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1999 - online version
A CATHOLIC VIEWS ZIONISM |
| Part I - Part II - Part III by Rev. Thomas F. Stransky, Paulist Rector of Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies, Jerusalem. Here is the Holy Land, if one can confirm future peace with justice only after all past injuries have been perfectly righted and retributed, there will never be even a half-loaf peace-of-sorts. What is considered absolute justice by one side means total injustice on the other side. Only a political compromise, inevitably resented as "unjust" by some Israelis and some Palestinians, can be a correct or "just" solution, as it will take into account not impossible dreams but the minimum legitimate, sometimes competing vital national interests of both Israelis and Palestinians. Such an attitudinal acceptance will be critical in the final negotiations over the return of Palestinian refugees in family reunification; the number, location, and status of Jewish settlements in Gaza, Samaria and Judea; the compensation for confiscated Arab homes; and the final status of governance in Jerusalem. Whatever the mutual acceptable final settlement determines, the political peace dividend for Israelis and Palestinians is not love — warm or cold, but normalization of a network of those routine relations which characterize peace between most States, most of the time, in most of the world. But the non-political, the "winning of hearts", can be resolved only in a relentless, slow process, not by a stop watch. "Unlike war, peace is always a tormenting victory of one’s own self" (Eli Sanbar). One already sees the beginnings of seized opportunities of reconciliation through purifying common history and healing collective memories: the initial willingness to admit that the long conflict is between two victims; to listen to the Other’s stories; to internalize the Other’s tragedies; and to recognize the role of those tragedies in shaping the national identity of each people. Can one ever dance on the graves of the Other’s misery? Thus, in the mutual recognition of each other’s wounds and sufferings and vulnerability grows the gradual recognition of each other’s national |
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Unstoppable progress? Or inevitable regression? History is never a slave to logic, or to dreams, or to predictability. Should one settle, with Hamlet’s question: "rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?" In the Middle East, the only predictable is the unpredictable. During the intifada one heard: "the day you see Palestinian autonomy is the day you see a black president in South Africa." Three years ago: " now that there is peace with the Kingdom of Jordan, Israel will find the same smooth path with the Palestinian National Authority." At that time Yitzak Rabin and his successor Shimon Perez were the truth-loving, vision-possessed leaders of their people through the valleys of death. Now too many are calling the duet misleaders who, for the editors of the Jerusalem Post, "managed to turn a wise, scarred nation which should have known better into a jelly of gullibility." In September of 1997, Martin Indyck, American assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, addressed his last speech , as U.S. ambassador to Israel, to the Council for Peace and Security — a group largely made up of former Israeli generals. He lamented that his great hope when he arrived in Israel after the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn, "seems to have been dashed on the rocks ... The dream of peace has turned into a nightmare" (Inter. Herald Tribune, Sept. 26, 1997). True or false? Never say "never". This axiom makes one cautious of being naively euphoric or cynically fatalistic. Religion is interwoven in this process, both negatively and positively. Douglas Johnson and other political scientists illustrate in Religion, the Mission Dimension of Statecraft that the foreign policies of the United States and Western European nations have so misread the importance of religion in the national policies and international behavior of Middle Eastern countries, including Israel, that incorrect analyses and erroneous responses have proven quite costly. No other area of the world demonstrates more clearly the fallacy that religion is a declining influence in society, a withering distraction from the really important decisions in life. In the Middle East, religion has never become a private affair, removed from the public square. One cannot isolate purely religious motivations and sensibilities from the political, cultural and ethnic elements. Piety quickly moves into politics, politics into piety. And this political religion and religious politics has many conflicting cultural, social and economic expressions. Furthermore, there is a taken-for-granted almost theocratic working relation between Arab state and mosque, Israel and synagogue — certainly no "neutral secular State" as in Western consciousness and civil law. To be inclusive of religious minorities is to tolerate them as the lesser of two evils. The local day-to-day experiences of Christians and Muslims and Jews are unique. Only in the Holy Land does a very small christian minority live with those of the two other monotheistic faiths, both in a majority. Local Christians have always been a small minority in Palestine, except for the Byzantine period from the mid-400's until the Persian invasion in 614 and Muslim conquest in 638. Even the 12th century temporary conquest by western crusaders did not produce an indigenous Christian majority. Look at present rough population numbers. According to the latest official statistics released at Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year in September, 1997), Israel itself embraces 5,863,000 people — a million and a quarter more than when I arrived ten years ago, primarily because of the sudden influx of over 650,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Of the total, 4.7 million are Jews. Non-Jews or Arabs number around 17 per cent: 872,000 Muslims (14%), 100,000 Druze (1.7%), and 180,000 Christians (about 2%). Over 80% of these Christians are of the Eastern church traditions. The largest of the Orthodox Churches, i.e. not in full communion with the Catholic, is the Greek Orthodox, the Syrian, the Armenian, the Coptic (Egyptian), and the Ethiopian. Of the six churches in full communion with the bishop of Rome, the largest is the Greek Catholic or Melchite, then the Latins, then the Maronite, the Syrian, the Coptic and the Armenian. The largest Protestant church is the Anglican, about 2,100 adherents; followed by the Lutheran, about 1,200 members. |
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Unknown are the number of committed Christians among the 125,000 legal and 150,000 illegal foreign workers from Asia (Thailand, Philippines, Sri Lanka), West and East Africa, and Romania. Unknown is the number os those Christians already married to Jews of Ethiopia and of the former USSR before the families immigrated to Israel during the past decade. And unknown are the scattered small groups of Messianic Jews who profess explicit Christian faith, probably three or four thousand. The majority of Israeli Christians live in northern coastal towns and in Galilee. All of the large post-’48 and post-‘68 development towns, such as the Negev, have no Christians. Of the estimated 2,250,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, only 35,000 are Christians; 85% of them live in three neighboring towns just over the southern border of Israel — Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahur, and north of Jerusalem, in Ramallah and its environs. In 1948, Bethlehem boasted 6,000 Christians our of 8,000. Today, it is 12,000 out of 50,000; the 38,000 are Muslims. Ramallah in 1948 was almost entirely Christian: 6,000 inhabitants. Today, there are only 10,000 Christians our of 40,000. The rest are Muslim. Thus, with over 8,000,000 people in the Holy Land today, only about 210,000 are Christians. What heightens fears, if not induces despair among local Christians is their possibly becoming disappearing facts on the ground, withering signs of continuous Christian presence and witness in its Holy Land cradle. Holy places with the "living stones" of local Christians? Only museums and archeological curiosities, as in today’s Turkey and Tunisia? In Jerusalem itself, with a total population of 600,000, reside about 10,000 Christians, one-third of the total at Israel’s founding in 1948 when the City had about 100,000 Jews and 40,000 Muslims. The Greek Orthodox, the largest community in Jerusalem, has dropped from 21,000 members in 1948, to about 14,000 in 1967, and now number around 3,000. The Anglican church has as many members in the entire Holy Land as boasted its Haifa parish in the pre-1967 years, before they became forced refugees in Jordan and elsewhere. Before the State of Israel, Christians in Nazareth totaled 6,00 out of 8,000. Today, it is 25,000 out of 50,000. This most Christian city in northern Israel increased not only because of the birthrate but also because of the influx of people from cities and villages, such as Beit She’an, whose Arab populations had been forced to leave and most of the Christians settled in the Nazareth area. |
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True, all Christians in the Middle East form small minorities which face political instabilities and more radical Islamic pressures, and the resulting lure is emigration. Since the late last century, there had been a steady outflow of Palestinian Christians. But the pace of emigration has dramatically increased with their leaving their homes in the 1948 and the 1967 wars and becoming refugees elsewhere. The percentage is sharply higher during and after the recent intifada, which erupted in December, 1987. Why this weakening will to remain? One claims: governmental/ military decisions concerning jobs, the confiscation of family lands and the lack of housing; the frequent closing for long periods of schools and universities; being treated as foreigners in their own land, where for 30 years, during their entire lives, they have been at the receiving end of Israeli policies decided over their heads and without their consent. Thse Christians who are most likely to emigrate are the well-educated young — high-school and university age, about twice the rate of Muslims. These young adults normally would comprise future leadership in the Christian communities and be among the professionals in a self-ruled homeland. Thus, the hemorrhage of emigration is a leadership drain, without any certainty of a plug to stop the outflow. How many now abroad will return permanently once Palestine has its rightful autonomy will depend more on steady economic viability than on new freedoms. For centuries Christians and Jews in Palestine had been living together in their shared Holy Land as two minority religious families amid the Muslims. Ottoman laws protected Christians and Jews because they also were "peoples of the Book", that is, not infidels but believers in the same One Revealing God who guides human beings in their histories of searching, finding, following the divine will. But these "protected groups" (dhimmi) enjoyed only second-class citizenship, because they were not full believers as God wills but only on the way to becoming so; that is, to becoming Muslims. With this civil protection and status, both Jews and Christians strived with remarkable stubbornness to survive in fidelity to their faiths, in comparative harmony with each other. In fact, Palestinian Christians claim to understand those Sephardi Jews, from the former Ottoman Empire and northern Africa who sought refuge in Israel, far better than these Jews are understood by most other Askenasi Israelis who arrived from Europe, North and South America, South Africa, and the former USSR. Also far better than do most Jews, Christians well know and understand fellow Palestinians who are Muslims, for they daily live communally with them as neighbors. The general culture — its art and architecture, music and literature, conventions of courtesy and hospitality, day-to-day vocabulary, is so deeply Islamicized that one hears the declaration: "I am Christian by faith, Muslim by culture." The 30 years of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has heightened the Palestinian ethnic and political identity. This includes those Israeli citizens who are Arabs, because of their extended family ties across borders and their ethnic identification with the under-dog; for this reason they are not quite trusted by fellow citizens who are Jews. Thus, it is no surprise that I hear more often: "We Palestinians" rather than "We Israeli Arabs." And on the West Bank and in Gaza, I hear "We Christian Palestinians" in solidarity with other Palestinians who are Muslims, more than "We Palestinian Christians" who are not Muslims. |
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What has primarily brought Muslims and Christians together is precisely their ethnic identity and perceived powerlessness vis-a-vis the Jewish people who firmly wields the power of the land. Even the Muslims and Christians who now participate in forums of religious dialogue between themselves initiated the contacts after the intifada had become more than a disorganized temporary episode. Christians and Muslims whether within or outside Israeli borders, acknowledge tensions between themselves, but together they are hypersensitive to perceived manipulation of those tensions by Israeli governmental, military or media pressure, in order to divide Christians and Muslims as Palestinians and to break their political and communal identity as one people, or even to strengthen divisions among the Christian churches. Nevertheless, since the peace process had begun and Gaza, Jericho and six other major West Bank cities have become autonomous, one already hears the shift of noun and adjective to: "We Palestinian Christians." They are beginning to worry about their civic status and de facto condition as Christians within a future Palestinian State. Already in the 19th century of the Ottoman Middle East, before the World War I victors carved up the region into new nations, Middle Eastern Christian intelligensia had been pressing for nation-states. They judged a western-style modern nation-state to be the one instrument that could create a secular identity and that in law and in practice would allow Christians to be fully equal with Muslims. Palestinians as Christians now ask: despite the political promises from Arafat, over the long haul, will there indeed be a juridic separation of the Palestinian State and mosque, equal civil rights to religious freedom, and de facto non-religious discrimination in governmental and private sector employment, financial allotments for new housing and for schools, and equitable sharing of political power? In the last three years, Christians feel caught between two waves — the growing fundamentalism of their Muslim neighbors, and the growing political power of Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy. Both these Jews and these Muslims view Christians with suspicion and hostility, and tolerate only a minimal Christian presence to avoit Western censure, and to support the pilgrim industry. I turn to the Islamic world. As protagonists such as Edward Said warn, I am well aware of the danger of forcing — and this misrepresenting and falsifying — cultures and peoples and sub-worlds into separate and distinct breeds of essences, especially if the neatness produces such artificial beasts called "The West", "The Near East", "The Islamic World." Analysts find it difficult to agree on the causes and institutionalizations of present tensions within the Islamic communities in Egypt and North Africa, in Turkey and the Middle East, and in the Holy Land. All agree that these tensions and conflicts are struggles over the very understanding of Islam. Many are the attempts to rediscover a heightened sense of religious ethnic identity in the face of encroaching Western secular ideas and patterns of behavior. You can call it an Islamic revival or resurgence, or a political return of the religious right, or a radical restoration of a Goden Age, or a renewed disciplined commitment to the fundamentals of God’s will as expressed in the Qur’an. And you can interpret the scene as a swelling thunder-cloud or an enlarging break of sunshine. In any case, it’s piety in politics, and politics in piety, and the extremist combination seriously threatens the peace process, and will threaten whatever be the ongoing condition of its resolution. |
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The Islamic ultra-religious right ties to constrain the leadership of Arafat’s Palestinian National Authority. It insists that God had given the entire Land, which includes intrusive Israel, as an Islamic religious trust or endowment (waqf) for all Muslim generations until the day of judgement. Relinquishing any part of this all-encompassing Palestine by hard-headed pragmatic bargaining for the sake of so-called peace is a selfish act of treason against past, present, and future Muslim generations, and worse, it is an arrogant disobedient act of blasphemy against Allah. God decides, man accepts. There is only one way (al-hal-wahid). No compromise. "Islam," after all means "submission." These radical restorationists are holy-Islamic warriors (mugahdun) who sanction intimidations, violence and terrorism against both Israeli Jews and fellow Palestinians. Their high profile causes anxiety for the large but less vocal majority of Muslims — those moderate, caring Palestinians who, in my experience, humbly give daily witness to the gentle side of Islam, in relations between themselves, and with their Christian and even Jewish neighbors. Since 1948, after centuries of adjusted living among a Muslim majority in the Land, Christians find a second majority — the Jewish, in a Jewish State, politically self-determined. But self-determination leads to the debate about the elusive self that is to be determined. The process still goes on in Israel after 50 years of reflective experience and introspection. Questions ever recur. "What is Zionism?", "What is Israel?", "How does Israel survive?", "How does the State relate to Jews who live elsewhere, especially those who have no intent to leave their countries to make the aliya to Israel?" "In a democratic state, how are the Jews to relate to fellow citizens who are not Jews?" These questions haunt the Jewish people and find conflicting answers within Israeli society — in what Hillel Neuer calls "the abyss of civil strife" ever since the PNA/Israel peace accords of Oslo I and II and their partial implementations. These very visible ideological and religious crises breed political radicalizations. Claims and counter-claims feed Jewish religious fundamentalists. A crude summary: These Religious Jews believe that Eretz Yisrael is the visible expression of the faithful God who wills by covenant the permanence of the Jewish people [klal], whether Jews live in Israel or elsewhere. Israel "is the beginning of the flowering of messianic redemption [resheet tzmihat geulateimu]". God commands the Jews to be the people of the entire Eretz Ysrael and to settle that entire land, and thus anticipate God’s blessing for all humankind — "a light to the nations." The spectacular Israeli victory of the Six Day War in June 1967 returned to Jewish control the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria — precisely what are now the West Bank territories. In faith, this almost miraculous act unfolded one more step in the process of God’s redemption of the divinely chosen Jewish people, in a Jewish nation which God does not intend to be, as secular Zionists had always hoped: "goy kekhol hagoyim" — a nation like other nations. Some extremists even claim that God wants Palestinians off the Land. God’s gift is only to the Jews, and only Jews should enjoy it. They quote one of their favorite biblical verses — from the Book of Numbers: "the people that dwells alone, and that will not be counted among the nations" (Num. 23:9). |
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Thus, the disposition of Judea and Samaria — an autonomous Palestinian entity, even another State, with a dismantling of several Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria — is explicitly a religious question: is God’s process of Redemption to go forward to its glorious conclusion? Or is God to be mocked, and the process to be tragically delayed or even halted by the decisions of Jewish government leaders? So an extreme answer was obscenely enfleshed. Among those same religious Jews who regarded the sabra Yitzhak Rabin a new Joshua when he had conquered Judea and Samaria in 1967 as the divinely blessed military commanding general, are those who three years ago had begun to call him a crypto-Canaanite, a neo-Nazi traitor of the Jewish people. Two years ago (Nov. 4, 1997), one of them, Yigal Amin, believed that he had the divine right and the duty to fire a dum-dum bullet into the heart of Rabin, the fellow Jew who shook hands with Arafat, and was leading the Jewish State out of its God-given patrimony into national suicide. Rabin, saint? Or Satan? Amin, saint or Satan? Bar-Ilan University released a survey, led by clinical psychologist David Green, on the reactions of Israeli teenagers (14-18), religious and secular, to the prime minister’s assassination. 27% of religious youth approved the murder and even identified with Yigal Amin. Only 4% of secular teenagers supported the assassination. Secular youth condemned, while the religious felt a sense of relief. The religious feared the peace process, the secular its uncertainty. Dr. Green concludes that "the traumatic event did not bring hearts closer, perhaps the contrary." In fact the murder seems to have driven more wedges between the religious and the secular youth [Ha’aretz, Oct. 28, 1997]. Independent from the secular and/or religious interpretation of the peace process is the internal tension over the societal implications of the question "Who is a Jew?" and its sub-questions: What and who is a religious Jew? At the establishment of Israel its founders needed a legal national status for Judaism. Otherwise Jews who would immigrate to the new State could easily identify themselves primarily by their original nationalities or political convictions. Judaism would be the primary common bond of Israelis. And common would be the rites of passage to full legal status within Israel. For this the State, by consensus, gave the legal authority to the Orthodox and to their interpretations of the halacha or rabbinic law. But in the last decade the question appeared on the political and legal agenda: Can Israel be hospitable to those other religious traditions of Judaism which are a small minority in the State but very much overshadowing the Orthodox in the rest of the world — the Conservative and the Reform? Can their rabbis in Israel also be legal interpreters and practitioners of the Jewish faith? These issues surfaced with a roar in recent weeks over the possible Supreme Court and Knesset legislation, called "the conversion bill." Is or is not a Gentile whose process of conversion is conducted in Israel by a Reform or Conservative rabbi a real Jew in Israel? Can or cannot a Reform or Conservative rabbi be on a religious council or court, even if the person be voted in by the local Jewish community? [You may not know that the State does not recognize marriages which a non-Orthodox rabbi performs in Israel, but it does recognize them if performed outside Israel, say, in nearby Cyprus,] |
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The rhetoric is obscenely heated. At an Ultra-Orthodox Shas political rally, Rabbi Yissacher Dov Rokach foresaw the future split within the Jewish people between "the believers in God and Torah, and the heretics who hate the Torah and Commandments." And Moshe Gafni, of the United Torah party, refused to sit in the same Knesset Law and Justice committee room with a few Conservative and Reform leaders, because the gesture would be "like watching a Torah being burned" [Jer. Report, July 10, 1997]. They are "not Jews", "not Zionists", but only "conditional Zionists." Christians enter the rhetoric indirectly. The Reform and Conservative adherents "are worse than Jesus." Furthermore, are non-religious or non-observant Jews truly Israelis, even if they compose some 80% of Israel society? What is religious freedom for such Jews in their democratic State; that is, freedom from civil coercion to be Orthodox-observant in such gutsy issues as marriage, divorce and remarriage, burial, Sabbath observances, kosher foods? The list is longer. These questions combine the general issue of Jewish unifying identity in Israel and in diaspora and the specific issue of religious identity in Israel. Claim the haredim of the religious parties: the way back to unity within the Jewish people is through the halacha — one standard for conversion, for marriage, for all details of Jewish religious life. Claims the other side: the public wants that freedom of choice which Jews already enjoy elsewhere, e.g. the United States. The new legislation would be "the open shot in a civil war within the Jewish people" (Avraham Burg, Jewish Agency chairman). Or as blunt-speaking President Ezer Weizman sums up the debate: "The last thing we need for the nation is to be split severely over an issue of religious tradition" [Ha’aretz, Oct. 29, 1997]. I place the entire list of issues, including the almost stalemate peace-process, at what Gertrude Himmelfarb calls "the dark and bloody crossroad where nationalism, politics and religion meet." The crisis of religious faith in Israel is precisely at this crossroad. Most Israeli Jews affirm their religious and ethical heritage while they dissociate themselves from the political manifestations of the religious establishment. Given political and demographic trends, no major party can form a stable government without a coalition that includes a haredi or religious party. With a present coalition of 23 votes of the Knesset’s 120, these religious political parties can easily hold an Israel coalition government hostage to their demands,, and the demands now extend beyond the unequal subsidies to yeshivas and public enforcement of the Sabbath and dietary observances. The crisis of religion, then, is more than the acknowledged corrosion of faith through secularisms which ignore or deny the Transcendent. It is a crisis about the positive and negative influences which religion wields in Israeli daily life; in particular the negative images religious parties create among Muslims and Christians, and among so many turned-off young Israeli-born Jews. |
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In this charged atmosphere Christians have cause for concern. Just a year ago, a poll taken by the Zionist Council in Israel revealed that two-thirds of Israelis believe that relations between religious and secular will only get worse (Jer. Post, Oct. 27, 1997). Most Israeli analysts foresee that once in the Middle East there be a peace-of-sorts, that is, a politically institutionalized tolerated co-existence with assured security, a then more inward-looking Israel will unleash new priorities in internal conflicts among Israeli Jews. Some woefully predict a much more open Kulturkampf, an inevitable cultural war which breaks apart the present fragile status quo between the minority religious establishment and the not-so-religious and secular majority. Local Christians will watch this new struggle. From the sidelines they wil be cheering on the secular wrestlers against their religious opponents, for the same reason they will support in a similar struggle those groups among the Islamic majority which press for the new Palestinian State to be secular. Is not this dynamic similar to what forged political stances of Jews when they welcomed completely secular States in Europe and North America? They supported anti-religious, anti-church French revolutionaries in the 18th century, and preferred the anti-clerical governments in a few Latin American governments. They rejoiced in the mid-19th century collapse of the papal states. [It was Garabaldi, not a pope, who canceled the restrictive laws which had confined Jews in the last ghetto in western Europe — in Rome]. Italian Jews voted Communist over and against the strongly Vatican-influenced Christian Democratic party in the decades following World War II, and in coalition with Italian Protestants, Jews pressed for a more tolerant Concordat of religious freedom and equality in a pluralistic Italy. Modern history demonstrates that when a church [read: a religious community] is wedded to secular power, in the long run religion and faith are the losers. Is Israel an exception? Or is the historian Clarence Lasby on target: the problem with history is not that people do not learn its lessons, but that they learn its wrong lessons? |
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