This past May I had the opportunity to visit the Holy Land for a week. I did not go as a religious pilgrim, I went to learn about the struggle between the Palestinian people and the Israeli government. But as I traveled through the Israeli-occupied West Bank and parts of Israel, I found myself haunted by the presence of Jesus.
This sense of Christ's presence did not come from my visits to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Those places seemed more like monuments to the Crusaders and the tourism industry than to the simple rabbi of Nazareth. Instead, this feeling about Jesus first struck me in the streets of Bethlehem, which today are part of the occupied West Bank. There I heard a Palestinian man tell how occupation troops came by night to arrest his 16-year-old son and demolish the family home, all because the boy was suspected of throwing a rock at a military vehicle.
As I listened, I realized that this must have been what life in Bethlehem was like when Jesus was born, during the Roman occupation. I could envision Mary and Joseph and the child there today, hounded by their occupiers and made refugees again. It was a vision that lingered and grew throughout the week.
But there was a painful ambiguity to that perception: I also knew that Jesus has relatives among the Jews of Israel, who have endured similar suffering and worse ever since they were driven out of that land centuries ago. I knew that many of them carry out or support the occupation and other oppression of Arabs because they believe these policies are their only road to survival in a world that has proven itself more than willing to exterminate Jews.
Perhaps in that ambiguity lies a key to the causes of the war that has again erupted in the Middle East. It is, at its core, a conflict between two rights: the right of Jews to safety and self-determination in the land that they have hallowed for millenia, and the right of Palestinians to national identity and self-determination in the same land of their ancient ancestors. Both claims are just, yet over the years these two rights have led to a terrible litany of wrongs, as each has too often been unable to recognize the other.
In this issue of Sojourners, we examine some of the complex issues of the Middle East conflict. It is not a task undertaken lightly. Both Jews and Arabs have rightly pointed out that as Western Christians we have little moral authority to address their situation. It was, after all, a deadly combination of Western Christian persecution of Jews and colonial domination of the Arab world that in large part created the present impasse. There is logic to the argument that people like ourselves should be silent on these issues, if only out of respect for the unerasable horror of the Nazi holocaust.
Yet as Christians who also happen to be citizens of a nation that is deeply implicated in the continuing suffering and bloodshed in the Middle East, we know that there is little hope for peace if we do not speak. Our nation has defined its national security to include a political and military dominance in the Middle East that can insure unfettered access to its oil resources. As a result, we are arming Israel and some of the Arab states to the teeth with the most expensive and deadly weapons available.
We have raised the stakes in the Middle East to the point that the region has become the most likely place for nuclear war with the Soviet Union to begin. This is especially true because the Soviet Union, bordering on the Middle East, has its own security interests in the region, which we seem intent on defying. While we should never try to speak for the Jewish and Arab peoples of the Middle East, for the sake of the whole human family we must attempt to contribute to peace in that region.
At present there are a variety of Christian voices in the U.S. speaking on the Middle East. Unfortunately, one of the dominant ones is that of the Christian Right, which sees in biblical prophecy a justification, indeed a blessing, of Israel's military policies and territorial ambitions. This position does violence to the Scriptures and is not helpful to any of the people in the Middle East. It would have Christians ignore the weightier matters of justice and mercy in order to manipulate events into place for the Second Coming.
But at the same time, it is impossible to address the Middle East as a foreign policy issue like any other. The religious dimensions of the conflict are undeniable. One need only consider the role of the city of Jerusalem in Judaism and Islam. And the lasting bond between the Jewish people and the land of Israel is too mysterious and powerful, and too rooted in the biblical tradition we share, not to be affirmed as a gift of God--not an exclusive or unconditional gift, but still a gift that gives them a right to a home in that land.
When I came back from the Middle East this spring, I was filled with a despair that was only made worse by my sense of urgency. Those feelings have been deepened by the war in Lebanon. The roots of the conflict are tangled, ancient, and deep, and it is difficult to see much hope for a solution.
I have found that when I think now of hope for the Middle East, I do not think so much of diplomatic initiatives, as important as those are, but of people I met there. I think of the Jewish Israeli activists who have taken great risks to speak and act on behalf of justice and self-determination for the Palestinians. I think of the Palestinians who carry on their struggle for freedom without giving in to hatred and violence, like the man who told me of his deep Christian pacifist convictions and his hope for a nonviolent liberation struggle in the occupied territories. I think of the Arabs of the Golan Heights, who carried on such a struggle against their annexation. In the world of generals and politicians, these people don't count for much. But in the biblical view, those who challenge the violence of the oppressor and the oppressed, defy racial barriers, and give themselves on behalf of justice and reconciliation are the seeds of a new order. These seeds may never grow in the poisoned rain of militarism that now dominates the Middle East. But in the right environment they might flourish and blossom. We can only hope and pray and do what we can in our own country to help create such an environment.
Danny Collum was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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