December 5 2014
In Bethlehem in December 2009, an ecumenical group of indigenous Christians launched Kairos Palestine: A moment of truth – a word of faith and hope from the heart of Palestinian suffering.
To mark the fifth anniversary of the launch, an international conference was held in Bethlehem this week, under the title Life with Dignity and with a verse from 2 Corinthians as its motto: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed, perplexed, but not despairing” (2 Cor 4.8).
I was invited to speak on The Inheritance of Abraham? in a conference workshop on international initiatives and responses to Kairos Palestine. I was also invited to be brief.
Here is what I said.
Preaching the good news in a bad way
The Inheritance of Abraham? Workshop presentation, Kairos Palestine conference, December 2014
Every May, the general assembly of the Church of Scotland meets to consider reports from our councils and committees. These reports for some years have been posted in advance on our church website.
Last year, we posted online a report from our Church and Society Council entitled The Inheritance of Abraham? A report on the ‘promised land’.
Immediately, we were inundated by a tsunami of Jewish criticism. Some of this was no doubt orchestrated, but much of it raised valid questions. The report was hastily pulled from the website and revised, and a meeting was hastily arranged to mend our fences with the Jewish community in Scotland and the UK.
In Mel Brooks’ film Robin Hood: Men in Tights, the Sheriff of Rottingham has bad news for Prince John, and Prince John hates bad news. He suggests that if the Sheriff tells him the bad news in a good way, maybe it won’t sound so bad. So Rottingham tries this, and of course it doesn’t work.
“What are you, crazy?” asks the prince. “Why are you laughing? This is terrible news!”
The Inheritance of Abraham? is the reverse of this: it preaches the good news in a bad way. And because it is available in both its original and its revised versions, it offers a case study not only of what western churches should say about the conflict in this land but also of how we should not say it. It is a cautionary tale.
The report is not explicitly a response to Kairos Palestine, but it does quote this text three times and is quite clearly influenced by it and more generally by Palestinian Christian voices.
The essential point it makes is that “Christians should not be supporting any claims by any people to an exclusive or even privileged divine right to possess particular territory.” It is a misuse of the Bible “to use it as a topographic guide to settle contemporary conflicts over land.”
In line with this, the key quote from Kairos Palestine is the third: “Our church points to the kingdom, which cannot be tied to any earthly kingdom… Therefore religion cannot favour or support any unjust political regime, but must rather promote justice, truth and human dignity.”
What is wrong with the Zionist project, if I may put it this way, is that it aims to create a Jewish state for a Jewish people by riding roughshod over the rights and dignities of the other inhabitants of the land, including those it has driven out and dispossessed. And so far, as is obvious, it has been quite successful in this.
The report looks at three different views of the land.
The first view reads Genesis 12 to 17 as a territorial guarantee. God promises the land unconditionally to Abraham and his descendants, understood as the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and the Jews of Israel today.
Against this, the report asks, ” How can Christians support the violation of human rights in the name of alleged divinely conferred exclusive rights to a specific area of land?”
It quotes Kairos Palestine: “Our land is God’s land, as is the case with all countries in the world… It is our duty to liberate it from the evil of injustice and war… God has put us here as two peoples, and God gives us the capacity, if we have the will, to live together and establish in it justice and peace, making it in reality God’s land…”
The second view sees the promise of the land as conditional on good behaviour. It points to the contradiction between the ideals of equality in the state of Israel’s declaration of independence and the policies and practices of this state from the beginning until today. It cites Bishop Mounib Younan’s book Witnessing for Peace: In Jerusalem and the World: The land is a gift, not a right, and one which brings with it obligations, most particularly to practice justice and to dwell equitably with the other.
The third view sees the land as a land with a universal mission.
This is the view preferred by the report, and it takes its title directly from Kairos Palestine: “We believe that our land has a universal mission. In this universality, the meaning of the promises, of the land, of the election, of the people of God, open up to include all of humanity, starting from all the peoples of this land.”
Christians in the 21st century, the report concludes, should not understand promises about the land of Israel literally, or as applying to a defined geographical territory. They are a way of speaking about how to live under God so that justice and peace reign, the weak and poor are protected, the stranger is included, and all have a share in the community and a contribution to make to it.
The ‘promised land’, it says, is not so much a place as a metaphor of how things ought to be among the people of God. This ‘promised land’ can be found – or built – anywhere.
Another way of putting this is that the true exile is not exile from the land but exile from God.
Now let me make two quick points in Scottish self-criticism – one political, the other theological.
Over breakfast in St Andrew’s Scottish Guesthouse, a Jerusalemite Jew in the Reform tradition who now teaches in the United States gave me a beguiling metaphor: In 1949, he said, the world put Israel on trial and found the new state not guilty; in 1967, the state of Israel said, “Try me again.”
In discussion of the original report with Jewish representatives, our church leaders said this: “The concern of the church about the injustices faced by the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian territories remains firm, but that concern should not be misunderstood as questioning the right of the state of Israel to exist… There is no change in the Church of Scotland’s long-held position of the right of Israel to exist.” And this statement is written into the revised version of the report.
Our leaders could hardly have said otherwise. Since the 1980s, we have officially supported a two-state solution, and we have yet to revisit this support in the light of developments over the last three decades.
But the statement fails to recognise the point of the demand that we recognise the right of the state of Israel to exist. It means: “Don’t talk to us about the Nakba. Talk about 1967 if you must. But don’t talk about the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs inherent in the creation of our state.”
In my view, it’s high time western churches did.
The report was also criticised for supersessionism. In the strict sense this is unfair: it does not say that the church replaces the synagogue, still less draw any of the nefarious conclusions from that claim that historically Christians have drawn.
The report is not strictly supersessionist, but it does suffer from an old-fashioned Christian superiority complex: The church is universal, the synagogue is particularist.
Well, this triumphalism is just silly; and straightaway it undermines any claim we may make to stand for justice. The Christian and Jewish traditions are both universal and particular – Judaism in rooting itself in a particular people, Christianity in founding itself on a particular Jew. And Christians and Jews can both be a force for good or a force for evil, and historically we each have been both.
Next time the Church of Scotland writes on justice and peace in this land, we should do so with a little more Christian humility.