Feature Article

For love of the land

What will the consequences be for the Middle East, when Yasser Arafat no longer leads the Palestinians? If Christians really want to understand the conflict there between Arabs and Jews, they need to understand two theologies - one of place, and one of liberation

A story is told about an Israeli and a Palestinian leader meeting God and asking whether there will ever be peace in the Middle East in their lifetime. Of course there will be peace, God tells them. They looked relieved. However, God continues, not in my time. One hundred and twenty years after the beginning of modern Zionism, a peaceful solution seems some distance away.

The approaching demise of Yasser Arafat and the potentially bloody consequences of a power vacuum among the Palestinians, combined with death threats from some Orthodox Jews and rabbis in Israel against Ariel Sharon, because of the proposed pull-out from Gaza, are reminders of what seems to be an intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

How did we get from statesmanlike handshakes on the White House lawn just a few years ago to Palestinian children falling victim to Israeli gunfire and to Israelis being butchered in the streets of Tel Aviv? What became of the hopes? Why did the dream of a lasting peace evaporate? For a start, a series of failures on both sides contributed to the collapse. On the Palestinian side, virtually nothing was done to develop a mentality of peace. This was a significant failure of Palestinian leadership. It has been said of Arafat that he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. On the Israeli side, there has been a failure over many years to respond positively to the pent-up economic frustration of the Palestinians. There had been a lot of talk about progress but to many Palestinians, especially in the refugee camps, such statements ring hollow. Israel is viewed as the sole culprit for their terrible sufferings.

So where do we go from here? For Jews and Christians, one way is to take seriously the theological significance of the land of Israel. For Jews, the centrality of the land of the Bible, as well as the survival of one third of world Jewry, is at stake. Christians, for their part, not only disagree as to the place of Israel in Christian theology, but many understandably feel particular concern for Arab Christians who live in Israel and Palestine. Israel is controversial because it cannot be viewed simply as a geographical and political entity whose emergence is like the establishment of any new state. Political, social, cultural and religious concerns all affect its place in the Jewish-Christian relationship.

In the Bible, possession of the land of Israel was an indispensable condition of self-fulfilment both for the individual and for the community. When dispossession and powerlessness arose as a result of the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, the Jewish response consisted both of the hope of divine restoration and of the mystical idea that God was also exiled with his people. Both Jews and Christians agreed that the exile occurred partly as a result of divine punishment. Traditional Christian interpretation emphasised punishment for failing to believe in Christ, whereas Jewish interpretations emphasised God's presence (Shekinah) in joining the exile, and the positive consequence of ensuring that Jewish teaching was spread far and wide. The traditional Christian emphasis on divine punishment provided the basis for replacement theology - in other words, the belief that Christians replaced Jews as the people of God. This teaching became dominant through the centuries, contributing greatly to anti-Semitism.

The emergence of the state of Israel, in which Jews are a sovereign majority and Judaism the established religion of the land, has, to a certain extent, sidelined replacement theology. For Palestinian Christians, a theology of liberation has developed out of their everyday experiences of living in Israel since 1948. It is not too extreme to state that the Palestinian Church has faced a major theological crisis since the establishment of Israel. A considerable part of this crisis has been due to a belief that the Bible has been used as a political Zionist text. Na'im Ateek, the Palestinian Christian who founded Sabeel, the Ecumenical Palestinian Liberation Theology Centre in Jerusalem, argues that before the creation of the state, the Old Testament was considered an essential part of Christian Scripture, pointing and witnessing to Jesus. Since the creation of the state, some Jewish and Christian interpreters have read the Old Testament largely as a Zionist text to such an extent that it has become almost repugnant to Palestinian Christians (Justice and Only Justice, p.77). The continuing problems faced by the Palestinian people have added to the crisis. Palestinian liberation theologians ask, with some justification, for their fellow Christians not to ignore the Palestinian people, their loss of homeland and struggle for liberation.

Yet, some Palestinian liberation theologians are politically partisan, hostile to Jews and Judaism and naive about the possibilities of dialogue with an increasingly militant Arab Islam. A wholly negative attitude towards Israel on the one hand and an embrace of a radical Palestinian liberation theology on the other are unhelpful to building bridges between communities. In fact, they are as unhelpful as some more extreme forms of Christian Zionism, which view any action by Israel as wholly positive. The way forward lies somewhere between the two.

As far as Jewish hopes were concerned, the will to survive in the diaspora generated messianic hopes of redemption, which occasionally led to a high level of anticipation and the extraordinary claims of self-appointed messiahs such as Bar Kokhba in the second century, Shabbetai Zevi in the seventeenth, and even the Lubavitch leader Rebbe Schneerson in the late twentieth. One common feature of these times of messianic fervour was that the Promised Land became a symbol of redress for all the wrongs Jews had suffered.

Modern Zionism is in part the fusion of messianic fervour and a longing for Zion. Jews took their destiny into their own hands and stopped waiting for a divine solution to their predicament. This was a dramatic break from the diaspora strategy of survival, which advocated endurance of the status quo as part of the covenant with God. For many Jews, the Jewish state offered the best hope not only for survival in response to the crises in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also for fulfilment. Not all Jews supported a Jewish state, particularly before the Holocaust. Indeed, Zionism resulted in vociferous arguments among Jews, and ultra-Orthodox Jews still reject the concept of a Jewish state, arguing that Israel should be a divine and not a human creation.

From the Christian perspective, perhaps because land is not central to Christian theology, Christians have found it hard to grasp that the Jews feel tied to a particular territory. One eminent American theologian, Walter Brueggemann, argues that the subject of land should move to the centre of Christian theology, and suggests that Christians cannot engage in serious dialogue with Jews unless they acknowledge the theological significance of land. In his view, controversy over the state of Israel highlights the lack of a theology of place in contemporary Christianity.

Catholicism's attitude towards Zionism changed greatly in the course of the twentieth century. In 1904, Pope Pius X (1903-14) rejected Theodor Herzl's plea for support unequivocally: The Jews have not recognised our Lord, therefore we cannot recognise the Jewish people. However, the Second Vatican Council and the 1965 document Nostra Aetate, while not explicitly mentioning Israel, began the process that eventually led to the Vatican's recognition of the state of Israel in 1994.
Increasing awareness among Catholics of the significance of Israel has become more noticeable during the papacy of John Paul II. For example, in his 1984 Good Friday apostolic letter the Pope wrote: [for] the Jewish people who live in the state of Israel, and who preserve in that land such precious testimonies to their history and their faith, we must ask for the desired security and the due tranquillity that is the prerogative of every nation and condition of life and of progress for every society. Ten years later the state of Israel and the Holy See exchanged ambassadors, and the process begun in 1965 reached another significant landmark with John Paul's pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 2000, and the everlasting image of his prayer at the Western Wall.

One feature of the debate about Zionism revolves around the question of whether Zionism is an integral part of being Jewish, as the vast majority of Jews and many Christians now maintain, or is incompatible with Judaism, as some Christian critics, such as the late Fr Michael Prior, insist. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Zionism became a pre-eminent part of Jewish identity, even though Jews continue to argue passionately over its desired future course. The debate about the place of Israel will continue in the future. If there is to be peace in the Middle East, we need to change our course. Listening to each other's views with generosity would be a good place to start.

Edward Kessler is the director at the Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge.