Near East Update

HAMAS and the Origins of the Muslim Brotherhood

2011-02-25T11:52:00.000-08:00

“HAMAS in the Context of the Historic Islamicization of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict”

Judith Mendelsohn Rood, Ph.D.
Department of History, Government, and Social Science
Biola University

Not to be Cited without Permission
© Judith Mendelsohn Rood

judith.rood@biola.edu

Abstract: Secular Palestinian nationalists and scholars have studied the emergence of the Islamic Resistance Movement, HAMAS, but few have paid attention to its characterization of Palestine as an Islamic waqf. Following Hamas’ successful ousting of Fatah from Gaza in 2006, Hamas has been gaining the upper hand in the West Bank and Jerusalem as well because of its continuation of armed resistance against Israel. Hamas’ political success must be understood as a success of the Muslim Brotherhood to repudiate the secular nationalist Palestinian movement. Should HAMAS’s position on land tenure in the Palestinian Authority, defined by the unfounded claim that all land in Palestine is waqf, new problems arise for the development of the secular Palestinian state and is already posing problems for individual municipalities on the West Bank. The ideologically driven Israeli policy in Jerusalem is again matched by ideological Islamist agenda.

Introduction
Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha has characterized HAMAS’s claim that Palestine is an Islamic waqf as “the main innovative idea” that the Islamic Resistance Movement has contributed to the Arab-Israel Conflict. However, to the contrary, the claim that all Palestine is waqf has been the official position of the Muslim Palestinian political establishment since before the days of the British Mandate. This claim, however, does not fit with the theory or practice of Islamic land tenure during any other period in Muslim history.
The HAMAS charter refers to the land of Palestine as “waqf” that is, set aside as an eternal charitable endowment for the Muslim community. This is exactly the concept that the infamous mufti of Jerusalem, al-Hajj Amin al-Husseini, used to oppose the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine at the time of the British Mandate, a policy that directly led to the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. Thus, the HAMAS position that the land of Palestine is an irrevocable waqf is the same position held by the mufti during the Mandate Period to outlaw Palestinian land sales to Jews, by the Jordanians from 1947-1967, by Palestinian secular nationalist groups, and by the Palestinian Authority today. Land sales to Jews are still defined as treason, and accused collaborators are punishable by death, a penalty often imposed extrajudicially.

Moreover, this was the position of the Muslim effendiyat (elite) of Jerusalem in the 19th century (they actually recognized that all of Palestine was not waqf, but consisted mostly of military land grants). The Ottoman authorities explicitly rejected their claim before the rise of political Zionism in order to encourage the growth of commerce in the region of Jerusalem.
However, now that HAMAS has become the Islamic Republic of Iran’s newest proxy, the claim is more dangerous than ever before. In this article, we will dissect the issue by defining the geographical, legal, and economic meanings of the terms used by HAMAS in order to disprove them strictly on the grounds of Islamic law and government during the Ottoman period. The 1988 Hamas Charter asserts in Article 11:
The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgment Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgment Day?

The failure of the Ottoman Empire to maintain and reform its financial and political policies in the face of changes in the international order in the nineteenth century led to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 and was capped by its calamitous decision to ally itself with Germany in the First World War, when the Empire was ultimately consigned to oblivion. Some Muslims confronted modern challenges to traditional Islam by focusing on the distant past, the Golden Age of the Rightly Guided Caliphs (Rashidun), or the Salafs, (ancestors). Those who seek to emulate these ancestors are called Salafis, and their movement is often referred to in Arabic as the Salafiyyah, and its first major ideologue was the Egyptian Rashid Rida.
Despite the lack of a political consensus among Palestinian Arabs about what form of government ought to be constituted following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, officials administering the major Palestinian Islamic institutions in Jerusalem under the British Mandate to the present day have adhered to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood inspired by Rida and articulated by the Hajj Amin al-Husseini and Hassan al-Banna in the 1930s. This continuity was masked throughout the periods of Hashemite and Israeli rule as the world’s focus was on the emergence of the secular nationalist Palestinian Liberation Organization and its associated rivals. From a minority position that emerged following the First World War in the Middle East, the claim that Palestine is waqf has been widely accepted in the Muslim discourse following the failures of the secularists to win the battle against Israel by the mid-1990s.

The Muslim link to Palestine is through Jerusalem, based upon the identity of the Dome of the Rock with the Night Journey and Ascension to Heaven of Muhammad, described in the Quran as happening only at the indeterminate “Furthest Mosque,” which traditionally has been identified with Jerusalem. The reason for the journey to the “Furthest Mosque” was for Muhammad to ascend to heaven to meet with Moses and the biblical prophets on the site of the Temple, where the Sakinah (Arabic) or Shechina (Hebrew), (the Glory of God) had once rested. To the consternation of well-educated Muslims worldwide, officials in charge of the Islamic institutions in Jerusalem serving the Palestinian National Authority, established May 4, 1994, took the position of HAMAS even further, stating that the Temple of Solomon itself was not located in Jerusalem. Ikramah Sabri, the then mufti of Jerusalem, said that “There is no evidence that Solomon’s Temple was in Jerusalem; probably it was in Bethlehem or in some other place.” He was also quoted as saying: "There is not [even] the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple on this place in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history." This assertion was made despite the existence of a well-known pamphlet for tourists published in 1935 by the Islamic authorities themselves, pointing out that it is “beyond dispute” that the Dome of the Rock sits on the site of Solomon’s Temple. The issue was so provocative that the Shaykh of Al-Azhar, the head of Islam’s most venerable and greatest religious university, in an article entitled “Does Solomon’s Temple Exist Under the Current Al-Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem?” published in Al-Ahram, November 2, 2000, felt compelled to explain its importance to his people. Yasser Arafat echoed this claim repeatedly until his death, and FATAH officials have continued to do so to this day, in total agreement with HAMAS, in order to deny any Jewish claims to the holy site.

In July, 2009 Avi Diskin, head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), told the Israeli cabinet that “Egyptian cleric Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi of the Muslim Brotherhood "had allocated some $25 million for the purchase of property and to build Hamas charitable institutions that would expand the group's reach in Jerusalem." This activity points to the importance of properly understanding the evidence in the Islamic law records relating to the historic role of the Islamic institutions in administering Islamic awaqf in practical and political terms in order to prove that such claims cannot be substantiated according to Islamic law.

I. The Conquest of the Arab Provinces and Ottoman Empire Land Tenure
According to Hamas’ charter, the Islamic claim to eternal sovereignty over “Palestine” resides in the very fact of the Islamic conquest.
This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgment.

It happened like this: When the leaders of the Islamic armies conquered Syria and Iraq, they sent to the Caliph of the Moslems, Umar bin-el-Khatab, asking for his advice concerning the conquered land - whether they should divide it among the soldiers, or leave it for its owners, or what? After consultations and discussions between the Caliph of the Moslems, Omar bin-el-Khatab and companions of the Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, it was decided that the land should be left with its owners who could benefit by its fruit. As for the real ownership of the land and the land itself, it should be consecrated for Moslem generations till Judgment Day. Those who are on the land, are there only to benefit from its fruit. This Waqf remains as long as earth and heaven remain. Any procedure in contradiction to Islamic Sharia, where Palestine is concerned, is null and void.

This understanding, however, is incorrect and cannot be justified according to Islamic law as it was practiced “in Palestine” under the Ottomans, and before them the Mamluks and the Ayyubids, stretching back to the conquests of Salah al-Din in 1187 and even to the peaceful submission to the third Caliph, Umar, of Jerusalem in 636 by the Patriarch Sophronious. One of the hallmarks of Salafi teaching, which is at the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood, is that since the previous regimes which have ruled the Muslim world were not truly Islamic, the history of their governance and laws cannot be held to have correctly followed the Shariah, and therefore cannot be used to determine proper Islamic policies. This willful amnesia was repudiated by the Ottomans during the Wahhabist rebellions in Arabia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but since the end of the First World War there has been no Muslim authority powerful enough to challenge the Salafists today, as we have learned since 9/11.
The Ottomans followed a well-articulated Sunni system of imperial land tenure based on the Levitical concept that asserts that God is the owner of the land, and the state and its subjects are but its possessors, who are to use of it justly for the benefit of its subjects. As such, the sovereign had the right to dispose of the land—to utilize it for its peoples’ benefit—as he saw fit within the administrative laws of the empire. The right of usufruct, as the scholars name it, is earned by properly using the property—keeping it productive—and ensuring that the state can tax its produce so that it will be able to sustain the safety and prosperity of its subjects.
The root of Ottoman identification of Jerusalem with Mecca and Medina lay both in their status as the three holy cities of Islam and in their juridical status following the original Muslim conquest of Syria. At an assembly in the Syrian military camp at Jabiya in 637, the Caliph 'Umar declared the lands which surrendered unconditionally to his armies as fay, (lands that would pay tribute to the central government, and which were to be held as a perpetual trust for all Muslims). Thus, Syria and Iraq were regarded as lands subject to the kharaj (land tax assessed upon non-Muslim landholders). According to the Jabiya agreement, revenue from the conquered territories was to be collected and given to the central government, and those who had participated in the campaigns of expansion would be enrolled in the diwan (imperial) registers. Those so enrolled would be entitled to fixed stipends and land grants. The lands were thus not divided and parceled out among the military, but instead were controlled directly by the central government. Muslims would not settle these lands and pay the ushr (land tax assessed on Muslim proprietors, i.e., the tithe): rather, the original inhabitants would remain on their property, but would pay the kharaj.
Under Islamic law, fay lands were thus held by the state, but its use was left in the possession of their inhabitants, who paid tribute from the revenues of the land to the central treasury of the state. Over the course of time the population increasingly became Muslim. The distinction between Hijazi and Syrian Muslims blurred, and the Muslims of Syria began, in effect, to pay the kharaj along with the non-Muslims because they lived on conquered lands worked by non-Muslims. When the Mamluk territories, encompassing the later Ottoman provinces of Sidon, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Tripoli (Libyan), Bengazi, the Hijaz, and Yemen, were conquered by the Ottomans, they were exempted from paying the normal miri (imperial land) taxes because of their status as kharaj land, unlike the Hijaz and Basra, which were categorizied as provinces paying the ushr tax.

The Ottomans, after their conquest of the Arab provinces and the creation of the Eyalet (Province) of Damascus during the years 1517-1520, recognized existing practices regarding the taxation of arable land in the Province of Damascus. In keeping with the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, upon their conquest of the Arab provinces, the Ottomans declared these conquered territories as belonging to the bayt mal al-muslimin (the common treasury of the state), to be used for the benefit of all Muslims, and by extension, the dhimmis, or protected minorities living among them. As such, under the Ottomans, the conquered lands of Syria continued to be considered kharaj lands whose usufruct could be granted or leased out in the name of the bayt al-mal by the Sultan as imam (leader), of the Muslim community.

The Ottomans organized the systems administering awqaf, timars (military land grants), and iltizams/malikanes (tax farms) on the varying types of land that they conquered. The Ottomans also had a well-articulated system for administering trade, and all other forms of production and property, based upon the sixteenth century Siyasetname (Administrative Law Code) of Sulayman the Magnificent. Devised by the brilliant Ebu Su’ud Effendi, the Shaykh al-Islam (Chief Jurisconsult of the Empire) based upon the Shari’ah and the Qanun (administrative law), this code stipulated that land could be disposed of (in the legal sense of disposition or use) in three ways: it could be assigned as a grant in return for military service, it could be leased directly to cultivators, or it could be held in perpetual trust for the Muslim subjects of the empire as waqf. Many parcels of land throughout the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces were divided and subdivided into fractions, some of which were assigned as military estates and some of which were assigned as waqf, while other portions may have been private property or shared pasture land. The land tenure system was designed to prevent the permanent alienation of land from the state, with one single exception: the assignment of land by the Sultan to an individual as milk (private property). This property always would revert ultimately to the state upon the death of the owner and his descendants.

During much of the Ottoman period, the city of Jerusalem was administered as a part of the Province of Damascus following the pattern of the classical timar system—some land in Jerusalem’s hinterlands was granted to military officers in return for their service to the Sultan. Other lands, recognized as property held as waqf by the Greek Orthodox Church (and a few others as well) under previous Muslim dynasties (the Ayyubids and the Mamluks), were integrated into the Ottoman administration. The city was the capital of the sanjaq of Jabal al-Quds (the administrative district of the mountains of Jerusalem). Other sanjaqs of the southern part of the Provinces of Sidon and Damascus—Jabal Nablus, Gaza, Jaffa, Ramla, Lydda, Acre, Hebron, Sidon, Jenin, Tulkarem, Karak—were all tied to Jerusalem through the legal system, evidenced by documents regarding cases from these towns scattered throughout the Ottoman Islamic court registers.

The sanjaq of Jerusalem and the mountainous lands of the sanjaq of Nablus (Jabal Nablus) were distinguished geographically from what is called in the court registers "the land of Palestine" (ard filastin) encompassing the towns of Gaza, Ramla, and Lydda (Lod). This distinction tallies with the description of Palestine given by Volney in the late eighteenth century, who described it as a geographical unit including all of the land "between the Mediterranean to the West and the chain of mountains to the East, and two lines, one drawn to the South, by Khan Younes, and the other to the North, between Kaisaria [Caesarea] and the rivulet of Yafa [Jaffa]." He noted that Palestine was "almost entirely a level plain, without either river or rivulet in summer, but watered by several torrents in winter" and that it was "a district independent of every pashalic [sanjaq]," which occasionally had "governors of its own, who reside at Gaza under the title of Pashas; but it is usually, as at present, divided into three appanages, or melkana, viz. Yafa, Loudd [Lydda/Lod] and Gaza.”

Thus, the term ard filastin, "the land of Palestine," was used during the Ottoman period to refer specifically to a geographical area in agricultural use and divided into tax farms, whether administered as independent sanjaqs or attached to adjacent sanjaqs. Historically this land was controlled directly by the central government in Istanbul by leasing it to Ottoman officers. In the period before the invasion, 'Abdullah Pasha, governor of Sidon, obtained the lease. The important point here is that a significant portion of the rich agricultural lands identified in the Islamic court records dating from the Ottoman period as “Palestine” were not attached to the imperial awqaf of Jerusalem, and thus were not administered by the notables of the city representing the Ottoman government, but directly by the Ottoman government in Istanbul. To the south lay Hebron, sometimes nominally a part of the sanjaq of Jerusalem, but in fact a rebellious and nearly autonomous town with a powerful and militant leadership of its own.

In Jerusalem, the Ottomans administered Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock together with the Waqf of the Two Noble Sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina (al-Haramayn al-Sharifayn). This admininstrative feature explains the relative unimportance of Jerusalem in the Ottoman Empire. Since the three cities were organized for purposes of revenue as one institution, and since the Ottomans placed a higher degree of importance on Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem was overshadowed in an institutional sense. Nevertheless, its rank as the third holiest city did confer status and important privileges to the ulama (learned authorities) who served as administrators of the imperial awqaf there. One of the most important posts in the city was the shaykh al-haram, (the superintendent of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa). Moreover, al-Aqsa had its own waqf, as did other mosques, tombs, schools, hospices, etc., which received revenues from many shops, agricultural lands, and other income-producing urban and rural properties throughout Bilad al-Sham which were dedicated and assigned to them.
In the sixteenth century, the wife of Sulayman the Magnificent, originally a Christian from somewhere in the Russian Empire, endowed the Khasseki Sultan imaret (foundation, waqf) with Greek Orthodox church properties in the vicinity of Bethlehem, Lydda and Ramla. The Palestinian National Authority still recognizes this fact, and the Christian tenants and sharecroppers who have resided on these lands still are not the legal landowners. The financial support of the Holy Cities, and the annual hajj pilgrimage, obviously were not solely a Palestinian responsibility. Financial obligations were imposed not only on towns and villages in the administrative districts of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Hebron, but also on other cities throughout the empire, including Damascus, Aleppo and cities in Anatolia and the Balkans. The Waqf of Sayyidna Ibrahim al-Khalil (Abraham, the Beloved Friend of God, as he is known to Muslims) located in Hebron, and known in the West as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, held claim to the revenues of many southern Palestinian villages and agricultural lands and was administered as a part of the other important imperial awqaf. Peasants living on lands dedicated to the support of these awqaf were among those exempted from paying the miri (imperial land tax, or kharaj)—instead, they paid to support the Hajj and the Haramayn awqaf. For example, taxes (payable in kind) were assessed on land held as awqaf by the Greek Orthodox church in Bethlehem and its neighboring villages throughout the district of Jerusalem. Such lands—and this means most of the arable lands in Bethlehem, for example— are still categorized in this manner to this day. This fact has the Christians living in these regions are literally caught between a rock and a hard place today—their village lands are still categorized as waqf with double ownership: the Greek Orthodox Church, which is the owner of the use of the property and the property itself, and the Khasseki Sultan Waqf, which claims a share of the produce of the land. This complicated situation has allowed the Israelis to confiscate what they call abandoned state lands in the West Bank, which in the past were administered by the Porte, and by Hamas, which now claims all property is waqf, belonging to the Muslim community.

The sharecroppers and tenants who worked these lands never received the “tapu” registration required for private land under the Ottoman Land Law of 1858 because these lands were waqf. Moreover, unworked land lapsed after three years into the category of mawat, (waste lands), which the Israelis also claim to have the right to confiscate, as against the HAMAS claim that all land in Palestine belongs to the Muslim community as waqf, no matter its condition. Under Ottoman law, to the contrary, a tenant who brought dead lands into cultivation could claim it as mulk, or freehold land. And if there was a time of political instability, peasants could leave the region until calm was restored within three years without losing their claim to land that they had improved. None of these laws is still in effect today.
Some two-thirds of the actual sum of the jizya (per capital poll tax on non-Muslim dhimmis) revenues collected in the district of Jerusalem in the first half of the nineteenth century ended up in the hands of the provincial governor of Damascus, who at the time also served as the amir alhajj, the commander of the hajj caravan from that city. It followed that the Porte would entrust this official with the collection and disbursement of the jizya. In other words, under the Ottomans, taxes paid by Jews and Christians in Jerusalem and its environs actually were sent outside of their territories to support the pilgrimage caravan to the Muslim Holy Cities in the Hijaz and the Haramayn Waqf.

Jerusalem, governed within the framework of Ottoman provincial administration, derived its status, then, from Muslim land law, but was not identified with Palestine under Ottoman rule. During the period of Sultan Mahmud II's reforms in the 1820s, the Ottomans explicitly identified the Muslim sanctuary in the city of Jerusalem, and its important imperial awqaf, with the exempted Sharifate (the Office of the Descendants of the Prophet) of Mecca and Medina (known to the Ottomans and other Muslims as the Haramayn (the Two Sanctuaries). Unlike current Palestinian usage of the term, during the Ottoman period "haramayn" did not refer to the al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, or to the buildings of the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem and the Tomb of Ibrahim al-Khalil (Cave of Machpelah) in Hebron, each of which had their own awqaf in addition to becoming attached to the Haramayn waqf during the centralization of religious institutions under a new ministry by the Ottomans in the nineteenth century.
The term traditionally had a specific meaning to Muslims, including the Ottomans: it referred only to the Holy Cities of the Hijaz. Jerusalem was called "thalith al-haramayn," (the third after the Two Holy Places). When, near the end of his life in 1566, Sulayman the Magnificent dedicated additional revenues and produce from throughout Bilad al-Sham (the Syrian Provinces of the Ottoman Empire) in support of the Khasseki Sultan Waqf (The Endowment of His Beloved Wife), for example, one of the titles he used to describe himself was "khadim al-Haramayn" “Servant of the Two Holy Cities,” referring to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Indeed, this relationship was manifested in the special fiscal relationship of Jerusalem with the Haramayn that was central to Ottoman administration of the city, particularly during the reform period of Mahmud II, all the way up to the Turkish defeat in the First World War in 1917 and the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate on March 3, 1924.

Therefore, what was actually “waqf” were some lands scattered, throughout the empire: some of which belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church, which had to pay the jizya and kharaj taxes on lands it leased to peasants to work. These individuals had to pay taxes, including a land tax as a portion of the produce to support the waqf which funded the Hajj Pilgrimage and the four Muslim sanctuaries of Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and Hebron. “Palestine” therefore was most definitely NOT a waqf under Islamic or Ottoman law. It was governed completely separately under the military land grant system and its lands were leased as iltizam/malikane (tax-farms).

II. Awqaf Under Ottoman Control

Under Islamic law, a waqf is a legal entity, comprising land or property whose revenues are set aside to benefit the entire Muslim community and its non-Muslim inhabitants who were considered as having joined the ummah by agreeing to accept Islamic rule. It has long been thought that this stipulation meant that such trusts were endowed for charitable purposes, and that it was the charitable purpose of such awqaf which made them valid and sound under Islamic and Ottoman law. However, that is not the case. A valid Islamic waqf, the waqf sahih, came to mean an endowment that is made from lands that pay the ushr or kharaj tax. The meaning of the waqf in the Ottoman context is that such lands can never be permanently alienated from the central treasury of the Islamic state—bayt mal al-muslimin. Property and land so endowed thus became in essence inalienable, removed from legal transfer, as church property is in the West. Since the ownership of such property ultimately belongs to God, only the use of the property, and the produce and revenues that it yields can be allotted to the beneficiaries of the waqf. The logic of this arrangement is based on the Islamic notion of the common good of the people residing in a just state, whose resources are exploited and protected for the benefit of all Muslims.

In the mid-1820s, Sultan Mahmud II began to implement reforms in waqf administration throughout the empire. He sought to reassert direct state control over all awqaf in the empire, based upon the formal recognition of the previously uncodified, but inherent distinction between canonically valid and invalid awqaf. This distinction was always inherent in the Ottoman system: Mahmud formalized it in order to reassert control of all miri—state lands in the empire. From this period onward, under Ottoman law, there were two officially recognized forms of awqaf: waqf sahih (the valid waqf ) and the waqf ghayr sahih (invalid waqf). Valid awqaf were made from lands paying the kharaj and the ushr, and thus were located in Syria, Iraq, and the Hijaz. Invalid endowments, however, reassigned revenues due to the treasury ostensibly for some religious or charitable purpose or a specific purpose by which awqaf could legitimately be established. There were three types of the "invalid" awqaf accepted by the Ottomans until 1825. The first type allowed the revenues of land to be made waqf, while the substance of the land, and its right of use and possession, were kept by the treasury; the second, the right of use is given as waqf, while the substance and revenues remain with the treasury; and the third type assigned both possession and revenue to the waqf, while the substance remains with the treasury. Under Ottoman administrative law after 1826, all awqaf not falling under the category of sahih were deemed invalid, since they were established upon land that had been alienated at some point from imperial lands. It is often thought that charitable and religious trusts were valid because they were established for ostensibly religious or charitable purposes. However, this is a misplaced assumption that has caused great confusion in the interpretation of the institution of the waqf in the Ottoman period. What is important is not the purpose of the waqf, nor the type of possession, but the nature of the land in the Ottoman system of land tenure.

These reforms reiterated that the lands of Syria, including the sanjaq of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Sidon were not waqf. That this was the clear situation is the Ottoman response to a request made on 28 May 28, 1837 recorded in the registers of the Islamic court in Jerusalem. The governing council (majlis) of Jerusalem asserted in a petition asking the Sultan to bar a group of Ashkenazi Jews from conducting trade in the city because “the lands of this region are miri and waqf.” The Muslim authorities of the city clearly understood that the land in the region was state land, and that some of it had been set aside as waqf. This request the Porte denied.
Indeed, in other cases, the Porte ruled that foreigners could purchase waqf property in order to restore it to productivity and usefulness. When the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and the Turks surrendered and withdrew from its Arab provinces, the Muslim community no longer had a Muslim sovereign whose legitimacy they accepted as the ultimate authority to decide political questions. When the Ottoman Caliphate was abolished, the problem of sovereignty thus became the basic political issue facing Muslims: should Islamic control be restored over the former Arab provinces, and if so, how should it be constituted?

The Turkish defeat led to the de facto separation of the Palestinian, Syrian and Hijazi elements of the Haramayn Waqf. Thereafter, the term in Palestinian usage came to mean first, Jerusalem and Hebron, referring to the two sanctuaries—Al-Aqsa and Sayyidna Khalil. After 1948, when Hebron went under Hashemite sovereignty, the term “Haramayn” came to refer to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.

III. Enter The Muslim Brotherhood
The Muslim Brotherhood is a modern ideological movement that was founded in Egypt in 1928. Ideologically it was shaped by the anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism in Egypt and the Middle East generally, and by the Arab-Jewish conflict in mandatory Palestine specifically. The Muslim Brotherhood has long been the most important of the Sunni opposition groups in the Arab world. Its aim is to reestablish the Caliphate and to govern according to the Shariah. While legal in Transjordan and then Jordan, it has been banned in Egypt and Syria, where it threatens to overthrow the current regimes. Violent splinter groups of the Brotherhood have arisen worldwide. Rashid Rida, Hassan al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb are the chief ideologues of the movement. They sought to create a vanguard to oppose the secularization of Islamic society, which they thought was accelerated through the introduction of imperialism, capitalism, Zionism, socialism, and communism in the period leading up to the First World War.
The Salafi Movement, and therefore the Muslim Brotherhood rejects all Muslim regimes since the death of ‘Ali as illegitimate and un-Islamic, and of all of these, considers the Ottoman Empire the most illegitimate. The Wahhabi doctrine has been at the heart of Saudi Arabian identity since its first irruption in 1740 when they rejected the legitimacy of the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs remember Turkish rule as a time of oppression and subjugation. Arab nationalist animosity regarding the historic legacy of the Ottomans burns hot to this day: from this perspective, the Ottoman defeat was at once a judgment on the Turks and a challenge to the Arabs, who struggled between the various ideological options available to them in the period between the world wars and thereafter. The entire twentieth century framed the failures of all of their ideological movements to solve the political dilemmas posed to the Arabs by the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
The Saudis and the Hashemite Jordanians competed for most of the last century over which dynasty could legitimately claim to be the rightful guardian of the Islamic Holy Cities: Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The impact of this competition was to further fragment the Arab Muslim political consensus over the fate of the lands entrusted by the League of Nations to the British in the form of a mandate to govern the region until its inhabitants were ready for self-governance. When King Hussein ultimately relinquished his claims to the West Bank and Jerusalem in 1988, leaving the PLO to administer their Islamic institutions, Yasser Arafat actually had to make dual appointments of key Islamic positions. Both Jordanian- and Saudi-approved officials initially served the Palestinian National Authority, since the PLO needed to assuage both powers in order to continue to receive their financial—and political support. Only when it became clear that Arafat had thrown in his lot with the Iranians during the Karina incident in the midst of the Al-Aqsa Intifada did both Saudi Arabia and Jordan abandon the PA. Since Arafat’s death, both Saudi Arabia and Jordan have been cooperating with the PA in order to attempt to rein in HAMAS and keep Iran out. They have not succeeded.

IV. The Islamicization of the Palestinian Resistance
The British, who invented a status quo in Palestine by creating de novo an Islamic administration in Palestine by placing in the office of the “mufti” Hajj Amin al-Hussayni, who engineered the policies that generated the dominant, and most radical, Arab response to Zionism. His fingerprints are all over the Islamic administration in Jerusalem even today. The fact that the mufti’s religious polemic led to the Nakba, the catastrophic Arab defeat in 1948, was precisely the reason that the Palestinian liberation movement reframed its opposition to Israel in terms of secular Arab nationalism.

The Islamicization of the Palestinian resistance to Zionism began with the British creation of the office of “Grand Mufti” in 1918 and the appointment of Hajj Amin as mufti in 1922. Traditionally, a mufti is a religious authority, or jurisconsult, who issues decisions relating to Islamic law. Under the British Mandate, for the first time the mufti became the highest Muslim official in Palestine. He was also named president of the newly created Supreme Muslim Council, becoming the officially recognized religious and political leader of the Palestinian Arabs. The fact that the mufti and his policies were opposed by the majority of the Palestinian Arabs for many different reasons, including those who took exception to his interpretation of Islam and Zionism, has emerged in Palestinian and Zionist historiography only recently.

Hajj Amin, whose influence on Palestinian political culture remains profound to this day, was deeply influenced by Rashid Rida, the leading Islamist teacher when he was a young man. As a soldier in the Ottoman army he was stationed in Smyrna where he witnessed the Turkish extermination of the Armenians, an event that left him deeply impressed by Turkish racial nationalism. He traveled to Damascus to support Faisal, who had declared an Arab state in Syria only to be expelled by France. On Amin’s return to Palestine in 1921 he soon became involved in riots against the Balfour Declaration and Jewish immigration. He became a fugitive from British justice for his radical politics, but then was nevertheless pardoned, and placed in control of all former Ottoman awqaf properties and the Islamic court bureaucracy in Jerusalem and throughout Palestine by Herbert Samuel, the High Commissioner of the British Mandate. The mufti, however, had had no Islamic religious training or certification as a member of the ulama, the Muslim officials trained and authorized to make religious decisions in the Islamic world.
At first, the mufti may have been hopeful that the British would treat the Arabs in Palestine fairly. While he was working on building an Arab Islamic university in the Mamilla district in West Jerusalem adjacent to the site of a Muslim cemetery in the late ‘20s, he worked with Jewish architects and construction crews to build the Palace Hotel, which he envisioned as a business whose profits would fund the university. The cemetery actually extended further than was then known, as the builders discovered when they began excavating to lay the foundation of the new hotel. The mufti sought to change the purpose of the waqf, endowed by Salah al-Din after his siege of the city in 1187 in order to build the campus, including the hotel. Thus, despite the fact that he worked closely with Jews while he was leading the Arab Higher Committee’s building program, early on his attitude towards them changed. He also rejected and dissolved the secular-nationalist Moslem-Christian Associations and began emphasizing the idea that the Palestine was waqf—the possession of the Muslim ummah in perpetuity. In the absence of Muslim sovereignty during the Mandate, he merged the idea of waqf , the kind of property that the Muslim authorities had administered before 1917, with the idea of state land (timar), a factor in 1837 but no longer. Amin began collaborating with Hassan al-Banna, considered the father of the Muslim Brotherhood, in 1935. The mufti thus articulated the idea that Palestine itself is a “waqf” sometime between 1929, when the Palace Hotel opened, and 1935, when they founded the Muslim Brotherhood in support of the Arab Higher Committee’s opposition to Zionism. Hajj Amin was able to rally a force of about two thousand Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood volunteers who fought in the Negev against the nascent Israeli state, and to field a Palestinian militia under the leadership of Qassam al-Ahmad, who was killed at Qastel and who has become the eponymous inspiration for the armed brigade of Hamas today.

Following the Mandate Period, the administration of Muslim institutions in Palestine shifted to the Transjordanian Ministry of Religious Foundations. Transjordan had de facto sovereignty over al-Haram al-Sharif (aka the Temple Mount) and paid the salaries of the Muslim officials employed in the Islamic court. The Muslim Brotherhood became the channel for Salafi ideas during this time. Outlawed for decades in Egypt and Syria, after 1948 clandestine cells operated in Muslim towns and villages in the West Bank and Gaza under Jordanian rule, even when the cells in Egypt and Syria were practically wiped out. However, as a result of the 1948 war, Transjordan took possession of the Temple Mount and the administration of waqf properties and the Islamic courts in the West Bank as protector and guardian of the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem and Haram al-Khalil in Hebron in 1950. Thus the Hashemite dynasty administered the Islamic institutions in Jerusalem until 1988, when King Hussein relinquished his sovereign claim to the Palestinian National Authority.
In 1964, President Gamal abd al-Nasser, Egypt, created the Palestinian Liberation Organization to fight a guerilla war against Israel. The PLO’s Muslim leadership included members of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the majority were secular nationalists, many of whom were nominal Christians. For the next thirty years, the PLO waged battle ostensibly with the support of the majority of all Palestinians, and, although the corruption and authoritarian nature of Arafat’s rule became well-known, they were willing to overlook his flaws in order to present a unified front against Israel, to share in his increasing power and international status, and to hold onto some sense of dignity. Egypt took over the Gaza Strip in 1948 using what Nasser claimed was the “State of Palestine” to infiltrate groups of Palestinian fighters into Israel until his ignominious defeat in 1967.

In the 1970s and early 80s, Israel permitted Saudi Arabia to fund an alternative group of Muslim administrators and officials, which eventually led to the establishment of the Islamic Resistance Movement, HAMAS, as the Gazan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. HAMAS emerged as an alternative to the failed policies of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, FATAH in the late 1980s. For the employees of the court, like many Palestinian Muslims, many of whom were sympathetic to, if not members of the Muslim Brotherhood, this was an exciting development, an opportunity for those who had remained under Israeli occupation to regain some of the power that the “outsiders” –the PLO—had asserted over them, the “insiders” who had steadfastly endured under the Israeli “occupation.” Discussions surrounding the disposition of Saudi Arabian charity from the PLO via SAMED—the “Steadfastness Fund” which provided social services to the Palestinian poor, widows, and orphans, and the sick—to the nascent HAMAS organization were intense. SAMED: Palestinian Martyrs Works Society – established in 1970 to provide vocational training to the children of Palestinian martyrs; played an important role - in the 1970s and 1980s, and especially during the First Intifada - in the economic and social welfare infrastructure of the Palestinian communities.

The emergence of HAMAS in the mid-1980s resulted from a Faustian bargain the Israelis made with the Saudis, allowing them to build mosques and provide social services through funds and personnel as a counterbalance to the PLO. Some people even suspect that an Israeli agent helped to name the movement—pronounced in Hebrew as “KHamas,” which means “terror” –to make the message clear. Dividing the Palestinians along ideological lines certainly has been advantageous to those Israelis and Palestinians who oppose negotiating a settlement. The homicide bombings and their inevitable reprisals have made Palestinians and Israelis pay a heavy price for this political decision. The resulting polarization has hastened the re-Islamicization of Palestinian society. It has also prevented the PLO from achieving any tangible political goals and reignited virulent anti-Semitism.

Popular Palestinian frustration with the corrupt and ineffective PLO, exiled into seeming oblivion in Tunis in 1982, particularly in the years before the First Intifada of the Stones (1987-2002), enabled HAMAS to emerge in 1986 as the most robust political rival to the PLO. On July 28, 1988 King Hussein of Jordan relinquished the Hashemite claim to Jerusalem, as well as the right to govern the West Bank or the Palestinians. The Islamic court employees were now to be paid by the PLO, preparing the way for the Palestinian National Authority, led by the PLO, to take over the administration of Islamic institutions in Jerusalem. Weakened by the war in Lebanon, its Tunisian exile, and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 the PLO committed itself to the peace process just as HAMAS began to emerge as a political force.

Meanwhile, during the Iraq War of 1990, Arafat had thrown his support behind Saddam Hussein, thereby incurring the wrath of Saudi Arabia. After a short period of time, during which there were two parallel groups of Muslim officials in the PNA, one Jordanian-trained and one Saudi-trained, the Palestinians chose the Saudis in order to placate them. These developments solidified the position of HAMAS in Palestinian Islamic institutions, and explain the intricate connections between FATAH/PNA and HAMAS during the al-Aqsa Intifada in the early 2000s.

What the Israelis did not expect was the cooptation of the Islamists by the PLO, which lasted until the death of Arafat. The Al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000 was characterized by a vicious cycle of suicide bombings and Israeli reprisals, which, along with the corruption and tyranny of Arafat, destroyed law and order in the territories. With his passing, the time had come for HAMAS to challenge its “brother” resistance movement by leveraging Iranian support via Syria. The resulting complete breakdown of civil society in Palestine was the tragic legacy of the Oslo Peace Process. Eventually, to the horror of Palestinian moderates who supported a two-state agreement with Israel, including many members of the PLO, an overwhelming majority democratically elected HAMAS to power in Gaza January 6, 2006.

Under the shadow of an increasingly belligerent Iran, a belated, and failed, Saudi attempt to forge a moderate coalition of the PLO and HAMAS was followed by the brutal expulsion of the PLO from Gaza on June 15, 2007. HAMAS is now completely under the control of Tehran, according to former Palestinian Foreign Minister Ziyad Abu Amr, the Palestinian scholar-diplomat who failed to convince HAMAS to recognize Israel and engage in diplomacy under the aegis of Saudi Arabia.

The ideology that has driven Israeli policy in Jerusalem and the West Bank for more than four decades, especially the suppression of the emergence of municipal self-government in the Arab villages of East Jerusalem and the neglect of the Arab inhabitants in the Occupied Territories, has undermined moderate Palestinians who sought a negotiated peace. The Second Intifada resulted in the breakdown of Palestinian society, including its legal, political, and social institutions. The violence of the Israeli response has radicalized the Palestinians even more, because the deaths of many innocent victims—family members, friends, and neighbors—who now include everyone in Gaza— are indelibly imprinted in Palestinian minds. The re-Islamicization of the conflict, enabled by the belief that their only alternative is armed struggle is almost universal among both Muslim and Christian Palestinians that I spoke with during my most recent trip to Bethlehem. The first, the Intifada of the Stones, began as a non-violent tax revolt in Bethlehem soon turned violent when Islamists took control of the narrative. The catastrophic Islamist Al-Aqsa Intifada, characterized by the collaboration of the PLO with HAMAS, has just barely been quelled on the West Bank, where the PNA is achieving a semblance of law and order. However, the foreboding calls for “Days of Rage” called for by members of the Palestinian cabinet illustrate how easily the current campaign of non-violence could easily dissolve into another armed uprising. However, there is another dimension to this situation.
Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the “Nakba” (“Catastrophe”) in which 600,000 Christian and Muslim Arabs lost their homes, the Palestinian national movement was basically secular. It is still politically incorrect to focus on sectarian identities in discussing Palestinian politics, primarily because Palestinian Christians desire to be understood as in fraternal solidarity with Muslim Palestinians against Zionism. The ahistorical claim that Palestine is waqf however, now represents a very real threat to the historically Christian communities on the West Bank and in Jerusalem. In March 2010, Palestinian activists are resurrecting the 1970s/80s concept of “sumud” (“solidarity”) to frame the third, ostensibly non-violent, “Al-Quds” (“Jerusalem”) Intifada, which has been called in the wake of Israeli settlement projects in East Jerusalem.
As Asma Afsarrudin, Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame has rightly asserted,

...although the system of dhimma (literally, protection) extended to Jews and Christians was considered sufficiently humane in pre-Modern Muslim societies, today it would rightly be considered as plainly discriminatory and unjust within the modern state system, which defines citizenship not by faith but on the basis of birthplace and residence.

This view, however, is under direct attack by HAMAS, which seeks to establish an Islamic state governed by Islamic law. Following the April 2, 2002 takeover of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem by the al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade/Tanzim and the punitive Israeli attacks on that town during the duration of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, the position of moderates in the West Bank became extremely tenuous. With the takeover of HAMAS in Gaza, the situation deteriorated completely. And, as Benny Morris argues, the maximalist Muslim position, that all Palestine is waqf, is at its heart the same jihadist position that has characterized Arab opposition to Israel all along.

V. Alternative Interpretations
War between Muslims and Jews is not inevitable. Muslim moderates are challenging the ideologically-driven Islamist apologetic against Israel. The most important one is Imam Abdul-Hadi Palazzi, Secretary-General of the Italian Muslim Association and Director of the Institute of the Italian Islamic Community, who has been calling for a revitalization of traditional Sunni Islam. He has taken aim at the historical amnesia of the Islamist movement. In his response to the 2001 statement made by the mufti of Jerusalem denying Jewish ties to the Haram al-Sharif, Palazzi wrote that Sabri “is representative of those [Muslims] who repudiate “… the Jewish heritage [of Islam] as a whole, with the clear attempt even to remove it from historical memory.” Muslims are so ignorant of their own history that they are “really inclined to take these words for granted, notwithstanding the fact that they contradict both historical evidence and Islamic sources.” He argues against the Salafi claim that Palestine is an Islamic waqf by revisiting the issues surrounding the Night Journey.
To remember the historical milieu compels every sincere observer to admit that there is no necessary connection between al-Miraj and sovereign rights over Jerusalem since, in the time when the Prophet... consecrated the place with his footprints on the Stone, the City was not a part of the Islamic State – whose borders were then limited to the Arabian Peninsula – but under Byzantine administration. Moreover, although radical preachers try to remove this from exegesis, the Glorious Quran expressly recognizes that Jerusalem plays for the Jewish people the same role that Mecca has for Muslims. We read in Surah al-Baqarah:

“...They would not follow thy direction of prayer
(qiblah), nor art thou to follow their direction of prayer; nor indeed will they follow each other’s direction of prayer....”

All Quranic annotators explain that "thy qiblah" is obviously the Kaabah of Mecca, while "their qiblah" refers to the Temple Site in Jerusalem. To quote just one of the most important of them, we read in Qadi Baydawi’s Commentary: “Verily, in their prayers Jews orientate themselves toward the Rock (al-Sakhrah), while Christians orientate themselves eastwards....”

Palazzi concludes that the Quran reveals the Jewish connection with Jerusalem.

As opposed to what sectarian radicals continuously claim, the
Book that is a guide for those who abide by Islam—as we have just now shown—
recognizes Jerusalem as Jewish direction of prayer.... After...deep reflection about the implications of this approach, it is not difficult to understand that separation in directions of prayer is a mean[s] to decrease possible rivalries in [the] management of [the] Holy Places. For those who receive from Allah the gift of equilibrium and the attitude to reconciliation, it should not be difficult to conclude that, as no one is willing to deny Muslims...complete sovereignty over Mecca, from an Islamic point of view... there is not any sound theological reason to deny an equal right of Jews over Jerusalem.

Other Muslims are challenging the HAMAS/Muslim Brotherhood’s doctrines on Israel to show that the Qur’an recognizes that God has given the Jews Jerusalem as an eternal bequest. There is an alternative Muslim narrative regarding the Jews and the Muslims.

VI. Brass Tacks: What is to be Done?
Many of the disputed holy sites in Israel and the Palestinian territories are of world-historical importance. Not only Jews, but Christians and Muslims consider these holy places sacred. The issues of historical preservation in the face of commercial development and competing historical narratives have emerged as Israel has articulated its policies over Jewish Heritage Sites in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. The media has zeroed in on two of the most important contested sites: Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem and the Cave of Machpelah (the Ibrahimi Mosque) in Hebron, where the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs are buried. On March 15, 2010, Jewish Jerusalem celebrated the reopening of the Hurva Synagogue, which had been destroyed by Transjordan during the battle for Jerusalem on May 25, 1948. The restored synagogue features paintings of both Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of Machpelah, one to the right of the Holy Ark and the other to the left. These decorations plainly assert Jewish claims over both of these other holy sites, located in the West Bank. The official Muslim reaction to the rededication of the synagogue, which was immediately linked to the threat of the rebuilding of the Third Temple, was harsh with calls for a new intifada, the “Al-Quds” intifada, coming from the Palestinian Authority as well as Hamas and other Islamist groups, due to this latest “provocation.” However, these developments were overshadowed by the controversy over Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem during Biden-Mitchell visit.
The issue of Jerusalem is one of the “final status” issues, like refugees and the borders of a Palestinian state, ran the Oslo Peace Process off the tracks. For the past several years, policy wonks in Foggy Bottom have been trying to design a “roadmap” to get the process back on track. In this, they have failed abysmally. And while time has passed, Israel’s religious Zionist parties have demanded unilateral actions to assure that Jewish settlements in the West Bank will not meet the same fate as those that were abandoned in Gaza in 2005.
In Israel, the Islamic movement emerged independently of these developments. Although the Israeli Islamic movement stands in solidarity with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, its day-to-day concerns are quite different. Under Israeli law, an Islamic court system adjudicates personal status laws for Israeli Muslims. An autonomous Muslim authority controls all functioning Islamic properties, although mosques, many which stand unused or abandoned, archeological sites, and architecturally significant buildings languish under state (Israeli) control as abandoned property. In Jerusalem, the condition of the Muslim monuments in Jerusalem is undeniably deplorable.
This situation is not unintentional. In their 1999 book, Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem (which unfortunately was largely overlooked in the aftermath the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the 9/11 attacks), Amir S. Chesin, Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek's adviser on Arab affairs from 1984 to 1993 and then for more one year for Kollek’s successor, the conservative Likud politician Ehud Olmert; Bill Hutman, senior reporter for The Jerusalem Post specializing in coverage of the city; and Avi Melamed, deputy adviser to the mayor on Arab affairs from 1991 to 1994 and principal adviser from 1994 to 1996 documented Israeli policy in Jerusalem from 1967 until 1998. As they make clear, Israeli national policies vis a vis the Palestinians overrode the issues facing the municipality of Jerusalem. According to former U.S. Ambassador to Israel W. C. Harrop, who reviewed the book and who helps to boil down their argument, the authors rightly recognize that Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem had four objectives: (1) rapidly expand Jewish population in East Jerusalem, (2) hinder and discourage the growth of the Arab population, (3) induce Arab residents to move out of the city and the West Bank, and (4) surround East Jerusalem with a barrier of Jewish settlements separating it from the Palestinian population of the West Bank. Harrop identifies “three interwoven” themes that the authors detailed in their book. “First,” Harrop writes, there is
a detailed dissection (perhaps "vivisection" would be more appropriate) of the Israeli government's systematic discrimination against the Arab citizens of East Jerusalem, a process which began immediately in June 1967 and (notwithstanding an elaborate public relations campaign to the contrary) continues to the present day.

“Second,” continues Harrop, there is “an iconoclastic analysis of the historic role played by Teddy Kollek, an analysis which is hard-edged yet not unsympathetic, a psychological study of a larger-than-life politician who was disingenuous despite himself.” The former ambassador then points to the third theme, which he says, is “written more in sorrow than in anger….” This is “a discussion of the great harm Israeli policy has done to Israel's own interests…along with speculation as to how an honest attempt to incorporate the Arab population into Israeli Jerusalem might have eased the difficult passage toward a settlement.”
Chesin, Hutman and Melamed document the “discriminatory zoning provisions, strict limits on construction of new Arab housing, denial of basic municipal services (water, sanitation, electricity, trash collection, road pavement and maintenance, parks and sports facilities, adequate schools) to Arab areas, subsidization of housing for Jewish families in East Jerusalem, expropriation of Arab land (23,378 dunams -- about 5800 acres -- over 25 years) for construction of nine Jewish neighborhoods to close the ring around Arab Jerusalem, and the construction of housing units in the West Bank to lure Arab residents out of the city.” These techniques implemented Israel’s true policies towards the Palestinians of the West Bank and Israel, despite the fact that “Israelis generally, and certainly Mayor Kollek, understood the political importance of presenting their harsh policies in a more humane and gentle light.” Harrop concurs with the authors that “Kollek was a master at persuading visitors to Jerusalem, and the international public as a whole, that his government was acting with enlightenment and compassion toward the Arabs of East Jerusalem.” He writes,
Kollek well understood the risks Israel ran by not doing more to improve the Arab standard of living (the intifada was especially virulent in Jerusalem). His repeated but unsuccessful efforts to obtain more resources for East Jerusalem from a string of Israeli prime ministers -- Meir, Begin, Peres, Shamir, Rabin, -- were quite authentic and even heartfelt, as was his creation and promotion of the international Jerusalem Fund for the betterment of the entire city. …This public persona of the mayor is well-known and admired.

The ambassador continues,

The authors of this book, however, reveal a different and darker side: Kollek was the architect and executive of the policy to shift Jewish population into East Jerusalem. Perhaps more tellingly, the reason he was driven to seek special supplementary funding to support municipal programs in East Jerusalem was that he failed to allocate any reasonable share of his regular budget to the Arab neighborhoods. A friend of Kollek's, former Foreign Ministry Director General Reuven Merhav, undertook a historical analysis of the city budget in 1990 on the mayor's behalf. After overcoming the resistance and dissimulation he encountered from city government officials, Merhav assembled the data and found that, while the Palestinians comprised 28 percent of the population of Jerusalem, they had been allocated only 2 to 12 percent of the budgets of the various municipal departments. While there is some ambiguity as to whether Kollek had been fully aware of the severity of this discrepancy, the report was so damning of the mayor's administration that it was quietly shelved.

Reflecting on the legacy of Israeli rule over East Jerusalem, he concludes,

The authors believe that Israel has tragically mismanaged the governance of Jerusalem and, by demeaning the lives of its Arab citizens, has made a lasting resolution of the conflict between Arabs and Jews far more difficult. … The intensity and passion of the three Israeli Jewish authors, and perhaps also their chagrin at their own role in the story, waves like a flag in the final paragraph:
“Do not believe the propaganda – the rosy picture Israel tries to show the world of life in Jerusalem since the 1967 reunification. Israel has treated the Palestinians of Jerusalem terribly. As a matter of policy, it has forced many of them from their homes and stripped them of their land, all the while lying to them and deceiving them and the world about its honorable intentions. And what makes all this so much more inexcusable is that there was no reason for it. Governing Jerusalem properly would not have jeopardized Israel's claim to the city. Indeed, it likely would have eased the growing conflict over Jerusalem's future. That massive error in judgment, we believe, is the tragedy of Israel's rule in East Jerusalem since 1967.”

In an article published by the History News Network blog on April 5, 2010, Professor Dror Wahrman of Indiana University discussed the issues relating to the controversy that scuttled the “proximity talks” before they’d ever begun. Wahrman, grew up in the divided city, and worked as a tour guide there for many years, writes that he has a “deep investment in its 3000 years of history, with its rich cultural and religious associations.”
“Until recently,” he writes, that he
believed that, despite the overblown rhetoric that Jerusalem inevitably elicits, the actual political problem it posits can lend itself to a reasonable solution. That Jerusalem is not in truth “united” is what makes such a solution possible. It has clearly Jewish parts and clearly Arab parts, and those function well independently of each other. Jews and Arabs mingle but can also retreat to their own space. An operational modus vivendi, in other words, already exists. Jerusalem’s overload of holiness is centered in a very small area in and around the Old City: several reasonable solutions for this “holy basin” have been suggested, combining pragmatic arrangements on the ground with creative fudging of the ultimate sovereignty which can be left in the hands of God.

Since 1995, the year that Israeli negotiator Yossi Beilin and future Palestinian Authority Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) published their proposal for sharing Jerusalem between Israel and the State of Palestine, there has been an elegantly simple solution that would allow both to claim the Holy City as their capital. Wahrman explains the concept for the shared capital.
And as for the symbols of real national sovereignty, if you actually mark on a map the Israeli “capitol hill,” that is the hill that houses the Knesset, the main Government Ministries and the Supreme Court, and then the Palestinian projected “capitol hill” in Abu Dis, a township on the Mount of Olives, you will discover that they are more or less equidistant from the holy places in the Old City. A perfect geographic basis for a balanced urban compromise.

Wahrman argues that “micro-geography” matters. By this he means that outside analysts who work with small-scale maps can never understand the real issues facing the Palestinians and Israelis as they try to sort out who will control what hill, valley, stream, or field adjacent to this or that village, city, house, or settlement. Only people who walk the perimeter of the wall through disputed neighborhoods in Bethlehem, Abu Dis, al-Azariya, Abu Tor, and Shaykh Jarrah can understand what is at stake in Jerusalem.
Walking through Wadi Fukin, Bittar, and countless other miniscule features of the Palestinian landscape, one realizes that architectural and agricultural features of Arab settlement in the rural areas of Palestine are quickly being covered in the debris, wastewater runoff, and mud generated by construction—both Israeli and Palestinian—throughout the West Bank. This development is political because it relates to both sides’ claims to have the right to decide the future of the land. In the rush to make “facts on the ground,” historic preservation of the rural and urban heritage of the Holy Land is left in the dust.
Thus, while the rest of the world is now somewhat aware of the complexities that Jerusalem and its hinterlands—which includes the villages surrounding Jerusalem on the West Bank—they still do not have the information that they need to follow the news. There has been a lot of dissimulation and disingenuousness about these issues over the past month. Israeli municipal planners have had detailed, large scale maps showing precisely where they planned to build settlements for over thirty years. Thus, while Jerusalem’s fate has recently grabbed the headlines again, precious little micro-geography has been taught about what the issues are. While Vice President Joe Biden and George Mitchell met with Abu Mazen, President of Palestine, and his Prime Minister Salam Fayyad were meeting to start those “Proximity Talks” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu, vowed to continue Israeli building projects in the eternal Jewish capital, as they have since 1967, claiming, as Professor Wahrman put it, “not to understand what all the fuss is about.” He writes,
These seemingly clear-cut statements actually mask much confusion and misinformation. Most people outside Israel/Palestine, and even many Israelis, do not actually understand the often complicated micro-geography of what is happening on the ground. But in this case, the micro matters. It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and thus to a large extent the future of American relations with the Islamic world, depend on the proper understanding of local Jerusalemite geography.

He then describes the consequences of Israeli policy in the city over the past thirty-three years. Professor

In my lectures to students taking my course on the Arab-Israel Conflict, we spend a great deal of time learning to define what we mean by “Jerusalem”? This is, as Professor Wahrman says, “Not as obvious a question as it sounds.” We are not talking about the mile square Old City, surrounded by the Ottoman walls built by Sultan Sulayman the Magnificent. Professor Wahrman explains:
When Israel conquered East Jerusalem from the Jordanians in 1967, it passed a law that unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem and reunited the divided city as its “eternal capital” [recognized by no sovereign country in the world]. Only that what was in fact annexed was a huge, sprawling area – 70 square kilometers! – that took a significant bite from the West Bank (The Jordanian East Jerusalem was only 6.4 square kilometers). Its meandering boundaries made little urban or geographical sense: the only clear logic of the hastily drawn map was to annex maximum land and minimum Palestinians. And yet several villages, and even a large refugee camp, suddenly found themselves part of Jerusalem, to which they had never belonged before. And now, when Israelis are reaffirming their commitment to their eternal capital, much of that outpouring of devotion is actually directed at areas that have absolutely nothing to do with the historic or holy Jerusalem; a fact that is willfully suppressed by some and no longer known to many others.

“Furthermore: what is “Israeli construction in East Jerusalem,” the putative bone of contention?” asks Wahrman. “Once again,” he states, “the answer is far from unambiguous.” He explains:
Soon after the Six Day War, Israel began building a series of large neighborhoods beyond the 1948-1967 border (the ‘Green Line’). Some restored a long-standing Jewish presence that was cut short during the war of 1948: the Jewish Quarter in the Old City that was conquered by the Jordanians during the war and destroyed; the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus, which actually remained in Israeli hands throughout this period, but as an isolated lifeless enclave. Some extended Jewish Jerusalem into new areas, which were either adjacent to pre-1967 Jewish neighborhoods or were on unoccupied hills further out: French Hill, Ramat Eshkol, Ramot, Giloh. By the time the peace process began with the Oslo Accords in 1993, these were already substantial neighborhoods with tens of thousands of people living in them, and thus became an inevitable factor in the negotiations. Few, even on the Palestinian side, expected these post-1967 Israeli neighborhoods to be evacuated. This was the so-called “Consensus” – a loaded reified term in Israeli politics – that Netanyahu and the Israeli government now invoke whenever they insist that nothing has changed in 43 years of Israeli government policy in Jerusalem. Which is, in fact, an utter misrepresentation. Neither of the recent storms about Israeli construction in East Jerusalem is part of the urban reality encompassed in the “Consensus.”

For example, he says,
Take Ramat Shlomo, the neighborhood in which an expansion of 1600 units was approved while Joe Biden was in Israel, a public snub that triggered the present storm over Jerusalem. In 1993 this spot was a barren hill. There were no buildings on it, no inhabitants, nothing. It was a hill, moreover, that was part of the contiguous section of East Jerusalem which was likely to revert back to the Palestinian side in any plausible geographic enactment of a two-state solution with Jerusalem as capital to both. Ramat Shlomo, like Har Homa, which was a major project of Netanyahu’s first government in the late 1990s, were last-ditch efforts to alter the map after negotiations had begun. However their fate is decided now, it is at least questionable whether they should unthinkingly merit the same status in negotiations as those neighborhoods that had already been in place in 1993, at the ostensible beginning of the peace process. But since these are neighborhoods in which most Israelis have never set foot, let alone foreigners, they are largely unaware of these distinctions. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are painfully aware of them. Their projected share of the city is a moving target, and one that is continually shrinking.

He then describes what he calls the recent, “even more pernicious,” “second eye of the storm.”
To understand the situation in Sheikh Jarrah, you really have to go there. You have to see for yourself these few buildings that have recently been taken over by Jewish settlers in the middle of a dense Palestinian neighborhood. The houses are literally wrapped in Israeli flags. Everything about them cries provocation. The Palestinian families that lived in them until their evacuation several months ago are now living in makeshift encampments opposite their former houses. Israeli police and military are present in large numbers. They ensure the safety of the settlers. They harass – sometimes violently – the weekly demonstrators, Israelis and Palestinians together, who every Friday march to protest this new outrage. But they do little to protect the Palestinian neighbors from the heckling and even violence of the newcomers. Sheikh Jarrah also includes the Shepherd Hotel Compound, where the approval of twenty settler units was announced on the day Netanyahu was in Washington, and thus got some press attention.

Another trouble spot is the conflict over the area known as Silwan, where the ancient Siloam springs are located. This is an even more intractable conflict. Wahrman writes:

It is actually but one of several such projects recently gaining ground but not always noticed by the press, including the six-story “Beit Yehonatan” in the large Palestinian village of Silwan, and a new settlement in the Palestinian village E-Tur on top of the Mount of Olives. These are completely different types of construction projects. They are hardly a response to natural urban growth, like Ramat Shlomo or the other large neighborhoods. Rather, they are small Israeli beachheads in the middle of well established and densely built Palestinian neighborhoods. They are ideologically driven and populated by settlers of the most aggressive type, whose behavior grates even many in the broader settler communities (Recently the small settler community in Sheikh Jarrah was filmed singing songs of praise for Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist who killed dozens of Muslims during prayer in Hebron in 1994; and singing so loudly that their Palestinian neighbors could not but hear every word). The goals of these small settler enclaves is to proclaim Jewish superiority everywhere, while disrupting the tissue of co-existence that depends on leaving Palestinians spaces of their own.

Israelis often protest Palestinian complaints that Israel really doesn’t want peace. Wahrman helps us to see why the Palestinians believe this.
In every case the government and the municipality – currently run by a right-wing mayor, Nir Barkat, who seems all too eager to stoke any fire that comes his way – put forth arguments that supposedly justify the invasion. Some are legal arguments about ownership, sometimes going back eighty years (as in the case of Sheikh Jarrah) and sometimes based on a recent purchase (as in the case of the Shepherd Hotel). Some are historical arguments, mobilizing traditional Jewish associations of those particular spots – partly true, partly invented or stretched – to buttress a claim from times immemorial. But the goal, the methods, and the consequences are always the same: an intrusive encroachment into Palestinian space, eyesore houses emblazoned with Israeli flags, aggressive settlers that often seek confrontation with the neighboring Palestinians, and a permanent disruptive presence of Israeli military and police that inevitably follow the settlers. That the legal argument is but a veneer is demonstrated by the fact that ever since the incongruous high-rise intrusion into the Palestinian village of Silwan, named by the settlers “Yehonatan House,” was declared by Israeli courts illegal and due for immediate demolition, Jerusalem’s mayor has openly defied this ruling.

Wahrman writes, “In terms of sheer damage to co-existence in a complicated city, therefore, twenty units in Sheikh Jarrah sow more immediate hatred than 1600 units in Ramat Shlomo.” And he is right. The propoganda value of such policies is great. Last fall, the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation invited a 16-year old Muslim girl whose entire family had been evicted from their home and was now living in the street to speak at a conference on Arab-Jewish relations. They young girl described in great detail how she and her family lived their lives day-to-day, trying to go to school and work while living on the street. Anecdote upon anecdote builds up the dossier against Israel’s infringements upon the human rights of the Palestinian people.

Wahrman argues against the assertions of Ambassador Harrop and authors Chesin, Hutman and Melamed, writing,
To present such aggressive acts as a continuation of the policies of Israeli governments over 43 years is simply untrue. Until recently, Israeli governments carefully avoided such conflicts, and thus allowed Jewish-Arab coexistence in the Holy City to remain surprisingly resilient in the face of many challenges during the first generation after 1967. Efforts to disrupt this pattern began by individuals and small groups, often with private American funding. Their intensification over the last decade and a half has largely flown under the radar, despite being a development with momentous consequences (much greater, say, than those of the settlement ‘outposts’ that have received so much attention). Their protestations of innocence notwithstanding, the support for this game-changing policy from Netanyahu’s government together with the zealous mayor of Jerusalem is unprecedented.

Wahrman finds the current Israeli government to blame for the deterioration of Israeli-Palestinian relations in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu’s government is deliberately undermining this balance and rapidly changing the urban circumstances, thus rendering a compromise less and less likely. As it turns out, counter to Netanyahu’s claims, these actions are not in the Israeli vaunted “Consensus.” Even at this juncture when the left in Israel is unprecedently [sic] weak, many Israelis (42% according to a recent poll) oppose these new Israeli policies and support a complete freeze of Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. The U.S. should not let manipulative rhetoric about the eternal city and 3000 years of history obfuscate the actual intersection of historical and geographic facts, nor stand in the way of the policy conclusions that must be drawn from them.

However, taking the larger view, which includes not only the municipality of Jerusalem, but the issue of settlements and Israeli “heritage sites” in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, and the entire course of the conflict, it is not only the Jerusalem municipality or Israel’s policies regarding the Palestinians which is to blame for the current impasse.
The Palestinians’ continued willingness to support violent action against Israel, and their continued hope for a one state solution, has resulted, contrary to all reason, to support for HAMAS. Emboldened by its defeat of FATAH in Gaza in 2007, and backed by an extraordinarily aggressive Iran, the maximalists again are threatening to lead the Palestinian remnant to their complete destruction. All attempts to convince the Palestinians to abandon jihadist ideology have failed, despite the fact that the Arab world is ready to accommodate Israel in the current Middle Eastern state system.
Recent calls for a bi-national, secular state instead of a two-state solution are distractions from the real issues at hand. Improving the living conditions of the Palestinian people, fostering the development of municipal and national government in Gaza and the West Bank, and fighting against Islamist opportunism are goals that can be achieved under the shadow of the Iranian threat. Only on the micro-level can political progress be made. The conflict has to become localized. Only by rejecting the regionalization of the political issues facing the Palestinian and Israeli conflict can the international threats on the macro-level be challenged.
The general squalor of the Muslim and Christian Quarters (including the Armenian Quarter) stands in contrast to the beautifully restored Jewish Quarter. The municipality should work with organizations seeking to preserve these monuments as a show of good faith before the radicals turn the city into a battleground. Perhaps Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, as part of a reconceptualized peace process, could work to restore the neglected Muslim neighborhoods and monuments of Jerusalem in a bid to fend off Hamas and Islamic Jihad as they seek to cash in on Muslim anger over this neglect. Israel and her international allies could urge UNESCO to move on Jordan's nomination of the Old City of Jerusalem as a World Heritage site, and invite international investment in the restoration of neglected treasures. Building a few playgrounds might prevent the march to making Jerusalem a battlefield once again. In 2009, the Palestinian academic, intellectual, and cultural communities attempted to celebrate Jerusalem’s Arab identity, but Israel frustrated these efforts by preventing the organizers from achieving their goals. A paradigm shift is needed to thwart the Islamist threat to Israel. Below are concrete steps towards localizing the conflict and to reinvigorate the peace process that could break the cycle of despair now characterizing the region within the parameters of the Beillin-Abu Mazen plan of 1995.

Immediate Steps Within the Realm of Realpolitik and Reason: Localize Conflict Management and Resolution
1. Establish embassies in West and East Jerusalem
All states having diplomatic relations with Israel should immediately establish embassies in Israel and Palestine.
Arab League states establish embassies in East and West Jerusalem.
Use these embassies to kick start economic development and housing in various neighborhoods.
2. Latin Patriarchate, Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, and other Christian landowners in Palestine/Israel to cooperate by developing local community development boards.
3) UNESCO overseas restoration and preservation of Islamic monuments and archeological sites.
Turkey to cooperate with Israel and Palestine with historical preservation projects.
4) Educational programs for Palestinian and Israeli students focusing on holy sites throughout the land.
Educational institutions currently training tour guides to spearhead these efforts, emphasizing change and continuity over time.
5) Truth and Reconciliation commissions to document and memorialize history. Institutions of higher learning to cooperate with education ministries.
6) UNRWA to close refugee camps throughout the Middle East.
Repatriate and reimburse Arab and Jewish refugees according their wishes—return, compensation, or memorials—on a case-by-case basis.

With my apologies for the formatting!

RFIA Draft Paper on Christian Zionism

2010-09-06T19:53:00.000-07:00

Is Christian Zionism Based On “Bad Theology”?
Judith Mendelsohn Rood & Paul W. Rood Biola University
The current criticism of Christian Zionism (hereafter CZ) comes from many quarters: secularists (both Jews and Gentiles), many religious Jews, Christian Arabists, and Islamists (Hamas cleric Ahmed al-Tamimi identified CZ as “the greatest danger to world truth, justice, and peace”). Ironically, Christians are among the most vociferous critics of CZ. An evangelical critic of Zionism, Hank Hanegraaff, writes "much of American Middle East policy is influenced by a huge voting bloc of evangelicals who are taught not to question Israel’s divine right to the land… fueled in part by bad theology.” Anglican theologian Stephen Sizer maintains that a distinctive theology embraced by many evangelical Christians, known as dispensational pre-millennialism, is foundational to CZ and a root cause of the deadlocked Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict. He writes, “bad theology is probably the reason why many Christians don’t seem to care …. they hope to be raptured to heaven and avoid suffering the consequences of the coming global holocaust” that the policies they support will ignite. This caricature is unfair to Christian supporters of Israel and an intentional distortion of dispensationalism. Evangelical Gary Burge has deployed theology to demolish any Jewish connection to Zion, an interpretation that Christian Arab Mitri Raheb vigorously challenges, emphasizing the importance of the land in Palestinian theology and Jewish and Church history. The fact that some people claim to find theological justification for bad political policies does not necessarily indicate bad theology; bad policy more often springs from bad interpretations of history and contemporary events, interpreted with bad applications of ethics and theology.
What is “dispensational theology”?
The distinctive theological tenets of dispensationalism include belief in the authority of the Bible and a philosophy of Providential history framed within respect for the prophetic writings in the Bible, in which the unique past, present and future role of the nation of Israel occupies a central role in God’s plan. The term itself seems to imply that what is distinctive about this theology is its division of human history into distinct “ages” or “dispensations” (most dispensationalists identify seven ages, or more, stretching from the Creation of man through the future millennial age). However, all Christian theologies hold to some division of history into different eras, and Christians holding to traditional orthodox doctrine also affirm the authority of Scripture and historical Providence as well as distinctive historical periods in biblical history. What is most distinctive about dispensationalism is its belief in a future literal fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, including the restoration of the Jewish nation in the Holy Land during the Millennial Age.
Other systems of theology hold that God’s covenant with Israel was transferred to the Christian Church, which became the new Israel at Pentecost. Sizer says “(CZ) errs most profoundly because it fails to appreciate the relationship between the Old and New Covenants and the ways in which the latter completes, fulfils and annuls the former.” In his view, the “bad theology” of dispensationalism, leads to blind support for the modern Jewish state of Israel and its “unjust” and “racist” policies. Sizer argues that the ethne, or People (Hebrew: ‘am) of Israel has no continuing theological significance during the Church Age, including no continuing or future role in providential history, nor a continuing valid connection to the land of Israel. Instead, in this view, there is no reason for the Jews to exist as a separate People of God because individual ethnic Jews, (like individual Gentiles), find fulfillment of their covenants and calling in Christ and His Church, in which they gain a new identity in Christ. Thus, they are no longer Jews, but Christians. This confusion of Israel as people with a territorial homeland, like the all the nations of the world, and Israel as a priesthood that leads them in the worship of God from Zion, as they did once and which they will do again, is a common error, an error which has led to Christian Anti-Semitism throughout the Church Age, the Age of the Nations.
Following the Holocaust, the Catholic Church articulated important theological statements concerning Israel and the Church in order to affirm that the Jewish People has a continuing significance in God’s plan. Similarly, some non-dispensational theologies give recognition to an enduring promise and blessing for Israel, believing the Kingdom of God as not fully realized until Christ’s future Second Advent when the redeemed from all of the nations, including the Jewish People, will be united in the Millennial Age. Other theological views are more explicit regarding Israel’s replacement, or fulfillment in Christ, and the “Kingdom of God” instituted in the Church, and completed progressively in history. In 1907, during the heyday of Progressivism, liberal theologian Walter Rauschenbusch spoke confidently of helping “to build the coming Messianic era of mankind” through a social gospel of the Kingdom. Similarly, many Jewish theologians, while rejecting the notion that God had replaced Israel with the Gentile Church, view the “Messianic Kingdom” as an activity of human progress, rather than the future accomplishment of Israel’s Messiah.
The wars and genocides of the twentieth century sobered many. Reinhold Niebuhr, a social gospel progressive of the 1920s who briefly flirted with Marxism, formulated his sober perspective of “Christian Realism” during WWII. While not embracing the dispensational system he commented favorably on its grounding in realism: “these various apocalyptic visions point to an interpretation of history in which there is no suggestion of a progressive triumph of good over evil, but rather a gradual sharpening of the distinction between good and evil.”

Current Concerns About Christian Zionism
According to a 2005 survey commissioned by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, evangelical Protestants are significantly more likely to believe that “God gave the land of Israel to the Jews” (72%) and that “Israel fulfills the Biblical prophecy about Jesus’ second coming” (63%). Many critics of CZ object that any faith in the literal fulfillment of prophecy is dangerous in and of itself; that “anticipation of the inevitable”, makes apocalyptic catastrophe more likely.
Others see less reason for alarm, appreciating CZs’ participation in the ongoing dynamic process by which contending perspectives check and balance each other, keeping American foreign relations grounded in our core values. Walter Russell Mead comments that for most evangelical Protestants, the “preservation of the Jews and their return to Israel is seen as proof that God acts in history — a very reassuring thought for people concerned about the dangers of modern life.” Mead notes that while some CZs may have their political judgment disoriented by apocalyptic speculation, “there are many others for whom it means just the opposite…. (that) this God is still around, still faithful to his promises, and still guiding humanity through the dangers that surround us. To be pro-Israel is to be pro-hope.”
Well, if mainstream CZs are relatively benign, how dangerous are the most zealous? The political philosopher Erik Voegelin warned of the dangerous desire to actualize eschatological events, describing this as the attempt to “Immanentize the Eschaton” by transfiguring reality through esoteric deeds, rituals or violent practices. Dispensationalism’s eschatological seriousness has led some errant adherents to become infected with a pathology which overrules or even violates their faith in Divine prophetic fulfillment. A few extreme outliers may attempt to use their own power to implement policies or create conditions to initiate the apocalypse. Responsible religious leaders need to guard against this deceit and guide their congregations toward a rational and normative obedience to the moral law and the Gospel.
Today, the most visible of the CZ organizations, CUFI (Christians United for Israel) and the ICEJ (International Christian Embassy in Jersusalem), provide necessary advocacy to combat anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, promote Israel as a liberal democracy and support Israel’s legitimate security needs. As Christians, they are motivated by a sense of shame about the Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, and indebtedness to the Jewish people for the faith of their Patriarchs, and their transmission of Holy Scripture to mankind. However, to varying degrees these organizations have lost the sober bearings of earlier Christian Zionists and normative dispensationalists, who accepted the brute reality that Israel (like all states, churches and people) is fallen, with a capacity to violate rights and commit acts of injustice – the very sins condemned by the Hebrew prophets -- and that such violations of God’s eternal moral law could never be justified by the necessity for prophetic fulfillment. Examples of our areas of concern are summarized below.
Territorial Compromise and Peace Negotiations
CZ media channels frequently send out dire warnings over any threatened loss of occupied territory. Strategic defense, civilian safety and security measures are factors for legitimate concern; it is another thing for some CZ leaders to view the territories currently under Israeli occupation as Jewish by right of divinely ordained conquest, causing them to view territorial compromise as unbiblical, opposing diplomatic negotiations that might lead to Palestinian self-government. Over the centuries, the three monotheistic faiths have battled over the sacred spaces in the Holy Land. Israeli fundamental law is committed to maintain the peaceful shared use of the holy sites, so some compromises over sacred geography must be acknowledged, rather than strenuously opposed by extreme CZ leaders.
Many dispensationalists have spoken out to guide their followers away from these dangerous positions. The full extent of the land promised to Abraham’s seed (Gen. 15:18), expounded further by the prophet Ezekiel (Ezek. 47:15-20), has never been under the control of a sovereign Jewish state. While the People of Israel is regathering and their homeland re-established, the territorial restoration of the Jewish nation, and their service to their King and Savior Jesus Christ, is a future eschatological event. The late Louis Goldberg, wrote in 1997, “all of the land which God has provided cannot be a current concern for negotiation. Some Israelis lay claim to the land now, but it will only be a reality when …. an entire generation of Israelis, in the midst of frightful pressures, call upon the Lord in their land…then, and only then, will Israel take title to all the land God promised through His prophet Ezekiel.”
Although most dispensationalists believe that in the last days Israel will enter into a peace treaty for seven years, later broken after 3 ½ years, marking the beginning of the catastrophic events of the Tribulation, they understand that no peace treaty made by men lasts forever, and many treaties are preferable to no treaty. No one can be sure this or that treaty is the end of days treaty mentioned in Daniel 9:27. Dispensationalist theologian, Arnold Fruchtenbaum, expressed a pragmatic view: “I am not against Israeli withdrawal from either the Gaza Strip or from segments of the West Bank. It may save Jewish lives….concerning the roadmap for peace … whatever peace is attained through human effort will be temporary at best.” The Israeli people and their government are in the best position to make pragmatic policy decisions concerning negotiations with the Palestinians, and their Christian friends should support their diplomatic efforts.
CZ and Compassionate Justice
Many CZ leaders view the humanitarian and political crisis of the Palestinian Arabs, as self-inflicted, and some would say, even divine retribution for their opposition to the State of Israel. Whatever truth may lie in this perspective, it is no excuse for indifference toward the suffering of innocents and failure to support programs for Palestinian education, development and reconciliation. CZ organizations fund West Bank Jewish settlements, ignoring projects that seek to strengthen civil society and public safety in the West Bank and Gaza. Fortunately, there are a few Christian organizations, like Seeds of Hope in Jericho, that empower Palestinians with education and micro-business projects that bring hope and healing to both Jews and Palestinians. CZ leaders have also failed to advocate for full religious and political rights for Christian Palestinians and Messianic Jews. Christians who want to show their love for the Jewish people should be willing to share about the One who loves us so much, and to defend the rights of those who do. Indeed, local Israeli Messianic and evangelical Arab congregations are among the groups most actively involved in reconciliation ministries.
Dr. Mark Bailey, President of Dallas Theological Seminary, considered the pre-eminent center of dispensationalist theology, notes that Ezekiel’s prophesy of Israel’s return is to a land with non-Jewish peoples, including their ancient Arab kin, “You are to consider them as native-born Israelites; along with you they are to be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel.” (Ezekial 47:21-22). He urges, “We act most like Christ when we seek to bring God’s perspective and peace to a situation.”

Was early Christian Zionism different?
Dispensationalism did not produce any heavyweight political ethicists or international relations theorists like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, or neo-Christian Realist Jean Bethke Elshtain. Nevertheless, dispensationalists are clearly more (though not entirely) futurist regarding the Kingdom of God and fundamentally in agreement with the pragmatism of the realists, who recognize as operating principles the need for deterrence and restraint of evil, activated by an ethic of compassionate justice for a suffering world.

The politicized form of CZ that has risen to prominence today differs greatly from the earliest CZ perspectives of a century ago. Proto-CZ emerged out of the Protestant Reformation, drawing from both Hebrew Scriptures (the Tanakh) and the early Church. These interpretations of prophecies focus on the regathering and restoration of the People of Israel to their ancient homeland, as well as the spiritual redemption of the nation which will enable them to practice their spiritual calling on behalf of all the nations of the world. As many recently published historical studies have documented, these early perspectives varied significantly, some focusing on the spiritual redemptionist aspect of large masses of individual Jews turning to faith in Jesus as Messiah; others focused on the restorationist miracle of Jewish preservation and their modern regathering in their ancient homeland. Most held to elements of both.
Political Zionism arose only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nearly all Jewish leaders opposed the movement, as did quite a few dispensationalist Christians. Support for political Zionism gradually emerged across a broad spectrum of Anglo-American Christians and Reformed Jews, largely motivated in response to the humanitarian crisis caused by the suffering of millions of displaced Jews expelled by rising forces of nationalism and anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe.

In 1878, Chicago businessman and dispensationalist William E. Blackstone, wrote a best-selling theological book, Jesus is Coming, outlining the Biblical prophecies concerning the restoration of national Israel as a preparation for Jesus’ second Messianic return. He did not become a CZ activist until ten years later, when he witnessed and compassionately responded to the mass expulsions of over two million poor, stateless Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement.
In 1891, Blackstone drafted and circulated the historic “Blackstone Memorial Petition” proposing an international conference to establish a refuge for homeless Jews in Palestine. Signed by over 400 of America’s leading citizens, statesmen and religious leaders, the Petition addressed issues of humanitarian justice and natural-rights, opening with the words “What shall be done for the Russian Jews?” The Petition urged the European and American heads of state to convene an international conference addressing the following: expulsions and property seizures in Europe, immigration/emigration to Palestine, and territorial issues leading to “security and autonomy in self government”. It noted that the equitable resolution of these issues involved a bundle of competing rights and claims – but it contained no theological statement concerning prophetic fulfillment. The only religious connection was to acknowledge and seek to repair the long history of Jewish persecution in the Christian nations by appealing to an appreciation of their shared biblical heritage.

The principles laid out by Blackstone were remarkably similar to those of the Balfour Declaration and League of Nation’s Mandate for Palestine three decades later. This is why Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, leader of the American Zionist Movement, asked William Blackstone to reissue his Memorial Petition in 1916, believing it incorporated the principles upon which a just and humanitarian Jewish homeland movement could be founded. Brandeis hailed “that document, ante-dating as it did Theodore Herzl’s own participation in the Zionist movement, is destined to become of historical significance” and called Blackstone “the true founder of Zionism.”
Early Christian Zionism and the Arabs
Other early dispensationalists were similarly grounded in realism, clearly appreciating the rights and hopes of the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine (in this period it was the Jewish residents of Palestine who were called “Palestinians”. After 1948, the usage shifted as they became “Israelis” and their Arab neighbors in Israel and the places they were scattered began to be called “Palestinians”.) Jewish Christian Rev. Sabbtai Rohold, founder of the evangelical Haifa Mission in 1920, wrote: “I believe with all my heart and soul in the absolute, full restoration of the Jew, and I believe also at the present time in the partial return of the Jew to Palestine, but there are many difficulties…. Modern Zionism is the result of anti-Semitism, but six hundred thousand Arabs cannot be brushed aside…. As for the great plans and pretenses, good offices, and the sympathy of the nations, that is beautiful; but let me tell you, and I repeat it emphatically, that the undercurrents are too many.” Rohold was adamant that his Haifa Mission school, Jewish immigrant shelter, and medical clinic would maintain warm and supportive relations with his Moslem and Christian Arab neighbors. In Rohold’s school, Jewish immigrants would learn Arabic first, and then Hebrew. His Hebrew congregation would celebrate the Biblical feasts and also join with the Christian Arab congregation for Christmas Eve and Easter Morning worship. The clinic and school staff were a mixture of Arabs and Jews. Rohold pursued his pragmatic program of humanitarian refuge, reconciliation and gospel witness through each difficult day and week from 1921, through the Arab riots of 1929 and the ensuing years of violent resistance to Jewish immigration, up until his death in 1931.
Bible scholar David L. Cooper, whose classic works of dispensational theology shaped several generations of theologians and Christian Zionists, wrote in 1939 on the growing tensions between Arab and Jew in Palestine: “Those who know God and His Word have a sympathy and love for every race, tribe, tongue, and people. Especially so, the Arabic people because they too are descendants of Abraham. …These people have a right to live in the land because of the history of the past one thousand years…. To them this is their home.… The birthright of every individual coming into the world grants him an opportunity to live and pursue peace and happiness…No man or group of men are able…to harmonize the conflicting claims of the Jews and Arabs in Palestine…Thus with ill-will toward none, but with the kindliest feelings toward all parties concerned, we shall pray very earnestly to God to have His will in this matter and to unravel the difficulty for the advancement of His cause among men.”
Blackstone, Rohold and Cooper were among the most widely known dispensational Bible teachers in America, yet their pragmatic foreign policy and international relations views were remarkably consistent with those expressed a generation later by the Christian Realist and Zionist Reinhold Niebuhr. The more liberal Niebuhr scorned the prophetic literalism of evangelical revivalists, stating “we feel as embarrassed as anti-Zionist religious Jews when messianic claims are used to substantiate the right of the Jews to the particular homeland in Palestine”. Nevertheless, he shared with other early CZs a case for Zionism framed in the language of justice. Niebuhr’s clear response to the anti-Semitism of Europe and the racial policies of the Nazi’s, was to affirm that “many Christians are pro-Zionist in the sense that they believe that a homeless people require a homeland”. Ten years after its dramatic establishment, Niebuhr wrote, “History is full of strange configurations. Among them is the thrilling emergence of the State of Israel.” Dispensationalists viewed these events as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Nevertheless, their faith did not fundamentally overrule their profound pragmatic realism nor deter them from following an ethic of compassionate justice.
Tony Maalouf presents a scholarly interpretation of the interwoven history and Biblical prophecies concerning the shared destiny and blessing of the Jewish and Arab peoples in his book Arabs in the Shadow of Israel. Maalouf, an evangelical Arab theologian, and self-described progressive dispensationalist, views the current divide between many evangelical CZs and anti-Zionists as “a crisis of interpretation of history and theology.” Maalouf counsels Christians to prioritize “the redemptive mandate over the political agendas…and invest in the spiritual awakening predicted among both the Arabs and the Jews. Removing unwarranted biases against Arabs, which neither Bible nor history sustains, would play a healing role in the Middle East conflict”.
The crisis of contemporary Christian Zionism is not “bad theology”, but “bad praxis”. The faithful Gospel witness and ethic of compassionate justice demonstrated by the early Christian “lovers of Zion” is a model that can restore this movement to be a pragmatic, constructive and healing partner.

God's Work in History or Tikkun Olam?

2010-09-03T09:26:00.001-07:00

Sep 3, 2010

Beyond Repair
Is tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of “healing the world,” as dangerous as David Horowitz says it is?

By Marissa Brostoff | Tablet Magazine [Online] Sep 3, 2010 at

http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/44356/beyond-repair/

At long last the concept of Tikkun Olam is being interrogated for its emphasis on our ability to achieve justice in the world. Only God can do this. It is time for us to begin to reframe the rabbinical paradigm which Neusner surfaced in his study of Jewish historiography. Biblical history is not allegorical; and the escape to Talmud was a response forced upon Jews by their loss of sovereignty and their sense that God had removed Himself from history. We need to reconsider the concept of providential history and recover our sense of God’s ongoing work in world history. Dispensational Premillennialists, normally understood as Evangelical Fundamentalists, represent a stream of Jewish thought did recognize the import of the end of Jewish Temple service and sovereignty in 586 B.C. and understands the shift to the Age of the Nations that some rabbis discerned in the Tanakh. Messianic Judaism appeals to Jews who have confidence that God is acting providentially in history, and that His Tikkun Olam is yet future, in the Messianic, Millennial Kingdom when Israel will be fully restored to its service to the Nations from Zion. At that time all of the nations created God will worship Him from Zion, just as God promised. The injustice and imperfection of our age is a function of the international state system that is governed by human passions and interests in disobedience to God. However, it is impossible for them to obey Him through their own efforts. Only by working in the will of God, revealed in His Word, the Bible, can rebellious mankind repent and be reconciled with God. In this Age we have an opportunity to relate to God in our Savior, the Jewish messiah, who atoned for the sins of the Jewish people and all nations, and at the end of this Age, God will come to judge the nations and establish His Kingdom. Before that happens, the doors of the Kingdom will finally be closed to those who don’t recognize Yeshua as God and King. This understanding of human history is at the heart of Christian Zionism and Messianic Judaism.

What We Choose to Remember: Jerusalem in World History

2010-04-08T17:12:00.000-07:00

What We Choose to Remember: Jerusalem in World History

As I prepare to participate in a conference called “What We Choose to Remember” at the University of Portland on the Holocaust and the Arab-Israel Conflict next week, I have been thinking more and more about the controversy over a parcel of land in the district in West Jerusalem called Mamilla.

Readers who recognize the place name, Mamilla, will know that this is the site that was chosen by the Jerusalem municipality to be the future home of the L.A.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance. The Muslim community in Israel brought the case to the Israeli Supreme Court, which has ruled that although it had served as an important Muslim cemetery for centuries, because the Mufti had closed the cemetery and that it had been unused for many years, there were no legal grounds to prevent the construction of the museum.

The court did not consider the fact that the parcel remained a property of the Salahiyyah Waqf, evidently on logic that since the Muslim authorities themselves had decided to develop the land for commercial and educational purposes it was no longer a cemetery, and that the State, as the custodian of public land—which in Israel often had been endowed to the Muslim community for centuries—had the right to dispose of as it chose. Muslim descendants of those buried in the cemetery have taken their case to the U.N. in the hope that the international community will intervene. Clearly this case has enormous consequences for deciding land tenure disputes between Palestinians and Israelis, especially in light of Hamas’ claim that all land in Palestine is Waqf endowed in perpetuity to the Muslim community—including all Jewish and Christian properties in Israel and Palestine.

There has been scarce mention of the horrific massacre of Byzantine Christian residents by Jews in the extensive coverage of the museum controversy. Although the incident is well-attested in the historical record, despite the discovery and analysis of the physical evidence over almost twenty years and the fact that it is the subject of an important scholarly article on the way that the massacre has been treated by Christian, Jewish and Israeli historians, its significance has been ignored in the public controversy over the museum.

History is stranger than fiction, and the kaleidoscope of alliances and conflicts in the Middle East is strange indeed. One of the darkest chapters of the history of Jerusalem occurred during a great superpower conflict in the seventh century A.D. between the Christian heirs of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Christians, and their inveterate enemies in Persia, the Sasanian Zoroastrians. This chapter was unearthed in 1992, as the ground was being prepared for the construction of a municipal parking lot in West Jerusalem, not far from the King David Hotel and the YMCA in the Mamilla commercial district of Jerusalem, not far from the Old City. The construction crew uncovered a cave bearing the Greek inscription, “Only God Knows Their Names” and filled with thousands upon thousands of bone fragments.

Israeli archeologist Ronny Reich excavated the cave, verifying that it was a mass burial site for the victims of a well-known massacre committed during the epic Byzantine-Sasanian War. Jews and Persians joined forces in the Galilee, and together destroyed Byzantine churches and other Christian buildings up and down the coast from Antioch to Gaza in 614 A.D. All of the churches and Christian buildings in Palestine, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem were destroyed, and the remnants of the True Cross was taken triumphantly to Persia. The Persians ransomed their hostages to the Jewish fighters, who then marched them to the Mamilla Pool and slaughtered them. The only church that remained untouched at this time was the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, because the Persians, recognizing the Magi depicted in a mosaic as Persian sages, decided to leave it unharmed. The war permanently shaped the Christian built environment in Jerusalem and its rural hinterlands, the Galilee, and along the Lebanese coast. Christian chroniclers preserved the memory of the massacre. Ultimately, the Persians withdrew in 617 A.D. and the Byzantines began to rebuild. All of this occurred before the beginning of Islamic history

The Biblical Archeology Review published Reich’s discoveries in 1996. In 2000, physical anthropologist Yossi Nagar reported the results of studies conducted on the forensic evidence and published on the Israel Antiquities Authority website. That evidence shows that the Greek-speaking Christian population of the city was neither Jewish nor Arab. Of the estimated 24,000-90,000 victims reported by chroniclers at the time of the massacre, only 526 individuals could be identified, although the large number of fragments suggested that thousands of victims were interred in the cave. The ratio of 38 males to 100 females indicates that those slain in the massacre were primarily Christian women, aged 30-35 years old. The archeologists speculate that this was because most of the city’s male inhabitants were fighting at the front, and the women stayed behind. Many of these were nuns. Apparently there were few children or elderly inhabitants.

When Umar took the city from the Byzantines in 636 he agreed to the surrendering Greek patriarch’s request that Jews not be allowed back into the city, although ultimately the Muslims did permit them to return; the first time during the Umayyad Period, and the second when Saladin conquered the city in 1187 A.D. Umar is famed in Jerusalem for his humility in resanctifying the site of the Temple and for leaving the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Christian hands. Among the Muslim tombs, there are Christian sepulchres dating from the Crusader Period in the small remaining area of the cemetery. When Saladin defeated the Crusaders in 1187, he endowed the Mamilla district, where he had established his headquarters, as a trust in his charitable foundation, called the Salahiyah Waqf. This trust, logically, also administered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other Christian and Muslim institutions established before 1187 and during the Ayyubid period. The Waqf Administration continued to administer these even under British, Jordanian and Israeli rule. During the British Mandate, the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, co-founder, with Hassan al-Banna, of the Muslim Brotherhood, closed the cemetery and rededicated the parcel, still part of the Salahiyyah Waqf, for the purpose of building an Arab university on the site. The Palace Hotel, a beautiful example of late-Ottoman architecture recently demolished and currently being rebuilt as luxury condominiums and boutiques, was built to provide income for the development of the future university. The Muslim authorities envisioned the university as a centerpiece of the new commercial district, which had been developed primarily by non-Jews during the Mandate Period.

The Palace Hotel was taken over for use by the Israeli government at the time of the ceasefire. The cemetery at Mamilla became an overgrown corner of Independence Park, covered by trash and weeds an unsafe place for anyone to go. The Muslim community, however, remembered it and the notables who were buried there, but few others were even aware of it. Retired Muslim judge Shaykh Muhammad As’ad al-Imam al-Husseini gave me a guided tour of the cemetery in 1986, pointeing out some of the graves of dignitaries, including former mayors of Jerusalem and other notables I was writing about in my doctoral dissertation.

Theological differences between the three Abrahamic religions have become more and more pronounced as secular nationalism has failed to solve political and social conflicts in the Middle East, allowing fundamentalist religious ideologies to fill in the gap. The legacy of Christianity and Islam in Jerusalem is slowly being effaced through the neglect of the city’s non-Jewish architectural legacy and the emigration of the city’s secular Jewish and Palestinian Muslim and Christian inhabitants. While the significance of the Holy City to Jews and Muslims threatens to ignite apocalyptic warfare, the significance of the city to Christians nearly has been buried in the ashes of the Holocaust.

The idea believers in the God of Abraham, Jews, Muslims and Christians together should hallow the blood-soaked ground of Mamilla may not be the strangest of all the options for this blood-drenched parcel of land.

Jerusalem, in the words of an Islamic court document written in the 19th century, is “desired by all the nations.” Each generation has left its own imprint. The Israeli Supreme Court, in a decision about the excavation of King David’s Palace in the tiny village of Silwan just outside the walls of the Old City in East Jerusalem, ruled in favor of the dig, explaining that,

"the rich historical past of the country… is folded layer upon layer in its earth. The chronicles of the country and the land, the nations who dwelt there, have been relegated to the pages of history books, buried over the course of years under the earth and have turned into its hidden treasures. …Though Israel is a young country, it has deep roots in the history of mankind and throughout the length and breadth of the country, the earth is saturated with the remnants of ancient civilizations that lived in and created on this land for thousands of years, both before and after the common era.”

Like the City of David, Mamilla

has both national and international importance, and is not only important to the Jewish people, rather it has importance to anyone who wishes to investigate the history of the area which is the cradle of the monotheistic religions. The importance of the archaeological research isn't only to understand the history of the land and to verify the truth of the facts we know from our sources, but … sheds light on the development of human culture. Therefore, its importance overrides nations and borders.

The Mamilla Massacre is a dark chapter in the annals of the Jewish people, a sobering and necessary reminder of what hatred and the desire for revenge can breed in the human heart. If Jews, Christians, and Muslims can come together to find a way together to create a hallowed space for confession, repentance, and reconciliation, perhaps Mamilla can serve not only as a place of commemoration and warning, but also as a place of sanctification, where we can stand in awe and terror before God, pleading for mercy and forgiveness for what has been done in His name and praying for those whose names only He remembers.

Mamilla offers two lessons. The first lesson, that Jews have committed outrages against their enemies, is one that the Jewish people must remember and acknowledge. At a time when Jewish-Muslim relations have never been worse, and Jewish-Christian relations are continually strained, the second lesson, that Jerusalem is a city of world historical importance to non-Jews, is of no less consequence.

Sabbatical Beginnings

2010-01-03T23:24:00.001-08:00

As I participated in various services and gatherings building up to Christmas day, I was deeply saddened that no one prayed for peace between Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, Palestinians and Israelis, and the Jewish People and the Church in the land where our Savior was born.

I've struggled to understand why American evangelicals avoid praying about Israel and her neighbors, especially at Christmas. With all of the nativity scenes, cards depicting the maji, the celebration of the advent, when we are all thinking about the miracle in Bethlehem, why no prayers for the people who are living daily with the consequences of God's appearance in human history?

Salim Munayer, the founder and director of Musalaha Ministry, wrote a letter this Christmas reflecting on this very question. He thinks that God’s message of peace and reconciliation in Christ is central to the meaning of Christmas.

I'm copying it here verbatim because he passionately writes that this message "should be the center of our focus, a message that we live and share with others." Salim's thoughts are poignant to me, and I want to share them with you. Following his letter, I write a little bit more about my upcoming sabbatical plans:

"Recently, while I was touring a visitor around Bethlehem, I took the time to stop and look out over the fields traditionally known as Shepherd’s Field, where the shepherds are said to have been keeping watch over their flocks when an angel of the Lord appeared to them in Luke 2. I was reminded of this story as Christmas time is near, and thought to myself that the fields must not have been much different than they are now. As I stood there, something else caught my eye. Just a few kilometers away, stands the imposing mountain-tower of Herodian. Herodian was Herod’s hill-top, summer time palace, overlooking the town of Bethlehem. The proximity of the two historic locations struck me, especially given the extent to which they were interwoven in the narrative of Christ’s birth. They represent two polar opposites, the political, arrogant power of Herod’s palace, and the simple, rustic fields where the shepherds slept.

Seeing these two spots also brought into sharp focus the politically subversive nature of the angel’s announcement on that starry night. The angel spoke to the shepherds, saying “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people.” (Luke 2:10) Most people interpret this to mean that the shepherds were afraid of the angels. But I can imagine them casting a nervous glance over the angel’s shoulder towards Herod’s palace, knowing that he would not be happy about a “Savior” being born in the “city of David.” Essentially what the angel was suggesting could be perceived as an act of rebellion against the cruel reign of Herod. The palace of Herodian did not instill in them feelings of loyalty or pride. They knew it was there as a reminder of Herod’s military power and the Roman power behind him. It was not there to watch over them, but to watch them. In spite of this, they still chose to obey the angels and go see Jesus.

We are always faced with choices concerning loyalty. We chose to whom our loyalty goes. Are we loyal to the worldly, political power, or to the message of good news? We’re not always forced to make this choice, but sometimes we are and there are consequences that stem from our choices. For example, Herod’s power was real, and in his paranoia, he ordered all the male children in the Bethlehem area to be killed, a massacre of the innocents. Jesus and his parents Joseph and Mary had to flee into exile in Egypt, and only returned after Herod’s death. From the beginning accepting the message of Jesus has come with a price. But the power of God’s message is stronger than all earthly expressions of might. Mary was also faced with a frightening situation when the angel Gabriel appeared to her, telling her that she would bear the Messiah. She immediately questioned because she was a virgin. She knew that a pregnancy for her, as an unmarried woman could mean death. But Gabriel calmed her fears, and told her, “with God nothing will be impossible.” (Luke 1:37)

This is the kind of attitude we need, especially when we try to work towards reconciliation. Stepping out and calling for an end to hatred and violence will always leave you vulnerable to accusations. You will quickly be labeled a “traitor,” and someone who betrays their own people. It is easy to be discouraged, to look at the conflict and think it is impossible to stop. But “with God nothing will be impossible.” This is a promise from God. Where is Herod now? What has happened to the mighty Roman Empire? God will do great things with us and through us if we are willing to take up his message, and join the angels in singing, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.'"

Thus ends Salim's message.

As I begin my sabbatical, my focus will be turned fully to my lifetime study of Middle Eastern and Islamic history and how I can deploy what I know to foster reconciliation with the tools of the historian. I am praying that I will be able to go to Jerusalem again in March, this time as a Fulbright Specialist, to help al-Quds University develop curriculum for its new honors college.

In January I'll be travelling to Dallas to meet with the other 399 North American delegates to Cape Town this October, where we will join the other 1100 delegates from around the world to discuss the issues facing the Church and its calling on Earth.

My writing projects all revolve around the issue of God's mission for the nations, the Arab-Israel Conflict, and Islam today. I pray that God will use me and that I will be able to do all that He asks. I thank God for the support Biola University has given me and I just pray that I will use my time well, that I will be strong and healthy enough to undertake these trips, trusting that the Lord will provide for all of my financial needs, and that these opportunities and adventures will enrich my classes to benefit my students.

Near East Update: Follow this link to view the video on Saddam Hussein in which I appear.

2010-01-03T23:17:00.000-08:00

Near East Update: Follow this link to view the video on Saddam Hussein in which I appear.

Jerusalem and the Muslim Brotherhood: Who will Claim the Future of the City?

2009-07-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

According the Jerusalem Post reporter Herb Keinon on Jul 19, 2009 in an article entiled "Limits on Settlement Freeze Being Set" Avi Diskin, head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), told the Israeli cabinet that "Israel had identified widespread activity by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to block land purchases in east Jerusalem by Jews." Furthermore, he reported that Egyptian cleric Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi of the Muslim Brotherhood "had allocated some $25 million for the purchase of property and to build Hamas charitable institutions that would expand the group's reach in Jerusalem." Adding to concerns, Keinon reported that although "there has been a drop in terrorist activity both in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank," foreigners affiliated with the global Islamic jihad movement were trickling into Gaza, and that
"Hamas continued to develop its armament capabilities inside Gaza, even though the organization was not currently carrying out attacks."

Fear mongering and terrorism have both succeeded in perpetuating the state of war between Palestinians and Israelis. The condition of the Muslim monuments in Jerusalem is undeniably deplorable. The Palestinians have chosen to neglect their patrimony to prove that Israel is effacing the legacy of Islam in the city. Before Hamas and Islamic Jihad can cash in on this neglect by taking over these institutions, Israel and her international allies ought to urge UNESCO to move on Jordan's nomination on the Old City of Jerusalem as a World Heritage site. This year, Arabs are celebrating Jerusalem, but they have been either unwilling or unable to clean up the architectural treasures that are sprinkled throughout the city and concentrated in the Muslim Quarter. The municipality should work with organizations seeking to preserve these monuments as a show of good faith before the radicals turn the city into a battleground.

Salim Munayer of Musalaha Ministry on the Gaza War

2009-01-08T05:07:00.000-08:00

To both Israelis and Palestinians, the current conflict in Gaza has brought nothing but pain and suffering. It has also caused friction among some believers as they choose to pledge sole allegiance to their own people group. Some are even expressing an unabashed hatred for the other side through articles, e-mails and graphic content on Facebook.

From the Israeli point of view they pulled out of the Gaza Strip in the name of peace and an Islamic regime took over. Israel’s justification for going to war was to protect its citizens against Hamas launching rockets on the communities in the Negev. Soldiers continue to mobilize along the Gaza border as they prepare to defend their people and country against terror. They claim that others would have acted more quickly and aggressively. Their reasoning is that it is necessary to attack now before Hamas has longer-range missiles.

The Palestinians claim that though Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2006, the army is still controlling the borders making it the biggest open-air prison in the world. In the last 18-months, 1.5 million Palestinians have been under siege and were prevented from receiving sufficient water, medical aid and food supply. For the Palestinians, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was just an excuse to expand their control in the West Bank and build further settlements. The Palestinians also believe they have a right to self-defense. For them, the Israeli reaction is disproportionate. The number of Israelis killed cannot be compared to the hundreds of Palestinians killed.

Each player in the conflict places the full responsibility of the cycle of violence on the other side. There is a general unwillingness to enter into peace talks on ideological or political grounds. For example, Israel will say Hamas is an ideological religious organization that doesn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Palestinians, on the other hand, say the Palestinian Authority has entered into concessions and nothing substantial has evolved; all that increased were settlements and checkpoints.

So, what is our role as believers in this situation? How can we be a model of Messiah as we move forward in the reconciliation process? Are we too busy challenging the moral and ethical position of the other side that we are unwilling to take responsibility? Because our societies have chosen war and violence, there is a great need for reconciliation. We can accomplish this through taking on a priestly role of intercessor and prophetic role of speaking the truth.

While the conflict has divided some believers, there are those taking a stand and fulfilling their priestly role. I was greatly encouraged last week to hear a Messianic pastor lead his congregation in a prayer of repentance, especially emphasizing that in a time of war, repentance is necessary from both the Israelis and the Palestinians. We must begin by examining our own sins, failures and shortcomings and seek God’s forgiveness and direction.

Applying Joel 2, he read, “Return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning. Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity” (Joel 2:12-13). God desires us to grieve from within and turn our hearts back towards him. As we as believers intercede on behalf of the people in our societies we need to invoke the nature of God and beg for his mercy and compassion to fall upon us because we have sinned before him. We must also cry out for God’s mercy and compassion to fall upon the other side.

In time of war we are also called to take on a prophetic role. The prophet was a representative of God who brought a message primarily to effect social change. The prophet spoke the truth and reminded us to care for the widow, orphan and stranger. When speaking the prophetic word, we need to be blunt without any hidden messages, and we need to have the courage to speak out when our people are wrong. In the prophetic role we are reminded that we must not only speak out against the injustice which has been committed against our own people, but also against others. We have a duty to speak out against the misuse of power and the blood of the innocent shed whether it is Israeli or Palestinian.

The world views war as war. Some will say, “in war the innocent also die and we cannot help it.” My son was greatly distressed when his friend told him exactly this. I shared with him that in war we need to speak up for the innocent. We cannot justify the act of killing innocent people and say it was in self-defense. Yet, we cannot justify killing someone with a weapon just because they’re holding a weapon. Even killing in war for self-defense should be taken with caution and reverence. The enemy carrying the weapon is also a person who has also been created in the image of God. Especially in a time of war we need to speak louder and clearer against the misuse of power by our governments and their justification of power and violence. War doesn’t mean giving a free hand without any moral and ethical boundaries and limitations.

So, while we are in the midst of war, we need to honestly seek the will of God and be discerning. We must become intercessors for our nation, our leaders and the other side and ask God to pour out his mercy and compassion. We must also become the prophet and convey that message of injustice happening in our societies. We need to attempt to relieve the pain of the innocent even if we feel our side’s reasoning for war is justified. Instead of pointing the finger, let us look within ourselves and repent. Then let us look at the other side with compassion and love, with a love that transcends societal boundaries, rocket fire and airstrikes.

Salim J. Munayer, Ph.D.
Director of Musalaha
Tel: 02-6720376
Fax: 02-6719616
Musalaha@netvision.net.il
__._,_.___

Follow this link to view the video on Saddam Hussein in which I appear.

2009-01-05T22:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyhTI7ZpnlE

For my most recent published article on What Muslims Really think about Israel.

2009-01-05T16:53:00.001-08:00

Follow this link to my most recent published article "What Muslims Really Think About Israel"

http://www.cfia.org/ArticlesAndReports/ArticlesDetail.aspx?id=11236

The Failed Attempt to Prevent the Hannukah War

2009-01-05T16:16:00.000-08:00

Monday, March 5, 2007 The Orange County Register

The Orange Grove: A Mideast opportunity we must seize

Saudi deal on Palestinian government a chance to undercut Iran, al-Qaida

By JUDITH MENDELSOHN ROOD

The Brea resident is an associate professor of history and Middle Eastern studies at Biola University in La Mirada.

The Mecca accord, a Saudi-brokered deal last month to bring Hamas into a Palestinian unity government with Fatah, is the result of Saudi Arabia's realization that the growing Iranian hegemony in Iraq, and the deepening presence of al-Qaida throughout the region, have made it imperative for them to bring Iranian-sponsored Hamas back into their orbit.

This will not be easy. Both al-Qaida and Iran have had no trouble infiltrating Gaza, and currently intelligence services of a number of Arab countries are urging the United States and its Arab allies to take these threats seriously.

The Bush administration's subsequent decision to join a round of talks among Iran, Iraq and Syria must be seen in this light. Supporting the initiative of a chastened Saudi Arabia may help to get the region back to a rational political course.

Ziad Abu Amr, an American-trained political scientist and a secular Muslim, has been named the new foreign minister of Palestine. This is that rare piece of good news that even the most dedicated students of the Arab-Israel conflict might miss. Abu Amr served in the Palestinian National Council before Hamas was elected to power. His Ph.D. is from Georgetown University, where he wrote his dissertation on the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas-Islamic Jihad, published in 1994 as "Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad."

Since the mid-'80s, when Israel permitted Saudi Arabia to reshape the Muslim Brotherhood into an Islamic movement in Palestine as an alternative to the secular PLO, Amr has tried to convince his people to eschew terrorism, to recognize Israel, and to establish a democratic Palestinian state. He challenged the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's deceitful policies. The disappointments of the Oslo peace process have been hardest on his generation of Palestinians, who had hoped that through reason and good will, peace between Israel and Palestine could be achieved. Instead, the continuing conflict and Arafat's corruption fueled Islamist ideology.

The officials of the new Palestinian unity government are taking their lives into their hands to try to change the course, to return to diplomacy. On Feb. 18, Zakariya Durmush, head of the Army of Islam, al-Qaida's Palestinian cell in Gaza, denounced the Mecca accord as heresy, singling out Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas official Ismail Haniya as violators of shariah, Islamic law.

Durmush told his supporters, "What is now to prevent Hamas from embracing the sinful laws of the Palestinian Authority and those of other satanic forces, the Americans and the Europeans?"

Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, our Arab allies are growing more and more frustrated that the U.S. is not taking seriously the threat of proliferating al-Qaida cells. The fact is that Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Morocco and other Arab allies have recognized that they must step up to the plate to defend themselves.

The United States can't solve these problems for these governments. Instead, we should work with them – taking every step possible to avert a repeat of the disastrous Al-Aqsa Intifada, when Arafat attacked Israel using the very security forces that had been put into place to preserve the peace – to prevent war with Iran and Syria. And Israel must allow the Palestinian Authority to accrue political and economic credits by working with her neighbors to establish stability in the region.

The United States has to act wisely in the face of these challenges, supporting regional initiatives without compromising them. It may seem unreasonable to trust the Palestinians after their many political missteps and the horrible reality of Palestinian terror.

Israelis and Arabs need their leaders to have the courage of a Nixon, who established diplomatic relations with China, of a Reagan, who brought down the Berlin Wall, and of a Sadat, who flew to Jerusalem to save Egyptian lives. Their diplomatic advances seemed unimaginable just before they happened. However, with courage and conviction, it is possible that we, too, can derail the train that Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has set loose.

We must try.

Available at the original source at:

http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/opinion/homepage/article_1596782.php

The Hannukah War

2009-01-05T16:05:00.000-08:00

Shalom from the war zone! Our friend, Avner Boskey, an Israeli Messianic Jew here in Israel has written an accurate account of what is going on in Israel in the Gaza Strip and what led up to the attack. He has given us permission to forward his letter. Lura & Eddie Beckford, Arad, Israel - Dec. 2008

We know Avner and his account is very helpful. More than that: this war may in the end prevent Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood from continuing their war against the West, with Israel as the prime target. The war may also help the Israelis and the Arabs to make a fresh stab at a peace treaty, based on the Fahd Plan.

War With Hamas – The First 40 Hours

This is a brief analysis of the war, followed by a report of details of today's fighting, and then specific prayer requests.

The war with Hamas began at 11:30 am Israel time on Shabbat (Saturday) December 27 – the sixth day of Hanukkah (the Feast of Dedication). The Operation was given the military name 'Cast Lead' or Opheret yetzuka in Hebrew, referring to the leaden dreidels (sevivon or spinning tops) played with on Hanukkah. These festive tops were once made of molten lead poured into a metal mold, and a popular Hanukkah children's song refers to a dreidl made of "cast lead". As God would have it, this war will be identified in the annals of Israeli history as the Hanukkah war.

Israelis have a lot of experience with war, and many significant wars are connected with certain Jewish holidays. The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 began on the Day of Atonement. The First Gulf War ended in 1991 on the first day of Purim, the Feast of Esther. The Second Intifada broke out on The Feast of Trumpets in 2000. On the Ninth of Av (Tisha b'Av) in 586 BC and 70 AD, both Jewish Temples were destroyed in Jerusalem. God is still speaking to Israel and the nations by using His prophetic calendar and His feast days (see Leviticus 23:2, 4), and this includes minor feasts like Hanukkah (see Daniel 11:29-35 and Hebrews 11:34-38).

Background to this war

After Israel withdrew or retreated from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, that region was taken over by the Islamist group Hamas ('The Islamic Resistance Movement'; for deeper background see newsletters February 2006, June 2007 at www.davidstent.org). This group is linked with the Muslim Brotherhood, a world jihadi group ideologically connected to Osama Bin Laden.

Hamas refuses to recognize the state of Israel. Hamas calls and plans for Israel's military destruction. Over the past three years it has fired more than 10,000 Qassam or Grad rockets and mortars against civilians only – towns, farms and cities within Israel. And over the past week it fired between 36 and 80 rockets per day into kibbutzim, small villages and large towns. Last Saturday I went to visit some believers on a kibbutz bordering on Gaza, and during my 30 minute visit five rockets fell close by.

The government of Israel has strangely tolerated a buildup of these rocket attacks over the past three years. Though originally then-Prime-Minister Ariel Sharon soothingly promised Israelis that the disengagement from Gaza would bring peace, and if even "one rocket were fired" Israel would reconquer the Gaza Strip, the 10,000 rockets fired starkly contradict the soundness and wisdom of his policies. Part of the recent tolerance is due to the fact that the Kadima party Sharon founded is still in office, and these officials owe their political positions to these failed policies.

Over the past few weeks Israel has repeatedly warned Hamas and surrounding countries that if the rocket attacks continue, it will decisively and powerfully respond. These Israeli warnings have gone unnoticed by the world's media, as have the rocket attacks. No country that is worthy of the name would allow terrorists to rocket their civilian populations for so long without an overwhelming response. For both Israel and Hamas, that day of response has come.

The surprise attack

As Palestinian rocket attacks have increased, Israel has spent the past year culling intelligence in preparation for a decisive counter-attack. Hamas command and control (CC) centers, arms depots, senior residences, training camps, rocket launcher sites and Qassam factories – all were located and charted.

On Saturday at 11:30 am 64 Israeli fighter jets and attack helicopters attacked and destroyed 50 strategic Hamas sites in 3 minutes and 45 seconds. A half hour later, another sortie of 20 plans hit 50 more sites, including underground launchers and bunkers. 95% of the hits were 'alpha', meaning exact strikes with no collateral damage.

Strategic targets

Over 240 strategic sites have been hit in the past 40 hours. One site hit was the Hamas police compound, where 80 gunmen were gathered. At other ammo dumps and command centers at least another 50 terrorists were killed. At other smaller CCs a total of 92 terrorists were killed.

On Sunday Israeli jets struck and destroyed 40 underground tunnels used by Hamas to smuggle in significant amounts of weapons, explosives and anti-tank/anti-aircraft missiles in a 3 minute 20 second sortie. This area is called the Philadelphi Corridor, and was surrendered to Hamas by Israel due to significant U.S. State Department pressure in 2005. Over 700 tunnels have been dug, and most are still operative.

Up to this point Hamas rocket squads have managed to fire more than 70 rockets at Israel, and Israel's Military Intelligence believes that Hamas has the ability and reserves to fire up to 200 rockets daily for quite some time.

On Sunday one Hamas rocket traveled 37 kilometers, hitting Gan Yavne a bedroom community east of Ashdod. This means that other towns including Gedera and Beersheva (where we live) are in possible range of Hamas rockets. The Home Front Command has ordered public bomb shelters to be opened in these twons beginning Monday morning. Pray for the Israeli civilians in rocket range of Hamas mortars and rockets (Qassams and Grad rockets, capable of reaching Ashkelon, Ashdod, Kiryat Gat and Beersheva).

The question of casulaties

The casualty rate in Gaza has now reached 300 (most of these terrorists), with over 1,000 wounded.

The IDF takes great pains to avoid civilian casualties, while Hamas deliberately locates its centers and fires its rockets from within civilian centers. Hamas rockets only target civilians, while the IDF tries very hard to only target terrorists. Due to the immediate proximity of civilians to rocket launchers and Hamas headquarters, there have certainly been some civilian casualties.

Israeli army intelligence has warned and even done mass telephoning of Gazan civilians, urging them to stay away from potential target areas. Though civilian casualties are deeply regretted, they are known in military parlance as collateral damage. General William Tecumseh Sherman once remarked (based on his American military experiences) that "war is hell". We agree, even though it is sometimes necessary.

The Palestinian terror groups unfortunately see these casualties in a positive light – as helpful grist in their propaganda mills. They immediately tell the world media that Israel is targeting civilians and causing massacres.

One prime example of this tactic was during Operation Defensive Shield (March 2002), triggered by Hamas terrorists who killed 30 Jews (including Holocaust survivors) and injured 140 at a public Passover meal in Netanya Israel. IDF troops retook control of major West Bank cities which had become suicide bomber havens. The army took great pains to avoid civilian casualties, suffering many fatalities in this process. Nevertheless, the Palestinian media accused Israel of a bloodthirsty massacre of over 500 civilians in Jenin. That number was eventually dropped to approximately 56 terrorists, most in uniform, and 7 or 8 civilians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Defensive_Shield).

One 58 year old Jewish man was killed this Saturday in his apartment by a Hamas rocket, and 10 Israelis have been wounded. We thank God for the protection He has granted so far to Israelis, and we strongly encourage you to pray for continued safety!

Prayer requests

Ø Pray for the leadership of Israel – that the God of Israel will give them clarity, strategy, courage and discernment (2 Kings 6:8-12)

Ø Pray for Gaza's leadership – that God would frustrate their plans, operations and strategies (Psalm 83:4, 9-15)

Ø Pray for the civilian population of Gaza, many who support the terror – that God in His mercy would reveal Himself to many as their Savior and Prince of peace (Jonah 3:8-9)

Ø Pray for the peace of Jerusalem and the salvation of the Jewish people (Psalm 122:6; Romans 10:1)

Ø Pray for the struggling tiny community of believers in Gaza, some who have been tortured or martyred by Islamists in recent days

Ø Pray for the Jewish believers in the Negev area bordering on Gaza, some who contend with daily rocket attacks

In Messiah Yeshua,

Avner Boskey

Donations can be sent to:

FINAL FRONTIER MINISTRIES

BOX 121971 NASHVILLE TN 37212-1971 USA

If you would like follow-up copies of what is happening, let me know, please. Lura lura_eddie@hotmail.com

Website: http://www.kingsmenarad.com

"Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.

Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and shun evil.
This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones." Proverbs

Preferatory Unscientific Reflections on the War in Gaza

2009-01-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

Pundits in the media talk endlessly about the Middle East conflict and the quest for peace in the Middle East. Feeding off violence in Israel, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or sensational terrorist attacks anywhere in the world, media frenzy creates its own fog, obscuring the real issues and trapping the political actors themselves into posturing for the press in search of public support for their policies. Yet the publics they pander to are themselves in a daze, unable to discern the true issues at stake, always surprised at the outbreak of war.

Few members of the public are equipped to analyze what they are hearing and seeing via the internet, radio and tv, and often the public response is emotional—rushing to support of the victims, innocent or not; shutting off the news completely because they perceive no connection of it to their own lives; or buying into the concept of the “cycle of violence” wishing only “a pox on both their houses” for the combatants’ inability (read refusal) to come to terms on what to outsiders seem to be inconsequential matters. However, with nuclear proliferation in the region now a reality, the looming threat of apocalyptic worldwide warfare has begun to sink into public awareness. Lines are being drawn. The axis of evil, in the public mind, still exists, and includes states not on the official list.

With the tsunami of unfiltered, graphic news, public opinion is becoming an ever-more important factor influencing foreign policy. No longer do we have secret treaties drawn up in back rooms. Nor do we have carefully crafted, albeit tendentious propaganda to sort through. Instead, we have "public diplomacy." New institutes are producing more and more “experts” who are studying how best to influence public opinion in favor of government policies by using the practices developed by public relations and media specialists. These experts, unlike the area-studies experts produced in the 1980s and 90s by international affairs programs, do not help to analyze what is happening and to forecast how to approach international crises, but they too are to engage in the fog of war and media coverage.

The Middle East, it is now well known, is fractured on multiple levels broadly across the region and deeply within the complex societies that make it up. This has been true for millennia. And it is true beyond the Middle East. Conflicts may be connected to one another historically, but what we are experiencing is not a cycle of violence, but a long war that has evolved and localized. Where some have seen religious conflict as the source of political violence, others have seen it as a consequence of nationalism and imperialism. Still others recognize conflict as not because of religious or political differences, but as the expressions and consequences of our human nature. Warfare is endemic. We are violent.

In the West, reason has been deemed the best arbiter for deciding the common good, while today the umma is torn between rationalism and fundamentalism (scriptural literalism) in structuring a just society.

In the West, religious freedom has been equated with political freedom. Note here that I'm not talking about secularization, which has been read as the removal of religion from the public sphere. People of faith read it as the separation of Church and State, that is, there ought to be no church established by the State. Citizens have the freedom to follow any faith, adhere to any religion, attend any meetings that they wish. They simply ought to have no power to coerce others into following their ways. And they respect the freedom of individuals to do as they please, so long as they do not harm anyone in the process.

In Islamic societies, the state has been understood as the guarantor of the spiritual welfare of the community. Political decentralization and multiculturalism has been the ascendant philosophy in the West, while centralization and homogenization has been in the ascendant in Islamic societies. Thus, it may be asked, who has the best understanding of human nature?

These questions have been asked, and answered, before. In Islamic societies there have been those who have believed that rationalism, not fundamentalism, should be the foundation of statecraft.

Should the state seek to ensure the spiritual welfare of its inhabitants? The West has responded with an emphatic no, while the Islamic world has answered, yes. Israel, caught between Islam and the West, has not yet decided, allowing religious authorities from each officially recognized religious body to exert control over their adherents’ private lives, with state support. This is the oft-discussed millet system that the Jewish State inherited from the Ottomans that remained in place throughout the years of the British Mandate.

Israel has been fighting several battles all at once. First, she has fought to save the lives of Jewish people by serving as their refuge from religious and political persecution. Secondly, she has fought for her survival as a political community among her Muslim neighbors. Thirdly, she has allowed multiple battles over religious authority to fester. Israel’s ambivalence relating to religious freedom and equality has been the result of political considerations. On the one hand, Israel seeks to create a space for Jewish identity, and thus has developed strong connections throughout the Galut (diaspora) and in the West, especially among Christians who have recognized her place in the international community for humanitarian, strategic, cultural, and religious reasons. On the other, she has asserted the civil equality of Christians, Muslims, and other religious minorities in the state. However, in reality she has fostered only the Orthodox Jewish community’s political power, subsumed into the very idea of Israel as a Jewish state. This despite the presence of many other varieties of Jewish identity and observance, as well as Jewish adherents to other faiths in Israel.

Muslims, as a community, following decades of uncertainty, for the most part rejected Israel’s claim to what the British called “Palestine” at the end of World War One. It took a rather long time for this position to become dominant, however, and that dominance resulted from an intentional process of the politicization of the Muslim community backed by Britain’s enemies, the Germans, and by the British themselves, who during the interwar period continued to follow their policy of divide-and-rule. Arab Christians, on the other hand, were supercessionists who believed that the Church had replaced Israel, and that therefore there simply could be no justification for a Jewish claim to Palestine. Having lived as dhimmis alongside Jews under Islamic governance for centuries, the Arab Christians chose to ally themselves with the Muslim majority, supporting the idea of secular Arab nationalism. During the interwar period, this alliance was not necessarily a right-wing or left-wing matter; there existed briefly during a time when what Albert Hourani brilliantly called “the Liberal Age” in the Middle East, when the Western conception of the state—that is, secularization, or the separation of Church and State—briefly gained acceptance in the region as liberal education began to make inroads into the traditional societies of the region.

However, the unresolved rivalries between the Europeans during the build-up to the Second World War had enormous influence on the frail liberal regimes of Central Europe and the Middle East. National socialism in Germany crushed liberalism in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Middle East, which saw the emergence of fascist parties in all of the communities there. Likewise, Communism resonated in Middle Eastern societies, eager to break the hold of traditional elites throughout the region. Hitler and Lenin’s ideas found enthusiasts—from Jabotinsky to Aflaq to Saadeh, who reinterpreted romantic ideas of ethnic nationalism and class solidarity into support for authoritarian political parties, of the Right or the Left, depending upon which power offered to provide the most military, economic, and political support against the Zionists.

Mulling over the political writings of Arab and Zionist nationalists from that period, one is often struck by their syncretism and eclecticism, merging Islamic, Christian, and Jewish ideas with Nazi and Communist ones. The strange syntheses produced in the interwar period now seem more comprehensible, as we ourselves contend with the seemingly incoherent mixture of Iranian Revolutionary Shi’ism with fundamentalist Sunnism (themselves incredibly syncretistic and eclectic) in the ideologies of Hamas and al-Qa’ida. What is at stake is not philosophical coherence, but pragmatic alliances in pursuit of political power.

And that is the one constant in all of this is the pursuit of power—the power to assert control over land, people, and resources, and today, as in the dark days of WWII and the Cold War, over public opinion.

This pursuit of power is motivated by either the desire to protect or to exploit. The way that these two aims have been understood in modern times is the same as they were by the ancient Hebrews and Greeks: liberty or tyranny. Ultimately, human nature will express itself no matter what the regime, for both the bad and the good. In the Abbasid period of Islamic history, the war of ideas known as the mihna, sometimes translated as "inquisition" in the sense of state persecution of schools of thought," is instructive to us today. This ideological battle was waged between the Mutazalites, who argued for the use of reason (falsafa, or Greek Philosophy) in statecraft, and the Ash'arites, who argued for scriptural literalism as the only legitimate political authority. The latter were the Wahhabis of their time. The Abbasid regime initially favored the Mutazalites, but at the same time promoted the licenciousness in its court, forever equating reasoning and libertinism (sin) in the Muslim mind.

The caliphate persecuted the fundamentalists until, after several decades, public opinion in the realm came to strongly support them, and the tables were turned. Why was this? The caliph turned to the Shariah-minded for public support. While the fundamentalists preached their sermons to the public and taught their doctrines to eager students, the philosophers worked in solitude, translating Greek works but not educating the masses. What they accomplished spurred the intellectual development of the West, but was forgotten by all but a few in the East until much later. Thus ended the most illustrious period of the Baghdad Court, which is enshrined today in the minds of many Arab humanists as the highest expression of Islamic Civilization. To fundamentalist Muslims, the excesses of the Abbasids overshadow their scholarly, artistic, literary, and technological attainments. Today's Salafists (fundamentalists) believe that the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258 was divine retribution for the sins of an un-Islamic regime. They feel the same way about the Ottomans, and believe that today's Arab states will have a similar fate. They seek a return to what they imagine is pure Islam, unsullied by sinfulness, controlled by a literal interpretation of the Qur’an and the law as it was ostensibly practiced by Muhammad in Medina.

So what we are actually seeing is conflict over how humankind ought to control our nature, for good or for bad. Since the Reformation, the West has increasingly been divided over whether individual liberty or material welfare should be the highest aim of politics. Since the Holocaust, the West has overwhelmingly rejected the notion that the Church and the State ought to be one. The state no longer makes any claim concerning its role in the spiritual condition of its people in this world or the next. Muslims, on the other hand, remain divided over how best to secure the eternal fate of the community. Should the State allow for religious freedom, or should it control the religious affairs of the ummah in this world, to guarantee their fate in the hereafter? Is heaven more important than this world? Or does what happen in this world matter when it comes to heaven? The Muslim world has not yet repudiated the quest for a universal state. Let us pray it will not take another Holocaust to convince them that they must.

Barack Obama's Biblical Literalism

2008-06-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

"Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith?

Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let's read our bibles. Folks haven't been reading their bibles."

Barack Obama's (June 28, 2008) homily on following levitical injunctions literally mockingly suggests that some might believe that in order to be obedient, they must live under the law. (Orthodox Jews follow the injunctions about Kashrut, but that's another matter entirely.)
However, some Christian, Muslim and Jewish literalists do make that mistake: not distinguishing between dispensations--that is, the specific, limited historical contexts in which specific revelations were given. Blinded by historical amnesia fostered by societies in too much of a hurry to understand their pasts, some believers, and their opponents, read sacred texts ahistorically. What is commanded at Sinai, or in Medina, only makes sense, they think, if the believer obeys literally, without regard for the subsequent development of revelation or law.

In Mr. Obama's case, his characterization of belief in the Bible was designed to show the dangers of using the bible, or religion, as a guide for life. Religion, viewed this way, is atavistic; a digression from the social progress that to him characterizes the movement of history. However, he is right that such literalism is a danger posed by Scripture: without careful interpretation, the Bible can be easily misused.

Good scriptural exegesis is possible only if properly guided. Good hermeneutics is based on the recognition that what God commanded under certain historic conditions applied only to those specific conditions. Those conditions no longer exist, and therefore must be understood for the principles that they can give us to our particular circumstances. Thus, the majority of Jewish people reject the horrific idea that the Palestinians, like the Canaanites, should be annihilated. Rather, they understand that in this dispensation, in the final analysis, Israel must adhere to international law. Most Muslims do not believe that they personally must wage jihad against non-Muslims, but, based upon the historical experience of Islamic polities, recognize the principle of religious pluralism. Christians now oppose slavery, because they recognize that although it was socially acceptable in the past, it was always a moral transgression against humanity. We are no longer under the law: we can eat shellfish if we choose.

Yet we must never mock sacred scripture, even if it is not our own, but especially if it is. Playing fast and loose with religions and their faithful shows a fundamental lack of respect for our neighbors and our Maker. Polemics are fraught with danger when essentialist interpretations are deployed against cultures and peoples. Careful higher criticism, based on philology and history, literary analysis, and all the other tools available to scholars seeking to understand texts, is still the best way to interpret religious texts.

Democracy and the Middle East

2008-03-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

Many Muslims and Arabs have suffered terribly from bad government, and we have suffered because of it. Many think that bad government results from Islam. Rather, bad government results from the lack of accountability to a nation’s citizenry—and if that citizenry has been deceived and misled by bad ideas parading as “modernization” or "tradition" or "anti-West" it will not demand its freedom. A passive populace endures bad government. And bad government invites outside intervention, either because it is threatening, or because it is weak.

Just as no man is an island, no land is an island, not in this age of global interconnectivity. Where Huntington saw a clash of civilizations, others have seen the difficult process of the integration of the Muslim world, painful at times, into the international system. The Muslim world has been caught in this process for the past century, and is as subject to historical contingencies and context just as any other people. Only now is Dar al-Islam, the Realm of Islam, assuming responsibility for its political mistakes by necessity, as its ruinous modern history has become increasingly clear to its more informed, and connected, populace.

We are all bound in a web of interconnections, ranging from economic relations, political interests, cultural sensibilities, religious, ethnic identities, historical patterns, philosophical inclinations, social tastes, architectural aesthetics, literary traditions: these webs are aspects of all civilizations. In the far distant past, when civilizations were fairly isolated from one another, they developed certain characteristics that allow historians to identify them on the basis of their religion, politics and socioeconomic structures, art and architecture, language and literature. However, since before the Age of Discovery, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution and the Modern Age , formerly singular civilizations have been drawn together by increasingly close ties. Change over time is slow. Glacial changes are incremental, but at times, we can look back and see radical discontinuity. Now is such a time.

In 1789, the French Revolution marked such a change. Secularization led to the intentional development of a political ideology designed to apply universally to all peoples. The deism of the French Enlightenment led to the instrumentalization of human beings for the service of the state. The revolutionary mantra spread across the world: liberty, brotherhood, equality! Nations were reawakened so that they could shake off the old and to struggle for freedom, but utopian ideas proved tragically deceptive.

Beyond Continental Europe, many, who identified themselves as liberals, were disturbed by the bloodlust of the revolution, and at the reactionary responses of the absolutist monarchies to the ideas of democracy. The Founders of the United States of America sought to address the threats they perceived to human freedom: tyranny, so they designed a system of checks and balances so that no individual could impose his will on the many; an established church, so that no authority could limit or control individual relationships with God; instability, so they established a system of laws which aimed at protecting the life and property of its citizens. The government of the United States of America was thus founded upon a healthy respect for man’s depraved nature as well as upon his dignity. They honored the importance of each person’s individual relationship to God by ensuring that that relationship had to be radically separate from the political sphere. The French had based their system on the idea of man’s goodness, while the Americans based their system on the idea of the freedom of the individual.
In Europe, the death of God led to the deification of the nation, and romantic nationalism led to the convergence blood and steel. Totalitarian governments emerged from the wreckage of the First World War in Europe as relentless homogenizers that swallowed up liberalism throughout Europe. The romantic ideal of national self-determination was buried along with Czechoslovakia when German panzers rolled into the Sudetenland.
Out of the ashes was reborn a worldwide struggle for human freedom, a struggle which had been cruelly aborted in the Arab world even as it was beginning its own rebirth.

People living in the Arab and Muslim world have never enjoyed political rights in the modern sense of the word, except as they have experienced as citizens of democracies outside of the Middle East and Central Asia. They remain subject to governments that claim authority based upon ideologies of one kind or another. Some Muslim states trace their lineage to European revolutionary and fascist ideologies, and some to Islamist ideology. Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt have embraced secular paths, but both have strong authoritarian tendencies in tension with the democratization of their societies. Jordan, some of the Gulf States, and Morocco have reforming monarchies that have embraced constitutionalism, but have not yet developed truly participatory civil society. The Palestinian stalemate between secularists and Islamists continues to trap them as pawns in the Arab struggle over integration into the international system. Security fears crush freedom throughout the region...and these fears are primarily not of external threats, but internal ones.

Dissenters of all kinds are endangered by lawless men: without the rule of law, there can be no freedom of expression. The subjects of dictatorships cannot be held responsible for the actions of their governments the way that citizens of democracies can. All this to say that until there are democratic governments in the Middle East whose citizens are free to hold their governments accountable for protecting their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, there will be no political stability, economic prosperity, or happiness for the rest of us.

"A Common Word Between Us"

2008-03-28T18:55:00.000-07:00

In “A Common Word” Muslim clerics wrote about the importance of the love of God and the love of neighbor in Islam and Christianity. The acknowledgement of the “Other” as human beings was a remarkable effort by moderate Muslims to repudiate the teachings of Osama bin Laden and his ilk that all non-Muslims are idolators who must be destroyed. The 138 affirmed that God is One, and that there is no other god beside Him. Many Christians say, “But Allah is not God!” and many Muslims reply, “And God is not Allah!” Worshipping any god besides the Creator of the Universe is the greatest sin, all believers agree. Yet we disagree on revelation, as God has ordained in this Age of the Nations. All the theology in the world cannot reveal that which is perceived only through a glass darkly by His creatures. Each of us must decide for ourselves how much power we want to allow God to have over our lives. Is He limited in any way? He can do anything He pleases. He is the Sovereign, Our Creator. We cannot judge another’s heart, and we are accountable only to God. In good faith, we must agree that God is Allah, and Allah is God, and that the God of Israel is the God of Muhammad, just as Muhammad taught his followers. All responsibility for misleading one another about who God by our deeds is ours alone. How the Lord God must weep at His children’s eagerness to condemn one another before His throne. Let us humbly affirm our humanity by recognizing His image in our neighbors’ eyes, and like Isaac said to Esau, "For to see your face is like seeing the face of God, now that you have received me favorably." Genesis 34:10.

Democracy, Freedom, and American Mideast Policies

2008-03-28T16:50:00.000-07:00

I am an American citizen. I am everlastingly thankful to God that He led my grandparents to immigrate to this country—my mother’s parents from the Pale of Settlement following the infamous Kishinev pogrom of 1903, and my father’s parents from Nazi Germany in 1939. They realized that they literally would not be permitted to live where absolutist, totalitarian governments did not recognize them as citizens—human beings with inherent rights and dignity.

All Americans, no matter their gender, race and creed, are equal under the law. No tyrant rules here, one who we could blame for pursuing policies with which we disagree. Our liberty comes with a cost, and that is shouldering our responsibilities and duties as citizens. While we cannot all serve in the armed forces, we must serve as members of the electorate. An informed citizenry is the only guarantee of keeping government officials accountable and of keeping our own personal liberty.

Our secular government represents us, for good or for ill. Some people of faith condemn the actions of our government, thinking that our nation should have a Christian government. That is tragic. Our country emerged as a nation because the established church was anathema to the many who dissented from the repressive policies of state churches throughout history. Persecuted for their faith, they fled to America and forged a new kind of government over centuries of conflict and strife. We enjoy the freedom of religion because we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—where happiness means not material bliss, but spiritual and legal independence.

Our democratic values matter not only domestically, but internationally, and our foreign policies should represent the interests of our nation’s citizenry. As citizens of a democratic country, we have to assume responsibility for the actions of our government, which acts in our name, because that is the meaning of democracy. Although we may not agree with their policies and actions, we cannot simply blame our elected officials and dissociate ourselves from our government. We must hold these officials responsible for their actions, and we must participate in policymaking through our involvement as citizens.

Our nation has undeniably brought harm to innocents—not just Iraqis, but Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, and others—through bad foreign policies that have led to a failure of diplomacy. Yet it has also done great good. Good or bad, we must recognize that those officials who are elected to high office—the president and the legislature—represent us and bear the heavy burden of making decisions under complicated, difficult, and terrifying circumstances. Whether or not we voted for them, we need to pray for them, thanking God that we are not the ones who have to make the hard decisions. We owe them the respect due to them--their work is not easy and their burden is great. And, ultimately, they will be judged for their actions, by history and by their maker.

We must face our own history and the consequences of the evil that have shaped the international state system of which we are a part and for which we too, will be judged.

Why I signed the "Christian Response" to the "Common Word Between Us"

2008-03-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

An Unpublished Response to Richard John Neuhaus, Public Square Comment “Islam and Christianity: Changing the Subject” First Things (February 2008)

March 28, 2008

I am one of the signatories of the “Christian Response to a Common Word Spoken Between Us” whose name was published in the New York Times of November 13, 2007. While I admit that the letter was rather effusive, reflecting Arabic style, but I did not read it as “supine.” Rather, as a Jewish follower of Yeshua HaMashiach, and as a scholar of Islamic history teaching Middle Eastern Studies at a major evangelical Christian university, two particular passages of the “Christian Response” resonated for me. The letter expresses two ideas that Jews would like to hear acknowledged by Christians and Muslims, as often as possible: an acknowledgment of our shared pasts, and our responsibility as citizens and believers for the acts committed by our countries and people of our faiths throughout history. Although accepting individual responsibility for acts we have not done personally is ethically complex, acknowledging the sinfulness of humanity over the centuries is fundamental to improving human relations in humility as we face the future.

The first passage reads:

“A Common Word Between Us and You (sic) identifies some core common ground between Christianity and Islam which lies at the heart of our respective faiths as well as at the heart of the most ancient Abrahamic faith, Judaism. Jesus Christ’s call to love God and neighbor was rooted in the divine revelation to the people of Israel embodied in the Torah (Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18).”

The core ideas here, that God created us, that He called upon us to worship and serve Him, and to treat one another with dignity and respect, is one that is too easily dismissed by those who want to focus on our differences.

Although great progress has been made in recent years, many Jews, Muslims, and Christians still know remarkably little about one another’s beliefs. The fundamental importance of the Hebrew Scriptures to all three religions is not widely known or accepted at the popular level. Today, Islamic anti-Semitism and anti-Christianism are fueling the attacks on Israel and the persecution of Christians in the Muslim world. At the same time, some Christian apologists claim that Allah is the “moon god,” a pernicious idea that is making its way increasingly into mainstream evangelical culture. By neglecting to understand the historical development of all three religions, important bridges between them are being sundered at the popular level, where hate finds a ready medium. While it is extremely important to understand the sharp differences between the three religions, it is equally important to understand their commonalities as well.

After centuries of rejection by Christians, the connection between the Christians and Jews has been transformed by the rejection of the teachings of contempt and supercessionism that denied the roots of Christianity in Jewish culture. Although many Christians, surprisingly, remain unaware of their problematic connection to the powerful anti-Semitic strands in the history of the Church, they must understand that they are often associated with Jewish suffering. Perhaps evangelicals prefer to see anti-semitism as an aberration, but it is an historical fact that should not be dismissed as of no concern to the contemporary Church.

Among Muslims, a type of the Marcion heresy that threatened the Early Church has taken root among salafis who reject the historicity of Muslim origins and their connection to the religious texts and teachings of Judaism and Christianity. Ahistoricism in Islam has legitimized the rejection of continuity—and connection—among the three monotheistic religious traditions, a rejection that lies at the heart of the difference between radical and moderate Islam. The majority understanding of Jews and Christians as Peoples of the Book along with the Muslims, has been rejected in favor of associating them with pagans and heretics, as taught in the Hanbali tradition.

The doctrine of the “uncreated Koran” has made the rejection of the Arab, pre-Islamic past as a period of darkness unworthy of study has become increasingly important, preventing Muslims from engaging in “higher criticism” to better understand the teachings of Muhammad. As in the West in the early modern period, Muslims fear that subjecting the Koran to historical examination will lead to disbelief. This fear has prevented Muslims from seeing the continuities—and differences—between their scriptures and the Bible. Such studies are still in their infancy, despite centuries of Islamic tradition based upon grammatical and syntactical studies of the Koran as well as “Orientalist” scholarship, efforts which the Muslim public finds extremely suspicious. Nevertheless, the spread of Wahhabism, which teaches a literalist interpretation of the Koran, has led to renewed interest in Koranic Studies worldwide and may lead to a deeper and fuller appreciation of the influence of Jewish and Christian ideas in Arabia and the development of Islamic civilization.

The other idea that Jews and Muslims would like to hear Christians is stated in this way:

“Before we ‘shake your hand’ in responding to your letter, we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world.” The letter continues; “...[W]e want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades [ Jews would like to see “The Inquisition, Pogroms, and the Holocaust” inserted there, along with “the Crusades”] and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the "war on terror") many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbors.”

While the historic record is complex, today’s Christians must understand that they are associated in non-Christian minds that the savagery of the pogroms along the Rhine and the slaughter of innocent Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims by the Crusaders remains at the center of Muslim sensibilities. In the War on Terror, the U.S. did not have to leave the infamous Abu Ghraib detention center standing. Scholar Kanan Makiya and filmmaker Michael Wood helped Americans understand the brutality of Saddam Hussein in the ‘80s and '90s: the first thing we ought to have done when we arrived in Baghdad was to tear down that infamous symbol of Saddam’s tyranny. Instead, we are forever saddled with the images of Americans as brutalizers in a war that is being fought in the name of freedom, and in which our sons and daughters are still laying down their lives.

While Christians today may forget that at one time Christianity was the “state church” in the Middle East, Muslims and Jews have not. Muslims see the United States as a Christian country, one of a long line of regimes that have sought to impose their power by homogenizing the faiths and cultures of the Middle East and Central Asia in the name of stability. While the United States is totally different from the medieval Christian and Islamic empires that ruled the Middle East, as outsiders we are pegged as aggressors, and our support of Saddam in the ‘80s, his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iran, our preservation of his rule through the ‘90s which led to genocidal policies against the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq, and which also deployed economic sanctions against the common people rather than Saddam’s Baathist supporters, led undeniably to great suffering. Can we not acknowledge our sins in allowing Saddam to rule for so long, despite his crimes against humanity, before 9/11? Is it not a sin that we failed adequately to defend our own nation against attack?

Of course none of the signatories to the letter would want to become subjects of an Islamist regime, as some critics of the letter speciously have suggested we’d prefer! As an American who has long accepted the necessity of warfare in the Middle East as the lesser of evils in the last resort, I have found the failures of our foreign policy and intelligent establishments shocking and incredible. Like many other Americans, I hope that the final word is not out, and that one day we will learn the full truth about all of the disinformation that we have endured since the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait.

For the full text of “A Common Word Between Us” and the Christian Response, see: http://www.yale.edu/faith/

2008-03-23T00:18:00.000-07:00

A Response to Richard John Neuhaus, Public Square Comment “Islam and Christianity: Changing the Subject” First Things (February 2008)

March 28, 2008

I am one of the signatories of the “Christian Response to a Common Word Spoken Between Us” whose name was published in the New York Times of November 13, 2007. While I admit that the letter was rather effusive, reflecting Arabic style, I did not read it as “supine.” Rather, as a Jewish follower of Yeshua HaMashiach, and as a scholar of Islamic history teaching Middle Eastern Studies at a major evangelical Christian university, two particular passages resonated for me: an acknowledgment of our shared pasts, and our responsibility as citizens and believers for the acts committed by our country and people of our faith throughout history. Although accepting individual responsibility for things we have not done personally is ethically complex, acknowledging the sinfulness of humanity over the centuries is fundamental to improving human relations in humility as we face the future.

The first passage reads:

“A Common Word Between Us and You (sic) identifies some core common ground between Christianity and Islam which lies at the heart of our respective faiths as well as at the heart of the most ancient Abrahamic faith, Judaism. Jesus Christ’s call to love God and neighbor was rooted in the divine revelation to the people of Israel embodied in the Torah (Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18).”

The core idea here, that God created us, calling upon us to worship and serve Him by treating one another with dignity and respect, is one that is too easily dismissed by those who want to focus on our differences.

Although great progress has been made in recent years, many Jews, Muslims, and Christians still know remarkably little about one another’s beliefs. The fundamental importance of the Hebrew Scriptures to all three religions is not widely known or accepted at the popular level. Today, Islamic anti-Semitism and anti-Christianism are fueling attacks on Israel and the Christians in the Muslim world. In response, Christian apologists are claiming that Allah is the “moon god” of a pagan religion--a pernicious idea that is making its way increasingly into mainstream evangelical culture. By neglecting the historical development of all three religions, important bridges between them are being sundered at the popular level, where hate finds a ready medium. While it is extremely important to understand the sharp differences between them, it is equally important to understand their commonalities as well.

After centuries of rejection by Christians, the connection between the Christians and Jews has been transformed by the rejection of the teachings of contempt and supercessionism that denied the roots of Christianity in Jewish culture. Although many Christians surprisingly are unaware of their problematic connection to the powerful anti-Semitic strands in the history of the Church, they must understand that non-Christians associate them with Jewish suffering. Perhaps evangelicals prefer to see anti-semitism as an aberration, it is an historical fact that cannot be dismissed as of no concern to the contemporary Church.

Among Muslims, the Marcion heresy that threatened the Early Church has taken root among salafis who reject the historicity of Muslim origins and their connection to the religious texts and teachings of Judaism and Christianity. Ahistoricism in Islam has legitimized the rejection of continuity—and connection—among the three monotheistic religious traditions, a rejection that lies at the heart of the difference between radical and moderate Islam. The majority understanding of Jews and Christians as Peoples of the Book along with the Muslims, has been rejected in favor associating them with pagans and heretics, as taught in the Hanbali tradition. The doctrine of the “uncreated Koran” has made the rejection of the Arab, pre-Islamic past as a period of darkness unworthy of study increasingly important, preventing Muslims from engaging in “higher criticism” to better understand the teachings of Muhammad. As in the West in the early modern period, Muslims fear that subjecting the Koran to historical examination will lead to disbelief. This fear has prevented Muslims from seeing the continuities—and differences—between their scriptures and the Bible. Such studies are still in their infancy, despite centuries of Islamic tradition based upon grammatical and syntactical studies of the Koran as well as “Orientalist” scholarship. The spread of Wahhabism, which teaches a literalist interpretation of the Koran, has led to renewed interest in Koranic Studies worldwide and may lead to a deeper and fuller appreciation of the influence of Jewish and Christian ideas in Arabia and the development of Islamic civilization.

The other idea that Jews and Muslims would like to hear Christians is stated in this way:

“Before we ‘shake your hand’ in responding to your letter, we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world.” The letter continues; “...[W]e want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades [we Jews would like to see “The Inquisition, Pogroms, and the Holocaust” inserted there, along with “the Crusades”] and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the "war on terror") many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbors.”

While the historic record is complex, today’s Christians must understand that they are associated in non-Christian minds with the savagery of the pogroms along the Rhine and the slaughter of innocent Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims by the Crusaders. Violent anti-Semitism is a part of the history of the Church, and, like it or not, Christians today must grapple with this fact. In the War on Terror, the U.S. did not have to leave the infamous Abu Ghraib detention center standing when we entered Baghdad. Scholar Kanan Makiya and filmmaker Michael Wood helped Americans understand the brutality of Saddam Hussein in the ‘80s: the first thing we ought to have done when we arrived in Baghdad was to tear down that infamous symbol of Saddam’s tyranny. Instead, we are forever saddled with the images of Americans as brutalizers in a war that was devoted to freedom, and for which our sons and daughters are still laying down their lives.

While Christians today may forget that at one time Christianity was the “state church” in the Middle East, Muslims and Jews have not. Muslims see the United States as a Christian country, one of a long line of regimes that have sought to impose and homogenize faith and culture in their region in the name of their religion. None of us today would want to become subjects of such regimes, as some critics of the letter speciously have suggested we’d prefer! While the United States in totally different from the medieval Christian and Islamic empires that ruled the Middle East, as outsiders we are pegged as aggressors, and our support of Saddam, his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iran, our preservation of his rule through the 90s which led to genocidal policies against the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq, and which also resulted in economic sanctions affecting the common people rather than Saddam’s Baathist supporters, led undeniably to great suffering. Can we not acknowledge our sins in allowing Saddam to rule for so long, despite his crimes against humanity, before 9/11? Is it not a sin that we failed adequately to defend our own nation against attack?

As an American who has long accepted the necessity of warfare in the Middle East as the lesser of evils in the last resort, the failures of our foreign policy and intelligent communities have been shocking and incredible. Like many other Americans, I hope that the final word is not out, and that one day we will learn the full truth about all of the disinformation that we have endured since the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait.

Therefore, the letterwriters’ decision to put quotation marks around the phrase “War on Terror” didn’t strike me as important enough not to sign it. It did not mean that each person who signed the letter opposed the war. As citizens of a democratic country, we have to assume responsibility for the actions of our government, which acts in our name. Our nation has brought harm to innocents—not just Iraqis, but Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, and others—through bad foreign policies that have led to a failure of diplomacy to resolve the many conflicts in the Middle East, at great human cost. Those officials who are elected to high office—the president and the legislature—represent us and bear the heavy burden of making decisions in complicated, difficult, and sometimes terrifying circumstances. Whether or not we voted for them, we need to pray for them, thanking God that we are not the ones who have to make the hard decisions. The least we can do is accept our part of the responsibility for these actions.

Therefore, as Christians, and as citizens of the United States, we must strive to strengthen and protect good governments by engaging in peacemaking efforts, grounded in strength and wisdom on all levels, rooted in the values, ethics, and beliefs that have sustained civilization. To do this, we must face our own history and the consequences of the evils that have shaped the international state system of which we are a part and for which we will be judged.

For the full text of “A Common Word Between Us” and the Evangelical Response, see: http://www.yale.edu/faith/

Evangelicals and Israel

2008-03-21T14:22:00.000-07:00

“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.”

Part One: Christian Zionism and Christian Arabism

To the American public, even before 9/11, the Arabs, with their supposed unlimited oil wealth and unfamiliar religion, are seen alternately as darlings or devils. On the other side, Israel and the Jews, seemingly besieged by genocidal regimes on all sides aimed at their destruction, are viewed as either victims or aggressors. Rarely do the public pronouncements of religious leaders of any persuasion help to clarify Middle Eastern politics for the American public. To foreign audiences, who do not understand denominational religions in the United States, pious but simplistic half-truths uttered by American clerics create profound fear and anger, mockery and disgust.

It is an undeniable political fact that “Evangelicals” have become a critical political factor in American elections. For that reason, the opinions and beliefs of those identifying themselves in that category have now become important to politicians and candidates running for office. Since the emergence of the Moral Majority in the ‘80s, the Israel-Arab conflict has increasingly become an unavoidable political issue for churchgoers. The history of the conflict has gone through many stages, and the thinking of liberal and conservative Christians in the United States has been affected by what has happened in the Middle East over the years.

The historic division between Christians for and against Israel has consolidated into two camps—so called “Christian Zionists” and those I prefer to call “Christian Arabists.” The politicization of the conflict in American politics has led to a booming multimedia industry designed to influence American policy in the Middle East. With an unlimited market, much material has been produced to fuel the debate, but remarkably little of it helps those who want to understand the conflict.

Even among academics, the dispute between Christian Zionists and Christian Arabists over the Arab-Israeli conflict is not as well understood as the vigorous Jewish debate over Zionism over the past century. However, their disputations have garnered a great deal of attention in the media and on the pulpit, with political consequences for Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab states.

It is important at this time to put the issue of Israel for Evangelicals in context. For moderate Evangelicals, the bitter mutual recriminations of both camps against one another have been confusing, distasteful, and harmful, resulting in the extreme polarization of the broader Christian community about proper U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Christian Zionists, sympathetic to the Jews as God’s Chosen People, have lobbied for pro-Israeli policies, while Christian Arabists, sympathetic to the historic Arab Christians in the Islamic Middle East and universal human rights, including the right of self-determination--have lobbied for the Palestinians. Following the Holocaust, Christians have eschewed anti-Semitism in the Church, and have feared the disappearance of Christians in the Middle East under the pressures of the Arab-Israel conflict. Against the background of the growth of secular nationalism in the twentieth century, Muslims, Jews and Christians in the U.S. and the Middle East had hoped that religious differences could be pacified through political liberalism and nationalism. By supporting Arab Nationalism, and later, specifically Palestinian Nationalism, Christians have sought to preserve common ground for Christians and Muslims against the twinned threats of political Islam and Western interventionism. With the end of the Cold War, Arab nationalism failed, and liberal democracy failed to take hold in the authoritarian Islamic world, reviving and fueling latent religious fundamentalism in both Israel and in the Muslim world. It is remarkable that although Jews and Christians, including Christian Arabists and Christian Zionists, and Muslims recognize the dangers of resurgent political Islam--the great Other whose growing strength threatens to engulf the entire region--their responses to this threat have been quite different and utterly flawed.

To Christian Zionists, Israel represents a society possessing affinities to the values to American democracy. Moreover, they perceive Israel as a strategic bulwark against the instabilities of the Middle Eastern state system. Combined with their faith in the literal truth revealed in the bible, fascination with biblical history and revulsion for anti-Semitism following the Holocaust, premillennial dispensationalist theology has, for Christian Zionists, framed the narrative of what God is doing in history. Yet now Christian Zionism has become the straw man of those who oppose Zionism, the national movement of the Jewish people. The foolish proclamations of Hagee, Falwell, and Robertson have disgraced the noble humanitarian impulses of Christian Zionism, allowing Israel's enemies to focus their attention on evangelicals rather than on themselves for the deplorable state of the Palestinians and the Arab world.

Against the background of the massacre of Jews in Russia, Armenians and Syriac Christians and the displacement of thousands of Greek Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the wake of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth century American missionary efforts among Jews, Christians, and Muslims overlapped with the humanitarian, liberal age of secularization worldwide. Arab nationalism, centered upon the modernization of the Arabic language, became the means by which Palestinian Jews, Muslims, and Christians initially sought to create new identities as former subjects of the Ottoman Empire. In short order various Western political ideologies streamed into Arab Nationalism, paralleling the development of political Zionism in the period 1890-1948.

Jewish and Christian support for the establishment of Israel was almost universal only after World War II: when the Arabs were linked in the popular mind with the Turks. The alliance of the Palestinian Arab Muslim Brotherhood with the Nazis during the Second World War did nothing to change that impression, nor did the fact of Soviet patronage of the Arab socialist liberation movements during the Cold War.

The perception of Israel as a defenseless refuge threatened by hate-filled Muslims changed in 1967, when the Arabs were trounced in the Six Day War. That victory created in the popular mind in America a feeling of pride at the vitality of the reborn Jewish nation. However, in the years following that victory, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza put large numbers of Palestinian Christians and Muslims under Israeli military rule. As the injustices suffered by the Palestinians began to be known, relationships between American Christians involved in educational and humanitarian organizations with Arab Christians led to a more nuanced understanding of the historical complexities of the Arab-Israel conflict and the draconian Israeli policies relating to the Arabs and their heritage in Palestine.

Sympathy for the sufferings of the Palestinians soon evolved into antipathy for Israel, particularly among newly politicized Evangelicals, many of them from Fundamentalist, premillennialist backgrounds. Those with experience in the Middle East, particularly those who had studied in the great Protestant colleges established in the Middle East in the nineteenth century, like the American Universities of Beirut and Cairo, where they were exposed to the ideologies of Arab and Palestinian Nationalism which had attracted many Arab Christians in the Middle East, and soon identified with secular national movements in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine.

Rather than dealing with the real issues of just government facing the Islamic world, Christian Arabists and Christian Zionists have attacked one another, seeking to justify their political positions theologically. The result has been that they have limited their relevance to resolving the real humanitarian, geostrategic and political challenges facing Americans, Israelis, Arabs, and the rest of the world in the Middle East. The current battle between Christian Arabists and Christian Zionists is really about Evangelical power in the American political system, not achieving a just and fair political settlement for the Palestinians and Israelis. The issue is votes, Christian Zionists joining Jews in lobbying for Israel in the United States. The truth is that just as Jewish Americans are not united in their support for Israel’s policies, as anyone familiar with Jewish life in the U.S. can attest, neither are the so-called Christian Zionists. Indeed, Christian Zionists are viewed with a considerable degree of suspicion by Jewish Zionists, who fear Christian evangelism. Thoughtful Evangelicals, especially those who are informed adherents to premillennial dispensationalism as a matter of theological doctrine, are chastened politically by their negative view of human nature and their suspicions about idea of human progress—political or cultural—and any scheme to manipulate prophecy by becoming politically involved in the historic struggle over Jewish and Palestinian self-determination.

Tarred by the press as extremists, the beliefs of premillennial dispensationalist evangelicals are seen as particularly pernicious by anti-Zionist Christians because they claim to be a part of the evangelical movement, a movement that many of its leaders wish to understand as a righteous movement for social justice, universal morality, and political engagement on behalf of the poor and oppressed. While it is unfortunately true that some Christian Zionists see things in terms of black and white, there are many more, among them seminarians, college and university professors and students, professionals, and writers who hold much more balanced and constrained views of Israel in this age, the Dispensation of the Nations, that has lasted from Pentecost and will end with the Rapture.

The very mention of the Apocalypse is frightening to many Christians, and of course, foolishness to non-Christians, who scorn literal interpretations of biblical literature. Many Jews and Christians over the millennia have chosen to understand the future judgment of the world allegorically at best or as dangerous folly at worst. Dispensationalists, however, like Jewish and Muslim literalists, accept these biblical teachings as trustworthy warnings, with thanks that the Almighty continues to restrain His wrath until the terrible day when He will
judge the nations.

Near East Update

Recommended Links

HAMAS and the Origins of the Muslim Brotherhood

RFIA Draft Paper on Christian Zionism

God's Work in History or Tikkun Olam?

What We Choose to Remember: Jerusalem in World History

Sabbatical Beginnings

Near East Update: Follow this link to view the video on Saddam Hussein in which I appear.

Jerusalem and the Muslim Brotherhood: Who will Claim the Future of the City?

Salim Munayer of Musalaha Ministry on the Gaza War

Follow this link to view the video on Saddam Hussein in which I appear.

For my most recent published article on What Muslims Really think about Israel.

The Failed Attempt to Prevent the Hannukah War

The Orange Grove: A Mideast opportunity we must seize

Saudi deal on Palestinian government a chance to undercut Iran, al-Qaida

The Hannukah War

Preferatory Unscientific Reflections on the War in Gaza

Barack Obama's Biblical Literalism

Democracy and the Middle East

"A Common Word Between Us"

Democracy, Freedom, and American Mideast Policies

Why I signed the "Christian Response" to the "Common Word Between Us"

Evangelicals and Israel