Presentation at The Gathering

Last week I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion about Middle East peacemaking at a conference in Florida.  My remarks follow: 

The elusive task of peace in the Middle East has been the focus of my attention for a long time now. While serving at the State Department in the post 9/11 era, I spent a good amount of time in the Middle East, and my work began to center on the Holy Land where, as we all know, Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for more than 60 years over who controls the land.  There’s too much history to tell it all, so I’ll just begin with my first actual visit t to Jerusalem which was during the Second Intifada, which was a violent Palestinian uprising against Israeli military occupation that was wreaking havoc on both Israelis and Palestinians.  Hundreds of Israeli civilians died as suicide bombers blew themselves up in cafes, shopping malls and on public buses.  Even more Palestinians died in the Israeli military response. 

I arrived in Jerusalem amidst the violence and the chaos to see the Israelis building a security barrier as a means of self-protection, the first priority of any State.  But I also saw the way in which some were using the justifiable response of erecting a physical barrier as an opportunity to demarcate a political boundary in sensitive places. 

The 24 foot high concrete wall snakes its way through Palestinian neighborhoods in E Jerusalem in ways that separate families and cut off communities from jobs, healthcare, access to churches and mosques, and from historic patterns of life. And I was of course troubled when I saw graffiti on the wall that read “Bush’s Wall” and “Made in the USA.”  

I spent several days there, learning more firsthand about the issues I’d only read about, and then and on the many visits since then, I spent time with the real people who live there

What I found was a complicated geopolitical conflict, one that included

·      two competing national narratives

·      three historic religions with claims on sacred space

·      a complicated history littered with too much bad leadership and too many missed opportunities

·      a cycle of violence and a belief in the necessity of revenge, because to not respond is to demonstrate weakness

·      high levels of fear and insecurity

·      indefensible amounts of injustice

·      a general sense of hopelessness, cynicism and despair

·      a beleaguered but vitally important Christian presence

·      a large American role.

The role of the American government is indeed a significant one.We provide $3B/year in military support to Israel, and we are also the largest contributor to the Palestinian Authority.  And we are the de facto authors of international policy vis-à-vis the conflict

As for the American church, I found two dominant approaches:  To put it in oversimplified terms, there are strong expressions of the evangelical church which are so desirous to affirm the State of Israel and the Jewish people that they ignore the reality of the Palestinians, including the historic Palestinian Christian community

Likewise, there are those mostly in Mainline Protestant churches who so seek to identify with Palestinian dispossession and suffering that they end up delegitimizing Israel.

Neither of these approaches, though in many cases well intentioned, serves the cause of peacemaking nor sees the links between justice, peace and security. 

And having met so many of the real Israelis and Palestinians who live there, I’ve come to the conclusion that both these approaches fall short of being an authentically Christian response to people caught up in a geopolitical conflict.

And yet I also met some of the most inspiring advocates of peace and justice you could ever know. Some were Israelis, some were Palestinians.  Some were Christians, some were Jews, some were Muslims, many were entirely secular.  And some became both friends and heroes to me.

Let me tell you about a couple of friends of mine. 

The first is Danny, an American-born Jew who made aliyah to Israeli 40 years ago.  Danny is a proud Zionist who has served as an officer in the Israeli army and who has had two daughters who’ve performed service in the IDF as well.  Danny’s own family history surely have shaped his commitment to the necessity of a safe and secure homeland for the Jewish people: His father was born in Germany and, thanks to a renegade American consular official who was willing to ignore the rules, managed to escape the Third Reich in around 1940.  He made his way across Russia, through Japan, and ended up in Seattle, Washington, where he graduated high school, then before the war was over Danny’s father found himself back in Germany, but this time wearing an American uniform and fighting the Nazis.  Danny is a lawyer who has basically abandoned his practice as he devotes himself to the work of creating a Jerusalem that is respectful of the deep and historic connections of three faith communities and two national narratives.  He works tirelessly for fairness, justice, compromise, and peace for both peoples. 

And then there is my friend Daoud, whose name means David in Arabic.  Daoud is a Palestinian Christian who was in fact born in the City of David.  His family has a farm on a hilltop just outside Bethlehem in an area that is now home to thousands of Israelis who since 1967 have built towns known as settlements on all the adjacent hills.  Daoud’s farm land is coveted and several attempts have been to take it by force, but because he has Ottoman-era deeds to the property he has been able to maintain control of the property through a protracted series of court cases.  But while he retains control of his land for now, he is not allowed to erect any kind of structure on the property, nor is he permitted electricity or running water.  Daoud is a committed follower of another son of Bethlehem, and has been forced to determine if all those things said about forgiveness and loving your enemies is real or impossible nonsense.  He’s decided to take Jesus commands seriously and he lives his life in this way.  At the entrance to his farm, you’ll find stone with these words etched into it’s face:  We Refuse To Be Enemies

And since that time I have felt implicated in this conflict, both as an American and as a Christian. But what I soon discovered, perhaps the most difficult challenge is finding out how to act in ways that don’t make the problems worse.  First do no harm.  

Most Americans, and particularly most American Christians, have felt compelled to take a side in this conflict.  Most Christians identify with the Israelis on a number of fronts:

·      a shared biblical and religious heritage;

·      a sense that the creation of the modern State of Israel is necessitated after centuries of European anti-Semitism which culminated in the horror of the Holocaust;

·      a view that the Israelis are underdogs and vulnerable allies in a sea of hostile neighbors;

·      and a belief that Americans and Israelis share a similar commitment to democracy and Western values. 

·      and for some, a theology of land, covenant, and end times prophecy;

So assuming for a minute all or much of this is true, where does that leave the other indigenous people group in the land, the Palestinians?  Contrary to what we may have been told the early Zionists who came to their ancestral homeland in the late 1800s and early 1900s did not find “a land without a people for a people without a land” as the slogan goes.  The overwhelming majority of those living in the Holy Land for many centuries were Arabs, both Muslims and Christians. Some 700,000 of them were displaced in 1948 when the State of Israel was created, with over 400 Palestinian villages being entirely abandoned or forcibly depopulated.   And today while the Israelis rightly and joyfully celebrate their independence won in 1948 and their many achievements since, the Palestinians commemorate 1948 as what they call their nakba or their great catastrophe. 

Subsequent wars followed the one in 1948, and in the intervening years many have suffered and died on both sides.  Both have missed opportunities, and both have their maximalists who can’t imagine the possibility of a shared future and whose deepest desire is the other would be driven from the land;

In short, in different ways both sides have suffered and are suffering the effects of a geopolitical conflict.  And if this is true, to borrow from Francis Schaeffer, how now shall we live?

Well, since I’ve been bold enough to suggest it’s absence, I think we should consider what a truly Christian response looks like.  Allow me to offer four points:

1.   An authentically Christian response understands the human condition. This means two things:  First, are all sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. We can neither be naïve about human nature nor about the consequence of the Fall.  Evil is real and can’t be wished away or safely ignored.  But second, we must affirm the dignity of created life.  All the people of the region are made in the image of God and thus share an inherent dignity.  The very lives of both Israelis and Palestinians are sacred to God and real cries for peace, justice and security can’t be ignored.

As University of Virginia professor Charles Marsh has put it:  “vivid realism about the human condition is more honest and clearly drawn against horizons of grace”

2.   An authentically Christian response refuses to choose a side.  To choose a side is to become a party to the conflict.  In our work at the Telos Group, we routinely take small groups of religious leaders on unique trips to the Holy Land in which we expose them to both people, their history, their culture, and to all three faith communities, but in particular to the church on the ground.  We often drive to Haifa in the north of Israel to meet with Abuna Elias Chacour, the Melkite Archbishop of the Galilee, and Abuna Chacour tells each of our groups the same thing:  “If you came here to be pro-Israel that’s fine, but don’t do it at the expense of the Palestinians; and if you came here to be pro-Palestinian, that’s good---we would welcome your solidarity, but don’t do that at the expense of the Israelis.  When you choose one side to the exclusion of the other, you are becoming a party to a conflict that’s been going on for a century, and we don’t need any more partisans in the war.”

I would say that you can’t be pro-Israeli without being pro-Palestinian; and you can’t be pro-Palestinian without being pro-Israeli. It would so much easier if the dividing lines between good and evil were geographic, ethinc, or religious lines, but as Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminds us, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.

3.   An authentically Christian response partners with and supports those pursuing peace, justice, and reconciliation.  In spite of what you see in press accounts and in political debates, there are people on both sides who are doing the hard work of trying to figure out how to end the conflict and live in peace.  Some do the work of reconciliation; some focus on coexistence; some are advocates for justice, or for the poor; these are true peacemakers; And almost all of them are incredibly inspiring.

We should encourage them, support them, and partner with them when we can.  And we should avoid at all cost undermining them by ignoring the reality they’re pushing back against.

To do this requires committing ourselves to the gritty work of peacemaking.  Not the Rodney King why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along kind, but the kind that acknowledges differences, deals with issues of justice, forgiveness, and reconciliation, and affirms the dignity of all.

4.   An authentically Christian response is eschatologically sound. Let’s get our eschatology right.  I’m not a theologian and don’t pretend to be, but as Eugene Peterson reminded us this morning, what we think about the end helps shape how we live and act today.

This is not to say we can’t have different views about how to read Ezekiel, Daniel and John’s Revelation, and I’m not taking sides between a- pre- and post-millenialists. But if we believe that violence, war and bloodshed in the Middle East is predetermined and necessary and even a good thing, we need to balance that out with what Jesus taught us from a sermon he gave on a Galilean mountaintop.  Our views of Christ’s return should not prevent us from taking up the mandate to be peacemakers and advocates for justice. How authentically Christian is any theology that, when applied, makes us more perpetuators of conflict than agents of reconciliation?  

This is not easy work.  But as a people called to practice forgiveness, to love enemies, to be passionate for justice, to be renewers and rebuilders in a fallen world…

To be a people who believe in common grace for the common good and the flourishing of all, to be heralds for a kingdom that has come and that is coming, how can we do any other?   This to me is what it looks like to pray and work for the peace of Jerusalem.

        

I’m not suggesting that we have it within our power to bring peace to the Middle East, but if we commit ourselves to this work we can help reshape the environment in which this and other conflicts take place in a way that is conducive to the creation of flourishing societies.