were told to line up in the field in front of the houses while the soldiers searched more carefully. I squatted down next to a jeep, watching in amazement. A girl of about five ran into the street, her mother screamed as she pursued her, and the soldiers yelled for them to get back in line. Then the rocks started falling. Soldiers on the top of the buildings nearby started targeting the young woman and her child with apple-sized stones. It was their laughter that disturbed me; it was their grisly sport here in Ramallah that I found stunning. The young mother swept up her child with tears streaming down her face and fled for the cover of trees. And there she wept. To this day I can still see and hear her weeping in the trees of Ramallah and laughing young Israeli soldiers targeting her with rocks.
I deduced what happened next. The frustrated platoon decided to come back that night and in a surprise raid catch whomever they could. The young critically wounded girl was just one more accidental victim.
We returned to breakfast, and the Palestinian Christian pastor said grace in a way I will never forget: Lord, thank you for this food you give us this day. And please Lord remember those of us who suffer in this land and remember to bring justice to us.
It was time to leave Ramallah. I joined a communal taxi already filled with Arab riders and headed south toward Jerusalem. I climbed out of the taxi on the Nablus Road just north of the Old City’s Damascus Gate. I bought a popsicle from a vendor, and as I watched, an army patrol stopped its truck on the road in front of me and began to abuse the passengers in the waiting cars. They were the dreaded Border Regiments that work primarily in the Occupied Territories and are known for their forest-green berets and their bravado. I watched as soldiers reached into the windows of the filled taxis and slapped people across the face. My anger was brimming—I had been with these people; my car had Arab medical students in it. But I had an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. I did not know how to control my rage at the injustice, the provocation.
Cameras are always a threatening weapon before soldiers, so I opened mine, slipped off the lens cap, and rested it on my chest. At once the patrol spotted me, the only blonde in a sea of Arab faces. With clubs poised inches from me they screamed in Hebrew something about photos. It was surreal. There I was standing face-to-face with a squad of heavily armed, arrogant young men. Each had a white-knuckled grip on his club and had weapons loaded with live clips. Clearly this roll of film was going to be a very expensive one.
Compassion is a Latin word that means to suffer with. I had crossed an invisible yet tangible line somewhere. Deep within me fear and courage were at work. For a moment I was sure I wanted to be arrested—to confront the system, to dare them to do to an American citizen what they were doing to these people.
Suddenly a Russian Israeli officer approached, intervened by yelling at the men, and escorted the squad back to the truck. Palestinian faces everywhere were looking at me—from the taxis to the sidewalk crowds. I turned to look at a shopkeeper behind me, and he smiled a smile like no other—a smile of grace, of sorrow, and of thanks—as the Israelis drove off. All I could say, as if he represented his entire people, was, I’m sorry. And I walked on into the old city of Jerusalem.
Inside the Damascus Gate I could tell that a demonstration was about to erupt. Shops were slamming closed and people were running. Israeli patrols had mounted the high walls surrounding the gate, and they were distributing tear-gas canisters and locking them on to the underside of their rifle barrels. About seventy-five teenage girls packed a narrow street in that quarter of Jerusalem chanting and clapping. An Arab shopkeeper grabbed me, saying that it was not good for me to stay there, but I felt compelled, intoxicated by the surge of voices and curious to witness the fate that awaited them. A patrol of soldiers—I could see them—was about four hundred yards ahead. The girls sang as men in sunglasses loaded and aimed tear-gas guns, M-16s, and Uzi machine guns. There was a scream, gas, panic, a stampede, and retching. The girls retreated from their demonstration as I sprinted up an alley to move away from the gas.
My head was still swimming from the adrenaline. I needed a place to sort out my feelings, to clear out my thinking. I followed a small road called the El Wad going south and then headed east on the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Suffering that Jesus walked on as he headed toward the cross of Golgotha. It was also the street where the women of Jerusalem wept for him. I knew of a private place—a quiet place, a place to settle down—and was anxious to weave through the crowds to get there. For a shekel the Sisters of Zion (a Catholic order) will let you into the remains of the ancient Roman Antonia Fortress. There underground, beneath the streets of Jerusalem, in perfect solitude, are pavements and cisterns built by the Romans to equip the Roman occupation army of the first century. The deepest ladder took me far from the awful world above. And there my surroundings hit me like nothing before: I was sitting amid the ruins of the Roman army that terrorized and battered this land in Jesus’ day—an army that Jesus knew all too well; an army that slapped him, mocked him, and crucified him.
So it had been Jesus’ experience too. Did he feel what I felt? Did his followers not want him to do more? Were the Israelis now behaving like the Romans once had? And I wept for the first time since I had visited this land.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE, 2002
For the next twelve years, I worked to sort out my assumptions about this land. In 1993, I published a book, Who Are God’s People in the Middle East?³—as much as an act of personal disclosure as anything. So many stories of suffering had come to me, that when I wrote these up I felt a sense of release. When a refugee gives you the sacred trust of his or her story, you carry it like a burden, wondering how to use it. When NATO troops and aid workers entered Kosovo in June 1999 following the Serbian invasion, they were overwhelmed with story after story of astonishing despair. The troops didn’t know what to do with all of the pain. I felt the same.
The most remarkable thing that happened following the publication of the book was the response I received from the evangelical community. Many letters came in, some thanking me profusely, others reserving a place for me in the lower levels of Dante’s inferno. At conservative Wheaton College (where I work), some alumni even wrote our president urging I be dismissed for not affirming a proper biblical perspective on Israel! I was invited to speak on a dozen radio programs and one television show where callers could engage in conversation. The passion and the anger my stories evoked simply astounded me.
I learned quickly that many did not want to hear about this difficult side of Israel’s life. One well-known Christian leader I know has led over eight church-based
pilgrimage trips to Israel using an Israeli guide and has never met an Arab Christian. Each summer Wheaton College takes fifty students to the Middle East for an extensive exposure to the historical geography of the Bible. I quickly learned that our Christian leaders could choose to walk through biblical sites without meeting a single Palestinian Christian. Imagine spending a month in Israel and never having a personal conversation with an Arab who is not a shopkeeper. Imagine being in a despair-filled country surrounded by Christians and not making an effort to learn about them, to meet them, even to embrace their struggles. In 1995, I led one of these trips and brought in Nora Kort from the Arab Orthodox Society to speak to the group one evening about her work as a Christian in the Old City of Jerusalem.⁴ The next day after Nora spoke, the president of the evangelical college where we stayed rebuked me angrily for letting her come to campus.
I also became active in a Christian advocacy organization called Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding.⁵ And through our annual conferences around the country I began to see that when evangelicals take the time to hear the other side, to meet their first Palestinian pastor, to share a meal with an Arab family, suddenly their hearts are changed. For a long time, many assumed that things were going quite well as the Middle East worked toward peace. Israel made peace with Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), and pulled out of Lebanon (May 23, 2000). And in 1993 a peace negotiation called the Oslo Accords began between Israel and the Palestinians.
Yet, behind the scenes, behind all of the talk about the peace process, a dangerous and treacherous struggle is being waged for the land of Palestine. A Palestinian national homeland—which was a dream in 1990—seems inevitable. And yet, in these years of peace, Israel has accelerated its acquisition of Palestinian land, its building of settlements, its destruction of Arab neighborhoods, and its bulldozing of Arab homes. By changing the facts on the ground, Israel hopes that final negotiations for this Palestinian homeland will take into account what Israel already possesses. And when Palestinian resistance occurs, violence often erupts. People who watch the region closely were not surprised when the entire country exploded in September 2000, and the world witnessed some of the worst bloodshed and fighting it had ever seen. By mid-2002, no one knew how the fighting would ever stop.
Rather than simple statistics, these numbers represent families no different than our families in our own homes. On January 26, 1999, more than a hundred Israeli soldiers accompanied by bulldozers arrived at the village of Isawiyeh on the outskirts of East Jerusalem. In this village the fourteen-member Awais family had outgrown their home and had built a four-room house on their own property. They were refused a building permit by Israel—as so often happens in these villages—so that the family would leave. But on this Tuesday, bulldozers arrived and began demolishing their new home. About a hundred local people gathered and started to throw stones. Soon the army used batons to suppress them. Next the troops shot rubber-coated metal bullets at close range and killed Zaki ’Ubayd, the twenty-eight-year-old father. The troops then left quickly, leaving the children in shock and tears, standing in the midst of rubble and death.
Such stories pour out in an endless stream if one listens carefully in this land. The Halaseh family (with its eleven children) had their family home demolished twice and were living in a tin shack on land that belonged to their family near the Jewish settlement of Kedar. Without warning on July 25, 1999, Israeli troops bulldozed their little home. The father (who was paralyzed) and his sixteen-year-old daughter were then arrested for attacking soldiers during the raid.
I wish you could stand with me in the rubble of a destroyed Palestinian home. To lose your home in the course of war is one thing. To have it destroyed before your eyes by government authorities when you are holding your property deed, when you know that your children will be homeless that very night, is quite another.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE, 2013
For the next ten years, we watched in amazement as not only the peace process between these two people collapsed completely, but the Israeli military occupation of what would become almost 4 million people increased its grip. Because of the publication of this book in 2003 and because open fighting was erupting throughout Israel, I was invited to speak at a number of national venues. The book was nominated for two awards. And then the letters and e-mails started arriving. And the phone calls. And the invitations to do radio interviews for evangelical outlets. One year I was doing a joint interview with a supporter of Israel on fundamentalist Moody Radio in Chicago and because things weren’t going as planned for the host, she broke her neutral stance and unleashed a barrage of harsh words about heresy and the betrayal of God’s chosen people. I was stunned at her unprofessional conduct but, more, I was awakened to a reality I had denied for years: many in my evangelical family saw this as an existential moral issue for them and not just for Israel. Evangelicals did not just stand in disagreement, they were angry at hearing this other side of the story.
The decade witnessed a remarkable number of causalities on both sides as Israelis and Palestinians struggled to find a way to end the fighting and restore calm. Palestinian suicide bombs and small arms fire were met with one of the world’s most sophisticated armies. I am always reminded that both sides were suffering and this is true. However, it is valuable simply to examine a chart of death statistics from this era (see following bar chart). At once it becomes evident that Palestinian deaths in many years were many times more those of Israelis. This useful chart is compiled from a variety of Arab and Jewish sources.
This means that from the beginning of the uprising in 2000 till 2006 Palestinian deaths reached remarkable numbers. In some cases, it was 7 to 1 (2004). The spike in 2008–2009 represents an uprising in Gaza following a multiyear Israeli blockade. Israel responded with shock and awe using a bombing campaign only seen elsewhere during the Iraq war. The infrastructure (water, electricity, roads) was devastated. Over 1400 Palestinians were killed compared with 13 Israeli deaths. In the most recent exchange between Gaza and Israel (2012) the causality rate was 15 to 1.
The period also witnessed the rapid settlement of what was hoped to be the region
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pilgrimage trips to Israel using an Israeli guide and has never met an Arab Christian. Each summer Wheaton College takes fifty students to the Middle East for an extensive exposure to the historical geography of the Bible. I quickly learned that our Christian leaders could choose to walk through biblical sites without meeting a single Palestinian Christian. Imagine spending a month in Israel and never having a personal conversation with an Arab who is not a shopkeeper. Imagine being in a despair-filled country surrounded by Christians and not making an effort to learn about them, to meet them, even to embrace their struggles. In 1995, I led one of these trips and brought in Nora Kort from the Arab Orthodox Society to speak to the group one evening about her work as a Christian in the Old City of Jerusalem.⁴ The next day after Nora spoke, the president of the evangelical college where we stayed rebuked me angrily for letting her come to campus. I also became active in a Christian advocacy organization called Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding.⁵ And through our annual conferences around the country I began to see that when evangelicals take the time to hear “the other side,” to meet their first Palestinian pastor, to share a meal with an Arab family, suddenly their hearts are changed. For a long time, many assumed that things were going quite well as the Middle East worked toward peace. Israel made peace with Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), and pulled out of Lebanon (May 23, 2000). And in 1993 a peace negotiation called the Oslo Accords began between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet, behind the scenes, behind all of the talk about “the peace process,” a dangerous and treacherous struggle is being waged for the land of Palestine. A Palestinian national homeland—which was a dream in 1990—seems inevitable. And yet, in these years of “peace,” Israel has accelerated its acquisition of Palestinian land, its building of settlements, its destruction of Arab neighborhoods, and its bulldozing of Arab homes. By changing the “facts on the ground,” Israel hopes that final negotiations for this Palestinian homeland will take into account what Israel already possesses. And when Palestinian resistance occurs, violence often erupts. People who watch the region closely were not surprised when the entire country exploded in September 2000, and the world witnessed some of the worst bloodshed and fighting it had ever seen. By mid-2002, no one knew how the fighting would ever stop. Rather than simple statistics, these numbers represent families no different than our families in our own homes. On January 26, 1999, more than a hundred Israeli soldiers accompanied by bulldozers arrived at the village of Isawiyeh on the outskirts of East Jerusalem. In this village the fourteen-member Awais family had outgrown their home and had built a four-room house on their own property. They were refused a building permit by Israel—as so often happens in these villages—so that the family would leave. But on this Tuesday, bulldozers arrived and began demolishing their new home. About a hundred local people gathered and started to throw stones. Soon the army used batons to suppress them. Next the troops shot rubber-coated metal bullets at close range and killed Zaki ’Ubayd, the twenty-eight-year-old father. The troops then left quickly, leaving the children in shock and tears, standing in the midst of rubble and death. Such stories pour out in an endless stream if one listens carefully in this land. The Halaseh family (with its eleven children) had their family home demolished twice and were living in a tin shack on land that belonged to their family near the Jewish settlement of Kedar. Without warning on July 25, 1999, Israeli troops bulldozed their little home. The father (who was paralyzed) and his sixteen-year-old daughter were then arrested for “attacking soldiers” during the raid. I wish you could stand with me in the rubble of a destroyed Palestinian home. To lose your home in the course of war is one thing. To have it destroyed before your eyes by government authorities when you are holding your property deed, when you know that your children will be homeless that very night, is quite another. ISRAEL/PALESTINE, 2013 For the next ten years, we watched in amazement as not only the peace process between these two people collapsed completely, but the Israeli military occupation of what would become almost 4 million people increased its grip. Because of the publication of this book in 2003 and because open fighting was erupting throughout Israel, I was invited to speak at a number of national venues. The book was nominated for two awards. And then the letters and e-mails started arriving. And the phone calls. And the invitations to do radio interviews for evangelical outlets. One year I was doing a joint interview with a supporter of Israel on fundamentalist Moody Radio in Chicago and because things weren’t going as planned for the host, she broke her neutral stance and unleashed a barrage of harsh words about heresy and the betrayal of God’s chosen people. I was stunned at her unprofessional conduct but, more, I was awakened to a reality I had denied for years: many in my evangelical family saw this as an existential moral issue for them and not just for Israel. Evangelicals did not just stand in disagreement, they were angry at hearing this “other side” of the story. The decade witnessed a remarkable number of causalities on both sides as Israelis and Palestinians struggled to find a way to end the fighting and restore calm. Palestinian suicide bombs and small arms fire were met with one of the world’s most sophisticated armies. I am always reminded that both sides were suffering and this is true. However, it is valuable simply to examine a chart of death statistics from this era (see following bar chart). At once it becomes evident that Palestinian deaths in many years were many times more those of Israelis. This useful chart is compiled from a variety of Arab and Jewish sources. This means that from the beginning of the uprising in 2000 till 2006 Palestinian deaths reached remarkable numbers. In some cases, it was 7 to 1 (2004). The spike in 2008–2009 represents an uprising in Gaza following a multiyear Israeli blockade. Israel responded with “shock and awe” using a bombing campaign only seen elsewhere during the Iraq war. The infrastructure (water, electricity, roads) was devastated. Over 1400 Palestinians were killed compared with 13 Israeli deaths. In the most recent exchange between Gaza and Israel (2012) the causality rate was 15 to 1. The period also witnessed the rapid settlement of what was hoped to be the region
a row of homes. An officer told me that a child had thrown a rock out of the yard and it had hit the new car of an Israeli settler. Now the soldiers were looking for him. They could find only women and young children since school was in session and the men were away at work. The residents were told to line up in the field in front of the houses while the soldiers searched more carefully. I squatted down next to a jeep, watching in amazement. A girl of about five ran into the street, her mother screamed as she pursued her, and the soldiers yelled for them to get back in line. Then the rocks started falling. Soldiers on the top of the buildings nearby started targeting the young woman and her child with apple-sized stones. It was their laughter that disturbed me; it was their grisly sport here in Ramallah that I found stunning. The young mother swept up her child with tears streaming down her face and fled for the cover of trees. And there she wept. To this day I can still see and hear her weeping in the trees of Ramallah and laughing young Israeli soldiers targeting her with rocks.
I deduced what happened next. The frustrated platoon decided to come back that night and in a surprise raid catch whomever they could. The young critically wounded girl was just one more accidental victim.
We returned to breakfast, and the Palestinian Christian pastor said grace in a way I will never forget: Lord, thank you for this food you give us this day. And please Lord remember those of us who suffer in this land and remember to bring justice to us.
It was time to leave Ramallah. I joined a communal taxi already filled with Arab riders and headed south toward Jerusalem. I climbed out of the taxi on the Nablus Road just north of the Old City’s Damascus Gate. I bought a popsicle from a vendor, and as I watched, an army patrol stopped its truck on the road in front of me and began to abuse the passengers in the waiting cars. They were the dreaded Border Regiments that work primarily in the Occupied Territories and are known for their forest-green berets and their bravado. I watched as soldiers reached into the windows of the filled taxis and slapped people across the face. My anger was brimming—I had been with these people; my car had Arab medical students in it. But I had an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. I did not know how to control my rage at the injustice, the provocation.
Cameras are always a threatening weapon before soldiers, so I opened mine, slipped off the lens cap, and rested it on my chest. At once the patrol spotted me, the only blonde in a sea of Arab faces. With clubs poised inches from me they screamed in Hebrew something about photos. It was surreal. There I was standing face-to-face with a squad of heavily armed, arrogant young men. Each had a white-knuckled grip on his club and had weapons loaded with live clips. Clearly this roll of film was going to be a very expensive one.
Compassion is a Latin word that means to suffer with. I had crossed an invisible yet tangible line somewhere. Deep within me fear and courage were at work. For a moment I was sure I wanted to be arrested—to confront the system, to dare them to do to an American citizen what they were doing to these people.
Suddenly a Russian Israeli officer approached, intervened by yelling at the men, and escorted the squad back to the truck. Palestinian faces everywhere were looking at me—from the taxis to the sidewalk crowds. I turned to look at a shopkeeper behind me, and he smiled a smile like no other—a smile of grace, of sorrow, and of thanks—as the Israelis drove off. All I could say, as if he represented his entire people, was, I’m sorry. And I walked on into the old city of Jerusalem.
Inside the Damascus Gate I could tell that a demonstration was about to erupt. Shops were slamming closed and people were running. Israeli patrols had mounted the high walls surrounding the gate, and they were distributing tear-gas canisters and locking them on to the underside of their rifle barrels. About seventy-five teenage girls packed a narrow street in that quarter of Jerusalem chanting and clapping. An Arab shopkeeper grabbed me, saying that it was not good for me to stay there, but I felt compelled, intoxicated by the surge of voices and curious to witness the fate that awaited them. A patrol of soldiers—I could see them—was about four hundred yards ahead. The girls sang as men in sunglasses loaded and aimed tear-gas guns, M-16s, and Uzi machine guns. There was a scream, gas, panic, a stampede, and retching. The girls retreated from their demonstration as I sprinted up an alley to move away from the gas.
My head was still swimming from the adrenaline. I needed a place to sort out my feelings, to clear out my thinking. I followed a small road called the El Wad going south and then headed east on the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Suffering that Jesus walked on as he headed toward the cross of Golgotha. It was also the street where the women of Jerusalem wept for him. I knew of a private place—a quiet place, a place to settle down—and was anxious to weave through the crowds to get there. For a shekel the Sisters of Zion (a Catholic order) will let you into the remains of the ancient Roman Antonia Fortress. There underground, beneath the streets of Jerusalem, in perfect solitude, are pavements and cisterns built by the Romans to equip the Roman occupation army of the first century. The deepest ladder took me far from the awful world above. And there my surroundings hit me like nothing before: I was sitting amid the ruins of the Roman army that terrorized and battered this land in Jesus’ day—an army that Jesus knew all too well; an army that slapped him, mocked him, and crucified him.
So it had been Jesus’ experience too. Did he feel what I felt? Did his followers not want him to do more? Were the Israelis now behaving like the Romans once had? And I wept for the first time since I had visited this land.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE, 2002
For the next twelve years, I worked to sort out my assumptions about this land. In 1993, I published a book, Who Are God’s People in the Middle East?³—as much as an act of personal disclosure as anything. So many stories of suffering had come to me, that when I wrote these up I felt a sense of release. When a refugee gives you the sacred trust of his or her story, you carry it like a burden, wondering how to use it. When NATO troops and aid workers entered Kosovo in June 1999 following the Serbian invasion, they were overwhelmed with story after story of astonishing despair. The troops didn’t know what to do with all of the pain. I felt the same.
The most remarkable thing that happened following the publication of the book was the response I received from the evangelical community. Many letters came in, some thanking me profusely, others reserving a place for me in the lower levels of Dante’s inferno. At conservative Wheaton College (where I work), some alumni even wrote our president urging I be dismissed for not affirming a proper biblical perspective on Israel! I was invited to speak on a dozen radio programs and one television show where callers could engage in conversation. The passion and the anger my stories evoked simply astounded me.
I learned quickly that many did not want to hear about this difficult side of Israel’s life. One well-known Christian leader I know has led over eight church-based
pilgrimage trips to Israel using an Israeli guide and has never met an Arab Christian. Each summer Wheaton College takes fifty students to the Middle East for an extensive exposure to the historical geography of the Bible. I quickly learned that our Christian leaders could choose to walk through biblical sites without meeting a single Palestinian Christian. Imagine spending a month in Israel and never having a personal conversation with an Arab who is not a shopkeeper. Imagine being in a despair-filled country surrounded by Christians and not making an effort to learn about them, to meet them, even to embrace their struggles. In 1995, I led one of these trips and brought in Nora Kort from the Arab Orthodox Society to speak to the group one evening about her work as a Christian in the Old City of Jerusalem.⁴ The next day after Nora spoke, the president of the evangelical college where we stayed rebuked me angrily for letting her come to campus.
I also became active in a Christian advocacy organization called Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding.⁵ And through our annual conferences around the country I began to see that when evangelicals take the time to hear the other side, to meet their first Palestinian pastor, to share a meal with an Arab family, suddenly their hearts are changed. For a long time, many assumed that things were going quite well as the Middle East worked toward peace. Israel made peace with Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), and pulled out of Lebanon (May 23, 2000). And in 1993 a peace negotiation called the Oslo Accords began between Israel and the Palestinians.
Yet, behind the scenes, behind all of the talk about the peace process, a dangerous and treacherous struggle is being waged for the land of Palestine. A Palestinian national homeland—which was a dream in 1990—seems inevitable. And yet, in these years of peace, Israel has accelerated its acquisition of Palestinian land, its building of settlements, its destruction of Arab neighborhoods, and its bulldozing of Arab homes. By changing the facts on the ground, Israel hopes that final negotiations for this Palestinian homeland will take into account what Israel already possesses. And when Palestinian resistance occurs, violence often erupts. People who watch the region closely were not surprised when the entire country exploded in September 2000, and the world witnessed some of the worst bloodshed and fighting it had ever seen. By mid-2002, no one knew how the fighting would ever stop.
Rather than simple statistics, these numbers represent families no different than our families in our own homes. On January 26, 1999, more than a hundred Israeli soldiers accompanied by bulldozers arrived at the village of Isawiyeh on the outskirts of East Jerusalem. In this village the fourteen-member Awais family had outgrown their home and had built a four-room house on their own property. They were refused a building permit by Israel—as so often happens in these villages—so that the family would leave. But on this Tuesday, bulldozers arrived and began demolishing their new home. About a hundred local people gathered and started to throw stones. Soon the army used batons to suppress them. Next the troops shot rubber-coated metal bullets at close range and killed Zaki ’Ubayd, the twenty-eight-year-old father. The troops then left quickly, leaving the children in shock and tears, standing in the midst of rubble and death.
Such stories pour out in an endless stream if one listens carefully in this land. The Halaseh family (with its eleven children) had their family home demolished twice and were living in a tin shack on land that belonged to their family near the Jewish settlement of Kedar. Without warning on July 25, 1999, Israeli troops bulldozed their little home. The father (who was paralyzed) and his sixteen-year-old daughter were then arrested for attacking soldiers during the raid.
I wish you could stand with me in the rubble of a destroyed Palestinian home. To lose your home in the course of war is one thing. To have it destroyed before your eyes by government authorities when you are holding your property deed, when you know that your children will be homeless that very night, is quite another.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE, 2013
For the next ten years, we watched in amazement as not only the peace process between these two people collapsed completely, but the Israeli military occupation of what would become almost 4 million people increased its grip. Because of the publication of this book in 2003 and because open fighting was erupting throughout Israel, I was invited to speak at a number of national venues. The book was nominated for two awards. And then the letters and e-mails started arriving. And the phone calls. And the invitations to do radio interviews for evangelical outlets. One year I was doing a joint interview with a supporter of Israel on fundamentalist Moody Radio in Chicago and because things weren’t going as planned for the host, she broke her neutral stance and unleashed a barrage of harsh words about heresy and the betrayal of God’s chosen people. I was stunned at her unprofessional conduct but, more, I was awakened to a reality I had denied for years: many in my evangelical family saw this as an existential moral issue for them and not just for Israel. Evangelicals did not just stand in disagreement, they were angry at hearing this other side of the story.
The decade witnessed a remarkable number of causalities on both sides as Israelis and Palestinians struggled to find a way to end the fighting and restore calm. Palestinian suicide bombs and small arms fire were met with one of the world’s most sophisticated armies. I am always reminded that both sides were suffering and this is true. However, it is valuable simply to examine a chart of death statistics from this era (see following bar chart). At once it becomes evident that Palestinian deaths in many years were many times more those of Israelis. This useful chart is compiled from a variety of Arab and Jewish sources.
This means that from the beginning of the uprising in 2000 till 2006 Palestinian deaths reached remarkable numbers. In some cases, it was 7 to 1 (2004). The spike in 2008–2009 represents an uprising in Gaza following a multiyear Israeli blockade. Israel responded with shock and awe using a bombing campaign only seen elsewhere during the Iraq war. The infrastructure (water, electricity, roads) was devastated. Over 1400 Palestinians were killed compared with 13 Israeli deaths. In the most recent exchange between Gaza and Israel (2012) the causality rate was 15 to 1.
The period also witnessed the rapid settlement of what was hoped to be the region
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of a Palestinian national state: the West Bank. And it witnessed the increased destruction of Palestinian homes in order to reduce the Arab population and make way for Israeli settlement. According to the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights, B’tselem, from 1999 to 2012 Israel destroyed 1,513 Palestinian homes, leaving 4,262 people homeless (1,328 of these are children). Following the 2009 war in Gaza, 3,500 homes were destroyed, leaving 20,000 people homeless (according to the United Nations). Sometimes used to push populations out of their towns or sometimes to punish families, home destruction and homelessness is a part of the Palestinian narrative. To grasp the full measure of this you simply have to stand in a village that is under occupation. The village of `Aboud in the central West Bank near Ramallah would do nicely. Here are about 2,500 Palestinians and a Christian history that reaches back 1,700 years. `Aboud’s chief income is agricultural (olives, figs, grapes, apples, almonds, and olive soap) and fully 43 percent of the village land was olive groves. Then in 1980 the Israeli government confiscated 200 of its acres (780 dunums), declaring this land a “military zone.” Then the first settlers arrived. And soon the settlement of Beit Arye was built. In 1988 the new settlement of Ofarim took more confiscated land. But the settlements needed more room. In 2000 settlers backed up by the army destroyed 4,000 of `Aboud’s olive trees. In 2002 the army blew up `Aboud’s famous sixth-century Saint Barbara church as it destroyed more trees and forbade `Aboud’s residents from harvesting much of what was left. Then in 2005 the Israelis brought the “separation wall/barrier” and, rather than build it near the settlements, they ran the wall through `Aboud’s fields, slicing off 32 percent of the village. Today `Aboud’s economy is on the verge of collapse. A once flourishing village—filled with incredibly beautiful homes—is in turmoil. Well educated, politically moderate, prosperous—if there ever was a village that could mingle with its Israeli neighbors for a better future, `Aboud was it. One Sunday in March 2012 I took thirty-five college students to `Aboud for a day. We joined the town’s residents for worship in a variety of churches (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox), we socialized with them, and we had lunch together. And then we walked to the perimeter of the village and stood on the enormous dirt pile blocking one of `Aboud’s chief roads to its markets. The military had closed the road and the people were wary of walking past the roadblock lest settlers or soldiers react. My students were astonished at what they saw. And I believe that anyone with a conscience and a heart would feel the same. But here is what has become my most intriguing discovery in this decade. Israelis were seeing things like this as well. And it offended the deeply held commitments to righteousness so central to Jewish life and belief. As a Jewish friend once told me, “This is not who we are—this is not who we want to be.” And I began to discover grassroots movements of people who have lost faith in their politicians and military leaders. They are no less loyal to Israel: but they wonder if their country has lost its way. Because of the enormous imbalance of economic, political, and military power in this conflict, Israelis will always have the upper hand. And because of this, conversions of conscience within the Israeli context will always be deeply important. I have stood with Israelis who were marching to end the occupation. I have watched Jewish women marching against soldiers in Jerusalem. I have watched incredibly brave orthodox Jews do it. I have listened to former decorated soldiers who now refuse to join their units if it means occupying the Palestinians (rather than defending Israel against its enemies). I was surprised one Friday afternoon in Jerusalem after lunch to find “women in black” standing in silent vigil against Israeli militarism (where Agron and King George Streets cross). Then there is the Parent’s Circle—over five hundred Jewish and Arab families who have lost children in this conflict and have decided to meet, talk, and share their mutual sorrow. There have been courageous Messianic Jewish leaders who were willing to break with trends of “separation” and join with Palestinian Christians for fellowship, study, and reconciliation. And in October 2012 there was the first Bethlehem Walk—imagine a thousand Israeli women walking into Bethlehem, demanding to bypass the occupation wall, and marching to the town center to make friends with a thousand Palestinian women. Just the idea could make you cry. I had always known that some of my very best sources in quantifying this conflict had come from Israeli Jewish sources. Web sites like B’Tselem have been invaluable to everyone’s research. But here was something new: movements (often led by women) who are appalled by the militant posturing of their political leaders. They want a future. And somewhere, somehow, it will be a shared future that includes 3.8 million Palestinians. FOUR COMPLICATIONS Why do we sense we cannot get anywhere when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians? Why have Christians been peculiarly—and sometimes rightly—paralyzed on the matter of this subject? Passions always flare when someone brings up aid for Israel or the settlement of the West Bank or the Palestinian resistance. We are torn. We are drawn to this subject instinctively. If rioting takes place in Bethlehem, the story may well make the national news, but if hundreds die in Sudan or Pakistan, we may never hear. As Christians our interest is heightened because we attribute a spiritual importance to this part of the world. One of the most popular books circulating among evangelicals today is Bodie Thoene’s multivolume sets The Zion Covenant and The Zion Chronicles, which trace the story of Jewish families surviving Holocaust Europe and establishing the State of Israel. This romantic story of suffering, endurance, and hope does not want to be complicated by another story of suffering and endurance among people whom Thoene’s fictional characters displace. Today the nationally best-selling series Left Behind paints a similar portrait of political crisis centered around Israel’s fate in world history. Four factors seem to continue to influence and complicate our thinking when we reflect on modern Israel today. 1. We bear a subliminal sense of guilt for the horrors of the twentieth century that have been perpetrated on Judaism. We share the guilt of men and women who, in the name of Christ, pursued, persecuted, and massacred Jews. From Moscow to Chicago, anti-Semitism is a part of the heritage of Western Christendom. Jews were killed by the Byzantine armies, the Holy Roman Empire, and even the Crusaders. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem in 1099 CE in the name of Christ, they massacred everyone who looked Middle Eastern, Muslims and Jews alike. Few in the Middle East have forgotten this. Twentieth-century Jews have had to face similar horrors. That Jewish synagogues on the north side of Chicago have metal fireproof doors on their buildings is no accident. Congregation members can often be seen scrubbing off swastikas from the alleyway entrances. Kristallnacht, the night of November 9, 1938, commemorates the day when the Nazi SS began destroying Jewish businesses and synagogues in Munich. Its anniversary is still remembered each year, especially in Skokie, north of Chicago,
among the neo-Nazis. Jews in the synagogues there pray that the night will pass without incident. Our relationship with Israel is thus complicated by a collective feeling of guilt. These people have suffered severely in history, and our debt to their future is great. Judaism deserves a place of security—a place to protect itself from outsiders. I cannot imagine the restraint it took for the Israelis not to respond with force when Saddam Hussein was lobbing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv in early 1990. “To defend yourself and not rely on someone else’s guns” is a vow that was born somewhere in the Warsaw ghetto in the 1930s. I recall standing on the top of the mountain of Masada, the “last stand” of the Jews against the Romans, and watching the bar mitzvah of a young man in the ruins of the two-thousand-year-old synagogue. As he vowed in the silence of the desert to embrace his faith and his land with his entire life, an F-16 fighter barreling down the Jordan Valley screamed defiantly over the mountain and its synagogue with a deafening roar. Judaism will never be desecrated in a ghetto again. Ever. And this is good. Israel has not hesitated to remind the West of this obligation. Comments about the “debt” of the West are heard frequently. Well-known theologian Dr. Rosemary Ruether was recently traveling in Gaza and there watched a Palestinian demonstration. A car full of Israeli settlers drove past, threatening the marchers. “Why are you doing this?” she asked them. “Because of the war!” one Israeli yelled back. My friend continued, “But these people didn’t do anything to you.” The settler responded, “But they must pay. The whole world must pay.” 2. Evangelical Christians have rightly concluded that we of all people have a shared sense of spiritual destiny with Judaism. Our branches spring from the same Middle Eastern olive tree. We share a parallel faith. The Lord is the same God both of synagogue and church. Every autumn, thousands of evangelical Christians flood into Jerusalem from the United States and Europe to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. They march around the walled city of Jerusalem arm in arm with Jewish worshipers, waving palms and praising God for the harvest of vine and tree. Jerusalem’s mayor usually gives a speech praising the evangelicals’ presence, and every Israeli prime minister (except Ehud Barak) has celebrated with them. We know that Jesus was Jewish. He was of the tribe of Judah, a descendant of David. Paul was from the tribe of Benjamin, a rabbi. Eighty percent of our Bible belongs to the Hebrew canon. The Lord’s Supper is actually a Jewish Passover Seder. Above all, we are commanded in Scripture to bless the children of Abraham. Paul’s life witnessed intense hostility from the Jewish synagogues: he was jailed, cursed, arrested, flogged with forty lashes five times, beaten with rods three times, and nearly stoned to death once. Still he could say (in Romans 11) that for the sake of the promises God made to their ancestors, the Jewish people—especially those who refuse to believe in Christ—are still beloved (Rom. 11:28). Judaism holds an incomparable place in divine history. So our relationship with Israel is further complicated by the kinship we feel with this Israeli state that overtly professes faith in the God of Jesus. Even the Israeli Parliament building, the Knesset, is architecturally designed to recall the Ten Commandments—ostensibly the basis of secular Jewish law. Christians can only wish that our American Supreme Court could do as well. 3. Deep within our instincts we have concluded that we are witnesses to a miracle in the twentieth century. The nation of Israel is God’s doing. The return of the Jews to Israel after two thousand years, Israel’s survival against inestimable odds—are these not signs of something larger than history? How many cultures alive today are thirty-five hundred years old, have suffered multiple exiles, and then after two thousand years of assimilation into the European world have resurrected their dead language and political life in a self-sustaining state? After the miraculous Israeli victory in 1967’s Six-Day War, evangelical Christians throughout America and Europe were freely and confidently exclaiming that God had stepped in and won the victory on behalf of the Israeli defense forces. Legends circulated widely from one Christian pulpit to the next of besieged Israeli soldiers whose Arab enemies were quickly closing in on them with overwhelming firepower. Then suddenly a reversal of fortune occurred—the intervention of an angelic army?—and the Arab soldiers retreated in droves. Clearly, many of us have claimed, this victory and the others—1948, 1956, 1973—were miracles. God was defending Israel. As we look at Israel through this lens, we are cautious. If this little nation in the eastern Mediterranean is God’s handiwork, if Israel’s history is being orchestrated from on high, then we should be slow to criticize, careful about our chastisements, and supportive at all costs. Evangelicals are prone to cite Genesis 12:2–3 as a reasonable approach to Middle Eastern foreign policy. In this passage God says to Abraham, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” 4. In 1991 we rediscovered the fourth factor that influences our judgments about Israel. At the height of the Gulf War, many people realized that this event might be the configuration of nations that will bring about the end of history. Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth topped the 25 million mark in sales. John F. Walvoord’s Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis sold 2 million copies thanks to the Gulf War. Both authors said the same thing: Israel will play a role in the end times. In fact, the hostility of the Arabs figures into a prophesied scenario in which Israel is backed up against the sea, total war breaks out in the Middle East, and Armageddon erupts, bringing about the end of human history as we know it today. I heard a news commentator reflect on this idea one night in early January 1991 as American bombers were racing to Saudi Arabia. This announcer made the one deduction that evangelicals everywhere were pondering: If Armageddon is upon us, we had better be on the right side. No matter what happens militarily in the Middle East, evangelical eschatology demands that we keep a firm commitment to Israel. John Walvoord wrote during the Kuwait war, “The rise of military action in the Middle East [such as that taken by Iraq against Kuwait] is an important prophetic development. While wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Europe were not necessarily prophetically significant, all end-time prophecy pictures the Middle East as the center of political, financial, and military power at the end time.”⁶ I once received a publication called “The Jerusalem Prayer Letter,” distributed by a conservative Christian organization called Bridges for Peace. These Christians earnestly support Israel and endeavor to foster Christian/Jewish understanding. Reflecting on the Gulf War, Jim Gerrish, the editor of the prayer letter, compared hostility against Israel during the war with the rise of Nebuchadnezzar in the Old Testament. Nebuchadnezzar, like Hussein, plotted the destruction of Jerusalem. Gerrish remarks: Today we now see presidents and nations taking their stand against the covenant people [Israel]. It would seem that all the odds are against Israel. Israel, however, has
of a Palestinian national state: the West Bank. And it witnessed the increased destruction of Palestinian homes in order to reduce the Arab population and make way for Israeli settlement. According to the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights, B’tselem, from 1999 to 2012 Israel destroyed 1,513 Palestinian homes, leaving 4,262 people homeless (1,328 of these are children). Following the 2009 war in Gaza, 3,500 homes were destroyed, leaving 20,000 people homeless (according to the United Nations). Sometimes used to push populations out of their towns or sometimes to punish families, home destruction and homelessness is a part of the Palestinian narrative.
To grasp the full measure of this you simply have to stand in a village that is under occupation. The village of `Aboud in the central West Bank near Ramallah would do nicely. Here are about 2,500 Palestinians and a Christian history that reaches back 1,700 years. `Aboud’s chief income is agricultural (olives, figs, grapes, apples, almonds, and olive soap) and fully 43 percent of the village land was olive groves. Then in 1980 the Israeli government confiscated 200 of its acres (780 dunums), declaring this land a military zone. Then the first settlers arrived. And soon the settlement of Beit Arye was built. In 1988 the new settlement of Ofarim took more confiscated land. But the settlements needed more room. In 2000 settlers backed up by the army destroyed 4,000 of `Aboud’s olive trees. In 2002 the army blew up `Aboud’s famous sixth-century Saint Barbara church as it destroyed more trees and forbade `Aboud’s residents from harvesting much of what was left. Then in 2005 the Israelis brought the separation wall/barrier and, rather than build it near the settlements, they ran the wall through `Aboud’s fields, slicing off 32 percent of the village. Today `Aboud’s economy is on the verge of collapse. A once flourishing village—filled with incredibly beautiful homes—is in turmoil. Well educated, politically moderate, prosperous—if there ever was a village that could mingle with its Israeli neighbors for a better future, `Aboud was it.
One Sunday in March 2012 I took thirty-five college students to `Aboud for a day. We joined the town’s residents for worship in a variety of churches (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox), we socialized with them, and we had lunch together. And then we walked to the perimeter of the village and stood on the enormous dirt pile blocking one of `Aboud’s chief roads to its markets. The military had closed the road and the people were wary of walking past the roadblock lest settlers or soldiers react.
My students were astonished at what they saw. And I believe that anyone with a conscience and a heart would feel the same.
But here is what has become my most intriguing discovery in this decade. Israelis were seeing things like this as well. And it offended the deeply held commitments to righteousness so central to Jewish life and belief. As a Jewish friend once told me, This is not who we are—this is not who we want to be. And I began to discover grassroots movements of people who have lost faith in their politicians and military leaders. They are no less loyal to Israel: but they wonder if their country has lost its way. Because of the enormous imbalance of economic, political, and military power in this conflict, Israelis will always have the upper hand. And because of this, conversions of conscience within the Israeli context will always be deeply important.
I have stood with Israelis who were marching to end the occupation. I have watched Jewish women marching against soldiers in Jerusalem. I have watched incredibly brave orthodox Jews do it. I have listened to former decorated soldiers who now refuse to join their units if it means occupying the Palestinians (rather than defending Israel against its enemies). I was surprised one Friday afternoon in Jerusalem after lunch to find women in black standing in silent vigil against Israeli militarism (where Agron and King George Streets cross). Then there is the Parent’s Circle—over five hundred Jewish and Arab families who have lost children in this conflict and have decided to meet, talk, and share their mutual sorrow. There have been courageous Messianic Jewish leaders who were willing to break with trends of separation and join with Palestinian Christians for fellowship, study, and reconciliation. And in October 2012 there was the first Bethlehem Walk—imagine a thousand Israeli women walking into Bethlehem, demanding to bypass the occupation wall, and marching to the town center to make friends with a thousand Palestinian women. Just the idea could make you cry.
I had always known that some of my very best sources in quantifying this conflict had come from Israeli Jewish sources. Web sites like B’Tselem have been invaluable to everyone’s research. But here was something new: movements (often led by women) who are appalled by the militant posturing of their political leaders. They want a future. And somewhere, somehow, it will be a shared future that includes 3.8 million Palestinians.
FOUR COMPLICATIONS
Why do we sense we cannot get anywhere when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians? Why have Christians been peculiarly—and sometimes rightly—paralyzed on the matter of this subject? Passions always flare when someone brings up aid for Israel or the settlement of the West Bank or the Palestinian resistance. We are torn. We are drawn to this subject instinctively. If rioting takes place in Bethlehem, the story may well make the national news, but if hundreds die in Sudan or Pakistan, we may never hear. As Christians our interest is heightened because we attribute a spiritual importance to this part of the world.
One of the most popular books circulating among evangelicals today is Bodie Thoene’s multivolume sets The Zion Covenant and The Zion Chronicles, which trace the story of Jewish families surviving Holocaust Europe and establishing the State of Israel. This romantic story of suffering, endurance, and hope does not want to be complicated by another story of suffering and endurance among people whom Thoene’s fictional characters displace. Today the nationally best-selling series Left Behind paints a similar portrait of political crisis centered around Israel’s fate in world history.
Four factors seem to continue to influence and complicate our thinking when we reflect on modern Israel today.
1. We bear a subliminal sense of guilt for the horrors of the twentieth century that have been perpetrated on Judaism. We share the guilt of men and women who, in the name of Christ, pursued, persecuted, and massacred Jews. From Moscow to Chicago, anti-Semitism is a part of the heritage of Western Christendom. Jews were killed by the Byzantine armies, the Holy Roman Empire, and even the Crusaders. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem in 1099 CE in the name of Christ, they massacred everyone who looked Middle Eastern, Muslims and Jews alike. Few in the Middle East have forgotten this.
Twentieth-century Jews have had to face similar horrors. That Jewish synagogues on the north side of Chicago have metal fireproof doors on their buildings is no accident. Congregation members can often be seen scrubbing off swastikas from the alleyway entrances. Kristallnacht, the night of November 9, 1938, commemorates the day when the Nazi SS began destroying Jewish businesses and synagogues in Munich. Its anniversary is still remembered each year, especially in Skokie, north of Chicago,
among the neo-Nazis. Jews in the synagogues there pray that the night will pass without incident.
Our relationship with Israel is thus complicated by a collective feeling of guilt. These people have suffered severely in history, and our debt to their future is great. Judaism deserves a place of security—a place to protect itself from outsiders. I cannot imagine the restraint it took for the Israelis not to respond with force when Saddam Hussein was lobbing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv in early 1990. To defend yourself and not rely on someone else’s guns is a vow that was born somewhere in the Warsaw ghetto in the 1930s. I recall standing on the top of the mountain of Masada, the last stand of the Jews against the Romans, and watching the bar mitzvah of a young man in the ruins of the two-thousand-year-old synagogue. As he vowed in the silence of the desert to embrace his faith and his land with his entire life, an F-16 fighter barreling down the Jordan Valley screamed defiantly over the mountain and its synagogue with a deafening roar. Judaism will never be desecrated in a ghetto again. Ever. And this is good.
Israel has not hesitated to remind the West of this obligation. Comments about the debt of the West are heard frequently. Well-known theologian Dr. Rosemary Ruether was recently traveling in Gaza and there watched a Palestinian demonstration. A car full of Israeli settlers drove past, threatening the marchers. Why are you doing this? she asked them. Because of the war! one Israeli yelled back. My friend continued, But these people didn’t do anything to you. The settler responded, But they must pay. The whole world must pay.
2. Evangelical Christians have rightly concluded that we of all people have a shared sense of spiritual destiny with Judaism. Our branches spring from the same Middle Eastern olive tree. We share a parallel faith. The Lord is the same God both of synagogue and church. Every autumn, thousands of evangelical Christians flood into Jerusalem from the United States and Europe to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. They march around the walled city of Jerusalem arm in arm with Jewish worshipers, waving palms and praising God for the harvest of vine and tree. Jerusalem’s mayor usually gives a speech praising the evangelicals’ presence, and every Israeli prime minister (except Ehud Barak) has celebrated with them.
We know that Jesus was Jewish. He was of the tribe of Judah, a descendant of David. Paul was from the tribe of Benjamin, a rabbi. Eighty percent of our Bible belongs to the Hebrew canon. The Lord’s Supper is actually a Jewish Passover Seder. Above all, we are commanded in Scripture to bless the children of Abraham. Paul’s life witnessed intense hostility from the Jewish synagogues: he was jailed, cursed, arrested, flogged with forty lashes five times, beaten with rods three times, and nearly stoned to death once. Still he could say (in Romans 11) that for the sake of the promises God made to their ancestors, the Jewish people—especially those who refuse to believe in Christ—are still beloved (Rom. 11:28). Judaism holds an incomparable place in divine history.
So our relationship with Israel is further complicated by the kinship we feel with this Israeli state that overtly professes faith in the God of Jesus. Even the Israeli Parliament building, the Knesset, is architecturally designed to recall the Ten Commandments—ostensibly the basis of secular Jewish law. Christians can only wish that our American Supreme Court could do as well.
3. Deep within our instincts we have concluded that we are witnesses to a miracle in the twentieth century. The nation of Israel is God’s doing. The return of the Jews to Israel after two thousand years, Israel’s survival against inestimable odds—are these not signs of something larger than history? How many cultures alive today are thirty-five hundred years old, have suffered multiple exiles, and then after two thousand years of assimilation into the European world have resurrected their dead language and political life in a self-sustaining state?
After the miraculous Israeli victory in 1967’s Six-Day War, evangelical Christians throughout America and Europe were freely and confidently exclaiming that God had stepped in and won the victory on behalf of the Israeli defense forces. Legends circulated widely from one Christian pulpit to the next of besieged Israeli soldiers whose Arab enemies were quickly closing in on them with overwhelming firepower. Then suddenly a reversal of fortune occurred—the intervention of an angelic army?—and the Arab soldiers retreated in droves. Clearly, many of us have claimed, this victory and the others—1948, 1956, 1973—were miracles. God was defending Israel.
As we look at Israel through this lens, we are cautious. If this little nation in the eastern Mediterranean is God’s handiwork, if Israel’s history is being orchestrated from on high, then we should be slow to criticize, careful about our chastisements, and supportive at all costs. Evangelicals are prone to cite Genesis 12:2–3 as a reasonable approach to Middle Eastern foreign policy. In this passage God says to Abraham, I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
4. In 1991 we rediscovered the fourth factor that influences our judgments about Israel. At the height of the Gulf War, many people realized that this event might be the configuration of nations that will bring about the end of history. Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth topped the 25 million mark in sales. John F. Walvoord’s Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis sold 2 million copies thanks to the Gulf War. Both authors said the same thing: Israel will play a role in the end times. In fact, the hostility of the Arabs figures into a prophesied scenario in which Israel is backed up against the sea, total war breaks out in the Middle East, and Armageddon erupts, bringing about the end of human history as we know it today.
I heard a news commentator reflect on this idea one night in early January 1991 as American bombers were racing to Saudi Arabia. This announcer made the one deduction that evangelicals everywhere were pondering: If Armageddon is upon us, we had better be on the right side. No matter what happens militarily in the Middle East, evangelical eschatology demands that we keep a firm commitment to Israel. John Walvoord wrote during the Kuwait war, The rise of military action in the Middle East [such as that taken by Iraq against Kuwait] is an important prophetic development. While wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Europe were not necessarily prophetically significant, all end-time prophecy pictures the Middle East as the center of political, financial, and military power at the end time.⁶
I once received a publication called The Jerusalem Prayer Letter, distributed by a conservative Christian organization called Bridges for Peace. These Christians earnestly support Israel and endeavor to foster Christian/Jewish understanding. Reflecting on the Gulf War, Jim Gerrish, the editor of the prayer letter, compared hostility against Israel during the war with the rise of Nebuchadnezzar in the Old Testament. Nebuchadnezzar, like Hussein, plotted the destruction of Jerusalem. Gerrish remarks:
Today we now see presidents and nations taking their stand against the covenant people [Israel]. It would seem that all the odds are against Israel. Israel, however, has
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among the neo-Nazis. Jews in the synagogues there pray that the night will pass without incident. Our relationship with Israel is thus complicated by a collective feeling of guilt. These people have suffered severely in history, and our debt to their future is great. Judaism deserves a place of security—a place to protect itself from outsiders. I cannot imagine the restraint it took for the Israelis not to respond with force when Saddam Hussein was lobbing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv in early 1990. “To defend yourself and not rely on someone else’s guns” is a vow that was born somewhere in the Warsaw ghetto in the 1930s. I recall standing on the top of the mountain of Masada, the “last stand” of the Jews against the Romans, and watching the bar mitzvah of a young man in the ruins of the two-thousand-year-old synagogue. As he vowed in the silence of the desert to embrace his faith and his land with his entire life, an F-16 fighter barreling down the Jordan Valley screamed defiantly over the mountain and its synagogue with a deafening roar. Judaism will never be desecrated in a ghetto again. Ever. And this is good. Israel has not hesitated to remind the West of this obligation. Comments about the “debt” of the West are heard frequently. Well-known theologian Dr. Rosemary Ruether was recently traveling in Gaza and there watched a Palestinian demonstration. A car full of Israeli settlers drove past, threatening the marchers. “Why are you doing this?” she asked them. “Because of the war!” one Israeli yelled back. My friend continued, “But these people didn’t do anything to you.” The settler responded, “But they must pay. The whole world must pay.” 2. Evangelical Christians have rightly concluded that we of all people have a shared sense of spiritual destiny with Judaism. Our branches spring from the same Middle Eastern olive tree. We share a parallel faith. The Lord is the same God both of synagogue and church. Every autumn, thousands of evangelical Christians flood into Jerusalem from the United States and Europe to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. They march around the walled city of Jerusalem arm in arm with Jewish worshipers, waving palms and praising God for the harvest of vine and tree. Jerusalem’s mayor usually gives a speech praising the evangelicals’ presence, and every Israeli prime minister (except Ehud Barak) has celebrated with them. We know that Jesus was Jewish. He was of the tribe of Judah, a descendant of David. Paul was from the tribe of Benjamin, a rabbi. Eighty percent of our Bible belongs to the Hebrew canon. The Lord’s Supper is actually a Jewish Passover Seder. Above all, we are commanded in Scripture to bless the children of Abraham. Paul’s life witnessed intense hostility from the Jewish synagogues: he was jailed, cursed, arrested, flogged with forty lashes five times, beaten with rods three times, and nearly stoned to death once. Still he could say (in Romans 11) that for the sake of the promises God made to their ancestors, the Jewish people—especially those who refuse to believe in Christ—are still beloved (Rom. 11:28). Judaism holds an incomparable place in divine history. So our relationship with Israel is further complicated by the kinship we feel with this Israeli state that overtly professes faith in the God of Jesus. Even the Israeli Parliament building, the Knesset, is architecturally designed to recall the Ten Commandments—ostensibly the basis of secular Jewish law. Christians can only wish that our American Supreme Court could do as well. 3. Deep within our instincts we have concluded that we are witnesses to a miracle in the twentieth century. The nation of Israel is God’s doing. The return of the Jews to Israel after two thousand years, Israel’s survival against inestimable odds—are these not signs of something larger than history? How many cultures alive today are thirty-five hundred years old, have suffered multiple exiles, and then after two thousand years of assimilation into the European world have resurrected their dead language and political life in a self-sustaining state? After the miraculous Israeli victory in 1967’s Six-Day War, evangelical Christians throughout America and Europe were freely and confidently exclaiming that God had stepped in and won the victory on behalf of the Israeli defense forces. Legends circulated widely from one Christian pulpit to the next of besieged Israeli soldiers whose Arab enemies were quickly closing in on them with overwhelming firepower. Then suddenly a reversal of fortune occurred—the intervention of an angelic army?—and the Arab soldiers retreated in droves. Clearly, many of us have claimed, this victory and the others—1948, 1956, 1973—were miracles. God was defending Israel. As we look at Israel through this lens, we are cautious. If this little nation in the eastern Mediterranean is God’s handiwork, if Israel’s history is being orchestrated from on high, then we should be slow to criticize, careful about our chastisements, and supportive at all costs. Evangelicals are prone to cite Genesis 12:2–3 as a reasonable approach to Middle Eastern foreign policy. In this passage God says to Abraham, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” 4. In 1991 we rediscovered the fourth factor that influences our judgments about Israel. At the height of the Gulf War, many people realized that this event might be the configuration of nations that will bring about the end of history. Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth topped the 25 million mark in sales. John F. Walvoord’s Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis sold 2 million copies thanks to the Gulf War. Both authors said the same thing: Israel will play a role in the end times. In fact, the hostility of the Arabs figures into a prophesied scenario in which Israel is backed up against the sea, total war breaks out in the Middle East, and Armageddon erupts, bringing about the end of human history as we know it today. I heard a news commentator reflect on this idea one night in early January 1991 as American bombers were racing to Saudi Arabia. This announcer made the one deduction that evangelicals everywhere were pondering: If Armageddon is upon us, we had better be on the right side. No matter what happens militarily in the Middle East, evangelical eschatology demands that we keep a firm commitment to Israel. John Walvoord wrote during the Kuwait war, “The rise of military action in the Middle East [such as that taken by Iraq against Kuwait] is an important prophetic development. While wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Europe were not necessarily prophetically significant, all end-time prophecy pictures the Middle East as the center of political, financial, and military power at the end time.”⁶ I once received a publication called “The Jerusalem Prayer Letter,” distributed by a conservative Christian organization called Bridges for Peace. These Christians earnestly support Israel and endeavor to foster Christian/Jewish understanding. Reflecting on the Gulf War, Jim Gerrish, the editor of the prayer letter, compared hostility against Israel during the war with the rise of Nebuchadnezzar in the Old Testament. Nebuchadnezzar, like Hussein, plotted the destruction of Jerusalem. Gerrish remarks: Today we now see presidents and nations taking their stand against the covenant people [Israel]. It would seem that all the odds are against Israel. Israel, however, has
of a Palestinian national state: the West Bank. And it witnessed the increased destruction of Palestinian homes in order to reduce the Arab population and make way for Israeli settlement. According to the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights, B’tselem, from 1999 to 2012 Israel destroyed 1,513 Palestinian homes, leaving 4,262 people homeless (1,328 of these are children). Following the 2009 war in Gaza, 3,500 homes were destroyed, leaving 20,000 people homeless (according to the United Nations). Sometimes used to push populations out of their towns or sometimes to punish families, home destruction and homelessness is a part of the Palestinian narrative.
To grasp the full measure of this you simply have to stand in a village that is under occupation. The village of `Aboud in the central West Bank near Ramallah would do nicely. Here are about 2,500 Palestinians and a Christian history that reaches back 1,700 years. `Aboud’s chief income is agricultural (olives, figs, grapes, apples, almonds, and olive soap) and fully 43 percent of the village land was olive groves. Then in 1980 the Israeli government confiscated 200 of its acres (780 dunums), declaring this land a military zone. Then the first settlers arrived. And soon the settlement of Beit Arye was built. In 1988 the new settlement of Ofarim took more confiscated land. But the settlements needed more room. In 2000 settlers backed up by the army destroyed 4,000 of `Aboud’s olive trees. In 2002 the army blew up `Aboud’s famous sixth-century Saint Barbara church as it destroyed more trees and forbade `Aboud’s residents from harvesting much of what was left. Then in 2005 the Israelis brought the separation wall/barrier and, rather than build it near the settlements, they ran the wall through `Aboud’s fields, slicing off 32 percent of the village. Today `Aboud’s economy is on the verge of collapse. A once flourishing village—filled with incredibly beautiful homes—is in turmoil. Well educated, politically moderate, prosperous—if there ever was a village that could mingle with its Israeli neighbors for a better future, `Aboud was it.
One Sunday in March 2012 I took thirty-five college students to `Aboud for a day. We joined the town’s residents for worship in a variety of churches (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox), we socialized with them, and we had lunch together. And then we walked to the perimeter of the village and stood on the enormous dirt pile blocking one of `Aboud’s chief roads to its markets. The military had closed the road and the people were wary of walking past the roadblock lest settlers or soldiers react.
My students were astonished at what they saw. And I believe that anyone with a conscience and a heart would feel the same.
But here is what has become my most intriguing discovery in this decade. Israelis were seeing things like this as well. And it offended the deeply held commitments to righteousness so central to Jewish life and belief. As a Jewish friend once told me, This is not who we are—this is not who we want to be. And I began to discover grassroots movements of people who have lost faith in their politicians and military leaders. They are no less loyal to Israel: but they wonder if their country has lost its way. Because of the enormous imbalance of economic, political, and military power in this conflict, Israelis will always have the upper hand. And because of this, conversions of conscience within the Israeli context will always be deeply important.
I have stood with Israelis who were marching to end the occupation. I have watched Jewish women marching against soldiers in Jerusalem. I have watched incredibly brave orthodox Jews do it. I have listened to former decorated soldiers who now refuse to join their units if it means occupying the Palestinians (rather than defending Israel against its enemies). I was surprised one Friday afternoon in Jerusalem after lunch to find women in black standing in silent vigil against Israeli militarism (where Agron and King George Streets cross). Then there is the Parent’s Circle—over five hundred Jewish and Arab families who have lost children in this conflict and have decided to meet, talk, and share their mutual sorrow. There have been courageous Messianic Jewish leaders who were willing to break with trends of separation and join with Palestinian Christians for fellowship, study, and reconciliation. And in October 2012 there was the first Bethlehem Walk—imagine a thousand Israeli women walking into Bethlehem, demanding to bypass the occupation wall, and marching to the town center to make friends with a thousand Palestinian women. Just the idea could make you cry.
I had always known that some of my very best sources in quantifying this conflict had come from Israeli Jewish sources. Web sites like B’Tselem have been invaluable to everyone’s research. But here was something new: movements (often led by women) who are appalled by the militant posturing of their political leaders. They want a future. And somewhere, somehow, it will be a shared future that includes 3.8 million Palestinians.
FOUR COMPLICATIONS
Why do we sense we cannot get anywhere when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians? Why have Christians been peculiarly—and sometimes rightly—paralyzed on the matter of this subject? Passions always flare when someone brings up aid for Israel or the settlement of the West Bank or the Palestinian resistance. We are torn. We are drawn to this subject instinctively. If rioting takes place in Bethlehem, the story may well make the national news, but if hundreds die in Sudan or Pakistan, we may never hear. As Christians our interest is heightened because we attribute a spiritual importance to this part of the world.
One of the most popular books circulating among evangelicals today is Bodie Thoene’s multivolume sets The Zion Covenant and The Zion Chronicles, which trace the story of Jewish families surviving Holocaust Europe and establishing the State of Israel. This romantic story of suffering, endurance, and hope does not want to be complicated by another story of suffering and endurance among people whom Thoene’s fictional characters displace. Today the nationally best-selling series Left Behind paints a similar portrait of political crisis centered around Israel’s fate in world history.
Four factors seem to continue to influence and complicate our thinking when we reflect on modern Israel today.
1. We bear a subliminal sense of guilt for the horrors of the twentieth century that have been perpetrated on Judaism. We share the guilt of men and women who, in the name of Christ, pursued, persecuted, and massacred Jews. From Moscow to Chicago, anti-Semitism is a part of the heritage of Western Christendom. Jews were killed by the Byzantine armies, the Holy Roman Empire, and even the Crusaders. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem in 1099 CE in the name of Christ, they massacred everyone who looked Middle Eastern, Muslims and Jews alike. Few in the Middle East have forgotten this.
Twentieth-century Jews have had to face similar horrors. That Jewish synagogues on the north side of Chicago have metal fireproof doors on their buildings is no accident. Congregation members can often be seen scrubbing off swastikas from the alleyway entrances. Kristallnacht, the night of November 9, 1938, commemorates the day when the Nazi SS began destroying Jewish businesses and synagogues in Munich. Its anniversary is still remembered each year, especially in Skokie, north of Chicago,
among the neo-Nazis. Jews in the synagogues there pray that the night will pass without incident.
Our relationship with Israel is thus complicated by a collective feeling of guilt. These people have suffered severely in history, and our debt to their future is great. Judaism deserves a place of security—a place to protect itself from outsiders. I cannot imagine the restraint it took for the Israelis not to respond with force when Saddam Hussein was lobbing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv in early 1990. To defend yourself and not rely on someone else’s guns is a vow that was born somewhere in the Warsaw ghetto in the 1930s. I recall standing on the top of the mountain of Masada, the last stand of the Jews against the Romans, and watching the bar mitzvah of a young man in the ruins of the two-thousand-year-old synagogue. As he vowed in the silence of the desert to embrace his faith and his land with his entire life, an F-16 fighter barreling down the Jordan Valley screamed defiantly over the mountain and its synagogue with a deafening roar. Judaism will never be desecrated in a ghetto again. Ever. And this is good.
Israel has not hesitated to remind the West of this obligation. Comments about the debt of the West are heard frequently. Well-known theologian Dr. Rosemary Ruether was recently traveling in Gaza and there watched a Palestinian demonstration. A car full of Israeli settlers drove past, threatening the marchers. Why are you doing this? she asked them. Because of the war! one Israeli yelled back. My friend continued, But these people didn’t do anything to you. The settler responded, But they must pay. The whole world must pay.
2. Evangelical Christians have rightly concluded that we of all people have a shared sense of spiritual destiny with Judaism. Our branches spring from the same Middle Eastern olive tree. We share a parallel faith. The Lord is the same God both of synagogue and church. Every autumn, thousands of evangelical Christians flood into Jerusalem from the United States and Europe to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. They march around the walled city of Jerusalem arm in arm with Jewish worshipers, waving palms and praising God for the harvest of vine and tree. Jerusalem’s mayor usually gives a speech praising the evangelicals’ presence, and every Israeli prime minister (except Ehud Barak) has celebrated with them.
We know that Jesus was Jewish. He was of the tribe of Judah, a descendant of David. Paul was from the tribe of Benjamin, a rabbi. Eighty percent of our Bible belongs to the Hebrew canon. The Lord’s Supper is actually a Jewish Passover Seder. Above all, we are commanded in Scripture to bless the children of Abraham. Paul’s life witnessed intense hostility from the Jewish synagogues: he was jailed, cursed, arrested, flogged with forty lashes five times, beaten with rods three times, and nearly stoned to death once. Still he could say (in Romans 11) that for the sake of the promises God made to their ancestors, the Jewish people—especially those who refuse to believe in Christ—are still beloved (Rom. 11:28). Judaism holds an incomparable place in divine history.
So our relationship with Israel is further complicated by the kinship we feel with this Israeli state that overtly professes faith in the God of Jesus. Even the Israeli Parliament building, the Knesset, is architecturally designed to recall the Ten Commandments—ostensibly the basis of secular Jewish law. Christians can only wish that our American Supreme Court could do as well.
3. Deep within our instincts we have concluded that we are witnesses to a miracle in the twentieth century. The nation of Israel is God’s doing. The return of the Jews to Israel after two thousand years, Israel’s survival against inestimable odds—are these not signs of something larger than history? How many cultures alive today are thirty-five hundred years old, have suffered multiple exiles, and then after two thousand years of assimilation into the European world have resurrected their dead language and political life in a self-sustaining state?
After the miraculous Israeli victory in 1967’s Six-Day War, evangelical Christians throughout America and Europe were freely and confidently exclaiming that God had stepped in and won the victory on behalf of the Israeli defense forces. Legends circulated widely from one Christian pulpit to the next of besieged Israeli soldiers whose Arab enemies were quickly closing in on them with overwhelming firepower. Then suddenly a reversal of fortune occurred—the intervention of an angelic army?—and the Arab soldiers retreated in droves. Clearly, many of us have claimed, this victory and the others—1948, 1956, 1973—were miracles. God was defending Israel.
As we look at Israel through this lens, we are cautious. If this little nation in the eastern Mediterranean is God’s handiwork, if Israel’s history is being orchestrated from on high, then we should be slow to criticize, careful about our chastisements, and supportive at all costs. Evangelicals are prone to cite Genesis 12:2–3 as a reasonable approach to Middle Eastern foreign policy. In this passage God says to Abraham, I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
4. In 1991 we rediscovered the fourth factor that influences our judgments about Israel. At the height of the Gulf War, many people realized that this event might be the configuration of nations that will bring about the end of history. Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth topped the 25 million mark in sales. John F. Walvoord’s Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis sold 2 million copies thanks to the Gulf War. Both authors said the same thing: Israel will play a role in the end times. In fact, the hostility of the Arabs figures into a prophesied scenario in which Israel is backed up against the sea, total war breaks out in the Middle East, and Armageddon erupts, bringing about the end of human history as we know it today.
I heard a news commentator reflect on this idea one night in early January 1991 as American bombers were racing to Saudi Arabia. This announcer made the one deduction that evangelicals everywhere were pondering: If Armageddon is upon us, we had better be on the right side. No matter what happens militarily in the Middle East, evangelical eschatology demands that we keep a firm commitment to Israel. John Walvoord wrote during the Kuwait war, The rise of military action in the Middle East [such as that taken by Iraq against Kuwait] is an important prophetic development. While wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Europe were not necessarily prophetically significant, all end-time prophecy pictures the Middle East as the center of political, financial, and military power at the end time.⁶
I once received a publication called The Jerusalem Prayer Letter, distributed by a conservative Christian organization called Bridges for Peace. These Christians earnestly support Israel and endeavor to foster Christian/Jewish understanding. Reflecting on the Gulf War, Jim Gerrish, the editor of the prayer letter, compared hostility against Israel during the war with the rise of Nebuchadnezzar in the Old Testament. Nebuchadnezzar, like Hussein, plotted the destruction of Jerusalem. Gerrish remarks:
Today we now see presidents and nations taking their stand against the covenant people [Israel]. It would seem that all the odds are against Israel. Israel, however, has
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one thing in her favor. The King of the Universe is on her side and will remain so forever. It is Israel who will be the ultimate winner in any contest. Nations who come against her will vanish away (Psalm 129:6). Those who stand with her will be blessed both now and hereafter.⁷ When we look at Israel through this lens of eschatology, or prophecies of the end times, we are sobered, lest we find ourselves playing on the wrong side of the table if the Lord should return during the next major conflict. Together these four factors have made it difficult, if not impossible, to see Israel as just another nation. We have become paralyzed and perplexed, unable to launch appropriate criticisms of the Middle East. Just possibly, we have been unable to see other features of the land and its difficulties. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Many complicated technical works have given exhaustive attention to the problems of Israel/Palestine. Our goal is to distill these works, decipher their leading arguments, and digest them as Christians might who have a heartfelt commitment to this Holy Land. As a Christian writing to other Christians, I am hoping to make two simple points:
1.If Israel makes a biblical claim to the Holy Land, then Israel must adhere to biblical standards of national righteousness. Land promises are a by-product of a covenant with God. Therefore, all aspects of biblical nationhood must be at work. In chapters 4–8 we examine what the Old Testament says about the land promises and how God’s people should live on the land. We also study Jerusalem—a flashpoint in conflict today—and examine modern Israeli ambitions for their country.
2.Christians must look more closely at their commitments. The New Testament must be read alongside the Old Testament when we interpret the land promises of the Bible. Further, Israel/Palestine has a body of Christian believers who today look to us for support. As fellow Christians we must ask if we have a spiritual obligation here as well. Chapters 9–13 give insights from the Christian community that lives in Israel/Palestine today. Arab and Jewish Christians together struggle to live in this land. An outline of each chapter and how it addresses these questions is given as follows. Part 1: The Background to the Problem Chapter 2: Knowing the Land. As we begin we need to understand the land itself. What is its geography? Where is the West Bank? On what issues do the border disagreements focus? Why do the Palestinians fight against the “Israeli settlers”? Chapter 3: Knowing the History. We also need some savvy for the history of this land. When did Abraham come here? What sort of kingdom did David build? How long did the Arabs possess Jerusalem? What about the wars fought by the Israelis since 1948? These historical facts provide the context of the present struggle. Part 2: The Old Testament and the Land Chapter 4: The Land Promises of Abraham. What are the promises God has given concerning this land? Are the promises conditional? How does God’s covenant connect with the land? Does the land ever belong to anyone, or is it always God’s land? Chapter 5: The Nation of Israel and the Land. What obligation does the land bring to its occupier? Is the conquest of Joshua an apt parallel to the modern growth of the state of Israel? How did the Israelites treat non-Israelites (called “aliens” or “sojourners”)? Was the Old Testament kingdom of Israel an ethnically exclusive Jewish state? Chapter 6: The Prophets and the Land. How do the prophets of the Old Testament relate the land of Israel to the people of Israel? What unique message did they bring? When they considered this inheritance, how did they explain Israel’s loss of land during the exiles of the eighth and sixth centuries BCE? Chapter 7: Jerusalem. What about the city of Jerusalem? How was this city established? To whom was it given? What were its purposes? The ownership of this city lies at the heart of present-day struggles between Palestinians and Israelis. Chapter 8: Modern Israel in the Land. Is the modern state of Israel claiming a historical connection between biblical Israel and its own nationhood? If so, how do we apply the Old Testament to this modern nation? How does the modern state compare to Old Testament Israel? Part 3: The New Testament and the Land Chapter 9: Jesus and the Early Christians. Does the New Testament say anything about the land? What do Jesus and Paul say? If Christians are the descendants of Abraham by faith, what does this mean for the promises to Abraham’s descendants? What did the earliest Christians think about the land of Israel? Chapter 10: The Palestinian Church. Who are the Palestinian Christians? What are their concerns? What have Western Christians not been told? What struggles do Palestinian Christians face? Chapter 11: Living Stones in the Land. Who are the Palestinian Christian leaders whose voices need to be heard today? Who are some of the “silent saints” within the Palestinian church? What are they saying? What must Western Christians hear from them? Chapter 12: Evangelicals and the Land. How have Western evangelicals approached the question of Israel and the Palestinians? How should evangelicals relate to the Palestinian church? Should Israel be treated like “just any other nation”? Chapter 13: Where Do We Go from Here? The epilogue brings many of the most recent developments into focus. This chapter also asks, “Is it right to be critical of Israel? Is such criticism anti-Semitic?” 1. In the late 1970s Israel finally occupied southern Lebanon, made an alliance with the Christian militias there, and created a buffer zone. In order to stop Palestinian reprisals, Israel went as far as laying siege to Beirut in 1982. After twenty-two years of occupation, Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon on the night of May 23, 2000. Abandoned Christian communities, fearing for their lives, fled to the new Israeli border. Thousands were then let in. These “Christian” communities use this designation as a cultural-political identifier. In many cases, however, it represents a deep and profound faith.
2. H. Lindsey (with C. C. Carlson), The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1970). 3. G. M. Burge, Who Are God’s People in the Middle East? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1993). 4. Today Nora works for the evangelical Venture International Organization, bringing aid to the women of Jerusalem’s Old City. 5. See the website www.emeu.net. 6. J. F. Walvoord, Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1991), 48. 7. J. Gerrish, “Jerusalem Prayer Letter,” November 18, 1991. Published by Bridges for Peace, International Headquarters: 7 Shaul Adler, Jerusalem, Israel. See www.bridgesforpeace.com.
one thing in her favor. The King of the Universe is on her side and will remain so forever. It is Israel who will be the ultimate winner in any contest. Nations who come against her will vanish away (Psalm 129:6). Those who stand with her will be blessed both now and hereafter.⁷
When we look at Israel through this lens of eschatology, or prophecies of the end times, we are sobered, lest we find ourselves playing on the wrong side of the table if the Lord should return during the next major conflict.
Together these four factors have made it difficult, if not impossible, to see Israel as just another nation. We have become paralyzed and perplexed, unable to launch appropriate criticisms of the Middle East. Just possibly, we have been unable to see other features of the land and its difficulties.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Many complicated technical works have given exhaustive attention to the problems of Israel/Palestine. Our goal is to distill these works, decipher their leading arguments, and digest them as Christians might who have a heartfelt commitment to this Holy Land. As a Christian writing to other Christians, I am hoping to make two simple points:
If Israel makes a biblical claim to the Holy Land, then Israel must adhere to biblical standards of national righteousness. Land promises are a by-product of a covenant with God. Therefore, all aspects of biblical nationhood must be at work. In chapters 4–8 we examine what the Old Testament says about the land promises and how God’s people should live on the land. We also study Jerusalem—a flashpoint in conflict today—and examine modern Israeli ambitions for their country.
Christians must look more closely at their commitments. The New Testament must be read alongside the Old Testament when we interpret the land promises of the Bible. Further, Israel/Palestine has a body of Christian believers who today look to us for support. As fellow Christians we must ask if we have a spiritual obligation here as well. Chapters 9–13 give insights from the Christian community that lives in Israel/Palestine today. Arab and Jewish Christians together struggle to live in this land.
An outline of each chapter and how it addresses these questions is given as follows.
Part 1: The Background to the Problem
Chapter 2: Knowing the Land. As we begin we need to understand the land itself. What is its geography? Where is the West Bank? On what issues do the border disagreements focus? Why do the Palestinians fight against the Israeli settlers?
Chapter 3: Knowing the History. We also need some savvy for the history of this land. When did Abraham come here? What sort of kingdom did David build? How long did the Arabs possess Jerusalem? What about the wars fought by the Israelis since 1948? These historical facts provide the context of the present struggle.
Part 2: The Old Testament and the Land
Chapter 4: The Land Promises of Abraham. What are the promises God has given concerning this land? Are the promises conditional? How does God’s covenant connect with the land? Does the land ever belong to anyone, or is it always God’s land?
Chapter 5: The Nation of Israel and the Land. What obligation does the land bring to its occupier? Is the conquest of Joshua an apt parallel to the modern growth of the state of Israel? How did the Israelites treat non-Israelites (called aliens or sojourners)? Was the Old Testament kingdom of Israel an ethnically exclusive Jewish state?
Chapter 6: The Prophets and the Land. How do the prophets of the Old Testament relate the land of Israel to the people of Israel? What unique message did they bring? When they considered this inheritance, how did they explain Israel’s loss of land during the exiles of the eighth and sixth centuries BCE?
Chapter 7: Jerusalem. What about the city of Jerusalem? How was this city established? To whom was it given? What were its purposes? The ownership of this city lies at the heart of present-day struggles between Palestinians and Israelis.
Chapter 8: Modern Israel in the Land. Is the modern state of Israel claiming a historical connection between biblical Israel and its own nationhood? If so, how do we apply the Old Testament to this modern nation? How does the modern state compare to Old Testament Israel?
Part 3: The New Testament and the Land
Chapter 9: Jesus and the Early Christians. Does the New Testament say anything about the land? What do Jesus and Paul say? If Christians are the descendants of Abraham by faith, what does this mean for the promises to Abraham’s descendants? What did the earliest Christians think about the land of Israel?
Chapter 10: The Palestinian Church. Who are the Palestinian Christians? What are their concerns? What have Western Christians not been told? What struggles do Palestinian Christians face?
Chapter 11: Living Stones in the Land. Who are the Palestinian Christian leaders whose voices need to be heard today? Who are some of the silent saints within the Palestinian church? What are they saying? What must Western Christians hear from them?
Chapter 12: Evangelicals and the Land. How have Western evangelicals approached the question of Israel and the Palestinians? How should evangelicals relate to the Palestinian church? Should Israel be treated like just any other nation?
Chapter 13: Where Do We Go from Here? The epilogue brings many of the most recent developments into focus. This chapter also asks, Is it right to be critical of Israel? Is such criticism anti-Semitic?
1. In the late 1970s Israel finally occupied southern Lebanon, made an alliance with the Christian militias there, and created a buffer zone. In order to stop Palestinian reprisals, Israel went as far as laying siege to Beirut in 1982. After twenty-two years of occupation, Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon on the night of May 23, 2000. Abandoned Christian communities, fearing for their lives, fled to the new Israeli border. Thousands were then let in. These Christian communities use this designation as a cultural-political identifier. In many cases, however, it represents a deep and profound faith.
2. H. Lindsey (with C. C. Carlson), The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1970).
3. G. M. Burge, Who Are God’s People in the Middle East? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1993).
4. Today Nora works for the evangelical Venture International Organization, bringing aid to the women of Jerusalem’s Old City.
5. See the website www.emeu.net.
6. J. F. Walvoord, Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1991), 48.
7. J. Gerrish, Jerusalem Prayer Letter, November 18, 1991. Published by Bridges for Peace, International Headquarters: 7 Shaul Adler, Jerusalem, Israel. See www.bridgesforpeace.com.
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1.If Israel makes a biblical claim to the Holy Land, then Israel must adhere to biblical standards of national righteousness. Land promises are a by-product of a covenant with God. Therefore, all aspects of biblical nationhood must be at work. In chapters 4–8 we examine what the Old Testament says about the land promises and how God’s people should live on the land. We also study Jerusalem—a flashpoint in conflict today—and examine modern Israeli ambitions for their country.
2.Christians must look more closely at their commitments. The New Testament must be read alongside the Old Testament when we interpret the land promises of the Bible. Further, Israel/Palestine has a body of Christian believers who today look to us for support. As fellow Christians we must ask if we have a spiritual obligation here as well. Chapters 9–13 give insights from the Christian community that lives in Israel/Palestine today. Arab and Jewish Christians together struggle to live in this land. An outline of each chapter and how it addresses these questions is given as follows. Part 1: The Background to the Problem Chapter 2: Knowing the Land. As we begin we need to understand the land itself. What is its geography? Where is the West Bank? On what issues do the border disagreements focus? Why do the Palestinians fight against the “Israeli settlers”? Chapter 3: Knowing the History. We also need some savvy for the history of this land. When did Abraham come here? What sort of kingdom did David build? How long did the Arabs possess Jerusalem? What about the wars fought by the Israelis since 1948? These historical facts provide the context of the present struggle. Part 2: The Old Testament and the Land Chapter 4: The Land Promises of Abraham. What are the promises God has given concerning this land? Are the promises conditional? How does God’s covenant connect with the land? Does the land ever belong to anyone, or is it always God’s land? Chapter 5: The Nation of Israel and the Land. What obligation does the land bring to its occupier? Is the conquest of Joshua an apt parallel to the modern growth of the state of Israel? How did the Israelites treat non-Israelites (called “aliens” or “sojourners”)? Was the Old Testament kingdom of Israel an ethnically exclusive Jewish state? Chapter 6: The Prophets and the Land. How do the prophets of the Old Testament relate the land of Israel to the people of Israel? What unique message did they bring? When they considered this inheritance, how did they explain Israel’s loss of land during the exiles of the eighth and sixth centuries BCE? Chapter 7: Jerusalem. What about the city of Jerusalem? How was this city established? To whom was it given? What were its purposes? The ownership of this city lies at the heart of present-day struggles between Palestinians and Israelis. Chapter 8: Modern Israel in the Land. Is the modern state of Israel claiming a historical connection between biblical Israel and its own nationhood? If so, how do we apply the Old Testament to this modern nation? How does the modern state compare to Old Testament Israel? Part 3: The New Testament and the Land Chapter 9: Jesus and the Early Christians. Does the New Testament say anything about the land? What do Jesus and Paul say? If Christians are the descendants of Abraham by faith, what does this mean for the promises to Abraham’s descendants? What did the earliest Christians think about the land of Israel? Chapter 10: The Palestinian Church. Who are the Palestinian Christians? What are their concerns? What have Western Christians not been told? What struggles do Palestinian Christians face? Chapter 11: Living Stones in the Land. Who are the Palestinian Christian leaders whose voices need to be heard today? Who are some of the “silent saints” within the Palestinian church? What are they saying? What must Western Christians hear from them? Chapter 12: Evangelicals and the Land. How have Western evangelicals approached the question of Israel and the Palestinians? How should evangelicals relate to the Palestinian church? Should Israel be treated like “just any other nation”? Chapter 13: Where Do We Go from Here? The epilogue brings many of the most recent developments into focus. This chapter also asks, “Is it right to be critical of Israel? Is such criticism anti-Semitic?” 1. In the late 1970s Israel finally occupied southern Lebanon, made an alliance with the Christian militias there, and created a buffer zone. In order to stop Palestinian reprisals, Israel went as far as laying siege to Beirut in 1982. After twenty-two years of occupation, Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon on the night of May 23, 2000. Abandoned Christian communities, fearing for their lives, fled to the new Israeli border. Thousands were then let in. These “Christian” communities use this designation as a cultural-political identifier. In many cases, however, it represents a deep and profound faith.
2. H. Lindsey (with C. C. Carlson), The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1970). 3. G. M. Burge, Who Are God’s People in the Middle East? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1993). 4. Today Nora works for the evangelical Venture International Organization, bringing aid to the women of Jerusalem’s Old City. 5. See the website www.emeu.net. 6. J. F. Walvoord, Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1991), 48. 7. J. Gerrish, “Jerusalem Prayer Letter,” November 18, 1991. Published by Bridges for Peace, International Headquarters: 7 Shaul Adler, Jerusalem, Israel. See www.bridgesforpeace.com.
one thing in her favor. The King of the Universe is on her side and will remain so forever. It is Israel who will be the ultimate winner in any contest. Nations who come against her will vanish away (Psalm 129:6). Those who stand with her will be blessed both now and hereafter.⁷
When we look at Israel through this lens of eschatology, or prophecies of the end times, we are sobered, lest we find ourselves playing on the wrong side of the table if the Lord should return during the next major conflict.
Together these four factors have made it difficult, if not impossible, to see Israel as just another nation. We have become paralyzed and perplexed, unable to launch appropriate criticisms of the Middle East. Just possibly, we have been unable to see other features of the land and its difficulties.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Many complicated technical works have given exhaustive attention to the problems of Israel/Palestine. Our goal is to distill these works, decipher their leading arguments, and digest them as Christians might who have a heartfelt commitment to this Holy Land. As a Christian writing to other Christians, I am hoping to make two simple points:
If Israel makes a biblical claim to the Holy Land, then Israel must adhere to biblical standards of national righteousness. Land promises are a by-product of a covenant with God. Therefore, all aspects of biblical nationhood must be at work. In chapters 4–8 we examine what the Old Testament says about the land promises and how God’s people should live on the land. We also study Jerusalem—a flashpoint in conflict today—and examine modern Israeli ambitions for their country.
Christians must look more closely at their commitments. The New Testament must be read alongside the Old Testament when we interpret the land promises of the Bible. Further, Israel/Palestine has a body of Christian believers who today look to us for support. As fellow Christians we must ask if we have a spiritual obligation here as well. Chapters 9–13 give insights from the Christian community that lives in Israel/Palestine today. Arab and Jewish Christians together struggle to live in this land.
An outline of each chapter and how it addresses these questions is given as follows.
Part 1: The Background to the Problem
Chapter 2: Knowing the Land. As we begin we need to understand the land itself. What is its geography? Where is the West Bank? On what issues do the border disagreements focus? Why do the Palestinians fight against the Israeli settlers?
Chapter 3: Knowing the History. We also need some savvy for the history of this land. When did Abraham come here? What sort of kingdom did David build? How long did the Arabs possess Jerusalem? What about the wars fought by the Israelis since 1948? These historical facts provide the context of the present struggle.
Part 2: The Old Testament and the Land
Chapter 4: The Land Promises of Abraham. What are the promises God has given concerning this land? Are the promises conditional? How does God’s covenant connect with the land? Does the land ever belong to anyone, or is it always God’s land?
Chapter 5: The Nation of Israel and the Land. What obligation does the land bring to its occupier? Is the conquest of Joshua an apt parallel to the modern growth of the state of Israel? How did the Israelites treat non-Israelites (called aliens or sojourners)? Was the Old Testament kingdom of Israel an ethnically exclusive Jewish state?
Chapter 6: The Prophets and the Land. How do the prophets of the Old Testament relate the land of Israel to the people of Israel? What unique message did they bring? When they considered this inheritance, how did they explain Israel’s loss of land during the exiles of the eighth and sixth centuries BCE?
Chapter 7: Jerusalem. What about the city of Jerusalem? How was this city established? To whom was it given? What were its purposes? The ownership of this city lies at the heart of present-day struggles between Palestinians and Israelis.
Chapter 8: Modern Israel in the Land. Is the modern state of Israel claiming a historical connection between biblical Israel and its own nationhood? If so, how do we apply the Old Testament to this modern nation? How does the modern state compare to Old Testament Israel?
Part 3: The New Testament and the Land
Chapter 9: Jesus and the Early Christians. Does the New Testament say anything about the land? What do Jesus and Paul say? If Christians are the descendants of Abraham by faith, what does this mean for the promises to Abraham’s descendants? What did the earliest Christians think about the land of Israel?
Chapter 10: The Palestinian Church. Who are the Palestinian Christians? What are their concerns? What have Western Christians not been told? What struggles do Palestinian Christians face?
Chapter 11: Living Stones in the Land. Who are the Palestinian Christian leaders whose voices need to be heard today? Who are some of the silent saints within the Palestinian church? What are they saying? What must Western Christians hear from them?
Chapter 12: Evangelicals and the Land. How have Western evangelicals approached the question of Israel and the Palestinians? How should evangelicals relate to the Palestinian church? Should Israel be treated like just any other nation?
Chapter 13: Where Do We Go from Here? The epilogue brings many of the most recent developments into focus. This chapter also asks, Is it right to be critical of Israel? Is such criticism anti-Semitic?
1. In the late 1970s Israel finally occupied southern Lebanon, made an alliance with the Christian militias there, and created a buffer zone. In order to stop Palestinian reprisals, Israel went as far as laying siege to Beirut in 1982. After twenty-two years of occupation, Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon on the night of May 23, 2000. Abandoned Christian communities, fearing for their lives, fled to the new Israeli border. Thousands were then let in. These Christian communities use this designation as a cultural-political identifier. In many cases, however, it represents a deep and profound faith.
2. H. Lindsey (with C. C. Carlson), The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1970).
3. G. M. Burge, Who Are God’s People in the Middle East? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1993).
4. Today Nora works for the evangelical Venture International Organization, bringing aid to the women of Jerusalem’s Old City.
5. See the website www.emeu.net.
6. J. F. Walvoord, Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1991), 48.
7. J. Gerrish, Jerusalem Prayer Letter, November 18, 1991. Published by Bridges for Peace, International Headquarters: 7 Shaul Adler, Jerusalem, Israel. See www.bridgesforpeace.com.
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Part One THE BACKGROUND TO THE PROBLEM
Relief Map of Israel/Palestine
Part One
THE BACKGROUND TO THE PROBLEM
Relief Map of Israel/Palestine
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Relief Map of Israel/Palestine
Part One
THE BACKGROUND TO THE PROBLEM
Relief Map of Israel/Palestine
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==
2 KNOWING THE LAND
The land that you are crossing over to occupy is a land of hills and valleys, watered by rain from the sky, a land that the Lord your God looks after. The eyes of the Lord your God are always on it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. —DEUTERONOMY 11:11–12 The countryside of Israel is dotted with a series of peculiar-looking forts that date back to the British occupation of the country during the first part of the twentieth century. Tour guides generally pass these by since today most are simply outposts for the Israeli army (known as the Israeli Defense Forces, or the IDF). They all have a distinctive architecture and are easy to identify. Sir Charles Teggart built them around 1937, and the British used them to maintain control during the turbulent years before the founding of the modern state of Israel (1948). Teggart had come from India, where he had a reputation for effective police enforcement. In Palestine he introduced a system of sixty-five military-police forts situated strategically throughout the land.¹ When I have a group of students with me, I like to stop the bus and ask them to examine their maps in order to tell me why Teggart chose to build a fort in this particular place rather than elsewhere along the highway. A good place is Latrun on the main highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (Hwy. 1). Teggart’s advisors were keen strategists who studied geography and history. They knew the mountains and valleys, and they understood which routes had to be controlled, which highways needed protection if the British were to be successful administrators of this region in the 1930s and 1940s. This particular highway is the primary artery that gains access to the central mountains and Jerusalem from the coast. Today its edges are dotted with wrecked military vehicles from the 1940s, preserved by the government to show the courage and perseverance of fighters who kept West Jerusalem linked to Tel Aviv. Once we see the strategic importance of the landscape, I then ask students if this route was important in antiquity. Did the ancient Israelites and Philistines fortify this area as well? Nine times out of ten, nearby we discover a crusader fort and an archaeological tell, a mound that looks like a human-made hill which hides the remains of some ancient fortress or city. The conclusion is clear: ancient conquerors, just like Teggart, knew which valleys and passes had to be fortified. Strategic considerations have never changed in Israel. King David, King Herod, Titus, the Crusaders, Saladin, the Ottoman Turks, General Teggart, King Abdullah I of Jordan, and Moshe Dayan of Israel all were concerned about the same valleys. While long-range artillery and air power may have changed the strategic military equation, the struggle for control of the central hills of Israel will never change. MAJOR FEATURES OF THE LAND Most political conflicts have a great deal to do with geography. The location of mountains, valleys, highways, bodies of water, and rainfall for agriculture all define the problem. For example, the Black Sea just north of Istanbul, Turkey, held vital warm-water ports for the Soviet Union’s naval fleet. Now with the breakup of the U.S.S.R., Ukraine has inherited these advantages. These geographical questions have a direct bearing on a country’s sense of well-being. Understanding the complex problems of Israel/Palestine is impossible without at least a cursory knowledge of the land itself. Look carefully at the map on the following page. Israel is a small country approximately the size of the state of Vermont. For the sake of convenience, we discuss the major regions of Israel by dividing the country north-to-south into four zones. Zone 1: Galilee The northern area is called Galilee and is dominated by a large, pear-shaped lake that is about thirteen miles long, eight miles wide. Mountains having an east-west pattern rise to the west of the lake and continue all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. To the north, these mountains ascend to Mount Hermon, which stands in all of its ninety-three hundred feet of majesty. In the Bible the dew of Mt. Hermon, falling on the country, is a sign of rich blessing (Ps. 133:3). Water drains down from these mountains into a wide basin called the Huleh Valley that eventually makes its way to the Sea of Galilee. Therefore the “headwaters” of the Jordan River, which runs like a north/south ribbon through the land, begin in the far north, on the shoulders of Hermon.
Israel/Palestine: Geographic Zones East of Mount Hermon is an elevated plateau called the Golan Heights. This plateau continues south around the east side of the Sea of Galilee and towers over it from 2,500 to 3,000 feet. Considering that the Sea of Galilee is about 650 feet below sea level, the Golan offers a huge strategic advantage over the region. The value of this area for any nation’s economy—from the Old Testament to today—cannot be missed. It receives generous rainfall and has good soil. Virtually any crop can be grown in abundance in Galilee. Even the Golan Heights receives enough rainfall to support cereal crops. Overland caravan traffic in the ancient world traveled south down the Golan Heights into the Huleh Valley above the Sea of Galilee. In Old Testament times, this valley possessed one of the largest fortress cities in the ancient Near East, Hazor. It stood as an imposing obstacle to any who would travel this route and perhaps try to lay siege to it. Today Hazor displays a massive archaeological tell that covers twenty-five acres. In New Testament times, Capernaum, located on the north coast of the sea, was a station for taxation along this route. This fact explains why Matthew, a tax collector, was found at Capernaum (Mark 2:1, 13–14) and why there was a contingent of Roman soldiers with its centurion there (Matt. 8:5). Galilee is a vital source of fresh water for modern Israel. In fact, Israel’s national water carrier (which supplies Tel Aviv) begins here and runs the length of the country. In some respects, Israel views the sea as its one great natural reservoir and so will protect and control at all costs the sources that feed this sea. Its outflow is the Jordan River, which continues south all the way to the Dead Sea. As it travels the Jordan is joined by other rivers coming from the great eastern plateaus. In particular, the Yarmouk Gorge has a river that supplies a flow almost equal to that of the Jordan. The Yarmouk is also an essential supplier of water for the region. Zone 2: Jezreel Galilee is bordered on the south by the prominent Jezreel Valley. It is a break in the mountains that connects the Mediterranean Sea on the west with the Jordan River valley on the east. This valley has been the site of many wars, especially during the Judges and early kingdom periods. Any foreign army that could control this valley with chariots could essentially cut Israel in half, which is why the great judge Deborah decided to confront the nine hundred iron chariots of Jabin, the king of Hazor, in Galilee (Judg. 4). King Saul also fought to control this place and, with his son Jonathan, lost his life in its eastern borders. To control access to the valley from the east, a tremendous fortress, Beit Shean, was built. Even in New Testament times when the movements of commerce replaced that of armies, Beit Shean was a large commercial city, Scythopolis, which today holds one of the largest theaters in Israel. Israeli archaeologists are working at high speed to uncover and reconstruct this beautiful city for modern tourism. Considering the number of biblical wars in the Jezreel Valley, it comes as no surprise that this valley is called the “Valley of Armageddon.” Megiddo is a fortress in the mountains of the southwest portion of the valley. “Har” means “mountains of.” This valley beneath the “mountains of Megiddo” is the one that will witness, according to Revelation 16:16, the final conflict of human history. The valley has also proven to be an agricultural asset. Generous rainfall can enter the region from the Mediterranean Sea and give it a fertility that is unsurpassed elsewhere in the country. Today the Jezreel is cultivated intensely by the Israelis. Zone 3: The Central Mountains and Jordan Valley From the Jezreel Valley to the southern end of the Dead Sea, the land follows a consistent pattern. A central mountain range follows the Jezreel Valley diagonally (northwest to southeast beginning south of Haifa), turns south when it nears the Jordan River, and then continues south for many miles. It rises to about twenty-six hundred feet around Jerusalem and three thousand feet around Shechem and Hebron.
The land that you are crossing over to occupy is a land of hills and valleys, watered by rain from the sky, a land that the Lord your God looks after. The eyes of the Lord your God are always on it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.
—DEUTERONOMY 11:11–12
The countryside of Israel is dotted with a series of peculiar-looking forts that date back to the British occupation of the country during the first part of the twentieth century. Tour guides generally pass these by since today most are simply outposts for the Israeli army (known as the Israeli Defense Forces, or the IDF). They all have a distinctive architecture and are easy to identify. Sir Charles Teggart built them around 1937, and the British used them to maintain control during the turbulent years before the founding of the modern state of Israel (1948). Teggart had come from India, where he had a reputation for effective police enforcement. In Palestine he introduced a system of sixty-five military-police forts situated strategically throughout the land.¹
When I have a group of students with me, I like to stop the bus and ask them to examine their maps in order to tell me why Teggart chose to build a fort in this particular place rather than elsewhere along the highway. A good place is Latrun on the main highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (Hwy. 1). Teggart’s advisors were keen strategists who studied geography and history. They knew the mountains and valleys, and they understood which routes had to be controlled, which highways needed protection if the British were to be successful administrators of this region in the 1930s and 1940s. This particular highway is the primary artery that gains access to the central mountains and Jerusalem from the coast. Today its edges are dotted with wrecked military vehicles from the 1940s, preserved by the government to show the courage and perseverance of fighters who kept West Jerusalem linked to Tel Aviv.
Once we see the strategic importance of the landscape, I then ask students if this route was important in antiquity. Did the ancient Israelites and Philistines fortify this area as well? Nine times out of ten, nearby we discover a crusader fort and an archaeological tell, a mound that looks like a human-made hill which hides the remains of some ancient fortress or city. The conclusion is clear: ancient conquerors, just like Teggart, knew which valleys and passes had to be fortified. Strategic considerations have never changed in Israel. King David, King Herod, Titus, the Crusaders, Saladin, the Ottoman Turks, General Teggart, King Abdullah I of Jordan, and Moshe Dayan of Israel all were concerned about the same valleys. While long-range artillery and air power may have changed the strategic military equation, the struggle for control of the central hills of Israel will never change.
MAJOR FEATURES OF THE LAND
Most political conflicts have a great deal to do with geography. The location of mountains, valleys, highways, bodies of water, and rainfall for agriculture all define the problem. For example, the Black Sea just north of Istanbul, Turkey, held vital warm-water ports for the Soviet Union’s naval fleet. Now with the breakup of the U.S.S.R., Ukraine has inherited these advantages. These geographical questions have a direct bearing on a country’s sense of well-being.
Understanding the complex problems of Israel/Palestine is impossible without at least a cursory knowledge of the land itself. Look carefully at the map on the following page. Israel is a small country approximately the size of the state of Vermont. For the sake of convenience, we discuss the major regions of Israel by dividing the country north-to-south into four zones.
Zone 1: Galilee
The northern area is called Galilee and is dominated by a large, pear-shaped lake that is about thirteen miles long, eight miles wide. Mountains having an east-west pattern rise to the west of the lake and continue all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. To the north, these mountains ascend to Mount Hermon, which stands in all of its ninety-three hundred feet of majesty. In the Bible the dew of Mt. Hermon, falling on the country, is a sign of rich blessing (Ps. 133:3). Water drains down from these mountains into a wide basin called the Huleh Valley that eventually makes its way to the Sea of Galilee. Therefore the headwaters of the Jordan River, which runs like a north/south ribbon through the land, begin in the far north, on the shoulders of Hermon.
Israel/Palestine: Geographic Zones
East of Mount Hermon is an elevated plateau called the Golan Heights. This plateau continues south around the east side of the Sea of Galilee and towers over it from 2,500 to 3,000 feet. Considering that the Sea of Galilee is about 650 feet below sea level, the Golan offers a huge strategic advantage over the region.
The value of this area for any nation’s economy—from the Old Testament to today—cannot be missed. It receives generous rainfall and has good soil. Virtually any crop can be grown in abundance in Galilee. Even the Golan Heights receives enough rainfall to support cereal crops. Overland caravan traffic in the ancient world traveled south down the Golan Heights into the Huleh Valley above the Sea of Galilee. In Old Testament times, this valley possessed one of the largest fortress cities in the ancient Near East, Hazor. It stood as an imposing obstacle to any who would travel this route and perhaps try to lay siege to it. Today Hazor displays a massive archaeological tell that covers twenty-five acres. In New Testament times, Capernaum, located on the north coast of the sea, was a station for taxation along this route. This fact explains why Matthew, a tax collector, was found at Capernaum (Mark 2:1, 13–14) and why there was a contingent of Roman soldiers with its centurion there (Matt. 8:5).
Galilee is a vital source of fresh water for modern Israel. In fact, Israel’s national water carrier (which supplies Tel Aviv) begins here and runs the length of the country. In some respects, Israel views the sea as its one great natural reservoir and so will protect and control at all costs the sources that feed this sea. Its outflow is the Jordan River, which continues south all the way to the Dead Sea. As it travels the Jordan is joined by other rivers coming from the great eastern plateaus. In particular, the Yarmouk Gorge has a river that supplies a flow almost equal to that of the Jordan. The Yarmouk is also an essential supplier of water for the region.
Zone 2: Jezreel
Galilee is bordered on the south by the prominent Jezreel Valley. It is a break in the mountains that connects the Mediterranean Sea on the west with the Jordan River valley on the east. This valley has been the site of many wars, especially during the Judges and early kingdom periods. Any foreign army that could control this valley with chariots could essentially cut Israel in half, which is why the great judge Deborah decided to confront the nine hundred iron chariots of Jabin, the king of Hazor, in Galilee (Judg. 4). King Saul also fought to control this place and, with his son Jonathan, lost his life in its eastern borders. To control access to the valley from the east, a tremendous fortress, Beit Shean, was built. Even in New Testament times when the movements of commerce replaced that of armies, Beit Shean was a large commercial city, Scythopolis, which today holds one of the largest theaters in Israel. Israeli archaeologists are working at high speed to uncover and reconstruct this beautiful city for modern tourism.
Considering the number of biblical wars in the Jezreel Valley, it comes as no surprise that this valley is called the Valley of Armageddon. Megiddo is a fortress in the mountains of the southwest portion of the valley. Har means mountains of. This valley beneath the "mountains of Megiddo" is the one that will witness, according to Revelation 16:16, the final conflict of human history.
The valley has also proven to be an agricultural asset. Generous rainfall can enter the region from the Mediterranean Sea and give it a fertility that is unsurpassed elsewhere in the country. Today the Jezreel is cultivated intensely by the Israelis.
Zone 3: The Central Mountains and Jordan Valley
From the Jezreel Valley to the southern end of the Dead Sea, the land follows a consistent pattern. A central mountain range follows the Jezreel Valley diagonally (northwest to southeast beginning south of Haifa), turns south when it nears the Jordan River, and then continues south for many miles. It rises to about twenty-six hundred feet around Jerusalem and three thousand feet around Shechem and Hebron.
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These central mountain regions today are called “Samaria” and “Judea” by Israel and are the ancient homeland of the Israelite tribes. Palestinians, on the other hand, refer to it as the “West Bank,” meaning the west bank of the Jordan River. Israelite life—with Jerusalem at its center—found in these relatively remote cities safety from Egyptian and Mesopotamian armies moving along the coast. The western flank of the mountain range is made up of low rolling hills (called the Shephelah) that decrease until they become a plain near the Mediterranean Sea. This side of the mountains (the west side) is extremely fertile since it catches the moist western rainfall from the Mediterranean Sea. Thus the west is a good agricultural region. The climate has also made it a much-sought-after region: witness the conflicts in the central mountains between the Philistines (who controlled much of the Shephelah and the coast) and the Israelites. The historic ambition of ancient Israel was to move west, to enter these hills and turn them into agricultural regions. The historical ambition of the Philistines was to keep them out. Today that rivalry continues. Numerous Arab villages were destroyed in this area from 1948 till 1967, and today many new Israeli towns have appeared. The eastern flank of the central mountains drops quickly into the Jordan Valley. These descending hills are desert because they are in a rain shadow from the central mountains. Average rainfall here is five to ten inches per year, while in the western Shephelah rainfall is twenty to twenty-five inches per year. This area is often called “the Judean desert,” which begins just over the hill from Bethel, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron. The site of Jesus’ wilderness temptation, these parched hills provide a formidable obstacle for anyone entering the land from the east. When Joshua entered the land this way, he had to climb more than 3,700 feet in as few as fifteen miles since he began at Jericho (well below sea level). When the Roman conqueror Pompey attacked Israel in 63 BCE, he came through this “back door” since it was the least expected approach. The Jordan Valley, one of nature’s miracles, is the lowest place on earth. The Jordan River flows south out of Galilee and culminates in the Dead Sea (about 1,275 feet below sea level). While the Jordan River is picturesque up near Galilee, in the south it winds through dreadful, deserted badlands where summer temperatures regularly exceed 100 degrees. Winter is almost the only time to appreciate this region. Herod the Great built a “winter palace” for himself near Jericho to escape the winter winds in Jerusalem. Although few tourists visit it, today his pools and villas can still be seen. Along the western edge of the Dead Sea, numerous important archaeological sites have been found: Qumran, the home of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Masada, the mountaintop fortress built by Roman engineers and finally defended by Jews in their last great struggle against Rome in the first century. East of the Jordan Valley are the mountains of Moab and Edom. The valley climbs dramatically up almost four thousand feet until it levels off on a high desert plateau. Today these mountains are in the country of Jordan. This plateau was the location of biblical Edom, Moab, and Gilead (south to north) and contained a desert highway used by Moses and the Israelites as they finished their forty-year wanderings and moved toward the Promised Land. The plateau is broken by a number of gorges that bring water down from the mountains to the Jordan Valley below. Zone 4: The Negev Deserts The central mountains descend and fan out into the deserts in the southernmost reaches of the country. The high Jordanian Plateau still follows the eastern border; the Jordan Valley (now waterless) is still a rift that continues beyond the Dead Sea; and in the west, deserts (called “the Negev”) have populations that must live near natural springs. Isaac, for instance, decided to live in Be’er Sheva (Beersheba), which in Hebrew means “seven springs.” Modern Israeli settlements here prosper only with great effort, but native Bedouin tribes still wander the region. Lucky visitors can still see camels roaming the hillsides or south of Be’er Sheva visit the splendid Museum of Bedouin History. SUMMARY This brief tour of the land clearly shows that the land of Israel/Palestine has dramatic differences in quality. Life in Galilee cannot be compared with life in the Negev. Farming in Israel’s western hills near, say, Beit Shemesh, is good. An identical farm in the Jordan Valley near Jericho must use completely different agricultural techniques. Travel three miles north of Jericho and agriculture is virtually impossible. The distribution of land here must always consider the location of water. Israel/Palestine is not like Illinois or Michigan where land quality and rainfall are somewhat even. The country’s primary river system remains in the center of a deep valley, and water cannot be carried or piped up to Jerusalem’s mountains. Therefore every region is valued by how much agriculture it can sustain. Most ancient towns in biblical times survived in the central mountains by catching rainfall and holding the water in underground cisterns. An interesting approach is to study the settlement patterns of the twelve Israelite tribes with geography in mind. Benjamin (the last son of Rachel) fortunately gained the central hill country and the hills and valleys west. This fact is really a theological comment, showing that this treasured son of Judah obtained the very best land in the country. Judah, Ephraim, and Manasseh (all privileged tribes) gained the rest of the central mountains, including the city of Jerusalem. Dan, on the other hand, lived so far down in the western hills that conflict with the Philistines made the Danites migrate north to Galilee (Judg. 18). Reuben, the firstborn son of Jacob, who should have inherited the best land, settled in the high deserts on the other side of the Dead Sea. Jacob’s last words to his sons in Genesis 48 and 49 describe their fate and give insight into the future life of their people. The modern significance of this distribution is that good land is so precious in Israel/Palestine that it is passed down from generation to generation. Even the ancient Israelite Jubilee year returned lost land to families again. Today Arabs name their land—as well as every significant feature it holds (such as caves and trees and springs). Land is a treasure. When someone is forcibly moved from the land, or when someone says “you get 50 percent” of the land, of utmost importance is the answer to the question, “Which 50 percent?” It is important to note which 50 percent we are talking about. Is this land desert (east of Jerusalem)? Is this land fertile (west of Jerusalem)? Can this land be cultivated? Hebron, for instance, grows some of the best grape harvests in the entire region! The Dotan Valley just south of Jenin and north of Nablus has rich fertile valleys that welcome intense agriculture. But villages east of Bethlehem such as Beit Sahour have such little rainfall that they must rely entirely on light industry for economic development. ISRAEL’S NEIGHBORS
Of equal importance is understanding what countries surround Israel/Palestine, because they have frequently played a role in Israel’s internal politics. All of these countries are Arab, and each has fought Israel at some point since 1948. Today, however, many have signed peace treaties. These countries are also relative newcomers to the world scene. For four hundred years (from 1517), the Ottoman Empire based in Istanbul, Turkey, dominated this entire land. While regional differences persisted, Ottoman control was complete, and any local expressions of autonomy were brutally suppressed. Jerusalem and its holy sites were sorely neglected for centuries. An excellent record of this neglect is clearly apparent in photographs made by the Bonfils family from Beirut, who visited the Holy Land in the 1870s.² North Israel shares a forty-nine-mile border in the north with Lebanon. Lebanon is a breathtakingly beautiful country with Mediterranean beaches backed by mountains rising to 10,000 feet; even in biblical times the “Cedars of Lebanon” were famous as symbols of majesty and strength (Judg. 9:15; Ps. 92:12; 104:16). The most famous delivery of its precious wood came to King Solomon and was used in building the Jerusalem Temple (1 Kings 5:1–14; 2 Chron. 2:1–16). Following the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, Lebanon came under French control (which explains why French can be heard along with Arabic in the capital of Beirut) and gained its independence in 1943. Its population of 3.5 million is well educated (87 percent literacy), and its European links made it a commerce and culture capital of the region. This reputation for being the “Paris” of the Middle East came to an abrupt halt in 1975 when Lebanon was plunged into a sixteen-year civil war that devastated the country. Beirut is now being rebuilt with the ingenuity, creativity, and hard work so characteristic of the Lebanese. Since 1991, Lebanon has invested over $31 billion in the complete rebuilding of Beirut. Its downtown banking district hosts perhaps the most beautiful French colonial architecture in the Middle East, with cafés and restaurants crowded every night. But Lebanon also lives with an uneasy religious balance that has often led to strife: 70 percent Muslim and 30 percent Christian. The government recognizes thirteen Christian groups (four Orthodox, six Catholic, and three Protestant). When Israel gained nationhood in 1948, over a hundred thousand Palestinian refugees (14 percent of the total) fled to Lebanon and were blocked by Israel from returning home. This situation led to the development of refugee camps throughout the southern half of the country and made Lebanon a natural base for Palestinian resistance groups. By 1990, there were thirteen huge camps and the refugee population had climbed to over 300,000. According to the United Nations (UN), Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee population today is about 425,000, of whom 225,000 still live in camps. These are registered with the UN and qualify for international aid.³ From 1971 until 1982, the Palestine Liberation Organization (the PLO) was based in Lebanon and waged numerous conflicts with Israel in an attempt to redress the refugee problem.⁴ The PLO was driven out in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, moving right to the outskirts of Beirut. Israel made a buffer zone by controlling the south with its own armies and alliances with Christian militias. However, this severe Israeli occupation gave birth to an equally severe resistance movement—Hezbollah (or the Party of God)—which fought the Israelis and led to their unilateral withdrawal from the area on May 23, 2000, ending over twenty years of occupation. Today, Hezbollah still controls the south, and their distinctive yellow and green banners can be seen in almost every village. In 2006 Hezbollah continued an enormous military buildup in southern Lebanon with Iranian support, and tensions with Israel increased. Minor skirmishes led to a full-scale exchange of missiles and artillery that led to a dreadful devastation to this region. Over 1,300 Lebanese died (165 Israeli soldiers died) and perhaps 1 million Lebanese were displaced. After a month of hostilities (July–August) the UN helped broker a peace agreement. But the Israeli punishment of Lebanon has not been forgotten. Israeli bombing of Beirut’s infrastructure (oil storage facilities, bridges, power grids) as well as archaeological and sentimental sites (Beirut’s historic lighthouse) were all attempts to cripple the country and force it to eject Hezbollah. Israel also employed cluster bombs (4.6 million bomblets) that were scattered over the region—and estimates are that perhaps 1 million of them did not explode and linger as landmines. Today Lebanese farmers and children are still killed when they mistakenly touch them. Israel also shares a similar border with Syria (forty-seven miles). This large desert country sited on a semi-arid plateau is almost twenty times the size of Lebanon. Only 28 percent of Syria is arable, which means it values those regions that can be cultivated (particularly in the south). About 74 percent of Syria is Muslim, 16 percent belongs to Muslim sects (Druze, Alawite), and 10 percent is Christian; between 1 million and 1.5 million Christians live in Syria today. In fact, Syria hosts some of the most ancient Christian villages in the world. For instance, the well-known “Christian Valley” (in the southwest, near Krac de Chevaliers) hosts forty Christian villages and a living monastery with twenty monks in residence. In the northwest at Qal’at Sam’aan, one can see the ruins of a huge monastery complex that once flourished for five hundred years (before the advent of Islam). The village of Maaloula (in the hills north of Damascus) still speaks Aramaic (the language of Jesus) and has chapels dating from the early 300s. Damascus itself, a city of 5 million, has hundreds of thousands of Christians and numerous churches. Syria lived under Ottoman rule until the end of World War I, when it declared itself an independent state ruled from Damascus in 1919. But the European powers had other plans. Backed by the League of Nations, France defeated its weak Arab army and ruled the country from 1920 until 1946 when Syria gained independence. A military regime has ruled since 1963, and, following a coup, Hafez al-Assad ruled from 1971. Assad died June 10, 2000, and his thirty-four-year-old son, Bashar Al-Assad, succeeded him. Syrian Christians today speak positively of the Syrian government, claiming that they have more freedom and protection today than at any other time. Churches can be built anywhere. When they are completed, they pay no taxes and all their utilities are paid by the government. Christians even sit on Assad’s ruling cabinet. In 1948, Syria also received numerous Palestinian refugees (about 75,000) and today this number has grown to 427,000, and they use nine official and three unofficial camps. Syria supported the Palestinian cause and has always held a militant posture with Israel. In the failed war of 1967, Syria lost to Israel its southern link to the Galilee region and the elevated Golan Heights—both deeply valued to the country. Today the Golan has over 42 Israeli settlements (about 19,000 settlers) and is a point of sharp contention with Israel as both countries seek a way to normalize relations. Israel takes
These central mountain regions today are called Samaria and Judea by Israel and are the ancient homeland of the Israelite tribes. Palestinians, on the other hand, refer to it as the West Bank, meaning the west bank of the Jordan River. Israelite life—with Jerusalem at its center—found in these relatively remote cities safety from Egyptian and Mesopotamian armies moving along the coast.
The western flank of the mountain range is made up of low rolling hills (called the Shephelah) that decrease until they become a plain near the Mediterranean Sea. This side of the mountains (the west side) is extremely fertile since it catches the moist western rainfall from the Mediterranean Sea. Thus the west is a good agricultural region. The climate has also made it a much-sought-after region: witness the conflicts in the central mountains between the Philistines (who controlled much of the Shephelah and the coast) and the Israelites. The historic ambition of ancient Israel was to move west, to enter these hills and turn them into agricultural regions. The historical ambition of the Philistines was to keep them out. Today that rivalry continues. Numerous Arab villages were destroyed in this area from 1948 till 1967, and today many new Israeli towns have appeared.
The eastern flank of the central mountains drops quickly into the Jordan Valley. These descending hills are desert because they are in a rain shadow from the central mountains. Average rainfall here is five to ten inches per year, while in the western Shephelah rainfall is twenty to twenty-five inches per year. This area is often called the Judean desert, which begins just over the hill from Bethel, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron. The site of Jesus’ wilderness temptation, these parched hills provide a formidable obstacle for anyone entering the land from the east. When Joshua entered the land this way, he had to climb more than 3,700 feet in as few as fifteen miles since he began at Jericho (well below sea level). When the Roman conqueror Pompey attacked Israel in 63 BCE, he came through this back door since it was the least expected approach.
The Jordan Valley, one of nature’s miracles, is the lowest place on earth. The Jordan River flows south out of Galilee and culminates in the Dead Sea (about 1,275 feet below sea level). While the Jordan River is picturesque up near Galilee, in the south it winds through dreadful, deserted badlands where summer temperatures regularly exceed 100 degrees. Winter is almost the only time to appreciate this region. Herod the Great built a winter palace for himself near Jericho to escape the winter winds in Jerusalem. Although few tourists visit it, today his pools and villas can still be seen. Along the western edge of the Dead Sea, numerous important archaeological sites have been found: Qumran, the home of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Masada, the mountaintop fortress built by Roman engineers and finally defended by Jews in their last great struggle against Rome in the first century.
East of the Jordan Valley are the mountains of Moab and Edom. The valley climbs dramatically up almost four thousand feet until it levels off on a high desert plateau. Today these mountains are in the country of Jordan. This plateau was the location of biblical Edom, Moab, and Gilead (south to north) and contained a desert highway used by Moses and the Israelites as they finished their forty-year wanderings and moved toward the Promised Land. The plateau is broken by a number of gorges that bring water down from the mountains to the Jordan Valley below.
Zone 4: The Negev Deserts
The central mountains descend and fan out into the deserts in the southernmost reaches of the country. The high Jordanian Plateau still follows the eastern border; the Jordan Valley (now waterless) is still a rift that continues beyond the Dead Sea; and in the west, deserts (called the Negev) have populations that must live near natural springs. Isaac, for instance, decided to live in Be’er Sheva (Beersheba), which in Hebrew means seven springs. Modern Israeli settlements here prosper only with great effort, but native Bedouin tribes still wander the region. Lucky visitors can still see camels roaming the hillsides or south of Be’er Sheva visit the splendid Museum of Bedouin History.
SUMMARY
This brief tour of the land clearly shows that the land of Israel/Palestine has dramatic differences in quality. Life in Galilee cannot be compared with life in the Negev. Farming in Israel’s western hills near, say, Beit Shemesh, is good. An identical farm in the Jordan Valley near Jericho must use completely different agricultural techniques. Travel three miles north of Jericho and agriculture is virtually impossible. The distribution of land here must always consider the location of water. Israel/Palestine is not like Illinois or Michigan where land quality and rainfall are somewhat even. The country’s primary river system remains in the center of a deep valley, and water cannot be carried or piped up to Jerusalem’s mountains. Therefore every region is valued by how much agriculture it can sustain. Most ancient towns in biblical times survived in the central mountains by catching rainfall and holding the water in underground cisterns.
An interesting approach is to study the settlement patterns of the twelve Israelite tribes with geography in mind. Benjamin (the last son of Rachel) fortunately gained the central hill country and the hills and valleys west. This fact is really a theological comment, showing that this treasured son of Judah obtained the very best land in the country. Judah, Ephraim, and Manasseh (all privileged tribes) gained the rest of the central mountains, including the city of Jerusalem. Dan, on the other hand, lived so far down in the western hills that conflict with the Philistines made the Danites migrate north to Galilee (Judg. 18). Reuben, the firstborn son of Jacob, who should have inherited the best land, settled in the high deserts on the other side of the Dead Sea. Jacob’s last words to his sons in Genesis 48 and 49 describe their fate and give insight into the future life of their people.
The modern significance of this distribution is that good land is so precious in Israel/Palestine that it is passed down from generation to generation. Even the ancient Israelite Jubilee year returned lost land to families again. Today Arabs name their land—as well as every significant feature it holds (such as caves and trees and springs). Land is a treasure. When someone is forcibly moved from the land, or when someone says you get 50 percent of the land, of utmost importance is the answer to the question, Which 50 percent? It is important to note which 50 percent we are talking about. Is this land desert (east of Jerusalem)? Is this land fertile (west of Jerusalem)? Can this land be cultivated? Hebron, for instance, grows some of the best grape harvests in the entire region! The Dotan Valley just south of Jenin and north of Nablus has rich fertile valleys that welcome intense agriculture. But villages east of Bethlehem such as Beit Sahour have such little rainfall that they must rely entirely on light industry for economic development.
ISRAEL’S NEIGHBORS
Of equal importance is understanding what countries surround Israel/Palestine, because they have frequently played a role in Israel’s internal politics. All of these countries are Arab, and each has fought Israel at some point since 1948. Today, however, many have signed peace treaties.
These countries are also relative newcomers to the world scene. For four hundred years (from 1517), the Ottoman Empire based in Istanbul, Turkey, dominated this entire land. While regional differences persisted, Ottoman control was complete, and any local expressions of autonomy were brutally suppressed. Jerusalem and its holy sites were sorely neglected for centuries. An excellent record of this neglect is clearly apparent in photographs made by the Bonfils family from Beirut, who visited the Holy Land in the 1870s.²
North
Israel shares a forty-nine-mile border in the north with Lebanon. Lebanon is a breathtakingly beautiful country with Mediterranean beaches backed by mountains rising to 10,000 feet; even in biblical times the Cedars of Lebanon were famous as symbols of majesty and strength (Judg. 9:15; Ps. 92:12; 104:16). The most famous delivery of its precious wood came to King Solomon and was used in building the Jerusalem Temple (1 Kings 5:1–14; 2 Chron. 2:1–16).
Following the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, Lebanon came under French control (which explains why French can be heard along with Arabic in the capital of Beirut) and gained its independence in 1943. Its population of 3.5 million is well educated (87 percent literacy), and its European links made it a commerce and culture capital of the region. This reputation for being the Paris of the Middle East came to an abrupt halt in 1975 when Lebanon was plunged into a sixteen-year civil war that devastated the country. Beirut is now being rebuilt with the ingenuity, creativity, and hard work so characteristic of the Lebanese. Since 1991, Lebanon has invested over $31 billion in the complete rebuilding of Beirut. Its downtown banking district hosts perhaps the most beautiful French colonial architecture in the Middle East, with cafés and restaurants crowded every night.
But Lebanon also lives with an uneasy religious balance that has often led to strife: 70 percent Muslim and 30 percent Christian. The government recognizes thirteen Christian groups (four Orthodox, six Catholic, and three Protestant).
When Israel gained nationhood in 1948, over a hundred thousand Palestinian refugees (14 percent of the total) fled to Lebanon and were blocked by Israel from returning home. This situation led to the development of refugee camps throughout the southern half of the country and made Lebanon a natural base for Palestinian resistance groups. By 1990, there were thirteen huge camps and the refugee population had climbed to over 300,000. According to the United Nations (UN), Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee population today is about 425,000, of whom 225,000 still live in camps. These are registered with the UN and qualify for international aid.³
From 1971 until 1982, the Palestine Liberation Organization (the PLO) was based in Lebanon and waged numerous conflicts with Israel in an attempt to redress the refugee problem.⁴ The PLO was driven out in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, moving right to the outskirts of Beirut. Israel made a buffer zone by controlling the south with its own armies and alliances with Christian militias. However, this severe Israeli occupation gave birth to an equally severe resistance movement—Hezbollah (or the Party of God)—which fought the Israelis and led to their unilateral withdrawal from the area on May 23, 2000, ending over twenty years of occupation. Today, Hezbollah still controls the south, and their distinctive yellow and green banners can be seen in almost every village.
In 2006 Hezbollah continued an enormous military buildup in southern Lebanon with Iranian support, and tensions with Israel increased. Minor skirmishes led to a full-scale exchange of missiles and artillery that led to a dreadful devastation to this region. Over 1,300 Lebanese died (165 Israeli soldiers died) and perhaps 1 million Lebanese were displaced. After a month of hostilities (July–August) the UN helped broker a peace agreement. But the Israeli punishment of Lebanon has not been forgotten. Israeli bombing of Beirut’s infrastructure (oil storage facilities, bridges, power grids) as well as archaeological and sentimental sites (Beirut’s historic lighthouse) were all attempts to cripple the country and force it to eject Hezbollah. Israel also employed cluster bombs (4.6 million bomblets) that were scattered over the region—and estimates are that perhaps 1 million of them did not explode and linger as landmines. Today Lebanese farmers and children are still killed when they mistakenly touch them.
Israel also shares a similar border with Syria (forty-seven miles). This large desert country sited on a semi-arid plateau is almost twenty times the size of Lebanon. Only 28 percent of Syria is arable, which means it values those regions that can be cultivated (particularly in the south). About 74 percent of Syria is Muslim, 16 percent belongs to Muslim sects (Druze, Alawite), and 10 percent is Christian; between 1 million and 1.5 million Christians live in Syria today. In fact, Syria hosts some of the most ancient Christian villages in the world. For instance, the well-known Christian Valley (in the southwest, near Krac de Chevaliers) hosts forty Christian villages and a living monastery with twenty monks in residence. In the northwest at Qal’at Sam’aan, one can see the ruins of a huge monastery complex that once flourished for five hundred years (before the advent of Islam). The village of Maaloula (in the hills north of Damascus) still speaks Aramaic (the language of Jesus) and has chapels dating from the early 300s. Damascus itself, a city of 5 million, has hundreds of thousands of Christians and numerous churches.
Syria lived under Ottoman rule until the end of World War I, when it declared itself an independent state ruled from Damascus in 1919. But the European powers had other plans. Backed by the League of Nations, France defeated its weak Arab army and ruled the country from 1920 until 1946 when Syria gained independence. A military regime has ruled since 1963, and, following a coup, Hafez al-Assad ruled from 1971. Assad died June 10, 2000, and his thirty-four-year-old son, Bashar Al-Assad, succeeded him. Syrian Christians today speak positively of the Syrian government, claiming that they have more freedom and protection today than at any other time. Churches can be built anywhere. When they are completed, they pay no taxes and all their utilities are paid by the government. Christians even sit on Assad’s ruling cabinet.
In 1948, Syria also received numerous Palestinian refugees (about 75,000) and today this number has grown to 427,000, and they use nine official and three unofficial camps. Syria supported the Palestinian cause and has always held a militant posture with Israel. In the failed war of 1967, Syria lost to Israel its southern link to the Galilee region and the elevated Golan Heights—both deeply valued to the country. Today the Golan has over 42 Israeli settlements (about 19,000 settlers) and is a point of sharp contention with Israel as both countries seek a way to normalize relations. Israel takes
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Of equal importance is understanding what countries surround Israel/Palestine, because they have frequently played a role in Israel’s internal politics. All of these countries are Arab, and each has fought Israel at some point since 1948. Today, however, many have signed peace treaties. These countries are also relative newcomers to the world scene. For four hundred years (from 1517), the Ottoman Empire based in Istanbul, Turkey, dominated this entire land. While regional differences persisted, Ottoman control was complete, and any local expressions of autonomy were brutally suppressed. Jerusalem and its holy sites were sorely neglected for centuries. An excellent record of this neglect is clearly apparent in photographs made by the Bonfils family from Beirut, who visited the Holy Land in the 1870s.² North Israel shares a forty-nine-mile border in the north with Lebanon. Lebanon is a breathtakingly beautiful country with Mediterranean beaches backed by mountains rising to 10,000 feet; even in biblical times the “Cedars of Lebanon” were famous as symbols of majesty and strength (Judg. 9:15; Ps. 92:12; 104:16). The most famous delivery of its precious wood came to King Solomon and was used in building the Jerusalem Temple (1 Kings 5:1–14; 2 Chron. 2:1–16). Following the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, Lebanon came under French control (which explains why French can be heard along with Arabic in the capital of Beirut) and gained its independence in 1943. Its population of 3.5 million is well educated (87 percent literacy), and its European links made it a commerce and culture capital of the region. This reputation for being the “Paris” of the Middle East came to an abrupt halt in 1975 when Lebanon was plunged into a sixteen-year civil war that devastated the country. Beirut is now being rebuilt with the ingenuity, creativity, and hard work so characteristic of the Lebanese. Since 1991, Lebanon has invested over $31 billion in the complete rebuilding of Beirut. Its downtown banking district hosts perhaps the most beautiful French colonial architecture in the Middle East, with cafés and restaurants crowded every night. But Lebanon also lives with an uneasy religious balance that has often led to strife: 70 percent Muslim and 30 percent Christian. The government recognizes thirteen Christian groups (four Orthodox, six Catholic, and three Protestant). When Israel gained nationhood in 1948, over a hundred thousand Palestinian refugees (14 percent of the total) fled to Lebanon and were blocked by Israel from returning home. This situation led to the development of refugee camps throughout the southern half of the country and made Lebanon a natural base for Palestinian resistance groups. By 1990, there were thirteen huge camps and the refugee population had climbed to over 300,000. According to the United Nations (UN), Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee population today is about 425,000, of whom 225,000 still live in camps. These are registered with the UN and qualify for international aid.³ From 1971 until 1982, the Palestine Liberation Organization (the PLO) was based in Lebanon and waged numerous conflicts with Israel in an attempt to redress the refugee problem.⁴ The PLO was driven out in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, moving right to the outskirts of Beirut. Israel made a buffer zone by controlling the south with its own armies and alliances with Christian militias. However, this severe Israeli occupation gave birth to an equally severe resistance movement—Hezbollah (or the Party of God)—which fought the Israelis and led to their unilateral withdrawal from the area on May 23, 2000, ending over twenty years of occupation. Today, Hezbollah still controls the south, and their distinctive yellow and green banners can be seen in almost every village. In 2006 Hezbollah continued an enormous military buildup in southern Lebanon with Iranian support, and tensions with Israel increased. Minor skirmishes led to a full-scale exchange of missiles and artillery that led to a dreadful devastation to this region. Over 1,300 Lebanese died (165 Israeli soldiers died) and perhaps 1 million Lebanese were displaced. After a month of hostilities (July–August) the UN helped broker a peace agreement. But the Israeli punishment of Lebanon has not been forgotten. Israeli bombing of Beirut’s infrastructure (oil storage facilities, bridges, power grids) as well as archaeological and sentimental sites (Beirut’s historic lighthouse) were all attempts to cripple the country and force it to eject Hezbollah. Israel also employed cluster bombs (4.6 million bomblets) that were scattered over the region—and estimates are that perhaps 1 million of them did not explode and linger as landmines. Today Lebanese farmers and children are still killed when they mistakenly touch them. Israel also shares a similar border with Syria (forty-seven miles). This large desert country sited on a semi-arid plateau is almost twenty times the size of Lebanon. Only 28 percent of Syria is arable, which means it values those regions that can be cultivated (particularly in the south). About 74 percent of Syria is Muslim, 16 percent belongs to Muslim sects (Druze, Alawite), and 10 percent is Christian; between 1 million and 1.5 million Christians live in Syria today. In fact, Syria hosts some of the most ancient Christian villages in the world. For instance, the well-known “Christian Valley” (in the southwest, near Krac de Chevaliers) hosts forty Christian villages and a living monastery with twenty monks in residence. In the northwest at Qal’at Sam’aan, one can see the ruins of a huge monastery complex that once flourished for five hundred years (before the advent of Islam). The village of Maaloula (in the hills north of Damascus) still speaks Aramaic (the language of Jesus) and has chapels dating from the early 300s. Damascus itself, a city of 5 million, has hundreds of thousands of Christians and numerous churches. Syria lived under Ottoman rule until the end of World War I, when it declared itself an independent state ruled from Damascus in 1919. But the European powers had other plans. Backed by the League of Nations, France defeated its weak Arab army and ruled the country from 1920 until 1946 when Syria gained independence. A military regime has ruled since 1963, and, following a coup, Hafez al-Assad ruled from 1971. Assad died June 10, 2000, and his thirty-four-year-old son, Bashar Al-Assad, succeeded him. Syrian Christians today speak positively of the Syrian government, claiming that they have more freedom and protection today than at any other time. Churches can be built anywhere. When they are completed, they pay no taxes and all their utilities are paid by the government. Christians even sit on Assad’s ruling cabinet. In 1948, Syria also received numerous Palestinian refugees (about 75,000) and today this number has grown to 427,000, and they use nine official and three unofficial camps. Syria supported the Palestinian cause and has always held a militant posture with Israel. In the failed war of 1967, Syria lost to Israel its southern link to the Galilee region and the elevated Golan Heights—both deeply valued to the country. Today the Golan has over 42 Israeli settlements (about 19,000 settlers) and is a point of sharp contention with Israel as both countries seek a way to normalize relations. Israel takes
These central mountain regions today are called Samaria and Judea by Israel and are the ancient homeland of the Israelite tribes. Palestinians, on the other hand, refer to it as the West Bank, meaning the west bank of the Jordan River. Israelite life—with Jerusalem at its center—found in these relatively remote cities safety from Egyptian and Mesopotamian armies moving along the coast.
The western flank of the mountain range is made up of low rolling hills (called the Shephelah) that decrease until they become a plain near the Mediterranean Sea. This side of the mountains (the west side) is extremely fertile since it catches the moist western rainfall from the Mediterranean Sea. Thus the west is a good agricultural region. The climate has also made it a much-sought-after region: witness the conflicts in the central mountains between the Philistines (who controlled much of the Shephelah and the coast) and the Israelites. The historic ambition of ancient Israel was to move west, to enter these hills and turn them into agricultural regions. The historical ambition of the Philistines was to keep them out. Today that rivalry continues. Numerous Arab villages were destroyed in this area from 1948 till 1967, and today many new Israeli towns have appeared.
The eastern flank of the central mountains drops quickly into the Jordan Valley. These descending hills are desert because they are in a rain shadow from the central mountains. Average rainfall here is five to ten inches per year, while in the western Shephelah rainfall is twenty to twenty-five inches per year. This area is often called the Judean desert, which begins just over the hill from Bethel, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron. The site of Jesus’ wilderness temptation, these parched hills provide a formidable obstacle for anyone entering the land from the east. When Joshua entered the land this way, he had to climb more than 3,700 feet in as few as fifteen miles since he began at Jericho (well below sea level). When the Roman conqueror Pompey attacked Israel in 63 BCE, he came through this back door since it was the least expected approach.
The Jordan Valley, one of nature’s miracles, is the lowest place on earth. The Jordan River flows south out of Galilee and culminates in the Dead Sea (about 1,275 feet below sea level). While the Jordan River is picturesque up near Galilee, in the south it winds through dreadful, deserted badlands where summer temperatures regularly exceed 100 degrees. Winter is almost the only time to appreciate this region. Herod the Great built a winter palace for himself near Jericho to escape the winter winds in Jerusalem. Although few tourists visit it, today his pools and villas can still be seen. Along the western edge of the Dead Sea, numerous important archaeological sites have been found: Qumran, the home of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Masada, the mountaintop fortress built by Roman engineers and finally defended by Jews in their last great struggle against Rome in the first century.
East of the Jordan Valley are the mountains of Moab and Edom. The valley climbs dramatically up almost four thousand feet until it levels off on a high desert plateau. Today these mountains are in the country of Jordan. This plateau was the location of biblical Edom, Moab, and Gilead (south to north) and contained a desert highway used by Moses and the Israelites as they finished their forty-year wanderings and moved toward the Promised Land. The plateau is broken by a number of gorges that bring water down from the mountains to the Jordan Valley below.
Zone 4: The Negev Deserts
The central mountains descend and fan out into the deserts in the southernmost reaches of the country. The high Jordanian Plateau still follows the eastern border; the Jordan Valley (now waterless) is still a rift that continues beyond the Dead Sea; and in the west, deserts (called the Negev) have populations that must live near natural springs. Isaac, for instance, decided to live in Be’er Sheva (Beersheba), which in Hebrew means seven springs. Modern Israeli settlements here prosper only with great effort, but native Bedouin tribes still wander the region. Lucky visitors can still see camels roaming the hillsides or south of Be’er Sheva visit the splendid Museum of Bedouin History.
SUMMARY
This brief tour of the land clearly shows that the land of Israel/Palestine has dramatic differences in quality. Life in Galilee cannot be compared with life in the Negev. Farming in Israel’s western hills near, say, Beit Shemesh, is good. An identical farm in the Jordan Valley near Jericho must use completely different agricultural techniques. Travel three miles north of Jericho and agriculture is virtually impossible. The distribution of land here must always consider the location of water. Israel/Palestine is not like Illinois or Michigan where land quality and rainfall are somewhat even. The country’s primary river system remains in the center of a deep valley, and water cannot be carried or piped up to Jerusalem’s mountains. Therefore every region is valued by how much agriculture it can sustain. Most ancient towns in biblical times survived in the central mountains by catching rainfall and holding the water in underground cisterns.
An interesting approach is to study the settlement patterns of the twelve Israelite tribes with geography in mind. Benjamin (the last son of Rachel) fortunately gained the central hill country and the hills and valleys west. This fact is really a theological comment, showing that this treasured son of Judah obtained the very best land in the country. Judah, Ephraim, and Manasseh (all privileged tribes) gained the rest of the central mountains, including the city of Jerusalem. Dan, on the other hand, lived so far down in the western hills that conflict with the Philistines made the Danites migrate north to Galilee (Judg. 18). Reuben, the firstborn son of Jacob, who should have inherited the best land, settled in the high deserts on the other side of the Dead Sea. Jacob’s last words to his sons in Genesis 48 and 49 describe their fate and give insight into the future life of their people.
The modern significance of this distribution is that good land is so precious in Israel/Palestine that it is passed down from generation to generation. Even the ancient Israelite Jubilee year returned lost land to families again. Today Arabs name their land—as well as every significant feature it holds (such as caves and trees and springs). Land is a treasure. When someone is forcibly moved from the land, or when someone says you get 50 percent of the land, of utmost importance is the answer to the question, Which 50 percent? It is important to note which 50 percent we are talking about. Is this land desert (east of Jerusalem)? Is this land fertile (west of Jerusalem)? Can this land be cultivated? Hebron, for instance, grows some of the best grape harvests in the entire region! The Dotan Valley just south of Jenin and north of Nablus has rich fertile valleys that welcome intense agriculture. But villages east of Bethlehem such as Beit Sahour have such little rainfall that they must rely entirely on light industry for economic development.
ISRAEL’S NEIGHBORS
Of equal importance is understanding what countries surround Israel/Palestine, because they have frequently played a role in Israel’s internal politics. All of these countries are Arab, and each has fought Israel at some point since 1948. Today, however, many have signed peace treaties.
These countries are also relative newcomers to the world scene. For four hundred years (from 1517), the Ottoman Empire based in Istanbul, Turkey, dominated this entire land. While regional differences persisted, Ottoman control was complete, and any local expressions of autonomy were brutally suppressed. Jerusalem and its holy sites were sorely neglected for centuries. An excellent record of this neglect is clearly apparent in photographs made by the Bonfils family from Beirut, who visited the Holy Land in the 1870s.²
North
Israel shares a forty-nine-mile border in the north with Lebanon. Lebanon is a breathtakingly beautiful country with Mediterranean beaches backed by mountains rising to 10,000 feet; even in biblical times the Cedars of Lebanon were famous as symbols of majesty and strength (Judg. 9:15; Ps. 92:12; 104:16). The most famous delivery of its precious wood came to King Solomon and was used in building the Jerusalem Temple (1 Kings 5:1–14; 2 Chron. 2:1–16).
Following the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, Lebanon came under French control (which explains why French can be heard along with Arabic in the capital of Beirut) and gained its independence in 1943. Its population of 3.5 million is well educated (87 percent literacy), and its European links made it a commerce and culture capital of the region. This reputation for being the Paris of the Middle East came to an abrupt halt in 1975 when Lebanon was plunged into a sixteen-year civil war that devastated the country. Beirut is now being rebuilt with the ingenuity, creativity, and hard work so characteristic of the Lebanese. Since 1991, Lebanon has invested over $31 billion in the complete rebuilding of Beirut. Its downtown banking district hosts perhaps the most beautiful French colonial architecture in the Middle East, with cafés and restaurants crowded every night.
But Lebanon also lives with an uneasy religious balance that has often led to strife: 70 percent Muslim and 30 percent Christian. The government recognizes thirteen Christian groups (four Orthodox, six Catholic, and three Protestant).
When Israel gained nationhood in 1948, over a hundred thousand Palestinian refugees (14 percent of the total) fled to Lebanon and were blocked by Israel from returning home. This situation led to the development of refugee camps throughout the southern half of the country and made Lebanon a natural base for Palestinian resistance groups. By 1990, there were thirteen huge camps and the refugee population had climbed to over 300,000. According to the United Nations (UN), Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee population today is about 425,000, of whom 225,000 still live in camps. These are registered with the UN and qualify for international aid.³
From 1971 until 1982, the Palestine Liberation Organization (the PLO) was based in Lebanon and waged numerous conflicts with Israel in an attempt to redress the refugee problem.⁴ The PLO was driven out in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, moving right to the outskirts of Beirut. Israel made a buffer zone by controlling the south with its own armies and alliances with Christian militias. However, this severe Israeli occupation gave birth to an equally severe resistance movement—Hezbollah (or the Party of God)—which fought the Israelis and led to their unilateral withdrawal from the area on May 23, 2000, ending over twenty years of occupation. Today, Hezbollah still controls the south, and their distinctive yellow and green banners can be seen in almost every village.
In 2006 Hezbollah continued an enormous military buildup in southern Lebanon with Iranian support, and tensions with Israel increased. Minor skirmishes led to a full-scale exchange of missiles and artillery that led to a dreadful devastation to this region. Over 1,300 Lebanese died (165 Israeli soldiers died) and perhaps 1 million Lebanese were displaced. After a month of hostilities (July–August) the UN helped broker a peace agreement. But the Israeli punishment of Lebanon has not been forgotten. Israeli bombing of Beirut’s infrastructure (oil storage facilities, bridges, power grids) as well as archaeological and sentimental sites (Beirut’s historic lighthouse) were all attempts to cripple the country and force it to eject Hezbollah. Israel also employed cluster bombs (4.6 million bomblets) that were scattered over the region—and estimates are that perhaps 1 million of them did not explode and linger as landmines. Today Lebanese farmers and children are still killed when they mistakenly touch them.
Israel also shares a similar border with Syria (forty-seven miles). This large desert country sited on a semi-arid plateau is almost twenty times the size of Lebanon. Only 28 percent of Syria is arable, which means it values those regions that can be cultivated (particularly in the south). About 74 percent of Syria is Muslim, 16 percent belongs to Muslim sects (Druze, Alawite), and 10 percent is Christian; between 1 million and 1.5 million Christians live in Syria today. In fact, Syria hosts some of the most ancient Christian villages in the world. For instance, the well-known Christian Valley (in the southwest, near Krac de Chevaliers) hosts forty Christian villages and a living monastery with twenty monks in residence. In the northwest at Qal’at Sam’aan, one can see the ruins of a huge monastery complex that once flourished for five hundred years (before the advent of Islam). The village of Maaloula (in the hills north of Damascus) still speaks Aramaic (the language of Jesus) and has chapels dating from the early 300s. Damascus itself, a city of 5 million, has hundreds of thousands of Christians and numerous churches.
Syria lived under Ottoman rule until the end of World War I, when it declared itself an independent state ruled from Damascus in 1919. But the European powers had other plans. Backed by the League of Nations, France defeated its weak Arab army and ruled the country from 1920 until 1946 when Syria gained independence. A military regime has ruled since 1963, and, following a coup, Hafez al-Assad ruled from 1971. Assad died June 10, 2000, and his thirty-four-year-old son, Bashar Al-Assad, succeeded him. Syrian Christians today speak positively of the Syrian government, claiming that they have more freedom and protection today than at any other time. Churches can be built anywhere. When they are completed, they pay no taxes and all their utilities are paid by the government. Christians even sit on Assad’s ruling cabinet.
In 1948, Syria also received numerous Palestinian refugees (about 75,000) and today this number has grown to 427,000, and they use nine official and three unofficial camps. Syria supported the Palestinian cause and has always held a militant posture with Israel. In the failed war of 1967, Syria lost to Israel its southern link to the Galilee region and the elevated Golan Heights—both deeply valued to the country. Today the Golan has over 42 Israeli settlements (about 19,000 settlers) and is a point of sharp contention with Israel as both countries seek a way to normalize relations. Israel takes
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a Syrian threat quite seriously; Damascus boasts a considerable military budget of about $1 billion per year. Israel made peace with Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), and has pulled out of Lebanon (May 23, 2000). Many thought with the death of Syria’s militant president, Hafez al-Assad, and the new rule of his more moderate son, Bashar al-Assad, that hope could be found there too. But, alas, today Syria is engulfed in one of the worst civil wars the region has ever seen. East Immediately to the east, Israel shares a 148-mile border with Jordan, whose capital is Amman. This small desert kingdom has always seen its history as closely tied with Palestine. Following Ottoman rule, British control continued until 1946 when Jordan became independent. However—and this fact is important—Jordan possessed valuable lands west of the Jordan River in present-day Israel. East Jerusalem and the central hills north and south were Jordanian from 1948 (Israel’s independence) until 1967, when Israel conquered Jerusalem, the West Bank, and all lands up to the Jordan River. Many older Palestinians still remember “Jordanian” Jerusalem, which continues to be a point of contention. One friend who was an official in the Jordanian government in Jerusalem now runs a well-known gift shop at the Seven Arches Hotel on the Mount of Olives. Such stories are common. Jordan emerged into nationhood as a resource-poor country populated by Bedouins and Palestinians living on a desert plateau with virtually none of the tools for building a strong economy. Water is scarce (only 4 percent arable land), and even pasture land is hard to find (9 percent). Its few resources are in mining (phosphates, potash), and most Jordanians work in industry or services. The forty-six-year rule of Jordan’s King Hussein which began in 1953 made Jordan into a modern state. Despite a number of wars with Israel and Israeli possession of vast lands once claimed by Jordan, Hussein signed a peace treaty in 1994. Since then, borders have opened and trade moves between the countries. Jordan’s capital, Amman, is today a modern city where English is spoken freely and Western institutions live alongside Arab culture. Its downtown sparkles with European stores, expensive cars, and billboards promoting the Internet. Hussein was dearly loved, as was his American wife, Queen Noor, who promoted many humanitarian and environmental causes. When Hussein died on February 7, 1999, the country was grief-stricken. Within hours, Hussein’s eldest son, Abdullah, was crowned as king. Respect for the nation can be seen in the tremendous number of dignitaries who deeply admired Hussein and attended the state funeral. About 1.9 million Palestinian refugees (from the 1948 and 1967 conflicts) now live in Jordan and are registered with the UN. Unlike other countries, Jordan provided them with full citizenship (except for 120,000 who came from Gaza). This gives Jordan an inherent sympathy for Palestinian causes. Even though militant Palestinian groups were expelled in 1971, Jordan still holds a keen interest in the fate of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Many still have family connections, and Palestinians frequently travel to Amman for medical care and business. Today about 288,000 of the Palestinians live in refugee camps. Christianity spread to these deserts early. When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman army in 70 CE, the first Christian historian (Eusebius) tells us that the apostles and their followers moved to Pella (today a Jordanian city) to avoid the war. A strong Christian community about 200,000 strong (4 percent of the population) lives here today, and Amman hosts one of the best evangelical seminaries in the region. A number of Catholic priests currently in leadership in Palestine have come from the Jordanian city of Madaba, home to a particularly strong Roman Catholic community. While not sharing a border with Israel, Iraq has always been deeply involved in the wider Arab opposition to Israel. Iraq is a large country with rich natural resources and an important history. This land is the home of the great empires of antiquity (Assyria, Babylonia), thanks to its strategic geographical location on a plain watered by the great Tigris-Euphrates river system. When Jerusalem was taken into exile in the Old Testament, its captives were brought to Babylon—a city about fifty miles south of Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. During the New Testament era, Babylon had a huge Jewish population stemming from the exile and soon found many Christian communities growing as well. In fact, its present Assyrian population (not to be confused with “Syrian”) in the north is proud of the antiquity of its faith, dating from the earliest Christian centuries. This enthusiasm can lead to exaggeration, however, as one Assyrian told me, “We’ve been Christians since the days when Jonah preached in Nineveh!” Following Ottoman rule, Iraq came under British control until gaining full independence in 1932, which explains the frequent use of English throughout the country. Its monarchy was pro-Western until 1958, when a period of turmoil overthrew the government. The military dictatorship of Saddam Hussein began in 1979. Beginning with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, however, suddenly Iraq came under scrutiny. The Gulf War led by the United States in 1991 expelled Iraq from Kuwait but set in motion a conflict with the United States that would climax with the American defeat of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Today Iraq has a new independent government but in reality it will be rebuilding itself for decades. South Underestimating the significance of Egypt in the larger scheme of Middle East life is simply impossible. This is one of the great empires of antiquity. In the Bible Joseph prospered here and Moses led Israel out of this land after a four-hundred-year sojourn. Even Jesus spent some of his childhood in Egypt. That religious heritage has not been forgotten today. The Christian church in Egypt—called the Coptic Orthodox Church—has about 10 million members in Egypt and another 1.2 million living overseas. It traces its history to the ministry of St. Mark, who was martyred in the city of Alexandria (on Easter Monday), and today the leader of the Copts, Pope Theodoros II (or Tawadros II), claims to be Mark’s 118th successor.⁵ Many Christians who have interviewed Pope Theodoros are at once impressed with his pastoral wisdom and wit, and his near-perfect ability to recite any passage of Scripture. Egyptian Christianity also has a rich tradition of Christian theology. Its great libraries and schools in Alexandria produced some of the church’s most profound thinkers (Clement, Origen) as well as thousands of copies of the Bible and libraries of Christian works. The New Testament may even have been translated into Coptic first (in the third century). Christian monasticism began here with the first monk, St. Anthony, who was a Copt from southern Egypt. But this church bears its own cross. The Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 brought the end of Christian leadership, and since then so many Christians have died that today Copts commonly use “The Calendar of the Martyrs” to remember them. Fortunately,
one of Muhammad’s wives was Egyptian, and so he gave generous concessions to the Copts, permitting them to freely exercise their faith. Egypt’s large majority of Muslims nevertheless makes clear that this large church will always find its power checked. Islamic fundamentalist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood today would like to change entirely the tolerant complexion of Egypt’s religiously pluralistic world. Egypt’s vast arid desert (three times the size of New Mexico) is blessed with one gift that made its great civilizations possible: the Nile River. Today while only 2 percent of Egypt has arable land, 22,000 square miles are irrigated from the Nile, which provides food for the country’s 75 million people. European interest in Egypt also comes from the Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, making a passage to the East that avoided transit around Africa. British interests in Iraq and India until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made this canal a vital strategic asset. Since the fall of Ottoman rule, British control of Egypt continued until 1922 when independence was gained. Egyptian nationalism and defiance against Israel was shaped under Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956–70), but Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s vice president and successor, helped bring Egypt into the community of world states. Despite two defeats to Israel (1967, 1973) and the loss of the Sinai Peninsula, Sadat still sought peace. In November 1977, Sadat shocked the world by asking to come to Israel to speak at its parliament. While this led to the Camp David Accords (with Jimmy Carter in 1978), a peace settlement with Israel (1979), and the return of the Sinai, Sadat alienated himself from many former Arab allies. In October 1981, Sadat was assassinated during a military parade for this overture to Israel. On October 11, 1981, England’s Sunday Times wrote, “By that one act, committed in the third most holy city of Islam [Jerusalem], he branded himself a traitor to his own religion and invited the ‘execution’ that finally came from the guns of his own soldiers.” Egypt has always held firm sympathies with the losses of the Palestinians and so joined in most wars against Israel. Few refugees came to Egypt in 1948 (7,000 people) because of its distance, but over 200,000 Palestinians fleeing south packed into Gaza, a coastal region under Egyptian control. Gaza came under the control of Israel in 1967 and the refugee population grew considerably. By 2010, the Gaza refugee population was 1.1 million (out of a total Gaza population of 1.5 million), creating a truly explosive environment where extremist movements have been born. But Egypt will not be pushed by Palestinian calls for justice and statehood. Sadat’s successor was Mohammed Hosni Mubarak, who cultivated diplomatic relations with the United States, built a militaristic regime, and placed national interests before Palestinian concerns. Mubarak’s overthrow in 2011 by a popular uprising stunned the world and witnessed new tensions between Egypt and Israel. Internal It is difficult to know how to classify the Palestinians who live within Gaza (1.5m) or the West Bank (2.3m). Officially Israel does not want to declare its borders on the east (the UN recognized Israel’s borders in 1948 after independence but not its conquests in 1967—which explains why the American embassy is still in Tel Aviv). If these areas were annexed into the State of Israel, these Palestinians could expect to be full participants in Israeli national life. But Israel does not want that. As it is, these regions live under “occupation” and the Israeli military controls the movement of their people. At present (2012) the UN claims that there are 779,000 refugees in the West Bank in nineteen camps and 1.1 million in Gaza. They are in one respect Israel’s “neighbors,” and yet, they live a life of stark jeopardy. For instance, the GDP per capita for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza taken together is about $2,800 per year. In Israel, it is $32,000 (in the USA it is $48,000).⁶ But there are Palestinians within Israel too. Some estimates suggest that in the 1940s over 300,000 Palestinians were “caught” within the borders of the new country. Most of these Arabs accepted citizenship. Today the Palestinian population within Israel (excluding Gaza and the West Bank) is about 1.5 million, creating a truly explosive environment where extremist movements have been born. SUMMARY The Arab states surrounding Israel have been consistent in their resistance to Israel’s statehood. They are sympathetic to the Palestinian loss of land and see Israel as one more extension of Western imperialism in the Middle East. This time, however, French and English interests are not the problem, but rather Jewish interests backed by American dollars. Therefore while Israel is not a threat, say, to Jordan or Egypt, Israel is viewed as an offense to Arab sensibility and pride. As Israel has conquered and acquired more and more land—creating more and more refugees—Arab states have unified in their opposition. However, to stereotype these countries as trying to “push Israel into the sea” would be incorrect. Arab belligerence was a luxury of the cold war era when Russian dollars financed Arab armies. Those days are over, and a new generation of Arab leaders sees Israel as a permanent resident in the neighborhood. Jordan and Egypt now hold peace accords with Israel. Israel has withdrawn its troops from southern Lebanon. Beirut is being rebuilt, and Cairo is more keen to promote economic modernization than military threats. This situation bodes well for regional peace, but it comes at the price of taking Arab support away from the Palestinians. Without the help of military intervention from across the border, Palestinian national movements—in all of their chaos and powerlessness—stand alone facing Israel, which continues to build itself internally. Today, however, in light of the 2011 “Arab Spring” and the overthrow of governments from Tunisia to Egypt—as well as a civil war exploding in Syria, it is difficult predict how Palestinian concerns will get noticed. The world’s attention has moved elsewhere. The Middle East is a rough neighborhood, and the political alignments and interests of just ten years ago can quickly look outdated. For us, at least, it is crucial to know where these conflicts originated. We tell that story in the next chapter. 1. R. John and S. Hadawi, The Palestine Diary, 2 vols. (New York: New World Press, 1970), 1:280; M. Begin, The Revolt (Los Angeles: Nash, 1948), 91. 2. The Bonfils collection can be seen in many museums today and is frequently published. On the web, see http://almashriq.hiof.no/general/700/770/779/historical/pcd0109/pcd0109.html. 3. These statistics and all subsequent refugee numbers are taken from a 2010 UN report in “Humanitarian News and Analysis” occasional publication (a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). This can be found at www.irinnews.org/Report/89571/MIDDLE-EAST-Palestinian-refugee-numbers-whereabouts. 4. The PLO is a confederation of multiple Palestinian political, resistance, and humanitarian organizations formerly headed by Yasir Arafat, now headed by Mahmoud Abbas. It even formed a “government in exile” and today has provided the nucleus of
a Syrian threat quite seriously; Damascus boasts a considerable military budget of about $1 billion per year.
Israel made peace with Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), and has pulled out of Lebanon (May 23, 2000). Many thought with the death of Syria’s militant president, Hafez al-Assad, and the new rule of his more moderate son, Bashar al-Assad, that hope could be found there too. But, alas, today Syria is engulfed in one of the worst civil wars the region has ever seen.
East
Immediately to the east, Israel shares a 148-mile border with Jordan, whose capital is Amman. This small desert kingdom has always seen its history as closely tied with Palestine. Following Ottoman rule, British control continued until 1946 when Jordan became independent. However—and this fact is important—Jordan possessed valuable lands west of the Jordan River in present-day Israel. East Jerusalem and the central hills north and south were Jordanian from 1948 (Israel’s independence) until 1967, when Israel conquered Jerusalem, the West Bank, and all lands up to the Jordan River. Many older Palestinians still remember Jordanian Jerusalem, which continues to be a point of contention. One friend who was an official in the Jordanian government in Jerusalem now runs a well-known gift shop at the Seven Arches Hotel on the Mount of Olives. Such stories are common.
Jordan emerged into nationhood as a resource-poor country populated by Bedouins and Palestinians living on a desert plateau with virtually none of the tools for building a strong economy. Water is scarce (only 4 percent arable land), and even pasture land is hard to find (9 percent). Its few resources are in mining (phosphates, potash), and most Jordanians work in industry or services. The forty-six-year rule of Jordan’s King Hussein which began in 1953 made Jordan into a modern state. Despite a number of wars with Israel and Israeli possession of vast lands once claimed by Jordan, Hussein signed a peace treaty in 1994. Since then, borders have opened and trade moves between the countries. Jordan’s capital, Amman, is today a modern city where English is spoken freely and Western institutions live alongside Arab culture. Its downtown sparkles with European stores, expensive cars, and billboards promoting the Internet.
Hussein was dearly loved, as was his American wife, Queen Noor, who promoted many humanitarian and environmental causes. When Hussein died on February 7, 1999, the country was grief-stricken. Within hours, Hussein’s eldest son, Abdullah, was crowned as king. Respect for the nation can be seen in the tremendous number of dignitaries who deeply admired Hussein and attended the state funeral.
About 1.9 million Palestinian refugees (from the 1948 and 1967 conflicts) now live in Jordan and are registered with the UN. Unlike other countries, Jordan provided them with full citizenship (except for 120,000 who came from Gaza). This gives Jordan an inherent sympathy for Palestinian causes. Even though militant Palestinian groups were expelled in 1971, Jordan still holds a keen interest in the fate of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Many still have family connections, and Palestinians frequently travel to Amman for medical care and business. Today about 288,000 of the Palestinians live in refugee camps.
Christianity spread to these deserts early. When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman army in 70 CE, the first Christian historian (Eusebius) tells us that the apostles and their followers moved to Pella (today a Jordanian city) to avoid the war. A strong Christian community about 200,000 strong (4 percent of the population) lives here today, and Amman hosts one of the best evangelical seminaries in the region. A number of Catholic priests currently in leadership in Palestine have come from the Jordanian city of Madaba, home to a particularly strong Roman Catholic community.
While not sharing a border with Israel, Iraq has always been deeply involved in the wider Arab opposition to Israel. Iraq is a large country with rich natural resources and an important history. This land is the home of the great empires of antiquity (Assyria, Babylonia), thanks to its strategic geographical location on a plain watered by the great Tigris-Euphrates river system. When Jerusalem was taken into exile in the Old Testament, its captives were brought to Babylon—a city about fifty miles south of Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. During the New Testament era, Babylon had a huge Jewish population stemming from the exile and soon found many Christian communities growing as well. In fact, its present Assyrian population (not to be confused with Syrian) in the north is proud of the antiquity of its faith, dating from the earliest Christian centuries. This enthusiasm can lead to exaggeration, however, as one Assyrian told me, We’ve been Christians since the days when Jonah preached in Nineveh!
Following Ottoman rule, Iraq came under British control until gaining full independence in 1932, which explains the frequent use of English throughout the country. Its monarchy was pro-Western until 1958, when a period of turmoil overthrew the government. The military dictatorship of Saddam Hussein began in 1979. Beginning with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, however, suddenly Iraq came under scrutiny. The Gulf War led by the United States in 1991 expelled Iraq from Kuwait but set in motion a conflict with the United States that would climax with the American defeat of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Today Iraq has a new independent government but in reality it will be rebuilding itself for decades.
South
Underestimating the significance of Egypt in the larger scheme of Middle East life is simply impossible. This is one of the great empires of antiquity. In the Bible Joseph prospered here and Moses led Israel out of this land after a four-hundred-year sojourn. Even Jesus spent some of his childhood in Egypt. That religious heritage has not been forgotten today. The Christian church in Egypt—called the Coptic Orthodox Church—has about 10 million members in Egypt and another 1.2 million living overseas. It traces its history to the ministry of St. Mark, who was martyred in the city of Alexandria (on Easter Monday), and today the leader of the Copts, Pope Theodoros II (or Tawadros II), claims to be Mark’s 118th successor.⁵ Many Christians who have interviewed Pope Theodoros are at once impressed with his pastoral wisdom and wit, and his near-perfect ability to recite any passage of Scripture.
Egyptian Christianity also has a rich tradition of Christian theology. Its great libraries and schools in Alexandria produced some of the church’s most profound thinkers (Clement, Origen) as well as thousands of copies of the Bible and libraries of Christian works. The New Testament may even have been translated into Coptic first (in the third century). Christian monasticism began here with the first monk, St. Anthony, who was a Copt from southern Egypt.
But this church bears its own cross. The Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 brought the end of Christian leadership, and since then so many Christians have died that today Copts commonly use The Calendar of the Martyrs to remember them. Fortunately,
one of Muhammad’s wives was Egyptian, and so he gave generous concessions to the Copts, permitting them to freely exercise their faith. Egypt’s large majority of Muslims nevertheless makes clear that this large church will always find its power checked. Islamic fundamentalist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood today would like to change entirely the tolerant complexion of Egypt’s religiously pluralistic world.
Egypt’s vast arid desert (three times the size of New Mexico) is blessed with one gift that made its great civilizations possible: the Nile River. Today while only 2 percent of Egypt has arable land, 22,000 square miles are irrigated from the Nile, which provides food for the country’s 75 million people. European interest in Egypt also comes from the Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, making a passage to the East that avoided transit around Africa. British interests in Iraq and India until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made this canal a vital strategic asset.
Since the fall of Ottoman rule, British control of Egypt continued until 1922 when independence was gained. Egyptian nationalism and defiance against Israel was shaped under Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956–70), but Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s vice president and successor, helped bring Egypt into the community of world states. Despite two defeats to Israel (1967, 1973) and the loss of the Sinai Peninsula, Sadat still sought peace. In November 1977, Sadat shocked the world by asking to come to Israel to speak at its parliament. While this led to the Camp David Accords (with Jimmy Carter in 1978), a peace settlement with Israel (1979), and the return of the Sinai, Sadat alienated himself from many former Arab allies. In October 1981, Sadat was assassinated during a military parade for this overture to Israel. On October 11, 1981, England’s Sunday Times wrote, By that one act, committed in the third most holy city of Islam [Jerusalem], he branded himself a traitor to his own religion and invited the ‘execution’ that finally came from the guns of his own soldiers.
Egypt has always held firm sympathies with the losses of the Palestinians and so joined in most wars against Israel. Few refugees came to Egypt in 1948 (7,000 people) because of its distance, but over 200,000 Palestinians fleeing south packed into Gaza, a coastal region under Egyptian control. Gaza came under the control of Israel in 1967 and the refugee population grew considerably. By 2010, the Gaza refugee population was 1.1 million (out of a total Gaza population of 1.5 million), creating a truly explosive environment where extremist movements have been born. But Egypt will not be pushed by Palestinian calls for justice and statehood. Sadat’s successor was Mohammed Hosni Mubarak, who cultivated diplomatic relations with the United States, built a militaristic regime, and placed national interests before Palestinian concerns. Mubarak’s overthrow in 2011 by a popular uprising stunned the world and witnessed new tensions between Egypt and Israel.
Internal
It is difficult to know how to classify the Palestinians who live within Gaza (1.5m) or the West Bank (2.3m). Officially Israel does not want to declare its borders on the east (the UN recognized Israel’s borders in 1948 after independence but not its conquests in 1967—which explains why the American embassy is still in Tel Aviv). If these areas were annexed into the State of Israel, these Palestinians could expect to be full participants in Israeli national life. But Israel does not want that. As it is, these regions live under occupation and the Israeli military controls the movement of their people. At present (2012) the UN claims that there are 779,000 refugees in the West Bank in nineteen camps and 1.1 million in Gaza. They are in one respect Israel’s neighbors, and yet, they live a life of stark jeopardy. For instance, the GDP per capita for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza taken together is about $2,800 per year. In Israel, it is $32,000 (in the USA it is $48,000).⁶
But there are Palestinians within Israel too. Some estimates suggest that in the 1940s over 300,000 Palestinians were caught within the borders of the new country. Most of these Arabs accepted citizenship. Today the Palestinian population within Israel (excluding Gaza and the West Bank) is about 1.5 million, creating a truly explosive environment where extremist movements have been born.
SUMMARY
The Arab states surrounding Israel have been consistent in their resistance to Israel’s statehood. They are sympathetic to the Palestinian loss of land and see Israel as one more extension of Western imperialism in the Middle East. This time, however, French and English interests are not the problem, but rather Jewish interests backed by American dollars. Therefore while Israel is not a threat, say, to Jordan or Egypt, Israel is viewed as an offense to Arab sensibility and pride. As Israel has conquered and acquired more and more land—creating more and more refugees—Arab states have unified in their opposition.
However, to stereotype these countries as trying to push Israel into the sea would be incorrect. Arab belligerence was a luxury of the cold war era when Russian dollars financed Arab armies. Those days are over, and a new generation of Arab leaders sees Israel as a permanent resident in the neighborhood. Jordan and Egypt now hold peace accords with Israel. Israel has withdrawn its troops from southern Lebanon. Beirut is being rebuilt, and Cairo is more keen to promote economic modernization than military threats.
This situation bodes well for regional peace, but it comes at the price of taking Arab support away from the Palestinians. Without the help of military intervention from across the border, Palestinian national movements—in all of their chaos and powerlessness—stand alone facing Israel, which continues to build itself internally. Today, however, in light of the 2011 Arab Spring and the overthrow of governments from Tunisia to Egypt—as well as a civil war exploding in Syria, it is difficult predict how Palestinian concerns will get noticed. The world’s attention has moved elsewhere.
The Middle East is a rough neighborhood, and the political alignments and interests of just ten years ago can quickly look outdated. For us, at least, it is crucial to know where these conflicts originated. We tell that story in the next chapter.
1. R. John and S. Hadawi, The Palestine Diary, 2 vols. (New York: New World Press, 1970), 1:280; M. Begin, The Revolt (Los Angeles: Nash, 1948), 91.
2. The Bonfils collection can be seen in many museums today and is frequently published. On the web, see http://almashriq.hiof.no/general/700/770/779/historical/pcd0109/pcd0109.html.
3. These statistics and all subsequent refugee numbers are taken from a 2010 UN report in Humanitarian News and Analysis occasional publication (a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). This can be found at www.irinnews.org/Report/89571/MIDDLE-EAST-Palestinian-refugee-numbers-whereabouts.
4. The PLO is a confederation of multiple Palestinian political, resistance, and humanitarian organizations formerly headed by Yasir Arafat, now headed by Mahmoud Abbas. It even formed a government in exile and today has provided the nucleus of
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one of Muhammad’s wives was Egyptian, and so he gave generous concessions to the Copts, permitting them to freely exercise their faith. Egypt’s large majority of Muslims nevertheless makes clear that this large church will always find its power checked. Islamic fundamentalist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood today would like to change entirely the tolerant complexion of Egypt’s religiously pluralistic world. Egypt’s vast arid desert (three times the size of New Mexico) is blessed with one gift that made its great civilizations possible: the Nile River. Today while only 2 percent of Egypt has arable land, 22,000 square miles are irrigated from the Nile, which provides food for the country’s 75 million people. European interest in Egypt also comes from the Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, making a passage to the East that avoided transit around Africa. British interests in Iraq and India until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made this canal a vital strategic asset. Since the fall of Ottoman rule, British control of Egypt continued until 1922 when independence was gained. Egyptian nationalism and defiance against Israel was shaped under Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956–70), but Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s vice president and successor, helped bring Egypt into the community of world states. Despite two defeats to Israel (1967, 1973) and the loss of the Sinai Peninsula, Sadat still sought peace. In November 1977, Sadat shocked the world by asking to come to Israel to speak at its parliament. While this led to the Camp David Accords (with Jimmy Carter in 1978), a peace settlement with Israel (1979), and the return of the Sinai, Sadat alienated himself from many former Arab allies. In October 1981, Sadat was assassinated during a military parade for this overture to Israel. On October 11, 1981, England’s Sunday Times wrote, “By that one act, committed in the third most holy city of Islam [Jerusalem], he branded himself a traitor to his own religion and invited the ‘execution’ that finally came from the guns of his own soldiers.” Egypt has always held firm sympathies with the losses of the Palestinians and so joined in most wars against Israel. Few refugees came to Egypt in 1948 (7,000 people) because of its distance, but over 200,000 Palestinians fleeing south packed into Gaza, a coastal region under Egyptian control. Gaza came under the control of Israel in 1967 and the refugee population grew considerably. By 2010, the Gaza refugee population was 1.1 million (out of a total Gaza population of 1.5 million), creating a truly explosive environment where extremist movements have been born. But Egypt will not be pushed by Palestinian calls for justice and statehood. Sadat’s successor was Mohammed Hosni Mubarak, who cultivated diplomatic relations with the United States, built a militaristic regime, and placed national interests before Palestinian concerns. Mubarak’s overthrow in 2011 by a popular uprising stunned the world and witnessed new tensions between Egypt and Israel. Internal It is difficult to know how to classify the Palestinians who live within Gaza (1.5m) or the West Bank (2.3m). Officially Israel does not want to declare its borders on the east (the UN recognized Israel’s borders in 1948 after independence but not its conquests in 1967—which explains why the American embassy is still in Tel Aviv). If these areas were annexed into the State of Israel, these Palestinians could expect to be full participants in Israeli national life. But Israel does not want that. As it is, these regions live under “occupation” and the Israeli military controls the movement of their people. At present (2012) the UN claims that there are 779,000 refugees in the West Bank in nineteen camps and 1.1 million in Gaza. They are in one respect Israel’s “neighbors,” and yet, they live a life of stark jeopardy. For instance, the GDP per capita for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza taken together is about $2,800 per year. In Israel, it is $32,000 (in the USA it is $48,000).⁶ But there are Palestinians within Israel too. Some estimates suggest that in the 1940s over 300,000 Palestinians were “caught” within the borders of the new country. Most of these Arabs accepted citizenship. Today the Palestinian population within Israel (excluding Gaza and the West Bank) is about 1.5 million, creating a truly explosive environment where extremist movements have been born. SUMMARY The Arab states surrounding Israel have been consistent in their resistance to Israel’s statehood. They are sympathetic to the Palestinian loss of land and see Israel as one more extension of Western imperialism in the Middle East. This time, however, French and English interests are not the problem, but rather Jewish interests backed by American dollars. Therefore while Israel is not a threat, say, to Jordan or Egypt, Israel is viewed as an offense to Arab sensibility and pride. As Israel has conquered and acquired more and more land—creating more and more refugees—Arab states have unified in their opposition. However, to stereotype these countries as trying to “push Israel into the sea” would be incorrect. Arab belligerence was a luxury of the cold war era when Russian dollars financed Arab armies. Those days are over, and a new generation of Arab leaders sees Israel as a permanent resident in the neighborhood. Jordan and Egypt now hold peace accords with Israel. Israel has withdrawn its troops from southern Lebanon. Beirut is being rebuilt, and Cairo is more keen to promote economic modernization than military threats. This situation bodes well for regional peace, but it comes at the price of taking Arab support away from the Palestinians. Without the help of military intervention from across the border, Palestinian national movements—in all of their chaos and powerlessness—stand alone facing Israel, which continues to build itself internally. Today, however, in light of the 2011 “Arab Spring” and the overthrow of governments from Tunisia to Egypt—as well as a civil war exploding in Syria, it is difficult predict how Palestinian concerns will get noticed. The world’s attention has moved elsewhere. The Middle East is a rough neighborhood, and the political alignments and interests of just ten years ago can quickly look outdated. For us, at least, it is crucial to know where these conflicts originated. We tell that story in the next chapter. 1. R. John and S. Hadawi, The Palestine Diary, 2 vols. (New York: New World Press, 1970), 1:280; M. Begin, The Revolt (Los Angeles: Nash, 1948), 91. 2. The Bonfils collection can be seen in many museums today and is frequently published. On the web, see http://almashriq.hiof.no/general/700/770/779/historical/pcd0109/pcd0109.html. 3. These statistics and all subsequent refugee numbers are taken from a 2010 UN report in “Humanitarian News and Analysis” occasional publication (a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). This can be found at www.irinnews.org/Report/89571/MIDDLE-EAST-Palestinian-refugee-numbers-whereabouts. 4. The PLO is a confederation of multiple Palestinian political, resistance, and humanitarian organizations formerly headed by Yasir Arafat, now headed by Mahmoud Abbas. It even formed a “government in exile” and today has provided the nucleus of
a Syrian threat quite seriously; Damascus boasts a considerable military budget of about $1 billion per year.
Israel made peace with Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), and has pulled out of Lebanon (May 23, 2000). Many thought with the death of Syria’s militant president, Hafez al-Assad, and the new rule of his more moderate son, Bashar al-Assad, that hope could be found there too. But, alas, today Syria is engulfed in one of the worst civil wars the region has ever seen.
East
Immediately to the east, Israel shares a 148-mile border with Jordan, whose capital is Amman. This small desert kingdom has always seen its history as closely tied with Palestine. Following Ottoman rule, British control continued until 1946 when Jordan became independent. However—and this fact is important—Jordan possessed valuable lands west of the Jordan River in present-day Israel. East Jerusalem and the central hills north and south were Jordanian from 1948 (Israel’s independence) until 1967, when Israel conquered Jerusalem, the West Bank, and all lands up to the Jordan River. Many older Palestinians still remember Jordanian Jerusalem, which continues to be a point of contention. One friend who was an official in the Jordanian government in Jerusalem now runs a well-known gift shop at the Seven Arches Hotel on the Mount of Olives. Such stories are common.
Jordan emerged into nationhood as a resource-poor country populated by Bedouins and Palestinians living on a desert plateau with virtually none of the tools for building a strong economy. Water is scarce (only 4 percent arable land), and even pasture land is hard to find (9 percent). Its few resources are in mining (phosphates, potash), and most Jordanians work in industry or services. The forty-six-year rule of Jordan’s King Hussein which began in 1953 made Jordan into a modern state. Despite a number of wars with Israel and Israeli possession of vast lands once claimed by Jordan, Hussein signed a peace treaty in 1994. Since then, borders have opened and trade moves between the countries. Jordan’s capital, Amman, is today a modern city where English is spoken freely and Western institutions live alongside Arab culture. Its downtown sparkles with European stores, expensive cars, and billboards promoting the Internet.
Hussein was dearly loved, as was his American wife, Queen Noor, who promoted many humanitarian and environmental causes. When Hussein died on February 7, 1999, the country was grief-stricken. Within hours, Hussein’s eldest son, Abdullah, was crowned as king. Respect for the nation can be seen in the tremendous number of dignitaries who deeply admired Hussein and attended the state funeral.
About 1.9 million Palestinian refugees (from the 1948 and 1967 conflicts) now live in Jordan and are registered with the UN. Unlike other countries, Jordan provided them with full citizenship (except for 120,000 who came from Gaza). This gives Jordan an inherent sympathy for Palestinian causes. Even though militant Palestinian groups were expelled in 1971, Jordan still holds a keen interest in the fate of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Many still have family connections, and Palestinians frequently travel to Amman for medical care and business. Today about 288,000 of the Palestinians live in refugee camps.
Christianity spread to these deserts early. When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman army in 70 CE, the first Christian historian (Eusebius) tells us that the apostles and their followers moved to Pella (today a Jordanian city) to avoid the war. A strong Christian community about 200,000 strong (4 percent of the population) lives here today, and Amman hosts one of the best evangelical seminaries in the region. A number of Catholic priests currently in leadership in Palestine have come from the Jordanian city of Madaba, home to a particularly strong Roman Catholic community.
While not sharing a border with Israel, Iraq has always been deeply involved in the wider Arab opposition to Israel. Iraq is a large country with rich natural resources and an important history. This land is the home of the great empires of antiquity (Assyria, Babylonia), thanks to its strategic geographical location on a plain watered by the great Tigris-Euphrates river system. When Jerusalem was taken into exile in the Old Testament, its captives were brought to Babylon—a city about fifty miles south of Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. During the New Testament era, Babylon had a huge Jewish population stemming from the exile and soon found many Christian communities growing as well. In fact, its present Assyrian population (not to be confused with Syrian) in the north is proud of the antiquity of its faith, dating from the earliest Christian centuries. This enthusiasm can lead to exaggeration, however, as one Assyrian told me, We’ve been Christians since the days when Jonah preached in Nineveh!
Following Ottoman rule, Iraq came under British control until gaining full independence in 1932, which explains the frequent use of English throughout the country. Its monarchy was pro-Western until 1958, when a period of turmoil overthrew the government. The military dictatorship of Saddam Hussein began in 1979. Beginning with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, however, suddenly Iraq came under scrutiny. The Gulf War led by the United States in 1991 expelled Iraq from Kuwait but set in motion a conflict with the United States that would climax with the American defeat of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Today Iraq has a new independent government but in reality it will be rebuilding itself for decades.
South
Underestimating the significance of Egypt in the larger scheme of Middle East life is simply impossible. This is one of the great empires of antiquity. In the Bible Joseph prospered here and Moses led Israel out of this land after a four-hundred-year sojourn. Even Jesus spent some of his childhood in Egypt. That religious heritage has not been forgotten today. The Christian church in Egypt—called the Coptic Orthodox Church—has about 10 million members in Egypt and another 1.2 million living overseas. It traces its history to the ministry of St. Mark, who was martyred in the city of Alexandria (on Easter Monday), and today the leader of the Copts, Pope Theodoros II (or Tawadros II), claims to be Mark’s 118th successor.⁵ Many Christians who have interviewed Pope Theodoros are at once impressed with his pastoral wisdom and wit, and his near-perfect ability to recite any passage of Scripture.
Egyptian Christianity also has a rich tradition of Christian theology. Its great libraries and schools in Alexandria produced some of the church’s most profound thinkers (Clement, Origen) as well as thousands of copies of the Bible and libraries of Christian works. The New Testament may even have been translated into Coptic first (in the third century). Christian monasticism began here with the first monk, St. Anthony, who was a Copt from southern Egypt.
But this church bears its own cross. The Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 brought the end of Christian leadership, and since then so many Christians have died that today Copts commonly use The Calendar of the Martyrs to remember them. Fortunately,
one of Muhammad’s wives was Egyptian, and so he gave generous concessions to the Copts, permitting them to freely exercise their faith. Egypt’s large majority of Muslims nevertheless makes clear that this large church will always find its power checked. Islamic fundamentalist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood today would like to change entirely the tolerant complexion of Egypt’s religiously pluralistic world.
Egypt’s vast arid desert (three times the size of New Mexico) is blessed with one gift that made its great civilizations possible: the Nile River. Today while only 2 percent of Egypt has arable land, 22,000 square miles are irrigated from the Nile, which provides food for the country’s 75 million people. European interest in Egypt also comes from the Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, making a passage to the East that avoided transit around Africa. British interests in Iraq and India until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made this canal a vital strategic asset.
Since the fall of Ottoman rule, British control of Egypt continued until 1922 when independence was gained. Egyptian nationalism and defiance against Israel was shaped under Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956–70), but Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s vice president and successor, helped bring Egypt into the community of world states. Despite two defeats to Israel (1967, 1973) and the loss of the Sinai Peninsula, Sadat still sought peace. In November 1977, Sadat shocked the world by asking to come to Israel to speak at its parliament. While this led to the Camp David Accords (with Jimmy Carter in 1978), a peace settlement with Israel (1979), and the return of the Sinai, Sadat alienated himself from many former Arab allies. In October 1981, Sadat was assassinated during a military parade for this overture to Israel. On October 11, 1981, England’s Sunday Times wrote, By that one act, committed in the third most holy city of Islam [Jerusalem], he branded himself a traitor to his own religion and invited the ‘execution’ that finally came from the guns of his own soldiers.
Egypt has always held firm sympathies with the losses of the Palestinians and so joined in most wars against Israel. Few refugees came to Egypt in 1948 (7,000 people) because of its distance, but over 200,000 Palestinians fleeing south packed into Gaza, a coastal region under Egyptian control. Gaza came under the control of Israel in 1967 and the refugee population grew considerably. By 2010, the Gaza refugee population was 1.1 million (out of a total Gaza population of 1.5 million), creating a truly explosive environment where extremist movements have been born. But Egypt will not be pushed by Palestinian calls for justice and statehood. Sadat’s successor was Mohammed Hosni Mubarak, who cultivated diplomatic relations with the United States, built a militaristic regime, and placed national interests before Palestinian concerns. Mubarak’s overthrow in 2011 by a popular uprising stunned the world and witnessed new tensions between Egypt and Israel.
Internal
It is difficult to know how to classify the Palestinians who live within Gaza (1.5m) or the West Bank (2.3m). Officially Israel does not want to declare its borders on the east (the UN recognized Israel’s borders in 1948 after independence but not its conquests in 1967—which explains why the American embassy is still in Tel Aviv). If these areas were annexed into the State of Israel, these Palestinians could expect to be full participants in Israeli national life. But Israel does not want that. As it is, these regions live under occupation and the Israeli military controls the movement of their people. At present (2012) the UN claims that there are 779,000 refugees in the West Bank in nineteen camps and 1.1 million in Gaza. They are in one respect Israel’s neighbors, and yet, they live a life of stark jeopardy. For instance, the GDP per capita for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza taken together is about $2,800 per year. In Israel, it is $32,000 (in the USA it is $48,000).⁶
But there are Palestinians within Israel too. Some estimates suggest that in the 1940s over 300,000 Palestinians were caught within the borders of the new country. Most of these Arabs accepted citizenship. Today the Palestinian population within Israel (excluding Gaza and the West Bank) is about 1.5 million, creating a truly explosive environment where extremist movements have been born.
SUMMARY
The Arab states surrounding Israel have been consistent in their resistance to Israel’s statehood. They are sympathetic to the Palestinian loss of land and see Israel as one more extension of Western imperialism in the Middle East. This time, however, French and English interests are not the problem, but rather Jewish interests backed by American dollars. Therefore while Israel is not a threat, say, to Jordan or Egypt, Israel is viewed as an offense to Arab sensibility and pride. As Israel has conquered and acquired more and more land—creating more and more refugees—Arab states have unified in their opposition.
However, to stereotype these countries as trying to push Israel into the sea would be incorrect. Arab belligerence was a luxury of the cold war era when Russian dollars financed Arab armies. Those days are over, and a new generation of Arab leaders sees Israel as a permanent resident in the neighborhood. Jordan and Egypt now hold peace accords with Israel. Israel has withdrawn its troops from southern Lebanon. Beirut is being rebuilt, and Cairo is more keen to promote economic modernization than military threats.
This situation bodes well for regional peace, but it comes at the price of taking Arab support away from the Palestinians. Without the help of military intervention from across the border, Palestinian national movements—in all of their chaos and powerlessness—stand alone facing Israel, which continues to build itself internally. Today, however, in light of the 2011 Arab Spring and the overthrow of governments from Tunisia to Egypt—as well as a civil war exploding in Syria, it is difficult predict how Palestinian concerns will get noticed. The world’s attention has moved elsewhere.
The Middle East is a rough neighborhood, and the political alignments and interests of just ten years ago can quickly look outdated. For us, at least, it is crucial to know where these conflicts originated. We tell that story in the next chapter.
1. R. John and S. Hadawi, The Palestine Diary, 2 vols. (New York: New World Press, 1970), 1:280; M. Begin, The Revolt (Los Angeles: Nash, 1948), 91.
2. The Bonfils collection can be seen in many museums today and is frequently published. On the web, see http://almashriq.hiof.no/general/700/770/779/historical/pcd0109/pcd0109.html.
3. These statistics and all subsequent refugee numbers are taken from a 2010 UN report in Humanitarian News and Analysis occasional publication (a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). This can be found at www.irinnews.org/Report/89571/MIDDLE-EAST-Palestinian-refugee-numbers-whereabouts.
4. The PLO is a confederation of multiple Palestinian political, resistance, and humanitarian organizations formerly headed by Yasir Arafat, now headed by Mahmoud Abbas. It even formed a government in exile and today has provided the nucleus of
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the “Palestinian National Authority” that may eventually shape a Palestinian state. 5. For a fascinating survey of this church, visit the official website of the Christian Coptic Orthodox Church at www.coptic.net. 6. See http://www.indexmundi.com. See the helpful aggregate data collection from four sources at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita.
3 KNOWING THE HISTORY
My final purpose is to take possession in due course of Palestine and to restore to the Jews the political independence of which they have now been deprived for two thousand years. Don’t laugh. It is not a mirage. There will come that splendid day prophesied by Isaiah. Then the Jews, if necessary with arms in their hands, will publicly proclaim themselves master of their own ancient fatherland. —ZE’EV DUBOV, ONE OF THE FIRST ZIONISTS TO REACH PALESTINE, 1882 One of the most difficult things to understand about Israel/Palestine is its history of conquest and occupation. Most books give more detail than we need. Modern descriptions assume we know, for instance, why the Palestinians are angry about land “taken” by Israel in 1967. Where do the British fit in? And what about these “wars” whose dates writers often parade out (1948, 1967, etc.)? At the risk of oversimplifying, I shall attempt a concise summary of the last four thousand years, beginning with the tribes of Abraham and concluding with the modern era. Keep in mind that the earlier dates are debated. This outline is designed for reference and comparison. THE BIBLICAL PERIOD Tribal Period (2000–1000 BCE) In the earliest period, Abraham’s tribe migrated from Mesopotamia (Iraq) into the land. Israel/Palestine was an Egyptian province called Canaan. The descendants of Abraham through his grandson Jacob (Israel’s twelve tribes) migrated to Egypt and remained there for more than four hundred years. Moses led them back to Canaan, and Joshua led their conquest of the land. They were loosely organized around God’s tabernacle in the central mountains. However, Israel yearned to have a king and a kingdom like other nations. Saul was the first king, which was Israel’s first overture to self-conscious nationhood. The Kingdom of Israel (1000–538? BCE) Saul, David, and Solomon gave Israel international status in the region, but this era of successful nationhood lasted only about seventy-five years. A civil war following the death of Solomon divided the land north and south. The north (Samaria; capital: Samaria) was conquered by the Assyrians in 721 BCE. The south (Judah; capital: Jerusalem) was conquered by Babylon in 586 BCE. Survivors from the south remained in Babylon in exile until they were freed by the Persians about fifty years later. The Persian Period (538?–332 BCE) The Persian defeat of Babylon sent the Israelites back to Jerusalem, but they were not permitted to rebuild a completely autonomous nation. Israel/ Palestine was a Persian province ruled from Samaria. Jerusalem was rebuilt (Ezra, Nehemiah), and the Jews lived under Persian domination for two hundred years. The Greek Period (332–164 BCE) Alexander the Great conquered the Middle East after he defeated the Persians in 333 BCE, went on to subdue Israel in 332 BCE, and made the entire region a part of the Greek Empire. For 150 years Judaism lived as a vassal under Greek rulers and adopted much of Greek culture. The Jewish Hasmonean Kingdom (164–63 BCE) Jewish armies defeated their Greek overlords and established the first Jewish “kingdom” since the monarchy of the Old Testament. However, following its victory the leadership quickly fell to corruption and internal conflict, with warring factions (Pharisees and Sadducees) paralyzing the government. Many Jews dissented and departed, forming enclaves of communal life in the desert (such as the Dead Sea community at Qumran). The Roman Empire (63 BCE–324 CE) The Romans conquered the entire Middle East in the century before the birth of Christ (63 BCE) and made it one of its provinces for more than four hundred years. The Jews were given some autonomy, but persecution was common and revolts against Rome frequent. In 66–70 CE, Rome suppressed a major revolt and utterly destroyed Jerusalem. In 132–35 CE, a second revolt was likewise defeated, and the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem permanently and Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina. Jewish leadership migrated to Galilee. Countless other Jews found themselves forming communities throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD The Christian Roman Empire (324–638 CE) From 324 to 638 CE, Israel/Palestine was controlled by rulers in Constantinople (today called Istanbul, Turkey). This civilization (called Byzantine) was the grandchild of the Roman Empire and embraced Christianity as a national religion. Jerusalem witnessed the construction of many of its most famous churches in these centuries, because many Christians began to travel on pilgrimage to the “Holy Land.” Likewise the Christian communities of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan grew rapidly. Pilgrimage to Syria, for instance, was common among Byzantine Christians, and vast ruins of Christian monastic complexes are still visible in the country today. The Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena, claimed to find the original cross in Jerusalem, and with her inspiration, Constantine consecrated three important churches centered on three caves, recalling Christ’s birth, death/ resurrection, and ascension. Soon pilgrims were traveling in vast numbers. Monasteries were turning desert valleys into cities. At one point, twenty-four churches surrounded by their monasteries populated the Mount of Olives. Despite devastating attacks by Persians (614) and later Muslim clerics (e.g., the Caliph Hakim, 1009), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre still stands today as a great and historic monument to Byzantine devotion. Islamic Period (638–1099 CE) Arabs from present-day Saudi Arabia swept north bearing the religion of Muhammad (Islam) with evangelistic zeal. All “Byzantine” provinces in the Middle East were put under siege, and an exhausted Byzantine military could not resist. In 636, a major army lost in battle to Arab invaders at the Yarmouk River gorge (in western Jordan), and two years later (638) Jerusalem surrendered to the second successor of Muhammad, the Caliph Omar. Omar respected both Jews and Christians and did not slaughter the residents of the city. In fact, he refused to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
the Palestinian National Authority that may eventually shape a Palestinian state.
5. For a fascinating survey of this church, visit the official website of the Christian Coptic Orthodox Church at www.coptic.net.
6. See http://www.indexmundi.com. See the helpful aggregate data collection from four sources at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita.
My final purpose is to take possession in due course of Palestine and to restore to the Jews the political independence of which they have now been deprived for two thousand years. Don’t laugh. It is not a mirage. There will come that splendid day prophesied by Isaiah. Then the Jews, if necessary with arms in their hands, will publicly proclaim themselves master of their own ancient fatherland.
—ZE’EV DUBOV, ONE OF THE FIRST ZIONISTS TO REACH PALESTINE, 1882
One of the most difficult things to understand about Israel/Palestine is its history of conquest and occupation. Most books give more detail than we need. Modern descriptions assume we know, for instance, why the Palestinians are angry about land taken by Israel in 1967. Where do the British fit in? And what about these wars whose dates writers often parade out (1948, 1967, etc.)? At the risk of oversimplifying, I shall attempt a concise summary of the last four thousand years, beginning with the tribes of Abraham and concluding with the modern era. Keep in mind that the earlier dates are debated. This outline is designed for reference and comparison.
THE BIBLICAL PERIOD
Tribal Period (2000–1000 BCE)
In the earliest period, Abraham’s tribe migrated from Mesopotamia (Iraq) into the land. Israel/Palestine was an Egyptian province called Canaan. The descendants of Abraham through his grandson Jacob (Israel’s twelve tribes) migrated to Egypt and remained there for more than four hundred years. Moses led them back to Canaan, and Joshua led their conquest of the land. They were loosely organized around God’s tabernacle in the central mountains. However, Israel yearned to have a king and a kingdom like other nations. Saul was the first king, which was Israel’s first overture to self-conscious nationhood.
The Kingdom of Israel (1000–538? BCE)
Saul, David, and Solomon gave Israel international status in the region, but this era of successful nationhood lasted only about seventy-five years. A civil war following the death of Solomon divided the land north and south. The north (Samaria; capital: Samaria) was conquered by the Assyrians in 721 BCE. The south (Judah; capital: Jerusalem) was conquered by Babylon in 586 BCE. Survivors from the south remained in Babylon in exile until they were freed by the Persians about fifty years later.
The Persian Period (538?–332 BCE)
The Persian defeat of Babylon sent the Israelites back to Jerusalem, but they were not permitted to rebuild a completely autonomous nation. Israel/ Palestine was a Persian province ruled from Samaria. Jerusalem was rebuilt (Ezra, Nehemiah), and the Jews lived under Persian domination for two hundred years.
The Greek Period (332–164 BCE)
Alexander the Great conquered the Middle East after he defeated the Persians in 333 BCE, went on to subdue Israel in 332 BCE, and made the entire region a part of the Greek Empire. For 150 years Judaism lived as a vassal under Greek rulers and adopted much of Greek culture.
The Jewish Hasmonean Kingdom (164–63 BCE)
Jewish armies defeated their Greek overlords and established the first Jewish kingdom since the monarchy of the Old Testament. However, following its victory the leadership quickly fell to corruption and internal conflict, with warring factions (Pharisees and Sadducees) paralyzing the government. Many Jews dissented and departed, forming enclaves of communal life in the desert (such as the Dead Sea community at Qumran).
The Roman Empire (63 BCE–324 CE)
The Romans conquered the entire Middle East in the century before the birth of Christ (63 BCE) and made it one of its provinces for more than four hundred years. The Jews were given some autonomy, but persecution was common and revolts against Rome frequent. In 66–70 CE, Rome suppressed a major revolt and utterly destroyed Jerusalem. In 132–35 CE, a second revolt was likewise defeated, and the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem permanently and Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina. Jewish leadership migrated to Galilee. Countless other Jews found themselves forming communities throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
The Christian Roman Empire (324–638 CE)
From 324 to 638 CE, Israel/Palestine was controlled by rulers in Constantinople (today called Istanbul, Turkey). This civilization (called Byzantine) was the grandchild of the Roman Empire and embraced Christianity as a national religion. Jerusalem witnessed the construction of many of its most famous churches in these centuries, because many Christians began to travel on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Likewise the Christian communities of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan grew rapidly. Pilgrimage to Syria, for instance, was common among Byzantine Christians, and vast ruins of Christian monastic complexes are still visible in the country today.
The Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena, claimed to find the original cross in Jerusalem, and with her inspiration, Constantine consecrated three important churches centered on three caves, recalling Christ’s birth, death/ resurrection, and ascension. Soon pilgrims were traveling in vast numbers. Monasteries were turning desert valleys into cities. At one point, twenty-four churches surrounded by their monasteries populated the Mount of Olives. Despite devastating attacks by Persians (614) and later Muslim clerics (e.g., the Caliph Hakim, 1009), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre still stands today as a great and historic monument to Byzantine devotion.
Islamic Period (638–1099 CE)
Arabs from present-day Saudi Arabia swept north bearing the religion of Muhammad (Islam) with evangelistic zeal. All Byzantine provinces in the Middle East were put under siege, and an exhausted Byzantine military could not resist. In 636, a major army lost in battle to Arab invaders at the Yarmouk River gorge (in western Jordan), and two years later (638) Jerusalem surrendered to the second successor of Muhammad, the Caliph Omar. Omar respected both Jews and Christians and did not slaughter the residents of the city. In fact, he refused to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
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3 KNOWING THE HISTORY
My final purpose is to take possession in due course of Palestine and to restore to the Jews the political independence of which they have now been deprived for two thousand years. Don’t laugh. It is not a mirage. There will come that splendid day prophesied by Isaiah. Then the Jews, if necessary with arms in their hands, will publicly proclaim themselves master of their own ancient fatherland. —ZE’EV DUBOV, ONE OF THE FIRST ZIONISTS TO REACH PALESTINE, 1882 One of the most difficult things to understand about Israel/Palestine is its history of conquest and occupation. Most books give more detail than we need. Modern descriptions assume we know, for instance, why the Palestinians are angry about land “taken” by Israel in 1967. Where do the British fit in? And what about these “wars” whose dates writers often parade out (1948, 1967, etc.)? At the risk of oversimplifying, I shall attempt a concise summary of the last four thousand years, beginning with the tribes of Abraham and concluding with the modern era. Keep in mind that the earlier dates are debated. This outline is designed for reference and comparison. THE BIBLICAL PERIOD Tribal Period (2000–1000 BCE) In the earliest period, Abraham’s tribe migrated from Mesopotamia (Iraq) into the land. Israel/Palestine was an Egyptian province called Canaan. The descendants of Abraham through his grandson Jacob (Israel’s twelve tribes) migrated to Egypt and remained there for more than four hundred years. Moses led them back to Canaan, and Joshua led their conquest of the land. They were loosely organized around God’s tabernacle in the central mountains. However, Israel yearned to have a king and a kingdom like other nations. Saul was the first king, which was Israel’s first overture to self-conscious nationhood. The Kingdom of Israel (1000–538? BCE) Saul, David, and Solomon gave Israel international status in the region, but this era of successful nationhood lasted only about seventy-five years. A civil war following the death of Solomon divided the land north and south. The north (Samaria; capital: Samaria) was conquered by the Assyrians in 721 BCE. The south (Judah; capital: Jerusalem) was conquered by Babylon in 586 BCE. Survivors from the south remained in Babylon in exile until they were freed by the Persians about fifty years later. The Persian Period (538?–332 BCE) The Persian defeat of Babylon sent the Israelites back to Jerusalem, but they were not permitted to rebuild a completely autonomous nation. Israel/ Palestine was a Persian province ruled from Samaria. Jerusalem was rebuilt (Ezra, Nehemiah), and the Jews lived under Persian domination for two hundred years. The Greek Period (332–164 BCE) Alexander the Great conquered the Middle East after he defeated the Persians in 333 BCE, went on to subdue Israel in 332 BCE, and made the entire region a part of the Greek Empire. For 150 years Judaism lived as a vassal under Greek rulers and adopted much of Greek culture. The Jewish Hasmonean Kingdom (164–63 BCE) Jewish armies defeated their Greek overlords and established the first Jewish “kingdom” since the monarchy of the Old Testament. However, following its victory the leadership quickly fell to corruption and internal conflict, with warring factions (Pharisees and Sadducees) paralyzing the government. Many Jews dissented and departed, forming enclaves of communal life in the desert (such as the Dead Sea community at Qumran). The Roman Empire (63 BCE–324 CE) The Romans conquered the entire Middle East in the century before the birth of Christ (63 BCE) and made it one of its provinces for more than four hundred years. The Jews were given some autonomy, but persecution was common and revolts against Rome frequent. In 66–70 CE, Rome suppressed a major revolt and utterly destroyed Jerusalem. In 132–35 CE, a second revolt was likewise defeated, and the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem permanently and Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina. Jewish leadership migrated to Galilee. Countless other Jews found themselves forming communities throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD The Christian Roman Empire (324–638 CE) From 324 to 638 CE, Israel/Palestine was controlled by rulers in Constantinople (today called Istanbul, Turkey). This civilization (called Byzantine) was the grandchild of the Roman Empire and embraced Christianity as a national religion. Jerusalem witnessed the construction of many of its most famous churches in these centuries, because many Christians began to travel on pilgrimage to the “Holy Land.” Likewise the Christian communities of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan grew rapidly. Pilgrimage to Syria, for instance, was common among Byzantine Christians, and vast ruins of Christian monastic complexes are still visible in the country today. The Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena, claimed to find the original cross in Jerusalem, and with her inspiration, Constantine consecrated three important churches centered on three caves, recalling Christ’s birth, death/ resurrection, and ascension. Soon pilgrims were traveling in vast numbers. Monasteries were turning desert valleys into cities. At one point, twenty-four churches surrounded by their monasteries populated the Mount of Olives. Despite devastating attacks by Persians (614) and later Muslim clerics (e.g., the Caliph Hakim, 1009), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre still stands today as a great and historic monument to Byzantine devotion. Islamic Period (638–1099 CE) Arabs from present-day Saudi Arabia swept north bearing the religion of Muhammad (Islam) with evangelistic zeal. All “Byzantine” provinces in the Middle East were put under siege, and an exhausted Byzantine military could not resist. In 636, a major army lost in battle to Arab invaders at the Yarmouk River gorge (in western Jordan), and two years later (638) Jerusalem surrendered to the second successor of Muhammad, the Caliph Omar. Omar respected both Jews and Christians and did not slaughter the residents of the city. In fact, he refused to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
the Palestinian National Authority that may eventually shape a Palestinian state.
5. For a fascinating survey of this church, visit the official website of the Christian Coptic Orthodox Church at www.coptic.net.
6. See http://www.indexmundi.com. See the helpful aggregate data collection from four sources at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita.
My final purpose is to take possession in due course of Palestine and to restore to the Jews the political independence of which they have now been deprived for two thousand years. Don’t laugh. It is not a mirage. There will come that splendid day prophesied by Isaiah. Then the Jews, if necessary with arms in their hands, will publicly proclaim themselves master of their own ancient fatherland.
—ZE’EV DUBOV, ONE OF THE FIRST ZIONISTS TO REACH PALESTINE, 1882
One of the most difficult things to understand about Israel/Palestine is its history of conquest and occupation. Most books give more detail than we need. Modern descriptions assume we know, for instance, why the Palestinians are angry about land taken by Israel in 1967. Where do the British fit in? And what about these wars whose dates writers often parade out (1948, 1967, etc.)? At the risk of oversimplifying, I shall attempt a concise summary of the last four thousand years, beginning with the tribes of Abraham and concluding with the modern era. Keep in mind that the earlier dates are debated. This outline is designed for reference and comparison.
THE BIBLICAL PERIOD
Tribal Period (2000–1000 BCE)
In the earliest period, Abraham’s tribe migrated from Mesopotamia (Iraq) into the land. Israel/Palestine was an Egyptian province called Canaan. The descendants of Abraham through his grandson Jacob (Israel’s twelve tribes) migrated to Egypt and remained there for more than four hundred years. Moses led them back to Canaan, and Joshua led their conquest of the land. They were loosely organized around God’s tabernacle in the central mountains. However, Israel yearned to have a king and a kingdom like other nations. Saul was the first king, which was Israel’s first overture to self-conscious nationhood.
The Kingdom of Israel (1000–538? BCE)
Saul, David, and Solomon gave Israel international status in the region, but this era of successful nationhood lasted only about seventy-five years. A civil war following the death of Solomon divided the land north and south. The north (Samaria; capital: Samaria) was conquered by the Assyrians in 721 BCE. The south (Judah; capital: Jerusalem) was conquered by Babylon in 586 BCE. Survivors from the south remained in Babylon in exile until they were freed by the Persians about fifty years later.
The Persian Period (538?–332 BCE)
The Persian defeat of Babylon sent the Israelites back to Jerusalem, but they were not permitted to rebuild a completely autonomous nation. Israel/ Palestine was a Persian province ruled from Samaria. Jerusalem was rebuilt (Ezra, Nehemiah), and the Jews lived under Persian domination for two hundred years.
The Greek Period (332–164 BCE)
Alexander the Great conquered the Middle East after he defeated the Persians in 333 BCE, went on to subdue Israel in 332 BCE, and made the entire region a part of the Greek Empire. For 150 years Judaism lived as a vassal under Greek rulers and adopted much of Greek culture.
The Jewish Hasmonean Kingdom (164–63 BCE)
Jewish armies defeated their Greek overlords and established the first Jewish kingdom since the monarchy of the Old Testament. However, following its victory the leadership quickly fell to corruption and internal conflict, with warring factions (Pharisees and Sadducees) paralyzing the government. Many Jews dissented and departed, forming enclaves of communal life in the desert (such as the Dead Sea community at Qumran).
The Roman Empire (63 BCE–324 CE)
The Romans conquered the entire Middle East in the century before the birth of Christ (63 BCE) and made it one of its provinces for more than four hundred years. The Jews were given some autonomy, but persecution was common and revolts against Rome frequent. In 66–70 CE, Rome suppressed a major revolt and utterly destroyed Jerusalem. In 132–35 CE, a second revolt was likewise defeated, and the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem permanently and Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina. Jewish leadership migrated to Galilee. Countless other Jews found themselves forming communities throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
The Christian Roman Empire (324–638 CE)
From 324 to 638 CE, Israel/Palestine was controlled by rulers in Constantinople (today called Istanbul, Turkey). This civilization (called Byzantine) was the grandchild of the Roman Empire and embraced Christianity as a national religion. Jerusalem witnessed the construction of many of its most famous churches in these centuries, because many Christians began to travel on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Likewise the Christian communities of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan grew rapidly. Pilgrimage to Syria, for instance, was common among Byzantine Christians, and vast ruins of Christian monastic complexes are still visible in the country today.
The Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena, claimed to find the original cross in Jerusalem, and with her inspiration, Constantine consecrated three important churches centered on three caves, recalling Christ’s birth, death/ resurrection, and ascension. Soon pilgrims were traveling in vast numbers. Monasteries were turning desert valleys into cities. At one point, twenty-four churches surrounded by their monasteries populated the Mount of Olives. Despite devastating attacks by Persians (614) and later Muslim clerics (e.g., the Caliph Hakim, 1009), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre still stands today as a great and historic monument to Byzantine devotion.
Islamic Period (638–1099 CE)
Arabs from present-day Saudi Arabia swept north bearing the religion of Muhammad (Islam) with evangelistic zeal. All Byzantine provinces in the Middle East were put under siege, and an exhausted Byzantine military could not resist. In 636, a major army lost in battle to Arab invaders at the Yarmouk River gorge (in western Jordan), and two years later (638) Jerusalem surrendered to the second successor of Muhammad, the Caliph Omar. Omar respected both Jews and Christians and did not slaughter the residents of the city. In fact, he refused to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
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Jump Back
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despite the invitation of the patriarch because, he argued, “If I had prayed in the church it would have been lost to you, for the Believers [Muslims] would have taken it saying: Omar prayed here.” Islamic control continued until 1099. Impressive architectural remains (such as the famous “Dome of the Rock”) originated in this era. The Crusaders (1099–1187 CE) Christian knights from Europe traveled to Israel/Palestine and recaptured the city of Jerusalem in 1099, slaughtering most of the city’s residents, Jew and Muslim alike. Even today, Muslims have not forgotten the fanaticism and brutality of that act, and “crusader” is a name that can evoke passionate anger.¹ Their control was brief, however. The Arab leader Saladin (or Salah Aldin) defeated the Crusaders in Galilee in 1187. The Europeans barely held a few remaining fortresses (such as Acco in the western Jezreel Valley and Krac de Chevaliers in Syria) with the help of reinforcements from France and Britain. Nevertheless, internecine conflict reigned for many years. Finally in 1291, the crusaders were utterly driven out (their remaining armies fleeing to Cyprus). The Egyptian Mamlukes (1250–1517 CE) In 1250, armies from Egypt defeated the regime of Saladin, and for more than three hundred years, Israel/Palestine was a defensive province for an Egyptian Islamic empire that needed to guard its northern frontier. The land and its people were neglected terribly even though Christian pilgrims, particularly from the Latin west, continued to travel to Jerusalem. The Ottoman Turks (1517–1918 CE) In 1517, a rival Islamic power in Istanbul, Turkey, defeated the Mamlukes and took Israel/Palestine into its realm. Ottoman control lasted four hundred years, giving the old city of Jerusalem its distinctive character we see today. For instance, the ancient walls of the city were built by Ottoman ruler Sulayman the Magnificent from 1537 to 1540. Despite Turkish dominance, an Arab society lived in Palestine (along with a very small Jewish minority) and flourished. While some claim that Palestinian life barely existed through this period, excellent written and photographic histories depict a thriving culture.² In the nineteenth century, European Jews began to migrate because of persecution, and Palestine was one of their destinations. They had been expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1394, and from Spain in 1492. Most had gone to Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. But in the nineteenth century, European persecutions—particularly in Russia—became acute, and the dream of a homeland was born. By the late nineteenth century, only about 25,000 Jews were in Palestine, and most of these lived in Jerusalem surrounded by a vast Arab majority. This dream—called Zionism—was rooted in a Jewish theological vision that sustained a hope for return to the land of Israel. “Next year in Jerusalem” was a centuries-old Passover refrain everyone knew, but this vision found expression between 1880 and 1900 when Russian persecution had reached its peak. In 1897, Theodor Herzl organized the first “Zionist Congress” in Basel, Switzerland, and gathered Jewish intellectuals from twenty-four countries. Following this meeting, Herzl wrote in his diary, “At Basel I founded the Jewish state.”³ Within a couple of years, over ten thousand Zionist settlers had moved to Palestine. Many purchased land from absentee Arab landlords who had no investment in the local people, but other Zionist leaders understood that one feature of their strategy had to be removing the Arab population. In public Herzel made no public declarations about the fate of the Arab population. In fact, he talked about how they could be equal citizens with the incoming Jews. But it private, it was a different matter. Herzl wrote in his diary on June 12, 1895, that the removal of the Arabs bodily from Palestine is part of the Zionist plan “to spirit a penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out.”⁴ The only obstacle to Herzl’s plan for a Jewish homeland in Israel was Ottoman rule, which was about to be overturned by World War I. THE MODERN PERIOD The British Mandate (1918–48) Because the Turks had sided with Germany in the war, the victors dismembered the Ottoman Empire and took the spoils. France and Britain divided up the Middle East and created most of the borders we know today. Britain initiated its control over “Palestine” (they termed it) and Jordan (as well as other areas such as Iraq and Egypt). The Zionists saw clearly that if they were to establish their homeland, they had to win British support. In 1916, the key was found when Arthur Balfour, a friend of the Zionist cause, became Britain’s foreign minister. Balfour successfully convinced the government to support Zionism because it would wear well in America, which they wanted to bring into the war. The “Balfour Declaration” (1917) did not support the formation of a Jewish state, but it affirmed British support for a “national home” for Jews in Palestine with the condition that the civil and religious rights of non-Jews in Palestine would not be lost. Five weeks after the declaration, British troops entered Jerusalem. British control over Palestine continued until the outbreak of World War II. Many Jewish families emigrated to Palestine, joining courageous communities of Zionist pioneers who at first truly worked to coexist with the Arabs. Their numbers were small (fewer than 100,000 living with 500,000 Arabs) but they were well-organized, bringing with them skills honed in European universities. They also built organizations that would eventually become the seeds of the Israeli state. Arab anxiety was strong, however, as they watched the balance of power and influence shift under British rule. Fighting in numerous cities tore the fragile peace between Jew and Arab. In 1929, for instance, sixty Jews were killed in rioting in the Arab town of Hebron, and conflicts like this evoked memories of European persecutions—which only galvanized Zionist determination. Israeli settlers in downtown Hebron today have a museum for this massacre, and it contributes to their “siege” mentality, framing their relation to the Arabs as if they were once again living in Germany. The shock of the Nazi Holocaust created a fervor among Zionists to move out of Europe that much sooner. As British troops tried to govern a now-divided country, Jewish pressure for immigration increased. The British had changed their minds, though, knowing that the creation of a Jewish state would explode the fragile peace in the region. Nevertheless, ships continued to force their way to the coastline, and British troops found themselves in the unenviable position of stopping refugee-survivors from the European Holocaust. Zionist soldiers began attacking British positions and using terrorism, such as blowing up part of Jerusalem’s King David
Hotel (July 1946) where British officials kept their offices. American public opinion and the sympathies of Washington soon became critical of Britain’s posture and openly supported the formation of a Jewish state. Exhausted and further depleted by World War II, Britain could not retain control of the lands mandated to it following World War I. In 1947, Britain announced that it would leave the region, handing “Palestine” over to the United Nations. That year, the United Nations proposed a partition of Palestine in order to make an Arab and a Jewish state.⁵ But the divisions of land barely reflected the size of each population. Despite extreme Arab resentment, Israel raised its new flag with the star of David on May 14, 1948. Within eleven minutes, President Truman of the United States gave Israel formal recognition. At once the Arabs declared war. The First War: 1948, “The War of Independence” Known as Israel’s War of Independence, Israeli and Arab armies (from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq) fought viciously to change the boundaries. King Abdullah I of Jordan no doubt had dreams of taking everything, including land promised to Israel. Other Arabs were offended even by the notion of an Israeli state or the presumption that a European-American assembly (the United Nations) could determine the destiny of the region. Israel won decisively and redrew the map, acquiring more land than was even offered in the UN partition. At the close of the war, Israel occupied 77 percent of the land (33 percent more than the UN proposal). Nevertheless, Jordan occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River (all the way into the central mountains, including the cities of Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron). Jordan also possessed the eastern half of the city of Jerusalem. Even though the Partition Plan of 1947 anticipated a Palestinian state, Jordan later annexed the West Bank (issuing Jordanian citizenship papers and passports there). In the end, hopes for a Palestinian state free of Israeli and Jordanian rule evaporated. In response to the fighting thousands of refugees fled from the war zone into the West Bank and neighboring countries (see notes below). According to UN estimates, about 750,000 people were displaced. Seeing this activity as an opportunity to move a population, Israel then closed its borders, refusing reentry to most of the refugees following the war. Soon hundreds of Arab villages were destroyed (over 400 of them), making any return an impossibility. As Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Land Fund, remarked in 1940, “It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. If the Arabs leave the country, it will be broad and wide open for us. If the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and miserable. The only solution is Israel without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point.” Even David Ben-Gurion struggled with what to do with the Arab population. He did not want to expel them unilaterally—he hoped that the land could hold both peoples—but if the Arabs did not accept the incoming Jewish settlements, force would have to be used against them.⁶ In order to accomplish the “ethnic cleansing” of important regions, Jewish military regiments, the Irgun (led by Menachem Begin), the Stern Gang (led by Yizhak Shamir), and the Haganah launched terrorist offensives to remove villagers. The most famous took place on April 9, 1948, when the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem was attacked. Over 100 people were slaughtered, and the news spread quickly. Israeli propaganda distributed in Arab villages referred frequently to “Deir Yassin” as the fate of villages that resist. Some of Deir Yassin’s villagers were even driven through Jerusalem in a “victory parade” before being taken back to the village and shot.⁷ (The survivors of Deir Yassin have kept these memories alive and even have their own website publishing their personal accounts and photographs.⁸) Within days, 50,000 Arabs fled from both Haifa and Jaffa. By May, 250,000 Arabs were running. More than any other event, the massacre at Deir Yassin was responsible for breaking the spirit of the civilian population. In June 1948, Israeli leader Ben-Gurion made his policy clear: “I do not accept that we should encourage their return. I believe we should prevent their return. We must settle Jaffa. Jaffa will become a Jewish city. We must prevent at all costs their return.”⁹ From the beginning, Ben-Gurion knew that dealing with, indeed, removing the “Palestinian problem” would be essential as plans for the new state went forward. His plan was their removal and resettlement as refugees in surrounding Arab countries.¹⁰ In order to guarantee that the Arabs would not return, the villages were generally destroyed and their village wells poisoned, generally with typhus and dysentery bacteria. The Arab village at Acre, for instance, could not be conquered, so in 1948 soldiers placed dysentery bacteria in the spring feeding the town (called the Capri); once the entire town became sick, Jewish forces occupied the town.¹¹ In addition wholesale looting of Arab homes commenced and it became so horrid that Ben Gurion himself admitted that because Jews of “all classes” became involved it was “a shameful and distressful spectacle.”¹² Today the Israeli water authority, Mekorot, regularly checks wells in rural areas since, according to many technicians, soldiers poisoned virtually every Arab well they captured. Israelis frequently dispute this tragic story, but today it cannot be denied. A new generation of historians—such as Benny Morris—have opened this painful chapter for all Israelis to see. Morris’s most recent book, Correcting a Mistake—Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel 1936–1956, is a shocking exposé of government half-truths that covered up plans to “cleanse” a land and exterminate an entire people.¹³ In addition we can now read the memoirs of Israeli military officers who served during these difficult years of Israel’s birth. For example, just recently the remembrances of the renowned Israeli general Matti Peled have been told by his son, Miko Peled, in the astonishing book The General’s Son. Miko grew up loving his country, serving in its army, and believing that the Palestinians were an implacable enemy. But when a suicide bomber killed his niece in 1997, he set out on a quest to discover the origins of this struggle. He learned that his father, once the military governor of Gaza, was opposed to the occupation of the Palestinians and he learned what happened to the Palestinians during this war—and the war of 1967, where his father also served. Here is Miko telling us what soldiers used to do to the fishermen of Gaza in order to suppress the population. They would come upon Gazan fishing boats and from time to time they would single out a particular boat, order the fishermen to jump in the water and blow up the boat. Then under gunpoint, they told the fishermen to count from one to a hundred and then when they were done to start over again. They would make them count over and over again until one by one the fishermen could no longer tread water, and they drowned.¹⁴ This book and others like it are a type or genre of literature. They are almost family confessions, inspired by soldiers who are in their eighties, who know that they have terrible crimes in their past, and they want to tell the truth. Today Miko is a national
despite the invitation of the patriarch because, he argued, If I had prayed in the church it would have been lost to you, for the Believers [Muslims] would have taken it saying: Omar prayed here. Islamic control continued until 1099. Impressive architectural remains (such as the famous Dome of the Rock) originated in this era.
The Crusaders (1099–1187 CE)
Christian knights from Europe traveled to Israel/Palestine and recaptured the city of Jerusalem in 1099, slaughtering most of the city’s residents, Jew and Muslim alike. Even today, Muslims have not forgotten the fanaticism and brutality of that act, and crusader is a name that can evoke passionate anger.¹ Their control was brief, however. The Arab leader Saladin (or Salah Aldin) defeated the Crusaders in Galilee in 1187. The Europeans barely held a few remaining fortresses (such as Acco in the western Jezreel Valley and Krac de Chevaliers in Syria) with the help of reinforcements from France and Britain. Nevertheless, internecine conflict reigned for many years. Finally in 1291, the crusaders were utterly driven out (their remaining armies fleeing to Cyprus).
The Egyptian Mamlukes (1250–1517 CE)
In 1250, armies from Egypt defeated the regime of Saladin, and for more than three hundred years, Israel/Palestine was a defensive province for an Egyptian Islamic empire that needed to guard its northern frontier. The land and its people were neglected terribly even though Christian pilgrims, particularly from the Latin west, continued to travel to Jerusalem.
The Ottoman Turks (1517–1918 CE)
In 1517, a rival Islamic power in Istanbul, Turkey, defeated the Mamlukes and took Israel/Palestine into its realm. Ottoman control lasted four hundred years, giving the old city of Jerusalem its distinctive character we see today. For instance, the ancient walls of the city were built by Ottoman ruler Sulayman the Magnificent from 1537 to 1540. Despite Turkish dominance, an Arab society lived in Palestine (along with a very small Jewish minority) and flourished. While some claim that Palestinian life barely existed through this period, excellent written and photographic histories depict a thriving culture.²
In the nineteenth century, European Jews began to migrate because of persecution, and Palestine was one of their destinations. They had been expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1394, and from Spain in 1492. Most had gone to Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. But in the nineteenth century, European persecutions—particularly in Russia—became acute, and the dream of a homeland was born. By the late nineteenth century, only about 25,000 Jews were in Palestine, and most of these lived in Jerusalem surrounded by a vast Arab majority.
This dream—called Zionism—was rooted in a Jewish theological vision that sustained a hope for return to the land of Israel. Next year in Jerusalem was a centuries-old Passover refrain everyone knew, but this vision found expression between 1880 and 1900 when Russian persecution had reached its peak. In 1897, Theodor Herzl organized the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, and gathered Jewish intellectuals from twenty-four countries. Following this meeting, Herzl wrote in his diary, At Basel I founded the Jewish state.³ Within a couple of years, over ten thousand Zionist settlers had moved to Palestine. Many purchased land from absentee Arab landlords who had no investment in the local people, but other Zionist leaders understood that one feature of their strategy had to be removing the Arab population. In public Herzel made no public declarations about the fate of the Arab population. In fact, he talked about how they could be equal citizens with the incoming Jews. But it private, it was a different matter. Herzl wrote in his diary on June 12, 1895, that the removal of the Arabs bodily from Palestine is part of the Zionist plan to spirit a penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out.⁴
The only obstacle to Herzl’s plan for a Jewish homeland in Israel was Ottoman rule, which was about to be overturned by World War I.
THE MODERN PERIOD
The British Mandate (1918–48)
Because the Turks had sided with Germany in the war, the victors dismembered the Ottoman Empire and took the spoils. France and Britain divided up the Middle East and created most of the borders we know today. Britain initiated its control over Palestine (they termed it) and Jordan (as well as other areas such as Iraq and Egypt). The Zionists saw clearly that if they were to establish their homeland, they had to win British support. In 1916, the key was found when Arthur Balfour, a friend of the Zionist cause, became Britain’s foreign minister. Balfour successfully convinced the government to support Zionism because it would wear well in America, which they wanted to bring into the war. The Balfour Declaration (1917) did not support the formation of a Jewish state, but it affirmed British support for a national home for Jews in Palestine with the condition that the civil and religious rights of non-Jews in Palestine would not be lost. Five weeks after the declaration, British troops entered Jerusalem.
British control over Palestine continued until the outbreak of World War II. Many Jewish families emigrated to Palestine, joining courageous communities of Zionist pioneers who at first truly worked to coexist with the Arabs. Their numbers were small (fewer than 100,000 living with 500,000 Arabs) but they were well-organized, bringing with them skills honed in European universities. They also built organizations that would eventually become the seeds of the Israeli state. Arab anxiety was strong, however, as they watched the balance of power and influence shift under British rule. Fighting in numerous cities tore the fragile peace between Jew and Arab. In 1929, for instance, sixty Jews were killed in rioting in the Arab town of Hebron, and conflicts like this evoked memories of European persecutions—which only galvanized Zionist determination. Israeli settlers in downtown Hebron today have a museum for this massacre, and it contributes to their siege mentality, framing their relation to the Arabs as if they were once again living in Germany.
The shock of the Nazi Holocaust created a fervor among Zionists to move out of Europe that much sooner. As British troops tried to govern a now-divided country, Jewish pressure for immigration increased. The British had changed their minds, though, knowing that the creation of a Jewish state would explode the fragile peace in the region. Nevertheless, ships continued to force their way to the coastline, and British troops found themselves in the unenviable position of stopping refugee-survivors from the European Holocaust. Zionist soldiers began attacking British positions and using terrorism, such as blowing up part of Jerusalem’s King David
Hotel (July 1946) where British officials kept their offices. American public opinion and the sympathies of Washington soon became critical of Britain’s posture and openly supported the formation of a Jewish state.
Exhausted and further depleted by World War II, Britain could not retain control of the lands mandated to it following World War I. In 1947, Britain announced that it would leave the region, handing Palestine over to the United Nations. That year, the United Nations proposed a partition of Palestine in order to make an Arab and a Jewish state.⁵ But the divisions of land barely reflected the size of each population. Despite extreme Arab resentment, Israel raised its new flag with the star of David on May 14, 1948. Within eleven minutes, President Truman of the United States gave Israel formal recognition. At once the Arabs declared war.
The First War: 1948, The War of Independence
Known as Israel’s War of Independence, Israeli and Arab armies (from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq) fought viciously to change the boundaries. King Abdullah I of Jordan no doubt had dreams of taking everything, including land promised to Israel. Other Arabs were offended even by the notion of an Israeli state or the presumption that a European-American assembly (the United Nations) could determine the destiny of the region.
Israel won decisively and redrew the map, acquiring more land than was even offered in the UN partition. At the close of the war, Israel occupied 77 percent of the land (33 percent more than the UN proposal). Nevertheless, Jordan occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River (all the way into the central mountains, including the cities of Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron). Jordan also possessed the eastern half of the city of Jerusalem. Even though the Partition Plan of 1947 anticipated a Palestinian state, Jordan later annexed the West Bank (issuing Jordanian citizenship papers and passports there). In the end, hopes for a Palestinian state free of Israeli and Jordanian rule evaporated.
In response to the fighting thousands of refugees fled from the war zone into the West Bank and neighboring countries (see notes below). According to UN estimates, about 750,000 people were displaced. Seeing this activity as an opportunity to move a population, Israel then closed its borders, refusing reentry to most of the refugees following the war. Soon hundreds of Arab villages were destroyed (over 400 of them), making any return an impossibility. As Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Land Fund, remarked in 1940, It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. If the Arabs leave the country, it will be broad and wide open for us. If the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and miserable. The only solution is Israel without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point. Even David Ben-Gurion struggled with what to do with the Arab population. He did not want to expel them unilaterally—he hoped that the land could hold both peoples—but if the Arabs did not accept the incoming Jewish settlements, force would have to be used against them.⁶
In order to accomplish the ethnic cleansing of important regions, Jewish military regiments, the Irgun (led by Menachem Begin), the Stern Gang (led by Yizhak Shamir), and the Haganah launched terrorist offensives to remove villagers. The most famous took place on April 9, 1948, when the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem was attacked. Over 100 people were slaughtered, and the news spread quickly. Israeli propaganda distributed in Arab villages referred frequently to Deir Yassin as the fate of villages that resist. Some of Deir Yassin’s villagers were even driven through Jerusalem in a victory parade before being taken back to the village and shot.⁷ (The survivors of Deir Yassin have kept these memories alive and even have their own website publishing their personal accounts and photographs.⁸)
Within days, 50,000 Arabs fled from both Haifa and Jaffa. By May, 250,000 Arabs were running. More than any other event, the massacre at Deir Yassin was responsible for breaking the spirit of the civilian population. In June 1948, Israeli leader Ben-Gurion made his policy clear: I do not accept that we should encourage their return. I believe we should prevent their return. We must settle Jaffa. Jaffa will become a Jewish city. We must prevent at all costs their return.⁹ From the beginning, Ben-Gurion knew that dealing with, indeed, removing the Palestinian problem would be essential as plans for the new state went forward. His plan was their removal and resettlement as refugees in surrounding Arab countries.¹⁰ In order to guarantee that the Arabs would not return, the villages were generally destroyed and their village wells poisoned, generally with typhus and dysentery bacteria. The Arab village at Acre, for instance, could not be conquered, so in 1948 soldiers placed dysentery bacteria in the spring feeding the town (called the Capri); once the entire town became sick, Jewish forces occupied the town.¹¹ In addition wholesale looting of Arab homes commenced and it became so horrid that Ben Gurion himself admitted that because Jews of all classes became involved it was a shameful and distressful spectacle.¹² Today the Israeli water authority, Mekorot, regularly checks wells in rural areas since, according to many technicians, soldiers poisoned virtually every Arab well they captured.
Israelis frequently dispute this tragic story, but today it cannot be denied. A new generation of historians—such as Benny Morris—have opened this painful chapter for all Israelis to see. Morris’s most recent book, Correcting a Mistake—Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel 1936–1956, is a shocking exposé of government half-truths that covered up plans to cleanse a land and exterminate an entire people.¹³
In addition we can now read the memoirs of Israeli military officers who served during these difficult years of Israel’s birth. For example, just recently the remembrances of the renowned Israeli general Matti Peled have been told by his son, Miko Peled, in the astonishing book The General’s Son. Miko grew up loving his country, serving in its army, and believing that the Palestinians were an implacable enemy. But when a suicide bomber killed his niece in 1997, he set out on a quest to discover the origins of this struggle. He learned that his father, once the military governor of Gaza, was opposed to the occupation of the Palestinians and he learned what happened to the Palestinians during this war—and the war of 1967, where his father also served.
Here is Miko telling us what soldiers used to do to the fishermen of Gaza in order to suppress the population.
They would come upon Gazan fishing boats and from time to time they would single out a particular boat, order the fishermen to jump in the water and blow up the boat. Then under gunpoint, they told the fishermen to count from one to a hundred and then when they were done to start over again. They would make them count over and over again until one by one the fishermen could no longer tread water, and they drowned.¹⁴
This book and others like it are a type or genre of literature. They are almost family confessions, inspired by soldiers who are in their eighties, who know that they have terrible crimes in their past, and they want to tell the truth. Today Miko is a national
Book Navigation
Jump Back
==
Hotel (July 1946) where British officials kept their offices. American public opinion and the sympathies of Washington soon became critical of Britain’s posture and openly supported the formation of a Jewish state. Exhausted and further depleted by World War II, Britain could not retain control of the lands mandated to it following World War I. In 1947, Britain announced that it would leave the region, handing “Palestine” over to the United Nations. That year, the United Nations proposed a partition of Palestine in order to make an Arab and a Jewish state.⁵ But the divisions of land barely reflected the size of each population. Despite extreme Arab resentment, Israel raised its new flag with the star of David on May 14, 1948. Within eleven minutes, President Truman of the United States gave Israel formal recognition. At once the Arabs declared war. The First War: 1948, “The War of Independence” Known as Israel’s War of Independence, Israeli and Arab armies (from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq) fought viciously to change the boundaries. King Abdullah I of Jordan no doubt had dreams of taking everything, including land promised to Israel. Other Arabs were offended even by the notion of an Israeli state or the presumption that a European-American assembly (the United Nations) could determine the destiny of the region. Israel won decisively and redrew the map, acquiring more land than was even offered in the UN partition. At the close of the war, Israel occupied 77 percent of the land (33 percent more than the UN proposal). Nevertheless, Jordan occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River (all the way into the central mountains, including the cities of Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron). Jordan also possessed the eastern half of the city of Jerusalem. Even though the Partition Plan of 1947 anticipated a Palestinian state, Jordan later annexed the West Bank (issuing Jordanian citizenship papers and passports there). In the end, hopes for a Palestinian state free of Israeli and Jordanian rule evaporated. In response to the fighting thousands of refugees fled from the war zone into the West Bank and neighboring countries (see notes below). According to UN estimates, about 750,000 people were displaced. Seeing this activity as an opportunity to move a population, Israel then closed its borders, refusing reentry to most of the refugees following the war. Soon hundreds of Arab villages were destroyed (over 400 of them), making any return an impossibility. As Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Land Fund, remarked in 1940, “It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. If the Arabs leave the country, it will be broad and wide open for us. If the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and miserable. The only solution is Israel without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point.” Even David Ben-Gurion struggled with what to do with the Arab population. He did not want to expel them unilaterally—he hoped that the land could hold both peoples—but if the Arabs did not accept the incoming Jewish settlements, force would have to be used against them.⁶ In order to accomplish the “ethnic cleansing” of important regions, Jewish military regiments, the Irgun (led by Menachem Begin), the Stern Gang (led by Yizhak Shamir), and the Haganah launched terrorist offensives to remove villagers. The most famous took place on April 9, 1948, when the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem was attacked. Over 100 people were slaughtered, and the news spread quickly. Israeli propaganda distributed in Arab villages referred frequently to “Deir Yassin” as the fate of villages that resist. Some of Deir Yassin’s villagers were even driven through Jerusalem in a “victory parade” before being taken back to the village and shot.⁷ (The survivors of Deir Yassin have kept these memories alive and even have their own website publishing their personal accounts and photographs.⁸) Within days, 50,000 Arabs fled from both Haifa and Jaffa. By May, 250,000 Arabs were running. More than any other event, the massacre at Deir Yassin was responsible for breaking the spirit of the civilian population. In June 1948, Israeli leader Ben-Gurion made his policy clear: “I do not accept that we should encourage their return. I believe we should prevent their return. We must settle Jaffa. Jaffa will become a Jewish city. We must prevent at all costs their return.”⁹ From the beginning, Ben-Gurion knew that dealing with, indeed, removing the “Palestinian problem” would be essential as plans for the new state went forward. His plan was their removal and resettlement as refugees in surrounding Arab countries.¹⁰ In order to guarantee that the Arabs would not return, the villages were generally destroyed and their village wells poisoned, generally with typhus and dysentery bacteria. The Arab village at Acre, for instance, could not be conquered, so in 1948 soldiers placed dysentery bacteria in the spring feeding the town (called the Capri); once the entire town became sick, Jewish forces occupied the town.¹¹ In addition wholesale looting of Arab homes commenced and it became so horrid that Ben Gurion himself admitted that because Jews of “all classes” became involved it was “a shameful and distressful spectacle.”¹² Today the Israeli water authority, Mekorot, regularly checks wells in rural areas since, according to many technicians, soldiers poisoned virtually every Arab well they captured. Israelis frequently dispute this tragic story, but today it cannot be denied. A new generation of historians—such as Benny Morris—have opened this painful chapter for all Israelis to see. Morris’s most recent book, Correcting a Mistake—Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel 1936–1956, is a shocking exposé of government half-truths that covered up plans to “cleanse” a land and exterminate an entire people.¹³ In addition we can now read the memoirs of Israeli military officers who served during these difficult years of Israel’s birth. For example, just recently the remembrances of the renowned Israeli general Matti Peled have been told by his son, Miko Peled, in the astonishing book The General’s Son. Miko grew up loving his country, serving in its army, and believing that the Palestinians were an implacable enemy. But when a suicide bomber killed his niece in 1997, he set out on a quest to discover the origins of this struggle. He learned that his father, once the military governor of Gaza, was opposed to the occupation of the Palestinians and he learned what happened to the Palestinians during this war—and the war of 1967, where his father also served. Here is Miko telling us what soldiers used to do to the fishermen of Gaza in order to suppress the population. They would come upon Gazan fishing boats and from time to time they would single out a particular boat, order the fishermen to jump in the water and blow up the boat. Then under gunpoint, they told the fishermen to count from one to a hundred and then when they were done to start over again. They would make them count over and over again until one by one the fishermen could no longer tread water, and they drowned.¹⁴ This book and others like it are a type or genre of literature. They are almost family confessions, inspired by soldiers who are in their eighties, who know that they have terrible crimes in their past, and they want to tell the truth. Today Miko is a national
despite the invitation of the patriarch because, he argued, If I had prayed in the church it would have been lost to you, for the Believers [Muslims] would have taken it saying: Omar prayed here. Islamic control continued until 1099. Impressive architectural remains (such as the famous Dome of the Rock) originated in this era.
The Crusaders (1099–1187 CE)
Christian knights from Europe traveled to Israel/Palestine and recaptured the city of Jerusalem in 1099, slaughtering most of the city’s residents, Jew and Muslim alike. Even today, Muslims have not forgotten the fanaticism and brutality of that act, and crusader is a name that can evoke passionate anger.¹ Their control was brief, however. The Arab leader Saladin (or Salah Aldin) defeated the Crusaders in Galilee in 1187. The Europeans barely held a few remaining fortresses (such as Acco in the western Jezreel Valley and Krac de Chevaliers in Syria) with the help of reinforcements from France and Britain. Nevertheless, internecine conflict reigned for many years. Finally in 1291, the crusaders were utterly driven out (their remaining armies fleeing to Cyprus).
The Egyptian Mamlukes (1250–1517 CE)
In 1250, armies from Egypt defeated the regime of Saladin, and for more than three hundred years, Israel/Palestine was a defensive province for an Egyptian Islamic empire that needed to guard its northern frontier. The land and its people were neglected terribly even though Christian pilgrims, particularly from the Latin west, continued to travel to Jerusalem.
The Ottoman Turks (1517–1918 CE)
In 1517, a rival Islamic power in Istanbul, Turkey, defeated the Mamlukes and took Israel/Palestine into its realm. Ottoman control lasted four hundred years, giving the old city of Jerusalem its distinctive character we see today. For instance, the ancient walls of the city were built by Ottoman ruler Sulayman the Magnificent from 1537 to 1540. Despite Turkish dominance, an Arab society lived in Palestine (along with a very small Jewish minority) and flourished. While some claim that Palestinian life barely existed through this period, excellent written and photographic histories depict a thriving culture.²
In the nineteenth century, European Jews began to migrate because of persecution, and Palestine was one of their destinations. They had been expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1394, and from Spain in 1492. Most had gone to Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. But in the nineteenth century, European persecutions—particularly in Russia—became acute, and the dream of a homeland was born. By the late nineteenth century, only about 25,000 Jews were in Palestine, and most of these lived in Jerusalem surrounded by a vast Arab majority.
This dream—called Zionism—was rooted in a Jewish theological vision that sustained a hope for return to the land of Israel. Next year in Jerusalem was a centuries-old Passover refrain everyone knew, but this vision found expression between 1880 and 1900 when Russian persecution had reached its peak. In 1897, Theodor Herzl organized the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, and gathered Jewish intellectuals from twenty-four countries. Following this meeting, Herzl wrote in his diary, At Basel I founded the Jewish state.³ Within a couple of years, over ten thousand Zionist settlers had moved to Palestine. Many purchased land from absentee Arab landlords who had no investment in the local people, but other Zionist leaders understood that one feature of their strategy had to be removing the Arab population. In public Herzel made no public declarations about the fate of the Arab population. In fact, he talked about how they could be equal citizens with the incoming Jews. But it private, it was a different matter. Herzl wrote in his diary on June 12, 1895, that the removal of the Arabs bodily from Palestine is part of the Zionist plan to spirit a penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out.⁴
The only obstacle to Herzl’s plan for a Jewish homeland in Israel was Ottoman rule, which was about to be overturned by World War I.
THE MODERN PERIOD
The British Mandate (1918–48)
Because the Turks had sided with Germany in the war, the victors dismembered the Ottoman Empire and took the spoils. France and Britain divided up the Middle East and created most of the borders we know today. Britain initiated its control over Palestine (they termed it) and Jordan (as well as other areas such as Iraq and Egypt). The Zionists saw clearly that if they were to establish their homeland, they had to win British support. In 1916, the key was found when Arthur Balfour, a friend of the Zionist cause, became Britain’s foreign minister. Balfour successfully convinced the government to support Zionism because it would wear well in America, which they wanted to bring into the war. The Balfour Declaration (1917) did not support the formation of a Jewish state, but it affirmed British support for a national home for Jews in Palestine with the condition that the civil and religious rights of non-Jews in Palestine would not be lost. Five weeks after the declaration, British troops entered Jerusalem.
British control over Palestine continued until the outbreak of World War II. Many Jewish families emigrated to Palestine, joining courageous communities of Zionist pioneers who at first truly worked to coexist with the Arabs. Their numbers were small (fewer than 100,000 living with 500,000 Arabs) but they were well-organized, bringing with them skills honed in European universities. They also built organizations that would eventually become the seeds of the Israeli state. Arab anxiety was strong, however, as they watched the balance of power and influence shift under British rule. Fighting in numerous cities tore the fragile peace between Jew and Arab. In 1929, for instance, sixty Jews were killed in rioting in the Arab town of Hebron, and conflicts like this evoked memories of European persecutions—which only galvanized Zionist determination. Israeli settlers in downtown Hebron today have a museum for this massacre, and it contributes to their siege mentality, framing their relation to the Arabs as if they were once again living in Germany.
The shock of the Nazi Holocaust created a fervor among Zionists to move out of Europe that much sooner. As British troops tried to govern a now-divided country, Jewish pressure for immigration increased. The British had changed their minds, though, knowing that the creation of a Jewish state would explode the fragile peace in the region. Nevertheless, ships continued to force their way to the coastline, and British troops found themselves in the unenviable position of stopping refugee-survivors from the European Holocaust. Zionist soldiers began attacking British positions and using terrorism, such as blowing up part of Jerusalem’s King David
Hotel (July 1946) where British officials kept their offices. American public opinion and the sympathies of Washington soon became critical of Britain’s posture and openly supported the formation of a Jewish state.
Exhausted and further depleted by World War II, Britain could not retain control of the lands mandated to it following World War I. In 1947, Britain announced that it would leave the region, handing Palestine over to the United Nations. That year, the United Nations proposed a partition of Palestine in order to make an Arab and a Jewish state.⁵ But the divisions of land barely reflected the size of each population. Despite extreme Arab resentment, Israel raised its new flag with the star of David on May 14, 1948. Within eleven minutes, President Truman of the United States gave Israel formal recognition. At once the Arabs declared war.
The First War: 1948, The War of Independence
Known as Israel’s War of Independence, Israeli and Arab armies (from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq) fought viciously to change the boundaries. King Abdullah I of Jordan no doubt had dreams of taking everything, including land promised to Israel. Other Arabs were offended even by the notion of an Israeli state or the presumption that a European-American assembly (the United Nations) could determine the destiny of the region.
Israel won decisively and redrew the map, acquiring more land than was even offered in the UN partition. At the close of the war, Israel occupied 77 percent of the land (33 percent more than the UN proposal). Nevertheless, Jordan occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River (all the way into the central mountains, including the cities of Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron). Jordan also possessed the eastern half of the city of Jerusalem. Even though the Partition Plan of 1947 anticipated a Palestinian state, Jordan later annexed the West Bank (issuing Jordanian citizenship papers and passports there). In the end, hopes for a Palestinian state free of Israeli and Jordanian rule evaporated.
In response to the fighting thousands of refugees fled from the war zone into the West Bank and neighboring countries (see notes below). According to UN estimates, about 750,000 people were displaced. Seeing this activity as an opportunity to move a population, Israel then closed its borders, refusing reentry to most of the refugees following the war. Soon hundreds of Arab villages were destroyed (over 400 of them), making any return an impossibility. As Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Land Fund, remarked in 1940, It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. If the Arabs leave the country, it will be broad and wide open for us. If the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and miserable. The only solution is Israel without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point. Even David Ben-Gurion struggled with what to do with the Arab population. He did not want to expel them unilaterally—he hoped that the land could hold both peoples—but if the Arabs did not accept the incoming Jewish settlements, force would have to be used against them.⁶
In order to accomplish the ethnic cleansing of important regions, Jewish military regiments, the Irgun (led by Menachem Begin), the Stern Gang (led by Yizhak Shamir), and the Haganah launched terrorist offensives to remove villagers. The most famous took place on April 9, 1948, when the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem was attacked. Over 100 people were slaughtered, and the news spread quickly. Israeli propaganda distributed in Arab villages referred frequently to Deir Yassin as the fate of villages that resist. Some of Deir Yassin’s villagers were even driven through Jerusalem in a victory parade before being taken back to the village and shot.⁷ (The survivors of Deir Yassin have kept these memories alive and even have their own website publishing their personal accounts and photographs.⁸)
Within days, 50,000 Arabs fled from both Haifa and Jaffa. By May, 250,000 Arabs were running. More than any other event, the massacre at Deir Yassin was responsible for breaking the spirit of the civilian population. In June 1948, Israeli leader Ben-Gurion made his policy clear: I do not accept that we should encourage their return. I believe we should prevent their return. We must settle Jaffa. Jaffa will become a Jewish city. We must prevent at all costs their return.⁹ From the beginning, Ben-Gurion knew that dealing with, indeed, removing the Palestinian problem would be essential as plans for the new state went forward. His plan was their removal and resettlement as refugees in surrounding Arab countries.¹⁰ In order to guarantee that the Arabs would not return, the villages were generally destroyed and their village wells poisoned, generally with typhus and dysentery bacteria. The Arab village at Acre, for instance, could not be conquered, so in 1948 soldiers placed dysentery bacteria in the spring feeding the town (called the Capri); once the entire town became sick, Jewish forces occupied the town.¹¹ In addition wholesale looting of Arab homes commenced and it became so horrid that Ben Gurion himself admitted that because Jews of all classes became involved it was a shameful and distressful spectacle.¹² Today the Israeli water authority, Mekorot, regularly checks wells in rural areas since, according to many technicians, soldiers poisoned virtually every Arab well they captured.
Israelis frequently dispute this tragic story, but today it cannot be denied. A new generation of historians—such as Benny Morris—have opened this painful chapter for all Israelis to see. Morris’s most recent book, Correcting a Mistake—Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel 1936–1956, is a shocking exposé of government half-truths that covered up plans to cleanse a land and exterminate an entire people.¹³
In addition we can now read the memoirs of Israeli military officers who served during these difficult years of Israel’s birth. For example, just recently the remembrances of the renowned Israeli general Matti Peled have been told by his son, Miko Peled, in the astonishing book The General’s Son. Miko grew up loving his country, serving in its army, and believing that the Palestinians were an implacable enemy. But when a suicide bomber killed his niece in 1997, he set out on a quest to discover the origins of this struggle. He learned that his father, once the military governor of Gaza, was opposed to the occupation of the Palestinians and he learned what happened to the Palestinians during this war—and the war of 1967, where his father also served.
Here is Miko telling us what soldiers used to do to the fishermen of Gaza in order to suppress the population.
They would come upon Gazan fishing boats and from time to time they would single out a particular boat, order the fishermen to jump in the water and blow up the boat. Then under gunpoint, they told the fishermen to count from one to a hundred and then when they were done to start over again. They would make them count over and over again until one by one the fishermen could no longer tread water, and they drowned.¹⁴
This book and others like it are a type or genre of literature. They are almost family confessions, inspired by soldiers who are in their eighties, who know that they have terrible crimes in their past, and they want to tell the truth. Today Miko is a national
Book Navigation
Jump Back
==
speaker, author, and confessor on behalf of his family. And he provides a telling window, once secret, of what transpired during 1948–1967. It has always struck me as ironic that if you stand in the right place at the Jewish Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem (Yad Vashem), you can almost see the village of Deir Yassin. Even the family home of Menachem Begin (the leader of the massacre) is just across the valley. But Deir Yassin was not an exception to the Israeli’s ethnic cleansing. Countless villages received severe treatment. In the end, over 400 villages were turned to rubble. From the Palestinian view, these events were the first use of “terrorism” in the country. The Second War: 1956, “The Sinai War” Hostilities continued for eight years, generally in the form of guerrilla attacks. Egypt’s fury was expressed by nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1954 and by closing the canal to Israeli shipping the next year. Egypt also blockaded the Israeli port of Eilat, disrupting all Asia-bound shipping. Seeing this move as an act of war, Israel attacked Egypt on October 29, 1956, with a land assault across the Sinai. British and French forces then bombed Port Said and Port Fu’ad at the north end of the canal and landed troops. In response to exhaustive UN condemnations (and American pressure), Britain and France left Egypt; Israel withdrew in 1957. UN troops entered the region to secure a fragile peace on the promise that Egypt would not stop Israeli shipping from Eilat through the Gulf of Aqaba. The Third War: 1967, “The Six-Day War” The struggle was obviously not going to end that easily. Border skirmishes continued between Israel and the Arab countries of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt for eleven years. By 1966, all of the countries clearly were bracing for war. Egypt termed it “a holy war” to defeat the Jews. By spring 1967, Egypt called for the withdrawal of all UN troops in Sinai. Egypt then blocked the Gulf of Aqaba again and began moving heavily armored divisions to the border. Syria did the same. The Arabs were poised to field about 540,000 troops, 2,500 tanks, and 950 aircraft. The Israelis had 265,000 troops, 800 tanks, and 300 aircraft. The odds could not have been stacked more firmly against Israel. Anticipating an attack, on June 5, 1967, Israel struck first by launching an air strike in the early morning and virtually wiped out the Egyptian air force on the ground. By nightfall, Israel had destroyed 416 Arab planes. Within two days (June 7), Israel occupied all of east Jerusalem—meaning that for the first time since the days of the Roman Empire, Jews now occupied Jerusalem in its entirety. Within a week (June 10), the war was over. With lightning speed and superior organization, Israel had defeated an overwhelming Arab army and succeeded in taking the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank (to the Jordan River), and the Golan Heights. Following the war, another million Arabs were now under Israeli military control, and over 350,000 Arabs fled as refugees to neighboring countries. By December, 245,000 had fled the West Bank, 11,000 had fled Gaza, and 116,000 Syrians had fled the Golan Heights. And again Israel closed its borders to them. The United Nations concluded that Israel had no intention of returning to its “pre-1967” borders and in November 1967 demanded that it do so. This UN decision—Resolution 242—is famous and is still cited today as a call for Israel to return conquered lands and set captive people free.¹⁵ The Fourth War: 1973, “The Yom Kippur War” Calculating the wound to Arab pride that came in 1967 is impossible. Syria and Egypt—with massive aid from the Soviet Union—began rebuilding their armies almost immediately. This time, however, both were equipped with sophisticated surface-to-air missiles that would halt another Israeli air attack. Incredibly Israel was complacent, basking now in its victory of 1967 and enjoying the “buffer” zones created on most frontiers. On October 6, 1973—the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur—Jewish farmers relaxing near Gaza suddenly heard the scream of Egyptian fighters overhead. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. At the Suez Canal, 400 Israeli soldiers were quickly overrun, and in minutes 8,000 Egyptian troops were across the border, followed by wave after wave of tanks. Israelis scrambled to counter the attack by air, but Soviet missiles shot them down. On the Golan Heights, 1,100 Syrian tanks overran 157 Israeli tanks, and in a handful of days, Syrian forces had penetrated Israel. The seriousness of the attack was sobering and frightening. In one month, Israel lost 2,378 soldiers. Resupplied by American arms stores in Europe ($2.2 billion), the Israeli army counterattacked within the week, pushing the Syrians back. American satellite reconnaissance fed Israel the exact positions of all Egyptian troop movements in Sinai, and by mid-October the Egyptian army had lost over 250 tanks (compared to 10 Israeli tanks destroyed). Israeli speed, resolve, and discipline joined with superior American equipment and intelligence made victory inevitable. The Arab armies were fighting not simply Israel, but America—a note not later forgotten. In late October, the Egyptian Third Army was surrounded in Sinai, and though Israel wanted to completely destroy it, American pressure made Israel withdraw, ending the war on October 26. With the help of the United States (and Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy”), Egypt was willing to make concessions to Israel if Egypt would regain the oil fields of Sinai. Kissinger won this point in 1975, and with generous American aid now flowing to Egypt, Cairo’s hostilities eased. In this less tense atmosphere, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made a surprise visit to Jerusalem in 1977, paving the way for the famous meeting at Camp David in 1979 with Jimmy Carter. The accords reached at the meeting included a formal peace treaty, establishment of diplomatic relations, and Israel’s complete withdrawal from the Sinai. They also stipulated that this peace “be linked” to full autonomy for the Palestinians. Sadat’s courageous overture cost him his life, however, as he was killed in October 1981 by Egyptian radicals opposed to the peace process. The Fifth War: 1982, “The Invasion of Lebanon” With its southern border secured, Israel turned its attention to Palestinian military attacks on the Lebanese border in the north. Palestinians exiled since 1948 were waging a guerrilla war on northern Galilee, angry that they could not return home. In 1978, Israel launched its first land assault into Lebanon in order to create a buffer zone that it could control with the aid of Christian militias in the region. Still, the Palestinian forces were numerous and aggressive. Therefore, in June 1982, Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon (called “Operation Peace for Galilee”) in order to drive out the confederation of resistance groups called the Palestine Liberation Organization (known simply as the PLO). Refugee camps in southern Lebanon were destroyed, and
Israeli armor rolled to the edge of Beirut. For three months, Israeli artillery shelled the city, indiscriminately killing many thousands of Lebanese civilians until the Lebanese themselves agreed to usher the Palestinian leadership out of the country. Terror became another tactic as Lebanese militias under Israeli protection committed atrocities in refugee camps (e.g., the Sabra and Shatila camps). Finally, in August 1982, the PLO leadership was given safe passage out of Beirut and departed for Tunisia. In their wake, 16,000 Arabs and 700 Israeli soldiers had died.¹⁶ Many Arabs in Lebanon viewed America as responsible for financing Israel’s siege of their country. American hardware attacking them by air and land was easy to see. One popular Arab song of the period called Israel “the snake” to be watched—and America as “the head of the snake.” In July 1983, an Arab suicide bomber vented this hostility by destroying the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut, killing hundreds of American soldiers. For any astute observer of the region, the attack was an utterly predictable episode focused on a poorly defended target. Refugees Most of the major military conflicts just discussed produced refugees who fled their homes because of the war and then were refused permission to return. The numbers are simply staggering. Entire families have grown up in the squalor of these camps, and young adults have known no other life. This explains why the Palestinian refugee community is the largest refugee population in the world. According to a 2010 UN study, there are 4.7 million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. Palestinians have also migrated to Western countries such as Australia and the United States. Today in Chicago, Illinois, or Dearborn, Michigan, for example, entire Palestinian communities have their own stores and neighborhoods—and long memories of the land left behind. What is surprising is how these refugees still remember their villages and their histories. In the large camp of Jalazone outside Ramallah, a family once explained their history to me in detail. Their home once had been located where today we find Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport. In 1948, the family was driven out by the army. Some extent of the disaster to Palestinian villages can be seen in the following statistics: of about 807 registered Palestinian villages in 1945, only 433 were still standing by 1967. Put bluntly, 45 percent of the Palestinian villages were emptied and demolished as a result of the creation of the state of Israel.¹⁷ As Israel acquired land, one of its specific goals was to depopulate the areas acquired. Today we refer to such activity as “ethnic cleansing.” The Palestinians fell victim to propaganda campaigns telling them to flee. Many Arab countries affirmed the wisdom of flight on the assumption that everyone could return home once the fighting was over. One of my former Jewish neighbors spent most of his life in a kibbutz near Gaza during those turbulent years. He tells how in 1948 Israeli planes dropped leaflets in the Palestinian villages warning the people to get out or else they would all be killed. After they left, Israeli settlers simply moved into the Palestinian homes. Some of the villages were destroyed by dynamite, and some were plowed under for agricultural areas. Others are now buried in reforestation projects. Consider, for instance, the Galilee village of Lubya (or Louba). Not far north of Nazareth and Kana is a small hill just off the Tiberius-Nazareth highway where Lubya was once located (about five miles west of Tiberius). Its history goes back before the Crusaders, who called the town Lubia. Nearby are the ruins of a medieval caravansary known as “Khan Lubya,” which refreshed travelers a thousand years ago. Even nineteenth-century pilgrims leaving Nazareth made note of it in their diaries. During the early twentieth century, about 700 people lived here. The village was attacked at night on January 20, 1948, by Zionist forces, who were repelled. More attacks continued through March, but in April when Tiberius fell, Lubya looked to Nazareth for aid. In July, Nazareth surrendered to Israeli soldiers and the residents of Lubya were terrified. On July 16, most of the village fled northwest toward Lebanon, leaving behind some armed men and the elderly. When the Israelis arrived, they shelled the village and then began destroying homes. The elderly hid in caves and some escaped, but little is known of their fate. The villagers became refugees in Lebanon and have never been permitted by the Israelis to return. Today the Lavi Pine Forest planted by the Jewish National Fund stands on the site. The debris of Lubya’s houses is buried in these forests, and one can still find the cacti, the fig, and the pomegranate trees marking another generation’s work. Random stone walls and the village’s cisterns are still visible. Ironically, an Israeli military museum has been built adjacent to the site in honor of an Israeli brigade’s heroism.¹⁸ The Sixth War: 1987–93, “The First Intifada” During each of the previous wars, the Palestinians residing in and around Israel were becoming the pawns in a larger Middle Eastern chess game. As one Arab leader after the next came to terms with Israel’s existence, Palestinian frustration became acute. Who would champion their cause? In fact, an entire generation had now grown up under Israeli occupation, and 70 percent of the Palestinians were under twenty-five years of age. An estimated 120,000 of them traveled daily into Israel as manual laborers, and they could see the enormous inequities of their lives. Israeli appropriation of Arab land had grown at an alarming rate. Almost 50 percent of the West Bank and 30 percent of Gaza had been taken by the Israeli government. Water rights likewise provoked anger. In Gaza, 750,000 Palestinians consumed about 30 percent of the water available while 45,000 Jewish settlers were allotted the remaining 70 percent. Furthermore, in 1985, Israel’s Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin introduced his “Iron Fist II” policy to crush any Palestinian resistance. Within a month, twelve Palestinian political leaders were deported out of the country with no formal trial, sixty-two activists were placed under administrative detention, and five people were killed by the military. Israeli prisons were being filled with Palestinians, most under twenty-one. That same year, Israel bombed the new headquarters of the PLO in Tunis, killing more than seventy Palestinian leaders. These compressed feelings erupted with a fury on December 8, 1987. A small group of tired Palestinian men were waiting in their cars on a narrow Gaza road at a military checkpoint. They were returning from a day’s work in Israel, crossing back into the territory where they lived. Suddenly, an Israeli tank appeared and swerved into the line of cars, crushing everything in its path. Four men died instantly, seven were critically injured. Official military reports stated that the tank’s brakes had failed. Rumor among those living in Gaza told a different story—that the crash was deliberate, in retaliation for the death of an Israeli soldier’s relative. The Palestinians found the rumor more believable, and the following day 6,000 people attended the four men’s funeral. Soon there were demonstrations and protests, which were quickly confronted by Israeli soldiers in the streets of Gaza. Arab injuries were everywhere as tear gas, beatings, and
speaker, author, and confessor on behalf of his family. And he provides a telling window, once secret, of what transpired during 1948–1967.
It has always struck me as ironic that if you stand in the right place at the Jewish Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem (Yad Vashem), you can almost see the village of Deir Yassin. Even the family home of Menachem Begin (the leader of the massacre) is just across the valley. But Deir Yassin was not an exception to the Israeli’s ethnic cleansing. Countless villages received severe treatment. In the end, over 400 villages were turned to rubble. From the Palestinian view, these events were the first use of terrorism in the country.
The Second War: 1956, The Sinai War
Hostilities continued for eight years, generally in the form of guerrilla attacks. Egypt’s fury was expressed by nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1954 and by closing the canal to Israeli shipping the next year. Egypt also blockaded the Israeli port of Eilat, disrupting all Asia-bound shipping. Seeing this move as an act of war, Israel attacked Egypt on October 29, 1956, with a land assault across the Sinai. British and French forces then bombed Port Said and Port Fu’ad at the north end of the canal and landed troops. In response to exhaustive UN condemnations (and American pressure), Britain and France left Egypt; Israel withdrew in 1957. UN troops entered the region to secure a fragile peace on the promise that Egypt would not stop Israeli shipping from Eilat through the Gulf of Aqaba.
The Third War: 1967, The Six-Day War
The struggle was obviously not going to end that easily. Border skirmishes continued between Israel and the Arab countries of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt for eleven years. By 1966, all of the countries clearly were bracing for war. Egypt termed it a holy war to defeat the Jews. By spring 1967, Egypt called for the withdrawal of all UN troops in Sinai. Egypt then blocked the Gulf of Aqaba again and began moving heavily armored divisions to the border. Syria did the same. The Arabs were poised to field about 540,000 troops, 2,500 tanks, and 950 aircraft. The Israelis had 265,000 troops, 800 tanks, and 300 aircraft. The odds could not have been stacked more firmly against Israel.
Anticipating an attack, on June 5, 1967, Israel struck first by launching an air strike in the early morning and virtually wiped out the Egyptian air force on the ground. By nightfall, Israel had destroyed 416 Arab planes. Within two days (June 7), Israel occupied all of east Jerusalem—meaning that for the first time since the days of the Roman Empire, Jews now occupied Jerusalem in its entirety. Within a week (June 10), the war was over. With lightning speed and superior organization, Israel had defeated an overwhelming Arab army and succeeded in taking the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank (to the Jordan River), and the Golan Heights.
Following the war, another million Arabs were now under Israeli military control, and over 350,000 Arabs fled as refugees to neighboring countries. By December, 245,000 had fled the West Bank, 11,000 had fled Gaza, and 116,000 Syrians had fled the Golan Heights. And again Israel closed its borders to them. The United Nations concluded that Israel had no intention of returning to its pre-1967 borders and in November 1967 demanded that it do so. This UN decision—Resolution 242—is famous and is still cited today as a call for Israel to return conquered lands and set captive people free.¹⁵
The Fourth War: 1973, The Yom Kippur War
Calculating the wound to Arab pride that came in 1967 is impossible. Syria and Egypt—with massive aid from the Soviet Union—began rebuilding their armies almost immediately. This time, however, both were equipped with sophisticated surface-to-air missiles that would halt another Israeli air attack. Incredibly Israel was complacent, basking now in its victory of 1967 and enjoying the buffer zones created on most frontiers.
On October 6, 1973—the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur—Jewish farmers relaxing near Gaza suddenly heard the scream of Egyptian fighters overhead. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. At the Suez Canal, 400 Israeli soldiers were quickly overrun, and in minutes 8,000 Egyptian troops were across the border, followed by wave after wave of tanks. Israelis scrambled to counter the attack by air, but Soviet missiles shot them down. On the Golan Heights, 1,100 Syrian tanks overran 157 Israeli tanks, and in a handful of days, Syrian forces had penetrated Israel. The seriousness of the attack was sobering and frightening. In one month, Israel lost 2,378 soldiers.
Resupplied by American arms stores in Europe ($2.2 billion), the Israeli army counterattacked within the week, pushing the Syrians back. American satellite reconnaissance fed Israel the exact positions of all Egyptian troop movements in Sinai, and by mid-October the Egyptian army had lost over 250 tanks (compared to 10 Israeli tanks destroyed). Israeli speed, resolve, and discipline joined with superior American equipment and intelligence made victory inevitable. The Arab armies were fighting not simply Israel, but America—a note not later forgotten. In late October, the Egyptian Third Army was surrounded in Sinai, and though Israel wanted to completely destroy it, American pressure made Israel withdraw, ending the war on October 26.
With the help of the United States (and Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy), Egypt was willing to make concessions to Israel if Egypt would regain the oil fields of Sinai. Kissinger won this point in 1975, and with generous American aid now flowing to Egypt, Cairo’s hostilities eased. In this less tense atmosphere, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made a surprise visit to Jerusalem in 1977, paving the way for the famous meeting at Camp David in 1979 with Jimmy Carter. The accords reached at the meeting included a formal peace treaty, establishment of diplomatic relations, and Israel’s complete withdrawal from the Sinai. They also stipulated that this peace be linked to full autonomy for the Palestinians. Sadat’s courageous overture cost him his life, however, as he was killed in October 1981 by Egyptian radicals opposed to the peace process.
The Fifth War: 1982, The Invasion of Lebanon
With its southern border secured, Israel turned its attention to Palestinian military attacks on the Lebanese border in the north. Palestinians exiled since 1948 were waging a guerrilla war on northern Galilee, angry that they could not return home. In 1978, Israel launched its first land assault into Lebanon in order to create a buffer zone that it could control with the aid of Christian militias in the region. Still, the Palestinian forces were numerous and aggressive. Therefore, in June 1982, Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon (called Operation Peace for Galilee) in order to drive out the confederation of resistance groups called the Palestine Liberation Organization (known simply as the PLO). Refugee camps in southern Lebanon were destroyed, and
Israeli armor rolled to the edge of Beirut. For three months, Israeli artillery shelled the city, indiscriminately killing many thousands of Lebanese civilians until the Lebanese themselves agreed to usher the Palestinian leadership out of the country. Terror became another tactic as Lebanese militias under Israeli protection committed atrocities in refugee camps (e.g., the Sabra and Shatila camps). Finally, in August 1982, the PLO leadership was given safe passage out of Beirut and departed for Tunisia. In their wake, 16,000 Arabs and 700 Israeli soldiers had died.¹⁶
Many Arabs in Lebanon viewed America as responsible for financing Israel’s siege of their country. American hardware attacking them by air and land was easy to see. One popular Arab song of the period called Israel the snake to be watched—and America as the head of the snake. In July 1983, an Arab suicide bomber vented this hostility by destroying the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut, killing hundreds of American soldiers. For any astute observer of the region, the attack was an utterly predictable episode focused on a poorly defended target.
Refugees
Most of the major military conflicts just discussed produced refugees who fled their homes because of the war and then were refused permission to return. The numbers are simply staggering. Entire families have grown up in the squalor of these camps, and young adults have known no other life.
This explains why the Palestinian refugee community is the largest refugee population in the world. According to a 2010 UN study, there are 4.7 million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. Palestinians have also migrated to Western countries such as Australia and the United States. Today in Chicago, Illinois, or Dearborn, Michigan, for example, entire Palestinian communities have their own stores and neighborhoods—and long memories of the land left behind. What is surprising is how these refugees still remember their villages and their histories. In the large camp of Jalazone outside Ramallah, a family once explained their history to me in detail. Their home once had been located where today we find Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport. In 1948, the family was driven out by the army. Some extent of the disaster to Palestinian villages can be seen in the following statistics: of about 807 registered Palestinian villages in 1945, only 433 were still standing by 1967. Put bluntly, 45 percent of the Palestinian villages were emptied and demolished as a result of the creation of the state of Israel.¹⁷ As Israel acquired land, one of its specific goals was to depopulate the areas acquired. Today we refer to such activity as ethnic cleansing. The Palestinians fell victim to propaganda campaigns telling them to flee. Many Arab countries affirmed the wisdom of flight on the assumption that everyone could return home once the fighting was over.
One of my former Jewish neighbors spent most of his life in a kibbutz near Gaza during those turbulent years. He tells how in 1948 Israeli planes dropped leaflets in the Palestinian villages warning the people to get out or else they would all be killed. After they left, Israeli settlers simply moved into the Palestinian homes. Some of the villages were destroyed by dynamite, and some were plowed under for agricultural areas. Others are now buried in reforestation projects.
Consider, for instance, the Galilee village of Lubya (or Louba). Not far north of Nazareth and Kana is a small hill just off the Tiberius-Nazareth highway where Lubya was once located (about five miles west of Tiberius). Its history goes back before the Crusaders, who called the town Lubia. Nearby are the ruins of a medieval caravansary known as Khan Lubya, which refreshed travelers a thousand years ago. Even nineteenth-century pilgrims leaving Nazareth made note of it in their diaries. During the early twentieth century, about 700 people lived here.
The village was attacked at night on January 20, 1948, by Zionist forces, who were repelled. More attacks continued through March, but in April when Tiberius fell, Lubya looked to Nazareth for aid. In July, Nazareth surrendered to Israeli soldiers and the residents of Lubya were terrified. On July 16, most of the village fled northwest toward Lebanon, leaving behind some armed men and the elderly. When the Israelis arrived, they shelled the village and then began destroying homes. The elderly hid in caves and some escaped, but little is known of their fate. The villagers became refugees in Lebanon and have never been permitted by the Israelis to return.
Today the Lavi Pine Forest planted by the Jewish National Fund stands on the site. The debris of Lubya’s houses is buried in these forests, and one can still find the cacti, the fig, and the pomegranate trees marking another generation’s work. Random stone walls and the village’s cisterns are still visible. Ironically, an Israeli military museum has been built adjacent to the site in honor of an Israeli brigade’s heroism.¹⁸
The Sixth War: 1987–93, The First Intifada
During each of the previous wars, the Palestinians residing in and around Israel were becoming the pawns in a larger Middle Eastern chess game. As one Arab leader after the next came to terms with Israel’s existence, Palestinian frustration became acute. Who would champion their cause? In fact, an entire generation had now grown up under Israeli occupation, and 70 percent of the Palestinians were under twenty-five years of age. An estimated 120,000 of them traveled daily into Israel as manual laborers, and they could see the enormous inequities of their lives. Israeli appropriation of Arab land had grown at an alarming rate. Almost 50 percent of the West Bank and 30 percent of Gaza had been taken by the Israeli government. Water rights likewise provoked anger. In Gaza, 750,000 Palestinians consumed about 30 percent of the water available while 45,000 Jewish settlers were allotted the remaining 70 percent. Furthermore, in 1985, Israel’s Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin introduced his Iron Fist II policy to crush any Palestinian resistance. Within a month, twelve Palestinian political leaders were deported out of the country with no formal trial, sixty-two activists were placed under administrative detention, and five people were killed by the military. Israeli prisons were being filled with Palestinians, most under twenty-one. That same year, Israel bombed the new headquarters of the PLO in Tunis, killing more than seventy Palestinian leaders.
These compressed feelings erupted with a fury on December 8, 1987. A small group of tired Palestinian men were waiting in their cars on a narrow Gaza road at a military checkpoint. They were returning from a day’s work in Israel, crossing back into the territory where they lived. Suddenly, an Israeli tank appeared and swerved into the line of cars, crushing everything in its path. Four men died instantly, seven were critically injured. Official military reports stated that the tank’s brakes had failed. Rumor among those living in Gaza told a different story—that the crash was deliberate, in retaliation for the death of an Israeli soldier’s relative. The Palestinians found the rumor more believable, and the following day 6,000 people attended the four men’s funeral. Soon there were demonstrations and protests, which were quickly confronted by Israeli soldiers in the streets of Gaza. Arab injuries were everywhere as tear gas, beatings, and
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Israeli armor rolled to the edge of Beirut. For three months, Israeli artillery shelled the city, indiscriminately killing many thousands of Lebanese civilians until the Lebanese themselves agreed to usher the Palestinian leadership out of the country. Terror became another tactic as Lebanese militias under Israeli protection committed atrocities in refugee camps (e.g., the Sabra and Shatila camps). Finally, in August 1982, the PLO leadership was given safe passage out of Beirut and departed for Tunisia. In their wake, 16,000 Arabs and 700 Israeli soldiers had died.¹⁶ Many Arabs in Lebanon viewed America as responsible for financing Israel’s siege of their country. American hardware attacking them by air and land was easy to see. One popular Arab song of the period called Israel “the snake” to be watched—and America as “the head of the snake.” In July 1983, an Arab suicide bomber vented this hostility by destroying the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut, killing hundreds of American soldiers. For any astute observer of the region, the attack was an utterly predictable episode focused on a poorly defended target. Refugees Most of the major military conflicts just discussed produced refugees who fled their homes because of the war and then were refused permission to return. The numbers are simply staggering. Entire families have grown up in the squalor of these camps, and young adults have known no other life. This explains why the Palestinian refugee community is the largest refugee population in the world. According to a 2010 UN study, there are 4.7 million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. Palestinians have also migrated to Western countries such as Australia and the United States. Today in Chicago, Illinois, or Dearborn, Michigan, for example, entire Palestinian communities have their own stores and neighborhoods—and long memories of the land left behind. What is surprising is how these refugees still remember their villages and their histories. In the large camp of Jalazone outside Ramallah, a family once explained their history to me in detail. Their home once had been located where today we find Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport. In 1948, the family was driven out by the army. Some extent of the disaster to Palestinian villages can be seen in the following statistics: of about 807 registered Palestinian villages in 1945, only 433 were still standing by 1967. Put bluntly, 45 percent of the Palestinian villages were emptied and demolished as a result of the creation of the state of Israel.¹⁷ As Israel acquired land, one of its specific goals was to depopulate the areas acquired. Today we refer to such activity as “ethnic cleansing.” The Palestinians fell victim to propaganda campaigns telling them to flee. Many Arab countries affirmed the wisdom of flight on the assumption that everyone could return home once the fighting was over. One of my former Jewish neighbors spent most of his life in a kibbutz near Gaza during those turbulent years. He tells how in 1948 Israeli planes dropped leaflets in the Palestinian villages warning the people to get out or else they would all be killed. After they left, Israeli settlers simply moved into the Palestinian homes. Some of the villages were destroyed by dynamite, and some were plowed under for agricultural areas. Others are now buried in reforestation projects. Consider, for instance, the Galilee village of Lubya (or Louba). Not far north of Nazareth and Kana is a small hill just off the Tiberius-Nazareth highway where Lubya was once located (about five miles west of Tiberius). Its history goes back before the Crusaders, who called the town Lubia. Nearby are the ruins of a medieval caravansary known as “Khan Lubya,” which refreshed travelers a thousand years ago. Even nineteenth-century pilgrims leaving Nazareth made note of it in their diaries. During the early twentieth century, about 700 people lived here. The village was attacked at night on January 20, 1948, by Zionist forces, who were repelled. More attacks continued through March, but in April when Tiberius fell, Lubya looked to Nazareth for aid. In July, Nazareth surrendered to Israeli soldiers and the residents of Lubya were terrified. On July 16, most of the village fled northwest toward Lebanon, leaving behind some armed men and the elderly. When the Israelis arrived, they shelled the village and then began destroying homes. The elderly hid in caves and some escaped, but little is known of their fate. The villagers became refugees in Lebanon and have never been permitted by the Israelis to return. Today the Lavi Pine Forest planted by the Jewish National Fund stands on the site. The debris of Lubya’s houses is buried in these forests, and one can still find the cacti, the fig, and the pomegranate trees marking another generation’s work. Random stone walls and the village’s cisterns are still visible. Ironically, an Israeli military museum has been built adjacent to the site in honor of an Israeli brigade’s heroism.¹⁸ The Sixth War: 1987–93, “The First Intifada” During each of the previous wars, the Palestinians residing in and around Israel were becoming the pawns in a larger Middle Eastern chess game. As one Arab leader after the next came to terms with Israel’s existence, Palestinian frustration became acute. Who would champion their cause? In fact, an entire generation had now grown up under Israeli occupation, and 70 percent of the Palestinians were under twenty-five years of age. An estimated 120,000 of them traveled daily into Israel as manual laborers, and they could see the enormous inequities of their lives. Israeli appropriation of Arab land had grown at an alarming rate. Almost 50 percent of the West Bank and 30 percent of Gaza had been taken by the Israeli government. Water rights likewise provoked anger. In Gaza, 750,000 Palestinians consumed about 30 percent of the water available while 45,000 Jewish settlers were allotted the remaining 70 percent. Furthermore, in 1985, Israel’s Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin introduced his “Iron Fist II” policy to crush any Palestinian resistance. Within a month, twelve Palestinian political leaders were deported out of the country with no formal trial, sixty-two activists were placed under administrative detention, and five people were killed by the military. Israeli prisons were being filled with Palestinians, most under twenty-one. That same year, Israel bombed the new headquarters of the PLO in Tunis, killing more than seventy Palestinian leaders. These compressed feelings erupted with a fury on December 8, 1987. A small group of tired Palestinian men were waiting in their cars on a narrow Gaza road at a military checkpoint. They were returning from a day’s work in Israel, crossing back into the territory where they lived. Suddenly, an Israeli tank appeared and swerved into the line of cars, crushing everything in its path. Four men died instantly, seven were critically injured. Official military reports stated that the tank’s brakes had failed. Rumor among those living in Gaza told a different story—that the crash was deliberate, in retaliation for the death of an Israeli soldier’s relative. The Palestinians found the rumor more believable, and the following day 6,000 people attended the four men’s funeral. Soon there were demonstrations and protests, which were quickly confronted by Israeli soldiers in the streets of Gaza. Arab injuries were everywhere as tear gas, beatings, and
speaker, author, and confessor on behalf of his family. And he provides a telling window, once secret, of what transpired during 1948–1967.
It has always struck me as ironic that if you stand in the right place at the Jewish Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem (Yad Vashem), you can almost see the village of Deir Yassin. Even the family home of Menachem Begin (the leader of the massacre) is just across the valley. But Deir Yassin was not an exception to the Israeli’s ethnic cleansing. Countless villages received severe treatment. In the end, over 400 villages were turned to rubble. From the Palestinian view, these events were the first use of terrorism in the country.
The Second War: 1956, The Sinai War
Hostilities continued for eight years, generally in the form of guerrilla attacks. Egypt’s fury was expressed by nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1954 and by closing the canal to Israeli shipping the next year. Egypt also blockaded the Israeli port of Eilat, disrupting all Asia-bound shipping. Seeing this move as an act of war, Israel attacked Egypt on October 29, 1956, with a land assault across the Sinai. British and French forces then bombed Port Said and Port Fu’ad at the north end of the canal and landed troops. In response to exhaustive UN condemnations (and American pressure), Britain and France left Egypt; Israel withdrew in 1957. UN troops entered the region to secure a fragile peace on the promise that Egypt would not stop Israeli shipping from Eilat through the Gulf of Aqaba.
The Third War: 1967, The Six-Day War
The struggle was obviously not going to end that easily. Border skirmishes continued between Israel and the Arab countries of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt for eleven years. By 1966, all of the countries clearly were bracing for war. Egypt termed it a holy war to defeat the Jews. By spring 1967, Egypt called for the withdrawal of all UN troops in Sinai. Egypt then blocked the Gulf of Aqaba again and began moving heavily armored divisions to the border. Syria did the same. The Arabs were poised to field about 540,000 troops, 2,500 tanks, and 950 aircraft. The Israelis had 265,000 troops, 800 tanks, and 300 aircraft. The odds could not have been stacked more firmly against Israel.
Anticipating an attack, on June 5, 1967, Israel struck first by launching an air strike in the early morning and virtually wiped out the Egyptian air force on the ground. By nightfall, Israel had destroyed 416 Arab planes. Within two days (June 7), Israel occupied all of east Jerusalem—meaning that for the first time since the days of the Roman Empire, Jews now occupied Jerusalem in its entirety. Within a week (June 10), the war was over. With lightning speed and superior organization, Israel had defeated an overwhelming Arab army and succeeded in taking the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank (to the Jordan River), and the Golan Heights.
Following the war, another million Arabs were now under Israeli military control, and over 350,000 Arabs fled as refugees to neighboring countries. By December, 245,000 had fled the West Bank, 11,000 had fled Gaza, and 116,000 Syrians had fled the Golan Heights. And again Israel closed its borders to them. The United Nations concluded that Israel had no intention of returning to its pre-1967 borders and in November 1967 demanded that it do so. This UN decision—Resolution 242—is famous and is still cited today as a call for Israel to return conquered lands and set captive people free.¹⁵
The Fourth War: 1973, The Yom Kippur War
Calculating the wound to Arab pride that came in 1967 is impossible. Syria and Egypt—with massive aid from the Soviet Union—began rebuilding their armies almost immediately. This time, however, both were equipped with sophisticated surface-to-air missiles that would halt another Israeli air attack. Incredibly Israel was complacent, basking now in its victory of 1967 and enjoying the buffer zones created on most frontiers.
On October 6, 1973—the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur—Jewish farmers relaxing near Gaza suddenly heard the scream of Egyptian fighters overhead. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. At the Suez Canal, 400 Israeli soldiers were quickly overrun, and in minutes 8,000 Egyptian troops were across the border, followed by wave after wave of tanks. Israelis scrambled to counter the attack by air, but Soviet missiles shot them down. On the Golan Heights, 1,100 Syrian tanks overran 157 Israeli tanks, and in a handful of days, Syrian forces had penetrated Israel. The seriousness of the attack was sobering and frightening. In one month, Israel lost 2,378 soldiers.
Resupplied by American arms stores in Europe ($2.2 billion), the Israeli army counterattacked within the week, pushing the Syrians back. American satellite reconnaissance fed Israel the exact positions of all Egyptian troop movements in Sinai, and by mid-October the Egyptian army had lost over 250 tanks (compared to 10 Israeli tanks destroyed). Israeli speed, resolve, and discipline joined with superior American equipment and intelligence made victory inevitable. The Arab armies were fighting not simply Israel, but America—a note not later forgotten. In late October, the Egyptian Third Army was surrounded in Sinai, and though Israel wanted to completely destroy it, American pressure made Israel withdraw, ending the war on October 26.
With the help of the United States (and Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy), Egypt was willing to make concessions to Israel if Egypt would regain the oil fields of Sinai. Kissinger won this point in 1975, and with generous American aid now flowing to Egypt, Cairo’s hostilities eased. In this less tense atmosphere, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made a surprise visit to Jerusalem in 1977, paving the way for the famous meeting at Camp David in 1979 with Jimmy Carter. The accords reached at the meeting included a formal peace treaty, establishment of diplomatic relations, and Israel’s complete withdrawal from the Sinai. They also stipulated that this peace be linked to full autonomy for the Palestinians. Sadat’s courageous overture cost him his life, however, as he was killed in October 1981 by Egyptian radicals opposed to the peace process.
The Fifth War: 1982, The Invasion of Lebanon
With its southern border secured, Israel turned its attention to Palestinian military attacks on the Lebanese border in the north. Palestinians exiled since 1948 were waging a guerrilla war on northern Galilee, angry that they could not return home. In 1978, Israel launched its first land assault into Lebanon in order to create a buffer zone that it could control with the aid of Christian militias in the region. Still, the Palestinian forces were numerous and aggressive. Therefore, in June 1982, Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon (called Operation Peace for Galilee) in order to drive out the confederation of resistance groups called the Palestine Liberation Organization (known simply as the PLO). Refugee camps in southern Lebanon were destroyed, and
Israeli armor rolled to the edge of Beirut. For three months, Israeli artillery shelled the city, indiscriminately killing many thousands of Lebanese civilians until the Lebanese themselves agreed to usher the Palestinian leadership out of the country. Terror became another tactic as Lebanese militias under Israeli protection committed atrocities in refugee camps (e.g., the Sabra and Shatila camps). Finally, in August 1982, the PLO leadership was given safe passage out of Beirut and departed for Tunisia. In their wake, 16,000 Arabs and 700 Israeli soldiers had died.¹⁶
Many Arabs in Lebanon viewed America as responsible for financing Israel’s siege of their country. American hardware attacking them by air and land was easy to see. One popular Arab song of the period called Israel the snake to be watched—and America as the head of the snake. In July 1983, an Arab suicide bomber vented this hostility by destroying the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut, killing hundreds of American soldiers. For any astute observer of the region, the attack was an utterly predictable episode focused on a poorly defended target.
Refugees
Most of the major military conflicts just discussed produced refugees who fled their homes because of the war and then were refused permission to return. The numbers are simply staggering. Entire families have grown up in the squalor of these camps, and young adults have known no other life.
This explains why the Palestinian refugee community is the largest refugee population in the world. According to a 2010 UN study, there are 4.7 million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. Palestinians have also migrated to Western countries such as Australia and the United States. Today in Chicago, Illinois, or Dearborn, Michigan, for example, entire Palestinian communities have their own stores and neighborhoods—and long memories of the land left behind. What is surprising is how these refugees still remember their villages and their histories. In the large camp of Jalazone outside Ramallah, a family once explained their history to me in detail. Their home once had been located where today we find Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport. In 1948, the family was driven out by the army. Some extent of the disaster to Palestinian villages can be seen in the following statistics: of about 807 registered Palestinian villages in 1945, only 433 were still standing by 1967. Put bluntly, 45 percent of the Palestinian villages were emptied and demolished as a result of the creation of the state of Israel.¹⁷ As Israel acquired land, one of its specific goals was to depopulate the areas acquired. Today we refer to such activity as ethnic cleansing. The Palestinians fell victim to propaganda campaigns telling them to flee. Many Arab countries affirmed the wisdom of flight on the assumption that everyone could return home once the fighting was over.
One of my former Jewish neighbors spent most of his life in a kibbutz near Gaza during those turbulent years. He tells how in 1948 Israeli planes dropped leaflets in the Palestinian villages warning the people to get out or else they would all be killed. After they left, Israeli settlers simply moved into the Palestinian homes. Some of the villages were destroyed by dynamite, and some were plowed under for agricultural areas. Others are now buried in reforestation projects.
Consider, for instance, the Galilee village of Lubya (or Louba). Not far north of Nazareth and Kana is a small hill just off the Tiberius-Nazareth highway where Lubya was once located (about five miles west of Tiberius). Its history goes back before the Crusaders, who called the town Lubia. Nearby are the ruins of a medieval caravansary known as Khan Lubya, which refreshed travelers a thousand years ago. Even nineteenth-century pilgrims leaving Nazareth made note of it in their diaries. During the early twentieth century, about 700 people lived here.
The village was attacked at night on January 20, 1948, by Zionist forces, who were repelled. More attacks continued through March, but in April when Tiberius fell, Lubya looked to Nazareth for aid. In July, Nazareth surrendered to Israeli soldiers and the residents of Lubya were terrified. On July 16, most of the village fled northwest toward Lebanon, leaving behind some armed men and the elderly. When the Israelis arrived, they shelled the village and then began destroying homes. The elderly hid in caves and some escaped, but little is known of their fate. The villagers became refugees in Lebanon and have never been permitted by the Israelis to return.
Today the Lavi Pine Forest planted by the Jewish National Fund stands on the site. The debris of Lubya’s houses is buried in these forests, and one can still find the cacti, the fig, and the pomegranate trees marking another generation’s work. Random stone walls and the village’s cisterns are still visible. Ironically, an Israeli military museum has been built adjacent to the site in honor of an Israeli brigade’s heroism.¹⁸
The Sixth War: 1987–93, The First Intifada
During each of the previous wars, the Palestinians residing in and around Israel were becoming the pawns in a larger Middle Eastern chess game. As one Arab leader after the next came to terms with Israel’s existence, Palestinian frustration became acute. Who would champion their cause? In fact, an entire generation had now grown up under Israeli occupation, and 70 percent of the Palestinians were under twenty-five years of age. An estimated 120,000 of them traveled daily into Israel as manual laborers, and they could see the enormous inequities of their lives. Israeli appropriation of Arab land had grown at an alarming rate. Almost 50 percent of the West Bank and 30 percent of Gaza had been taken by the Israeli government. Water rights likewise provoked anger. In Gaza, 750,000 Palestinians consumed about 30 percent of the water available while 45,000 Jewish settlers were allotted the remaining 70 percent. Furthermore, in 1985, Israel’s Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin introduced his Iron Fist II policy to crush any Palestinian resistance. Within a month, twelve Palestinian political leaders were deported out of the country with no formal trial, sixty-two activists were placed under administrative detention, and five people were killed by the military. Israeli prisons were being filled with Palestinians, most under twenty-one. That same year, Israel bombed the new headquarters of the PLO in Tunis, killing more than seventy Palestinian leaders.
These compressed feelings erupted with a fury on December 8, 1987. A small group of tired Palestinian men were waiting in their cars on a narrow Gaza road at a military checkpoint. They were returning from a day’s work in Israel, crossing back into the territory where they lived. Suddenly, an Israeli tank appeared and swerved into the line of cars, crushing everything in its path. Four men died instantly, seven were critically injured. Official military reports stated that the tank’s brakes had failed. Rumor among those living in Gaza told a different story—that the crash was deliberate, in retaliation for the death of an Israeli soldier’s relative. The Palestinians found the rumor more believable, and the following day 6,000 people attended the four men’s funeral. Soon there were demonstrations and protests, which were quickly confronted by Israeli soldiers in the streets of Gaza. Arab injuries were everywhere as tear gas, beatings, and
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arrests spread and Israeli troops poured in. This funeral was to be the most significant in Palestinian history. The Intifada had begun. Palestinians took to the streets throughout the country, disengaging from the Israeli economy and fighting their occupation with civil disobedience (throwing stones, etc.) to thwart Israel’s control and inspire international sympathy. Soon the world’s televisions were showing heavily armed Israeli soldiers with Uzi submachine guns squaring off against teenagers with slings and rocks. It was made for TV: David and Goliath revisited, except that now the Jews were playing the role of the giant. In many cases, women took to the street and dared the soldiers to harm them. When harm came in the form of rubber bullets, toxic tear gas, or glass pellets shot from guns, the rage in the villages was uncontrollable. During the first year of fighting, 300 Palestinians were killed and 11,500 were wounded. To enter the street, to resist the soldier, even to be wounded—these became marks of heroism in villages and refugee camps. At last, Palestinians said, “we’re doing something.” Soon the uprising was guided by a central authority—The Unified National Command of the Uprising—which worked closely with the PLO. Momentum was growing. Intifada does not mean “uprising.” Palestinians say it means to shake off aggressively as if a scorpion had suddenly appeared on your arm. The Intifada was the first unifying expression of Palestinian solidarity that could not be stopped. The Israelis did everything to halt it: beatings, arrests, deportations, shootings. Nothing worked. The Palestinian school system was closed for two years; the university system was closed for four. In five years, over 1,000 Palestinians were killed by soldiers and 230 of these were under sixteen years old. Over 16,000 people were imprisoned, and over 1,882 homes were demolished as punishment. On any given day, 25,000 Arabs could be found under curfew. Some villages witnessed mass arrests where all males between the ages of fourteen and sixty were taken away to detention camps where torture became a frequent policy of the Israeli Secret Police (Shin Bet). Only in the last few years has Israel admitted these policies and made them public in its national press. A June 1994 report of the Palestine Human Rights Information Center offers some idea of the impact of the Intifada. By their estimate, the total deaths resulting from shootings, beatings, or tear gas was 1,392. Of this number, 362 were children under the age of sixteen. Injuries stemming from actions of the Israeli army were about 130,787. The number of property demolitions numbered at almost 2,000, and about 382 houses had been sealed shut. Given statistics such as these, it is little wonder that the world raised an outcry at the images the media captured from the streets. In fact, one of the main reasons that the Intifada had some definite, positive consequences was because of the media’s role in the conflict. Thousands of protests erupted throughout the world in countries such as West Germany, Italy, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, and Japan. Gallup polls in the United States revealed that 41 percent of Americans thought U.S. aid to Israel should be decreased, and 20 percent wanted it stopped altogether. Twenty-two percent of these people gave Israel’s handling of the Intifada as the reason for their opinion. The effect on Israel was paralyzing. Israelis suddenly were engaged in an internal war that could not be won. Young Israeli men and women, trained in field combat, were now in the streets brutalizing average people, and it wounded the Jewish conscience. Numerous Israeli peace groups spoke out, condemning Israeli behavior. Many Jewish families, shaped by the heroism of other wars, viewed these deeds as demolishing Israeli virtue. The government had worked hard in many cases to improve life in the West Bank. The number of clinics and hospitals, for instance, had grown from 113 to 378 since 1967. The roster of schoolteachers had grown from 5,316 to 17,373. Nevertheless, three times more Arabs had died under Israeli occupation than the number of blacks killed under South African apartheid. No Israeli could be proud of this record. In 1988, King Hussein of Jordan made a bold move. He gave up all claim to the West Bank, thus making way for a Palestinian claim to statehood. As a result, peace in Bethlehem and East Jerusalem had to be negotiated directly with the Palestinians and no one else. In December 1989, a yet more remarkable event occurred. The leader of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, spoke to the general assembly of the United Nations and not only recognized the State of Israel (by embracing UN Resolution 242 [see p. 44]), but he denounced terrorism. While Israel refused to talk to the PLO, the United States announced that it would accept direct diplomatic discussions with Arafat, thus acknowledging the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The Gulf War, 1990–91 If the Six-Day War of 1967 inspired many Christian writers to wonder about the biblical fulfillment of prophesy, the Gulf War in 1990 helped these writers identify the enemy clearly: Saddam Hussein. While eschatological zeal among Christians was evaporating in the 1980s, Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 resurrected prophetic speculation again. Did Iraq’s mighty army represent that configuration of armies that would meet in Armageddon? As hundreds of thousands of allied troops raced to the gulf along with the largest arms airlift in military history, Iraq knew that it had to fracture the Arab coalition arrayed against it. Israel stayed out of the conflict (because of American pressure) given that no Egyptian or Saudi soldier would ever fight alongside an Israeli against another Arab. On December 27, 1990, Saddam Hussein unofficially began Israel’s involvement in the Gulf War by broadcasting his intentions publicly: “If aggression were to take place, we should assume that Israel has taken part in it. Therefore, without asking any questions we will strike at Israel.” Less than a month later, on January 18 the first of forty-two Scud missiles hit Israeli cities. Thanks to President Bush’s immediate order to deploy U.S. Patriot antimissile batteries to protect Israel, the damage was fairly minimal. A total of two deaths, 230 injuries, and 4,100 damaged buildings resulted from the attacks. Israeli military restraint not to retaliate was phenomenal. Israel had thorough surveillance of Iraqi war capabilities. In 1981, for instance, Israel had attacked Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant, fearing the development of nuclear warheads. One week prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Arens perfectly predicted the Iraqi offensive by warning the American State Department. Hussein’s strategy to play the Israeli card failed. In fact, his actions probably strengthened the allied coalition. The common threat that he posed to such countries as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, and Turkey provided the glue that held these unlikely friends together. Ironically one byproduct of the war may have been the many peace talks between Israel and its neighbors throughout the 1990s. The situation that the Palestinians found themselves in at the time of the Gulf War can be illustrated simply by reading the headlines of newspapers around the world at the time: “In Time of Trouble,” “Caught in a Crossfire,” “The Other Occupation,” “The Biggest Losers of the Gulf War,” “The Palestinians Back Another Loser.” The Gulf War
put in bold relief the Palestinian dilemma in the early 1990s. The Intifada was losing steam and the world’s television cameras had gone elsewhere. Saddam Hussein had welcomed the Palestinians for years and was a champion of their cause. A Palestinian doctor in Gaza said it poignantly in 1991, “Everyone has closed the door to us. . . . There’s just one light coming through, and it’s coming from Saddam Hussein. Can you blame us for wanting to follow that light to the end?” No matter how ludicrous it seems now, Saddam Hussein had dedicated his cause to the liberation of these Palestinians living in Occupied Territories like the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat and the Palestinians thus threw in with Saddam Hussein, and many hoped and prayed that the war would bring them freedom. This alliance did not make their lives any easier. For the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, the war meant strict curfews that were enforced at gunpoint. The Palestinian economy was paralyzed, and many feared hunger. Gas masks were distributed to all Israeli citizens but not to Arabs in the West Bank. When the shooting started, one nineteen-year-old Arab boy remarked, “We don’t have shelters or gas masks. If there’s an attack, we’ll die in flocks. If we make any problems, Israeli soldiers will flatten the whole area.” During the war, perhaps 10 percent of Kuwait was made up of Palestinian workers. Open Palestinian support for Iraq after the invasion put them under immediate suspicion by the Kuwaitis. Some of them helped administer the occupation; many simply stayed out of sight. Following the war, Kuwaiti courts sentenced 29 Palestinians to death. Most of the rest fled or were expelled, but few Arab countries opened their doors. Jordan accepted over 300,000 people with no place to put them. Refugee camps spilled over. Amman was filled with men and women who had no place to go. Abdul Fatah, a former researcher for the Kuwait government, took a job at a small plastics factory in Jordan but could not make ends meet on his monthly salary of $102. “We had a comfortable life in Kuwait and were content,” said his wife, Ne’meh, sitting in the family’s shack on the outskirts of Amman. “Now that’s all gone.” Muhammad Ayyash Milhem, head of a Jordanian committee for the new arrivals, estimated in March 1992 that about 188,000 of the Palestinian refugees were in complete poverty. Another consequence of the war was the disengagement of many Arab countries with the PLO. Saudi Arabia, for instance, provided $250 million per year to the PLO budget but cut off all funds. Arafat was being discredited by many. His people were angry and despairing. In Jerusalem’s Old City, Mohammed Kamel said it well: “We are depressed and desperate because we have no friends and no allies. This is the story of our lives.” The Peace Process in the 1990s By the close of the Gulf War, the eyes of the world were no longer on the Palestinians, and the sympathy the Intifada had created had all but dissipated. Street conflicts continued, but they were sporadic. Many of the world’s leaders knew that something had to be done to address this unresolved problem. The United States, recently buoyed by the victory over Iraq, now viewed itself as a genuine leader in the region. In October 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union sponsored a Middle East peace conference in Madrid between Arab and Israeli delegates, and they invited leaders from the PLO. Israelis and the Palestinians were negotiating for the first time, but the meetings were a disappointment. Palestinian national aspirations were dashed as Israel and the United States only offered autonomy over civilian affairs, which the Palestinians rejected. More meetings—this time secret—came in Oslo, Norway, in January 1993. After lengthy negotiations, both Israel and the PLO signed the “Declaration of Principles” in Washington, D.C., on September 13, 1993. This declaration (also called the “Oslo Accords”) brought formal mutual recognition to both parties and affirmed that both the West Bank and Gaza would be progressively handed over to the Palestinians over five years. By May 1994, Israel fulfilled the beginning of its promises by removing its troops from Gaza. In July, Arafat entered Gaza with great fanfare and soon swore in the members of the new “Palestinian Authority.” By the end of the year, the “PA” had assumed control of education, social welfare, health, tourism, and taxation. But the peace process did not please many extremists, particularly among the Israeli settlers. On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir took out his rage by assassinating Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv.¹⁹ Rabin was a hero of the peace process and the winner (along with Peres and Arafat) of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. His death profoundly shocked the Israeli public. For the next seven years, Palestinians and Israelis continued to negotiate about how the West Bank—or which parts of it—would come under Arab control. Large Arab cities like Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, and Jennin would have Palestinian police and no more Israeli military patrols (except in limited areas where settlers lived). The entire countryside would be divided into zones, some planned for Palestinian control, others reserved for Israeli development, making the West Bank a patchwork or regions without contiguous borders. According to many Arab leaders, these disconnected areas eliminated the possibility of a Palestinian state altogether. Many questions remain. How could Gaza and the West Bank be united when they share no contiguous border? Would Israeli settlers be placed under Palestinian authority? Would the PA be able to control borders with the outside world? And what about East Jerusalem, now annexed by Israel along with its large Palestinian population? Many Palestinian leaders view Jerusalem as the heart of their country. As progress on these matters continues, Palestinian optimism will grow. But when negotiations continue year after year and more and more Israeli settlements are built on Arab land, the prospect for continued violence remains and Palestinian optimism dissipates quickly. Afaf Mikki, a Palestinian woman who owned an embroidery shop in Gaza, commented in 1995, “I only feel that we are in a big prison, and the Israelis have the keys, and they will open the door only when they want.” After seven years of living under the Oslo Accords (by mid-2000), Palestinian frustration reached a peak. Rather than using this time to advance peace, the Israeli government accelerated its acquisition of Palestinian land. The West Bank is today a bewildering array of disconnected “cantons” that have no territorial contiguity. Early Palestinian worries have been confirmed. This fragmentation makes the building of any Palestinian state impossible. Most observers today see it as a new form of apartheid. One Palestinian described it thus: This is like two teenagers arguing over the last slice of pizza, except that one of them is eating it. But in addition, settlements expanded at a rate not seen before. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accelerated settlement growth to four times what it was previously, despite promises made at Oslo. To echo an old adage, simply follow the money. During the Oslo era (after 1993) successive Israeli governments invested almost $7 billion to encourage and expand West Bank and, until 2005, Gaza settlements. And the pace of government investment has continued since 2003. From
arrests spread and Israeli troops poured in. This funeral was to be the most significant in Palestinian history. The Intifada had begun.
Palestinians took to the streets throughout the country, disengaging from the Israeli economy and fighting their occupation with civil disobedience (throwing stones, etc.) to thwart Israel’s control and inspire international sympathy. Soon the world’s televisions were showing heavily armed Israeli soldiers with Uzi submachine guns squaring off against teenagers with slings and rocks. It was made for TV: David and Goliath revisited, except that now the Jews were playing the role of the giant. In many cases, women took to the street and dared the soldiers to harm them. When harm came in the form of rubber bullets, toxic tear gas, or glass pellets shot from guns, the rage in the villages was uncontrollable. During the first year of fighting, 300 Palestinians were killed and 11,500 were wounded. To enter the street, to resist the soldier, even to be wounded—these became marks of heroism in villages and refugee camps. At last, Palestinians said, we’re doing something. Soon the uprising was guided by a central authority—The Unified National Command of the Uprising—which worked closely with the PLO. Momentum was growing.
Intifada does not mean uprising. Palestinians say it means to shake off aggressively as if a scorpion had suddenly appeared on your arm. The Intifada was the first unifying expression of Palestinian solidarity that could not be stopped. The Israelis did everything to halt it: beatings, arrests, deportations, shootings. Nothing worked. The Palestinian school system was closed for two years; the university system was closed for four. In five years, over 1,000 Palestinians were killed by soldiers and 230 of these were under sixteen years old. Over 16,000 people were imprisoned, and over 1,882 homes were demolished as punishment. On any given day, 25,000 Arabs could be found under curfew. Some villages witnessed mass arrests where all males between the ages of fourteen and sixty were taken away to detention camps where torture became a frequent policy of the Israeli Secret Police (Shin Bet). Only in the last few years has Israel admitted these policies and made them public in its national press.
A June 1994 report of the Palestine Human Rights Information Center offers some idea of the impact of the Intifada. By their estimate, the total deaths resulting from shootings, beatings, or tear gas was 1,392. Of this number, 362 were children under the age of sixteen. Injuries stemming from actions of the Israeli army were about 130,787. The number of property demolitions numbered at almost 2,000, and about 382 houses had been sealed shut. Given statistics such as these, it is little wonder that the world raised an outcry at the images the media captured from the streets. In fact, one of the main reasons that the Intifada had some definite, positive consequences was because of the media’s role in the conflict. Thousands of protests erupted throughout the world in countries such as West Germany, Italy, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, and Japan. Gallup polls in the United States revealed that 41 percent of Americans thought U.S. aid to Israel should be decreased, and 20 percent wanted it stopped altogether. Twenty-two percent of these people gave Israel’s handling of the Intifada as the reason for their opinion.
The effect on Israel was paralyzing. Israelis suddenly were engaged in an internal war that could not be won. Young Israeli men and women, trained in field combat, were now in the streets brutalizing average people, and it wounded the Jewish conscience. Numerous Israeli peace groups spoke out, condemning Israeli behavior. Many Jewish families, shaped by the heroism of other wars, viewed these deeds as demolishing Israeli virtue. The government had worked hard in many cases to improve life in the West Bank. The number of clinics and hospitals, for instance, had grown from 113 to 378 since 1967. The roster of schoolteachers had grown from 5,316 to 17,373. Nevertheless, three times more Arabs had died under Israeli occupation than the number of blacks killed under South African apartheid. No Israeli could be proud of this record.
In 1988, King Hussein of Jordan made a bold move. He gave up all claim to the West Bank, thus making way for a Palestinian claim to statehood. As a result, peace in Bethlehem and East Jerusalem had to be negotiated directly with the Palestinians and no one else. In December 1989, a yet more remarkable event occurred. The leader of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, spoke to the general assembly of the United Nations and not only recognized the State of Israel (by embracing UN Resolution 242 [see p. 44]), but he denounced terrorism. While Israel refused to talk to the PLO, the United States announced that it would accept direct diplomatic discussions with Arafat, thus acknowledging the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
The Gulf War, 1990–91
If the Six-Day War of 1967 inspired many Christian writers to wonder about the biblical fulfillment of prophesy, the Gulf War in 1990 helped these writers identify the enemy clearly: Saddam Hussein. While eschatological zeal among Christians was evaporating in the 1980s, Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 resurrected prophetic speculation again. Did Iraq’s mighty army represent that configuration of armies that would meet in Armageddon?
As hundreds of thousands of allied troops raced to the gulf along with the largest arms airlift in military history, Iraq knew that it had to fracture the Arab coalition arrayed against it. Israel stayed out of the conflict (because of American pressure) given that no Egyptian or Saudi soldier would ever fight alongside an Israeli against another Arab. On December 27, 1990, Saddam Hussein unofficially began Israel’s involvement in the Gulf War by broadcasting his intentions publicly: If aggression were to take place, we should assume that Israel has taken part in it. Therefore, without asking any questions we will strike at Israel. Less than a month later, on January 18 the first of forty-two Scud missiles hit Israeli cities. Thanks to President Bush’s immediate order to deploy U.S. Patriot antimissile batteries to protect Israel, the damage was fairly minimal. A total of two deaths, 230 injuries, and 4,100 damaged buildings resulted from the attacks. Israeli military restraint not to retaliate was phenomenal. Israel had thorough surveillance of Iraqi war capabilities. In 1981, for instance, Israel had attacked Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant, fearing the development of nuclear warheads. One week prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Arens perfectly predicted the Iraqi offensive by warning the American State Department.
Hussein’s strategy to play the Israeli card failed. In fact, his actions probably strengthened the allied coalition. The common threat that he posed to such countries as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, and Turkey provided the glue that held these unlikely friends together. Ironically one byproduct of the war may have been the many peace talks between Israel and its neighbors throughout the 1990s.
The situation that the Palestinians found themselves in at the time of the Gulf War can be illustrated simply by reading the headlines of newspapers around the world at the time: In Time of Trouble, Caught in a Crossfire, The Other Occupation, The Biggest Losers of the Gulf War, The Palestinians Back Another Loser. The Gulf War
put in bold relief the Palestinian dilemma in the early 1990s. The Intifada was losing steam and the world’s television cameras had gone elsewhere. Saddam Hussein had welcomed the Palestinians for years and was a champion of their cause. A Palestinian doctor in Gaza said it poignantly in 1991, Everyone has closed the door to us. . . . There’s just one light coming through, and it’s coming from Saddam Hussein. Can you blame us for wanting to follow that light to the end?
No matter how ludicrous it seems now, Saddam Hussein had dedicated his cause to the liberation of these Palestinians living in Occupied Territories like the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat and the Palestinians thus threw in with Saddam Hussein, and many hoped and prayed that the war would bring them freedom. This alliance did not make their lives any easier. For the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, the war meant strict curfews that were enforced at gunpoint. The Palestinian economy was paralyzed, and many feared hunger. Gas masks were distributed to all Israeli citizens but not to Arabs in the West Bank. When the shooting started, one nineteen-year-old Arab boy remarked, We don’t have shelters or gas masks. If there’s an attack, we’ll die in flocks. If we make any problems, Israeli soldiers will flatten the whole area.
During the war, perhaps 10 percent of Kuwait was made up of Palestinian workers. Open Palestinian support for Iraq after the invasion put them under immediate suspicion by the Kuwaitis. Some of them helped administer the occupation; many simply stayed out of sight. Following the war, Kuwaiti courts sentenced 29 Palestinians to death. Most of the rest fled or were expelled, but few Arab countries opened their doors. Jordan accepted over 300,000 people with no place to put them. Refugee camps spilled over. Amman was filled with men and women who had no place to go. Abdul Fatah, a former researcher for the Kuwait government, took a job at a small plastics factory in Jordan but could not make ends meet on his monthly salary of $102. We had a comfortable life in Kuwait and were content, said his wife, Ne’meh, sitting in the family’s shack on the outskirts of Amman. Now that’s all gone. Muhammad Ayyash Milhem, head of a Jordanian committee for the new arrivals, estimated in March 1992 that about 188,000 of the Palestinian refugees were in complete poverty.
Another consequence of the war was the disengagement of many Arab countries with the PLO. Saudi Arabia, for instance, provided $250 million per year to the PLO budget but cut off all funds. Arafat was being discredited by many. His people were angry and despairing. In Jerusalem’s Old City, Mohammed Kamel said it well: We are depressed and desperate because we have no friends and no allies. This is the story of our lives.
The Peace Process in the 1990s
By the close of the Gulf War, the eyes of the world were no longer on the Palestinians, and the sympathy the Intifada had created had all but dissipated. Street conflicts continued, but they were sporadic. Many of the world’s leaders knew that something had to be done to address this unresolved problem. The United States, recently buoyed by the victory over Iraq, now viewed itself as a genuine leader in the region. In October 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union sponsored a Middle East peace conference in Madrid between Arab and Israeli delegates, and they invited leaders from the PLO. Israelis and the Palestinians were negotiating for the first time, but the meetings were a disappointment. Palestinian national aspirations were dashed as Israel and the United States only offered autonomy over civilian affairs, which the Palestinians rejected.
More meetings—this time secret—came in Oslo, Norway, in January 1993. After lengthy negotiations, both Israel and the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles in Washington, D.C., on September 13, 1993. This declaration (also called the Oslo Accords) brought formal mutual recognition to both parties and affirmed that both the West Bank and Gaza would be progressively handed over to the Palestinians over five years. By May 1994, Israel fulfilled the beginning of its promises by removing its troops from Gaza. In July, Arafat entered Gaza with great fanfare and soon swore in the members of the new Palestinian Authority. By the end of the year, the PA had assumed control of education, social welfare, health, tourism, and taxation.
But the peace process did not please many extremists, particularly among the Israeli settlers. On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir took out his rage by assassinating Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv.¹⁹ Rabin was a hero of the peace process and the winner (along with Peres and Arafat) of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. His death profoundly shocked the Israeli public.
For the next seven years, Palestinians and Israelis continued to negotiate about how the West Bank—or which parts of it—would come under Arab control. Large Arab cities like Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, and Jennin would have Palestinian police and no more Israeli military patrols (except in limited areas where settlers lived). The entire countryside would be divided into zones, some planned for Palestinian control, others reserved for Israeli development, making the West Bank a patchwork or regions without contiguous borders. According to many Arab leaders, these disconnected areas eliminated the possibility of a Palestinian state altogether.
Many questions remain. How could Gaza and the West Bank be united when they share no contiguous border? Would Israeli settlers be placed under Palestinian authority? Would the PA be able to control borders with the outside world? And what about East Jerusalem, now annexed by Israel along with its large Palestinian population? Many Palestinian leaders view Jerusalem as the heart of their country. As progress on these matters continues, Palestinian optimism will grow. But when negotiations continue year after year and more and more Israeli settlements are built on Arab land, the prospect for continued violence remains and Palestinian optimism dissipates quickly. Afaf Mikki, a Palestinian woman who owned an embroidery shop in Gaza, commented in 1995, I only feel that we are in a big prison, and the Israelis have the keys, and they will open the door only when they want.
After seven years of living under the Oslo Accords (by mid-2000), Palestinian frustration reached a peak. Rather than using this time to advance peace, the Israeli government accelerated its acquisition of Palestinian land. The West Bank is today a bewildering array of disconnected cantons that have no territorial contiguity. Early Palestinian worries have been confirmed. This fragmentation makes the building of any Palestinian state impossible. Most observers today see it as a new form of apartheid. One Palestinian described it thus: This is like two teenagers arguing over the last slice of pizza, except that one of them is eating it.
But in addition, settlements expanded at a rate not seen before. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accelerated settlement growth to four times what it was previously, despite promises made at Oslo. To echo an old adage, simply follow the money. During the Oslo era (after 1993) successive Israeli governments invested almost $7 billion to encourage and expand West Bank and, until 2005, Gaza settlements. And the pace of government investment has continued since 2003. From
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put in bold relief the Palestinian dilemma in the early 1990s. The Intifada was losing steam and the world’s television cameras had gone elsewhere. Saddam Hussein had welcomed the Palestinians for years and was a champion of their cause. A Palestinian doctor in Gaza said it poignantly in 1991, “Everyone has closed the door to us. . . . There’s just one light coming through, and it’s coming from Saddam Hussein. Can you blame us for wanting to follow that light to the end?” No matter how ludicrous it seems now, Saddam Hussein had dedicated his cause to the liberation of these Palestinians living in Occupied Territories like the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat and the Palestinians thus threw in with Saddam Hussein, and many hoped and prayed that the war would bring them freedom. This alliance did not make their lives any easier. For the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, the war meant strict curfews that were enforced at gunpoint. The Palestinian economy was paralyzed, and many feared hunger. Gas masks were distributed to all Israeli citizens but not to Arabs in the West Bank. When the shooting started, one nineteen-year-old Arab boy remarked, “We don’t have shelters or gas masks. If there’s an attack, we’ll die in flocks. If we make any problems, Israeli soldiers will flatten the whole area.” During the war, perhaps 10 percent of Kuwait was made up of Palestinian workers. Open Palestinian support for Iraq after the invasion put them under immediate suspicion by the Kuwaitis. Some of them helped administer the occupation; many simply stayed out of sight. Following the war, Kuwaiti courts sentenced 29 Palestinians to death. Most of the rest fled or were expelled, but few Arab countries opened their doors. Jordan accepted over 300,000 people with no place to put them. Refugee camps spilled over. Amman was filled with men and women who had no place to go. Abdul Fatah, a former researcher for the Kuwait government, took a job at a small plastics factory in Jordan but could not make ends meet on his monthly salary of $102. “We had a comfortable life in Kuwait and were content,” said his wife, Ne’meh, sitting in the family’s shack on the outskirts of Amman. “Now that’s all gone.” Muhammad Ayyash Milhem, head of a Jordanian committee for the new arrivals, estimated in March 1992 that about 188,000 of the Palestinian refugees were in complete poverty. Another consequence of the war was the disengagement of many Arab countries with the PLO. Saudi Arabia, for instance, provided $250 million per year to the PLO budget but cut off all funds. Arafat was being discredited by many. His people were angry and despairing. In Jerusalem’s Old City, Mohammed Kamel said it well: “We are depressed and desperate because we have no friends and no allies. This is the story of our lives.” The Peace Process in the 1990s By the close of the Gulf War, the eyes of the world were no longer on the Palestinians, and the sympathy the Intifada had created had all but dissipated. Street conflicts continued, but they were sporadic. Many of the world’s leaders knew that something had to be done to address this unresolved problem. The United States, recently buoyed by the victory over Iraq, now viewed itself as a genuine leader in the region. In October 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union sponsored a Middle East peace conference in Madrid between Arab and Israeli delegates, and they invited leaders from the PLO. Israelis and the Palestinians were negotiating for the first time, but the meetings were a disappointment. Palestinian national aspirations were dashed as Israel and the United States only offered autonomy over civilian affairs, which the Palestinians rejected. More meetings—this time secret—came in Oslo, Norway, in January 1993. After lengthy negotiations, both Israel and the PLO signed the “Declaration of Principles” in Washington, D.C., on September 13, 1993. This declaration (also called the “Oslo Accords”) brought formal mutual recognition to both parties and affirmed that both the West Bank and Gaza would be progressively handed over to the Palestinians over five years. By May 1994, Israel fulfilled the beginning of its promises by removing its troops from Gaza. In July, Arafat entered Gaza with great fanfare and soon swore in the members of the new “Palestinian Authority.” By the end of the year, the “PA” had assumed control of education, social welfare, health, tourism, and taxation. But the peace process did not please many extremists, particularly among the Israeli settlers. On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir took out his rage by assassinating Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv.¹⁹ Rabin was a hero of the peace process and the winner (along with Peres and Arafat) of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. His death profoundly shocked the Israeli public. For the next seven years, Palestinians and Israelis continued to negotiate about how the West Bank—or which parts of it—would come under Arab control. Large Arab cities like Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, and Jennin would have Palestinian police and no more Israeli military patrols (except in limited areas where settlers lived). The entire countryside would be divided into zones, some planned for Palestinian control, others reserved for Israeli development, making the West Bank a patchwork or regions without contiguous borders. According to many Arab leaders, these disconnected areas eliminated the possibility of a Palestinian state altogether. Many questions remain. How could Gaza and the West Bank be united when they share no contiguous border? Would Israeli settlers be placed under Palestinian authority? Would the PA be able to control borders with the outside world? And what about East Jerusalem, now annexed by Israel along with its large Palestinian population? Many Palestinian leaders view Jerusalem as the heart of their country. As progress on these matters continues, Palestinian optimism will grow. But when negotiations continue year after year and more and more Israeli settlements are built on Arab land, the prospect for continued violence remains and Palestinian optimism dissipates quickly. Afaf Mikki, a Palestinian woman who owned an embroidery shop in Gaza, commented in 1995, “I only feel that we are in a big prison, and the Israelis have the keys, and they will open the door only when they want.” After seven years of living under the Oslo Accords (by mid-2000), Palestinian frustration reached a peak. Rather than using this time to advance peace, the Israeli government accelerated its acquisition of Palestinian land. The West Bank is today a bewildering array of disconnected “cantons” that have no territorial contiguity. Early Palestinian worries have been confirmed. This fragmentation makes the building of any Palestinian state impossible. Most observers today see it as a new form of apartheid. One Palestinian described it thus: This is like two teenagers arguing over the last slice of pizza, except that one of them is eating it. But in addition, settlements expanded at a rate not seen before. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accelerated settlement growth to four times what it was previously, despite promises made at Oslo. To echo an old adage, simply follow the money. During the Oslo era (after 1993) successive Israeli governments invested almost $7 billion to encourage and expand West Bank and, until 2005, Gaza settlements. And the pace of government investment has continued since 2003. From
arrests spread and Israeli troops poured in. This funeral was to be the most significant in Palestinian history. The Intifada had begun.
Palestinians took to the streets throughout the country, disengaging from the Israeli economy and fighting their occupation with civil disobedience (throwing stones, etc.) to thwart Israel’s control and inspire international sympathy. Soon the world’s televisions were showing heavily armed Israeli soldiers with Uzi submachine guns squaring off against teenagers with slings and rocks. It was made for TV: David and Goliath revisited, except that now the Jews were playing the role of the giant. In many cases, women took to the street and dared the soldiers to harm them. When harm came in the form of rubber bullets, toxic tear gas, or glass pellets shot from guns, the rage in the villages was uncontrollable. During the first year of fighting, 300 Palestinians were killed and 11,500 were wounded. To enter the street, to resist the soldier, even to be wounded—these became marks of heroism in villages and refugee camps. At last, Palestinians said, we’re doing something. Soon the uprising was guided by a central authority—The Unified National Command of the Uprising—which worked closely with the PLO. Momentum was growing.
Intifada does not mean uprising. Palestinians say it means to shake off aggressively as if a scorpion had suddenly appeared on your arm. The Intifada was the first unifying expression of Palestinian solidarity that could not be stopped. The Israelis did everything to halt it: beatings, arrests, deportations, shootings. Nothing worked. The Palestinian school system was closed for two years; the university system was closed for four. In five years, over 1,000 Palestinians were killed by soldiers and 230 of these were under sixteen years old. Over 16,000 people were imprisoned, and over 1,882 homes were demolished as punishment. On any given day, 25,000 Arabs could be found under curfew. Some villages witnessed mass arrests where all males between the ages of fourteen and sixty were taken away to detention camps where torture became a frequent policy of the Israeli Secret Police (Shin Bet). Only in the last few years has Israel admitted these policies and made them public in its national press.
A June 1994 report of the Palestine Human Rights Information Center offers some idea of the impact of the Intifada. By their estimate, the total deaths resulting from shootings, beatings, or tear gas was 1,392. Of this number, 362 were children under the age of sixteen. Injuries stemming from actions of the Israeli army were about 130,787. The number of property demolitions numbered at almost 2,000, and about 382 houses had been sealed shut. Given statistics such as these, it is little wonder that the world raised an outcry at the images the media captured from the streets. In fact, one of the main reasons that the Intifada had some definite, positive consequences was because of the media’s role in the conflict. Thousands of protests erupted throughout the world in countries such as West Germany, Italy, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, and Japan. Gallup polls in the United States revealed that 41 percent of Americans thought U.S. aid to Israel should be decreased, and 20 percent wanted it stopped altogether. Twenty-two percent of these people gave Israel’s handling of the Intifada as the reason for their opinion.
The effect on Israel was paralyzing. Israelis suddenly were engaged in an internal war that could not be won. Young Israeli men and women, trained in field combat, were now in the streets brutalizing average people, and it wounded the Jewish conscience. Numerous Israeli peace groups spoke out, condemning Israeli behavior. Many Jewish families, shaped by the heroism of other wars, viewed these deeds as demolishing Israeli virtue. The government had worked hard in many cases to improve life in the West Bank. The number of clinics and hospitals, for instance, had grown from 113 to 378 since 1967. The roster of schoolteachers had grown from 5,316 to 17,373. Nevertheless, three times more Arabs had died under Israeli occupation than the number of blacks killed under South African apartheid. No Israeli could be proud of this record.
In 1988, King Hussein of Jordan made a bold move. He gave up all claim to the West Bank, thus making way for a Palestinian claim to statehood. As a result, peace in Bethlehem and East Jerusalem had to be negotiated directly with the Palestinians and no one else. In December 1989, a yet more remarkable event occurred. The leader of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, spoke to the general assembly of the United Nations and not only recognized the State of Israel (by embracing UN Resolution 242 [see p. 44]), but he denounced terrorism. While Israel refused to talk to the PLO, the United States announced that it would accept direct diplomatic discussions with Arafat, thus acknowledging the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
The Gulf War, 1990–91
If the Six-Day War of 1967 inspired many Christian writers to wonder about the biblical fulfillment of prophesy, the Gulf War in 1990 helped these writers identify the enemy clearly: Saddam Hussein. While eschatological zeal among Christians was evaporating in the 1980s, Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 resurrected prophetic speculation again. Did Iraq’s mighty army represent that configuration of armies that would meet in Armageddon?
As hundreds of thousands of allied troops raced to the gulf along with the largest arms airlift in military history, Iraq knew that it had to fracture the Arab coalition arrayed against it. Israel stayed out of the conflict (because of American pressure) given that no Egyptian or Saudi soldier would ever fight alongside an Israeli against another Arab. On December 27, 1990, Saddam Hussein unofficially began Israel’s involvement in the Gulf War by broadcasting his intentions publicly: If aggression were to take place, we should assume that Israel has taken part in it. Therefore, without asking any questions we will strike at Israel. Less than a month later, on January 18 the first of forty-two Scud missiles hit Israeli cities. Thanks to President Bush’s immediate order to deploy U.S. Patriot antimissile batteries to protect Israel, the damage was fairly minimal. A total of two deaths, 230 injuries, and 4,100 damaged buildings resulted from the attacks. Israeli military restraint not to retaliate was phenomenal. Israel had thorough surveillance of Iraqi war capabilities. In 1981, for instance, Israel had attacked Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant, fearing the development of nuclear warheads. One week prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Arens perfectly predicted the Iraqi offensive by warning the American State Department.
Hussein’s strategy to play the Israeli card failed. In fact, his actions probably strengthened the allied coalition. The common threat that he posed to such countries as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, and Turkey provided the glue that held these unlikely friends together. Ironically one byproduct of the war may have been the many peace talks between Israel and its neighbors throughout the 1990s.
The situation that the Palestinians found themselves in at the time of the Gulf War can be illustrated simply by reading the headlines of newspapers around the world at the time: In Time of Trouble, Caught in a Crossfire, The Other Occupation, The Biggest Losers of the Gulf War, The Palestinians Back Another Loser. The Gulf War
put in bold relief the Palestinian dilemma in the early 1990s. The Intifada was losing steam and the world’s television cameras had gone elsewhere. Saddam Hussein had welcomed the Palestinians for years and was a champion of their cause. A Palestinian doctor in Gaza said it poignantly in 1991, Everyone has closed the door to us. . . . There’s just one light coming through, and it’s coming from Saddam Hussein. Can you blame us for wanting to follow that light to the end?
No matter how ludicrous it seems now, Saddam Hussein had dedicated his cause to the liberation of these Palestinians living in Occupied Territories like the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat and the Palestinians thus threw in with Saddam Hussein, and many hoped and prayed that the war would bring them freedom. This alliance did not make their lives any easier. For the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, the war meant strict curfews that were enforced at gunpoint. The Palestinian economy was paralyzed, and many feared hunger. Gas masks were distributed to all Israeli citizens but not to Arabs in the West Bank. When the shooting started, one nineteen-year-old Arab boy remarked, We don’t have shelters or gas masks. If there’s an attack, we’ll die in flocks. If we make any problems, Israeli soldiers will flatten the whole area.
During the war, perhaps 10 percent of Kuwait was made up of Palestinian workers. Open Palestinian support for Iraq after the invasion put them under immediate suspicion by the Kuwaitis. Some of them helped administer the occupation; many simply stayed out of sight. Following the war, Kuwaiti courts sentenced 29 Palestinians to death. Most of the rest fled or were expelled, but few Arab countries opened their doors. Jordan accepted over 300,000 people with no place to put them. Refugee camps spilled over. Amman was filled with men and women who had no place to go. Abdul Fatah, a former researcher for the Kuwait government, took a job at a small plastics factory in Jordan but could not make ends meet on his monthly salary of $102. We had a comfortable life in Kuwait and were content, said his wife, Ne’meh, sitting in the family’s shack on the outskirts of Amman. Now that’s all gone. Muhammad Ayyash Milhem, head of a Jordanian committee for the new arrivals, estimated in March 1992 that about 188,000 of the Palestinian refugees were in complete poverty.
Another consequence of the war was the disengagement of many Arab countries with the PLO. Saudi Arabia, for instance, provided $250 million per year to the PLO budget but cut off all funds. Arafat was being discredited by many. His people were angry and despairing. In Jerusalem’s Old City, Mohammed Kamel said it well: We are depressed and desperate because we have no friends and no allies. This is the story of our lives.
The Peace Process in the 1990s
By the close of the Gulf War, the eyes of the world were no longer on the Palestinians, and the sympathy the Intifada had created had all but dissipated. Street conflicts continued, but they were sporadic. Many of the world’s leaders knew that something had to be done to address this unresolved problem. The United States, recently buoyed by the victory over Iraq, now viewed itself as a genuine leader in the region. In October 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union sponsored a Middle East peace conference in Madrid between Arab and Israeli delegates, and they invited leaders from the PLO. Israelis and the Palestinians were negotiating for the first time, but the meetings were a disappointment. Palestinian national aspirations were dashed as Israel and the United States only offered autonomy over civilian affairs, which the Palestinians rejected.
More meetings—this time secret—came in Oslo, Norway, in January 1993. After lengthy negotiations, both Israel and the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles in Washington, D.C., on September 13, 1993. This declaration (also called the Oslo Accords) brought formal mutual recognition to both parties and affirmed that both the West Bank and Gaza would be progressively handed over to the Palestinians over five years. By May 1994, Israel fulfilled the beginning of its promises by removing its troops from Gaza. In July, Arafat entered Gaza with great fanfare and soon swore in the members of the new Palestinian Authority. By the end of the year, the PA had assumed control of education, social welfare, health, tourism, and taxation.
But the peace process did not please many extremists, particularly among the Israeli settlers. On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir took out his rage by assassinating Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv.¹⁹ Rabin was a hero of the peace process and the winner (along with Peres and Arafat) of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. His death profoundly shocked the Israeli public.
For the next seven years, Palestinians and Israelis continued to negotiate about how the West Bank—or which parts of it—would come under Arab control. Large Arab cities like Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, and Jennin would have Palestinian police and no more Israeli military patrols (except in limited areas where settlers lived). The entire countryside would be divided into zones, some planned for Palestinian control, others reserved for Israeli development, making the West Bank a patchwork or regions without contiguous borders. According to many Arab leaders, these disconnected areas eliminated the possibility of a Palestinian state altogether.
Many questions remain. How could Gaza and the West Bank be united when they share no contiguous border? Would Israeli settlers be placed under Palestinian authority? Would the PA be able to control borders with the outside world? And what about East Jerusalem, now annexed by Israel along with its large Palestinian population? Many Palestinian leaders view Jerusalem as the heart of their country. As progress on these matters continues, Palestinian optimism will grow. But when negotiations continue year after year and more and more Israeli settlements are built on Arab land, the prospect for continued violence remains and Palestinian optimism dissipates quickly. Afaf Mikki, a Palestinian woman who owned an embroidery shop in Gaza, commented in 1995, I only feel that we are in a big prison, and the Israelis have the keys, and they will open the door only when they want.
After seven years of living under the Oslo Accords (by mid-2000), Palestinian frustration reached a peak. Rather than using this time to advance peace, the Israeli government accelerated its acquisition of Palestinian land. The West Bank is today a bewildering array of disconnected cantons that have no territorial contiguity. Early Palestinian worries have been confirmed. This fragmentation makes the building of any Palestinian state impossible. Most observers today see it as a new form of apartheid. One Palestinian described it thus: This is like two teenagers arguing over the last slice of pizza, except that one of them is eating it.
But in addition, settlements expanded at a rate not seen before. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accelerated settlement growth to four times what it was previously, despite promises made at Oslo. To echo an old adage, simply follow the money. During the Oslo era (after 1993) successive Israeli governments invested almost $7 billion to encourage and expand West Bank and, until 2005, Gaza settlements. And the pace of government investment has continued since 2003. From
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2003 to 2011 Israel invested $2.5 billion in settlements. These costs included tax incentives, infrastructure, grants, mortgage subsidies, and public buildings.²⁰ These amounts are simply extraordinary and they betray Israel’s true interests in the West Bank. In other words, the “settlements” are not a marginal, nettlesome issue: they are a mainstream national commitment. During the same period, Palestinians were commonly denied building permits for their homes in the same region—all while Israel was plowing millions into building settler communities nearby. Hundreds of Palestinians’ houses—built on their own land—have been destroyed since 1993. The key fact, though, is that Israel built a matrix of bypass roads in the West Bank that avoid the villages and link the settlements, making a web of well-connected settlement life. In 1999, the U.S. government even gave Israel $1.2 billion for building these roads.²¹ The roads cut through Arab land, further fragmenting Arab society and restricting the growth of Arab villages. Rather than offering peace, the ongoing consequences of Oslo for Arabs became tragic. In 1993, for example, Israel “closed” Jerusalem to Palestinians who do not have a travel permit; as a result, access to hospitals, religious centers, and educational institutions is off-limits. A close look at Bethlehem shows the effects of this policy. In the 1990’s the main checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem would be one of the busiest in the country. But then the Israelis built an alternate checkpoint reserved for Palestinians.²² Diplomats, tourists, and Israeli settlers would use the old checkpoint known for years, but Palestinians would be routed out of sight 650 meters away to a parking lot for 700 cars. Here the Israelis could limit Arab entry without the scrutiny of foreign visitors. As one writer describes it, this practice of separating travelers based on race is “tantamount to apartheid.”²³ But more, Bethlehem is utterly dependent on greater Jerusalem for its economic growth. This “closure” starved Bethlehem while non-Arabs were free to move smoothly in and out of Jerusalem, bypassing the town itself. Camp David II, July 12–25, 2000 Such conditions inevitably lead to conflict since people without hope soon become desperate. In May 2000, when Israel celebrated its fifty-second “Independence Day,” the Palestinians commemorated what they term “the Nakbah” which in Arabic refers to “the catastrophe.” For them, the founding of the Israeli state has been just that, a catastrophe. Street fighting erupted on a scale not seen in years, with many deaths. But for the first time in memory, Palestinian police did not stand passively when they watched Israeli soldiers firing on civilians. The newly armed police fired back—which brought a sobering realization to Israel how an armed struggle would look if the Palestinians traded in stones for weapons. The old images of the Intifada from ten years earlier seemed like paradise compared with live fire from Palestinian rifles. Since 1993, the Palestinians had been permitted to equip and train a professional police force of forty thousand. Suddenly the threat no longer looked like rioting. This new dimension could lead to civil war. On July 12, 2000, President Bill Clinton invited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasir Arafat to Camp David in order to discuss the future of the peace talks. This meeting was to be an important one, evoking memories of the famous talks hosted by President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1979 when Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Israel’s Menachem Begin negotiated genuine peace for the first time. Expectations ran high, and all onlookers realized that a meeting producing a halfway settlement would be a disaster.²⁴ The incendiary issues of Jerusalem and land confiscation and refugees could no longer be ignored. After nine days of intense negotiations (to July 20), both sides declared that a resolution was impossible. President Clinton intervened, urging the parties to remain and work further. Secretary of State Madeline Albright worked with negotiators day and night. But at last on July 25, after fifteen days of exhausting work, both Israeli and Palestinian leaders announced that the meeting was a failure. While the media represented Arafat as walking away from Barak’s generous offers—offers that were never placed in writing—the PLO negotiators found the Israeli proposals impossible to accept. For example, they planned to divide up the Palestinians into four cantons, each separated by Israeli land (the northern West Bank, the central West Bank, the southern West Bank, and Gaza). The Arabs would not have control over their own water, borders, or air space. Months later the details of the map used by the Israelis came to light, clearly showing their intentions.²⁵ Another sticking point turned on the ownership of Jerusalem. One of Arafat’s aids commented about him, “He is very angry and he doesn’t believe the Israelis are willing to make peace. It’s a waste of time to stay here any longer.” Barak was also in a dilemma. Conservatives at home threatened to destroy his fragile political coalition if he should make any concessions on Jerusalem—while progressives were urging him to provide the Palestinians with genuine access to the city. On July 26, 300 American rabbis calling themselves “The American Committee on Jerusalem” met at the University of Maryland and called for a halt to Israeli demands on Jerusalem. For them, Jerusalem should be a shared city that recognizes a “divine ownership” over its precincts. But their 300 voices were not heard.²⁶ The Violent Aftermath: The Second Intifada Before long, Palestinian frustration with this process exploded. On September 28, 2000, the spark that lit the fuse arrived at Jerusalem’s Old City in the form of retired general Ariel Sharon, the leader of the conservative Likud party with a grim history as leader of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Together with hundreds of armed Israelis and with the full permission of Ehud Barak, he entered the Muslim sanctuaries of the Haram al-Sharif (to Muslims “the noble sanctuary,” or to Jews, the Temple Mount), stood near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and announced Jewish sovereignty over even this region. Rioting broke out immediately. Within two weeks, over 90 Arabs were dead and 2,000 in the hospital. Worried Israeli and Palestinian leadership wondered how they might stop an anger that showed no signs of abating. Two months later, the fighting continued to escalate. Soon no one knew how to stop it. By late summer 2001, over 800 Arabs were dead (150 of them children) and over 12,000 wounded. Over 7,000 Arab homes and 50 public buildings were destroyed. The Israelis even pulled up over 23,000 Arab fruit and olive trees as punishment.²⁷ These conflicts forced an early election in Israel and challenged Barak’s ability to broker a peace deal with the Palestinians. In a remarkably ironic twist, in late January 2001, Barak found himself running against the notoriously hawkish Ariel Sharon, who started the entire incident. On February 6, the Israeli public, exhausted by months of violence and failed negotiations, elected Sharon as prime minister in the largest landslide in Israel’s history (Sharon won 62.6 percent of the vote). Within days he announced that all peace concessions engineered by Barak were “off the table” and soon declared the Oslo Peace Accords “dead.” Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian
negotiator, told CNN, “I’m afraid that we will not have a peace process anymore. I would say ‘God help Palestinians and Israelis’, because to have a meaningful peace process means that we would continue where we left off.” In spring 2002, Sharon launched a full-scale military assault on the Palestinian territories, arresting Arabs by the thousands, destroying the infrastructure of Arab towns (phone lines, water, sewers), ruining administrative buildings and offices (such as the education ministry and the office of land deeds), and confiscating all documents of the Palestinian government. The Palestinians announced a “Day of Rage” and street conflicts escalated. Neighboring Arab governments saw these conflicts as ominous and asked publicly if they indicated a future of renewed tensions in the region. At a funeral for a fallen Israeli soldier and friend, Chaim Azran, nineteen, commented to the New York Times, “I voted for Ariel Sharon so there will be war, because only through war can we put an end to this.”²⁸ No one imagined where this so-called “Second Intifada” would go. Conflict raged for months. Palestinian gunmen were no match for Israel’s army, one of the best in the world. Soon tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters, and jet fighters were laying siege to Palestinian cities that had not seen occupation for years. Yasir Arafat’s personal compound in Ramallah was surrounded, bombed, and occupied, leaving the leader and his small circle of aides in just a handful of rooms. The death toll climbed. Palestinian deaths outpaced Israeli causalities four to one until suicide bombs brought unspeakable terror to Israeli streets. Many observers viewed the two peoples in a death grip, pulling each other toward national suicide. By the end of July 2002, Palestinian deaths beginning in September 2000 totaled 1,674. In addition, 19,938 people had been wounded.²⁹ During the same period, 577 Israelis were dead with 4,122 wounded.³⁰ And the killing showed no sign of ending. On July 23, 2002, an Israeli F-16 jet fighter destroyed a residential building in Gaza City. The missile successfully killed the military leader of the militant group Hamas. However, the missile also killed 15 civilians who were sleeping in the same building and wounded scores of others. But the loss of life among the children grieves us most. In eighteen months, 286 Palestinian children under the age of eighteen died. During the same time, Israel lost 54 children.³¹ In order to comprehend the shock of these figures, American congresspersons supportive of Israel have translated these casualty figures into American demographics. From 2000 to 2012 there were about 1,075 Israeli causalities. If America had lost the same proportion of lives as Israel, our losses would have been 54,850. By any measure this is intolerable. But we need to do the same math and ask what the Palestinian losses look like if projected onto the American population. In the same period, 6,348 Palestinians died. This is the equivalent of America experiencing 481,000 deaths in a dozen years due to civil strife.³² To sharpen this further, Palestinian deaths are the same as if the United States underwent the tragedy of the New York World Trade Center crisis of September 11, 2001, 160 times over twelve years. Stalemate The Second Intifada slowly came to an end somewhere near 2005. By the time conflicts had begun to dissipate, Palestinian deaths had reached about 5,500. Israeli deaths (both collateral and military) were around 1,100. According to the Israeli organization B’Tselem, 46 percent of the Palestinians who died took no part in the fighting but were collateral victims. Because of the remarkable imbalance in causality statistics and weapons, Palestinians began employing suicide bombers to bring the conflict to the Israeli civilian population, arguing that their civilian centers were already under siege. In 2001 there were forty bombings; in 2002, forty-seven; in 2003, twenty-three, in 2004, eighteen; and then in 2005, nine. Then it quickly dropped off. This tactic was rightly judged as reprehensible by world opinion. Its symbol became the “Passover Bombing” of March 2002 when a bomber dressed like a woman entered the Park Hotel in Natanya, Israel, and killed 28 people and wounded 140. The world was stunned. Palestinian pleas pointing to the atrocities in their own villages never made news. Israeli bombings were surgical and behind the scenes (media access was strictly controlled); the suicide bombers pursued high-profile public targets and the press was there immediately. The Israeli response was to build a “separation barrier” that would protect the Israeli population. Its original plan called for 430 miles of sophisticated fences and thirty-foot (nine-meter) walls—which is what visitors to Israeli will see today surrounding a city like Bethlehem. Supporters of the barrier claim that it stemmed suicide terror. Critics say that suicide bombing was voluntarily withdrawn. When the wall was incomplete (say, in 2006), the bombings were rare and yet the boundary could be easily breached. Today the barrier is visible throughout the West Bank but can be compromised with moderate effort. By some estimates, hundreds of Palestinians move daily into Israel for work illegally. On YouTube you can actually watch them breaching the wall. A friend of mine is an Israeli peace activist who once told me that her boyfriend was a Palestinian in Ramallah. “Ok,” I said, “so how do you get together?” “Seriously?” she answered. “He hops the wall.” The permeability of the wall and its path moving deep into West Bank territory (8.5 percent of the West Bank was taken by the wall) have led Israeli critics to say that this is about segregation or perhaps the suppression of a population. Some believe it is about economic control since now these areas must trade with Israel for goods and services. In many cases, the barrier does not divide Arabs and Jews—it sometimes simply hems in Palestinians so they cannot contact other Palestinians. In Jerusalem the wall is used to limit Palestinian residential areas so that Jerusalem maintains a Jewish majority. In July 2011 Jerusalem city council member Yakir Segev gave a speech indicating that all Palestinians left “outside” the wall no longer belonged to Jerusalem. He noted that the “separation fence . . . was built for political and demographic reasons—not just security concerns.”³³ In this period after the Second Intifada some notable changes did occur in addition to the construction of the separation barrier. The year 2004 witnessed the death of the iconic leader of Palestinian resistance, Yasser Arafat. In August 2005 Israel began the forcible removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza: a bid to end potential conflict and pacify a region prone to explosions. In 2006, in Gaza’s first genuinely democratic election (monitored by the Carter Center), the political party Hamas was elected to majority rule. And they promised to take a decidedly more belligerent posture toward Israel. Israel responded with a blockade that paralyzed the Gazan economy. By 2006 Israel’s two remaining areas of conflict were well defined. First the Palestinian resistance group Hezbollah in Lebanon (backed by Syria and Iran) began a rocket offensive in that year (they fired 4,000 and terrorized the cities of northern Galilee). The Israeli military threw everything it could at southern Lebanon: 12,000 tactical fighter missions, 2,500 artillery shells by sea, and 100,000 land-based artillery.
2003 to 2011 Israel invested $2.5 billion in settlements. These costs included tax incentives, infrastructure, grants, mortgage subsidies, and public buildings.²⁰
These amounts are simply extraordinary and they betray Israel’s true interests in the West Bank. In other words, the settlements are not a marginal, nettlesome issue: they are a mainstream national commitment. During the same period, Palestinians were commonly denied building permits for their homes in the same region—all while Israel was plowing millions into building settler communities nearby. Hundreds of Palestinians’ houses—built on their own land—have been destroyed since 1993. The key fact, though, is that Israel built a matrix of bypass roads in the West Bank that avoid the villages and link the settlements, making a web of well-connected settlement life. In 1999, the U.S. government even gave Israel $1.2 billion for building these roads.²¹ The roads cut through Arab land, further fragmenting Arab society and restricting the growth of Arab villages.
Rather than offering peace, the ongoing consequences of Oslo for Arabs became tragic. In 1993, for example, Israel closed Jerusalem to Palestinians who do not have a travel permit; as a result, access to hospitals, religious centers, and educational institutions is off-limits. A close look at Bethlehem shows the effects of this policy. In the 1990’s the main checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem would be one of the busiest in the country. But then the Israelis built an alternate checkpoint reserved for Palestinians.²² Diplomats, tourists, and Israeli settlers would use the old checkpoint known for years, but Palestinians would be routed out of sight 650 meters away to a parking lot for 700 cars. Here the Israelis could limit Arab entry without the scrutiny of foreign visitors. As one writer describes it, this practice of separating travelers based on race is tantamount to apartheid.²³ But more, Bethlehem is utterly dependent on greater Jerusalem for its economic growth. This closure starved Bethlehem while non-Arabs were free to move smoothly in and out of Jerusalem, bypassing the town itself.
Camp David II, July 12–25, 2000
Such conditions inevitably lead to conflict since people without hope soon become desperate. In May 2000, when Israel celebrated its fifty-second Independence Day, the Palestinians commemorated what they term the Nakbah which in Arabic refers to the catastrophe. For them, the founding of the Israeli state has been just that, a catastrophe. Street fighting erupted on a scale not seen in years, with many deaths. But for the first time in memory, Palestinian police did not stand passively when they watched Israeli soldiers firing on civilians. The newly armed police fired back—which brought a sobering realization to Israel how an armed struggle would look if the Palestinians traded in stones for weapons. The old images of the Intifada from ten years earlier seemed like paradise compared with live fire from Palestinian rifles. Since 1993, the Palestinians had been permitted to equip and train a professional police force of forty thousand. Suddenly the threat no longer looked like rioting. This new dimension could lead to civil war.
On July 12, 2000, President Bill Clinton invited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasir Arafat to Camp David in order to discuss the future of the peace talks. This meeting was to be an important one, evoking memories of the famous talks hosted by President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1979 when Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Israel’s Menachem Begin negotiated genuine peace for the first time. Expectations ran high, and all onlookers realized that a meeting producing a halfway settlement would be a disaster.²⁴ The incendiary issues of Jerusalem and land confiscation and refugees could no longer be ignored.
After nine days of intense negotiations (to July 20), both sides declared that a resolution was impossible. President Clinton intervened, urging the parties to remain and work further. Secretary of State Madeline Albright worked with negotiators day and night. But at last on July 25, after fifteen days of exhausting work, both Israeli and Palestinian leaders announced that the meeting was a failure. While the media represented Arafat as walking away from Barak’s generous offers—offers that were never placed in writing—the PLO negotiators found the Israeli proposals impossible to accept. For example, they planned to divide up the Palestinians into four cantons, each separated by Israeli land (the northern West Bank, the central West Bank, the southern West Bank, and Gaza). The Arabs would not have control over their own water, borders, or air space. Months later the details of the map used by the Israelis came to light, clearly showing their intentions.²⁵ Another sticking point turned on the ownership of Jerusalem. One of Arafat’s aids commented about him, He is very angry and he doesn’t believe the Israelis are willing to make peace. It’s a waste of time to stay here any longer. Barak was also in a dilemma. Conservatives at home threatened to destroy his fragile political coalition if he should make any concessions on Jerusalem—while progressives were urging him to provide the Palestinians with genuine access to the city. On July 26, 300 American rabbis calling themselves The American Committee on Jerusalem met at the University of Maryland and called for a halt to Israeli demands on Jerusalem. For them, Jerusalem should be a shared city that recognizes a divine ownership over its precincts. But their 300 voices were not heard.²⁶
The Violent Aftermath: The Second Intifada
Before long, Palestinian frustration with this process exploded. On September 28, 2000, the spark that lit the fuse arrived at Jerusalem’s Old City in the form of retired general Ariel Sharon, the leader of the conservative Likud party with a grim history as leader of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Together with hundreds of armed Israelis and with the full permission of Ehud Barak, he entered the Muslim sanctuaries of the Haram al-Sharif (to Muslims the noble sanctuary, or to Jews, the Temple Mount), stood near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and announced Jewish sovereignty over even this region. Rioting broke out immediately. Within two weeks, over 90 Arabs were dead and 2,000 in the hospital. Worried Israeli and Palestinian leadership wondered how they might stop an anger that showed no signs of abating. Two months later, the fighting continued to escalate. Soon no one knew how to stop it. By late summer 2001, over 800 Arabs were dead (150 of them children) and over 12,000 wounded. Over 7,000 Arab homes and 50 public buildings were destroyed. The Israelis even pulled up over 23,000 Arab fruit and olive trees as punishment.²⁷
These conflicts forced an early election in Israel and challenged Barak’s ability to broker a peace deal with the Palestinians. In a remarkably ironic twist, in late January 2001, Barak found himself running against the notoriously hawkish Ariel Sharon, who started the entire incident. On February 6, the Israeli public, exhausted by months of violence and failed negotiations, elected Sharon as prime minister in the largest landslide in Israel’s history (Sharon won 62.6 percent of the vote). Within days he announced that all peace concessions engineered by Barak were off the table and soon declared the Oslo Peace Accords dead. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian
negotiator, told CNN, I’m afraid that we will not have a peace process anymore. I would say ‘God help Palestinians and Israelis’, because to have a meaningful peace process means that we would continue where we left off. In spring 2002, Sharon launched a full-scale military assault on the Palestinian territories, arresting Arabs by the thousands, destroying the infrastructure of Arab towns (phone lines, water, sewers), ruining administrative buildings and offices (such as the education ministry and the office of land deeds), and confiscating all documents of the Palestinian government.
The Palestinians announced a Day of Rage and street conflicts escalated. Neighboring Arab governments saw these conflicts as ominous and asked publicly if they indicated a future of renewed tensions in the region. At a funeral for a fallen Israeli soldier and friend, Chaim Azran, nineteen, commented to the New York Times, I voted for Ariel Sharon so there will be war, because only through war can we put an end to this.²⁸
No one imagined where this so-called Second Intifada would go. Conflict raged for months. Palestinian gunmen were no match for Israel’s army, one of the best in the world. Soon tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters, and jet fighters were laying siege to Palestinian cities that had not seen occupation for years. Yasir Arafat’s personal compound in Ramallah was surrounded, bombed, and occupied, leaving the leader and his small circle of aides in just a handful of rooms. The death toll climbed. Palestinian deaths outpaced Israeli causalities four to one until suicide bombs brought unspeakable terror to Israeli streets. Many observers viewed the two peoples in a death grip, pulling each other toward national suicide. By the end of July 2002, Palestinian deaths beginning in September 2000 totaled 1,674. In addition, 19,938 people had been wounded.²⁹ During the same period, 577 Israelis were dead with 4,122 wounded.³⁰ And the killing showed no sign of ending. On July 23, 2002, an Israeli F-16 jet fighter destroyed a residential building in Gaza City. The missile successfully killed the military leader of the militant group Hamas. However, the missile also killed 15 civilians who were sleeping in the same building and wounded scores of others. But the loss of life among the children grieves us most. In eighteen months, 286 Palestinian children under the age of eighteen died. During the same time, Israel lost 54 children.³¹
In order to comprehend the shock of these figures, American congresspersons supportive of Israel have translated these casualty figures into American demographics. From 2000 to 2012 there were about 1,075 Israeli causalities. If America had lost the same proportion of lives as Israel, our losses would have been 54,850. By any measure this is intolerable. But we need to do the same math and ask what the Palestinian losses look like if projected onto the American population. In the same period, 6,348 Palestinians died. This is the equivalent of America experiencing 481,000 deaths in a dozen years due to civil strife.³² To sharpen this further, Palestinian deaths are the same as if the United States underwent the tragedy of the New York World Trade Center crisis of September 11, 2001, 160 times over twelve years.
Stalemate
The Second Intifada slowly came to an end somewhere near 2005. By the time conflicts had begun to dissipate, Palestinian deaths had reached about 5,500. Israeli deaths (both collateral and military) were around 1,100. According to the Israeli organization B’Tselem, 46 percent of the Palestinians who died took no part in the fighting but were collateral victims. Because of the remarkable imbalance in causality statistics and weapons, Palestinians began employing suicide bombers to bring the conflict to the Israeli civilian population, arguing that their civilian centers were already under siege. In 2001 there were forty bombings; in 2002, forty-seven; in 2003, twenty-three, in 2004, eighteen; and then in 2005, nine. Then it quickly dropped off.
This tactic was rightly judged as reprehensible by world opinion. Its symbol became the Passover Bombing of March 2002 when a bomber dressed like a woman entered the Park Hotel in Natanya, Israel, and killed 28 people and wounded 140. The world was stunned. Palestinian pleas pointing to the atrocities in their own villages never made news. Israeli bombings were surgical and behind the scenes (media access was strictly controlled); the suicide bombers pursued high-profile public targets and the press was there immediately.
The Israeli response was to build a separation barrier that would protect the Israeli population. Its original plan called for 430 miles of sophisticated fences and thirty-foot (nine-meter) walls—which is what visitors to Israeli will see today surrounding a city like Bethlehem. Supporters of the barrier claim that it stemmed suicide terror. Critics say that suicide bombing was voluntarily withdrawn. When the wall was incomplete (say, in 2006), the bombings were rare and yet the boundary could be easily breached. Today the barrier is visible throughout the West Bank but can be compromised with moderate effort. By some estimates, hundreds of Palestinians move daily into Israel for work illegally. On YouTube you can actually watch them breaching the wall. A friend of mine is an Israeli peace activist who once told me that her boyfriend was a Palestinian in Ramallah. Ok, I said, so how do you get together? Seriously? she answered. He hops the wall.
The permeability of the wall and its path moving deep into West Bank territory (8.5 percent of the West Bank was taken by the wall) have led Israeli critics to say that this is about segregation or perhaps the suppression of a population. Some believe it is about economic control since now these areas must trade with Israel for goods and services. In many cases, the barrier does not divide Arabs and Jews—it sometimes simply hems in Palestinians so they cannot contact other Palestinians. In Jerusalem the wall is used to limit Palestinian residential areas so that Jerusalem maintains a Jewish majority. In July 2011 Jerusalem city council member Yakir Segev gave a speech indicating that all Palestinians left outside the wall no longer belonged to Jerusalem. He noted that the separation fence . . . was built for political and demographic reasons—not just security concerns.³³
In this period after the Second Intifada some notable changes did occur in addition to the construction of the separation barrier. The year 2004 witnessed the death of the iconic leader of Palestinian resistance, Yasser Arafat. In August 2005 Israel began the forcible removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza: a bid to end potential conflict and pacify a region prone to explosions. In 2006, in Gaza’s first genuinely democratic election (monitored by the Carter Center), the political party Hamas was elected to majority rule. And they promised to take a decidedly more belligerent posture toward Israel. Israel responded with a blockade that paralyzed the Gazan economy.
By 2006 Israel’s two remaining areas of conflict were well defined. First the Palestinian resistance group Hezbollah in Lebanon (backed by Syria and Iran) began a rocket offensive in that year (they fired 4,000 and terrorized the cities of northern Galilee). The Israeli military threw everything it could at southern Lebanon: 12,000 tactical fighter missions, 2,500 artillery shells by sea, and 100,000 land-based artillery.
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Jump Back
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negotiator, told CNN, “I’m afraid that we will not have a peace process anymore. I would say ‘God help Palestinians and Israelis’, because to have a meaningful peace process means that we would continue where we left off.” In spring 2002, Sharon launched a full-scale military assault on the Palestinian territories, arresting Arabs by the thousands, destroying the infrastructure of Arab towns (phone lines, water, sewers), ruining administrative buildings and offices (such as the education ministry and the office of land deeds), and confiscating all documents of the Palestinian government. The Palestinians announced a “Day of Rage” and street conflicts escalated. Neighboring Arab governments saw these conflicts as ominous and asked publicly if they indicated a future of renewed tensions in the region. At a funeral for a fallen Israeli soldier and friend, Chaim Azran, nineteen, commented to the New York Times, “I voted for Ariel Sharon so there will be war, because only through war can we put an end to this.”²⁸ No one imagined where this so-called “Second Intifada” would go. Conflict raged for months. Palestinian gunmen were no match for Israel’s army, one of the best in the world. Soon tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters, and jet fighters were laying siege to Palestinian cities that had not seen occupation for years. Yasir Arafat’s personal compound in Ramallah was surrounded, bombed, and occupied, leaving the leader and his small circle of aides in just a handful of rooms. The death toll climbed. Palestinian deaths outpaced Israeli causalities four to one until suicide bombs brought unspeakable terror to Israeli streets. Many observers viewed the two peoples in a death grip, pulling each other toward national suicide. By the end of July 2002, Palestinian deaths beginning in September 2000 totaled 1,674. In addition, 19,938 people had been wounded.²⁹ During the same period, 577 Israelis were dead with 4,122 wounded.³⁰ And the killing showed no sign of ending. On July 23, 2002, an Israeli F-16 jet fighter destroyed a residential building in Gaza City. The missile successfully killed the military leader of the militant group Hamas. However, the missile also killed 15 civilians who were sleeping in the same building and wounded scores of others. But the loss of life among the children grieves us most. In eighteen months, 286 Palestinian children under the age of eighteen died. During the same time, Israel lost 54 children.³¹ In order to comprehend the shock of these figures, American congresspersons supportive of Israel have translated these casualty figures into American demographics. From 2000 to 2012 there were about 1,075 Israeli causalities. If America had lost the same proportion of lives as Israel, our losses would have been 54,850. By any measure this is intolerable. But we need to do the same math and ask what the Palestinian losses look like if projected onto the American population. In the same period, 6,348 Palestinians died. This is the equivalent of America experiencing 481,000 deaths in a dozen years due to civil strife.³² To sharpen this further, Palestinian deaths are the same as if the United States underwent the tragedy of the New York World Trade Center crisis of September 11, 2001, 160 times over twelve years. Stalemate The Second Intifada slowly came to an end somewhere near 2005. By the time conflicts had begun to dissipate, Palestinian deaths had reached about 5,500. Israeli deaths (both collateral and military) were around 1,100. According to the Israeli organization B’Tselem, 46 percent of the Palestinians who died took no part in the fighting but were collateral victims. Because of the remarkable imbalance in causality statistics and weapons, Palestinians began employing suicide bombers to bring the conflict to the Israeli civilian population, arguing that their civilian centers were already under siege. In 2001 there were forty bombings; in 2002, forty-seven; in 2003, twenty-three, in 2004, eighteen; and then in 2005, nine. Then it quickly dropped off. This tactic was rightly judged as reprehensible by world opinion. Its symbol became the “Passover Bombing” of March 2002 when a bomber dressed like a woman entered the Park Hotel in Natanya, Israel, and killed 28 people and wounded 140. The world was stunned. Palestinian pleas pointing to the atrocities in their own villages never made news. Israeli bombings were surgical and behind the scenes (media access was strictly controlled); the suicide bombers pursued high-profile public targets and the press was there immediately. The Israeli response was to build a “separation barrier” that would protect the Israeli population. Its original plan called for 430 miles of sophisticated fences and thirty-foot (nine-meter) walls—which is what visitors to Israeli will see today surrounding a city like Bethlehem. Supporters of the barrier claim that it stemmed suicide terror. Critics say that suicide bombing was voluntarily withdrawn. When the wall was incomplete (say, in 2006), the bombings were rare and yet the boundary could be easily breached. Today the barrier is visible throughout the West Bank but can be compromised with moderate effort. By some estimates, hundreds of Palestinians move daily into Israel for work illegally. On YouTube you can actually watch them breaching the wall. A friend of mine is an Israeli peace activist who once told me that her boyfriend was a Palestinian in Ramallah. “Ok,” I said, “so how do you get together?” “Seriously?” she answered. “He hops the wall.” The permeability of the wall and its path moving deep into West Bank territory (8.5 percent of the West Bank was taken by the wall) have led Israeli critics to say that this is about segregation or perhaps the suppression of a population. Some believe it is about economic control since now these areas must trade with Israel for goods and services. In many cases, the barrier does not divide Arabs and Jews—it sometimes simply hems in Palestinians so they cannot contact other Palestinians. In Jerusalem the wall is used to limit Palestinian residential areas so that Jerusalem maintains a Jewish majority. In July 2011 Jerusalem city council member Yakir Segev gave a speech indicating that all Palestinians left “outside” the wall no longer belonged to Jerusalem. He noted that the “separation fence . . . was built for political and demographic reasons—not just security concerns.”³³ In this period after the Second Intifada some notable changes did occur in addition to the construction of the separation barrier. The year 2004 witnessed the death of the iconic leader of Palestinian resistance, Yasser Arafat. In August 2005 Israel began the forcible removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza: a bid to end potential conflict and pacify a region prone to explosions. In 2006, in Gaza’s first genuinely democratic election (monitored by the Carter Center), the political party Hamas was elected to majority rule. And they promised to take a decidedly more belligerent posture toward Israel. Israel responded with a blockade that paralyzed the Gazan economy. By 2006 Israel’s two remaining areas of conflict were well defined. First the Palestinian resistance group Hezbollah in Lebanon (backed by Syria and Iran) began a rocket offensive in that year (they fired 4,000 and terrorized the cities of northern Galilee). The Israeli military threw everything it could at southern Lebanon: 12,000 tactical fighter missions, 2,500 artillery shells by sea, and 100,000 land-based artillery.
2003 to 2011 Israel invested $2.5 billion in settlements. These costs included tax incentives, infrastructure, grants, mortgage subsidies, and public buildings.²⁰
These amounts are simply extraordinary and they betray Israel’s true interests in the West Bank. In other words, the settlements are not a marginal, nettlesome issue: they are a mainstream national commitment. During the same period, Palestinians were commonly denied building permits for their homes in the same region—all while Israel was plowing millions into building settler communities nearby. Hundreds of Palestinians’ houses—built on their own land—have been destroyed since 1993. The key fact, though, is that Israel built a matrix of bypass roads in the West Bank that avoid the villages and link the settlements, making a web of well-connected settlement life. In 1999, the U.S. government even gave Israel $1.2 billion for building these roads.²¹ The roads cut through Arab land, further fragmenting Arab society and restricting the growth of Arab villages.
Rather than offering peace, the ongoing consequences of Oslo for Arabs became tragic. In 1993, for example, Israel closed Jerusalem to Palestinians who do not have a travel permit; as a result, access to hospitals, religious centers, and educational institutions is off-limits. A close look at Bethlehem shows the effects of this policy. In the 1990’s the main checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem would be one of the busiest in the country. But then the Israelis built an alternate checkpoint reserved for Palestinians.²² Diplomats, tourists, and Israeli settlers would use the old checkpoint known for years, but Palestinians would be routed out of sight 650 meters away to a parking lot for 700 cars. Here the Israelis could limit Arab entry without the scrutiny of foreign visitors. As one writer describes it, this practice of separating travelers based on race is tantamount to apartheid.²³ But more, Bethlehem is utterly dependent on greater Jerusalem for its economic growth. This closure starved Bethlehem while non-Arabs were free to move smoothly in and out of Jerusalem, bypassing the town itself.
Camp David II, July 12–25, 2000
Such conditions inevitably lead to conflict since people without hope soon become desperate. In May 2000, when Israel celebrated its fifty-second Independence Day, the Palestinians commemorated what they term the Nakbah which in Arabic refers to the catastrophe. For them, the founding of the Israeli state has been just that, a catastrophe. Street fighting erupted on a scale not seen in years, with many deaths. But for the first time in memory, Palestinian police did not stand passively when they watched Israeli soldiers firing on civilians. The newly armed police fired back—which brought a sobering realization to Israel how an armed struggle would look if the Palestinians traded in stones for weapons. The old images of the Intifada from ten years earlier seemed like paradise compared with live fire from Palestinian rifles. Since 1993, the Palestinians had been permitted to equip and train a professional police force of forty thousand. Suddenly the threat no longer looked like rioting. This new dimension could lead to civil war.
On July 12, 2000, President Bill Clinton invited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasir Arafat to Camp David in order to discuss the future of the peace talks. This meeting was to be an important one, evoking memories of the famous talks hosted by President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1979 when Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Israel’s Menachem Begin negotiated genuine peace for the first time. Expectations ran high, and all onlookers realized that a meeting producing a halfway settlement would be a disaster.²⁴ The incendiary issues of Jerusalem and land confiscation and refugees could no longer be ignored.
After nine days of intense negotiations (to July 20), both sides declared that a resolution was impossible. President Clinton intervened, urging the parties to remain and work further. Secretary of State Madeline Albright worked with negotiators day and night. But at last on July 25, after fifteen days of exhausting work, both Israeli and Palestinian leaders announced that the meeting was a failure. While the media represented Arafat as walking away from Barak’s generous offers—offers that were never placed in writing—the PLO negotiators found the Israeli proposals impossible to accept. For example, they planned to divide up the Palestinians into four cantons, each separated by Israeli land (the northern West Bank, the central West Bank, the southern West Bank, and Gaza). The Arabs would not have control over their own water, borders, or air space. Months later the details of the map used by the Israelis came to light, clearly showing their intentions.²⁵ Another sticking point turned on the ownership of Jerusalem. One of Arafat’s aids commented about him, He is very angry and he doesn’t believe the Israelis are willing to make peace. It’s a waste of time to stay here any longer. Barak was also in a dilemma. Conservatives at home threatened to destroy his fragile political coalition if he should make any concessions on Jerusalem—while progressives were urging him to provide the Palestinians with genuine access to the city. On July 26, 300 American rabbis calling themselves The American Committee on Jerusalem met at the University of Maryland and called for a halt to Israeli demands on Jerusalem. For them, Jerusalem should be a shared city that recognizes a divine ownership over its precincts. But their 300 voices were not heard.²⁶
The Violent Aftermath: The Second Intifada
Before long, Palestinian frustration with this process exploded. On September 28, 2000, the spark that lit the fuse arrived at Jerusalem’s Old City in the form of retired general Ariel Sharon, the leader of the conservative Likud party with a grim history as leader of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Together with hundreds of armed Israelis and with the full permission of Ehud Barak, he entered the Muslim sanctuaries of the Haram al-Sharif (to Muslims the noble sanctuary, or to Jews, the Temple Mount), stood near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and announced Jewish sovereignty over even this region. Rioting broke out immediately. Within two weeks, over 90 Arabs were dead and 2,000 in the hospital. Worried Israeli and Palestinian leadership wondered how they might stop an anger that showed no signs of abating. Two months later, the fighting continued to escalate. Soon no one knew how to stop it. By late summer 2001, over 800 Arabs were dead (150 of them children) and over 12,000 wounded. Over 7,000 Arab homes and 50 public buildings were destroyed. The Israelis even pulled up over 23,000 Arab fruit and olive trees as punishment.²⁷
These conflicts forced an early election in Israel and challenged Barak’s ability to broker a peace deal with the Palestinians. In a remarkably ironic twist, in late January 2001, Barak found himself running against the notoriously hawkish Ariel Sharon, who started the entire incident. On February 6, the Israeli public, exhausted by months of violence and failed negotiations, elected Sharon as prime minister in the largest landslide in Israel’s history (Sharon won 62.6 percent of the vote). Within days he announced that all peace concessions engineered by Barak were off the table and soon declared the Oslo Peace Accords dead. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian
negotiator, told CNN, I’m afraid that we will not have a peace process anymore. I would say ‘God help Palestinians and Israelis’, because to have a meaningful peace process means that we would continue where we left off. In spring 2002, Sharon launched a full-scale military assault on the Palestinian territories, arresting Arabs by the thousands, destroying the infrastructure of Arab towns (phone lines, water, sewers), ruining administrative buildings and offices (such as the education ministry and the office of land deeds), and confiscating all documents of the Palestinian government.
The Palestinians announced a Day of Rage and street conflicts escalated. Neighboring Arab governments saw these conflicts as ominous and asked publicly if they indicated a future of renewed tensions in the region. At a funeral for a fallen Israeli soldier and friend, Chaim Azran, nineteen, commented to the New York Times, I voted for Ariel Sharon so there will be war, because only through war can we put an end to this.²⁸
No one imagined where this so-called Second Intifada would go. Conflict raged for months. Palestinian gunmen were no match for Israel’s army, one of the best in the world. Soon tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters, and jet fighters were laying siege to Palestinian cities that had not seen occupation for years. Yasir Arafat’s personal compound in Ramallah was surrounded, bombed, and occupied, leaving the leader and his small circle of aides in just a handful of rooms. The death toll climbed. Palestinian deaths outpaced Israeli causalities four to one until suicide bombs brought unspeakable terror to Israeli streets. Many observers viewed the two peoples in a death grip, pulling each other toward national suicide. By the end of July 2002, Palestinian deaths beginning in September 2000 totaled 1,674. In addition, 19,938 people had been wounded.²⁹ During the same period, 577 Israelis were dead with 4,122 wounded.³⁰ And the killing showed no sign of ending. On July 23, 2002, an Israeli F-16 jet fighter destroyed a residential building in Gaza City. The missile successfully killed the military leader of the militant group Hamas. However, the missile also killed 15 civilians who were sleeping in the same building and wounded scores of others. But the loss of life among the children grieves us most. In eighteen months, 286 Palestinian children under the age of eighteen died. During the same time, Israel lost 54 children.³¹
In order to comprehend the shock of these figures, American congresspersons supportive of Israel have translated these casualty figures into American demographics. From 2000 to 2012 there were about 1,075 Israeli causalities. If America had lost the same proportion of lives as Israel, our losses would have been 54,850. By any measure this is intolerable. But we need to do the same math and ask what the Palestinian losses look like if projected onto the American population. In the same period, 6,348 Palestinians died. This is the equivalent of America experiencing 481,000 deaths in a dozen years due to civil strife.³² To sharpen this further, Palestinian deaths are the same as if the United States underwent the tragedy of the New York World Trade Center crisis of September 11, 2001, 160 times over twelve years.
Stalemate
The Second Intifada slowly came to an end somewhere near 2005. By the time conflicts had begun to dissipate, Palestinian deaths had reached about 5,500. Israeli deaths (both collateral and military) were around 1,100. According to the Israeli organization B’Tselem, 46 percent of the Palestinians who died took no part in the fighting but were collateral victims. Because of the remarkable imbalance in causality statistics and weapons, Palestinians began employing suicide bombers to bring the conflict to the Israeli civilian population, arguing that their civilian centers were already under siege. In 2001 there were forty bombings; in 2002, forty-seven; in 2003, twenty-three, in 2004, eighteen; and then in 2005, nine. Then it quickly dropped off.
This tactic was rightly judged as reprehensible by world opinion. Its symbol became the Passover Bombing of March 2002 when a bomber dressed like a woman entered the Park Hotel in Natanya, Israel, and killed 28 people and wounded 140. The world was stunned. Palestinian pleas pointing to the atrocities in their own villages never made news. Israeli bombings were surgical and behind the scenes (media access was strictly controlled); the suicide bombers pursued high-profile public targets and the press was there immediately.
The Israeli response was to build a separation barrier that would protect the Israeli population. Its original plan called for 430 miles of sophisticated fences and thirty-foot (nine-meter) walls—which is what visitors to Israeli will see today surrounding a city like Bethlehem. Supporters of the barrier claim that it stemmed suicide terror. Critics say that suicide bombing was voluntarily withdrawn. When the wall was incomplete (say, in 2006), the bombings were rare and yet the boundary could be easily breached. Today the barrier is visible throughout the West Bank but can be compromised with moderate effort. By some estimates, hundreds of Palestinians move daily into Israel for work illegally. On YouTube you can actually watch them breaching the wall. A friend of mine is an Israeli peace activist who once told me that her boyfriend was a Palestinian in Ramallah. Ok, I said, so how do you get together? Seriously? she answered. He hops the wall.
The permeability of the wall and its path moving deep into West Bank territory (8.5 percent of the West Bank was taken by the wall) have led Israeli critics to say that this is about segregation or perhaps the suppression of a population. Some believe it is about economic control since now these areas must trade with Israel for goods and services. In many cases, the barrier does not divide Arabs and Jews—it sometimes simply hems in Palestinians so they cannot contact other Palestinians. In Jerusalem the wall is used to limit Palestinian residential areas so that Jerusalem maintains a Jewish majority. In July 2011 Jerusalem city council member Yakir Segev gave a speech indicating that all Palestinians left outside the wall no longer belonged to Jerusalem. He noted that the separation fence . . . was built for political and demographic reasons—not just security concerns.³³
In this period after the Second Intifada some notable changes did occur in addition to the construction of the separation barrier. The year 2004 witnessed the death of the iconic leader of Palestinian resistance, Yasser Arafat. In August 2005 Israel began the forcible removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza: a bid to end potential conflict and pacify a region prone to explosions. In 2006, in Gaza’s first genuinely democratic election (monitored by the Carter Center), the political party Hamas was elected to majority rule. And they promised to take a decidedly more belligerent posture toward Israel. Israel responded with a blockade that paralyzed the Gazan economy.
By 2006 Israel’s two remaining areas of conflict were well defined. First the Palestinian resistance group Hezbollah in Lebanon (backed by Syria and Iran) began a rocket offensive in that year (they fired 4,000 and terrorized the cities of northern Galilee). The Israeli military threw everything it could at southern Lebanon: 12,000 tactical fighter missions, 2,500 artillery shells by sea, and 100,000 land-based artillery.
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Jump Back
==
But this was not just about suppressing Hezbollah. It was to teach Lebanon the severity of the consequences should they permit this again. In Lebanon Israel destroyed infrastructure: 400 miles of roads, 73 bridges, 25 fuel depots, 900 commercial structures, 350 schools, 15,000 homes (damaging 130,000), and the famed Beirut lighthouse. In the end, 43 Israeli civilians and 120 soldiers died. On the other side, 1,120 Lebanese civilians and approximately 800 soldiers died. The second remaining area of conflict was Gaza. The Israeli blockade continued to bring acute duress on what some were describing as 1.5 million people engaged in a social and psychological experiment of stress and deprivation. In the winter of 2008–09 hostilities broke out as Gazans fired homemade rockets (called Qassam Rockets) over their walls and fences in order to hit nearby Israeli towns. Understandably Israel could not tolerate this. Israel repeated what it had done in Lebanon, naming their offensive Operation Cast Lead, and began a massive bombing campaign on December 7, 2008. In one day, Israel dropped 100 tons of bombs on the small region, which led to immediate international concerns about proportionality. Israel was also accused of using phosphorus bombs on the civilian population centers (video evidence of this is easily seen on YouTube). The Gazans were accused of using human shields. The fighting lasted three weeks and observers described postwar conditions there as unspeakably bad. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed (437 were children) and 5,400 were wounded. On the Israeli side, only 13 died (four from friendly fire) and 182 were wounded. To get a sense of the scope of what happened, I wish that every Christian could read two articles that begin with the same event: the murder of Rayya Abu Hajjaj and her daughter Majda Abu Hajjaj, who were waving white flags and were shot to death by advancing Israeli soldiers on the first day of the ground invasion. The Israeli condemnation of this event and the invasion can be read in the Jewish paper Ha’aretz on August 12, 2012.³⁴ Dr. Mads Gilbert, an emergency medicine specialist from Norway who was working at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, wrote a more extensive Christian analysis. His report appeared in The Link and was titled “When War Criminals Walk Free.”³⁵ As in Lebanon, Israel targeted Gazan infrastructure (electrical, water, sewage, even UN supply depots and enormous chicken farms). The Gazans were being taught: remain silent in your captivity or be punished. Yoav Galant, the commanding officer of the army near Gaza at the time said publicly that the goal of the bombing was to “send Gaza decades into the past.”³⁶ Today the political and economic “strangulation” of Gaza continues. And it shows up in enormous ways (military assassinations of Hamas leaders) and in small ways that few note; for example, in 2009 the U.S. State Department provided a million-dollar scholarship program to enable disadvantaged Gaza students to study in the West Bank or the United States.³⁷ It was a brilliant program that would cultivate a new generation of educated Palestinian leaders. In 2012 Israel imposed a travel ban on these students so they could not leave Gaza and, in response, the State Department cancelled the scholarship program.³⁸ It is this sort of “quiet persecution” that radicalizes the Gaza population and cultivates toxic levels of despair. And it is why in the winter of 2012–13, Gazans began firing longer range missiles into Israel (many made in Iran) at Israeli cities. In March 2009 Benjamin Netanyahu formed a coalition government and was installed as Israel’s new president. He represented the far-right Likud party, he opposed the removal of settlers from Gaza, promoted the settlement of the West Bank by Israelis, and was unlikely to negotiate flexibly with any Palestinian government. This probably explains why today there is a feeling of despair that is tangible in the occupied territories. Israel feels it has now “contained” the problem. The Palestinians feel powerless to change their situation. Israel’s borders seem (temporarily) quiet. A civil war has erupted in Syria, a new unpredictable regime is now in Egypt, and Iran continues to rebuild Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Has Palestine been pacified? For the last five years it seemed so. And then Hamas leaders in Gaza, hoping to build on the Arab Spring, this time using longer range rockets smuggled in from Iran, began firing against Israel in November 2012. Israel responded again with more bombing campaigns and it was all over in a couple of weeks. Friends in Israel suddenly felt the discouragement and weight of it all. An Israeli friend of mine wrote poignantly: “The mood in the country is dreadful—anger, fear, discouragement.” Palestine and the United Nations The Palestinian bid to win a place in the community of nations took an important step forward in late 2012. On November 29 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas won his bid to bring Palestine into the U.N. In a General Assembly vote of 138–9 (41 abstaining) the Palestinians gained the status of “nonmember observer state,” which gives them considerable formal recognition and access to a number of agencies, such as the International Court of Justice. It was not surprising that the United States and Israel (joined by Canada, the Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Panama) voted against it. The key here is in how this vote may signal a shift in world opinion. France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and Ireland, as well as Japan and New Zealand, voted in favor of the request. Britain and Germany abstained. And the United States was very much alone with Israel objecting to it. This alignment is a new and rare development. Israel called the overture meaningless and threatened to build 3,000 new homes in the occupied West Bank in response. But clearly the vote was unsettling to Israeli leaders, who saw this as a loss they could barely acknowledge. The vast majority of the world’s nations see the Israeli settlement and occupation of the West Bank as violating international law. And now the Palestinians may try to use this to broker their own statehood. THE MODERN STRATEGIC EQUATION The challenge for us today is to weave these many threads of history and geography into a coherent pattern, making some sense of this modern conflict. We continue to live in a remarkably tense situation in which Israel struggles for moral credibility in the world (few nations have been condemned as many times by the United Nations), where Israel’s neighbors have grievances based on war and loss of land, and over almost 4 million Palestinian refugees seek their home in the midst of the conflict. Some Palestinians would like to see Israel pull back to its borders of before 1967, which will likely not happen. But what we can hope for is a resolution that meets most of the needs of both parties. More is at stake. Arabs grieve the loss of control in this land where Islamic empires have had the upper hand for twelve hundred of the last two thousand years. The success of Israel—militarily as well as economically—has shamed Arab pride
significantly, which is one reason the Arab world is pleased to see Western dependence on its oil. Since the 1970s, oil has reaped considerable political leverage for the Arab world. Israel is a remarkably small country: about 40 miles from the western Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River in the east, and about 140 miles from the far north (Mount Hermon) to the southern desert city of Be’er Sheva. From the mountains in the center of the country, a good artillery unit could easily reach Tel Aviv. From the Golan Heights, a mortar round could land almost anywhere in northern Galilee. An F-16 fighter flying out of Amman, the capital of Jordan, could reach Jerusalem in seventy-five seconds and Tel Aviv in three minutes.³⁹ Syrians and Iraqis alike can easily target Israel with modern missiles. Today if Egypt were to place Scud missiles with a 160-mile range on the Suez Canal, they could target both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. If these missiles were advanced 50 miles east into the Sinai, they could hit any city in Galilee. This close proximity explains the paranoia that so often accompanies negotiations and the preoccupation with security. Every piece of real estate has some strategic value. So when people begin to talk about slicing up the country to build, say, a parallel Palestinian state, almost every Israeli shudders to think how this might alter the military equation. Lebanon borders Israel in the north above Galilee and is well known among Israelis as the source of “terrorist” infiltration. The country is perceived today as unstable, and yet occupying a buffer zone in southern Lebanon for twenty years has come at a high price in Jewish lives. When Israel pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000, it abandoned its Christian allies there—many of whom have now been allowed to “come through” the fence and enter Israel. Israel watches southern Lebanon closely today using world-class reconnaissance. Palestinian refugees still populate the region and have harbored anger toward Israel for generations. Syria once owned the Golan Heights but lost them in the war of 1967. The Golan’s elevation (to almost 3,000 feet) offers a serious advantage over the lowlands of Galilee. So many mortars have been fired on the kibbutzes of northern Galilee that most have underground shelters today. Above ground the Israelis devised an ingenious means of protection: loose stone boulders are held in place with heavy fencing, forming small twenty-by-twenty-foot shelters that can absorb the impact of a direct hit. After many years of these attacks, Israel could not tolerate the security risk any longer and so conquered the plateau in 1967. In 1973, Syria tried to regain the region but failed in the midst of one of the largest tank battles of modern history. Israel later annexed this region in 1981. Traditional underground shelters today are popular places for kibbutzes to sponsor dances. The bomb-proof walls are likewise rock music–proof. The Golan Heights are an eerie no-man’s land. An abandoned Syrian city called Quneitra sits on the plateau like a ghost town. The flank of Mount Hermon nearby bristles with high-tech surveillance devices that keep an eye on everything that moves. The United Nations maintains a buffer zone between the two armies. If Israel eventually makes peace with Syria, this region will have to be negotiated. Jordan shares a long border with Israel from south of the Sea of Galilee (along the Yarmouk River gorge), along the Jordan River itself, to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south. Hot springs on the Yarmouk River date back to Roman times (Hammet Gader). Visitors who like adventure can sit in the hot springs and then climb the hill to watch Israeli guards and Jordanian soldiers staring at each other with high-powered binoculars. From 1948 until the war of 1967, the Jordanian border used to cross over the Jordan River and extend into the central mountains, encompassing the Arab cities of Nablus (biblical Shechem), Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. In fact, just north of Jerusalem (in the village of Shuafat) are a curious little airport and palace that were being built by King Hussein of Jordan before he lost the mountains to Israel. The Israelis redrew the border of Jerusalem and annexed this region so that the airport could be theirs. In the war of 1967, Jordan lost the central mountains to Israel. From a strategic standpoint, this victory was a significant achievement for Israel. Today Israel occupies all of the highlands inside the country and uses the deep gorge of the Jordan River as a natural barrier against attacks from the east. Hightech sensors and electric fences stretch along this eastern frontier. Near the Israeli highway that skirts the border, a double fence is separated by soft sand that is combed daily by an army patrol looking for the footprints of intruders. But since Israel has negotiated a peace accord with Jordan, traffic now moves across multiple crossings every day. In the far south are the great deserts that extend from the region south of the Dead Sea all the way west to the Mediterranean. As we noted above, these deserts are a buffer between Israel and Egypt. Israel conquered them in 1956, returned them, reconquered them in 1967, nearly lost them in 1973, and then as a result of a 1979 treaty returned them again in 1982. THE CENTRAL ISSUE: TAKING LAND The form of the equation is evident: Israel has a genuine security problem. It is surrounded by Arab nations who are suspicious of its intentions because Israel occupies land that is hotly disputed. In each of the major wars, Israel strategically increased the size of its holdings at the expense of Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Consider the following statistics gleaned from the records of the United Nations: When the UN General Assembly approved a plan to divide the country into an Israeli state and a Palestinian state on November 29, 1947, the breakdown of land and population looked like this:
ARABS (Muslims and Christians) JEWS
% of population 69 31
% of land owned or settled 94 6
% of land offered in UN plan 48 52
At once the relative inequity is clear: 31 percent of the population living on 6 percent of the land was being given half the country! Let us look at one district (as the British organized the area) and see how this worked out. In Nazareth District in 1945, the Arab population was 84 percent and the Jewish population was 16 percent. Land ownership broke down thus: Arab, 52 percent; Jewish, 28 percent; public lands, 20 percent. Therefore it made sense to give this region to the Palestinians. But consider the neighboring Galilee District: Arab population, 67 percent; Jewish population, 33 percent. Land holdings: Arab, 51 percent; Jewish, 38 percent; public lands, 11 percent. Yet this area near the Sea of Galilee was given to Israel.⁴⁰ When Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, the Arabs took offense that Westerners would divide their land and then offer them such a slice. King Abdullah of Jordan no doubt saw this as an attempt to limit his growing control. At the close of the war, Israel even exceeded its allotted holdings significantly; instead of possessing 52 percent of the land as the United Nations urged, Israel held 77 percent of it—one-third
But this was not just about suppressing Hezbollah. It was to teach Lebanon the severity of the consequences should they permit this again. In Lebanon Israel destroyed infrastructure: 400 miles of roads, 73 bridges, 25 fuel depots, 900 commercial structures, 350 schools, 15,000 homes (damaging 130,000), and the famed Beirut lighthouse. In the end, 43 Israeli civilians and 120 soldiers died. On the other side, 1,120 Lebanese civilians and approximately 800 soldiers died.
The second remaining area of conflict was Gaza. The Israeli blockade continued to bring acute duress on what some were describing as 1.5 million people engaged in a social and psychological experiment of stress and deprivation. In the winter of 2008–09 hostilities broke out as Gazans fired homemade rockets (called Qassam Rockets) over their walls and fences in order to hit nearby Israeli towns. Understandably Israel could not tolerate this.
Israel repeated what it had done in Lebanon, naming their offensive Operation Cast Lead, and began a massive bombing campaign on December 7, 2008. In one day, Israel dropped 100 tons of bombs on the small region, which led to immediate international concerns about proportionality. Israel was also accused of using phosphorus bombs on the civilian population centers (video evidence of this is easily seen on YouTube). The Gazans were accused of using human shields. The fighting lasted three weeks and observers described postwar conditions there as unspeakably bad. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed (437 were children) and 5,400 were wounded. On the Israeli side, only 13 died (four from friendly fire) and 182 were wounded.
To get a sense of the scope of what happened, I wish that every Christian could read two articles that begin with the same event: the murder of Rayya Abu Hajjaj and her daughter Majda Abu Hajjaj, who were waving white flags and were shot to death by advancing Israeli soldiers on the first day of the ground invasion. The Israeli condemnation of this event and the invasion can be read in the Jewish paper Ha’aretz on August 12, 2012.³⁴ Dr. Mads Gilbert, an emergency medicine specialist from Norway who was working at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, wrote a more extensive Christian analysis. His report appeared in The Link and was titled When War Criminals Walk Free.³⁵
As in Lebanon, Israel targeted Gazan infrastructure (electrical, water, sewage, even UN supply depots and enormous chicken farms). The Gazans were being taught: remain silent in your captivity or be punished. Yoav Galant, the commanding officer of the army near Gaza at the time said publicly that the goal of the bombing was to send Gaza decades into the past.³⁶
Today the political and economic strangulation of Gaza continues. And it shows up in enormous ways (military assassinations of Hamas leaders) and in small ways that few note; for example, in 2009 the U.S. State Department provided a million-dollar scholarship program to enable disadvantaged Gaza students to study in the West Bank or the United States.³⁷ It was a brilliant program that would cultivate a new generation of educated Palestinian leaders. In 2012 Israel imposed a travel ban on these students so they could not leave Gaza and, in response, the State Department cancelled the scholarship program.³⁸ It is this sort of quiet persecution that radicalizes the Gaza population and cultivates toxic levels of despair. And it is why in the winter of 2012–13, Gazans began firing longer range missiles into Israel (many made in Iran) at Israeli cities.
In March 2009 Benjamin Netanyahu formed a coalition government and was installed as Israel’s new president. He represented the far-right Likud party, he opposed the removal of settlers from Gaza, promoted the settlement of the West Bank by Israelis, and was unlikely to negotiate flexibly with any Palestinian government.
This probably explains why today there is a feeling of despair that is tangible in the occupied territories. Israel feels it has now contained the problem. The Palestinians feel powerless to change their situation. Israel’s borders seem (temporarily) quiet. A civil war has erupted in Syria, a new unpredictable regime is now in Egypt, and Iran continues to rebuild Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Has Palestine been pacified? For the last five years it seemed so. And then Hamas leaders in Gaza, hoping to build on the Arab Spring, this time using longer range rockets smuggled in from Iran, began firing against Israel in November 2012. Israel responded again with more bombing campaigns and it was all over in a couple of weeks. Friends in Israel suddenly felt the discouragement and weight of it all. An Israeli friend of mine wrote poignantly: The mood in the country is dreadful—anger, fear, discouragement.
Palestine and the United Nations
The Palestinian bid to win a place in the community of nations took an important step forward in late 2012. On November 29 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas won his bid to bring Palestine into the U.N. In a General Assembly vote of 138–9 (41 abstaining) the Palestinians gained the status of nonmember observer state, which gives them considerable formal recognition and access to a number of agencies, such as the International Court of Justice. It was not surprising that the United States and Israel (joined by Canada, the Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Panama) voted against it.
The key here is in how this vote may signal a shift in world opinion. France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and Ireland, as well as Japan and New Zealand, voted in favor of the request. Britain and Germany abstained. And the United States was very much alone with Israel objecting to it. This alignment is a new and rare development.
Israel called the overture meaningless and threatened to build 3,000 new homes in the occupied West Bank in response. But clearly the vote was unsettling to Israeli leaders, who saw this as a loss they could barely acknowledge. The vast majority of the world’s nations see the Israeli settlement and occupation of the West Bank as violating international law. And now the Palestinians may try to use this to broker their own statehood.
THE MODERN STRATEGIC EQUATION
The challenge for us today is to weave these many threads of history and geography into a coherent pattern, making some sense of this modern conflict. We continue to live in a remarkably tense situation in which Israel struggles for moral credibility in the world (few nations have been condemned as many times by the United Nations), where Israel’s neighbors have grievances based on war and loss of land, and over almost 4 million Palestinian refugees seek their home in the midst of the conflict. Some Palestinians would like to see Israel pull back to its borders of before 1967, which will likely not happen. But what we can hope for is a resolution that meets most of the needs of both parties.
More is at stake. Arabs grieve the loss of control in this land where Islamic empires have had the upper hand for twelve hundred of the last two thousand years. The success of Israel—militarily as well as economically—has shamed Arab pride
significantly, which is one reason the Arab world is pleased to see Western dependence on its oil. Since the 1970s, oil has reaped considerable political leverage for the Arab world.
Israel is a remarkably small country: about 40 miles from the western Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River in the east, and about 140 miles from the far north (Mount Hermon) to the southern desert city of Be’er Sheva. From the mountains in the center of the country, a good artillery unit could easily reach Tel Aviv. From the Golan Heights, a mortar round could land almost anywhere in northern Galilee. An F-16 fighter flying out of Amman, the capital of Jordan, could reach Jerusalem in seventy-five seconds and Tel Aviv in three minutes.³⁹ Syrians and Iraqis alike can easily target Israel with modern missiles. Today if Egypt were to place Scud missiles with a 160-mile range on the Suez Canal, they could target both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. If these missiles were advanced 50 miles east into the Sinai, they could hit any city in Galilee. This close proximity explains the paranoia that so often accompanies negotiations and the preoccupation with security. Every piece of real estate has some strategic value. So when people begin to talk about slicing up the country to build, say, a parallel Palestinian state, almost every Israeli shudders to think how this might alter the military equation.
Lebanon borders Israel in the north above Galilee and is well known among Israelis as the source of terrorist infiltration. The country is perceived today as unstable, and yet occupying a buffer zone in southern Lebanon for twenty years has come at a high price in Jewish lives. When Israel pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000, it abandoned its Christian allies there—many of whom have now been allowed to come through the fence and enter Israel. Israel watches southern Lebanon closely today using world-class reconnaissance. Palestinian refugees still populate the region and have harbored anger toward Israel for generations.
Syria once owned the Golan Heights but lost them in the war of 1967. The Golan’s elevation (to almost 3,000 feet) offers a serious advantage over the lowlands of Galilee. So many mortars have been fired on the kibbutzes of northern Galilee that most have underground shelters today. Above ground the Israelis devised an ingenious means of protection: loose stone boulders are held in place with heavy fencing, forming small twenty-by-twenty-foot shelters that can absorb the impact of a direct hit. After many years of these attacks, Israel could not tolerate the security risk any longer and so conquered the plateau in 1967. In 1973, Syria tried to regain the region but failed in the midst of one of the largest tank battles of modern history. Israel later annexed this region in 1981. Traditional underground shelters today are popular places for kibbutzes to sponsor dances. The bomb-proof walls are likewise rock music–proof.
The Golan Heights are an eerie no-man’s land. An abandoned Syrian city called Quneitra sits on the plateau like a ghost town. The flank of Mount Hermon nearby bristles with high-tech surveillance devices that keep an eye on everything that moves. The United Nations maintains a buffer zone between the two armies. If Israel eventually makes peace with Syria, this region will have to be negotiated.
Jordan shares a long border with Israel from south of the Sea of Galilee (along the Yarmouk River gorge), along the Jordan River itself, to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south. Hot springs on the Yarmouk River date back to Roman times (Hammet Gader). Visitors who like adventure can sit in the hot springs and then climb the hill to watch Israeli guards and Jordanian soldiers staring at each other with high-powered binoculars.
From 1948 until the war of 1967, the Jordanian border used to cross over the Jordan River and extend into the central mountains, encompassing the Arab cities of Nablus (biblical Shechem), Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. In fact, just north of Jerusalem (in the village of Shuafat) are a curious little airport and palace that were being built by King Hussein of Jordan before he lost the mountains to Israel. The Israelis redrew the border of Jerusalem and annexed this region so that the airport could be theirs.
In the war of 1967, Jordan lost the central mountains to Israel. From a strategic standpoint, this victory was a significant achievement for Israel. Today Israel occupies all of the highlands inside the country and uses the deep gorge of the Jordan River as a natural barrier against attacks from the east. Hightech sensors and electric fences stretch along this eastern frontier. Near the Israeli highway that skirts the border, a double fence is separated by soft sand that is combed daily by an army patrol looking for the footprints of intruders. But since Israel has negotiated a peace accord with Jordan, traffic now moves across multiple crossings every day.
In the far south are the great deserts that extend from the region south of the Dead Sea all the way west to the Mediterranean. As we noted above, these deserts are a buffer between Israel and Egypt. Israel conquered them in 1956, returned them, reconquered them in 1967, nearly lost them in 1973, and then as a result of a 1979 treaty returned them again in 1982.
THE CENTRAL ISSUE: TAKING LAND
The form of the equation is evident: Israel has a genuine security problem. It is surrounded by Arab nations who are suspicious of its intentions because Israel occupies land that is hotly disputed. In each of the major wars, Israel strategically increased the size of its holdings at the expense of Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Consider the following statistics gleaned from the records of the United Nations: When the UN General Assembly approved a plan to divide the country into an Israeli state and a Palestinian state on November 29, 1947, the breakdown of land and population looked like this:
At once the relative inequity is clear: 31 percent of the population living on 6 percent of the land was being given half the country! Let us look at one district (as the British organized the area) and see how this worked out. In Nazareth District in 1945, the Arab population was 84 percent and the Jewish population was 16 percent. Land ownership broke down thus: Arab, 52 percent; Jewish, 28 percent; public lands, 20 percent. Therefore it made sense to give this region to the Palestinians. But consider the neighboring Galilee District: Arab population, 67 percent; Jewish population, 33 percent. Land holdings: Arab, 51 percent; Jewish, 38 percent; public lands, 11 percent. Yet this area near the Sea of Galilee was given to Israel.⁴⁰
When Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, the Arabs took offense that Westerners would divide their land and then offer them such a slice. King Abdullah of Jordan no doubt saw this as an attempt to limit his growing control. At the close of the war, Israel even exceeded its allotted holdings significantly; instead of possessing 52 percent of the land as the United Nations urged, Israel held 77 percent of it—one-third
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significantly, which is one reason the Arab world is pleased to see Western dependence on its oil. Since the 1970s, oil has reaped considerable political leverage for the Arab world. Israel is a remarkably small country: about 40 miles from the western Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River in the east, and about 140 miles from the far north (Mount Hermon) to the southern desert city of Be’er Sheva. From the mountains in the center of the country, a good artillery unit could easily reach Tel Aviv. From the Golan Heights, a mortar round could land almost anywhere in northern Galilee. An F-16 fighter flying out of Amman, the capital of Jordan, could reach Jerusalem in seventy-five seconds and Tel Aviv in three minutes.³⁹ Syrians and Iraqis alike can easily target Israel with modern missiles. Today if Egypt were to place Scud missiles with a 160-mile range on the Suez Canal, they could target both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. If these missiles were advanced 50 miles east into the Sinai, they could hit any city in Galilee. This close proximity explains the paranoia that so often accompanies negotiations and the preoccupation with security. Every piece of real estate has some strategic value. So when people begin to talk about slicing up the country to build, say, a parallel Palestinian state, almost every Israeli shudders to think how this might alter the military equation. Lebanon borders Israel in the north above Galilee and is well known among Israelis as the source of “terrorist” infiltration. The country is perceived today as unstable, and yet occupying a buffer zone in southern Lebanon for twenty years has come at a high price in Jewish lives. When Israel pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000, it abandoned its Christian allies there—many of whom have now been allowed to “come through” the fence and enter Israel. Israel watches southern Lebanon closely today using world-class reconnaissance. Palestinian refugees still populate the region and have harbored anger toward Israel for generations. Syria once owned the Golan Heights but lost them in the war of 1967. The Golan’s elevation (to almost 3,000 feet) offers a serious advantage over the lowlands of Galilee. So many mortars have been fired on the kibbutzes of northern Galilee that most have underground shelters today. Above ground the Israelis devised an ingenious means of protection: loose stone boulders are held in place with heavy fencing, forming small twenty-by-twenty-foot shelters that can absorb the impact of a direct hit. After many years of these attacks, Israel could not tolerate the security risk any longer and so conquered the plateau in 1967. In 1973, Syria tried to regain the region but failed in the midst of one of the largest tank battles of modern history. Israel later annexed this region in 1981. Traditional underground shelters today are popular places for kibbutzes to sponsor dances. The bomb-proof walls are likewise rock music–proof. The Golan Heights are an eerie no-man’s land. An abandoned Syrian city called Quneitra sits on the plateau like a ghost town. The flank of Mount Hermon nearby bristles with high-tech surveillance devices that keep an eye on everything that moves. The United Nations maintains a buffer zone between the two armies. If Israel eventually makes peace with Syria, this region will have to be negotiated. Jordan shares a long border with Israel from south of the Sea of Galilee (along the Yarmouk River gorge), along the Jordan River itself, to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south. Hot springs on the Yarmouk River date back to Roman times (Hammet Gader). Visitors who like adventure can sit in the hot springs and then climb the hill to watch Israeli guards and Jordanian soldiers staring at each other with high-powered binoculars. From 1948 until the war of 1967, the Jordanian border used to cross over the Jordan River and extend into the central mountains, encompassing the Arab cities of Nablus (biblical Shechem), Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. In fact, just north of Jerusalem (in the village of Shuafat) are a curious little airport and palace that were being built by King Hussein of Jordan before he lost the mountains to Israel. The Israelis redrew the border of Jerusalem and annexed this region so that the airport could be theirs. In the war of 1967, Jordan lost the central mountains to Israel. From a strategic standpoint, this victory was a significant achievement for Israel. Today Israel occupies all of the highlands inside the country and uses the deep gorge of the Jordan River as a natural barrier against attacks from the east. Hightech sensors and electric fences stretch along this eastern frontier. Near the Israeli highway that skirts the border, a double fence is separated by soft sand that is combed daily by an army patrol looking for the footprints of intruders. But since Israel has negotiated a peace accord with Jordan, traffic now moves across multiple crossings every day. In the far south are the great deserts that extend from the region south of the Dead Sea all the way west to the Mediterranean. As we noted above, these deserts are a buffer between Israel and Egypt. Israel conquered them in 1956, returned them, reconquered them in 1967, nearly lost them in 1973, and then as a result of a 1979 treaty returned them again in 1982. THE CENTRAL ISSUE: TAKING LAND The form of the equation is evident: Israel has a genuine security problem. It is surrounded by Arab nations who are suspicious of its intentions because Israel occupies land that is hotly disputed. In each of the major wars, Israel strategically increased the size of its holdings at the expense of Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Consider the following statistics gleaned from the records of the United Nations: When the UN General Assembly approved a plan to divide the country into an Israeli state and a Palestinian state on November 29, 1947, the breakdown of land and population looked like this:
ARABS (Muslims and Christians) JEWS
% of population 69 31
% of land owned or settled 94 6
% of land offered in UN plan 48 52
At once the relative inequity is clear: 31 percent of the population living on 6 percent of the land was being given half the country! Let us look at one district (as the British organized the area) and see how this worked out. In Nazareth District in 1945, the Arab population was 84 percent and the Jewish population was 16 percent. Land ownership broke down thus: Arab, 52 percent; Jewish, 28 percent; public lands, 20 percent. Therefore it made sense to give this region to the Palestinians. But consider the neighboring Galilee District: Arab population, 67 percent; Jewish population, 33 percent. Land holdings: Arab, 51 percent; Jewish, 38 percent; public lands, 11 percent. Yet this area near the Sea of Galilee was given to Israel.⁴⁰ When Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, the Arabs took offense that Westerners would divide their land and then offer them such a slice. King Abdullah of Jordan no doubt saw this as an attempt to limit his growing control. At the close of the war, Israel even exceeded its allotted holdings significantly; instead of possessing 52 percent of the land as the United Nations urged, Israel held 77 percent of it—one-third
But this was not just about suppressing Hezbollah. It was to teach Lebanon the severity of the consequences should they permit this again. In Lebanon Israel destroyed infrastructure: 400 miles of roads, 73 bridges, 25 fuel depots, 900 commercial structures, 350 schools, 15,000 homes (damaging 130,000), and the famed Beirut lighthouse. In the end, 43 Israeli civilians and 120 soldiers died. On the other side, 1,120 Lebanese civilians and approximately 800 soldiers died.
The second remaining area of conflict was Gaza. The Israeli blockade continued to bring acute duress on what some were describing as 1.5 million people engaged in a social and psychological experiment of stress and deprivation. In the winter of 2008–09 hostilities broke out as Gazans fired homemade rockets (called Qassam Rockets) over their walls and fences in order to hit nearby Israeli towns. Understandably Israel could not tolerate this.
Israel repeated what it had done in Lebanon, naming their offensive Operation Cast Lead, and began a massive bombing campaign on December 7, 2008. In one day, Israel dropped 100 tons of bombs on the small region, which led to immediate international concerns about proportionality. Israel was also accused of using phosphorus bombs on the civilian population centers (video evidence of this is easily seen on YouTube). The Gazans were accused of using human shields. The fighting lasted three weeks and observers described postwar conditions there as unspeakably bad. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed (437 were children) and 5,400 were wounded. On the Israeli side, only 13 died (four from friendly fire) and 182 were wounded.
To get a sense of the scope of what happened, I wish that every Christian could read two articles that begin with the same event: the murder of Rayya Abu Hajjaj and her daughter Majda Abu Hajjaj, who were waving white flags and were shot to death by advancing Israeli soldiers on the first day of the ground invasion. The Israeli condemnation of this event and the invasion can be read in the Jewish paper Ha’aretz on August 12, 2012.³⁴ Dr. Mads Gilbert, an emergency medicine specialist from Norway who was working at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, wrote a more extensive Christian analysis. His report appeared in The Link and was titled When War Criminals Walk Free.³⁵
As in Lebanon, Israel targeted Gazan infrastructure (electrical, water, sewage, even UN supply depots and enormous chicken farms). The Gazans were being taught: remain silent in your captivity or be punished. Yoav Galant, the commanding officer of the army near Gaza at the time said publicly that the goal of the bombing was to send Gaza decades into the past.³⁶
Today the political and economic strangulation of Gaza continues. And it shows up in enormous ways (military assassinations of Hamas leaders) and in small ways that few note; for example, in 2009 the U.S. State Department provided a million-dollar scholarship program to enable disadvantaged Gaza students to study in the West Bank or the United States.³⁷ It was a brilliant program that would cultivate a new generation of educated Palestinian leaders. In 2012 Israel imposed a travel ban on these students so they could not leave Gaza and, in response, the State Department cancelled the scholarship program.³⁸ It is this sort of quiet persecution that radicalizes the Gaza population and cultivates toxic levels of despair. And it is why in the winter of 2012–13, Gazans began firing longer range missiles into Israel (many made in Iran) at Israeli cities.
In March 2009 Benjamin Netanyahu formed a coalition government and was installed as Israel’s new president. He represented the far-right Likud party, he opposed the removal of settlers from Gaza, promoted the settlement of the West Bank by Israelis, and was unlikely to negotiate flexibly with any Palestinian government.
This probably explains why today there is a feeling of despair that is tangible in the occupied territories. Israel feels it has now contained the problem. The Palestinians feel powerless to change their situation. Israel’s borders seem (temporarily) quiet. A civil war has erupted in Syria, a new unpredictable regime is now in Egypt, and Iran continues to rebuild Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Has Palestine been pacified? For the last five years it seemed so. And then Hamas leaders in Gaza, hoping to build on the Arab Spring, this time using longer range rockets smuggled in from Iran, began firing against Israel in November 2012. Israel responded again with more bombing campaigns and it was all over in a couple of weeks. Friends in Israel suddenly felt the discouragement and weight of it all. An Israeli friend of mine wrote poignantly: The mood in the country is dreadful—anger, fear, discouragement.
Palestine and the United Nations
The Palestinian bid to win a place in the community of nations took an important step forward in late 2012. On November 29 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas won his bid to bring Palestine into the U.N. In a General Assembly vote of 138–9 (41 abstaining) the Palestinians gained the status of nonmember observer state, which gives them considerable formal recognition and access to a number of agencies, such as the International Court of Justice. It was not surprising that the United States and Israel (joined by Canada, the Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Panama) voted against it.
The key here is in how this vote may signal a shift in world opinion. France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and Ireland, as well as Japan and New Zealand, voted in favor of the request. Britain and Germany abstained. And the United States was very much alone with Israel objecting to it. This alignment is a new and rare development.
Israel called the overture meaningless and threatened to build 3,000 new homes in the occupied West Bank in response. But clearly the vote was unsettling to Israeli leaders, who saw this as a loss they could barely acknowledge. The vast majority of the world’s nations see the Israeli settlement and occupation of the West Bank as violating international law. And now the Palestinians may try to use this to broker their own statehood.
THE MODERN STRATEGIC EQUATION
The challenge for us today is to weave these many threads of history and geography into a coherent pattern, making some sense of this modern conflict. We continue to live in a remarkably tense situation in which Israel struggles for moral credibility in the world (few nations have been condemned as many times by the United Nations), where Israel’s neighbors have grievances based on war and loss of land, and over almost 4 million Palestinian refugees seek their home in the midst of the conflict. Some Palestinians would like to see Israel pull back to its borders of before 1967, which will likely not happen. But what we can hope for is a resolution that meets most of the needs of both parties.
More is at stake. Arabs grieve the loss of control in this land where Islamic empires have had the upper hand for twelve hundred of the last two thousand years. The success of Israel—militarily as well as economically—has shamed Arab pride
significantly, which is one reason the Arab world is pleased to see Western dependence on its oil. Since the 1970s, oil has reaped considerable political leverage for the Arab world.
Israel is a remarkably small country: about 40 miles from the western Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River in the east, and about 140 miles from the far north (Mount Hermon) to the southern desert city of Be’er Sheva. From the mountains in the center of the country, a good artillery unit could easily reach Tel Aviv. From the Golan Heights, a mortar round could land almost anywhere in northern Galilee. An F-16 fighter flying out of Amman, the capital of Jordan, could reach Jerusalem in seventy-five seconds and Tel Aviv in three minutes.³⁹ Syrians and Iraqis alike can easily target Israel with modern missiles. Today if Egypt were to place Scud missiles with a 160-mile range on the Suez Canal, they could target both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. If these missiles were advanced 50 miles east into the Sinai, they could hit any city in Galilee. This close proximity explains the paranoia that so often accompanies negotiations and the preoccupation with security. Every piece of real estate has some strategic value. So when people begin to talk about slicing up the country to build, say, a parallel Palestinian state, almost every Israeli shudders to think how this might alter the military equation.
Lebanon borders Israel in the north above Galilee and is well known among Israelis as the source of terrorist infiltration. The country is perceived today as unstable, and yet occupying a buffer zone in southern Lebanon for twenty years has come at a high price in Jewish lives. When Israel pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000, it abandoned its Christian allies there—many of whom have now been allowed to come through the fence and enter Israel. Israel watches southern Lebanon closely today using world-class reconnaissance. Palestinian refugees still populate the region and have harbored anger toward Israel for generations.
Syria once owned the Golan Heights but lost them in the war of 1967. The Golan’s elevation (to almost 3,000 feet) offers a serious advantage over the lowlands of Galilee. So many mortars have been fired on the kibbutzes of northern Galilee that most have underground shelters today. Above ground the Israelis devised an ingenious means of protection: loose stone boulders are held in place with heavy fencing, forming small twenty-by-twenty-foot shelters that can absorb the impact of a direct hit. After many years of these attacks, Israel could not tolerate the security risk any longer and so conquered the plateau in 1967. In 1973, Syria tried to regain the region but failed in the midst of one of the largest tank battles of modern history. Israel later annexed this region in 1981. Traditional underground shelters today are popular places for kibbutzes to sponsor dances. The bomb-proof walls are likewise rock music–proof.
The Golan Heights are an eerie no-man’s land. An abandoned Syrian city called Quneitra sits on the plateau like a ghost town. The flank of Mount Hermon nearby bristles with high-tech surveillance devices that keep an eye on everything that moves. The United Nations maintains a buffer zone between the two armies. If Israel eventually makes peace with Syria, this region will have to be negotiated.
Jordan shares a long border with Israel from south of the Sea of Galilee (along the Yarmouk River gorge), along the Jordan River itself, to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south. Hot springs on the Yarmouk River date back to Roman times (Hammet Gader). Visitors who like adventure can sit in the hot springs and then climb the hill to watch Israeli guards and Jordanian soldiers staring at each other with high-powered binoculars.
From 1948 until the war of 1967, the Jordanian border used to cross over the Jordan River and extend into the central mountains, encompassing the Arab cities of Nablus (biblical Shechem), Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. In fact, just north of Jerusalem (in the village of Shuafat) are a curious little airport and palace that were being built by King Hussein of Jordan before he lost the mountains to Israel. The Israelis redrew the border of Jerusalem and annexed this region so that the airport could be theirs.
In the war of 1967, Jordan lost the central mountains to Israel. From a strategic standpoint, this victory was a significant achievement for Israel. Today Israel occupies all of the highlands inside the country and uses the deep gorge of the Jordan River as a natural barrier against attacks from the east. Hightech sensors and electric fences stretch along this eastern frontier. Near the Israeli highway that skirts the border, a double fence is separated by soft sand that is combed daily by an army patrol looking for the footprints of intruders. But since Israel has negotiated a peace accord with Jordan, traffic now moves across multiple crossings every day.
In the far south are the great deserts that extend from the region south of the Dead Sea all the way west to the Mediterranean. As we noted above, these deserts are a buffer between Israel and Egypt. Israel conquered them in 1956, returned them, reconquered them in 1967, nearly lost them in 1973, and then as a result of a 1979 treaty returned them again in 1982.
THE CENTRAL ISSUE: TAKING LAND
The form of the equation is evident: Israel has a genuine security problem. It is surrounded by Arab nations who are suspicious of its intentions because Israel occupies land that is hotly disputed. In each of the major wars, Israel strategically increased the size of its holdings at the expense of Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Consider the following statistics gleaned from the records of the United Nations: When the UN General Assembly approved a plan to divide the country into an Israeli state and a Palestinian state on November 29, 1947, the breakdown of land and population looked like this:
At once the relative inequity is clear: 31 percent of the population living on 6 percent of the land was being given half the country! Let us look at one district (as the British organized the area) and see how this worked out. In Nazareth District in 1945, the Arab population was 84 percent and the Jewish population was 16 percent. Land ownership broke down thus: Arab, 52 percent; Jewish, 28 percent; public lands, 20 percent. Therefore it made sense to give this region to the Palestinians. But consider the neighboring Galilee District: Arab population, 67 percent; Jewish population, 33 percent. Land holdings: Arab, 51 percent; Jewish, 38 percent; public lands, 11 percent. Yet this area near the Sea of Galilee was given to Israel.⁴⁰
When Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, the Arabs took offense that Westerners would divide their land and then offer them such a slice. King Abdullah of Jordan no doubt saw this as an attempt to limit his growing control. At the close of the war, Israel even exceeded its allotted holdings significantly; instead of possessing 52 percent of the land as the United Nations urged, Israel held 77 percent of it—one-third
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more than the original UN plan. The next major territorial increase came in the spring of 1967. Within a week, Israel captured the entire Sinai desert, the West Bank (including east Jerusalem), Gaza, and the Golan Heights. This was a watershed event, for in one campaign Israel virtually doubled its size by taking huge chunks of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. These lands are called today “the Occupied Territories” in the political jargon of the Middle East, and they are sorely disputed. On November 22, 1967, the United Nations passed Resolution 242 (perhaps the most famous resolution for Israel and the Palestinians), declaring that Israel must withdraw its armed forces from territories taken in this conflict. The United States agreed to the resolution, and ever since then Resolution 242 has played a pivotal role in all discussions. Even though Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1982, Israel still holds the Golan Heights (annexed in December 1981) and most of the West Bank. Israel even increased the size of Jerusalem significantly and annexed it for its own. Look once more at the map on p. 21. Consider the military advantages that come to anyone holding the mountains (the West Bank) and the Golan Heights above Galilee. Consider the religious and psychological importance of capturing Jerusalem in its entirety and making it a new capital. Israeli strategists, like Joshua long ago, know precisely what they are doing. But today another problem is surfacing in the Israeli consciousness: the rapid growth of the Arab population within its borders. The survival of Israel is not simply tied to its ability to hold on to disputed land, but its ability to be viable amid a growing population of Arabs. UN demographers predict huge population growth in the next fifty years in the Middle East. The population of the Palestinian “Occupied Territories” (the West Bank and Gaza) is growing twice as fast as Israel. Those 3.8 million Palestinians living under occupation will become 12 million by 2050 since Palestinian women have five or six babies each (Israelis have about two). Israel will have only 8 million people. But alongside Israel, Syria’s population will swell from 20 million to 36 million. Imagine the stress on land and natural resources such as water.⁴¹ One day the Arabs within Israel’s own borders—Israeli citizens—will be able to outvote their Jewish neighbors by sheer numbers. Perhaps it is useful—because it is so essential—to review once again the numbers of people who live in this country and see how their numbers compare. Take another look at the following a graph of current (2012) population numbers. This means that 48 percent of the people living within the de facto boundaries of Israel-Palestine (excluding refugees in surrounding countries) are Palestinians. Fifty-two percent are Jewish. It is a fair question to ask at what point one may demand that this be a state committed to one cultural ethnicity when it does not eventually hold the majority. ANCIENT AND MODERN TIMES COMPARED The story I have just summarized is nothing new to the Middle East. Since the earliest days when Joshua surveyed this land with his lieutenants, every leader has been forced to consider how to control this narrow strip of real estate. Four facts must be kept in mind: 1. Israel/Palestine is an ancient highway. Thousands of years ago, the superpowers of the ancient world were Egypt in the south and the kingdoms of Mesopotamia in the north (particularly Assyria and Babylon, today in modern Iraq). Because the deserts of Arabia and Syria do not permit easy passage, caravans (in peacetime) and armies (in war) traveled along a coastal route between the desert and the sea, directly through Israel/Palestine. They would hug the coast, traveling between the hills and the coastal swamps, finding easy passage to their destinations. Keep in mind that Abraham and Sarah were from Iraq. When God called them to travel south, they followed this ancient highway. As a result, even today, Israel/Palestine plays a pivotal geographical role. Travel from Turkey, Syria, or Lebanon to Egypt must pass through Israel/Palestine to avoid a major detour. Some strategists in Washington see the American alliance with Israel as serving a similar modern purpose. Israel is an outpost, a Western friend, a point of access to the larger Middle East. 2. Life in Israel/Palestine is dangerous. In peacetime long ago, the coastal regions offered access to the great trade route, but in war, armies moving north and south laid waste to every city and fortress in the region. Abraham must have known this when he climbed into these mountains and settled there, leaving the ancient highway behind. In later years, Israel became a mountain kingdom, extending west through the hills and into the coast only when it was safe (see the stories of Samson and the Philistines and of Eli and his sons as examples). This is why Jerusalem (the capital of King David) is tucked away high in the mountains—as is Samaria, the capital of the breakaway northern kingdom in the Old Testament. These were good places to build defenses against marauding foreigners. Is it any surprise that Israel refuses to give up the West Bank? This area is much more than just the west bank of the Jordan River! The West Bank is really the highlands, the
mountains from Nablus to Hebron called “Samaria and Judea” by Israeli leaders. These mountains provide refuge and safety. In war they offer the possessor an astonishing advantage. Foreign armies from distant places—such as Greece and Rome in the ancient world, the Crusaders in medieval times, and the British in the twentieth century—have learned the hard way the awesome advantage of these mountains. 3. Life in Israel/Palestine is precarious. Perhaps the most precious commodity in Israel is water. When Moses described the land to the Israelites, this item was one of the first he wanted to clarify: “For the land that you are about to enter to occupy is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sow your seed and irrigate by foot like a vegetable garden” (Deut. 11:10). In the next verses, Moses goes on to tell the people that rainfall is one tool that God uses in this land to bless or to discipline the people. Why is this a problem? The Jordan River is in a deep gorge almost four thousand feet below the central mountains. The Sea of Galilee has abundant water, but only this century has the Israeli government effectively pumped its water throughout the country by pipe. In the winter of 1991–92, record snow and rain fell, bringing up the water levels, and the entire nation celebrated! Ten years later the region saw drought, the Sea of Galilee was dramatically low, and concerns about water were everywhere. Israel struggles for some of its natural resources. The land is a hard land that requires the people who would subdue it to have faith in God. Every century the use of these limited resources must be negotiated carefully with Israel’s neighbors. Today, considering the value of Galilee’s water, what does it mean if Jordan has lost access to it? What does it mean when Palestinian villagers are not permitted to dig new wells while neighboring Jewish settlements have sprinkler systems for their lawns with piped-in Galilee water? Within Israel, hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian villages have been destroyed by bulldozers because they sat on excellent land. Today careful observers can identify these silent villages because the cactuses (the Sabra) used by the Arabs for fencing continue to grow back. 4. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.” In the absence of dominating superpowers (ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome—or today, Turkey, Britain, or the United States), the regional nations struggle for dominance. In the Old Testament the Israelites fought against the Philistines (on the coast), the Edomites and the Moabites (in modern-day Jordan), the Ammonites (in modern Syria), and the Phoenicians (in modern Lebanon). Each country leveraged its power against others. Unusual treaties were formed—such as Ahab’s alliance with Phoenicia. This pattern of regional struggle is no different today. The desert kingdom of Jordan has precious few resources and historically has always laid claim to lands west of the Jordan River. For example, Amman, the capital of Jordan, gets less than half the rainfall that Jerusalem does. Syria likewise values the good agricultural potential of the Golan Heights and Lebanon. In New Testament times, the Golan (called Gaulinitis and Batanea) was used for grain production by the Romans because it receives sufficient rain each year for a cereal crop. SUMMARY In order to win at Monopoly, we have to know the playing board. In order to understand the life-and-death game being played in Israel/Palestine, we have to understand the major political and geographical issues that have been weighed for thousands of years. Who will occupy the best land in this country? Where will they live? Can they defend themselves? The struggle for this land is not new. Its contours have been known from earliest times. When Alexander the Great conquered the land in 332 BCE, he wisely built his regional administrative center in Samaria. He knew the advantages. The remains of his buildings can be seen today just west of modern Nablus. When General Teggart surveyed the land for the British in 1937, legend has it that he studied the Bible, especially the book of Joshua. From these notes and the input of his Middle Eastern advisors, he planned the British occupation of Israel/Palestine. Ancient principles are still at work.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Boxed dates (e.g., 1967 ) indicate a major strategic war.
1918–48 BRITISH MANDATE PERIOD
1922 League of Nations grants Mandate
1948 WAR OF INDEPENDENCE (May 1948–July 1949)
Israel’s strategic goal: the coastal corridor, Galilee, and Eilat
Independence: May 14, 1948
1956 THE SINAI CAMPAIGN
Israel’s strategic goal: South (Sinai) and a buffer zone with Egypt
1967 THE SIX-DAY WAR
Israel’s strategic goal: East (West Bank, Golan Heights, Sinai, Jerusalem)
1973 THE YOM KIPPUR WAR
Arab retaliation led by Syria (Golan Heights) and Egypt (Sinai)
1978 CAMP DAVID ACCORDS (September 17)
Washington peace conference led by J. Carter, M. Begin, A Sadat
1979 TREATY WITH EGYPT (March 26)
1982 INVASION OF LEBANON
Israel’s strategic goal: North (southern Lebanon) and the defeat of the PLO
1987–93 THE UPRISING/INTIFADA
Popular Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation
1990–91 THE GULF WAR
Iraq invades Kuwait
1993 TREATY WITH PLO
Y. Rabin assassinated November 4
S. Peres forms government November 22
1996 B. NETENYAHU ELECTED (May 29)
more than the original UN plan.
The next major territorial increase came in the spring of 1967. Within a week, Israel captured the entire Sinai desert, the West Bank (including east Jerusalem), Gaza, and the Golan Heights. This was a watershed event, for in one campaign Israel virtually doubled its size by taking huge chunks of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
These lands are called today the Occupied Territories in the political jargon of the Middle East, and they are sorely disputed. On November 22, 1967, the United Nations passed Resolution 242 (perhaps the most famous resolution for Israel and the Palestinians), declaring that Israel must withdraw its armed forces from territories taken in this conflict. The United States agreed to the resolution, and ever since then Resolution 242 has played a pivotal role in all discussions. Even though Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1982, Israel still holds the Golan Heights (annexed in December 1981) and most of the West Bank. Israel even increased the size of Jerusalem significantly and annexed it for its own.
Look once more at the map on p. 21. Consider the military advantages that come to anyone holding the mountains (the West Bank) and the Golan Heights above Galilee. Consider the religious and psychological importance of capturing Jerusalem in its entirety and making it a new capital. Israeli strategists, like Joshua long ago, know precisely what they are doing.
But today another problem is surfacing in the Israeli consciousness: the rapid growth of the Arab population within its borders. The survival of Israel is not simply tied to its ability to hold on to disputed land, but its ability to be viable amid a growing population of Arabs. UN demographers predict huge population growth in the next fifty years in the Middle East. The population of the Palestinian Occupied Territories (the West Bank and Gaza) is growing twice as fast as Israel. Those 3.8 million Palestinians living under occupation will become 12 million by 2050 since Palestinian women have five or six babies each (Israelis have about two). Israel will have only 8 million people. But alongside Israel, Syria’s population will swell from 20 million to 36 million. Imagine the stress on land and natural resources such as water.⁴¹ One day the Arabs within Israel’s own borders—Israeli citizens—will be able to outvote their Jewish neighbors by sheer numbers.
Perhaps it is useful—because it is so essential—to review once again the numbers of people who live in this country and see how their numbers compare. Take another look at the following a graph of current (2012) population numbers. This means that 48 percent of the people living within the de facto boundaries of Israel-Palestine (excluding refugees in surrounding countries) are Palestinians. Fifty-two percent are Jewish. It is a fair question to ask at what point one may demand that this be a state committed to one cultural ethnicity when it does not eventually hold the majority.
ANCIENT AND MODERN TIMES COMPARED
The story I have just summarized is nothing new to the Middle East. Since the earliest days when Joshua surveyed this land with his lieutenants, every leader has been forced to consider how to control this narrow strip of real estate. Four facts must be kept in mind:
1. Israel/Palestine is an ancient highway. Thousands of years ago, the superpowers of the ancient world were Egypt in the south and the kingdoms of Mesopotamia in the north (particularly Assyria and Babylon, today in modern Iraq). Because the deserts of Arabia and Syria do not permit easy passage, caravans (in peacetime) and armies (in war) traveled along a coastal route between the desert and the sea, directly through Israel/Palestine. They would hug the coast, traveling between the hills and the coastal swamps, finding easy passage to their destinations. Keep in mind that Abraham and Sarah were from Iraq. When God called them to travel south, they followed this ancient highway.
As a result, even today, Israel/Palestine plays a pivotal geographical role. Travel from Turkey, Syria, or Lebanon to Egypt must pass through Israel/Palestine to avoid a major detour. Some strategists in Washington see the American alliance with Israel as serving a similar modern purpose. Israel is an outpost, a Western friend, a point of access to the larger Middle East.
2. Life in Israel/Palestine is dangerous. In peacetime long ago, the coastal regions offered access to the great trade route, but in war, armies moving north and south laid waste to every city and fortress in the region. Abraham must have known this when he climbed into these mountains and settled there, leaving the ancient highway behind. In later years, Israel became a mountain kingdom, extending west through the hills and into the coast only when it was safe (see the stories of Samson and the Philistines and of Eli and his sons as examples). This is why Jerusalem (the capital of King David) is tucked away high in the mountains—as is Samaria, the capital of the breakaway northern kingdom in the Old Testament. These were good places to build defenses against marauding foreigners.
Is it any surprise that Israel refuses to give up the West Bank? This area is much more than just the west bank of the Jordan River! The West Bank is really the highlands, the
mountains from Nablus to Hebron called Samaria and Judea by Israeli leaders. These mountains provide refuge and safety. In war they offer the possessor an astonishing advantage. Foreign armies from distant places—such as Greece and Rome in the ancient world, the Crusaders in medieval times, and the British in the twentieth century—have learned the hard way the awesome advantage of these mountains.
3. Life in Israel/Palestine is precarious. Perhaps the most precious commodity in Israel is water. When Moses described the land to the Israelites, this item was one of the first he wanted to clarify: For the land that you are about to enter to occupy is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sow your seed and irrigate by foot like a vegetable garden (Deut. 11:10). In the next verses, Moses goes on to tell the people that rainfall is one tool that God uses in this land to bless or to discipline the people. Why is this a problem? The Jordan River is in a deep gorge almost four thousand feet below the central mountains. The Sea of Galilee has abundant water, but only this century has the Israeli government effectively pumped its water throughout the country by pipe. In the winter of 1991–92, record snow and rain fell, bringing up the water levels, and the entire nation celebrated! Ten years later the region saw drought, the Sea of Galilee was dramatically low, and concerns about water were everywhere.
Israel struggles for some of its natural resources. The land is a hard land that requires the people who would subdue it to have faith in God. Every century the use of these limited resources must be negotiated carefully with Israel’s neighbors. Today, considering the value of Galilee’s water, what does it mean if Jordan has lost access to it? What does it mean when Palestinian villagers are not permitted to dig new wells while neighboring Jewish settlements have sprinkler systems for their lawns with piped-in Galilee water? Within Israel, hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian villages have been destroyed by bulldozers because they sat on excellent land. Today careful observers can identify these silent villages because the cactuses (the Sabra) used by the Arabs for fencing continue to grow back.
4. When the cat’s away, the mice will play. In the absence of dominating superpowers (ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome—or today, Turkey, Britain, or the United States), the regional nations struggle for dominance. In the Old Testament the Israelites fought against the Philistines (on the coast), the Edomites and the Moabites (in modern-day Jordan), the Ammonites (in modern Syria), and the Phoenicians (in modern Lebanon). Each country leveraged its power against others. Unusual treaties were formed—such as Ahab’s alliance with Phoenicia.
This pattern of regional struggle is no different today. The desert kingdom of Jordan has precious few resources and historically has always laid claim to lands west of the Jordan River. For example, Amman, the capital of Jordan, gets less than half the rainfall that Jerusalem does. Syria likewise values the good agricultural potential of the Golan Heights and Lebanon. In New Testament times, the Golan (called Gaulinitis and Batanea) was used for grain production by the Romans because it receives sufficient rain each year for a cereal crop.
SUMMARY
In order to win at Monopoly, we have to know the playing board. In order to understand the life-and-death game being played in Israel/Palestine, we have to understand the major political and geographical issues that have been weighed for thousands of years. Who will occupy the best land in this country? Where will they live? Can they defend themselves?
The struggle for this land is not new. Its contours have been known from earliest times. When Alexander the Great conquered the land in 332 BCE, he wisely built his regional administrative center in Samaria. He knew the advantages. The remains of his buildings can be seen today just west of modern Nablus. When General Teggart surveyed the land for the British in 1937, legend has it that he studied the Bible, especially the book of Joshua. From these notes and the input of his Middle Eastern advisors, he planned the British occupation of Israel/Palestine. Ancient principles are still at work.
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mountains from Nablus to Hebron called “Samaria and Judea” by Israeli leaders. These mountains provide refuge and safety. In war they offer the possessor an astonishing advantage. Foreign armies from distant places—such as Greece and Rome in the ancient world, the Crusaders in medieval times, and the British in the twentieth century—have learned the hard way the awesome advantage of these mountains. 3. Life in Israel/Palestine is precarious. Perhaps the most precious commodity in Israel is water. When Moses described the land to the Israelites, this item was one of the first he wanted to clarify: “For the land that you are about to enter to occupy is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sow your seed and irrigate by foot like a vegetable garden” (Deut. 11:10). In the next verses, Moses goes on to tell the people that rainfall is one tool that God uses in this land to bless or to discipline the people. Why is this a problem? The Jordan River is in a deep gorge almost four thousand feet below the central mountains. The Sea of Galilee has abundant water, but only this century has the Israeli government effectively pumped its water throughout the country by pipe. In the winter of 1991–92, record snow and rain fell, bringing up the water levels, and the entire nation celebrated! Ten years later the region saw drought, the Sea of Galilee was dramatically low, and concerns about water were everywhere. Israel struggles for some of its natural resources. The land is a hard land that requires the people who would subdue it to have faith in God. Every century the use of these limited resources must be negotiated carefully with Israel’s neighbors. Today, considering the value of Galilee’s water, what does it mean if Jordan has lost access to it? What does it mean when Palestinian villagers are not permitted to dig new wells while neighboring Jewish settlements have sprinkler systems for their lawns with piped-in Galilee water? Within Israel, hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian villages have been destroyed by bulldozers because they sat on excellent land. Today careful observers can identify these silent villages because the cactuses (the Sabra) used by the Arabs for fencing continue to grow back. 4. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.” In the absence of dominating superpowers (ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome—or today, Turkey, Britain, or the United States), the regional nations struggle for dominance. In the Old Testament the Israelites fought against the Philistines (on the coast), the Edomites and the Moabites (in modern-day Jordan), the Ammonites (in modern Syria), and the Phoenicians (in modern Lebanon). Each country leveraged its power against others. Unusual treaties were formed—such as Ahab’s alliance with Phoenicia. This pattern of regional struggle is no different today. The desert kingdom of Jordan has precious few resources and historically has always laid claim to lands west of the Jordan River. For example, Amman, the capital of Jordan, gets less than half the rainfall that Jerusalem does. Syria likewise values the good agricultural potential of the Golan Heights and Lebanon. In New Testament times, the Golan (called Gaulinitis and Batanea) was used for grain production by the Romans because it receives sufficient rain each year for a cereal crop. SUMMARY In order to win at Monopoly, we have to know the playing board. In order to understand the life-and-death game being played in Israel/Palestine, we have to understand the major political and geographical issues that have been weighed for thousands of years. Who will occupy the best land in this country? Where will they live? Can they defend themselves? The struggle for this land is not new. Its contours have been known from earliest times. When Alexander the Great conquered the land in 332 BCE, he wisely built his regional administrative center in Samaria. He knew the advantages. The remains of his buildings can be seen today just west of modern Nablus. When General Teggart surveyed the land for the British in 1937, legend has it that he studied the Bible, especially the book of Joshua. From these notes and the input of his Middle Eastern advisors, he planned the British occupation of Israel/Palestine. Ancient principles are still at work.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Boxed dates (e.g., 1967 ) indicate a major strategic war.
1918–48 BRITISH MANDATE PERIOD
1922 League of Nations grants Mandate 1948 WAR OF INDEPENDENCE (May 1948–July 1949)
Israel’s strategic goal: the coastal corridor, Galilee, and Eilat Independence: May 14, 1948 1956 THE SINAI CAMPAIGN
Israel’s strategic goal: South (Sinai) and a buffer zone with Egypt 1967 THE SIX-DAY WAR
Israel’s strategic goal: East (West Bank, Golan Heights, Sinai, Jerusalem) 1973 THE YOM KIPPUR WAR
Arab retaliation led by Syria (Golan Heights) and Egypt (Sinai) 1978 CAMP DAVID ACCORDS (September 17)
Washington peace conference led by J. Carter, M. Begin, A Sadat 1979 TREATY WITH EGYPT (March 26)
1982 INVASION OF LEBANON
Israel’s strategic goal: North (southern Lebanon) and the defeat of the PLO 1987–93 THE UPRISING/INTIFADA
Popular Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation 1990–91 THE GULF WAR
Iraq invades Kuwait 1993 TREATY WITH PLO
Y. Rabin assassinated November 4 S. Peres forms government November 22 1996 B. NETENYAHU ELECTED (May 29)
more than the original UN plan.
The next major territorial increase came in the spring of 1967. Within a week, Israel captured the entire Sinai desert, the West Bank (including east Jerusalem), Gaza, and the Golan Heights. This was a watershed event, for in one campaign Israel virtually doubled its size by taking huge chunks of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
These lands are called today the Occupied Territories in the political jargon of the Middle East, and they are sorely disputed. On November 22, 1967, the United Nations passed Resolution 242 (perhaps the most famous resolution for Israel and the Palestinians), declaring that Israel must withdraw its armed forces from territories taken in this conflict. The United States agreed to the resolution, and ever since then Resolution 242 has played a pivotal role in all discussions. Even though Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1982, Israel still holds the Golan Heights (annexed in December 1981) and most of the West Bank. Israel even increased the size of Jerusalem significantly and annexed it for its own.
Look once more at the map on p. 21. Consider the military advantages that come to anyone holding the mountains (the West Bank) and the Golan Heights above Galilee. Consider the religious and psychological importance of capturing Jerusalem in its entirety and making it a new capital. Israeli strategists, like Joshua long ago, know precisely what they are doing.
But today another problem is surfacing in the Israeli consciousness: the rapid growth of the Arab population within its borders. The survival of Israel is not simply tied to its ability to hold on to disputed land, but its ability to be viable amid a growing population of Arabs. UN demographers predict huge population growth in the next fifty years in the Middle East. The population of the Palestinian Occupied Territories (the West Bank and Gaza) is growing twice as fast as Israel. Those 3.8 million Palestinians living under occupation will become 12 million by 2050 since Palestinian women have five or six babies each (Israelis have about two). Israel will have only 8 million people. But alongside Israel, Syria’s population will swell from 20 million to 36 million. Imagine the stress on land and natural resources such as water.⁴¹ One day the Arabs within Israel’s own borders—Israeli citizens—will be able to outvote their Jewish neighbors by sheer numbers.
Perhaps it is useful—because it is so essential—to review once again the numbers of people who live in this country and see how their numbers compare. Take another look at the following a graph of current (2012) population numbers. This means that 48 percent of the people living within the de facto boundaries of Israel-Palestine (excluding refugees in surrounding countries) are Palestinians. Fifty-two percent are Jewish. It is a fair question to ask at what point one may demand that this be a state committed to one cultural ethnicity when it does not eventually hold the majority.
ANCIENT AND MODERN TIMES COMPARED
The story I have just summarized is nothing new to the Middle East. Since the earliest days when Joshua surveyed this land with his lieutenants, every leader has been forced to consider how to control this narrow strip of real estate. Four facts must be kept in mind:
1. Israel/Palestine is an ancient highway. Thousands of years ago, the superpowers of the ancient world were Egypt in the south and the kingdoms of Mesopotamia in the north (particularly Assyria and Babylon, today in modern Iraq). Because the deserts of Arabia and Syria do not permit easy passage, caravans (in peacetime) and armies (in war) traveled along a coastal route between the desert and the sea, directly through Israel/Palestine. They would hug the coast, traveling between the hills and the coastal swamps, finding easy passage to their destinations. Keep in mind that Abraham and Sarah were from Iraq. When God called them to travel south, they followed this ancient highway.
As a result, even today, Israel/Palestine plays a pivotal geographical role. Travel from Turkey, Syria, or Lebanon to Egypt must pass through Israel/Palestine to avoid a major detour. Some strategists in Washington see the American alliance with Israel as serving a similar modern purpose. Israel is an outpost, a Western friend, a point of access to the larger Middle East.
2. Life in Israel/Palestine is dangerous. In peacetime long ago, the coastal regions offered access to the great trade route, but in war, armies moving north and south laid waste to every city and fortress in the region. Abraham must have known this when he climbed into these mountains and settled there, leaving the ancient highway behind. In later years, Israel became a mountain kingdom, extending west through the hills and into the coast only when it was safe (see the stories of Samson and the Philistines and of Eli and his sons as examples). This is why Jerusalem (the capital of King David) is tucked away high in the mountains—as is Samaria, the capital of the breakaway northern kingdom in the Old Testament. These were good places to build defenses against marauding foreigners.
Is it any surprise that Israel refuses to give up the West Bank? This area is much more than just the west bank of the Jordan River! The West Bank is really the highlands, the
mountains from Nablus to Hebron called Samaria and Judea by Israeli leaders. These mountains provide refuge and safety. In war they offer the possessor an astonishing advantage. Foreign armies from distant places—such as Greece and Rome in the ancient world, the Crusaders in medieval times, and the British in the twentieth century—have learned the hard way the awesome advantage of these mountains.
3. Life in Israel/Palestine is precarious. Perhaps the most precious commodity in Israel is water. When Moses described the land to the Israelites, this item was one of the first he wanted to clarify: For the land that you are about to enter to occupy is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sow your seed and irrigate by foot like a vegetable garden (Deut. 11:10). In the next verses, Moses goes on to tell the people that rainfall is one tool that God uses in this land to bless or to discipline the people. Why is this a problem? The Jordan River is in a deep gorge almost four thousand feet below the central mountains. The Sea of Galilee has abundant water, but only this century has the Israeli government effectively pumped its water throughout the country by pipe. In the winter of 1991–92, record snow and rain fell, bringing up the water levels, and the entire nation celebrated! Ten years later the region saw drought, the Sea of Galilee was dramatically low, and concerns about water were everywhere.
Israel struggles for some of its natural resources. The land is a hard land that requires the people who would subdue it to have faith in God. Every century the use of these limited resources must be negotiated carefully with Israel’s neighbors. Today, considering the value of Galilee’s water, what does it mean if Jordan has lost access to it? What does it mean when Palestinian villagers are not permitted to dig new wells while neighboring Jewish settlements have sprinkler systems for their lawns with piped-in Galilee water? Within Israel, hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian villages have been destroyed by bulldozers because they sat on excellent land. Today careful observers can identify these silent villages because the cactuses (the Sabra) used by the Arabs for fencing continue to grow back.
4. When the cat’s away, the mice will play. In the absence of dominating superpowers (ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome—or today, Turkey, Britain, or the United States), the regional nations struggle for dominance. In the Old Testament the Israelites fought against the Philistines (on the coast), the Edomites and the Moabites (in modern-day Jordan), the Ammonites (in modern Syria), and the Phoenicians (in modern Lebanon). Each country leveraged its power against others. Unusual treaties were formed—such as Ahab’s alliance with Phoenicia.
This pattern of regional struggle is no different today. The desert kingdom of Jordan has precious few resources and historically has always laid claim to lands west of the Jordan River. For example, Amman, the capital of Jordan, gets less than half the rainfall that Jerusalem does. Syria likewise values the good agricultural potential of the Golan Heights and Lebanon. In New Testament times, the Golan (called Gaulinitis and Batanea) was used for grain production by the Romans because it receives sufficient rain each year for a cereal crop.
SUMMARY
In order to win at Monopoly, we have to know the playing board. In order to understand the life-and-death game being played in Israel/Palestine, we have to understand the major political and geographical issues that have been weighed for thousands of years. Who will occupy the best land in this country? Where will they live? Can they defend themselves?
The struggle for this land is not new. Its contours have been known from earliest times. When Alexander the Great conquered the land in 332 BCE, he wisely built his regional administrative center in Samaria. He knew the advantages. The remains of his buildings can be seen today just west of modern Nablus. When General Teggart surveyed the land for the British in 1937, legend has it that he studied the Bible, especially the book of Joshua. From these notes and the input of his Middle Eastern advisors, he planned the British occupation of Israel/Palestine. Ancient principles are still at work.
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1999 E. BARAK ELECTED (May 17)
2000 ISRAEL WITHDRAWS FROM LEBANON (May 23)
Camp David II
A failed attempt at peace between E. Barak and Y. Arafat, July 12–25 The Al-Aqsa Uprising/Intifada (September 28– 2005?)
2001 A. SHARON ELECTED (February 6)
2001–2003 ISRAEL BEGINS BUILDING THE SEPARATION BARRIER
2004 YASSER ARAFAT DIES (November 11)
2005 M. ABBAS (ABU MAZAN) ELECTED PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY PRESIDENT (January 9)
2005 FORCED REMOVAL OF GAZA SETTLERS (August 17–21)
2006 HAMAS WINS GOVERNMENT ELECTION IN GAZA (January 26)
E. Olmert elected (May 4) following Sharon’s debilitating illness, as acting PM, from January 4 2006 ISRAEL’S OFFENSIVE IN SOUTHERN LEBANON (July 12–August 14)
Israel’s strategic goal: defeat of Hezbollah, securing northern boundary 2008–09 ISRAEL’S GAZA OFFENSIVE (December 27–January 18, 2009)
Israel’s strategic goal: defeat of Hamas and militias, securing southern boundary 2009 B. NETANYAHU ELECTED (March 31)
2010 FREE GAZA MOVEMENT
Ships with 700 international activists try to break the Israeli embargo of Gaza. The Israeli Navy intercepts, 16 killed 2010-2013? THE ARAB SPRING
Beginning in Tunisia (December 18) an uprising sweeps the Arab world (called the “Arab Revolution” in Arabic). Governments in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen fall. Civil uprisings occur in many places. Civil war erupts in Syria. Hamas and Israel exchange missile/rocket fire, November 2012 2012 PALESTINE WINS “OBSERVER STATUS” (NONVOTING) AT THE UN (November 29)
1. In October 2000, Wheaton College abandoned its historic mascot, the Crusader, following two years of debate and study. Our campus wisely decided not to associate with this era of Christian brutality. 2. See W. Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876–1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992). 3. Cited in B. Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (New York: Knopf, 1999), 21–22. 4. Cited in M. Lowenthan, ed., The Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York: Dial Press, 1956), 188 (June 12, 1895, entry); see also B. Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (New York: Knopf, 1999), 21–22. 5. A detailed map showing the borders of the partition is difficult to find. An excellent scholarly edition can be found in H. Cattan, Palestine, the Arabs and Israel: The Search for Justice (London: Longman, 1969), 207. Generally, the land was to be partitioned in three sections: 4,500 square miles for the Jewish state, and Jerusalem to be set off as an international island for both parties and all religions. 6. B. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25; see also the critique of Morris in E. Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The “New Historians” (New York: Routledge, 2000), 47–51. 7. A. Shlaim, The Politics of Partition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 136. 8. See www.deiryassin.org. 9. Omer Bartov, “From Buchach to Sheikh Muwannis: Building the Future and Erasing the Past,” in Michele R. Rivkin-Fish and Elena Trubina, eds., Dilemmas of Diversity after the Cold War: Analyses of “Cultural Difference” by U.S. and Russia-Based Scholars (Woodrow Wilson Center, 2010), 74. 10. H. Cattan, Palestine, the Arabs and Israel (London: Longman, 1969), 67. 11. The Link 34, no. 1 (January–March 2001): 4–6, citing S. Laybobis-Dar in the Hebrew newspaper Hadashot (August 13, 1993). 12. G. Kirk, The Middle East 1945-1950 (London: Oxford Univ. Press 1954), 263, cited in H. Cattan, Palestine, the Arabs and Israel (London: Longman, 1969), 79. 13. B. Morris, Correcting a Mistake—Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel 1936–1956 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2000). Also see B. Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See the review of G. Levy, Am Ha’aretz, November 3, 2000. 14. M. Peled, The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (Charlottesville, Va.: Just World Books, 2012), 159. 15. Today the boundary that marks the division between lands captured in 1948 and lands captured in 1967 is called “the green line.” One often hears, “That village is on the other side of the green line.” 16. For an outstanding study of the invasion of Lebanon written by a Christian pastor, see P. Crooks, Lebanon: The Pain and the Glory (Eastborne, Sussex: Monarch, 1990). Formerly an Anglican chaplain in Beirut and Damascus, Crooks now lives in England. The book is enthusiastically endorsed by the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem. More recently, see the article by B. Belsham, “Why Four Corners Was Perfectly Entitled to Accuse Sharon,” at www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/05/01/1019441390497.html. 17. S. Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, trans. from Arabic by Inea Bushnaq (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 70. Lists of Palestinian villages can be found in official Israeli publications. For 1967, see Census of Populations 1967 (Central Bureau of Statistics), West Bank of the Jordan, Gaza Strip and northern Sinai, Golan Heights, Publication 1 (Jerusalem, 1967), 45–49, 163–65. For a catalogue of villages, see J. Fayez, Lest the Civilized World Forget: The Colonization of Palestine (New York: Americans for Middle East Understanding, 1992). Increasingly the Internet is a repository for catalogues of these villages and their stories.
18. The secondary road that once led from the village to the Tiberias-Nazareth highway can still be located on the roadside. See also B. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 19. Today Amir is serving a life sentence in a Beer Sheba prison. In an interview with Mark Lavie from the Associated Press five years later, Amir boasted about his deed and only expressed regret that he did not do it sooner. 20. See Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories 22.5 (September–October 2012), 3, taken from the Tel Aviv newspaper Yediot Aharonot, August 2, 2012. 21. The Wye River aid package passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, November 5, 1999. Four million dollars was given to the Palestinian Authority. 22. Palestinians call it “Erez 2” after the Erez checkpoint in Gaza. 23. S. Jones, “Report: Erez 2, Bethlehem Checkpoint,” Cornerstone 17 (Winter 1999): 7. 24. C. Krauthammer, “The Last Deal, or No Deal,” Time, July 17, 2000, 88. 25. A. Eldar, “What Went Wrong at Camp David: The Official PLO Version,” Ha’aretz, July 24, 2001. For a map of the divisions of Palestine, see www.fmep.org/maps/v11n4 Barak Sharon map.jpg. 26. For a thorough study of the Peace Talks, see D. Sontag, “Quest for Middle East Peace: How and Why It Failed,” New York Times, July 26, 2001. 27. Chicago Tribune, July 20, 2001. 28. “Israeli Town’s Adieu to 4 ‘Finest Sons and Daughters,’” New York Times, February 16, 2001. 29. These numbers are updated weekly by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and are available at their website: www.palestinercs.org/Latest CrisisUpdates Figures&Graphs.htm. 30. These numbers are updated weekly by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and are available at their website: www.israel.org/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ia50. 31. See the free book Remember the Children published by Americans for Middle East Understanding and available from the American Educational Trust at www.rememberthesechildren.org. 32. In these figures I am assuming a Palestinian population of 5.3 million, an Israeli population of 5.7 million, and an American population of 300 million. 33. Yakir Segev cited in Ben White, “Israel wall used for segregation, not just security,” Aljazeera Online, 31 July 2012. 34. “When War Criminals Walk Free,” online at http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/when-war-criminals-walk-free-1.458055. 35. Gilbert, M., “When War Criminals Walk Free,” The Link (Americans for Middle East Understanding) 45.5 (December 2012), available online at http://www.ameu.org/Current-Issue/Current-Issue/2012-Volume-45/When-War-Criminals-Walk-Free.aspx. 36. Ibid., 2, with full citations. 37. See Matthew Kalman, “Clinton Announces Million-Dollar Scholarship Program for Palestinian Students,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 9, 2009, at http://chronicle.com/article/Clinton-Announces/42530/. 38. See Nick DeSantis, “U.S. Drops Gaza Scholarship Program . . . ,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 15, 2012, at http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/u-s-drops-gaza-scholarship-program-after-israeli-travel-ban?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en. 39. M. Widlanski, Can Israel Survive a Palestinian State? (Jerusalem: Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 1990), 32–33. 40. See the government statistics given in H. Cattan, Palestine, the Arabs and Israel: The Search for Justice (London: Longman, 1969), 18–30, 207–10. This data is based on UN Statistics, British Administration reports, and village land records. 41. See the UN report www.unfpa.org/swp/swpmain.htm.
1. In October 2000, Wheaton College abandoned its historic mascot, the Crusader, following two years of debate and study. Our campus wisely decided not to associate with this era of Christian brutality.
2. See W. Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876–1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).
3. Cited in B. Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (New York: Knopf, 1999), 21–22.
4. Cited in M. Lowenthan, ed., The Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York: Dial Press, 1956), 188 (June 12, 1895, entry); see also B. Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (New York: Knopf, 1999), 21–22.
5. A detailed map showing the borders of the partition is difficult to find. An excellent scholarly edition can be found in H. Cattan, Palestine, the Arabs and Israel: The Search for Justice (London: Longman, 1969), 207. Generally, the land was to be partitioned in three sections: 4,500 square miles for the Jewish state, and Jerusalem to be set off as an international island for both parties and all religions.
6. B. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25; see also the critique of Morris in E. Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians (New York: Routledge, 2000), 47–51.
7. A. Shlaim, The Politics of Partition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 136.
8. See www.deiryassin.org.
9. Omer Bartov, From Buchach to Sheikh Muwannis: Building the Future and Erasing the Past, in Michele R. Rivkin-Fish and Elena Trubina, eds., Dilemmas of Diversity after the Cold War: Analyses of Cultural Difference by U.S. and Russia-Based Scholars (Woodrow Wilson Center, 2010), 74.
10. H. Cattan, Palestine, the Arabs and Israel (London: Longman, 1969), 67.
11. The Link 34, no. 1 (January–March 2001): 4–6, citing S. Laybobis-Dar in the Hebrew newspaper Hadashot (August 13, 1993).
12. G. Kirk, The Middle East 1945-1950 (London: Oxford Univ. Press 1954), 263, cited in H. Cattan, Palestine, the Arabs and Israel (London: Longman, 1969), 79.
13. B. Morris, Correcting a Mistake—Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel 1936–1956 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2000). Also see B. Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See the review of G. Levy, Am Ha’aretz, November 3, 2000.
14. M. Peled, The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (Charlottesville, Va.: Just World Books, 2012), 159.
15. Today the boundary that marks the division between lands captured in 1948 and lands captured in 1967 is called the green line. One often hears, That village is on the other side of the green line.
16. For an outstanding study of the invasion of Lebanon written by a Christian pastor, see P. Crooks, Lebanon: The Pain and the Glory (Eastborne, Sussex: Monarch, 1990). Formerly an Anglican chaplain in Beirut and Damascus, Crooks now lives in England. The book is enthusiastically endorsed by the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem. More recently, see the article by B. Belsham, Why Four Corners Was Perfectly Entitled to Accuse Sharon, at www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/05/01/1019441390497.html.
17. S. Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, trans. from Arabic by Inea Bushnaq (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 70. Lists of Palestinian villages can be found in official Israeli publications. For 1967, see Census of Populations 1967 (Central Bureau of Statistics), West Bank of the Jordan, Gaza Strip and northern Sinai, Golan Heights, Publication 1 (Jerusalem, 1967), 45–49, 163–65. For a catalogue of villages, see J. Fayez, Lest the Civilized World Forget: The Colonization of Palestine (New York: Americans for Middle East Understanding, 1992). Increasingly the Internet is a repository for catalogues of these villages and their stories.
18. The secondary road that once led from the village to the Tiberias-Nazareth highway can still be located on the roadside. See also B. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
19. Today Amir is serving a life sentence in a Beer Sheba prison. In an interview with Mark Lavie from the Associated Press five years later, Amir boasted about his deed and only expressed regret that he did not do it sooner.
20. See Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories 22.5 (September–October 2012), 3, taken from the Tel Aviv newspaper Yediot Aharonot, August 2, 2012.
21. The Wye River aid package passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, November 5, 1999. Four million dollars was given to the Palestinian Authority.
22. Palestinians call it Erez 2 after the Erez checkpoint in Gaza.
23. S. Jones, Report: Erez 2, Bethlehem Checkpoint, Cornerstone 17 (Winter 1999): 7.
24. C. Krauthammer, The Last Deal, or No Deal, Time, July 17, 2000, 88.
25. A. Eldar, What Went Wrong at Camp David: The Official PLO Version, Ha’aretz, July 24, 2001. For a map of the divisions of Palestine, see www.fmep.org/maps/v11n4 Barak Sharon map.jpg.
26. For a thorough study of the Peace Talks, see D. Sontag, Quest for Middle East Peace: How and Why It Failed, New York Times, July 26, 2001.
27. Chicago Tribune, July 20, 2001.
28. Israeli Town’s Adieu to 4 ‘Finest Sons and Daughters,’ New York Times, February 16, 2001.
29. These numbers are updated weekly by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and are available at their website: www.palestinercs.org/Latest CrisisUpdates Figures&Graphs.htm.
30. These numbers are updated weekly by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and are available at their website: www.israel.org/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ia50.
31. See the free book Remember the Children published by Americans for Middle East Understanding and available from the American Educational Trust at www.rememberthesechildren.org.
32. In these figures I am assuming a Palestinian population of 5.3 million, an Israeli population of 5.7 million, and an American population of 300 million.
33. Yakir Segev cited in Ben White, Israel wall used for segregation, not just security, Aljazeera Online, 31 July 2012.
34. When War Criminals Walk Free, online at http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/when-war-criminals-walk-free-1.458055.
35. Gilbert, M., When War Criminals Walk Free, The Link (Americans for Middle East Understanding) 45.5 (December 2012), available online at http://www.ameu.org/Current-Issue/Current-Issue/2012-Volume-45/When-War-Criminals-Walk-Free.aspx.
36. Ibid., 2, with full citations.
37. See Matthew Kalman, Clinton Announces Million-Dollar Scholarship Program for Palestinian Students, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 9, 2009, at http://chronicle.com/article/Clinton-Announces/42530/.
38. See Nick DeSantis, U.S. Drops Gaza Scholarship Program . . . , The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 15, 2012, at http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/u-s-drops-gaza-scholarship-program-after-israeli-travel-ban?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en.
39. M. Widlanski, Can Israel Survive a Palestinian State? (Jerusalem: Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 1990), 32–33.
40. See the government statistics given in H. Cattan, Palestine, the Arabs and Israel: The Search for Justice (London: Longman, 1969), 18–30, 207–10. This data is based on UN Statistics, British Administration reports, and village land records.
41. See the UN report www.unfpa.org/swp/swpmain.htm.
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Part Two THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE LAND
4 THE LAND PROMISES OF ABRAHAM
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” —GENESIS 15:18–21 The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land. —LEVITICUS 25:23–24 The ancient walled city of Jerusalem is divided into four quarters. For centuries this tradition has been respected, giving the city its distinctive character. The Jewish Quarter (southeast), the Armenian Quarter (southwest), the Christian Quarter (northwest), and the Muslim Quarter (northeast) all preserve ancient communities that venerate unique holy sites.¹ The Christian Quarter, for example, consists of about forty-five acres and is centered on the magnificent Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the traditional place of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. Christians from all over the world pilgrimage to this place and there can witness worship in progress as Latin and Eastern traditions celebrate mass and Protestant Christians sing and pray in chapels carved into the stone walls. In early 1990, a group of Israeli settlers broke with tradition. Carefully disguising their plan, they purchased St. John’s Hospice in the Christian Quarter under false pretenses and began to move in—a move that offended even Jerusalem’s mayor, Teddy Kollek, who respected the privileges of each faith community in the city. The hospice, which stands between the Greek Convent of St. John and the sacred Church of the Holy Sepulchre, has been owned for centuries by the Greek Orthodox Church, and in the Old City of Jerusalem, no one sells property like this. In April that year, David Levy, Israel’s minister of Housing, admitted that he had secretly provided $1.8 million for the Jewish settlers to move into the Christian Quarter. During Holy Week, on Maundy Thursday, 150 Jewish settlers moved in, protected by the Israeli army. When the traditional Orthodox Holy Week procession came through the city, they stopped at St. John’s and tried to remove Israel’s flags, which covered sacred Christian symbols. The entire crowd was teargassed. Protests erupted everywhere. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was closed down on Easter for the first time in history. Christians throughout the Middle East—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—saw this as an unprecedented offense.² In fact, when the Greek patriarch Diodoros and many of his bishops came to the building in protest, these elderly dignified men were roughed up by soldiers and teargassed in front of television cameras. Bishop Timothy, the general secretary to the patriarch, commented that “it was a violation of the status quo of church property” in Jerusalem. I happened to be in Jerusalem that spring and thought it would be interesting to see what all the fuss was about. The government had demanded that most of the settlers leave, and only a “symbolic group” remained to occupy the property. As I rounded the corner, soldiers were everywhere, and I could see Hebrew graffiti that aggressively laid claim to the property. What looked like sheets covered up the Christian symbols on the building, and the star of David was spray-painted generously on the walls. As I looked on at the tense scene, two teenage boys from the settlement stopped me. They were eager to explain to a tourist what this meant, and so I listened. “We have bought what is ours anyway, and how we did it doesn’t matter,” they said. I asked if it were not true that the Greeks had owned this property for hundreds of years—maybe even a thousand years. “It doesn’t matter,” they answered. “God gave us this country and this city, and Jews can live anywhere.” I reflected on the fact that Greek Christians could not buy land in the Jewish Quarter. “We are only taking what is ours by right. These people have no right even to be in this city,” they replied. This last thought enticed me. I pursued this idea of “rights” with these seventeen-year-old zealots. “God gave this land to Abraham, and we are his descendants. It belongs to us. Everything that happened in between simply doesn’t matter. The Palestinian Christians should just get out.” The conversation struck me as odd because these boys were American. They were from New York and had been in the country only a few years. Yet they were ejecting an ancient Christian community that could trace its history to this bit of real estate for more than a thousand years. And, ironically, this community likewise claimed descent from Abraham. Did God promise the land to Judaism? What do the Scriptures say? Was the promise confirmed later? Did it come with conditions? THE ORIGINAL PROMISES The source of this argument used by the Israeli teenagers in Jerusalem can be found in Genesis 12. When God called Abraham, he made two promises. One promise concerned Abraham’s children—whose number would exceed the stars in the sky. The other concerned land, since Abraham was nomadic and had no land of his own. These two items—children and land—reside at the center of Middle Eastern life even today. One promises the continuing survival of name and heritage; the other promises a place, a refuge, a locale called “home.” Today an Arab man is commonly known as “the father” of his firstborn son.³ Arab village farmers likewise esteem their land by giving personal names to its trees, its springs, and its caves. The introductory verses of the Abraham story begin with an outline of God’s promise. Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 12:1–3) Two notes are important here. First, much is made of Genesis 12:3 among those in the Evangelical Zionist communities. Failure to bless modern Israel, it is argued, will lead to God’s refusal to bless us. We must always ask, however, when something was said and to whom it was said to get at the right meaning. This is addressed to Abraham alone (the pronoun “you” is Hebrew singular) and is intended to express God’s protection over Abraham’s family. It is not a universal pronouncement and hardly one to be applied to a modern secular state. This is clear by how the verse is never used as a
Part Two
THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE LAND
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.
—GENESIS 15:18–21
The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land.
—LEVITICUS 25:23–24
The ancient walled city of Jerusalem is divided into four quarters. For centuries this tradition has been respected, giving the city its distinctive character. The Jewish Quarter (southeast), the Armenian Quarter (southwest), the Christian Quarter (northwest), and the Muslim Quarter (northeast) all preserve ancient communities that venerate unique holy sites.¹ The Christian Quarter, for example, consists of about forty-five acres and is centered on the magnificent Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the traditional place of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. Christians from all over the world pilgrimage to this place and there can witness worship in progress as Latin and Eastern traditions celebrate mass and Protestant Christians sing and pray in chapels carved into the stone walls.
In early 1990, a group of Israeli settlers broke with tradition. Carefully disguising their plan, they purchased St. John’s Hospice in the Christian Quarter under false pretenses and began to move in—a move that offended even Jerusalem’s mayor, Teddy Kollek, who respected the privileges of each faith community in the city. The hospice, which stands between the Greek Convent of St. John and the sacred Church of the Holy Sepulchre, has been owned for centuries by the Greek Orthodox Church, and in the Old City of Jerusalem, no one sells property like this. In April that year, David Levy, Israel’s minister of Housing, admitted that he had secretly provided $1.8 million for the Jewish settlers to move into the Christian Quarter.
During Holy Week, on Maundy Thursday, 150 Jewish settlers moved in, protected by the Israeli army. When the traditional Orthodox Holy Week procession came through the city, they stopped at St. John’s and tried to remove Israel’s flags, which covered sacred Christian symbols. The entire crowd was teargassed.
Protests erupted everywhere. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was closed down on Easter for the first time in history. Christians throughout the Middle East—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—saw this as an unprecedented offense.² In fact, when the Greek patriarch Diodoros and many of his bishops came to the building in protest, these elderly dignified men were roughed up by soldiers and teargassed in front of television cameras. Bishop Timothy, the general secretary to the patriarch, commented that it was a violation of the status quo of church property in Jerusalem.
I happened to be in Jerusalem that spring and thought it would be interesting to see what all the fuss was about. The government had demanded that most of the settlers leave, and only a symbolic group remained to occupy the property. As I rounded the corner, soldiers were everywhere, and I could see Hebrew graffiti that aggressively laid claim to the property. What looked like sheets covered up the Christian symbols on the building, and the star of David was spray-painted generously on the walls.
As I looked on at the tense scene, two teenage boys from the settlement stopped me. They were eager to explain to a tourist what this meant, and so I listened.
We have bought what is ours anyway, and how we did it doesn’t matter, they said.
I asked if it were not true that the Greeks had owned this property for hundreds of years—maybe even a thousand years.
It doesn’t matter, they answered. God gave us this country and this city, and Jews can live anywhere.
I reflected on the fact that Greek Christians could not buy land in the Jewish Quarter.
We are only taking what is ours by right. These people have no right even to be in this city, they replied.
This last thought enticed me. I pursued this idea of rights with these seventeen-year-old zealots.
God gave this land to Abraham, and we are his descendants. It belongs to us. Everything that happened in between simply doesn’t matter. The Palestinian Christians should just get out.
The conversation struck me as odd because these boys were American. They were from New York and had been in the country only a few years. Yet they were ejecting an ancient Christian community that could trace its history to this bit of real estate for more than a thousand years. And, ironically, this community likewise claimed descent from Abraham. Did God promise the land to Judaism? What do the Scriptures say? Was the promise confirmed later? Did it come with conditions?
THE ORIGINAL PROMISES
The source of this argument used by the Israeli teenagers in Jerusalem can be found in Genesis 12. When God called Abraham, he made two promises. One promise concerned Abraham’s children—whose number would exceed the stars in the sky. The other concerned land, since Abraham was nomadic and had no land of his own. These two items—children and land—reside at the center of Middle Eastern life even today. One promises the continuing survival of name and heritage; the other promises a place, a refuge, a locale called home. Today an Arab man is commonly known as the father of his firstborn son.³ Arab village farmers likewise esteem their land by giving personal names to its trees, its springs, and its caves.
The introductory verses of the Abraham story begin with an outline of God’s promise.
Now the Lord said to Abram, Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Gen. 12:1–3)
Two notes are important here. First, much is made of Genesis 12:3 among those in the Evangelical Zionist communities. Failure to bless modern Israel, it is argued, will lead to God’s refusal to bless us. We must always ask, however, when something was said and to whom it was said to get at the right meaning. This is addressed to Abraham alone (the pronoun you is Hebrew singular) and is intended to express God’s protection over Abraham’s family. It is not a universal pronouncement and hardly one to be applied to a modern secular state. This is clear by how the verse is never used as a
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4 THE LAND PROMISES OF ABRAHAM
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” —GENESIS 15:18–21 The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land. —LEVITICUS 25:23–24 The ancient walled city of Jerusalem is divided into four quarters. For centuries this tradition has been respected, giving the city its distinctive character. The Jewish Quarter (southeast), the Armenian Quarter (southwest), the Christian Quarter (northwest), and the Muslim Quarter (northeast) all preserve ancient communities that venerate unique holy sites.¹ The Christian Quarter, for example, consists of about forty-five acres and is centered on the magnificent Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the traditional place of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. Christians from all over the world pilgrimage to this place and there can witness worship in progress as Latin and Eastern traditions celebrate mass and Protestant Christians sing and pray in chapels carved into the stone walls. In early 1990, a group of Israeli settlers broke with tradition. Carefully disguising their plan, they purchased St. John’s Hospice in the Christian Quarter under false pretenses and began to move in—a move that offended even Jerusalem’s mayor, Teddy Kollek, who respected the privileges of each faith community in the city. The hospice, which stands between the Greek Convent of St. John and the sacred Church of the Holy Sepulchre, has been owned for centuries by the Greek Orthodox Church, and in the Old City of Jerusalem, no one sells property like this. In April that year, David Levy, Israel’s minister of Housing, admitted that he had secretly provided $1.8 million for the Jewish settlers to move into the Christian Quarter. During Holy Week, on Maundy Thursday, 150 Jewish settlers moved in, protected by the Israeli army. When the traditional Orthodox Holy Week procession came through the city, they stopped at St. John’s and tried to remove Israel’s flags, which covered sacred Christian symbols. The entire crowd was teargassed. Protests erupted everywhere. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was closed down on Easter for the first time in history. Christians throughout the Middle East—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—saw this as an unprecedented offense.² In fact, when the Greek patriarch Diodoros and many of his bishops came to the building in protest, these elderly dignified men were roughed up by soldiers and teargassed in front of television cameras. Bishop Timothy, the general secretary to the patriarch, commented that “it was a violation of the status quo of church property” in Jerusalem. I happened to be in Jerusalem that spring and thought it would be interesting to see what all the fuss was about. The government had demanded that most of the settlers leave, and only a “symbolic group” remained to occupy the property. As I rounded the corner, soldiers were everywhere, and I could see Hebrew graffiti that aggressively laid claim to the property. What looked like sheets covered up the Christian symbols on the building, and the star of David was spray-painted generously on the walls. As I looked on at the tense scene, two teenage boys from the settlement stopped me. They were eager to explain to a tourist what this meant, and so I listened. “We have bought what is ours anyway, and how we did it doesn’t matter,” they said. I asked if it were not true that the Greeks had owned this property for hundreds of years—maybe even a thousand years. “It doesn’t matter,” they answered. “God gave us this country and this city, and Jews can live anywhere.” I reflected on the fact that Greek Christians could not buy land in the Jewish Quarter. “We are only taking what is ours by right. These people have no right even to be in this city,” they replied. This last thought enticed me. I pursued this idea of “rights” with these seventeen-year-old zealots. “God gave this land to Abraham, and we are his descendants. It belongs to us. Everything that happened in between simply doesn’t matter. The Palestinian Christians should just get out.” The conversation struck me as odd because these boys were American. They were from New York and had been in the country only a few years. Yet they were ejecting an ancient Christian community that could trace its history to this bit of real estate for more than a thousand years. And, ironically, this community likewise claimed descent from Abraham. Did God promise the land to Judaism? What do the Scriptures say? Was the promise confirmed later? Did it come with conditions? THE ORIGINAL PROMISES The source of this argument used by the Israeli teenagers in Jerusalem can be found in Genesis 12. When God called Abraham, he made two promises. One promise concerned Abraham’s children—whose number would exceed the stars in the sky. The other concerned land, since Abraham was nomadic and had no land of his own. These two items—children and land—reside at the center of Middle Eastern life even today. One promises the continuing survival of name and heritage; the other promises a place, a refuge, a locale called “home.” Today an Arab man is commonly known as “the father” of his firstborn son.³ Arab village farmers likewise esteem their land by giving personal names to its trees, its springs, and its caves. The introductory verses of the Abraham story begin with an outline of God’s promise. Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 12:1–3) Two notes are important here. First, much is made of Genesis 12:3 among those in the Evangelical Zionist communities. Failure to bless modern Israel, it is argued, will lead to God’s refusal to bless us. We must always ask, however, when something was said and to whom it was said to get at the right meaning. This is addressed to Abraham alone (the pronoun “you” is Hebrew singular) and is intended to express God’s protection over Abraham’s family. It is not a universal pronouncement and hardly one to be applied to a modern secular state. This is clear by how the verse is never used as a
Part Two
THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE LAND
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.
—GENESIS 15:18–21
The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land.
—LEVITICUS 25:23–24
The ancient walled city of Jerusalem is divided into four quarters. For centuries this tradition has been respected, giving the city its distinctive character. The Jewish Quarter (southeast), the Armenian Quarter (southwest), the Christian Quarter (northwest), and the Muslim Quarter (northeast) all preserve ancient communities that venerate unique holy sites.¹ The Christian Quarter, for example, consists of about forty-five acres and is centered on the magnificent Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the traditional place of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. Christians from all over the world pilgrimage to this place and there can witness worship in progress as Latin and Eastern traditions celebrate mass and Protestant Christians sing and pray in chapels carved into the stone walls.
In early 1990, a group of Israeli settlers broke with tradition. Carefully disguising their plan, they purchased St. John’s Hospice in the Christian Quarter under false pretenses and began to move in—a move that offended even Jerusalem’s mayor, Teddy Kollek, who respected the privileges of each faith community in the city. The hospice, which stands between the Greek Convent of St. John and the sacred Church of the Holy Sepulchre, has been owned for centuries by the Greek Orthodox Church, and in the Old City of Jerusalem, no one sells property like this. In April that year, David Levy, Israel’s minister of Housing, admitted that he had secretly provided $1.8 million for the Jewish settlers to move into the Christian Quarter.
During Holy Week, on Maundy Thursday, 150 Jewish settlers moved in, protected by the Israeli army. When the traditional Orthodox Holy Week procession came through the city, they stopped at St. John’s and tried to remove Israel’s flags, which covered sacred Christian symbols. The entire crowd was teargassed.
Protests erupted everywhere. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was closed down on Easter for the first time in history. Christians throughout the Middle East—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—saw this as an unprecedented offense.² In fact, when the Greek patriarch Diodoros and many of his bishops came to the building in protest, these elderly dignified men were roughed up by soldiers and teargassed in front of television cameras. Bishop Timothy, the general secretary to the patriarch, commented that it was a violation of the status quo of church property in Jerusalem.
I happened to be in Jerusalem that spring and thought it would be interesting to see what all the fuss was about. The government had demanded that most of the settlers leave, and only a symbolic group remained to occupy the property. As I rounded the corner, soldiers were everywhere, and I could see Hebrew graffiti that aggressively laid claim to the property. What looked like sheets covered up the Christian symbols on the building, and the star of David was spray-painted generously on the walls.
As I looked on at the tense scene, two teenage boys from the settlement stopped me. They were eager to explain to a tourist what this meant, and so I listened.
We have bought what is ours anyway, and how we did it doesn’t matter, they said.
I asked if it were not true that the Greeks had owned this property for hundreds of years—maybe even a thousand years.
It doesn’t matter, they answered. God gave us this country and this city, and Jews can live anywhere.
I reflected on the fact that Greek Christians could not buy land in the Jewish Quarter.
We are only taking what is ours by right. These people have no right even to be in this city, they replied.
This last thought enticed me. I pursued this idea of rights with these seventeen-year-old zealots.
God gave this land to Abraham, and we are his descendants. It belongs to us. Everything that happened in between simply doesn’t matter. The Palestinian Christians should just get out.
The conversation struck me as odd because these boys were American. They were from New York and had been in the country only a few years. Yet they were ejecting an ancient Christian community that could trace its history to this bit of real estate for more than a thousand years. And, ironically, this community likewise claimed descent from Abraham. Did God promise the land to Judaism? What do the Scriptures say? Was the promise confirmed later? Did it come with conditions?
THE ORIGINAL PROMISES
The source of this argument used by the Israeli teenagers in Jerusalem can be found in Genesis 12. When God called Abraham, he made two promises. One promise concerned Abraham’s children—whose number would exceed the stars in the sky. The other concerned land, since Abraham was nomadic and had no land of his own. These two items—children and land—reside at the center of Middle Eastern life even today. One promises the continuing survival of name and heritage; the other promises a place, a refuge, a locale called home. Today an Arab man is commonly known as the father of his firstborn son.³ Arab village farmers likewise esteem their land by giving personal names to its trees, its springs, and its caves.
The introductory verses of the Abraham story begin with an outline of God’s promise.
Now the Lord said to Abram, Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Gen. 12:1–3)
Two notes are important here. First, much is made of Genesis 12:3 among those in the Evangelical Zionist communities. Failure to bless modern Israel, it is argued, will lead to God’s refusal to bless us. We must always ask, however, when something was said and to whom it was said to get at the right meaning. This is addressed to Abraham alone (the pronoun you is Hebrew singular) and is intended to express God’s protection over Abraham’s family. It is not a universal pronouncement and hardly one to be applied to a modern secular state. This is clear by how the verse is never used as a
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promise in the balance of scripture. The Old Testament never uses it. Nor does the New Testament refer to it. It only appears on the lips of the false prophet Balaam in Numbers 22. Second, it is striking that this promise fails to mention the land. Virtually every scholar who studies the passage notes that this omission is peculiar.⁴ In some sense, the primary thrust of the story is that Abraham is going to be the father of a nation, and their identity as God’s people is most important, not necessarily where they live. This point makes sense when we consider that Abraham was nomadic, traveling between Mesopotamia (his home, Iraq) and the Egyptian province of Canaan (what we commonly call Israel/Palestine today). This original promise addressed the migratory life of the patriarch. The promise is for new pasture for the nomad, his clan, and his animals to escape the threat of starvation.⁵ As Abraham’s story continues, it is interesting that Abraham does not settle down. He moves his tents among the cities of Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, and Be’er Sheva. He does not buy any land or possess any land until Sarah dies and he needs a burial site. A brief form of this promise is mentioned in Genesis 13:14–17. After Abraham scans the countryside in all directions, God says, “The land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. . . . Rise up, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.” This promise is formally reaffirmed in Genesis 15 when God makes a covenant with Abraham. In 15:1–6 the land is omitted once again, but in 15:18–21, God speaks clearly about the land inheritance that Abraham will receive. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” (Gen. 15:18–21) Again in Genesis 17, when Abraham’s name is changed (formerly it had been Abram), God repeats the twofold promise for progeny and land: “I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.” God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations.” (Gen. 17:7–9) One thing is exceedingly clear. This gift of land is intimately connected to the covenant, or contract, that God is making with Abraham. This “package deal” includes the following elements:
•Abraham will receive the land as an everlasting possession.
•Abraham’s posterity will become a great nation.
•An everlasting covenant will bind Abraham and his descendants to God.
•All of the people of the earth will be blessed through Abraham and his people.⁶ In order to make clear that this promise extends to Abraham’s children, Genesis repeats these promises for Isaac (Abraham’s son) in 26:2–4 and for Jacob (Abraham’s grandson through Isaac) in 28:13–15. But in all cases—even when repeated elsewhere in the Old Testament—the promise to Abraham is the anchor passage. In fact, when Israel later disobeys the Lord and the prophets announce punishment, God’s promise to Abraham brings hope of restoration and forgiveness (Jer. 7:7; 16:15; cf. Deut. 8:18). Micah 7:20 says it succinctly: “You will show faithfulness to Jacob and unswerving loyalty to Abraham, as you have sworn to our ancestors from the days of old.”⁷ As we read the story of Abraham carefully, three things stand out. First, the native residents of this province called Canaan are not displaced. They are not ejected from their homes. Instead, Abraham becomes a neighbor (not a conqueror) who enters into trade relations with the indigenous people of the land. This point cannot be stressed enough. When Sarah dies (Gen. 23), Abraham does not presume that he can simply take any burial ground he desires. He must buy it. In fact, Genesis 23 records a lengthy negotiation in which Ephron the Hittite who owns the field Abraham desires to buy tries to give the property to Abraham as a gift. Abraham refuses to accept it. He insists on buying it. Before an array of legal witnesses at Hebron’s city gate, Abraham finally purchases the cave of Machpelah near the Oaks of Mamre.⁸ Keep in mind that Ephron was a Hittite—one of the very people listed in Genesis 15:20 whose land Abraham was going to inherit. Yet here Abraham treats the Hittites with considerable respect. Second, the story emphasizes that land is linked with covenant. Genesis 17:9 affirms Abraham’s responsibility, and this verse follows right on the heels of 17:8, which contains the land promise. It is not as if a “title deed” had been handed to Abraham and God was no longer part of the picture. Rather, the land is an outgrowth of the relationship between Abraham, Abraham’s descendants, and God. In this relationship, the land is certain to be an everlasting possession, but responsibility for it assumes faithfulness to a relationship with God. The law books Leviticus and Deuteronomy make this assumption clear. The prophets likewise remind Israel that this dimension cannot be ignored. Finally, God emphasizes that Abraham’s children will become “a great nation” and through them “all of the peoples of the earth will be blessed.” Frequently Christians have taken Genesis 12:2–3 out of context: I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. The idea here is not that the Gentiles must somehow support Israelite efforts at greatness and nationhood and in so doing discover the blessing of God. Nor (in its original setting) does the passage mean that the blessing of the families of the earth will come about because Israel will bring the world its messiah, Jesus Christ.⁹ Rather, these verses suggest that through Israel’s greatness, through Israel’s goodness, because Israel is blessed, God’s people will in turn be able to bless and enrich the lives of others living nearby. In other words, an ethical dimension exists within Israel’s election. The covenant is not designed simply to satisfy Israel’s nationhood and give it land. Nor is the covenant designed to satisfy Israel’s self-interest. The covenant with Israel is God’s strategy to bring his goodness and righteousness to the rest of humanity. Israel is to be a nation of priests (Exod. 19:6; Deut. 7:6), mediating God’s presence and goodness to the earth.
PROMISES WITH CONDITIONS The connection between covenant fidelity and the promise of land is evident throughout the Torah (the five traditional books of Moses). Possessing the land was contingent on Israel’s consistently living by God’s righteous standards.¹⁰ One of the most surprising discoveries for me was how rarely this theme is sounded by evangelical writers. Both Leviticus and Deuteronomy warn Israel about righteousness and the land in dramatic terms. In fact, the images are shocking. If Israel does not obey God’s laws, then the land itself will vomit the nation out. Leviticus 18 and 20 were given at Mount Sinai, where God was exceedingly explicit about his covenant and its obligations. Chapter 18 warns Israel against taking on the lifestyle of the Canaanites: Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, for by all these practices the nations I am casting out before you have defiled themselves. Thus the land became defiled; and I punished it for its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my ordinances and commit none of these abominations, either the citizen or the alien who resides among you (for the inhabitants of the land, who were before you, committed all of these abominations, and the land became defiled); otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For whoever commits any of these abominations shall be cut off from their people. So keep my charge not to commit any of these abominations that were done before you, and not to defile yourselves by them: I am the LORD your God. (Lev. 18:24–30, emphasis added.) Chapter 20 turns its attention to the expectations of ritual holiness within the covenant: You shall keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and observe them, so that the land to which I bring you to settle in may not vomit you out. You shall not follow the practices of the nation that I am driving out before you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them. But I have said to you: You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey. I am the LORD your God; I have separated you from the peoples. You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean animal and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean; you shall not bring abomination on yourselves by animal or by bird or by anything with which the ground teems, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean. You shall be holy to me; for I the LORD am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine. (Lev. 20:22–26, emphasis added) Note how Moses emphasizes holiness, and note how in each case the land itself will eject its inhabitants. The land has a life of its own and can suffer abuse and be defiled. Unrighteousness defiles the land of Israel/Palestine. Just as grievous sinners were ejected from the camp of Israel lest further wrongdoing increase, so, too, Israel could be ejected from the camp or land of God. After the wilderness wanderings, Moses led the people across the south end of the Dead Sea, up onto the plateau that is today Jordan, and then north until he was adjacent to Jericho, across the Jordan River. Here on “the plains of Moab” he delivered his final words of counsel concerning entry into Canaan. Again, the same theme is sounded. Possession of the land is linked to covenant fidelity. To break the law is to lose the land. Note his words in Deuteronomy 4: When you have had children and children’s children, and become complacent in the land, if you act corruptly by making an idol in the form of anything, thus doing what is evil in the sight of the LORD your God, and provoking him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to occupy; you will not live long on it, but will be utterly destroyed. The LORD will scatter you among the peoples; only a few of you will be left among the nations where the LORD will lead you. (vv. 25–27) Keep his statutes and his commandments, which I am commanding you today for your own well-being and that of your descendants after you, so that you may long remain in the land that the LORD your God is giving you for all time. (v. 40) Perhaps Moses’ most important teachings concerning the land can be found in Deuteronomy 8–9, which summarize what God had done for Israel from Egypt until then. Above all, the chapters remind Israel to be humble when it comes to the land. The land and its wealth are gifts to be held with humility. Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today. If you do forget the LORD your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. (Deut. 8:17–19) The severity of these words cannot be missed. Israel cannot be cavalier about its use of the land or its abuse of its inhabitants. This land is not like any other land. The wonder of this land has little to do with its natural beauty or its powerful history. We dare not be romantic or sentimental here. With many Christians I often read Deuteronomy 11:11–12 in this way. “But the land that you are crossing over to occupy is a land of hills and valleys, watered by rain from the sky, a land that the Lord your God looks after. The eyes of the Lord your God are always on it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.” What does God look for? God looks for holiness and justice among those who possess this land. WHO REALLY OWNS THE LAND? God’s remarkable interest in the land of Israel/Palestine is easily explained. The Bible teaches that the nation of Israel does not own the land; God does.¹¹ God’s investment in the land did not disappear when the covenant with Israel was written. Since Israel and God would live closely together in covenant relation, God and Israel together would enjoy the land. Leviticus makes this perfectly clear. As the law outlines how to use the land (tenant agreements, farming practices, purchasing land), the Israelites are reminded: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lev. 25:23). Israel is a tenant in the land, not a landlord. Israel is a renter, a visitor, an alien. The land is “a delightful gift—owned by [God] and leased to Israel in partial fulfillment of His word of promise.”¹² Israel must hold this land loosely, because God will always determine the tenure of its occupants. I often think of this “ownership” like the ownership of the computer on which I am typing this book. In one very real sense, this laptop is “mine.” No other faculty member may use it; it is mine to take home and use as I wish. However there this odd hidden sticker on the bottom that says “Property of Wheaton College.” And this indicates the
promise in the balance of scripture. The Old Testament never uses it. Nor does the New Testament refer to it. It only appears on the lips of the false prophet Balaam in Numbers 22.
Second, it is striking that this promise fails to mention the land. Virtually every scholar who studies the passage notes that this omission is peculiar.⁴ In some sense, the primary thrust of the story is that Abraham is going to be the father of a nation, and their identity as God’s people is most important, not necessarily where they live. This point makes sense when we consider that Abraham was nomadic, traveling between Mesopotamia (his home, Iraq) and the Egyptian province of Canaan (what we commonly call Israel/Palestine today). This original promise addressed the migratory life of the patriarch. The promise is for new pasture for the nomad, his clan, and his animals to escape the threat of starvation.⁵ As Abraham’s story continues, it is interesting that Abraham does not settle down. He moves his tents among the cities of Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, and Be’er Sheva. He does not buy any land or possess any land until Sarah dies and he needs a burial site.
A brief form of this promise is mentioned in Genesis 13:14–17. After Abraham scans the countryside in all directions, God says, The land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. . . . Rise up, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.
This promise is formally reaffirmed in Genesis 15 when God makes a covenant with Abraham. In 15:1–6 the land is omitted once again, but in 15:18–21, God speaks clearly about the land inheritance that Abraham will receive.
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites. (Gen. 15:18–21)
Again in Genesis 17, when Abraham’s name is changed (formerly it had been Abram), God repeats the twofold promise for progeny and land:
I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.
God said to Abraham, As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. (Gen. 17:7–9)
One thing is exceedingly clear. This gift of land is intimately connected to the covenant, or contract, that God is making with Abraham. This package deal includes the following elements:
Abraham will receive the land as an everlasting possession.
Abraham’s posterity will become a great nation.
An everlasting covenant will bind Abraham and his descendants to God.
All of the people of the earth will be blessed through Abraham and his people.⁶
In order to make clear that this promise extends to Abraham’s children, Genesis repeats these promises for Isaac (Abraham’s son) in 26:2–4 and for Jacob (Abraham’s grandson through Isaac) in 28:13–15. But in all cases—even when repeated elsewhere in the Old Testament—the promise to Abraham is the anchor passage. In fact, when Israel later disobeys the Lord and the prophets announce punishment, God’s promise to Abraham brings hope of restoration and forgiveness (Jer. 7:7; 16:15; cf. Deut. 8:18). Micah 7:20 says it succinctly: You will show faithfulness to Jacob and unswerving loyalty to Abraham, as you have sworn to our ancestors from the days of old.⁷
As we read the story of Abraham carefully, three things stand out. First, the native residents of this province called Canaan are not displaced. They are not ejected from their homes. Instead, Abraham becomes a neighbor (not a conqueror) who enters into trade relations with the indigenous people of the land. This point cannot be stressed enough. When Sarah dies (Gen. 23), Abraham does not presume that he can simply take any burial ground he desires. He must buy it. In fact, Genesis 23 records a lengthy negotiation in which Ephron the Hittite who owns the field Abraham desires to buy tries to give the property to Abraham as a gift. Abraham refuses to accept it. He insists on buying it. Before an array of legal witnesses at Hebron’s city gate, Abraham finally purchases the cave of Machpelah near the Oaks of Mamre.⁸ Keep in mind that Ephron was a Hittite—one of the very people listed in Genesis 15:20 whose land Abraham was going to inherit. Yet here Abraham treats the Hittites with considerable respect.
Second, the story emphasizes that land is linked with covenant. Genesis 17:9 affirms Abraham’s responsibility, and this verse follows right on the heels of 17:8, which contains the land promise. It is not as if a title deed had been handed to Abraham and God was no longer part of the picture. Rather, the land is an outgrowth of the relationship between Abraham, Abraham’s descendants, and God. In this relationship, the land is certain to be an everlasting possession, but responsibility for it assumes faithfulness to a relationship with God. The law books Leviticus and Deuteronomy make this assumption clear. The prophets likewise remind Israel that this dimension cannot be ignored.
Finally, God emphasizes that Abraham’s children will become a great nation and through them all of the peoples of the earth will be blessed. Frequently Christians have taken Genesis 12:2–3 out of context:
I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
The idea here is not that the Gentiles must somehow support Israelite efforts at greatness and nationhood and in so doing discover the blessing of God. Nor (in its original setting) does the passage mean that the blessing of the families of the earth will come about because Israel will bring the world its messiah, Jesus Christ.⁹ Rather, these verses suggest that through Israel’s greatness, through Israel’s goodness, because Israel is blessed, God’s people will in turn be able to bless and enrich the lives of others living nearby. In other words, an ethical dimension exists within Israel’s election. The covenant is not designed simply to satisfy Israel’s nationhood and give it land. Nor is the covenant designed to satisfy Israel’s self-interest. The covenant with Israel is God’s strategy to bring his goodness and righteousness to the rest of humanity. Israel is to be a nation of priests (Exod. 19:6; Deut. 7:6), mediating God’s presence and goodness to the earth.
PROMISES WITH CONDITIONS
The connection between covenant fidelity and the promise of land is evident throughout the Torah (the five traditional books of Moses). Possessing the land was contingent on Israel’s consistently living by God’s righteous standards.¹⁰ One of the most surprising discoveries for me was how rarely this theme is sounded by evangelical writers.
Both Leviticus and Deuteronomy warn Israel about righteousness and the land in dramatic terms. In fact, the images are shocking. If Israel does not obey God’s laws, then the land itself will vomit the nation out. Leviticus 18 and 20 were given at Mount Sinai, where God was exceedingly explicit about his covenant and its obligations. Chapter 18 warns Israel against taking on the lifestyle of the Canaanites:
Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, for by all these practices the nations I am casting out before you have defiled themselves. Thus the land became defiled; and I punished it for its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my ordinances and commit none of these abominations, either the citizen or the alien who resides among you (for the inhabitants of the land, who were before you, committed all of these abominations, and the land became defiled); otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For whoever commits any of these abominations shall be cut off from their people. So keep my charge not to commit any of these abominations that were done before you, and not to defile yourselves by them: I am the LORD your God. (Lev. 18:24–30, emphasis added.)
Chapter 20 turns its attention to the expectations of ritual holiness within the covenant:
You shall keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and observe them, so that the land to which I bring you to settle in may not vomit you out. You shall not follow the practices of the nation that I am driving out before you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them. But I have said to you: You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey. I am the LORD your God; I have separated you from the peoples. You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean animal and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean; you shall not bring abomination on yourselves by animal or by bird or by anything with which the ground teems, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean. You shall be holy to me; for I the LORD am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine. (Lev. 20:22–26, emphasis added)
Note how Moses emphasizes holiness, and note how in each case the land itself will eject its inhabitants. The land has a life of its own and can suffer abuse and be defiled. Unrighteousness defiles the land of Israel/Palestine. Just as grievous sinners were ejected from the camp of Israel lest further wrongdoing increase, so, too, Israel could be ejected from the camp or land of God.
After the wilderness wanderings, Moses led the people across the south end of the Dead Sea, up onto the plateau that is today Jordan, and then north until he was adjacent to Jericho, across the Jordan River. Here on the plains of Moab he delivered his final words of counsel concerning entry into Canaan. Again, the same theme is sounded. Possession of the land is linked to covenant fidelity. To break the law is to lose the land. Note his words in Deuteronomy 4:
When you have had children and children’s children, and become complacent in the land, if you act corruptly by making an idol in the form of anything, thus doing what is evil in the sight of the LORD your God, and provoking him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to occupy; you will not live long on it, but will be utterly destroyed. The LORD will scatter you among the peoples; only a few of you will be left among the nations where the LORD will lead you. (vv. 25–27)
Keep his statutes and his commandments, which I am commanding you today for your own well-being and that of your descendants after you, so that you may long remain in the land that the LORD your God is giving you for all time. (v. 40)
Perhaps Moses’ most important teachings concerning the land can be found in Deuteronomy 8–9, which summarize what God had done for Israel from Egypt until then. Above all, the chapters remind Israel to be humble when it comes to the land. The land and its wealth are gifts to be held with humility.
Do not say to yourself, My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth. But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today. If you do forget the LORD your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. (Deut. 8:17–19)
The severity of these words cannot be missed. Israel cannot be cavalier about its use of the land or its abuse of its inhabitants. This land is not like any other land. The wonder of this land has little to do with its natural beauty or its powerful history. We dare not be romantic or sentimental here. With many Christians I often read Deuteronomy 11:11–12 in this way. But the land that you are crossing over to occupy is a land of hills and valleys, watered by rain from the sky, a land that the Lord your God looks after. The eyes of the Lord your God are always on it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. What does God look for? God looks for holiness and justice among those who possess this land.
WHO REALLY OWNS THE LAND?
God’s remarkable interest in the land of Israel/Palestine is easily explained. The Bible teaches that the nation of Israel does not own the land; God does.¹¹ God’s investment in the land did not disappear when the covenant with Israel was written. Since Israel and God would live closely together in covenant relation, God and Israel together would enjoy the land. Leviticus makes this perfectly clear. As the law outlines how to use the land (tenant agreements, farming practices, purchasing land), the Israelites are reminded: The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants (Lev. 25:23). Israel is a tenant in the land, not a landlord. Israel is a renter, a visitor, an alien. The land is a delightful gift—owned by [God] and leased to Israel in partial fulfillment of His word of promise.¹² Israel must hold this land loosely, because God will always determine the tenure of its occupants.
I often think of this ownership like the ownership of the computer on which I am typing this book. In one very real sense, this laptop is mine. No other faculty member may use it; it is mine to take home and use as I wish. However there this odd hidden sticker on the bottom that says Property of Wheaton College. And this indicates the
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•Abraham will receive the land as an everlasting possession.
•Abraham’s posterity will become a great nation.
•An everlasting covenant will bind Abraham and his descendants to God.
•All of the people of the earth will be blessed through Abraham and his people.⁶ In order to make clear that this promise extends to Abraham’s children, Genesis repeats these promises for Isaac (Abraham’s son) in 26:2–4 and for Jacob (Abraham’s grandson through Isaac) in 28:13–15. But in all cases—even when repeated elsewhere in the Old Testament—the promise to Abraham is the anchor passage. In fact, when Israel later disobeys the Lord and the prophets announce punishment, God’s promise to Abraham brings hope of restoration and forgiveness (Jer. 7:7; 16:15; cf. Deut. 8:18). Micah 7:20 says it succinctly: “You will show faithfulness to Jacob and unswerving loyalty to Abraham, as you have sworn to our ancestors from the days of old.”⁷ As we read the story of Abraham carefully, three things stand out. First, the native residents of this province called Canaan are not displaced. They are not ejected from their homes. Instead, Abraham becomes a neighbor (not a conqueror) who enters into trade relations with the indigenous people of the land. This point cannot be stressed enough. When Sarah dies (Gen. 23), Abraham does not presume that he can simply take any burial ground he desires. He must buy it. In fact, Genesis 23 records a lengthy negotiation in which Ephron the Hittite who owns the field Abraham desires to buy tries to give the property to Abraham as a gift. Abraham refuses to accept it. He insists on buying it. Before an array of legal witnesses at Hebron’s city gate, Abraham finally purchases the cave of Machpelah near the Oaks of Mamre.⁸ Keep in mind that Ephron was a Hittite—one of the very people listed in Genesis 15:20 whose land Abraham was going to inherit. Yet here Abraham treats the Hittites with considerable respect. Second, the story emphasizes that land is linked with covenant. Genesis 17:9 affirms Abraham’s responsibility, and this verse follows right on the heels of 17:8, which contains the land promise. It is not as if a “title deed” had been handed to Abraham and God was no longer part of the picture. Rather, the land is an outgrowth of the relationship between Abraham, Abraham’s descendants, and God. In this relationship, the land is certain to be an everlasting possession, but responsibility for it assumes faithfulness to a relationship with God. The law books Leviticus and Deuteronomy make this assumption clear. The prophets likewise remind Israel that this dimension cannot be ignored. Finally, God emphasizes that Abraham’s children will become “a great nation” and through them “all of the peoples of the earth will be blessed.” Frequently Christians have taken Genesis 12:2–3 out of context: I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. The idea here is not that the Gentiles must somehow support Israelite efforts at greatness and nationhood and in so doing discover the blessing of God. Nor (in its original setting) does the passage mean that the blessing of the families of the earth will come about because Israel will bring the world its messiah, Jesus Christ.⁹ Rather, these verses suggest that through Israel’s greatness, through Israel’s goodness, because Israel is blessed, God’s people will in turn be able to bless and enrich the lives of others living nearby. In other words, an ethical dimension exists within Israel’s election. The covenant is not designed simply to satisfy Israel’s nationhood and give it land. Nor is the covenant designed to satisfy Israel’s self-interest. The covenant with Israel is God’s strategy to bring his goodness and righteousness to the rest of humanity. Israel is to be a nation of priests (Exod. 19:6; Deut. 7:6), mediating God’s presence and goodness to the earth.
PROMISES WITH CONDITIONS The connection between covenant fidelity and the promise of land is evident throughout the Torah (the five traditional books of Moses). Possessing the land was contingent on Israel’s consistently living by God’s righteous standards.¹⁰ One of the most surprising discoveries for me was how rarely this theme is sounded by evangelical writers. Both Leviticus and Deuteronomy warn Israel about righteousness and the land in dramatic terms. In fact, the images are shocking. If Israel does not obey God’s laws, then the land itself will vomit the nation out. Leviticus 18 and 20 were given at Mount Sinai, where God was exceedingly explicit about his covenant and its obligations. Chapter 18 warns Israel against taking on the lifestyle of the Canaanites: Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, for by all these practices the nations I am casting out before you have defiled themselves. Thus the land became defiled; and I punished it for its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my ordinances and commit none of these abominations, either the citizen or the alien who resides among you (for the inhabitants of the land, who were before you, committed all of these abominations, and the land became defiled); otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For whoever commits any of these abominations shall be cut off from their people. So keep my charge not to commit any of these abominations that were done before you, and not to defile yourselves by them: I am the LORD your God. (Lev. 18:24–30, emphasis added.) Chapter 20 turns its attention to the expectations of ritual holiness within the covenant: You shall keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and observe them, so that the land to which I bring you to settle in may not vomit you out. You shall not follow the practices of the nation that I am driving out before you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them. But I have said to you: You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey. I am the LORD your God; I have separated you from the peoples. You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean animal and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean; you shall not bring abomination on yourselves by animal or by bird or by anything with which the ground teems, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean. You shall be holy to me; for I the LORD am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine. (Lev. 20:22–26, emphasis added) Note how Moses emphasizes holiness, and note how in each case the land itself will eject its inhabitants. The land has a life of its own and can suffer abuse and be defiled. Unrighteousness defiles the land of Israel/Palestine. Just as grievous sinners were ejected from the camp of Israel lest further wrongdoing increase, so, too, Israel could be ejected from the camp or land of God. After the wilderness wanderings, Moses led the people across the south end of the Dead Sea, up onto the plateau that is today Jordan, and then north until he was adjacent to Jericho, across the Jordan River. Here on “the plains of Moab” he delivered his final words of counsel concerning entry into Canaan. Again, the same theme is sounded. Possession of the land is linked to covenant fidelity. To break the law is to lose the land. Note his words in Deuteronomy 4: When you have had children and children’s children, and become complacent in the land, if you act corruptly by making an idol in the form of anything, thus doing what is evil in the sight of the LORD your God, and provoking him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to occupy; you will not live long on it, but will be utterly destroyed. The LORD will scatter you among the peoples; only a few of you will be left among the nations where the LORD will lead you. (vv. 25–27) Keep his statutes and his commandments, which I am commanding you today for your own well-being and that of your descendants after you, so that you may long remain in the land that the LORD your God is giving you for all time. (v. 40) Perhaps Moses’ most important teachings concerning the land can be found in Deuteronomy 8–9, which summarize what God had done for Israel from Egypt until then. Above all, the chapters remind Israel to be humble when it comes to the land. The land and its wealth are gifts to be held with humility. Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today. If you do forget the LORD your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. (Deut. 8:17–19) The severity of these words cannot be missed. Israel cannot be cavalier about its use of the land or its abuse of its inhabitants. This land is not like any other land. The wonder of this land has little to do with its natural beauty or its powerful history. We dare not be romantic or sentimental here. With many Christians I often read Deuteronomy 11:11–12 in this way. “But the land that you are crossing over to occupy is a land of hills and valleys, watered by rain from the sky, a land that the Lord your God looks after. The eyes of the Lord your God are always on it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.” What does God look for? God looks for holiness and justice among those who possess this land. WHO REALLY OWNS THE LAND? God’s remarkable interest in the land of Israel/Palestine is easily explained. The Bible teaches that the nation of Israel does not own the land; God does.¹¹ God’s investment in the land did not disappear when the covenant with Israel was written. Since Israel and God would live closely together in covenant relation, God and Israel together would enjoy the land. Leviticus makes this perfectly clear. As the law outlines how to use the land (tenant agreements, farming practices, purchasing land), the Israelites are reminded: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lev. 25:23). Israel is a tenant in the land, not a landlord. Israel is a renter, a visitor, an alien. The land is “a delightful gift—owned by [God] and leased to Israel in partial fulfillment of His word of promise.”¹² Israel must hold this land loosely, because God will always determine the tenure of its occupants. I often think of this “ownership” like the ownership of the computer on which I am typing this book. In one very real sense, this laptop is “mine.” No other faculty member may use it; it is mine to take home and use as I wish. However there this odd hidden sticker on the bottom that says “Property of Wheaton College.” And this indicates the
promise in the balance of scripture. The Old Testament never uses it. Nor does the New Testament refer to it. It only appears on the lips of the false prophet Balaam in Numbers 22.
Second, it is striking that this promise fails to mention the land. Virtually every scholar who studies the passage notes that this omission is peculiar.⁴ In some sense, the primary thrust of the story is that Abraham is going to be the father of a nation, and their identity as God’s people is most important, not necessarily where they live. This point makes sense when we consider that Abraham was nomadic, traveling between Mesopotamia (his home, Iraq) and the Egyptian province of Canaan (what we commonly call Israel/Palestine today). This original promise addressed the migratory life of the patriarch. The promise is for new pasture for the nomad, his clan, and his animals to escape the threat of starvation.⁵ As Abraham’s story continues, it is interesting that Abraham does not settle down. He moves his tents among the cities of Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, and Be’er Sheva. He does not buy any land or possess any land until Sarah dies and he needs a burial site.
A brief form of this promise is mentioned in Genesis 13:14–17. After Abraham scans the countryside in all directions, God says, The land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. . . . Rise up, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.
This promise is formally reaffirmed in Genesis 15 when God makes a covenant with Abraham. In 15:1–6 the land is omitted once again, but in 15:18–21, God speaks clearly about the land inheritance that Abraham will receive.
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites. (Gen. 15:18–21)
Again in Genesis 17, when Abraham’s name is changed (formerly it had been Abram), God repeats the twofold promise for progeny and land:
I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.
God said to Abraham, As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. (Gen. 17:7–9)
One thing is exceedingly clear. This gift of land is intimately connected to the covenant, or contract, that God is making with Abraham. This package deal includes the following elements:
Abraham will receive the land as an everlasting possession.
Abraham’s posterity will become a great nation.
An everlasting covenant will bind Abraham and his descendants to God.
All of the people of the earth will be blessed through Abraham and his people.⁶
In order to make clear that this promise extends to Abraham’s children, Genesis repeats these promises for Isaac (Abraham’s son) in 26:2–4 and for Jacob (Abraham’s grandson through Isaac) in 28:13–15. But in all cases—even when repeated elsewhere in the Old Testament—the promise to Abraham is the anchor passage. In fact, when Israel later disobeys the Lord and the prophets announce punishment, God’s promise to Abraham brings hope of restoration and forgiveness (Jer. 7:7; 16:15; cf. Deut. 8:18). Micah 7:20 says it succinctly: You will show faithfulness to Jacob and unswerving loyalty to Abraham, as you have sworn to our ancestors from the days of old.⁷
As we read the story of Abraham carefully, three things stand out. First, the native residents of this province called Canaan are not displaced. They are not ejected from their homes. Instead, Abraham becomes a neighbor (not a conqueror) who enters into trade relations with the indigenous people of the land. This point cannot be stressed enough. When Sarah dies (Gen. 23), Abraham does not presume that he can simply take any burial ground he desires. He must buy it. In fact, Genesis 23 records a lengthy negotiation in which Ephron the Hittite who owns the field Abraham desires to buy tries to give the property to Abraham as a gift. Abraham refuses to accept it. He insists on buying it. Before an array of legal witnesses at Hebron’s city gate, Abraham finally purchases the cave of Machpelah near the Oaks of Mamre.⁸ Keep in mind that Ephron was a Hittite—one of the very people listed in Genesis 15:20 whose land Abraham was going to inherit. Yet here Abraham treats the Hittites with considerable respect.
Second, the story emphasizes that land is linked with covenant. Genesis 17:9 affirms Abraham’s responsibility, and this verse follows right on the heels of 17:8, which contains the land promise. It is not as if a title deed had been handed to Abraham and God was no longer part of the picture. Rather, the land is an outgrowth of the relationship between Abraham, Abraham’s descendants, and God. In this relationship, the land is certain to be an everlasting possession, but responsibility for it assumes faithfulness to a relationship with God. The law books Leviticus and Deuteronomy make this assumption clear. The prophets likewise remind Israel that this dimension cannot be ignored.
Finally, God emphasizes that Abraham’s children will become a great nation and through them all of the peoples of the earth will be blessed. Frequently Christians have taken Genesis 12:2–3 out of context:
I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
The idea here is not that the Gentiles must somehow support Israelite efforts at greatness and nationhood and in so doing discover the blessing of God. Nor (in its original setting) does the passage mean that the blessing of the families of the earth will come about because Israel will bring the world its messiah, Jesus Christ.⁹ Rather, these verses suggest that through Israel’s greatness, through Israel’s goodness, because Israel is blessed, God’s people will in turn be able to bless and enrich the lives of others living nearby. In other words, an ethical dimension exists within Israel’s election. The covenant is not designed simply to satisfy Israel’s nationhood and give it land. Nor is the covenant designed to satisfy Israel’s self-interest. The covenant with Israel is God’s strategy to bring his goodness and righteousness to the rest of humanity. Israel is to be a nation of priests (Exod. 19:6; Deut. 7:6), mediating God’s presence and goodness to the earth.
PROMISES WITH CONDITIONS
The connection between covenant fidelity and the promise of land is evident throughout the Torah (the five traditional books of Moses). Possessing the land was contingent on Israel’s consistently living by God’s righteous standards.¹⁰ One of the most surprising discoveries for me was how rarely this theme is sounded by evangelical writers.
Both Leviticus and Deuteronomy warn Israel about righteousness and the land in dramatic terms. In fact, the images are shocking. If Israel does not obey God’s laws, then the land itself will vomit the nation out. Leviticus 18 and 20 were given at Mount Sinai, where God was exceedingly explicit about his covenant and its obligations. Chapter 18 warns Israel against taking on the lifestyle of the Canaanites:
Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, for by all these practices the nations I am casting out before you have defiled themselves. Thus the land became defiled; and I punished it for its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my ordinances and commit none of these abominations, either the citizen or the alien who resides among you (for the inhabitants of the land, who were before you, committed all of these abominations, and the land became defiled); otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For whoever commits any of these abominations shall be cut off from their people. So keep my charge not to commit any of these abominations that were done before you, and not to defile yourselves by them: I am the LORD your God. (Lev. 18:24–30, emphasis added.)
Chapter 20 turns its attention to the expectations of ritual holiness within the covenant:
You shall keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and observe them, so that the land to which I bring you to settle in may not vomit you out. You shall not follow the practices of the nation that I am driving out before you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them. But I have said to you: You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey. I am the LORD your God; I have separated you from the peoples. You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean animal and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean; you shall not bring abomination on yourselves by animal or by bird or by anything with which the ground teems, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean. You shall be holy to me; for I the LORD am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine. (Lev. 20:22–26, emphasis added)
Note how Moses emphasizes holiness, and note how in each case the land itself will eject its inhabitants. The land has a life of its own and can suffer abuse and be defiled. Unrighteousness defiles the land of Israel/Palestine. Just as grievous sinners were ejected from the camp of Israel lest further wrongdoing increase, so, too, Israel could be ejected from the camp or land of God.
After the wilderness wanderings, Moses led the people across the south end of the Dead Sea, up onto the plateau that is today Jordan, and then north until he was adjacent to Jericho, across the Jordan River. Here on the plains of Moab he delivered his final words of counsel concerning entry into Canaan. Again, the same theme is sounded. Possession of the land is linked to covenant fidelity. To break the law is to lose the land. Note his words in Deuteronomy 4:
When you have had children and children’s children, and become complacent in the land, if you act corruptly by making an idol in the form of anything, thus doing what is evil in the sight of the LORD your God, and provoking him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to occupy; you will not live long on it, but will be utterly destroyed. The LORD will scatter you among the peoples; only a few of you will be left among the nations where the LORD will lead you. (vv. 25–27)
Keep his statutes and his commandments, which I am commanding you today for your own well-being and that of your descendants after you, so that you may long remain in the land that the LORD your God is giving you for all time. (v. 40)
Perhaps Moses’ most important teachings concerning the land can be found in Deuteronomy 8–9, which summarize what God had done for Israel from Egypt until then. Above all, the chapters remind Israel to be humble when it comes to the land. The land and its wealth are gifts to be held with humility.
Do not say to yourself, My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth. But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today. If you do forget the LORD your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. (Deut. 8:17–19)
The severity of these words cannot be missed. Israel cannot be cavalier about its use of the land or its abuse of its inhabitants. This land is not like any other land. The wonder of this land has little to do with its natural beauty or its powerful history. We dare not be romantic or sentimental here. With many Christians I often read Deuteronomy 11:11–12 in this way. But the land that you are crossing over to occupy is a land of hills and valleys, watered by rain from the sky, a land that the Lord your God looks after. The eyes of the Lord your God are always on it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. What does God look for? God looks for holiness and justice among those who possess this land.
WHO REALLY OWNS THE LAND?
God’s remarkable interest in the land of Israel/Palestine is easily explained. The Bible teaches that the nation of Israel does not own the land; God does.¹¹ God’s investment in the land did not disappear when the covenant with Israel was written. Since Israel and God would live closely together in covenant relation, God and Israel together would enjoy the land. Leviticus makes this perfectly clear. As the law outlines how to use the land (tenant agreements, farming practices, purchasing land), the Israelites are reminded: The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants (Lev. 25:23). Israel is a tenant in the land, not a landlord. Israel is a renter, a visitor, an alien. The land is a delightful gift—owned by [God] and leased to Israel in partial fulfillment of His word of promise.¹² Israel must hold this land loosely, because God will always determine the tenure of its occupants.
I often think of this ownership like the ownership of the computer on which I am typing this book. In one very real sense, this laptop is mine. No other faculty member may use it; it is mine to take home and use as I wish. However there this odd hidden sticker on the bottom that says Property of Wheaton College. And this indicates the
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real owner. Should I misuse the laptop for some unethical interest, it will be taken back (I am confident). In this sense, I have the “right of use,” but not fully the right of independent ownership. One of the interesting features of the first six books of the Bible is that the phrase “the land of Israel” is never used. Instead it is called “the land of Canaan.” This point is striking when we consider that this land is given to Israel in these books. Thus Genesis 23:2 says, “And Sarah died at Kiriatharba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan; and Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.”¹³ Naming is always significant in the Bible. This title for the land preserves an important reminder that the land has a heritage that is larger than Israel’s own history. Its importance is not defined by the new thing God is doing in the covenant with Israel. The land has a life and identity that is independent of Israel. God’s ownership of Israel/Palestine is clarified further through the rituals of Israel’s religion. 1. The land was not to be considered private property, but was something distributed by God. Therefore the whole land was divided up by the casting of lots (Num. 26:55) to make way for God’s will. The divisions of land were God’s decision, not that of the people of Israel.¹⁴ Note that the tribes and not individuals were trustees of the land (Num. 36:3; Josh. 17:5).¹⁵ Tribal supervision of land meant that individual ownership was always mediated through some corporate body. This notion of “loose ownership” is reinforced through the Jubilee year celebrations outlined in Leviticus 25. God’s gift of land could not be bought or sold permanently as if the Israelite owner could hand on a deed. Land could never be taken forever. Long-term investments in which wealthy people would develop large estates were impossible. The land was not the occupant’s to do with as he or she wished. By God’s decree, every fiftieth year the land had to be returned to its original owner. He controlled who would occupy the land. 2. The harvests were understood in light of God’s ownership. First things such as crops and firstborn animals belonged to God and were therefore offered to him in sacrifice (Lev. 27:30–33; Deut. 14:22; 26:9–15). These sacrifices represented the entire yield of the land and were a ritual way of acknowledging God’s ownership of the whole. 3. The command to “keep the Sabbath” (Exod. 20:8–10) was extended to the land: “When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a Sabbath for the Lord” (Lev. 25:2). Some have viewed this ecologically, thinking that productivity would be enhanced by giving the land rest every seventh year, but here the sense is different. The land itself is obligated to keep a Sabbath for the Lord. The land is almost personified as if it too owed worship to God. This emphasis underscores the special relationship the land has with God and, in this case, Israel was to free the land to fulfill its obligation to its creator and owner. 4. The land is often called a place of rest for Israel (Deut. 12:9). But curiously the land is actually called God’s resting place (Ps. 95:11; Isa. 66:1). “Resting place” is a technical term used to describe the place where God’s presence dwells. In the wilderness wanderings, this place is where God paused (Num. 10:33) or where he dwelt (Ps. 132:8). 5. Naming is significant throughout the Middle East. In the Bible, Israel/Palestine is the place where “God’s name dwells” (Deut. 12:11; 14:23). Similarly God “puts his name there” (Deut. 12:5, 21; 14:24) and assures “that his name is there” (1 Kings 8:16, 29). This naming is a mark of ownership indicating that the land is God’s own possession.¹⁶ 6. Finally, the land is described as “holy.” In Hebrew, the term holy has less to do with morality than we think. Land itself cannot have moral qualities as people can. Holiness (Heb., qodesh) means separation: something separated from the common world by its relationship to God is called holy. God dwells in the land, and by virtue of its closeness to him, its character is altered. Other land cannot share this quality. Other land is “unclean land” (Amos 7:17). Thus Numbers 35:34 warns, “You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I also dwell; for I the Lord dwell among the Israelites.” The land reacts violently to defilement (“otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you,” Lev. 18:28) because it has a ritual quality quite separate from the life of Israel. The land lives in close connection to God, and therefore God’s attributes radiate through it.¹⁷ WHO REALLY OWNS THE WATER? A parallel interest in the Bible is the ownership of water. This aspect too is an intimate part of the “land” promised to Abraham, for this land—which could easily become a desert—must drink water from heaven which God alone can send. Job reminds us that God alone “bestows rain on the earth and sends water upon the countryside” (Job 5:10; cf. 36:26f.). For Israel this rain which fills cistern and well is a gift that (like land) is linked to the covenant. And through the prosperity this heavenly water brings, Israel will be able to share with her neighbors. Listen to the words of Deuteronomy 28:12, “The Lord will open to you his good treasury in the heavens, to give the rain of your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hands; and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow.” During the festival of Tabernacles each autumn when the land is desperate for water, special prayers are offered for rain and water ceremonies occur at the altar in order to urge God to send his gift. Jesus knew these festivals well and made an appearance at one in John 7:37. Still today, Arab Muslims in Jordan believe that if rains come during the Jewish festival of Tabernacles, it will be a very good, wet season. But the opposite is also the case. Covenant disobedience results in drought (Deut. 28:24). In fact, throughout Israel’s history, the withdrawal of water resulting in famine was one means that God used to chastise his people (Amos 4:7; Joel 1:10–12). So Haggai announced: “Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce” (1:10). The most famous of these pronouncements is perhaps Elijah’s promise that neither rain nor dew would fall on Israel until the land was righteous (1 Kings 17:1). Just as covenant sin leads to the loss of land, so too, covenant sin leads to the loss of rain (2 Chron. 6:26f.). Without water, all land becomes desert. Israel/Palestine is an arid place, and water is a precious commodity. The absence of rainfall leads to drought, which forces people to leave the land (as happened in the days of Joseph). For example, Palestinian agriculture has adapted to this problem by using crops that can survive (olives, grapes, figs, etc.). Israeli agriculture, on the other hand, has developed a large citrus market for European export. A single orange grown in Israel will use up countless times the amount of water needed by equal amounts of grapes. Therefore I must apply the same standard for water as I do for land. Israel does not own its water. God owns it. Water is a heavenly gift to be shared and treasured. It should not be used without thanksgiving. The preservation and protection of water was even known in the Old Testament. Proverbs 5:15 says, “Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well” (emphasis added). To take water from a neighbor in this country is a serious crime whose scope has changed completely since biblical times. Water—like land—can be stolen. Modern
equipment and technology have the capability of depriving some of water in order to lavish others with prosperity. The same prophets who witness and criticize the misuse of land also identify the misuse of its resources. SUMMARY When we try to address the question of “Who owns the land?” only one answer seems appropriate: God owns the land. When we ask, “Who owns the water?” only one answer fits as well: God owns the water. To be sure, the nation of Israel is promised possession of the land as an everlasting gift, but this promise is conditional; it depends on Israel’s fidelity to the covenant and its stipulations. The land has a relationship with God too. This land is the land where he lives, and by association with him, it is holy. Thus Israel may possess this promise of residence in the land and still be expelled from it through unfaithfulness. Israel is a tenant, not an owner: “The land is mine—with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lev. 25:23). Humility and gratitude and caution should therefore hallmark anyone’s residence in the land. As God’s tenants, Abraham’s descendants are called to reflect God’s goodness and thereby bless those who live in community with them. As we shall see, aliens or sojourners (non-Israelites) are protected and respected in this land. We began this chapter with the account of St. John’s Greek Orthodox Hospice in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem. Does the Bible’s promise of land empower men and women to take land unjustly? Does divine privilege mean that fairness may be thrown to the wind? Must the heirs of these promises exemplify goodness as a part of their inheritance? Should they be a blessing so that through them “all the families of the earth shall be blessed”? As we shall see in the next chapter, Israel’s own history tested God’s expectations. The Israelites wanted the land but held no regard for the covenant or their relationship with God. 1. Both the Armenian and the “Christian” quarters are Christian. The former is dominated by the Armenian Orthodox Church and the latter mainly by the Greek Orthodox Church. Armenia was the first nation to embrace Christianity (fourth century CE). Even without land of their own, Armenians have remained an important Christian presence in the Middle East. In the early twentieth century, they suffered under a systematic massacre when the Turks killed more than 2 million of them. 2. “Christians in Israel Express Their Unease,” Christian Century 107 (April 25, 1990): 419–20. Cf. “Palestinian Christians Fear for the Future,” Christianity Today, August 20, 1990, 43. 3. I know a Palestinian student named Nakhleh Hussary. His father is called Abu Nakhleh. Abu in Arabic means “father of.” 4. Typically, see G. von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 83–84. 5. C. Westermann, “Promise to the Patriarchs,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, supplemental volume, ed. K. Crim (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), 690–93; also R. Ruether and H. Ruether, The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 7. 6. C. Chapman, Whose Promised Land?, (Herts, Eng.: Lion, 1983), 100–101. 7. In the New Testament, even the apostle Paul makes this appeal. In Romans 11:28, he admits that the Jews have been “enemies” of the gospel, but for the sake of their ancestors, “they are beloved.” 8. The details of the passage underscore how carefully land transactions are understood in the Middle East: trees, caves, springs, irregularities, and all assets are commonly itemized. 9. In Galatians 3:8, Paul interprets the blessing of Abraham as referring to Christ. From this vantage, since Christ has come, Genesis 12:2–3 has been fulfilled and Israel’s task of “blessing” is complete. 10. W. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961, 1967), 1:457–67; W. Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1978), 182–219. 11. “Never in Israel’s history did she ever own outright the land, earth, or soil in our sense of the word; it was always granted to her by Yahweh [God] as a fief in which she could cultivate and live on it as long as she served him” (Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology, 126). 12. Ibid., 127. 13. In the English Bible, “land of Canaan” appears sixty-two times while “land of Israel” appears twenty-nine times. 14. In Exodus 28:30 and Leviticus 8:8 we learn that the priest cast lots with “the Urim and Thummim” that he kept in his vestments. These judgments by lot were considered to be God’s commands for his people. On lots, see R. deVaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, trans. J. McHugh (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 352ff.; also W. D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 27–28. 15. Von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, 86. 16. Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology, 133–34. 17. Davies, Gospel and the Land, 29; also, W. D. Davies, The Territorial Dimension of Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 17–21.
real owner. Should I misuse the laptop for some unethical interest, it will be taken back (I am confident). In this sense, I have the right of use, but not fully the right of independent ownership.
One of the interesting features of the first six books of the Bible is that the phrase the land of Israel is never used. Instead it is called the land of Canaan. This point is striking when we consider that this land is given to Israel in these books. Thus Genesis 23:2 says, And Sarah died at Kiriatharba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan; and Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.¹³ Naming is always significant in the Bible. This title for the land preserves an important reminder that the land has a heritage that is larger than Israel’s own history. Its importance is not defined by the new thing God is doing in the covenant with Israel. The land has a life and identity that is independent of Israel.
God’s ownership of Israel/Palestine is clarified further through the rituals of Israel’s religion.
1. The land was not to be considered private property, but was something distributed by God. Therefore the whole land was divided up by the casting of lots (Num. 26:55) to make way for God’s will. The divisions of land were God’s decision, not that of the people of Israel.¹⁴ Note that the tribes and not individuals were trustees of the land (Num. 36:3; Josh. 17:5).¹⁵ Tribal supervision of land meant that individual ownership was always mediated through some corporate body.
This notion of loose ownership is reinforced through the Jubilee year celebrations outlined in Leviticus 25. God’s gift of land could not be bought or sold permanently as if the Israelite owner could hand on a deed. Land could never be taken forever. Long-term investments in which wealthy people would develop large estates were impossible. The land was not the occupant’s to do with as he or she wished. By God’s decree, every fiftieth year the land had to be returned to its original owner. He controlled who would occupy the land.
2. The harvests were understood in light of God’s ownership. First things such as crops and firstborn animals belonged to God and were therefore offered to him in sacrifice (Lev. 27:30–33; Deut. 14:22; 26:9–15). These sacrifices represented the entire yield of the land and were a ritual way of acknowledging God’s ownership of the whole.
3. The command to keep the Sabbath (Exod. 20:8–10) was extended to the land: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a Sabbath for the Lord (Lev. 25:2). Some have viewed this ecologically, thinking that productivity would be enhanced by giving the land rest every seventh year, but here the sense is different. The land itself is obligated to keep a Sabbath for the Lord. The land is almost personified as if it too owed worship to God. This emphasis underscores the special relationship the land has with God and, in this case, Israel was to free the land to fulfill its obligation to its creator and owner.
4. The land is often called a place of rest for Israel (Deut. 12:9). But curiously the land is actually called God’s resting place (Ps. 95:11; Isa. 66:1). Resting place is a technical term used to describe the place where God’s presence dwells. In the wilderness wanderings, this place is where God paused (Num. 10:33) or where he dwelt (Ps. 132:8).
5. Naming is significant throughout the Middle East. In the Bible, Israel/Palestine is the place where God’s name dwells (Deut. 12:11; 14:23). Similarly God puts his name there (Deut. 12:5, 21; 14:24) and assures that his name is there (1 Kings 8:16, 29). This naming is a mark of ownership indicating that the land is God’s own possession.¹⁶
6. Finally, the land is described as holy. In Hebrew, the term holy has less to do with morality than we think. Land itself cannot have moral qualities as people can. Holiness (Heb., qodesh) means separation: something separated from the common world by its relationship to God is called holy. God dwells in the land, and by virtue of its closeness to him, its character is altered. Other land cannot share this quality. Other land is unclean land (Amos 7:17). Thus Numbers 35:34 warns, You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I also dwell; for I the Lord dwell among the Israelites. The land reacts violently to defilement (otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you, Lev. 18:28) because it has a ritual quality quite separate from the life of Israel. The land lives in close connection to God, and therefore God’s attributes radiate through it.¹⁷
WHO REALLY OWNS THE WATER?
A parallel interest in the Bible is the ownership of water. This aspect too is an intimate part of the land promised to Abraham, for this land—which could easily become a desert—must drink water from heaven which God alone can send. Job reminds us that God alone bestows rain on the earth and sends water upon the countryside (Job 5:10; cf. 36:26f.). For Israel this rain which fills cistern and well is a gift that (like land) is linked to the covenant. And through the prosperity this heavenly water brings, Israel will be able to share with her neighbors. Listen to the words of Deuteronomy 28:12, The Lord will open to you his good treasury in the heavens, to give the rain of your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hands; and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow. During the festival of Tabernacles each autumn when the land is desperate for water, special prayers are offered for rain and water ceremonies occur at the altar in order to urge God to send his gift. Jesus knew these festivals well and made an appearance at one in John 7:37. Still today, Arab Muslims in Jordan believe that if rains come during the Jewish festival of Tabernacles, it will be a very good, wet season.
But the opposite is also the case. Covenant disobedience results in drought (Deut. 28:24). In fact, throughout Israel’s history, the withdrawal of water resulting in famine was one means that God used to chastise his people (Amos 4:7; Joel 1:10–12). So Haggai announced: Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce (1:10). The most famous of these pronouncements is perhaps Elijah’s promise that neither rain nor dew would fall on Israel until the land was righteous (1 Kings 17:1). Just as covenant sin leads to the loss of land, so too, covenant sin leads to the loss of rain (2 Chron. 6:26f.).
Without water, all land becomes desert. Israel/Palestine is an arid place, and water is a precious commodity. The absence of rainfall leads to drought, which forces people to leave the land (as happened in the days of Joseph). For example, Palestinian agriculture has adapted to this problem by using crops that can survive (olives, grapes, figs, etc.). Israeli agriculture, on the other hand, has developed a large citrus market for European export. A single orange grown in Israel will use up countless times the amount of water needed by equal amounts of grapes.
Therefore I must apply the same standard for water as I do for land. Israel does not own its water. God owns it. Water is a heavenly gift to be shared and treasured. It should not be used without thanksgiving. The preservation and protection of water was even known in the Old Testament. Proverbs 5:15 says, "Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well" (emphasis added).
To take water from a neighbor in this country is a serious crime whose scope has changed completely since biblical times. Water—like land—can be stolen. Modern
equipment and technology have the capability of depriving some of water in order to lavish others with prosperity. The same prophets who witness and criticize the misuse of land also identify the misuse of its resources.
SUMMARY
When we try to address the question of Who owns the land? only one answer seems appropriate: God owns the land. When we ask, Who owns the water? only one answer fits as well: God owns the water. To be sure, the nation of Israel is promised possession of the land as an everlasting gift, but this promise is conditional; it depends on Israel’s fidelity to the covenant and its stipulations. The land has a relationship with God too. This land is the land where he lives, and by association with him, it is holy. Thus Israel may possess this promise of residence in the land and still be expelled from it through unfaithfulness.
Israel is a tenant, not an owner: The land is mine—with me you are but aliens and tenants (Lev. 25:23). Humility and gratitude and caution should therefore hallmark anyone’s residence in the land. As God’s tenants, Abraham’s descendants are called to reflect God’s goodness and thereby bless those who live in community with them. As we shall see, aliens or sojourners (non-Israelites) are protected and respected in this land.
We began this chapter with the account of St. John’s Greek Orthodox Hospice in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem. Does the Bible’s promise of land empower men and women to take land unjustly? Does divine privilege mean that fairness may be thrown to the wind? Must the heirs of these promises exemplify goodness as a part of their inheritance? Should they be a blessing so that through them all the families of the earth shall be blessed?
As we shall see in the next chapter, Israel’s own history tested God’s expectations. The Israelites wanted the land but held no regard for the covenant or their relationship with God.
1. Both the Armenian and the Christian quarters are Christian. The former is dominated by the Armenian Orthodox Church and the latter mainly by the Greek Orthodox Church. Armenia was the first nation to embrace Christianity (fourth century CE). Even without land of their own, Armenians have remained an important Christian presence in the Middle East. In the early twentieth century, they suffered under a systematic massacre when the Turks killed more than 2 million of them.
2. Christians in Israel Express Their Unease, Christian Century 107 (April 25, 1990): 419–20. Cf. Palestinian Christians Fear for the Future, Christianity Today, August 20, 1990, 43.
3. I know a Palestinian student named Nakhleh Hussary. His father is called Abu Nakhleh. Abu in Arabic means father of.
4. Typically, see G. von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 83–84.
5. C. Westermann, Promise to the Patriarchs, in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, supplemental volume, ed. K. Crim (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), 690–93; also R. Ruether and H. Ruether, The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 7.
6. C. Chapman, Whose Promised Land?, (Herts, Eng.: Lion, 1983), 100–101.
7. In the New Testament, even the apostle Paul makes this appeal. In Romans 11:28, he admits that the Jews have been enemies of the gospel, but for the sake of their ancestors, they are beloved.
8. The details of the passage underscore how carefully land transactions are understood in the Middle East: trees, caves, springs, irregularities, and all assets are commonly itemized.
9. In Galatians 3:8, Paul interprets the blessing of Abraham as referring to Christ. From this vantage, since Christ has come, Genesis 12:2–3 has been fulfilled and Israel’s task of blessing is complete.
10. W. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961, 1967), 1:457–67; W. Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1978), 182–219.
11. Never in Israel’s history did she ever own outright the land, earth, or soil in our sense of the word; it was always granted to her by Yahweh [God] as a fief in which she could cultivate and live on it as long as she served him (Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology, 126).
12. Ibid., 127.
13. In the English Bible, land of Canaan appears sixty-two times while land of Israel appears twenty-nine times.
14. In Exodus 28:30 and Leviticus 8:8 we learn that the priest cast lots with the Urim and Thummim that he kept in his vestments. These judgments by lot were considered to be God’s commands for his people. On lots, see R. deVaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, trans. J. McHugh (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 352ff.; also W. D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 27–28.
15. Von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, 86.
16. Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology, 133–34.
17. Davies, Gospel and the Land, 29; also, W. D. Davies, The Territorial Dimension of Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 17–21.
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equipment and technology have the capability of depriving some of water in order to lavish others with prosperity. The same prophets who witness and criticize the misuse of land also identify the misuse of its resources. SUMMARY When we try to address the question of “Who owns the land?” only one answer seems appropriate: God owns the land. When we ask, “Who owns the water?” only one answer fits as well: God owns the water. To be sure, the nation of Israel is promised possession of the land as an everlasting gift, but this promise is conditional; it depends on Israel’s fidelity to the covenant and its stipulations. The land has a relationship with God too. This land is the land where he lives, and by association with him, it is holy. Thus Israel may possess this promise of residence in the land and still be expelled from it through unfaithfulness. Israel is a tenant, not an owner: “The land is mine—with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lev. 25:23). Humility and gratitude and caution should therefore hallmark anyone’s residence in the land. As God’s tenants, Abraham’s descendants are called to reflect God’s goodness and thereby bless those who live in community with them. As we shall see, aliens or sojourners (non-Israelites) are protected and respected in this land. We began this chapter with the account of St. John’s Greek Orthodox Hospice in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem. Does the Bible’s promise of land empower men and women to take land unjustly? Does divine privilege mean that fairness may be thrown to the wind? Must the heirs of these promises exemplify goodness as a part of their inheritance? Should they be a blessing so that through them “all the families of the earth shall be blessed”? As we shall see in the next chapter, Israel’s own history tested God’s expectations. The Israelites wanted the land but held no regard for the covenant or their relationship with God. 1. Both the Armenian and the “Christian” quarters are Christian. The former is dominated by the Armenian Orthodox Church and the latter mainly by the Greek Orthodox Church. Armenia was the first nation to embrace Christianity (fourth century CE). Even without land of their own, Armenians have remained an important Christian presence in the Middle East. In the early twentieth century, they suffered under a systematic massacre when the Turks killed more than 2 million of them. 2. “Christians in Israel Express Their Unease,” Christian Century 107 (April 25, 1990): 419–20. Cf. “Palestinian Christians Fear for the Future,” Christianity Today, August 20, 1990, 43. 3. I know a Palestinian student named Nakhleh Hussary. His father is called Abu Nakhleh. Abu in Arabic means “father of.” 4. Typically, see G. von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 83–84. 5. C. Westermann, “Promise to the Patriarchs,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, supplemental volume, ed. K. Crim (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), 690–93; also R. Ruether and H. Ruether, The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 7. 6. C. Chapman, Whose Promised Land?, (Herts, Eng.: Lion, 1983), 100–101. 7. In the New Testament, even the apostle Paul makes this appeal. In Romans 11:28, he admits that the Jews have been “enemies” of the gospel, but for the sake of their ancestors, “they are beloved.” 8. The details of the passage underscore how carefully land transactions are understood in the Middle East: trees, caves, springs, irregularities, and all assets are commonly itemized. 9. In Galatians 3:8, Paul interprets the blessing of Abraham as referring to Christ. From this vantage, since Christ has come, Genesis 12:2–3 has been fulfilled and Israel’s task of “blessing” is complete. 10. W. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961, 1967), 1:457–67; W. Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1978), 182–219. 11. “Never in Israel’s history did she ever own outright the land, earth, or soil in our sense of the word; it was always granted to her by Yahweh [God] as a fief in which she could cultivate and live on it as long as she served him” (Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology, 126). 12. Ibid., 127. 13. In the English Bible, “land of Canaan” appears sixty-two times while “land of Israel” appears twenty-nine times. 14. In Exodus 28:30 and Leviticus 8:8 we learn that the priest cast lots with “the Urim and Thummim” that he kept in his vestments. These judgments by lot were considered to be God’s commands for his people. On lots, see R. deVaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, trans. J. McHugh (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 352ff.; also W. D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 27–28. 15. Von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, 86. 16. Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology, 133–34. 17. Davies, Gospel and the Land, 29; also, W. D. Davies, The Territorial Dimension of Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 17–21.
real owner. Should I misuse the laptop for some unethical interest, it will be taken back (I am confident). In this sense, I have the right of use, but not fully the right of independent ownership.
One of the interesting features of the first six books of the Bible is that the phrase the land of Israel is never used. Instead it is called the land of Canaan. This point is striking when we consider that this land is given to Israel in these books. Thus Genesis 23:2 says, And Sarah died at Kiriatharba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan; and Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.¹³ Naming is always significant in the Bible. This title for the land preserves an important reminder that the land has a heritage that is larger than Israel’s own history. Its importance is not defined by the new thing God is doing in the covenant with Israel. The land has a life and identity that is independent of Israel.
God’s ownership of Israel/Palestine is clarified further through the rituals of Israel’s religion.
1. The land was not to be considered private property, but was something distributed by God. Therefore the whole land was divided up by the casting of lots (Num. 26:55) to make way for God’s will. The divisions of land were God’s decision, not that of the people of Israel.¹⁴ Note that the tribes and not individuals were trustees of the land (Num. 36:3; Josh. 17:5).¹⁵ Tribal supervision of land meant that individual ownership was always mediated through some corporate body.
This notion of loose ownership is reinforced through the Jubilee year celebrations outlined in Leviticus 25. God’s gift of land could not be bought or sold permanently as if the Israelite owner could hand on a deed. Land could never be taken forever. Long-term investments in which wealthy people would develop large estates were impossible. The land was not the occupant’s to do with as he or she wished. By God’s decree, every fiftieth year the land had to be returned to its original owner. He controlled who would occupy the land.
2. The harvests were understood in light of God’s ownership. First things such as crops and firstborn animals belonged to God and were therefore offered to him in sacrifice (Lev. 27:30–33; Deut. 14:22; 26:9–15). These sacrifices represented the entire yield of the land and were a ritual way of acknowledging God’s ownership of the whole.
3. The command to keep the Sabbath (Exod. 20:8–10) was extended to the land: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a Sabbath for the Lord (Lev. 25:2). Some have viewed this ecologically, thinking that productivity would be enhanced by giving the land rest every seventh year, but here the sense is different. The land itself is obligated to keep a Sabbath for the Lord. The land is almost personified as if it too owed worship to God. This emphasis underscores the special relationship the land has with God and, in this case, Israel was to free the land to fulfill its obligation to its creator and owner.
4. The land is often called a place of rest for Israel (Deut. 12:9). But curiously the land is actually called God’s resting place (Ps. 95:11; Isa. 66:1). Resting place is a technical term used to describe the place where God’s presence dwells. In the wilderness wanderings, this place is where God paused (Num. 10:33) or where he dwelt (Ps. 132:8).
5. Naming is significant throughout the Middle East. In the Bible, Israel/Palestine is the place where God’s name dwells (Deut. 12:11; 14:23). Similarly God puts his name there (Deut. 12:5, 21; 14:24) and assures that his name is there (1 Kings 8:16, 29). This naming is a mark of ownership indicating that the land is God’s own possession.¹⁶
6. Finally, the land is described as holy. In Hebrew, the term holy has less to do with morality than we think. Land itself cannot have moral qualities as people can. Holiness (Heb., qodesh) means separation: something separated from the common world by its relationship to God is called holy. God dwells in the land, and by virtue of its closeness to him, its character is altered. Other land cannot share this quality. Other land is unclean land (Amos 7:17). Thus Numbers 35:34 warns, You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I also dwell; for I the Lord dwell among the Israelites. The land reacts violently to defilement (otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you, Lev. 18:28) because it has a ritual quality quite separate from the life of Israel. The land lives in close connection to God, and therefore God’s attributes radiate through it.¹⁷
WHO REALLY OWNS THE WATER?
A parallel interest in the Bible is the ownership of water. This aspect too is an intimate part of the land promised to Abraham, for this land—which could easily become a desert—must drink water from heaven which God alone can send. Job reminds us that God alone bestows rain on the earth and sends water upon the countryside (Job 5:10; cf. 36:26f.). For Israel this rain which fills cistern and well is a gift that (like land) is linked to the covenant. And through the prosperity this heavenly water brings, Israel will be able to share with her neighbors. Listen to the words of Deuteronomy 28:12, The Lord will open to you his good treasury in the heavens, to give the rain of your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hands; and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow. During the festival of Tabernacles each autumn when the land is desperate for water, special prayers are offered for rain and water ceremonies occur at the altar in order to urge God to send his gift. Jesus knew these festivals well and made an appearance at one in John 7:37. Still today, Arab Muslims in Jordan believe that if rains come during the Jewish festival of Tabernacles, it will be a very good, wet season.
But the opposite is also the case. Covenant disobedience results in drought (Deut. 28:24). In fact, throughout Israel’s history, the withdrawal of water resulting in famine was one means that God used to chastise his people (Amos 4:7; Joel 1:10–12). So Haggai announced: Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce (1:10). The most famous of these pronouncements is perhaps Elijah’s promise that neither rain nor dew would fall on Israel until the land was righteous (1 Kings 17:1). Just as covenant sin leads to the loss of land, so too, covenant sin leads to the loss of rain (2 Chron. 6:26f.).
Without water, all land becomes desert. Israel/Palestine is an arid place, and water is a precious commodity. The absence of rainfall leads to drought, which forces people to leave the land (as happened in the days of Joseph). For example, Palestinian agriculture has adapted to this problem by using crops that can survive (olives, grapes, figs, etc.). Israeli agriculture, on the other hand, has developed a large citrus market for European export. A single orange grown in Israel will use up countless times the amount of water needed by equal amounts of grapes.
Therefore I must apply the same standard for water as I do for land. Israel does not own its water. God owns it. Water is a heavenly gift to be shared and treasured. It should not be used without thanksgiving. The preservation and protection of water was even known in the Old Testament. Proverbs 5:15 says, "Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well" (emphasis added).
To take water from a neighbor in this country is a serious crime whose scope has changed completely since biblical times. Water—like land—can be stolen. Modern
equipment and technology have the capability of depriving some of water in order to lavish others with prosperity. The same prophets who witness and criticize the misuse of land also identify the misuse of its resources.
SUMMARY
When we try to address the question of Who owns the land? only one answer seems appropriate: God owns the land. When we ask, Who owns the water? only one answer fits as well: God owns the water. To be sure, the nation of Israel is promised possession of the land as an everlasting gift, but this promise is conditional; it depends on Israel’s fidelity to the covenant and its stipulations. The land has a relationship with God too. This land is the land where he lives, and by association with him, it is holy. Thus Israel may possess this promise of residence in the land and still be expelled from it through unfaithfulness.
Israel is a tenant, not an owner: The land is mine—with me you are but aliens and tenants (Lev. 25:23). Humility and gratitude and caution should therefore hallmark anyone’s residence in the land. As God’s tenants, Abraham’s descendants are called to reflect God’s goodness and thereby bless those who live in community with them. As we shall see, aliens or sojourners (non-Israelites) are protected and respected in this land.
We began this chapter with the account of St. John’s Greek Orthodox Hospice in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem. Does the Bible’s promise of land empower men and women to take land unjustly? Does divine privilege mean that fairness may be thrown to the wind? Must the heirs of these promises exemplify goodness as a part of their inheritance? Should they be a blessing so that through them all the families of the earth shall be blessed?
As we shall see in the next chapter, Israel’s own history tested God’s expectations. The Israelites wanted the land but held no regard for the covenant or their relationship with God.
1. Both the Armenian and the Christian quarters are Christian. The former is dominated by the Armenian Orthodox Church and the latter mainly by the Greek Orthodox Church. Armenia was the first nation to embrace Christianity (fourth century CE). Even without land of their own, Armenians have remained an important Christian presence in the Middle East. In the early twentieth century, they suffered under a systematic massacre when the Turks killed more than 2 million of them.
2. Christians in Israel Express Their Unease, Christian Century 107 (April 25, 1990): 419–20. Cf. Palestinian Christians Fear for the Future, Christianity Today, August 20, 1990, 43.
3. I know a Palestinian student named Nakhleh Hussary. His father is called Abu Nakhleh. Abu in Arabic means father of.
4. Typically, see G. von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 83–84.
5. C. Westermann, Promise to the Patriarchs, in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, supplemental volume, ed. K. Crim (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), 690–93; also R. Ruether and H. Ruether, The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 7.
6. C. Chapman, Whose Promised Land?, (Herts, Eng.: Lion, 1983), 100–101.
7. In the New Testament, even the apostle Paul makes this appeal. In Romans 11:28, he admits that the Jews have been enemies of the gospel, but for the sake of their ancestors, they are beloved.
8. The details of the passage underscore how carefully land transactions are understood in the Middle East: trees, caves, springs, irregularities, and all assets are commonly itemized.
9. In Galatians 3:8, Paul interprets the blessing of Abraham as referring to Christ. From this vantage, since Christ has come, Genesis 12:2–3 has been fulfilled and Israel’s task of blessing is complete.
10. W. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961, 1967), 1:457–67; W. Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1978), 182–219.
11. Never in Israel’s history did she ever own outright the land, earth, or soil in our sense of the word; it was always granted to her by Yahweh [God] as a fief in which she could cultivate and live on it as long as she served him (Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology, 126).
12. Ibid., 127.
13. In the English Bible, land of Canaan appears sixty-two times while land of Israel appears twenty-nine times.
14. In Exodus 28:30 and Leviticus 8:8 we learn that the priest cast lots with the Urim and Thummim that he kept in his vestments. These judgments by lot were considered to be God’s commands for his people. On lots, see R. deVaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, trans. J. McHugh (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 352ff.; also W. D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 27–28.
15. Von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, 86.
16. Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology, 133–34.
17. Davies, Gospel and the Land, 29; also, W. D. Davies, The Territorial Dimension of Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 17–21.
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5 THE NATION OF ISRAEL AND THE LAND
When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. —LEVITICUS 19:33 Then Solomon took a census of all the aliens who were residing in the land of Israel, after the census that his father David had taken; and there were found to be one hundred fifty-three thousand six hundred. —2 CHRONICLES 2:17 Beth She’an is one of the most spectacular sites in Israel/Palestine that today is fast becoming one of the greatest archaeological parks in the country. Located on the east end of the Jezreel Valley (and twenty miles south of Tiberius), it was a fortress that protected one of the main access routes into the region. King Saul lost his life in battle here. When he died, his body was hung on the city’s walls. Today a tremendous archaeological tell marks the spot, and excavations continue annually. In New Testament times, Greeks and Romans built a city there. Called Scythopolis, it was a major city, boasting one of the largest theaters, baths, markets, temples, and horse racing tracks in the country. No doubt Jesus passed through its streets as he traveled between Galilee and Jerusalem. Many of these ancient sites have been occupied for centuries by Palestinian villages whose names still reflect the sounds of its ancient history. Biblical Emmaus, for example, can be found at the village of Imwas west of Jerusalem (note how the two sites sound the same). Bethany, known for the raising of Lazarus, is today called El Azariya, which recalls Lazarus’s name. Sepphoris was an Arab village of Saffuriya till it was conquered and became the Israeli town of Zippori. Near the colossal ruins of Beth She’an lived the thriving Arab town of Beisan, whose name likewise recalled this great Old Testament heritage. In 1948, it had an Arab population of 5,180 and a Jewish community of about a hundred.¹ No history of conflict was known between these communities—until 1948. Perhaps few towns exhibit the complexity of Israeli-Palestinian struggles quite like Beit She’an (Arab Beisan). From the early twentieth century, Jews settled there mainly from Kurdistan and various Muslim countries and lived alongside their Arab neighbors. But due to riots in 1929 between Jews and Arabs in other parts of the country, most of the Beit She’an Jews left. By the late 1930s many had returned, but more riots in 1936 led to another departure from what was a majority Arab town. By the 1940s, however, Beit She’an became radicalized and Arab bands based there began attacking surrounding Jewish villages, which led to a predictable Jewish reaction with strongly militarized Jewish settlements being built. Quickly relationships between Arab and Jew fell apart. By 1945 the populations were extremely close in size. A French survey published in that year showed the “Beisan District” as having the following land ownership: 44 percent Arab and 34 percent Jewish populations (22 percent of the land was either public land or owned by “other”).² Na’im Stifan Ateek was eleven years old in 1948.³ He and his family belonged to the Anglican Christian community in Beisan. Their home was a locus of Christian activity: Bible studies, visiting missionaries, and Sunday school classes met there. His father even helped build an Anglican church for Beisan. In the absence of a resident Anglican pastor (who came from Nazareth once a month for Holy Communion), Na’im’s father served as the church’s lay reader. On May 12, 1948 (two days before the state of Israel was declared), Israeli soldiers occupied Beisan. There was no fighting, no resistance, no killing. The town was simply taken over. After searching the homes for weapons and radios, on May 26 they rounded up the leading men of the town to make an important announcement. Everyone would have to leave their homes in a few hours. “If you do not leave, we will have to kill you,” they said. When the people had gathered in the center of town, the soldiers separated the Muslims from the Christians. The Muslims were sent east to Jordan, and the Christians were put on buses and deposited on the outskirts of Nazareth. Within a few hours, Na’im’s mother, father, seven sisters, and two brothers were refugees. They had lost everything except the things they could carry. In Nazareth they joined some friends, and seventeen of them lived in two rooms near “Mary’s Well.” Na’im’s father went to work at once helping relief efforts for the countless Christians and Muslims flooding Nazareth daily as refugees. Ten years later, in 1958, the government permitted many of the Palestinian families to travel for one day without restriction. Na’im’s father was eager to bring his children to Beisan so that they could see their “home.” The Anglican church had become a storehouse. The Roman Catholic church was a school. The Greek Orthodox church was in ruins. Na’im remembers the moment his father stepped up to the door of his home, the one he had built with his own hands. He wanted to see it one last time. But his request was refused. The new Israeli occupant said, “This is not your house. It is ours.” I frequently drive through the modern Israeli town of Beth She’an, which occupies the land once known as Beisan. I often reflect on the beauty of this place and the historic nature of its setting. Each time I am troubled when I remember that an ancient community—filled with Christians—was uprooted at gunpoint and is now gone. About eleven miles west of Beisan was another beautiful place called Jezreel (the city from which the valley takes its name). Tucked under the shoulder of Mount Gilboa (an outcropping of Samaria), Jezreel had good land, good water, and excellent access to the all-important Jezreel Valley. Once in the Old Testament, an Israelite king coveted a vineyard in Jezreel in the same manner that Beisan would become an Israeli city. In a similar manner, the king took it, and God sent his prophet Elijah to severely rebuke the leader of God’s people. In a moment we turn to this story, because it powerfully tells us about land and justice. When land is occupied, does the Bible not respect the rights or honor of the people who have lived there for centuries? When land is occupied by people who are not Jewish, what does God expect? JOSHUA’S CONQUEST The book of Joshua is required reading in Israeli schools today. The book holds an important place because in its pages many people think that a precedent can be found for the establishment of Israel as a nation.⁴ Once I was having dinner at an evangelical graduate school on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Speaking with a group of evangelical pastors and students, I wondered how we as Christians could explain Israel’s taking of land in the “Occupied Territories.” I was surprised to hear many of them agree that Joshua’s conquest set a legitimate precedent and pattern for the modern day. The instructions given to Joshua and the people of Israel before they enter the land are quite explicit. Read carefully the words of Moses as he explains what they are to do
upon entering Canaan: When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you—and when the LORD your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But this is how you must deal with them: break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire. For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. . . . (Deut. 7:1–6) Paragraphs such as this are troubling. It seems as if Joshua is commanded to pursue a policy of genocide in order to rid Canaan of its inhabitants. How does this compare with God’s command elsewhere to value and protect human life? Even Jonah was commanded to preach to the Assyrians (whose life was no better than the Canaanites). But no such suggestion comes in Joshua. This instruction seems to be a cavalier, sweeping disposal of an entire people. Three observations are necessary: 1. The battles in Joshua are aimed at coalitions of kings from the north and the south who realize that their sovereignty over Canaan is in jeopardy. Note Joshua 9:1–2: Now when all the kings who were beyond the Jordan in the hill country and in the lowland all along the coast of the Great Sea toward Lebanon—the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites—heard of this, they gathered together with one accord to fight Joshua and Israel. Joshua fights and destroys urban areas that exhibit military resistance to his arrival. The book offers no suggestion that Joshua ever massacres or depopulates large regions that did not join one of these armies. In fact, only three Canaanite cities are burned to the ground: Jericho, Ai, and Hazor. There is no Canaanite Holocaust. 2. Moses’ words have in mind the corrupting religious influences of the Canaanites. Note how Deuteronomy 7:5 underscores the obliteration of Canaanite religion: “But this is how you must deal with them: break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire.” This was a fertility religion devoted to snake worship, the sacrifice of children, and cult prostitution. According to many scholars, the religion had no moral interest at all. The Canaanites were not errant believers in God. Rather their culture had reached the depths of pagan depravity. 3. Joshua treats many of the Canaanites with respect. In Jericho, Rahab was not an Israelite, yet because she aided the spies and feared their God, she was protected and her life was preserved (Josh. 2). Further, even though Joshua is commanded to make no covenant with these people, he is tricked by the people of Gibeon to make such a pact. Even though Joshua erred, even though the Gibeonites were dishonest, still Joshua keeps his word and preserves the Gibeonites (Josh. 9). In 10:6–8, Joshua even enters a battle to protect them from an attack by a five-king coalition. The significance of this event cannot be missed. Israelites risked their lives to protect Canaanites who were about to be destroyed by hostile armies. If covenants conceived in deception are respected, so too would be covenants conceived in goodwill. This acceptance of non-Israelites is also seen when Joshua first enters the land, and he requires that the people renew their commitment to the covenant in the central mountains (on the mountains of Ebal and Gerizim, Josh. 8:30–35). The audience participating in this renewal ceremony consisted of Israelites and non-Israelites. Residents who were foreign to Israel’s history stood beneath the blessings and curses of the law. This event is surprising if only Israelites were permitted to enjoy this land and God’s covenant. And afterward [Joshua] read all the words of the law, blessings and curses, according to all that is written in the book of the law. There was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the aliens who resided among them. (Josh. 8:34–35, emphasis added) 4. Joshua never drives out all of the Canaanites. Joshua 13 lists those areas that remained under Canaanite control. In addition, we know that Jerusalem was never conquered by the tribe of Judah: “But the people of Judah could not drive out the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem; so the Jebusites live with the people of Judah in Jerusalem to this day” (Josh. 15:63). Curiously, Joshua 12:10 says clearly that the king of Jerusalem was defeated and his army destroyed when he joined a southern coalition of forces arrayed against Israel (10:3–5, 22–27). And yet the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem (who were now without military defense) were left alone. Why did Joshua not storm Jerusalem and take it? To sum up, the portrait given in Joshua is not as uniform as we might think. City-fortresses hostile to Joshua suffer a devastating defeat, but not every Canaanite life is expunged from the land. Indeed, significant areas, particularly in Galilee near Mount Hermon, the coast of Lebanon, and the foothills inhabited by Philistines remain in Canaanite control. The parallel between Joshua’s conquest and the modern Israeli occupation of the land is inappropriate. And today most thoughtful Christians reject it as a template for how things should work out in this conflict. Joshua’s mandate applied to a specific historic period of time when the Canaanites promoted a religion utterly inimical to God’s law. Modern Israel/Palestine is populated by many Christians and Muslims who have a deep reverence for the Lord God of Abraham. In fact, Rahab’s spiritual disposition was not unlike that of the Palestinians who acknowledge and worship the same God as the Jews but are not Jewish themselves. CRISIS AMONG THE JUDGES After Joshua’s conquest, the Israelite tribes settle in their designated territories and begin to enjoy the land God had promised to them. However, Judges tells us through a cycle of stories that each generation of people willfully neglects the covenant and then is brought under God’s judgment. Judges 3:7–8 is typical: The Israelites did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, forgetting the Lord their God, and worshiping the Baals and the Asherahs. Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of King Cushan-rishathaim of Aram Naharaim; and the Israelites served Cushanrishathaim eight years.
When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
—LEVITICUS 19:33
Then Solomon took a census of all the aliens who were residing in the land of Israel, after the census that his father David had taken; and there were found to be one hundred fifty-three thousand six hundred.
—2 CHRONICLES 2:17
Beth She’an is one of the most spectacular sites in Israel/Palestine that today is fast becoming one of the greatest archaeological parks in the country. Located on the east end of the Jezreel Valley (and twenty miles south of Tiberius), it was a fortress that protected one of the main access routes into the region. King Saul lost his life in battle here. When he died, his body was hung on the city’s walls. Today a tremendous archaeological tell marks the spot, and excavations continue annually.
In New Testament times, Greeks and Romans built a city there. Called Scythopolis, it was a major city, boasting one of the largest theaters, baths, markets, temples, and horse racing tracks in the country. No doubt Jesus passed through its streets as he traveled between Galilee and Jerusalem.
Many of these ancient sites have been occupied for centuries by Palestinian villages whose names still reflect the sounds of its ancient history. Biblical Emmaus, for example, can be found at the village of Imwas west of Jerusalem (note how the two sites sound the same). Bethany, known for the raising of Lazarus, is today called El Azariya, which recalls Lazarus’s name. Sepphoris was an Arab village of Saffuriya till it was conquered and became the Israeli town of Zippori.
Near the colossal ruins of Beth She’an lived the thriving Arab town of Beisan, whose name likewise recalled this great Old Testament heritage. In 1948, it had an Arab population of 5,180 and a Jewish community of about a hundred.¹ No history of conflict was known between these communities—until 1948.
Perhaps few towns exhibit the complexity of Israeli-Palestinian struggles quite like Beit She’an (Arab Beisan). From the early twentieth century, Jews settled there mainly from Kurdistan and various Muslim countries and lived alongside their Arab neighbors. But due to riots in 1929 between Jews and Arabs in other parts of the country, most of the Beit She’an Jews left. By the late 1930s many had returned, but more riots in 1936 led to another departure from what was a majority Arab town. By the 1940s, however, Beit She’an became radicalized and Arab bands based there began attacking surrounding Jewish villages, which led to a predictable Jewish reaction with strongly militarized Jewish settlements being built. Quickly relationships between Arab and Jew fell apart. By 1945 the populations were extremely close in size. A French survey published in that year showed the Beisan District as having the following land ownership: 44 percent Arab and 34 percent Jewish populations (22 percent of the land was either public land or owned by other).²
Na’im Stifan Ateek was eleven years old in 1948.³ He and his family belonged to the Anglican Christian community in Beisan. Their home was a locus of Christian activity: Bible studies, visiting missionaries, and Sunday school classes met there. His father even helped build an Anglican church for Beisan. In the absence of a resident Anglican pastor (who came from Nazareth once a month for Holy Communion), Na’im’s father served as the church’s lay reader.
On May 12, 1948 (two days before the state of Israel was declared), Israeli soldiers occupied Beisan. There was no fighting, no resistance, no killing. The town was simply taken over. After searching the homes for weapons and radios, on May 26 they rounded up the leading men of the town to make an important announcement. Everyone would have to leave their homes in a few hours. If you do not leave, we will have to kill you, they said.
When the people had gathered in the center of town, the soldiers separated the Muslims from the Christians. The Muslims were sent east to Jordan, and the Christians were put on buses and deposited on the outskirts of Nazareth. Within a few hours, Na’im’s mother, father, seven sisters, and two brothers were refugees. They had lost everything except the things they could carry. In Nazareth they joined some friends, and seventeen of them lived in two rooms near Mary’s Well. Na’im’s father went to work at once helping relief efforts for the countless Christians and Muslims flooding Nazareth daily as refugees.
Ten years later, in 1958, the government permitted many of the Palestinian families to travel for one day without restriction. Na’im’s father was eager to bring his children to Beisan so that they could see their home. The Anglican church had become a storehouse. The Roman Catholic church was a school. The Greek Orthodox church was in ruins. Na’im remembers the moment his father stepped up to the door of his home, the one he had built with his own hands. He wanted to see it one last time. But his request was refused. The new Israeli occupant said, This is not your house. It is ours.
I frequently drive through the modern Israeli town of Beth She’an, which occupies the land once known as Beisan. I often reflect on the beauty of this place and the historic nature of its setting. Each time I am troubled when I remember that an ancient community—filled with Christians—was uprooted at gunpoint and is now gone.
About eleven miles west of Beisan was another beautiful place called Jezreel (the city from which the valley takes its name). Tucked under the shoulder of Mount Gilboa (an outcropping of Samaria), Jezreel had good land, good water, and excellent access to the all-important Jezreel Valley. Once in the Old Testament, an Israelite king coveted a vineyard in Jezreel in the same manner that Beisan would become an Israeli city. In a similar manner, the king took it, and God sent his prophet Elijah to severely rebuke the leader of God’s people. In a moment we turn to this story, because it powerfully tells us about land and justice. When land is occupied, does the Bible not respect the rights or honor of the people who have lived there for centuries? When land is occupied by people who are not Jewish, what does God expect?
JOSHUA’S CONQUEST
The book of Joshua is required reading in Israeli schools today. The book holds an important place because in its pages many people think that a precedent can be found for the establishment of Israel as a nation.⁴ Once I was having dinner at an evangelical graduate school on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Speaking with a group of evangelical pastors and students, I wondered how we as Christians could explain Israel’s taking of land in the Occupied Territories. I was surprised to hear many of them agree that Joshua’s conquest set a legitimate precedent and pattern for the modern day.
The instructions given to Joshua and the people of Israel before they enter the land are quite explicit. Read carefully the words of Moses as he explains what they are to do
upon entering Canaan:
When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you—and when the LORD your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But this is how you must deal with them: break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire. For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. . . . (Deut. 7:1–6)
Paragraphs such as this are troubling. It seems as if Joshua is commanded to pursue a policy of genocide in order to rid Canaan of its inhabitants. How does this compare with God’s command elsewhere to value and protect human life? Even Jonah was commanded to preach to the Assyrians (whose life was no better than the Canaanites). But no such suggestion comes in Joshua. This instruction seems to be a cavalier, sweeping disposal of an entire people. Three observations are necessary:
1. The battles in Joshua are aimed at coalitions of kings from the north and the south who realize that their sovereignty over Canaan is in jeopardy. Note Joshua 9:1–2:
Now when all the kings who were beyond the Jordan in the hill country and in the lowland all along the coast of the Great Sea toward Lebanon—the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites—heard of this, they gathered together with one accord to fight Joshua and Israel.
Joshua fights and destroys urban areas that exhibit military resistance to his arrival. The book offers no suggestion that Joshua ever massacres or depopulates large regions that did not join one of these armies. In fact, only three Canaanite cities are burned to the ground: Jericho, Ai, and Hazor. There is no Canaanite Holocaust.
2. Moses’ words have in mind the corrupting religious influences of the Canaanites. Note how Deuteronomy 7:5 underscores the obliteration of Canaanite religion: But this is how you must deal with them: break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire. This was a fertility religion devoted to snake worship, the sacrifice of children, and cult prostitution. According to many scholars, the religion had no moral interest at all. The Canaanites were not errant believers in God. Rather their culture had reached the depths of pagan depravity.
3. Joshua treats many of the Canaanites with respect. In Jericho, Rahab was not an Israelite, yet because she aided the spies and feared their God, she was protected and her life was preserved (Josh. 2). Further, even though Joshua is commanded to make no covenant with these people, he is tricked by the people of Gibeon to make such a pact. Even though Joshua erred, even though the Gibeonites were dishonest, still Joshua keeps his word and preserves the Gibeonites (Josh. 9). In 10:6–8, Joshua even enters a battle to protect them from an attack by a five-king coalition. The significance of this event cannot be missed. Israelites risked their lives to protect Canaanites who were about to be destroyed by hostile armies. If covenants conceived in deception are respected, so too would be covenants conceived in goodwill.
This acceptance of non-Israelites is also seen when Joshua first enters the land, and he requires that the people renew their commitment to the covenant in the central mountains (on the mountains of Ebal and Gerizim, Josh. 8:30–35). The audience participating in this renewal ceremony consisted of Israelites and non-Israelites. Residents who were foreign to Israel’s history stood beneath the blessings and curses of the law. This event is surprising if only Israelites were permitted to enjoy this land and God’s covenant.
And afterward [Joshua] read all the words of the law, blessings and curses, according to all that is written in the book of the law. There was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the aliens who resided among them. (Josh. 8:34–35, emphasis added)
4. Joshua never drives out all of the Canaanites. Joshua 13 lists those areas that remained under Canaanite control. In addition, we know that Jerusalem was never conquered by the tribe of Judah: But the people of Judah could not drive out the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem; so the Jebusites live with the people of Judah in Jerusalem to this day (Josh. 15:63). Curiously, Joshua 12:10 says clearly that the king of Jerusalem was defeated and his army destroyed when he joined a southern coalition of forces arrayed against Israel (10:3–5, 22–27). And yet the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem (who were now without military defense) were left alone. Why did Joshua not storm Jerusalem and take it?
To sum up, the portrait given in Joshua is not as uniform as we might think. City-fortresses hostile to Joshua suffer a devastating defeat, but not every Canaanite life is expunged from the land. Indeed, significant areas, particularly in Galilee near Mount Hermon, the coast of Lebanon, and the foothills inhabited by Philistines remain in Canaanite control.
The parallel between Joshua’s conquest and the modern Israeli occupation of the land is inappropriate. And today most thoughtful Christians reject it as a template for how things should work out in this conflict. Joshua’s mandate applied to a specific historic period of time when the Canaanites promoted a religion utterly inimical to God’s law. Modern Israel/Palestine is populated by many Christians and Muslims who have a deep reverence for the Lord God of Abraham. In fact, Rahab’s spiritual disposition was not unlike that of the Palestinians who acknowledge and worship the same God as the Jews but are not Jewish themselves.
CRISIS AMONG THE JUDGES
After Joshua’s conquest, the Israelite tribes settle in their designated territories and begin to enjoy the land God had promised to them. However, Judges tells us through a cycle of stories that each generation of people willfully neglects the covenant and then is brought under God’s judgment. Judges 3:7–8 is typical:
The Israelites did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, forgetting the Lord their God, and worshiping the Baals and the Asherahs. Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of King Cushan-rishathaim of Aram Naharaim; and the Israelites served Cushanrishathaim eight years.
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In response to their prayers for mercy, God raises up a judge (such as Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, or Samson) who leads Israel to victory. This results in a period of national peace in which correct worship is restored (generally for forty years) until the next generation enters the scene. This much of Judges is well known. However, the book concludes with two troubling stories that serve as a summary of the evil that is growing in the land. The final verse of the book epitomizes Israel’s condition: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (Judg. 21:25). Judges 17–21 describes the fallenness of the tribes of Dan and Benjamin in parallel terms. The story of Dan illustrates Israel’s religious corruption (chaps. 17–18). Dan leaves its territory in the western coastal hills (the Shephelah), travels north through the central mountains of “Samaria,” and meets a priestly assistant (a Levite) in Ephraim and offers him a job as tribal priest.⁵ They said to him, “Come with us, and be to us a father and a priest.” The tribe resettles in the far north near Mount Hermon and there establishes a new religion based on this new priest’s idol. Spearheaded by six hundred men of Dan, this act is an utter rejection of God’s covenant, apostasy and religious corruption in its worst form. The story of Benjamin illustrates Israel’s moral corruption (chaps. 19–21). As the final story of Judges, it is meant to shock and sober. Once again a Levite takes center stage. Because his young concubine had fled home to her father in Bethlehem, the Levite goes there to recover her. He then travels with her north, en route no doubt to Shiloh, where he assists the priests. Because nightfall has come, he seeks lodging in Gibeah, a city of the tribe of Benjamin. After an elderly man takes them in, that night men of Gibeah pound on the door. They wish to rape the Levite (19:22). The host offers his virgin daughters instead but to no avail. Then the Levite throws his young concubine out the door, and she is raped by the group of men throughout the night. In the morning the Levite finds her on the doorstep and gives her an order to get up, but she is dead. He then chops her body into a dozen parts and ships them to each tribe. Outraged by the immorality witnessed in Gibeah, the tribes descend, attacking Benjamin and killing all but six hundred men; and then, lest tribal Benjamin become extinct, they kidnap wives for them at Jabesh-Gilead (after slaughtering the rest of the city) and Shiloh (where God is worshiped). This series of events shows moral anarchy and sexual violence unlike anything witnessed before.⁶ These two parallel stories make an important point.⁷ In chapter 3 we learned that God’s blessing of land was dependent on fidelity to the covenant. What was implicit in the law, Judges now shows in reality: sinfulness results in the loss of inheritance. Dan neglects its promised land in the coastal hills and migrates into apostasy in the far reaches of the north. Tribal Benjamin almost disappears from history because of losing any sense of God’s moral commands. Its sin as well as that of the Levite are simply heinous. Land and righteousness are linked. The book of Judges plays out the theological theme provided in Moses’ covenant: fidelity to covenant righteousness is a prerequisite to enjoying the blessings of that covenant. When each generation neglects the covenant, the land is conquered by a foreign power. When a specific tribe offends the covenant, its promises are placed in jeopardy. Joshua had reminded the people that this result would occur. When they first entered the land, recall that he gathered them at Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim and read the law once again aloud. He reminded them that the covenant did not simply bring privilege; it brought expectation. The covenant brought the prospects for both blessing and judgment at the same time. ISRAEL’S KINGS Throughout Judges and 1 Samuel, the people of Israel insist on having a king (cf. the offer to Gideon, Judg. 8:22ff.). While they think that this status will enhance their prospects for nationhood, the prophet Samuel warns that just the opposite will happen (1 Sam. 8). To have a human king is to reject God as king, which will lead to neglect of the covenant. Kings, Samuel argues, bring war (vv. 10–12) and taxes (vv. 15–18). They will consume the young who are seduced into serving the “empire” (vv. 13, 16). And, interestingly, they will steal the land (v. 14). Listen to Samuel’s words of warning: “He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants.” Samuel understands that land is one of the most precious gifts given by God. And when nations experience corruption—which in his view is inevitable—the gift of this land will be abused. It would be a mistake to think of the nation built by Saul, David, and Solomon as culturally monolithic, as if it were “a Jewish state” in the modern sense. Non-Jews were not marginalized or expelled. On the contrary, “ancient empires were hegemonic, not ethnically exclusive.”⁸ Different cultures were integrated into the mainstream of national life under the sovereignty of the king and his dominant nation. For instance, in 2 Samuel 4:2–3 we read that two of Saul’s military captains were “Be-er’othites.” This group was a “foreign” or “alien” tribe, a non-Israelite people living within Saul’s kingdom. This integration of non-Israelites can be seen in King David’s case by looking at the different men who populated the ranks of his military officers. Second Samuel 23 (also 1 Chron. 11:10–47) lists the core of David’s military organization: three leading “champions” and thirty secondary commanders. In this list, numerous non-Israelites are included from territories conquered by David.⁹ Zobah (2 Sam. 23:36) was in the central valley of Lebanon, Maacah (v. 34) was a Syrian kingdom above the Golan Heights,¹⁰ and Ammon (v. 37) was on the plateau east of the Jordan River (the capital of modern-day Jordan, Amman, gets its name from this kingdom).¹¹ The Hittites (v. 39) came from modern-day Turkey in the distant north. Remarkably David’s army was thus led by a diversity of men, many of whom were not native Israelites. Using today’s geographical terms, he enlisted men from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey, and they were some of his trusted leaders. David’s generals and colonels were fully international. The inclusion of the “alien” or foreigner can be seen in yet another way. Non-Israelites assisted in the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem (1 Chron. 22:2). At one point Solomon took a census of the number of resident aliens in his kingdom and discovered 153,600 of them (2 Chron. 2:17). After King Hezekiah cleansed and restored worship at the Temple following a time of severe disbelief, he called the people to Jerusalem and led them in a Passover festival. Were foreigners invited in? Indeed. “The whole assembly of Judah, the priests and the Levites, and the whole assembly that came out of Israel, and the resident aliens who came out of the land of Israel, and the resident aliens who lived in Judah, rejoiced” (2 Chron. 30:25). Why did Israel give such respect to these resident aliens? The answer came from Israel’s own history. Israel had been alienated once in Egypt. They too had been refugees. The Israelites were commanded to give offerings from their crops to God each year. As they handed the basket of goods to the priest, they were to recite: “A
wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous” (Deut. 26:5; cf. Ps. 119:19). Because God had been generous with the alien Israel, so too, Israel was obligated to be generous with other foreigners. At the end of his life, when David prayed for Solomon his son, his prayer for Solomon’s humility was rooted in this notion: “For we are aliens and transients before you, as were all our ancestors; our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no hope” (1 Chron. 29:15). ALIENS AND SOJOURNERS IN THE LAND Two themes are beginning to appear. First, Israel’s possession of the land is linked to covenant righteousness. Possession of the land is conditioned on faithfulness to God. Thus, when David gives advice to his son Solomon before the construction of God’s Temple begins, he says, “Now therefore in the sight of all Israel, the assembly of the Lord, and in the hearing of our God, observe and search out all the commandments of the Lord your God; that you may possess this good land, and leave it for an inheritance to your children after you forever” (1 Chron. 28:8). Keeping the land is hinged to keeping the law. Second, one feature of righteous nationhood is Israel’s fair treatment of resident aliens or foreigners—non-Israelites who were in the land before Israel arrived. Rather than being expelled, they are included in the fabric of Israelite society. In fact, Israel’s population had a significant non-Israelite minority (over 150,000 people). Let us take a closer look at the rights of these “aliens” who lived alongside the Israelites. One curiosity of the Bible is that the social fabric of ancient Israel made generous allowances for “the alien (or sojourner), the orphan, and the widow.” As non-Israelites, aliens were accorded surprising privileges. They were not pushed to the outskirts of society to make way for a comprehensive Jewish state. Here is a partial list of the benefits for aliens given in the law: 1. Religious Privileges: Non-Israelites were included in religious ceremony and worship.
•Aliens enjoyed the Sabbath rest and could not be required to work (Exod. 23:12).
•Aliens could participate in all the major festivals in Jerusalem (Num. 9:14); however, in order to participate in the Passover, the alien had to be circumcised (Exod. 12:48).
•Aliens could even make personal sacrifices at the altar for worship (Num. 15:14).
•Access to the holiest ceremonies was not restricted. For instance, when Joshua recommitted Israel to the covenant with God, aliens stood alongside Israelites near the ark (Josh. 8:33). 2. Social Privileges: Non-Israelites were cared for in “social programs” that assisted the needy.
•The Israelites were commanded not to harvest their fields thoroughly so that aliens, orphans, and widows could take freely what was left (Lev. 19:10; 23:27; Deut. 24:19–21).
•When the tithes were collected (these functioned like modern taxes), the income was also to be distributed to the aliens, orphans, and widows so that their lives could be blessed with material sustenance (Deut. 14:29; 26:12).
•The law protected anyone from falling into permanent slavery through indebtedness. Means of redemption were extended to all, including the alien (Lev. 25:47–50), which protected the social and financial future of the non-Israelite family. 3. Legal Privileges: Non-Israelites were to have access to the same system of justice enjoyed by the Israelites.
•Israel had a system of “cities of refuge” throughout the land which kept people from being victimized by revenge. The accused could flee there to find protection and justice. Aliens could use these cities without restriction (Num. 35:15; Josh. 20:9).
•Wages had to be fair, and none could be withheld from the alien (Deut. 24:14).
•Similarly, aliens could not be oppressed or discriminated against as if they were not full citizens. Leviticus 19:33–34 is explicit: “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
•The court system available to Israelites was to be available to aliens. There were not to be two systems of justice (Deut. 1:16; 24:17). Note the tone of Deuteronomy 27:19: “Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice. All the people shall say, Amen!”
•The Bible repeats numerous times that one law was to be applied to all people. Aliens and Israelites were not to obey different legal codes. No law could bind aliens unless it was also binding on Israelites (Lev. 24:22; Num. 9:14; 15:16, 29). The resulting conclusion is inescapable. Israel was commanded to create a remarkable society, and one test of its goodness was the way the foreigner, the alien, or the non-Israelite was treated. This land (which belongs to God) would produce a people who were a genuine blessing to their neighbors, who incorporated them into their lives and who invited them into their leadership. TWO STORIES, TWO KINGS Respect for anyone who owns land—including the resident alien—and the righteous requirements of possessing the land come together in two important Old Testament stories. In each case, an Israelite desires land. In each case, he has to make a moral choice about how to treat the person who owns it. In 1 Chronicles 21, King David is instructed to build an altar for God on a small hill just north of David’s Jerusalem. This place was going to become the site of Solomon’s glorious Temple (1 Chron. 22:1–5), and therefore an angel even points out the exact location (21:18, 20). Thus if the land belongs to God, surely this plot of land is especially his! If David is to be the steward of the whole land, this plot will be at the center of Israel’s inheritance. This Temple will be God’s own house, the symbolic place of his dwelling with his people. But one problem comes up. The chosen site is a threshing floor owned by a man named Ornan, a Canaanite resident of pre-Israelite Jerusalem when the city was called “Jebus.” Ornan “the Jebusite” is among those people listed in Genesis 15:20–21 whose land would be inherited by Israel. If David, the conqueror of Jebus/Jerusalem, had taken the land unilaterally from Ornan, it would not surprise us. Israel had inherited that threshing floor. But note what happens. Ornan tries to give it to David freely,
In response to their prayers for mercy, God raises up a judge (such as Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, or Samson) who leads Israel to victory. This results in a period of national peace in which correct worship is restored (generally for forty years) until the next generation enters the scene.
This much of Judges is well known. However, the book concludes with two troubling stories that serve as a summary of the evil that is growing in the land. The final verse of the book epitomizes Israel’s condition: In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes (Judg. 21:25). Judges 17–21 describes the fallenness of the tribes of Dan and Benjamin in parallel terms.
The story of Dan illustrates Israel’s religious corruption (chaps. 17–18). Dan leaves its territory in the western coastal hills (the Shephelah), travels north through the central mountains of Samaria, and meets a priestly assistant (a Levite) in Ephraim and offers him a job as tribal priest.⁵ They said to him, Come with us, and be to us a father and a priest. The tribe resettles in the far north near Mount Hermon and there establishes a new religion based on this new priest’s idol. Spearheaded by six hundred men of Dan, this act is an utter rejection of God’s covenant, apostasy and religious corruption in its worst form.
The story of Benjamin illustrates Israel’s moral corruption (chaps. 19–21). As the final story of Judges, it is meant to shock and sober. Once again a Levite takes center stage. Because his young concubine had fled home to her father in Bethlehem, the Levite goes there to recover her. He then travels with her north, en route no doubt to Shiloh, where he assists the priests. Because nightfall has come, he seeks lodging in Gibeah, a city of the tribe of Benjamin. After an elderly man takes them in, that night men of Gibeah pound on the door. They wish to rape the Levite (19:22). The host offers his virgin daughters instead but to no avail. Then the Levite throws his young concubine out the door, and she is raped by the group of men throughout the night. In the morning the Levite finds her on the doorstep and gives her an order to get up, but she is dead.
He then chops her body into a dozen parts and ships them to each tribe. Outraged by the immorality witnessed in Gibeah, the tribes descend, attacking Benjamin and killing all but six hundred men; and then, lest tribal Benjamin become extinct, they kidnap wives for them at Jabesh-Gilead (after slaughtering the rest of the city) and Shiloh (where God is worshiped). This series of events shows moral anarchy and sexual violence unlike anything witnessed before.⁶
These two parallel stories make an important point.⁷ In chapter 3 we learned that God’s blessing of land was dependent on fidelity to the covenant. What was implicit in the law, Judges now shows in reality: sinfulness results in the loss of inheritance. Dan neglects its promised land in the coastal hills and migrates into apostasy in the far reaches of the north. Tribal Benjamin almost disappears from history because of losing any sense of God’s moral commands. Its sin as well as that of the Levite are simply heinous.
Land and righteousness are linked. The book of Judges plays out the theological theme provided in Moses’ covenant: fidelity to covenant righteousness is a prerequisite to enjoying the blessings of that covenant. When each generation neglects the covenant, the land is conquered by a foreign power. When a specific tribe offends the covenant, its promises are placed in jeopardy. Joshua had reminded the people that this result would occur. When they first entered the land, recall that he gathered them at Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim and read the law once again aloud. He reminded them that the covenant did not simply bring privilege; it brought expectation. The covenant brought the prospects for both blessing and judgment at the same time.
ISRAEL’S KINGS
Throughout Judges and 1 Samuel, the people of Israel insist on having a king (cf. the offer to Gideon, Judg. 8:22ff.). While they think that this status will enhance their prospects for nationhood, the prophet Samuel warns that just the opposite will happen (1 Sam. 8). To have a human king is to reject God as king, which will lead to neglect of the covenant. Kings, Samuel argues, bring war (vv. 10–12) and taxes (vv. 15–18). They will consume the young who are seduced into serving the empire (vv. 13, 16). And, interestingly, they will steal the land (v. 14). Listen to Samuel’s words of warning: He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. Samuel understands that land is one of the most precious gifts given by God. And when nations experience corruption—which in his view is inevitable—the gift of this land will be abused.
It would be a mistake to think of the nation built by Saul, David, and Solomon as culturally monolithic, as if it were a Jewish state in the modern sense. Non-Jews were not marginalized or expelled. On the contrary, ancient empires were hegemonic, not ethnically exclusive.⁸ Different cultures were integrated into the mainstream of national life under the sovereignty of the king and his dominant nation. For instance, in 2 Samuel 4:2–3 we read that two of Saul’s military captains were Be-er’othites. This group was a foreign or alien tribe, a non-Israelite people living within Saul’s kingdom.
This integration of non-Israelites can be seen in King David’s case by looking at the different men who populated the ranks of his military officers. Second Samuel 23 (also 1 Chron. 11:10–47) lists the core of David’s military organization: three leading champions and thirty secondary commanders. In this list, numerous non-Israelites are included from territories conquered by David.⁹ Zobah (2 Sam. 23:36) was in the central valley of Lebanon, Maacah (v. 34) was a Syrian kingdom above the Golan Heights,¹⁰ and Ammon (v. 37) was on the plateau east of the Jordan River (the capital of modern-day Jordan, Amman, gets its name from this kingdom).¹¹ The Hittites (v. 39) came from modern-day Turkey in the distant north. Remarkably David’s army was thus led by a diversity of men, many of whom were not native Israelites. Using today’s geographical terms, he enlisted men from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey, and they were some of his trusted leaders. David’s generals and colonels were fully international.
The inclusion of the alien or foreigner can be seen in yet another way. Non-Israelites assisted in the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem (1 Chron. 22:2). At one point Solomon took a census of the number of resident aliens in his kingdom and discovered 153,600 of them (2 Chron. 2:17). After King Hezekiah cleansed and restored worship at the Temple following a time of severe disbelief, he called the people to Jerusalem and led them in a Passover festival. Were foreigners invited in? Indeed. The whole assembly of Judah, the priests and the Levites, and the whole assembly that came out of Israel, and the resident aliens who came out of the land of Israel, and the resident aliens who lived in Judah, rejoiced (2 Chron. 30:25).
Why did Israel give such respect to these resident aliens? The answer came from Israel’s own history. Israel had been alienated once in Egypt. They too had been refugees. The Israelites were commanded to give offerings from their crops to God each year. As they handed the basket of goods to the priest, they were to recite: "A
wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous (Deut. 26:5; cf. Ps. 119:19). Because God had been generous with the alien Israel, so too, Israel was obligated to be generous with other foreigners. At the end of his life, when David prayed for Solomon his son, his prayer for Solomon’s humility was rooted in this notion: For we are aliens and transients before you, as were all our ancestors; our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no hope" (1 Chron. 29:15).
ALIENS AND SOJOURNERS IN THE LAND
Two themes are beginning to appear. First, Israel’s possession of the land is linked to covenant righteousness. Possession of the land is conditioned on faithfulness to God. Thus, when David gives advice to his son Solomon before the construction of God’s Temple begins, he says, Now therefore in the sight of all Israel, the assembly of the Lord, and in the hearing of our God, observe and search out all the commandments of the Lord your God; that you may possess this good land, and leave it for an inheritance to your children after you forever (1 Chron. 28:8). Keeping the land is hinged to keeping the law.
Second, one feature of righteous nationhood is Israel’s fair treatment of resident aliens or foreigners—non-Israelites who were in the land before Israel arrived. Rather than being expelled, they are included in the fabric of Israelite society. In fact, Israel’s population had a significant non-Israelite minority (over 150,000 people).
Let us take a closer look at the rights of these aliens who lived alongside the Israelites. One curiosity of the Bible is that the social fabric of ancient Israel made generous allowances for the alien (or sojourner), the orphan, and the widow. As non-Israelites, aliens were accorded surprising privileges. They were not pushed to the outskirts of society to make way for a comprehensive Jewish state. Here is a partial list of the benefits for aliens given in the law:
1. Religious Privileges: Non-Israelites were included in religious ceremony and worship.
Aliens enjoyed the Sabbath rest and could not be required to work (Exod. 23:12).
Aliens could participate in all the major festivals in Jerusalem (Num. 9:14); however, in order to participate in the Passover, the alien had to be circumcised (Exod. 12:48).
Aliens could even make personal sacrifices at the altar for worship (Num. 15:14).
Access to the holiest ceremonies was not restricted. For instance, when Joshua recommitted Israel to the covenant with God, aliens stood alongside Israelites near the ark (Josh. 8:33).
2. Social Privileges: Non-Israelites were cared for in social programs that assisted the needy.
The Israelites were commanded not to harvest their fields thoroughly so that aliens, orphans, and widows could take freely what was left (Lev. 19:10; 23:27; Deut. 24:19–21).
When the tithes were collected (these functioned like modern taxes), the income was also to be distributed to the aliens, orphans, and widows so that their lives could be blessed with material sustenance (Deut. 14:29; 26:12).
The law protected anyone from falling into permanent slavery through indebtedness. Means of redemption were extended to all, including the alien (Lev. 25:47–50), which protected the social and financial future of the non-Israelite family.
3. Legal Privileges: Non-Israelites were to have access to the same system of justice enjoyed by the Israelites.
Israel had a system of cities of refuge throughout the land which kept people from being victimized by revenge. The accused could flee there to find protection and justice. Aliens could use these cities without restriction (Num. 35:15; Josh. 20:9).
Wages had to be fair, and none could be withheld from the alien (Deut. 24:14).
Similarly, aliens could not be oppressed or discriminated against as if they were not full citizens. Leviticus 19:33–34 is explicit: When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
The court system available to Israelites was to be available to aliens. There were not to be two systems of justice (Deut. 1:16; 24:17). Note the tone of Deuteronomy 27:19: Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice. All the people shall say, Amen!
The Bible repeats numerous times that one law was to be applied to all people. Aliens and Israelites were not to obey different legal codes. No law could bind aliens unless it was also binding on Israelites (Lev. 24:22; Num. 9:14; 15:16, 29).
The resulting conclusion is inescapable. Israel was commanded to create a remarkable society, and one test of its goodness was the way the foreigner, the alien, or the non-Israelite was treated. This land (which belongs to God) would produce a people who were a genuine blessing to their neighbors, who incorporated them into their lives and who invited them into their leadership.
TWO STORIES, TWO KINGS
Respect for anyone who owns land—including the resident alien—and the righteous requirements of possessing the land come together in two important Old Testament stories. In each case, an Israelite desires land. In each case, he has to make a moral choice about how to treat the person who owns it.
In 1 Chronicles 21, King David is instructed to build an altar for God on a small hill just north of David’s Jerusalem. This place was going to become the site of Solomon’s glorious Temple (1 Chron. 22:1–5), and therefore an angel even points out the exact location (21:18, 20). Thus if the land belongs to God, surely this plot of land is especially his! If David is to be the steward of the whole land, this plot will be at the center of Israel’s inheritance. This Temple will be God’s own house, the symbolic place of his dwelling with his people.
But one problem comes up. The chosen site is a threshing floor owned by a man named Ornan, a Canaanite resident of pre-Israelite Jerusalem when the city was called Jebus. Ornan the Jebusite is among those people listed in Genesis 15:20–21 whose land would be inherited by Israel. If David, the conqueror of Jebus/Jerusalem, had taken the land unilaterally from Ornan, it would not surprise us. Israel had inherited that threshing floor. But note what happens. Ornan tries to give it to David freely,
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wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous” (Deut. 26:5; cf. Ps. 119:19). Because God had been generous with the alien Israel, so too, Israel was obligated to be generous with other foreigners. At the end of his life, when David prayed for Solomon his son, his prayer for Solomon’s humility was rooted in this notion: “For we are aliens and transients before you, as were all our ancestors; our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no hope” (1 Chron. 29:15). ALIENS AND SOJOURNERS IN THE LAND Two themes are beginning to appear. First, Israel’s possession of the land is linked to covenant righteousness. Possession of the land is conditioned on faithfulness to God. Thus, when David gives advice to his son Solomon before the construction of God’s Temple begins, he says, “Now therefore in the sight of all Israel, the assembly of the Lord, and in the hearing of our God, observe and search out all the commandments of the Lord your God; that you may possess this good land, and leave it for an inheritance to your children after you forever” (1 Chron. 28:8). Keeping the land is hinged to keeping the law. Second, one feature of righteous nationhood is Israel’s fair treatment of resident aliens or foreigners—non-Israelites who were in the land before Israel arrived. Rather than being expelled, they are included in the fabric of Israelite society. In fact, Israel’s population had a significant non-Israelite minority (over 150,000 people). Let us take a closer look at the rights of these “aliens” who lived alongside the Israelites. One curiosity of the Bible is that the social fabric of ancient Israel made generous allowances for “the alien (or sojourner), the orphan, and the widow.” As non-Israelites, aliens were accorded surprising privileges. They were not pushed to the outskirts of society to make way for a comprehensive Jewish state. Here is a partial list of the benefits for aliens given in the law: 1. Religious Privileges: Non-Israelites were included in religious ceremony and worship.
•Aliens enjoyed the Sabbath rest and could not be required to work (Exod. 23:12).
•Aliens could participate in all the major festivals in Jerusalem (Num. 9:14); however, in order to participate in the Passover, the alien had to be circumcised (Exod. 12:48).
•Aliens could even make personal sacrifices at the altar for worship (Num. 15:14).
•Access to the holiest ceremonies was not restricted. For instance, when Joshua recommitted Israel to the covenant with God, aliens stood alongside Israelites near the ark (Josh. 8:33). 2. Social Privileges: Non-Israelites were cared for in “social programs” that assisted the needy.
•The Israelites were commanded not to harvest their fields thoroughly so that aliens, orphans, and widows could take freely what was left (Lev. 19:10; 23:27; Deut. 24:19–21).
•When the tithes were collected (these functioned like modern taxes), the income was also to be distributed to the aliens, orphans, and widows so that their lives could be blessed with material sustenance (Deut. 14:29; 26:12).
•The law protected anyone from falling into permanent slavery through indebtedness. Means of redemption were extended to all, including the alien (Lev. 25:47–50), which protected the social and financial future of the non-Israelite family. 3. Legal Privileges: Non-Israelites were to have access to the same system of justice enjoyed by the Israelites.
•Israel had a system of “cities of refuge” throughout the land which kept people from being victimized by revenge. The accused could flee there to find protection and justice. Aliens could use these cities without restriction (Num. 35:15; Josh. 20:9).
•Wages had to be fair, and none could be withheld from the alien (Deut. 24:14).
•Similarly, aliens could not be oppressed or discriminated against as if they were not full citizens. Leviticus 19:33–34 is explicit: “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
•The court system available to Israelites was to be available to aliens. There were not to be two systems of justice (Deut. 1:16; 24:17). Note the tone of Deuteronomy 27:19: “Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice. All the people shall say, Amen!”
•The Bible repeats numerous times that one law was to be applied to all people. Aliens and Israelites were not to obey different legal codes. No law could bind aliens unless it was also binding on Israelites (Lev. 24:22; Num. 9:14; 15:16, 29). The resulting conclusion is inescapable. Israel was commanded to create a remarkable society, and one test of its goodness was the way the foreigner, the alien, or the non-Israelite was treated. This land (which belongs to God) would produce a people who were a genuine blessing to their neighbors, who incorporated them into their lives and who invited them into their leadership. TWO STORIES, TWO KINGS Respect for anyone who owns land—including the resident alien—and the righteous requirements of possessing the land come together in two important Old Testament stories. In each case, an Israelite desires land. In each case, he has to make a moral choice about how to treat the person who owns it. In 1 Chronicles 21, King David is instructed to build an altar for God on a small hill just north of David’s Jerusalem. This place was going to become the site of Solomon’s glorious Temple (1 Chron. 22:1–5), and therefore an angel even points out the exact location (21:18, 20). Thus if the land belongs to God, surely this plot of land is especially his! If David is to be the steward of the whole land, this plot will be at the center of Israel’s inheritance. This Temple will be God’s own house, the symbolic place of his dwelling with his people. But one problem comes up. The chosen site is a threshing floor owned by a man named Ornan, a Canaanite resident of pre-Israelite Jerusalem when the city was called “Jebus.” Ornan “the Jebusite” is among those people listed in Genesis 15:20–21 whose land would be inherited by Israel. If David, the conqueror of Jebus/Jerusalem, had taken the land unilaterally from Ornan, it would not surprise us. Israel had inherited that threshing floor. But note what happens. Ornan tries to give it to David freely,
In response to their prayers for mercy, God raises up a judge (such as Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, or Samson) who leads Israel to victory. This results in a period of national peace in which correct worship is restored (generally for forty years) until the next generation enters the scene.
This much of Judges is well known. However, the book concludes with two troubling stories that serve as a summary of the evil that is growing in the land. The final verse of the book epitomizes Israel’s condition: In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes (Judg. 21:25). Judges 17–21 describes the fallenness of the tribes of Dan and Benjamin in parallel terms.
The story of Dan illustrates Israel’s religious corruption (chaps. 17–18). Dan leaves its territory in the western coastal hills (the Shephelah), travels north through the central mountains of Samaria, and meets a priestly assistant (a Levite) in Ephraim and offers him a job as tribal priest.⁵ They said to him, Come with us, and be to us a father and a priest. The tribe resettles in the far north near Mount Hermon and there establishes a new religion based on this new priest’s idol. Spearheaded by six hundred men of Dan, this act is an utter rejection of God’s covenant, apostasy and religious corruption in its worst form.
The story of Benjamin illustrates Israel’s moral corruption (chaps. 19–21). As the final story of Judges, it is meant to shock and sober. Once again a Levite takes center stage. Because his young concubine had fled home to her father in Bethlehem, the Levite goes there to recover her. He then travels with her north, en route no doubt to Shiloh, where he assists the priests. Because nightfall has come, he seeks lodging in Gibeah, a city of the tribe of Benjamin. After an elderly man takes them in, that night men of Gibeah pound on the door. They wish to rape the Levite (19:22). The host offers his virgin daughters instead but to no avail. Then the Levite throws his young concubine out the door, and she is raped by the group of men throughout the night. In the morning the Levite finds her on the doorstep and gives her an order to get up, but she is dead.
He then chops her body into a dozen parts and ships them to each tribe. Outraged by the immorality witnessed in Gibeah, the tribes descend, attacking Benjamin and killing all but six hundred men; and then, lest tribal Benjamin become extinct, they kidnap wives for them at Jabesh-Gilead (after slaughtering the rest of the city) and Shiloh (where God is worshiped). This series of events shows moral anarchy and sexual violence unlike anything witnessed before.⁶
These two parallel stories make an important point.⁷ In chapter 3 we learned that God’s blessing of land was dependent on fidelity to the covenant. What was implicit in the law, Judges now shows in reality: sinfulness results in the loss of inheritance. Dan neglects its promised land in the coastal hills and migrates into apostasy in the far reaches of the north. Tribal Benjamin almost disappears from history because of losing any sense of God’s moral commands. Its sin as well as that of the Levite are simply heinous.
Land and righteousness are linked. The book of Judges plays out the theological theme provided in Moses’ covenant: fidelity to covenant righteousness is a prerequisite to enjoying the blessings of that covenant. When each generation neglects the covenant, the land is conquered by a foreign power. When a specific tribe offends the covenant, its promises are placed in jeopardy. Joshua had reminded the people that this result would occur. When they first entered the land, recall that he gathered them at Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim and read the law once again aloud. He reminded them that the covenant did not simply bring privilege; it brought expectation. The covenant brought the prospects for both blessing and judgment at the same time.
ISRAEL’S KINGS
Throughout Judges and 1 Samuel, the people of Israel insist on having a king (cf. the offer to Gideon, Judg. 8:22ff.). While they think that this status will enhance their prospects for nationhood, the prophet Samuel warns that just the opposite will happen (1 Sam. 8). To have a human king is to reject God as king, which will lead to neglect of the covenant. Kings, Samuel argues, bring war (vv. 10–12) and taxes (vv. 15–18). They will consume the young who are seduced into serving the empire (vv. 13, 16). And, interestingly, they will steal the land (v. 14). Listen to Samuel’s words of warning: He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. Samuel understands that land is one of the most precious gifts given by God. And when nations experience corruption—which in his view is inevitable—the gift of this land will be abused.
It would be a mistake to think of the nation built by Saul, David, and Solomon as culturally monolithic, as if it were a Jewish state in the modern sense. Non-Jews were not marginalized or expelled. On the contrary, ancient empires were hegemonic, not ethnically exclusive.⁸ Different cultures were integrated into the mainstream of national life under the sovereignty of the king and his dominant nation. For instance, in 2 Samuel 4:2–3 we read that two of Saul’s military captains were Be-er’othites. This group was a foreign or alien tribe, a non-Israelite people living within Saul’s kingdom.
This integration of non-Israelites can be seen in King David’s case by looking at the different men who populated the ranks of his military officers. Second Samuel 23 (also 1 Chron. 11:10–47) lists the core of David’s military organization: three leading champions and thirty secondary commanders. In this list, numerous non-Israelites are included from territories conquered by David.⁹ Zobah (2 Sam. 23:36) was in the central valley of Lebanon, Maacah (v. 34) was a Syrian kingdom above the Golan Heights,¹⁰ and Ammon (v. 37) was on the plateau east of the Jordan River (the capital of modern-day Jordan, Amman, gets its name from this kingdom).¹¹ The Hittites (v. 39) came from modern-day Turkey in the distant north. Remarkably David’s army was thus led by a diversity of men, many of whom were not native Israelites. Using today’s geographical terms, he enlisted men from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey, and they were some of his trusted leaders. David’s generals and colonels were fully international.
The inclusion of the alien or foreigner can be seen in yet another way. Non-Israelites assisted in the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem (1 Chron. 22:2). At one point Solomon took a census of the number of resident aliens in his kingdom and discovered 153,600 of them (2 Chron. 2:17). After King Hezekiah cleansed and restored worship at the Temple following a time of severe disbelief, he called the people to Jerusalem and led them in a Passover festival. Were foreigners invited in? Indeed. The whole assembly of Judah, the priests and the Levites, and the whole assembly that came out of Israel, and the resident aliens who came out of the land of Israel, and the resident aliens who lived in Judah, rejoiced (2 Chron. 30:25).
Why did Israel give such respect to these resident aliens? The answer came from Israel’s own history. Israel had been alienated once in Egypt. They too had been refugees. The Israelites were commanded to give offerings from their crops to God each year. As they handed the basket of goods to the priest, they were to recite: "A
wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous (Deut. 26:5; cf. Ps. 119:19). Because God had been generous with the alien Israel, so too, Israel was obligated to be generous with other foreigners. At the end of his life, when David prayed for Solomon his son, his prayer for Solomon’s humility was rooted in this notion: For we are aliens and transients before you, as were all our ancestors; our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no hope" (1 Chron. 29:15).
ALIENS AND SOJOURNERS IN THE LAND
Two themes are beginning to appear. First, Israel’s possession of the land is linked to covenant righteousness. Possession of the land is conditioned on faithfulness to God. Thus, when David gives advice to his son Solomon before the construction of God’s Temple begins, he says, Now therefore in the sight of all Israel, the assembly of the Lord, and in the hearing of our God, observe and search out all the commandments of the Lord your God; that you may possess this good land, and leave it for an inheritance to your children after you forever (1 Chron. 28:8). Keeping the land is hinged to keeping the law.
Second, one feature of righteous nationhood is Israel’s fair treatment of resident aliens or foreigners—non-Israelites who were in the land before Israel arrived. Rather than being expelled, they are included in the fabric of Israelite society. In fact, Israel’s population had a significant non-Israelite minority (over 150,000 people).
Let us take a closer look at the rights of these aliens who lived alongside the Israelites. One curiosity of the Bible is that the social fabric of ancient Israel made generous allowances for the alien (or sojourner), the orphan, and the widow. As non-Israelites, aliens were accorded surprising privileges. They were not pushed to the outskirts of society to make way for a comprehensive Jewish state. Here is a partial list of the benefits for aliens given in the law:
1. Religious Privileges: Non-Israelites were included in religious ceremony and worship.
Aliens enjoyed the Sabbath rest and could not be required to work (Exod. 23:12).
Aliens could participate in all the major festivals in Jerusalem (Num. 9:14); however, in order to participate in the Passover, the alien had to be circumcised (Exod. 12:48).
Aliens could even make personal sacrifices at the altar for worship (Num. 15:14).
Access to the holiest ceremonies was not restricted. For instance, when Joshua recommitted Israel to the covenant with God, aliens stood alongside Israelites near the ark (Josh. 8:33).
2. Social Privileges: Non-Israelites were cared for in social programs that assisted the needy.
The Israelites were commanded not to harvest their fields thoroughly so that aliens, orphans, and widows could take freely what was left (Lev. 19:10; 23:27; Deut. 24:19–21).
When the tithes were collected (these functioned like modern taxes), the income was also to be distributed to the aliens, orphans, and widows so that their lives could be blessed with material sustenance (Deut. 14:29; 26:12).
The law protected anyone from falling into permanent slavery through indebtedness. Means of redemption were extended to all, including the alien (Lev. 25:47–50), which protected the social and financial future of the non-Israelite family.
3. Legal Privileges: Non-Israelites were to have access to the same system of justice enjoyed by the Israelites.
Israel had a system of cities of refuge throughout the land which kept people from being victimized by revenge. The accused could flee there to find protection and justice. Aliens could use these cities without restriction (Num. 35:15; Josh. 20:9).
Wages had to be fair, and none could be withheld from the alien (Deut. 24:14).
Similarly, aliens could not be oppressed or discriminated against as if they were not full citizens. Leviticus 19:33–34 is explicit: When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
The court system available to Israelites was to be available to aliens. There were not to be two systems of justice (Deut. 1:16; 24:17). Note the tone of Deuteronomy 27:19: Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice. All the people shall say, Amen!
The Bible repeats numerous times that one law was to be applied to all people. Aliens and Israelites were not to obey different legal codes. No law could bind aliens unless it was also binding on Israelites (Lev. 24:22; Num. 9:14; 15:16, 29).
The resulting conclusion is inescapable. Israel was commanded to create a remarkable society, and one test of its goodness was the way the foreigner, the alien, or the non-Israelite was treated. This land (which belongs to God) would produce a people who were a genuine blessing to their neighbors, who incorporated them into their lives and who invited them into their leadership.
TWO STORIES, TWO KINGS
Respect for anyone who owns land—including the resident alien—and the righteous requirements of possessing the land come together in two important Old Testament stories. In each case, an Israelite desires land. In each case, he has to make a moral choice about how to treat the person who owns it.
In 1 Chronicles 21, King David is instructed to build an altar for God on a small hill just north of David’s Jerusalem. This place was going to become the site of Solomon’s glorious Temple (1 Chron. 22:1–5), and therefore an angel even points out the exact location (21:18, 20). Thus if the land belongs to God, surely this plot of land is especially his! If David is to be the steward of the whole land, this plot will be at the center of Israel’s inheritance. This Temple will be God’s own house, the symbolic place of his dwelling with his people.
But one problem comes up. The chosen site is a threshing floor owned by a man named Ornan, a Canaanite resident of pre-Israelite Jerusalem when the city was called Jebus. Ornan the Jebusite is among those people listed in Genesis 15:20–21 whose land would be inherited by Israel. If David, the conqueror of Jebus/Jerusalem, had taken the land unilaterally from Ornan, it would not surprise us. Israel had inherited that threshing floor. But note what happens. Ornan tries to give it to David freely,
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