Christians and the Middle East Conflict

Christians and the Middle East Conflict deals with the relationship of Christians and Christian theology to the various conflicts in the Middle East, a topic that is often sensationalised but still insufficiently understood. Political developments over the last two decades, however, have prompted observers to rediscover and examine the central role religious motivations play in shaping public discourses.

This book proceeds on the assumption that neither a focus on the eschatological nor a narrow understanding of the plight of Christians in the Middle East is sufficient. Instead, it is necessary to understand Christians in context and to explore the ways that Christian theology applies through the actions of Christians who have lived and continue to live through conflict in the region either as native inhabitants or interested foreign observers. This volume addresses issues of concern to Christians from a theological perspective, from the perspective of Christian responses to conflict throughout history, and in reflection on the contemporary realities of Christians in the Middle East.

The essays in this volume combine contextual political and theological reflections written by both scholars and Christian activists and will be of interest to students and scholars of Politics, Religion and Middle East Studies.

Paul S. Rowe is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Trinity Western University.

John H. A. Dyck is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Trinity Western University.

Jens Zimmermann is Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Interpretation, Religion and Culture at Trinity Western University.

All three are senior research fellows in the Religion, Culture, and Conflict Research Group based at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, Canada.

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Giorgio Shani

Christians and the Middle East Conflict
Edited by Paul S. Rowe, John H. A. Dyck and Jens Zimmerman

Christians and the Middle East Conflict

Edited by Paul S. Rowe, John H. A. Dyck and Jens Zimmermann

First published 2014
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© 2014 selection and editorial matter, Paul S. Rowe, John H. A. Dyck and Jens Zimmermann; individual chapters, the authors.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Christians and the Middle East conflict / edited by Paul Rowe, John Dyck, and Jens Zimmermann.
    pages cm. – (Routledge studies in religion and politics)
    Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Christians–Middle East–History. 2. Christianity and politics–Middle East–History. 3. Middle East–History. I. Rowe, Paul S. (Paul Stanley) II. Dyck, John (John H. A.) III. Zimmermann, Jens
BR1110.C579 2014

   261.8′70956–dc23
2013050201

ISBN: 978-0-415-74398-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-81329-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents

List of illustrations

List of contributors

Introduction

PAULS. ROWE, JOHN H. A. DYCK AND JENS ZIMMERMANN

PART I
Theological perspectives

  1 Reconciliation as a Christian response to the Israel–Palestine conflict

SALIM J. MUNAYER

  2 The New Testament and the land

GARY M. BURGE

  3 Orientalism in Christian theology

MAGI ABDUL-MASIH

PART II
Historical perspectives

  4 Christian reactions to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem (637 CE)

MAHER Y. ABU-MUNSHAR

  5 Albert Hourani, Arab Christian minorities and the spiritual dimension of Britain’s problem in Palestine, 1938–1947

TODD THOMPSON

  6 The beginnings of a new coexistence: a case study of the veneration of the Prophet Elijah (Mar Ilyas) among Christians, Muslims and Jews in Haifa after 1948

AKIKO SUGASE

PART III
Contemporary perspectives

  7 In this world you will have trouble: Christians living amid conflict in the Middle East

PAULS. ROWE

  8 Christians working for peace in the Middle East: efforts and expectations

PETERE. MAKARI

  9 ‘The crescent and the cross are the marks on my hands’: the performance of Palestinian unity amid political fragmentation

ALAIN EPP WEAVER

10 Researching Palestinian Christian uses of the Bible: Israeli and Israelite violence as a canonical problem?

MARK DANIEL CALDER

Bibliography

Index of subjects and names

Index of scripture

Illustrations

Map

6.1 Maqamat al-Khader in Palestine and Israel

Figures

6.1 Women light candles to dedicate to Mar Ilyas. Stella Maris, Haifa, 2001

6.2 A man rubs the statue of Mar Ilyas to receive barakeh (blessing). Stella Maris, Haifa, 2001

6.3 Scarves, string and even plastic bags hang from the ceiling of the Cave of Mar Ilyas. Mt Carmel, Haifa, 2009

6.4 Mearat Eliyahu Ha-Nevi, the Cave of Mar Ilyas today. Mt Carmel, Haifa, 2010

6.5 Former land of the Convent of Mar Juries. The land is now divided by the ‘Apartheid Wall’ built by Israel. Al-Khader, 2014

6.6 A holy tree of Sayydna Al-Khader. Mahis, Jordan, 2009

6.7 Entry to a small holy place of the Virgin Mary. Sayydnaya, Syria, 2011

Table

6.1 Principal Maqamat al-Khader in the Eastern Mediterranean

Contributors

Magi Abdul-Masih is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s University.

Maher Y. Abu-Munshar is Assistant Professor of Islamic History at Qatar University.

Gary M. Burge is Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College.

Mark Daniel Calder is a PhD Candidate at the University of Aberdeen.

John H. A. Dyck is Assistant Professor of Political Studies at Trinity Western University.

Peter E. Makari is the Director for the Middle East and Europe of the Global Ministries of the United Christian Churches and Disciples of Christ.

Salim J. Munayer is Director of Musalaha Ministry of Reconciliation and Professor at Bethlehem Bible College.

Paul S. Rowe is Associate Professor of Political Studies at Trinity Western University.

Akiko Sugase is Assistant Professor at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan.

Todd Thompson is Assistant Professor of History, Torrey Honors Institute, Biola University.

Alain Epp Weaver holds a PhD in Theology and is the author of Mapping Exile and Return: Palestinian Dispossession and a Political Theology for a Shared Future (Fortress 2014).

Jens Zimmermann is Professor of English at Trinity Western University, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Interpretation, Religion, and Culture.

Introduction

Paul S. Rowe, John H. A. Dyck and Jens Zimmermann

This book deals with the relationship of Christians and Christian theology to the various conflicts in the Middle East, a topic that is often sensationalised but still insufficiently understood. Political developments over the last two decades, however, have prompted observers to rediscover and examine the central role religious motivations play in shaping public discourses. Without a doubt, one of the intentions of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 was to deepen the fault line between Islam and Christianity, to initiate a ‘clash of civilizations’ along the lines predicted by Samuel Huntington.¹ Radical Islamists knew the symbolic value of their attack on images of Western commercial and military power, the very heart of Western decadence, which they associated with Christianity. Their hope was that these attacks would mobilise the faithful. Their targets were buildings that represented American power, both financial and military, a power that stood behind modern attempts to control the Middle East in ways that they believed hearkened back to the time of the Crusades.

These perceptions were only vaguely understood by largely secularised Western societies, which perceived the attacks as unwarranted brutality. Even so, by drawing attention to the connection between religion and politics, the events of 9/11 also led many Western political and religious leaders, social activists and media personalities to sharpen their focus on the political role of Christianity. Christians have responded in multiple ways. Western governments, in states generally labelled ‘Christian’, have sought to downplay the extent to which there is an inevitable conflict between East and West, between Islam and Christianity. On the other hand, Churches, parachurch organisations and other explicitly Christian actors have responded with both charitable offers of interfaith dialogue and challenges to Muslims to consider the theological roots of religious extremism.²

Gathering interest in the political role of Christianity and Islam is only one part of a larger turn toward interest in religion and politics over the past couple of decades. It has centred on the work of old and new religious actors in the development of a global politics of religion. In their recent work, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics, Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott and Timothy Shah (2011) describe the multiple ways in which religious actors operate. They stress two interrelated theses. The first is that religious actors are able to act independently from governments, non-governmental organisations, political parties, resistance movements and other organisations to shape politics. In other words, religious actors of the kind we portray in this essay collection may shape the politics of the Middle East in ways that governments must accept, and occasionally follow. The second thesis is that, contrary to reigning academic and popular assumptions, religious actors are sooner motivated by theological ideals than by social circumstances:

To some it might seem obvious that ideas matter. Yet it is striking how often both scholars and the media treat religious ideas and motivations as a by-product of some ‘underlying’ force presumed to be more basic and compelling, whether it is economic deprivation, personal greed, stunted opportunity, resentment against colonialism, or a backlash against globalization.³

The authors of God’s Century argue that these actors are uniquely motivated by a guiding philosophy or political theology, whether they be Roman Catholics inspired to seek democratisation based on the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, or radicalised Saudi opposition movements aiming to restore a putative Islamic golden age.⁴

In our book, we invite the reader to reflect on political problems theologically, and to listen to people involved in religiously motivated, non-government initiatives toward peace in the Middle East. We follow a trail of inquiry that explores the theologies and actors that involve Christians in the various conflicts that beset the Middle East. At the centre of these conflicts is the conflict over the Holy Land of Israel-Palestine, which consequently also constitutes the main focus for most of the essays in this volume. This conflict has a modern history beginning with the period of decolonisation in the early part of the last century, a history in which Christians have been involved both as external political influence – as occupying powers, colonial overseers, protectors and mediators – and as active, local participants – as citizens of Arab and other Middle Eastern societies. And yet many other regional conflicts, such as the First and Second Palestinian Intifadas, the violence in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003, the Summer War in Lebanon of 2006, and the unfolding crisis that arose after the 2011 Arab Spring, all involve Christians as participants, mediators, relief agencies, lobbyists and victims.

Conflict appears on the surface to limit the voice of Christians in the Middle East. It is noteworthy that one of the unintended consequences of the Arab Spring of 2011 is the marginalisation and increased precariousness of Christian groups in the countries where autocratic governments have been replaced by democratically elected governments. In retrospect it is now evident that Christian groups enjoyed greater protection under non-democratic authoritarian governments than they currently do under democratically elected governments which are inclined to view Christian groups as suspiciously aligned with the previous discredited regimes. One recent article therefore notes that Christians remain ambivalent at best about democratisation.⁵ The papers in this collection provide a counterpoint: where conflict results in the further erosion of Christian communities, individual Christians, their churches and their groups respond through articulate defences of peace, common citizenship and reconciliation the means by which conflict-prone societies may move forward.

The essays in this volume combine contextual political and theological reflections written by both scholars and Christian activists. The significance of political theology in this area of the world is clear: internally, two people groups, Arab/Palestinian and Jewish, marshal contending theologies of land that contribute to a conflict over political control. Externally, foreign and indigenous Christians exacerbate the internal tensions by defending either one of the national claims or by seeking a middle way between them. Our contributors have a variety of perspectives on the justice of Arab and Jewish claims, and it is not our intention to present one particular interpretation of the conflict. However, most are committed to reframing simplistic narratives about Christian responses to the conflict: in this sense, they do not speak for one or the other side, but rather seek to illuminate the ways in which Christians have a role to play in this conflict-prone part of the world.

How do political theologies, rooted in long and complex histories, translate into action for Christians amid conflict in the Middle East? In what ways do they communicate alternative narratives to that of state authorities? And how do political theologies unite and divide Christians themselves when it comes to resolving those conflicts, speaking up for Christian interests, or interacting with Muslims and Jews in the midst of conflict?

Christian theologies and the Middle East conflict

Today’s conflicts in the Middle East, from sectarian and factional disputes in Lebanon and Iraq to public demonstrations and unrest in Egypt to the uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza, arose in the wake of the colonial era. They developed as a result of the incomplete process of decolonisation, the rise of secular and religious nationalisms, and the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. But these power struggles also have deep roots in the long history of the Middle East, a history shaped significantly by the interactions of the major monotheistic religious faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The numbers of indigenous Christians in the region have dwindled over the centuries, but Christians worldwide continue to look to the Middle East as the focal point of their history and the unfolding of their future.

Christianity was born in the Middle East in a period of relative calm amid the many global conflicts that have taken place in the region. But even Jesus Christ dealt with political and social turmoil, living as a Jewish man in a land occupied by a foreign power. His own example was to eschew conflict through non-violence, preaching a gospel that was ‘not of this world’ (John 18:36). As Christianity spread, it became the state religion of the Roman Empire and then of Western civilisation for over a millennium. As a result, the traditional teachings of Jesus had to be reinterpreted and understood for changing times. Among other things, Christians have had to deal with the challenge of divided loyalty as the locus of political authority has shifted – as subjects, citizens, soldiers, patriots, conscientious objectors and ministers. The practice of Western Christianity today has diverged significantly from its Middle Eastern roots. While theology, worship styles and world views of Christians in the Middle East preserve some of the vestiges of ancient practice, these differ significantly from those of their Western coreligionists.

Nevertheless, for Western Christians, the Middle East remains a central part of the political imagination. Christians look to the Old Testament scriptures and see conflicts that raged between the Jewish people, their neighbours and far-flung enemies as tales that confirm the interest of God in global politics. ‘Why do the nations conspire, and the peoples plot in vain?’ asks the ancient psalmist in Psalm 2, answering that God moves the nations like chess pieces and favours His own people. In this understanding of global politics, God rules the nations, pitting one against another to do His bidding. In Genesis 15:17–21, the lands of Palestine were given by divine covenant to the patriarch Abraham, ‘from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates’. According to the prophets, God uses foreign attack as a divine act of discipline on the nation or as instruments of restoration (as, for example, in Hab. 1:6, Isa. 45:1). The Old Testament literature promises a future and glorious restoration of the Jewish people to the land given to Abraham. This future was minimally reflected in return of the Jews to Palestine in the centuries leading up to the life of Jesus Christ but is also commonly interpreted to refer to the ultimate restoration that extends to the Jewish people as well as the Christian church. And in the apocalyptic literature, the rise and fall of armies and empires attends the final revelation of God’s intervention on Earth and the return of Christ.

Many biblical literalists today understand the modern State of Israel to be at the heart of God’s programme for the region. They interpret the modern state to be a continuation of the ancient state established by David and Solomon. Consequently, the preservation of the State of Israel looms large as a geopolitical priority. The assertion that a divine plan undergirds the restoration of the Jewish people to the land in the last century, and that Christians must seek to bless the nation of Israel in political ways, is the basic premise behind a political movement now known as Christian Zionism. Stephen Spector observes that Christian Zionism rests on several motivations, including realist foreign policies among Western states seeking a reliable ally in the region, a reverence for the covenantal theology that supports a Jewish claim to the land of Palestine, a feeling of gratitude to the Jewish heritage of Christianity, and feelings of remorse for the history of persecution of Jews at the hands of Christians.⁶ Christian Zionist institutions such as the US-based Christians United for Israel or the Jerusalem-based International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem actively raise funds for social welfare and building initiatives in Israel and the Occupied Territories. In addition, these organisations make extensive use of the printed word and new media to raise consciousness among Christians about the place of Israel in Christian eschatology and political theology. This movement has been widely described in recent scholarship, much of which is critical of its use of prophetic passages and political influence to support Israeli foreign policy in the region.⁷

Thus the theology of conflict in the Middle East is a teleological and apocalyptic one for many Western Christians. Christian Zionists assign conflict a central role in the Christian narrative about the Middle East. This narrative puts the Jewish people at the heart of the divine plan for history and stresses the extent to which they are besieged and targeted in both temporal and spiritual ways. Many Christian Zionists view the contemporary politics of the region through the lens of the coming apocalypse. In the early 1970s, evangelical writer Hal Lindsey pointed to the restoration of the Jewish people as the first of many signs heralding the return of Jesus and the eventual clash of nations at Armageddon described in the New Testament Book of Revelation.⁸ Lindsey’s dispensational premillennialism saw this battle as the culmination of God’s plan for this age and the final showdown that would bring about a 1,000-year kingdom of God on Earth. Lindsey’s perspective became dominant in North American Evangelical circles in the 1970s and 1980s, and continues to influence the theologies of contemporary evangelicals, as represented by Timothy LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s bestselling Left Behind series or Joel Rosenberg’s The Last Jihad. It is echoed in the popular teaching of church leaders such as John Hagee. This apocalyptic vision has also come to resonate with a growing community of Messianic Jewish believers in the State of Israel, who see themselves as the final remnant of the chosen people in their land. For many of these believers, conflict is at the heart of God’s plan for the Middle East as it will bring about the final redemption.

Christian Zionism, however, resonates very poorly with Arab Christians living in the modern Middle East, who interpret conflict largely as a present reality rather than an eschatological sign. The theological problem of conflict is presented by Arab Christians as a problem of social justice, peace and the temporal struggle of Christians who live as a minority among majority Muslim communities. In traditional Muslim jurisprudence, these communities live as ahl al-dhimma, as protected people. Arab Christians were central players in the development of modern Arab republics, which introduced secular categories of citizenship that would replace the sectarian ones. However, Christians’ political and social influence remains limited, given the official status of Muslim shari‘a under domestic law or the inherent difficulty of mobilising compatriots of another faith to concerted action. Christians nonetheless seek to address conflict through theological reflection and social action. Indigenous Churches such as the Oriental Orthodox, the Church of the East, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman (Latin) and Eastern Rite Catholic Churches, as well as parachurch organisations and missions, minister to their parishioners who are affected by internal pressures, persecution, legal marginalisation and violence.

For most Arab Christians, present realities in the Middle East underscore the primary need for a theology that addresses the problems of conflict, of their status as a minority, or of the persistence of faith amid suffering. Such a theology takes seriously the impact of conflict on the lives of Christians and their neighbours. Contextualisation means embracing the possibility of martyrdom as a calling of the church. For example, Munib Younan, bishop of the Palestinian Evangelical Lutheran Church, describes how the word ‘martyr’ indicates living out the gospel amid the struggles of life, as opposed to aggressive proselytisation or death seeking.⁹ Contextualised theology seeks to explain historic biblical accounts through an Arab and regional lens. In the words of Palestinian clergyman Naim Ateek, ‘[t]he Palestinian Christian community is, I believe, in desperate need of a proper and adequate understanding of the theological meaning of the Palestinians’ experience’, specifically their experience under occupation.¹⁰ To this end, he engages in regular reflection upon the relevance of biblical stories for contemporary Palestinians. Contextualisation also commonly entails advocacy for sectarian harmony and justice, in particular for the Palestinian cause. The late Coptic Pope Shenouda III famously avowed that Egyptian Christians would ‘not enter Jerusalem again, until we go hand-in-hand with our Muslim and Arab brothers’.¹¹ In this volume, Palestinian Christian and Israeli citizen Salim Munayer proposes a theology of reconciliation designed to build a bridge between Jewish and Palestinian Christians, one that might be applied by Christians amid ethno-religious conflicts worldwide.

Christians and the Middle East conflict: theology, history and politics

This book proceeds on the assumption that neither a focus on the eschatological nor a narrow understanding of the plight of Christians in the Middle East is sufficient. Instead, it is necessary to understand Christians in context and to explore the ways that Christian theology applies through the actions of Christians who have lived and continue to live through conflict in the region either as native inhabitants or interested foreign observers. With this in mind, our contributors have addressed issues of concern to Christians from a theological perspective, from the perspective of Christian responses to conflict throughout history, and in reflection on the contemporary realities of Christians in the Middle East. These essays are arranged in this order, recognising the primacy of political theologies to the actions of Christians in the region, and then exploring the ways in which such political theologies are put into practice. The collection is not intended to be exhaustive, but to provide some thought-provoking reflections that will be of interest to Western Christians responding to the reality of conflict in the Middle East, to scholars of Middle Eastern religion and politics, and to students seeking to gain insight into the life of Christians in the region.

The call to contextualisation is a call to reflection and understanding of the lived experiences of Christians in the Middle East. It is a call to both Christians and non-Christians to integrate the political theologies that motivate Christian reflection on the region with the political realities that they face. With this in mind, this book proceeds first with an exploration of theological perspectives on Christians and the Middle East conflict and then moves on to the ways in which Christians apply their theology to conflicts, to relationships with outsiders, and to their interaction with one another.

Salim J. Munayer, Director of Musalaha Ministry of Reconciliation and professor at Bethlehem Bible College, is deeply engaged in creating a contextual theology for Christians from both Jewish and Palestinian backgrounds. Dr Munayer is a Palestinian Christian and a citizen of the State of Israel. His work in developing a theology of reconciliation for these two hostile societies has given him a burden to develop a truly workable theology of reconciliation that bridges the gap between a narrow eschatological hope for the Jewish people and a theology that eliminates the Jewish people from the Christian narrative. In his chapter, he thus encourages discussion about the role that Jesus plays within the salvation history of the Jewish nation. The death of Jesus upon the cross provides an example of the way in which ethnic Israel is able to remain loyal to its historic covenant while providing a vehicle of salvation to the nations. This event liberates all Christians from ethnic constraints and universalises the gospel, allowing believers to seek reconciliation.

Gary Burge, a scholar of New Testament from Wheaton College and a long-time commentator on Christian attitudes toward the Middle East conflict, seeks out ways in which biblical passages need to be interpreted for Christians to gain a full understanding of land and rights to land in the context of the modern conflict. He argues that the New Testament was written in a world alive with debates about the promises and privileges of ‘holy land’. Beginning with Jesus, the entire New Testament represented new Christian thinking about ‘holy land’ and thereby overturned conventional theologies completely.

Magi Abdul-Masih embarks upon a critical assessment of the theology of the Middle East through the lens of Orientalism as presented by Edward Said and other scholars. In her chapter, Dr Abdul-Masih provides a challenge to Western received wisdom that limits the Eastern identity of Jesus Christ. Such marginalisation of Jesus’s Eastern identity serves as a basis for the continuation of latent conflict between Eastern and Western Churches, cultures and civilisations. She assesses different manifestations of Orientalism in theology and their ramifications for theological method and hermeneutics. Her primary contention is that Orientalism in theology, and more specifically the Orientalist representation of Jesus, plays a major role in the political arena, especially in the Palestine–Israel conflict.

In the next three chapters, authors reflect on the historic development of Christian attitudes toward conflict in the Middle East. Maher Y. Abu-Munshar deals with the history of Christian–Muslim relations in seventh-century Jerusalem during the period of the Islamic conquest. The historic city of Jerusalem has a special place in the hearts and minds of the followers of the three major monotheistic religions. During the course of its history, followers of these religions have made intensive efforts to conquer it by any means and at any cost. It has been argued that under Muslim rule, adherents of different religions were allowed to live together in Jerusalem in an atmosphere of tolerance and coexistence. In this chapter, Dr Abu-Munshar seeks to analyse critically the Christian attitude toward the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 637 CE. He finds a mixture of attitudes, but a general acceptance of the conquest and of the future need to preserve both communities’ stakes in the region.

In a more modern application of Christian attitudes toward interaction between Christians and Muslims in the context of conquest, Todd Thompson sketches out the life of Arab historian Albert Hourani (1915–1993), a pivotal figure in the Arab Christian response to the Middle East conflict. Well before Hourani became the bestselling author of A History of the Arab Peoples, the Oxford don was one of the most consequential spokespersons for a unified, democratic Palestinian state in the 1940s. Hourani is emblematic of the way that Christianity and Arab Christian intellectuals played a role in shaping early Arab nationalism.

Japanese scholar Akiko Sugase looks at the problem of Christian–Muslim relations in the region through the lens of anthropological analysis of the veneration of saints by both communities. The Middle East, especially Palestine and Israel, is often viewed as the land of ethnic and religious conflict, but it is notable that saint veneration unites the two communities in faith and practice. Using some examples of saint veneration in the region of Mount Carmel, Dr Sugase challenges the assumption that religious conflict is endemic to the land of Israel. Folk beliefs have provided and continue to provide a basis for interaction and coexistence.

How do Middle Eastern Christians endure, react and survive conflict in the region? This is the question addressed in the last four chapters of the book. Paul S. Rowe discusses the regional problem of conflict and how that has had an impact on Christian populations in the Middle East. The legacy of conflict and terrorism in areas of the Middle East where Christians form a significant minority leads many to question the extent to which they have a viable future in the region. Surveying the political marginalisation of Christians amid conflict in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Israel-Palestine, Dr Rowe finds a great deal of reason for concern. But he also concludes that Christians are meeting the challenge through seeking new forms of political voice and a renewed interest in social activism.

Peter E. Makari follows up on this assessment with a survey of organised Christian responses to the problem of conflict through peace activism. The Middle East remains at the centre of media attention, most recently for demonstrations and protests, but more often in relation to war and conflict. The presence and roles of Christians across the region are often hidden from view. In his chapter, Dr Makari explores Christian efforts in several contexts. Dr Makari’s chapter was prepared before much of the tumult that has arisen since the Arab Spring protests of 2011. In this volume, he provides a short afterword to provide some updates to his observations.

Alain Epp Weaver seeks to reveal a more specific contemporary Christian response to the conflict over Israel-Palestine in his chapter. He profiles the work of a prominent Palestinian clergyman, Manuel Musallam. Building on Benedict Anderson’s discussion of nations as imagined communities and Laleh Khalili’s examination of the tragic and heroic narratives of Palestinian nationalism, Weaver deals with the public performances of Palestinian nationalist identity in the work of Musallam. Active within the Palestinian nationalist Fatah organisation and within Palestinian politics throughout his career, Musallam stands as a particularly dramatic representative of Christian immersion of Palestinian nationalist circles. Musallam represents the priority for the Palestinian Christian of stressing national unity in the period of the peace process, even as that unity has been challenged by the continuing constraints of Israeli occupation.

In the final chapter, Mark Daniel Calder deals with the contemporary uses of the Bible in Palestinian worship and practice. When Palestinian Christians encounter ‘the God of Israel’ in the Old Testament, we might imagine that they are burdened by a canonical problem in need of explanation. This does not seem to be the case, according to Calder. Focusing on textual exegesis alone is inadequate to seek an understanding of Palestinian Christian uses of and claims to the Bible, especially when considering Christians whose textual heritage and intellectual history differs markedly from that of Western post-Enlightenment Christianities. Instead, we can take account of the material, spatial and bodily aspects of scripture use as a particular sort of dialogue with others through time and with God.

At such a time as this

In late 2009, the Christian leaders of Palestine united to endorse a document that called for action in favour of Middle East peace on the part of the Churches of the region, Christians worldwide and non-Christians involved in one way or another in the Middle East conflict. Its title ‘Kairos Palestine’ was intended to invoke a Greek word that referred to a particularly significant moment in time. The intent was to say that this particular moment, a time in which the Churches of the Middle East are eroding in numbers and influence, and when factions and government continued to put off action in resolving the long-running conflict over the Holy Land, was a crucial one.

Indeed the time is crucial for Christian populations in the Middle East and for addressing the central conflicts among the people of that region. The revolutions of 2011 have ushered in a period of profound change that has presented a challenge to these people. It is our hope that this volume will help to focus attention on the role of Christians in the region at this moment in time and encourage the reinvigoration of Christian populations and a new understanding of their distinctives; that it would strengthen them in their interaction with non-Christian neighbours in a spirit of peace and harmony; and that it would inform those who are interested in the resolution of conflict that has affected Christian populations in unique and terrible ways.

Notes

  1 Huntington (1996).

  2 See for example, Martin (1999: 66–80); Jenkins (2002); Avram, ed. (2004); Hedges (2006); Goldberg (2007); and Chaplin with Joustra, eds (2010).

  3 Toft et al. (2011: 16).

  4 Ibid., 111, 143–144.

  5 McCallum (2012: 109–124).

  6 Spector (2008: 23–32).

  7 In addition to Spector above, consult Clark (2007); Merkeley (2007); and Sizer (2004).

  8 Lindsey (1970).

  9 Younan (2003: 41–54).

10 Ateek (1989: 2).

11 Guindy et al. (1999).

Part I

Theological perspectives

1 Reconciliation as a Christian response to the Israel–Palestine conflict

Salim J. Munayer

Why do we need reconciliation?

The subject of reconciliation is not a merely peripheral theme in our scriptures, but rather constitutes the driving force behind redemptive history. Commencing with our initial alienation from God in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of Genesis, and culminating in the hope of a restored Messianic community which we are pointed to in the vision of the new Jerusalem at the end of Revelation, the entire biblical narrative is moving to a time in which we shall all be reconciled with each other and with God. The category of reconciliation is therefore established as the basis of God’s acting in history to correct humanity’s initial alienation from Him. Currently, the church is located at the interplay between the redemption achieved on the cross, and the coming fullness of reconciliation, and we, as members of the church, are entrusted with ‘the ministry of reconciliation’ (2 Cor. 5:18) as both a response to this reality and as a way of enacting that fullness here and now. Nowhere does that calling need to be heard with more clarity than in nations at war.

The world view of all who live in Israel-Palestine today is clouded by violence and conflict. A daily reality of checkpoints, guns and soldiers, merely serves to reinforce entrenched historical oppositions and prejudices. This means that the encounter between Israelis and Palestinians is all too often preconditioned by both real and perceived threats, in a way that does not allow space for an alternative story to play out. So too, the relationships between Israeli and Palestinian believers are set on a course that has been dictated to them by social, cultural and political norms. Those who operate outside these paradigms are treated with hostility and suspicion. Our churches mirror those external conflicts internally. Even if the tensions ensuing in our churches do not result in physical violence, they nevertheless present a real conflict in which ingrained attitudes and hostilities parallel those outside the church community.

I believe that a main cause for the Christian community’s current failure to bear witness to the glory of God through unity consists in a distorting set of theological preconceptions that derive from the biblical hermeneutics of our respective ecclesial traditions. Consequently our assessment of the Israel–Palestine relation depends on unreflective theological intuitions that cannot overcome a conflictual stance toward the issues. Most Christians who seek to engage theologically in the conflict either place a strong emphasis on the significance of prophecy, and the place of Israel within a Dispensationalist reading of scripture, adhere to Palestinian liberation theology, dual covenant theology, or adopt the historical ‘replacement theology’ position of the church. All four positions, however, are inadequate for interpreting the theological nature of the conflict. They have either left the church impotent, without the tools for forming constructive approaches to conflict resolution, or they have even made the churches complicit in participating in oppressive regimes.

The inability of the Church to contribute to conflict resolution arises largely as a result of the exclusive nature of these four theologies. All are impervious to compromise and establish exclusive attitudes that do not make space for the other. Many international Christians find themselves taking ‘sides’ in the conflict, inhibiting their ability to encourage reconciliation. Their attitudes can even serve to aggravate the situation in Israel-Palestine.

Exploring the reasons for the Christian church’s complicity in ethnic conflicts, such as the Israel–Palestine conflict, Miroslav Volf notes that:

Though explicitly giving ultimate allegiance to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, many Christians in fact seem to have an overriding commitment to their respective cultures and ethnic groups. Hence, in conflict situations, they tend to fight on the side of their cultural group and employ faith as a weapon in struggle.¹

This is certainly true for our communities in Israel-Palestine. Tensions are largely split down ethnic and racial lines, and conflicting theological ideologies add a religious dimension. Scripture is all too often manipulated in order to further legitimise established political opposition, exacerbating existing social and political tensions. In many cases, our exclusive cultural ties simply mean more to us than the universal claims of the gospel and its call to Christian unity.

As Christians, however, we are called to resist the preconditions and categorisations that arise in our cultures, and through the cross we are given the means by which this can be achieved. A theology of reconciliation, which I will attempt to articulate here, is a proper Christian response to the situation because only the radically inclusive nature of the cross is in keeping with the universal claims the gospels make on us.

The contemporary paradigms

Prophecy and Dispensationalism

Prophecy occupies a central place within Messianic Jewish and Christian Zionist theology and is often married with a particular political agenda which legitimizes the establishment of the State of Israel. The biblical passage from Ezekiel 37:1–14 details the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones, which experience resurrection and recreation as God breathes His life-giving breath into them. A promise of national revival and territorial recovery follows as God promises to the house of Israel:

I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from them your graves, O my people. I will put my Spirit within you, and you will live, and I will place you on your own soil.

(Ezek. 37:12c–14a)

Operating within a certain framework of biblical literalism and futurism, the biblical ‘land of Israel’ became contiguous with a future hope for the restoration of a national entity, which was confirmed through the events of 1948 and 1967, and which has now taken on an eschatological dimension. The restoration of Israel, therefore, is not merely interpreted as a single, self-contained event, but is understood to be a forerunner of a global restoration, which will see the entire world come under Jesus’s millennial reign on Earth.

Francis Kett was an English clergyman who was among the first to advance a restorationist view of Israel and the Jewish people, and initiate a shift from thinking about Israel as a place of Christian pilgrimage and church history, to a future Jewish homeland. He believed that Revelation 20 should not be interpreted in the figurative manner expounded by the Roman Catholic Church, but should instead be read literally, concluding that the Jews would at some point convert to Christianity and return to the land of Israel.² Since this time, a literalist hermeneutic producing notions of Jewish national restoration has played a significant role in informing and shaping Christian Protestant theology and has in turn shaped the character of the Messianic Jewish theology.

This interpretation of prophecy, however, fails to assign a positive theological space to the Palestinian people already living in the land. It is exclusively concerned with the function of the Jewish people and is articulated without mentioning the Palestinians at all. This means that Palestinians are marginalised within the churches which teach this theology. This in turn can have political and social ramifications as international churches lend their vocal and pecuniary support to the modern State of Israel.

Similarly, this view of prophecy often neglects the importance of the setting of the texts, their authorship and the reader in their historical and cultural context. This can create other hermeneutical difficulties and complexities regarding how we are to correctly interpret the relationship between current events and prophecy.

Since it is assumed that these prophecies will come to fulfilment, fatalism can develop which detracts from the moral responsibility of a group or an individual. This can be particularly detrimental in the way the Messianic Jewish and Palestinian Christian congregations relate to each other. If the future is a foregone conclusion, there is little motivation to move toward reconciliation in the present.

This view also fails to recognise the conditional nature of prophecy. In Micah 3:12, the prophet predicts that Jerusalem will be reduced to rubble. However, his warning led to repentance and revival under King Hezekiah, and so the Lord held back his judgment on Jerusalem.³ This injects meaning back into our actions in the present as it allows us to view an individual, or a people, as moral agents. A picture of divine sovereignty that overwhelms human agency is certainly not a biblical picture of the mutual, covenantal relationship between humanity and God.

Palestinian liberation theology

The concept of a Palestinian liberation theology arose as a reaction to a situation of injustice and conflict in order to address a need within the Christian community. It also arose as a response to some of the prophecy-centred theologies. Naim Ateek, in his book Justice and Only Justice, sets his exegesis within a Christological and progressive hermeneutic which understands earlier sections of scripture to be a cruder and more nationalistic form of revelation than later more universal passages.⁴

According to Ateek, the God conceived of in the Book of Joshua is simply a regression to an uncritical, primal and nationalist conception of God which has been superseded by what we now know of God’s nature through Christ.⁵ Instead, a universalistic notion of God, such as is found in the prophets and in the narrative of Christ’s death for all humanity, is in keeping with our more sophisticated understanding of God’s nature. Relating this to ideas of territory, Ateek writes, ‘if God loves this land and this people, that is a sign – a sacrament – that God loves each and every land and its peoples’.⁶ We are then to act in a way that conforms to this universal character of Jesus.

There are several problematic elements with Palestinian liberation theology. The hermeneutical approach that reduces, and sometimes rejects, parts of scripture as early forms of revelation, is problematic. This does not allow us to participate in the creative and vibrant process of wrestling with these difficult texts, which at the very least may open up new ways of thinking and new roads of dialogue between distinct theologies. There is also no positive account of contemporary Jewish identity and no positive theological space given to them as a community.

Dual covenant theology

Dual covenant theology was first advanced by a Jewish theologian, Franz Rosenzweig, in the twentieth century. He writes:

We are wholly agreed as to what Christ and his church mean to the world: no one can reach the Father save through him. No one can reach the Father! But the situation is quite different for the one who does not have to reach the Father because he is already with him. And this is true of the people of Israel.⁷

Rosenzweig was laying the groundwork for a theological view which claims that Jesus only has salvific implications for those outside of the covenant God made with Israel, for the Gentiles; Jews, however, are already saved by virtue of their being Jewish and through the Torah.

The two paths outlined by Rosenzweig are exclusive and against the inclusive nature of Christ. Jesus establishes one unifying and reconciling path to God. Nowhere in the Bible is Jesus’s redemptive activity exclusively for non-Jews. Rather, salvation is of the Jews (John 4:22), through the Jewish Messiah. This was a privileged calling (Gen. 12:3). Paul himself, for example, speaks of his anguish and sorrow at his Jewish brother’s rejection of Jesus’s Messiahship (Rom. 9:1). Paul clearly endeavours to assert that the God of Israel is also the God of the world and the nations.

Replacement theology

Replacement theology, also termed ‘supersessionism’, is a subject of much controversy in Israel-Palestine. Underlying much of the discourse on replacement theology in these congregations is a fear that the Jewish people will lose their unique status in the believing community, along with their covenantal privileges such as the land of Israel. As a result, replacement theology is often bound up in discussions concerning the modern land of Israel and is thrown into the confusion of secular political manoeuvrings, used to legitimise or delegitimise claims to the land. Within the Palestinian Christian community, attitudes towards replacement theology vary greatly. Supersessionism for Palestinian Christians, however, tends to be a largely theological and non-political issue.

Replacement theology has taken precedence in church history and has a long background that can be traced to the church fathers and has taken many forms. Punitive supersessionism assumes that the Jews who reject Jesus are condemned by God and forfeit their part in the covenant. Economic supersessionism states that the function of the Jewish people to be a vehicle of salvation has now been replaced by the missionising role of the Church, and structural supersessionism marginalises the Hebrew Scriptures in the shaping of normative Christian theology.

The split between Judaism and Christianity in the years following the destruction of the Second Temple, however, means that both rabbinical Judaism and Christianity currently claim to be heirs of the biblical Jewish tradition and so both have ‘superseded’ the religion of Jesus’s time, which was reliant on the temple. On the one hand, rabbinical Judaism began to take shape as dietary laws and new purity laws distinguished the Jewish people from the other communities, and on the other hand, as more and more Gentiles joined the Church, these laws were seen as increasingly antagonistic to the establishment of a harmonious Jewish-Gentile community. Throughout the history of the Church, however, most forms of supersessionism have not been so positive. People have propagated violent racist discrimination, such as the myths of blood libels – the accusation that Jews engage in human sacrifice as part of their worship and ritual practice. Others forms of supersessionism have simply been an attempt to express the uniqueness of the Christian faith, and in particular, the radical discontinuity of the cross within salvation history.

Such a problematic history and such misguided supersessionist teachings have meant that today, the relationship between Christians and Jews is still one of distrust and fear. This causes a particular problem for Israeli Messianic Jews and Palestinian Christians living in the land, because all too often it is this Western European history which characterises and shapes the relationship between the two. Additionally, replacement theology does not offer a positive theological space for the Jewish people but instead excludes them from the sphere of Jesus’s salvific activity.

All four existing theological models largely characterise the Church’s positions on the Israel–Palestine conflict. However, all four are highly problematic, failing to take account of the ‘other’. They are exclusive rather than inclusive, and all attempt to further particular political, cultural and theological agendas. We will now explore the potential a theology of reconciliation contains for positively shaping relationships between believers in the Holy Land and as a proper Christian response to both the conflict and to the cross.

What is reconciliation?

The doctrine of reconciliation in the Bible has two main components. There is the vertical reconciliation which occurs between man and God through God’s salvific activity (justification), and at the same time there is a horizontal dimension which reconciles man to his brother. If we take a brief look at the Jewish salvation history, we can see that the vertical and horizontal aspects are intrinsically related.

The covenantal law in the Hebrew Scriptures was established as a way of ordering social relationships and right relationships between the Israelites and God. Following the laws correctly and justly would lead to the creation of a peaceful community which would exemplify the right relationships between man and God and man and man, and act as God’s vehicle of salvation to the nations.

Beginning with Abraham, Abraham was called a righteous man in virtue of his being in a right relationship with God and because he carried out justly the demands of community life. Isaiah 58:10–11a demonstrates this interdependence of communal living and righteous living before God, as the social obligations of the Israelites are juxtaposed with the Lord’s promise to his people, ‘if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually’.

Again we can see the interdependence between vertical and horizontal reconciliation, between the right ordering of social relationships, and a right relationship with God. The writer of First John in the New Testament puts it succinctly: ‘If anyone says, “I love God”, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen’ (1 John 4:20). We cannot be justified with God and continue to live in conflict and in a wrong relationship (unrighteousness) with our brother.

Time and time again, however, we read in scripture that the Israelites failed in their appointed task. They failed to embody the righteousness of God in their community, turned to other gods and built idols to worship. The prophets were continually championing social justice, calling people back into right living according to the law, and placing a particular emphasis on the vulnerable in society, the orphan, widow and stranger in the land. Israel’s refusal to listen to the words of the prophets takes Israel into a cycle of judgment and restoration until they are exiled from the land and their temple is destroyed.

N. T. Wright correctly locates the event of the Incarnation within this framework of covenantal history and within the cycle of judgment, grace and restoration.⁸ Christ comes as a representative of the righteous Israel, who is loyal to the covenant and lays claim to their social justice-making vocation.⁹ The cross therefore becomes a radically social event in continuity with the salvation history of the Jewish people. On the cross, this covenantal community takes on a universal aspect that liberates the gospel message from taking any particular social, ethnic or political forms. The relationships between man and man and God and man, in which we become adopted sons and daughters, reconciled to each other and God, are reconstituted on the cross.

The centrality of the cross for reconciliation

It is the cross that must ground our understanding of reconciliation, acting as the linchpin for how the Christian community interprets its ‘ministry of reconciliation’, and form constructive sociopolitical policy. This is because scripture makes it clear that only the crucified God can offer an authentic hope, that love and self-sacrifice can bring reconciliation. A theology or a life that does not relate to the cross and the resurrection together will therefore fail to embody the fullness of life which is offered by Jesus. Therefore, I will attempt to articulate a theology of reconciliation for Israel-Palestine in the shadow of the cross that will touch on several key theological issues of some significance in the conflict.

The issue of the Holy Land in the shadow of the cross

There are numerous theologies in the Messianic Jewish and Palestinian Christian communities which are concerned with the issue of land, land ownership and proper stewardship of the land. Generally, these theologies are used to lay claim to divinely ordained ownership of the land and legitimise an entitlement to political sovereignty. There are also occasions when these theologies have been used to justify violent national and ethnic conflict over the land.

In scripture, land has a significant role to play. It is the scene of man’s original disobedience against God that incurred punishment. While man was alienated from God, the relationship with the Earth and with creation was also broken. In Genesis 3:17–19, God spoke saying:

Cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground.

The event of the Incarnation in which God becomes man also serves to emphasise the physical nature of God’s dealings with humanity. In order for us to be fully reconciled to God, it was imperative that God became a perfect man, a physical being, allowing not only the reconstitution of human nature but also of human flesh. We are thereby made ‘new creations’, (2 Cor. 5:17) while the land is recast as a ‘new heaven and a new earth’ (Rev. 21:1) as the whole of the created order is placed back in a right relationship with God.

In the Israeli Messianic Jewish community the subject of the land is addressed by employing a particular, literalist reading of scripture. God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 21:1–3 is isolated from the rest of the text and used as a proof text in order to claim exclusive, ethnic, Jewish ownership over the land. David Stern, an American Messianic Jew, writes:

God promises the Land of Israel to the Jews. This promise has not been revoked, and, like all of God’s promises, it will be fulfilled through our blessed Jewish Messiah, Yeshua (Jesus), the Messiah, Lord and Savior of all humankind – Jews, Arabs, and everyone else.¹⁰

This is a highly exclusive interpretation of the land, and automatically eliminates the physical presence of others in the land, leaving little space for constructive discourse with the Palestinians. As a result, this is a problematic view for those seeking reconciliation because the possibility for shared life in the Holy Land is made conditional on adopting a particular theology, or rejected altogether. Stern continues:

Of the Arab Protestants, very few espouse the theology of the Lands presented above. Where this is not due to ignorance or mistaken teaching, it can only be the result either of finding that theology at odds with political ambitions or of fearing the consequences of holding an unpopular view. I am always impressed with the courage of the occasional Arab Christian brother willing to admit that God has given the Land to the Jews as an eternal possession – a view which for him is very politically incorrect.¹¹

For Palestinian Christians, living in the Holy Land is instrumental in the way in which the Church understands itself to receive, celebrate and share the gospel message. While many Western Evangelical Churches are attaching less and less importance to the administration of the sacraments, liturgical and ecclesiastical traditions and the sacredness of the holy sites, for many Palestinian Christians these remain at the heart of enacting the Christian faith of the Bible. Enacting biblical witness in this way serves to emphasise the physical nature of Palestinian Christianity and the significance of exemplifying the witness of their ancestors in the land. Yohanna Katanacho echoes similar sentiments when he describes the land as a ‘fifth gospel’¹² which aids in the transmission of the good news, having been shaped by the Messiah’s presence on the land and equally having shaped the character of the Messiah. For Katanacho, the physical land has a teleological function to lead us back to paradise and our previous ‘Edenic’ state, pre-fall. The land will fulfil this mission by being a land of faith, hope, reconciliation and peace.

The land, therefore, becomes important for providing the context for the establishment of a just social order and the site where this is to be enacted in the present. Naim Ateek argues that through Jesus, the covenant has been opened to include the nations, which includes the universalisation of the land promises to Abraham. Anything else would fail to do justice to the inclusive nature of salvation history. He writes:

The land of Israel/Palestine is part of God’s world. It belongs to God. God is its creator and owner as God is the maker and owner of the whole world. Today, God has placed both Palestinians and Jews to live on it. They must share the land under God and become good stewards of it. It does not belong to either of them exclusively. They must share it equitably and live as good neighbours with one another. Both nations must do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.¹³

Both responses to the question of land are, however, inadequate. From scripture we can ascertain that the physical land is of religious significance, however it does not appear to be God’s plan that any land be the exclusive property or absolute claim of anybody. Exclusive claims of this nature can easily become idolatrous if they cause us to reject others and are placed above the claims made upon us by the cross, which calls us to widen our sphere of social responsibility to the whole of humanity.

We are also able to see in the biblical narrative a coherent progression ‘from Eden to tabernacle to Jerusalem Temple to church to New Jerusalem’.¹⁴ Through Jesus, the broken land is recreated through its participation in Christ’s salvific activity and therefore takes on a Christological dimension. We are directed away from ethnocentric understandings of the land of Israel, towards a Christological interpretation of land theology, and a picture of a radically inclusive society worshipping the Lord. Possession of the Holy Land by any people group therefore needs to be shaped by this vision of hospitality.

The issue of identity and national aspirations in the shadow of the cross

Issues of individual and collective identity, and group belonging are major factors which exacerbate the Israel–Palestine conflict. Theology often plays a significant role in informing national identity, and in particular the notion of being a ‘chosen people’ often imbues Jewish believers with a sense of national entitlement. Palestinian Christian identity is similarly influenced by national entitlement; however, this is more historical than theological and is grounded on a belief in their continuous physical presence in the Holy Land as the receivers and celebrators of the gospel from the time of Jesus. Both identities are also informed by their opposition to and their dissimilarities from the other. This negatively conceived construction necessarily excludes the other.

Modern social identity theory recognises the significance of categorisation and the way in which being categorised as members of a larger group provide an important concept of the self for individuals. Henri Tajfel is one of the leading experts in social identity theory, and proposed the idea that self-esteem and pride are often derived from our membership in a particular group. We are able to increase our individual self-esteem through enhancing the status of the group to which we belong. We categorise elements of our identity as ‘good’ and elements of the other identity as ‘bad’, dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’. Such categorisation begins externally with socially constructed symbols that characterise our group from others. Problems occur, however, when these external symbols of identity are brought internally and used for self-promotion, or to promote ourselves at the expense or exclusion of another. When this occurs, enmity and hatred toward others, and pride toward oneself, can become the determining factor in relationships, and prevent peaceful interaction among ethnic groups.

It is these internal feelings of hostility and exclusiveness that Jesus comes to put an end to through his death. In Ephesians 2 it is written that God will ‘reconcile them [Jew and Gentile] both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity’ (Eph. 2:16). What is required from us, therefore, is to come with our neighbour to the cross, submitting our national aspirations and identities to the cross in order that God can put to death the enmity which arises as a result of using our external social characteristics to exclude the other, and to deny the other the full dignity of human life. If we come together to the cross, it is Jesus who will do the peacemaking in us and bring down the wall of partition.

Unfortunately, in the Middle Eastern conflict, identification and group membership is used to exclude others from the political and social realm. Group membership is used to dehumanise and to deny fundamental civil rights. In order to correct this, it is imperative that our cultural affinities are allowed to be undermined by the universal claims of the gospel and placed in the shadow of the cross.

The issue of justice in the shadow of the cross

Our own justification and reconciliation with God is founded upon justice – on the cross, justice is done as Jesus is judged and condemned in our place. Romans 5:18 states: ‘Just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all’. Our justice-making is therefore only a derivative of God’s just character. As Duncan Forrester writes:

The relative justice which is all that is possible in this sinful broken world, the justice which comes from the balancing of claims and interests and acts to restrain sin, must constantly be measured against the divine justice and love we know in Jesus Christ, and in our experience of justification.¹⁵

While it is right and proper to establish a just rule and to punish cases of injustice, this should always occur in the context of the cross that reconciles us together with each other and with God.

Absolutising claims as idolatry

Absolutising claims to justice, nationalism, ethnicity, or land will only ever be exclusive in character because it requires that all other claims, qualifications and interpretations of a certain issue be pushed out. To absolutise a claim to the land is to exclude all other claims on that land; to absolutise your identity or nationalism is to not allow the ‘other’ space to influence your identity, and in so doing take away the possibility of authentic relationship. To absolutise your claim to justice fails to recognise the sovereignty of God in establishing justice qua salvation, which reaches far beyond the human capacity of justice-making. Not only, therefore, are these claims to the absolute exclusive, but they are also idolatrous. Anything which we place above the cross is idolatry because it destabilises the foundations of our faith and replaces it with our own conceptions of worth.

The Good Samaritan

To finish, we will quickly explore the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the possibilities and challenges that this parable poses for Israeli and Palestinian believers living in the Holy Land.

Jesus tells the parable of the Samaritan as a response to the question ‘Teacher … what should I do to inherit eternal life?’ (Luke 10:25). Jesus’s response is to probe the man’s interpretation of the law, in which the appropriate answer seems to be love God and love your neighbour. However, this does not appear to be enough for the man questioning Jesus, and he wants to know who exactly his neighbour is. Immediately the man is asking a question with the intention to exclude certain individuals or groups from the category of ‘neighbour’, because the question itself presupposes that some people are neighbours and others are not. Notably, Jesus does not state the man’s ethnicity. Also notable is that the man in the parable is stripped of all clothes, making it impossible to distinguish his background from his clothes, and therefore impossible to ascertain whether or not he is a neighbour.

The priest and the Levite, we can therefore assume, make their own judgments about whether or not this man was an Israelite, which would have required them to take responsibility for him, according to the precepts set out in the Mosaic Law. The fact that they have passed by the man means that we can assume that he has been placed into a social category which falls outside of the sphere of legal and neighbourly responsibility. The Samaritan, however, does not seem to make these calculations, and he responds to the need of the man, we are told, purely out of compassion.

Exclusive group membership and collective identification is clearly shown to be morally inadequate when faced with human suffering. One may argue that what Jesus is attempting to do through this parable is break down the categories for a neighbour in a way that allows for radical inclusion. A neighbour is simply a human being. This re-categorisation is only part of the changing social dynamics, however, because we are told in the story that the Samaritan was moved to act out of compassion, and it is the Samaritan who is categorised as a neighbour because of this. Someone can therefore be considered a neighbour if they act out of compassion. The object of that compassion, the one whom we normally speak about as a neighbour, does not function as part of the equation. The category of neighbour therefore moves from designating someone else to a term that is given to designate an agent of compassion.

There is clearly a powerful message in Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan for us today, particularly those of us living in areas of conflict. Social categories are deconstructed in the parable in a way which calls us to re-evaluate our engagement with others, and particularly those with whom we are in conflict. It calls us to construct our communities around our own moral and ethical behaviours rather than external social identities. We are called to unconditional love which demands from us that we turn toward those with whom we are in conflict, and embrace them in just the same way Esau embraced Jacob (Gen. 33:4), the way the father embraced the prodigal son (Luke 15:20), and in the same way the Samaritan was moved by compassion for a dying man. It is our hope that as we continue down the difficult path of musalaha, more and more people will be moved by compassion to be a neighbour. It is our hope that Israelis would embrace Palestinians and Palestinians would embrace Israelis, and that each one would see Jesus in the face of the other, the Messiah who has reconciled us all together on the cross.

It is on the cross that God has spoken and acted decisively for humanity and it is the inclusive nature of the cross which should therefore drive our interaction with our neighbours. Any theology which seeks to exclude rather than include, or that does not articulate a hope for those around us, does not contain within it the transformative power of the gospel. It is only by embracing the cross, therefore, that we will be able to engage meaningfully in the Middle East and hope to see reconciliation between Israeli and Palestinian believers in the land. On the cross, reconciliation, life and all its fullness has the last word.

Notes

  1 Volf (1999: 7–12).

  2 Spector (2008: 16).

  3 Sizer (2004: 73).

  4 Ateek (1989).

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid., 110–111.

  7 Cited in Glatzer (1961: 341).

  8 Wright (2009).

  9 Ibid.

10 Stern (2011: 37).

11 Ibid., 49.

12 Katanacho (2011: 7).

13 Ateek (2011: 62).

14 Alexander (2008: 73).

15 Forrester (1990: 1–13).

2 The New Testament and the land

Gary M. Burge

Land is potent not simply because it represents geography we may own, but because it represents a place where we are rooted and can understand who we are. While most cultures around the world understand this notion intuitively, my Western world often lives with a sense of displacement, a yearning to find a place where identity may be securely held. When an American tells a visitor from Europe that his or her ancestors are from France or perhaps Britain, they may be referring to events 150 years ago. Many Americans want to hold on to an ancestral identity that has only the remotest connection to their present lives. The desire for identity is understandable. Each of us wants a place that we can call home, a place we may think of as our own, where familiar things are available, where old stories may be retold, where we experience some connection with a legacy that stretches out behind us.

My grandparents saved for years to make the fabled trip ‘home to Sweden and Germany’. And there they hoped to discover their separate roots and recover something of who they were by filling in the stories that they heard as children from their parents. When I first moved to Chicago in the late 1980s, my grandparents were delighted. They grew up in Chicago as a part of the Swedish and German immigrant communities. When they visited they were eager for me to take them to Andersonville – the remnants of the Swedish community that thrived from about 1890–1940. They were a part of that community for decades. The church where they married still stands, virtually the way it was in 1920. When my grandmother walked down the aisle again nearly fifty years after her wedding, when she saw that the murals and the altar in the church were unchanged, she felt rooted, anchored in history and time.

Places have a unique power for each of us – and they can inspire us to build great things or they can lead to devastation and suffering. This power of place is enhanced, when place is tied to religion. Suddenly the forces that these two represent become doubly potent because now I can make claim to a place because my God has given it to me. The following example from recent history illustrates the dangers of mixing historical claims to territory with religion.

In 1987, the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic rallied support among the Serbs in Kosovo by giving a now-famous speech in the Polje town hall in central Kosovo. It seemed incidental at the time, but it propelled Milosevic to power. Then in 1999, during the Kosovo War, it suddenly all made sense. Milosevic was no fool. He spoke to the Serbs evoking ancient memory claiming that this region, this land of Kosovo, belonged to them by divine right. At the time Kosovo was chiefly Muslim but the Christian Serbs held a grudge that was 650 years old. This had been historic Christian land and they had come to retake it.

Here is the backstory. On 15 June 1389, this site – known as Blackbird Field – is where 25,000 Serbian soldiers met 40,000 Ottoman troops in what would be considered the defining battle of Serbian cultural identity. The Ottoman armies won, but the event crystallised Serbian resistance against Islam, and continues to live even today as a symbol of land lost and land that must be reclaimed. In 1987, Milosevic was standing on that famed fourteenth-century battle field when he said to his Christian Serb audience: ‘No one has the right to beat you…. No one will beat you ever’. Blackbird Field was as much symbol as it was territory. To possess it helped define Serbian self-determination. He was evoking an amalgam of feelings: historical, cultural and religious. This is where Muslims killed Christians. And it would not happen again. Over twenty years later, when Kosovo declared its independence on 17 February 2008, (with American backing) it was no surprise that Serbian crowds (with Russian backing) expressed outrage. On 21 February, approximately 200,000 Serbs gathered in central Belgrade and by night’s end, the US embassy was in flames.

Human history is littered with such stories. Europe is replete with claims and counterclaims for land that has been lost and land that will be reclaimed. Land is not simply about possessing real estate; land is about security, identity, cultural cohesion and purpose. Land in its most profound sense is about place, possessing a locale which is ours, which can be defended, which can give us safety from the world. And frequently, land claims are linked to religious commitments.

This quest to gain land, hold it and use it for a secure identity easily describes the tribal life of ancient Israel. Land boundaries were an important part of Israelite settlement in Canaan. God had granted this land to each tribe as a heritage. And that struggle to hold this land, to protect those settlement boundaries, was acute right through the biblical period. Life in the land of promise was intimately connected to life within God’s covenant. To live outside the land of promise seemed inconceivable.

But the same observations can be seen today in the same geographical regions that witnessed struggles between the Israelites and their many neighbours. Where the Moabites, Edomites and Egyptians pressed Israel’s borders, today similar land struggles, no less vicious, are a regular occurrence. Arabs lived in this place called ‘Palestine’ for centuries alongside very small Jewish communities. But then, in the early twentieth century, a religious vision called Zionism sought to reclaim land that was a part of the old Jewish biblical heritage. Palestine was to become Israel. And in 1948 this vision became reality.

The Israeli–Arab wars of 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 and 2009 (joined by two Palestinian uprisings) made clear, however, that these struggles were not simply about the defeat of an opponent. It was about the struggle to possess land, to create a cultural and religious place, to build something ethnic: an exclusively Jewish nation. It is no accident, for instance, that Israel carefully emptied or destroyed over 400 Arab villages in these wars and did not permit their feeing residents to return.¹ Graffiti written by Israeli soldiers in occupied villages announced that the Arabs would be pushed ‘into the desert’. Few better examples could be found in the twentieth century of a modern nation state using ancient religious land claims to advance its purposes. But now look at the flip side. Arab calls could be heard to empty Palestine of Jews, pushing them into the sea. For some, Palestine was Arab land being stolen by Jews. Israel might eradicate an old Arab cultural heritage. Jerusalem is Islam’s third most holy city. And Muslims were called out to protect it. In the end, of course, Israel won this struggle and the world’s largest refugee crisis resulted. Israel possessed the land, but at a high cost to many.

This religious instinct to attach oneself to land is not regressive or some remnant of ancient religion that needs to be discarded. It is quite normal throughout the world and, if anything, the modern West is an exception. But there is a double bind that comes with the Holy Land (or the land of Israel-Palestine). If the Jewish people are the indigenous people of this land, then the Palestinians are indigenous nowhere; and if the Palestinians are indigenous here, then the Jews are indigenous nowhere.² The more Jews and Palestinians appeal to their exclusive ethnic or religious claim to the Holy Land, the more they will alienate the other.

What should Christians think about these competing land claims? This problem is all the more pressing because the land struggle within Israel is continuously on our minds. And the foreign policies of most Western nations have expressed strong opinions about what should be done. Given our theological framework, what is the relationship between land and theology in the New Testament? What did Jesus and the New Testament writers think about the territorial claims of ancient Israel? Did they retain the view of the sanctity of Jerusalem and its temple? Were they rethinking the relationship between faith and locale? Or were they confident that a sacred place was still to be held for believers?

Perhaps for Christians this subject has an application that transcends conflicts in places such as Serbia and Israel. The struggle for land is so deeply embedded in the human soul – it is so central to our way of viewing the world – and it has led to so many devastating wars. To rethink land and its value might well be another form of the gospel needed desperately in a modern age.

The New Testament and the land: three background observations

I have been thinking about this theological problem now for over three years and a number of unexpected surprises came my way.³ First, I was surprised that virtually no one had given this careful attention to this theme in the last forty years. Second, I was surprised how often Christians who tried to reflect on the land simply cited the Old Testament as if nothing new – no New Testament – had been written. Now at the end of this labour, permit me to outline a series of observations about what was going on in the first century. I will begin with three observations about the setting of the New Testament and the land.

Territorial debates

First, talk about the Holy Land and theology was alive everywhere in the first century. In the face of the Roman occupation, Jews in Judaea were asking tough questions about God’s design and whether He indeed would make good on His promises to Abraham. But these were explosive questions and anyone who raised them indiscreetly ran the risk of arrest or death. This explains why such questions had to go underground. This is always the way of life under occupation. The occupier usually watches for signs of subversion, and this was as true 2,000 years ago as it is today. We can observe this scenario in a couple of dreadful stories from the New Testament era.

In the mid-40s of the first century, territorial nationalism in Judaea began to boil over. Josephus tells us about a man named Theudas who lived under the Roman procurator Fadus. And Theudas had decided to wed armed resistance to a religious vision for the Holy Land of Judaea (Antiquities. 20.5.1; cf. Acts 5:33–39). This land belonged to the Jews, Theudas argued, and it needed to be cleansed of those Gentiles who occupied it. Theudas took 400 men to the River Jordan, claimed a Joshua-like re-entry that would reconquer the land, and decided he would defeat Rome as if they were the new Canaanites. The Roman governor would have none of it. His cavalry met the Jewish rebels in the desert, killed them, captured Theudas, and brought his head to Jerusalem as a trophy.

Two years later Rome’s next governor, Alexander, began re-registering Judaea for tax purposes. Again, violent resistance erupted. Josephus describes a man named Judas the Galilean who saw this act as so offensive he was willing to die in war to stop it (Antiquities. 20.5.2; cf. 18.1.6). Judas argued: if the Holy Land were to provide tax revenue, it belonged to Israel and the temple, not a Gentile occupier. God was the only ruler of the land and any who claimed sovereign rule usurped His role. The Romans quickly and easily killed Judas, as well as his sons, and this stood as a second warning to the Jews about who owned the land and what it would mean to make a religious claim on it. These two stories provide a convenient window into the nationalistic tensions at work in the first-century world of Judaea. Ownership and control of the Holy Land by the Jews had been frustrated since the Roman conquest in 63 BCE. The great accomplishments of the Maccabees, who in the second century BCE drove the Greek occupiers from the Judaean Mountains and established a Jewish kingdom, had now been lost to Rome. Theologies of land restoration – yearnings for a new and successful era of Jewish sovereignty over its ethnic heritage – were everywhere in the wind.

It should come as no surprise that Jesus and his followers were very careful about this topic.

One small story in the gospels teases this out. For many Jews, Roman taxation had become a burdensome symbol of Israel’s enslavement, and it was widely believed that it was the basis of Judaea’s financial value to the empire. The refusal to pay taxes became a political gesture among Jewish zealots in the mid-first century. In one instance – I’ll explain shortly – Jesus is given a thinly veiled test of his land politics: in Mark 12 he is asked about paying taxes to Caesar. Jesus denies their agenda – thereby denying their politics. In a word, Jesus is denying political action that would in some way fight for holy land. His movement would not be co-opted by a nationalistic movement that sought to win back the land by force.⁴

This is what I mean by veiling. Under occupation, the occupiers are watching. And so conversations like this one, this little political test, must take place in code language. Jesus was not asked about money in Mark 12. He was asked about resistance and revolution. It was about Jewish territorialism.

The Jewish Diaspora

Let’s now consider a second observation. While passionate debate was going on within Judaea about land promises, another odd debate followed in its wake. We know that more Jews were living outside Judaea than inside, and this presented Judaism with yet another existential problem. Could a Jew live a life of righteousness outside Judaea? When most of the law required life in the Holy Land for obedience, how could a Jew live in Macedonia or Libya or Spain? One estimate is that 30 per cent of the Jewish oral law (Mishnah) could not be fulflled outside the Holy Land.

We think that about three million Jews lived in first-century Judaea. And about four to five million lived outside the country (in what we call the Diaspora). Maybe one million in the east (Egypt and Syria) and four million in the Western Roman Empire. This problem brought a variety of understandable tensions. Rabbis in Jerusalem urged Jews in places like Rome to return home. They didn’t. These Jews might be keen to be buried in the Holy Land and come on occasional pilgrimages, but that was the limit of their interest.

This internal frustration within Judaism led to intolerance toward non-Jews in the regions of the Middle East nearby. When surrounding cities near Judaea refused Jewish culture, they were summarily destroyed. In the second century BCE, the Jewish ruler Alexander Janneaus came to the magnificent city of Pella (now in northwestern Jordan, near the Yarmuk Gorge). The Jewish historian Josephus says that Janneaus destroyed Pella because, ‘the city would not adopt Jewish customs’ (Antiquities, 13.395–397).

But millions of Jews refused to share this political zeal – which explains why they remained elsewhere in the Roman Empire. In a word, first-century Judaism was also questioning the exclusive territorial theology – the Holy Land theology – of the zealots of Jerusalem. Some Jews wanted to assimilate and join the empire. They were willing to live easily with those who were not Jewish. Others were exclusivist and wanted to build an exclusive Jewish domain.

It is the same debate you can see within modern Judaism today. Talk to a settler near Hebron and a Jew in Miami, Florida, and I suspect we’d hear these ancient voices all over again.

The three alternatives to occupation

If such concerns about Jewish identity and the land were widespread in early first -century Judaea, Jesus was surely aware of these debates and their competing visions. A faith centred on Torah, temple and land could not ignore the problem of occupation. Jesus’s contemporaries knew three alternatives that witnessed regular debate: cooperation, separation, or resistance.

First, one could cooperate with the occupation and hope that Rome would ease its control and the imperial demands would relax over time. And who knows, perhaps the province could even benefit from Augustus’s Pax Romana. Why not try to make it work? Herod and his dynasty had pursued this model fully. Any Roman ship arriving at the famed port of Caesarea Maritima in Judaea was greeted not only by state-of-the-art anchorage with marble quays and tapestry awnings, but an expansive marble temple for Augustus loomed over the breakwater. Roman public architecture, a theatre seating 3,500 and a hippodrome hosting 20,000 spectators for horse or chariot racing confirmed loudly that this was a Roman port. Judaea had never seen anything like this. Herod modelled the cooperative outlook on the Roman occupation. Even two of Herod’s sons, Herod Antipas and Philip (by his wife Cleopatra), were educated in Rome (Antiquities 17.20).

On the other hand (and this is the second alternative), one could separate from this wretched military occupation and build an alternate community where believers could pray for relief and await God’s intervention. The sectarians of Qumran near the Dead Sea pursued this course. Jerusalem and the land had become intolerably unclean not only through the Romans but through those Jews who were running Jerusalem and flirting with the occupiers. Life in the land had become impossible. In the wilderness where purity was still possible they prepared a place for the Lord. For them, a dream of God’s intervention brought resolution. In other words, they waited and prayed. Qumran’s War Scroll outlined how God would bring about His own intervention and the task of the believer was waiting and preparing. Its opening lines (1QM1: 1–7) lay out the contours of the final battle between the ‘sons of light’ and the ‘sons of darkness’. The opponents are the Kittim (a frequent code for the Romans) and Jews who have ignored the life of righteousness by aligning themselves with the ‘sons of darkness’.

But there is a third alternative. One could resist by refusing to pay taxes or even by taking up the sword. If Judas Maccabeus had done it in the second century BCE, why couldn’t Israel be successful again? We might call this a reborn ‘Maccabean Vision’ – a religiously fired Jewish nationalism that saw its first order of business as the cleansing of the land with violence. This was no doubt the vision of Judas the Galilean and Theudas. And it is echoed in the Messianic Psalms of Solomon, written by Pharisees:

Wisely and righteously let him [Messiah] expel sinners from the inherit-ance, and destroy the sinner’s pride as a potter’s vessel. With a rod of iron may he break in pieces all their resources. Let him destroy the lawless gen-tiles by the word of his mouth.

(17:21–24, emphasis added)

But this was a dangerous vision that ultimately led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the devastation of the nation by war. Indeed the land was ‘cleansed’ – but Rome did the cleansing with its own military legions by devastating Judaism beyond repair.

Summary

So there is our landscape. The land was vigorously debated in the New Testament era, rival ideologies about land and religious life were fighting for recognition, and a Jewish Diaspora hosting millions of Jews living throughout the Mediterranean began to question the so-called Zionist vision. Within Judaea, some Jews in the province collaborated with Rome, some took up weapons, and some disappeared into the vastness of the desert.

In this remarkably explosive political atmosphere, Jesus enters the stage. The Church is born. And Paul – a Diaspora Jew himself – begins to wrestle profoundly with the relationship of land, promised land and ethnic or national privilege.

The New Testament and the land: four remarkable ideas

Looking at the sweep of New Testament thinking on the land, four remarkable ideas are present. Two stem from the gospels, one from Acts and one from the New Testament letters.

Jesus subverts the land politics of his day

The gospels are clear that Jesus was a Jewish man from the Holy Land. He loved this land, was born here, worked here and restricted his ministry to its immediate region. He doesn’t, for instance, travel to Syria or Egypt much less the Western diaspora. And yet he is evasive about the territorial debates raging around him. He won’t get pulled in.

The national ambitions of Judaism under Rome constantly pressed Jewish leadership to respond. Either Judaea was capitulating to the occupation or Judaea had to organise to defeat it. However, Jesus is oddly silent about the debate. Jesus is curiously receptive to contact with the occupiers. In Matthew 8:5–13, he responds to the request of a Roman centurion whose valued servant was ill. Here we find no repulsion of the soldier, no condemnation of Gentiles, but rather we find receptivity and welcome. He says of the Roman: ‘Not even in Israel have I found such faith’ (8:10). Did we read this right? The enemy has a better grasp on faith than Jesus’s own fellow citizens!

What emerges is a general impression that Israel’s national ambitions tied to reclaiming the land live on the margin of Jesus’s thinking.

There was a Roman law (now well-known) that if a Roman soldier wanted a defeated subject to be his porter, he could demand it. This rule included use of the person’s donkey and cart as well. But the law limited this service to one (Roman) mile. Although this provision for forced labour was deeply resented, in Matthew 5:41 Jesus announces that if you are told to go one mile in such a situation, go two miles! And he says more. In 5:44 he commands his followers to love ‘their enemies’ and pray for those who persecute them. These are certain allusions to the Roman occupation that not only deny political resistance but also were no doubt inexplicable to Jesus’s followers. In a word, Jesus is strangely unsympathetic with attitudes that would demand resistance to Rome and the struggle for the land as religious duties.

However, in an important passage I mentioned earlier, Jesus is tested by those who chose aggressive resistance against the occupiers.

Following the removal of the corrupt and violent Archelaus (son of Herod I) in 6 CE, the subsequent political disruption that brought direct Roman rule to the land inspired new forms of Jewish resistance. Instability and reorganisation in 6 CE presented an ideal opportunity for this agenda.

For many Jews, Roman taxation had become a burdensome symbol of Israel’s enslavement, and it was widely believed that it was the basis of Judaea’s financial value to the empire. In 6 CE, tax revolts sought to lessen this value. Mark 12:13–17 records Jesus confronted by ‘Pharisees and Herodians’, two groups with deep, though different, concerns about the occupation. Their question concerning taxes (‘Should we pay taxes to Caesar or not?’) is not innocent but a veiled, opaque public test. When Jesus inspects a coin, sees Caesar’s image, and directs them to ‘render to Caesar what is his’, we can fairly interpret this as a refusal to support the tax revolt. This is Jesus’s explicit denial of a politically aggressive agenda. The kingdom he advocated could not be co-opted by a nationalistic movement that sought to win back the Holy Land by force.⁵

But not only is Jesus careful not to be cornered on Zionist politics, he implies quite clearly that theories about the land and who owns it may need to be inverted. There are a number of such passages, but I can only mention one.

In the well-known Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), Jesus describes a radical inversion of religious values. Enemies should be loved; mourners comforted; and the persecuted vindicated. Luke distributes these themes elsewhere: losing life will save it (9:24); the first will be last (13:30); the humbled exalted (14:11). This reversal of religious priority is the key to understanding Matthew 5:5, ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’. Here Jesus is echoing Psalms 37:11 (LXX) where the land, inheritance and the ‘meek’ are placed in juxtaposition.⁶ Anyone who wants to understand this beatitude must begin by reading Psalm 37.

The psalm describes the reversal of fortunes that will accompany God’s activity within Israel. Those who are wicked and angry represent the unrighteous who will share little of Israel’s inheritance. They employ the sword and aggression in order to take what they think is theirs. And yet, God is not on their side. He will give the land to those who trust in Him (37:3), who delight in His ways (37:4) remain patient (37:7) and are righteous (37:29). Those who are ‘meek’ will be delighted when they gain the land (37:11) because they are the ones who least expect it, who have been defeated by the strong and the powerful. Psalm 37 describes those who are greedy and those who are generous (37:21); those who grasp after what they want and those who wait for God to supply it. The land will belong to the latter.

The Greek term praus (here hoi praeis) refers to those who are humble and unassuming, and it is used both in Matthew 5:5 as well as the Greek version of Psalm 37. And yet the context in the psalm does not refer to submissiveness as a temperament but to those who have been humbled by the circumstances of their lives and do not react in anger. The New Testament scholar Don Hagner writes: ‘In view are not persons who are submissive, mild, unassertive, but those who are humble in the sense of being oppressed (hence, “have been humbled”)’.⁷ In Matthew’s only other two uses of the adjective, this describes the ministry of Jesus himself (11:29; 21:5); 1 Peter 3:4 applies this to Christians. In later Christian literature it should be an attribute of Christian leaders (Didache 15:1).

The gift such people receive is the land (Greek ge). This flexible word (used 250 times in the New Testament alone) can refer to the soil (Matt. 13:5), a region (‘land of Judaea’; Matt. 2:6), the Earth itself (Matt. 5:18, 35), or the inhabited world (Luke 21:35). It can also refer to the land of Israel (Luke 4:25). But since its use here in Matthew 5 springs from Psalm 37, Jesus’s reference would have gained immediate notice among his listeners as a reference not to the entire Earth but to the land of promise, the Holy Land. Moreover Jesus refers to these recipients as inheritors of this land. This is yet another potent term for Jesus’s audience. This word (klēronomeo, to inherit; klēros, inheritance) was commonly used to refer to the assignment of land in the Old Testament promises.⁸ When ‘inheritance’ is joined to ‘land’ the allusion is unmistakable: this is the land of inheritance, the land of promise. ‘Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Land’.⁹

This leads to a scandal at the heart of Jesus’s pronouncement.¹⁰ In a world where the powerful were ready to make bold political and military claims on the Land; where the strong assumed that they had the right thanks to their position or privilege to take what was theirs, Jesus appears as ‘the re-arranger of the Land’.¹¹ Meekness leads to inheritance – the strident will walk away empty-handed. The great reversal keenly felt throughout Jesus’s ministry – the last will be first! - has now been applied to the land, this land of inheritance, the land of Judah, no doubt the most precious commodity fought for in Jesus’s day.

Does this mean that Jesus here offered a territorial promise to his followers? This is not likely. For as we shall see (and as commentators regularly show) while the land itself had a concrete application for most in Judaism, Jesus and his followers reinterpreted the promises that came to those in his kingdom. Their kingdom is in Heaven (Matt. 5:3, 10), they shall see God (5:8) and their rewards will be counted in Heaven (5:12). Still, Jesus exploited one of the most potent images of his day – the land – and refused to offer it to those who demanded to have it.

This one passage is a hint of what is to come. Jesus knows that people are struggling to make religious and political claims on the land. And yet he does not imagine that the kingdom he promotes – the kingdom of God – will ever be taken in by those politics. Jesus clearly respects the uniqueness of Israel’s location in the land. He limits his ministry and that of his disciples to geographic Israel with very few exceptions. We have no record of Jesus working within the major Hellenistic regions of his world despite the fact that they surrounded and penetrated Galilee. For him, both Judaea and its great city, Jerusalem, were sacred locales with unparalleled theological roles to play in history.

But this ushers in a surprise. Jesus is reticent with regard to debates about the land. He expresses no overt affirmation of first-century territorial theologies. He does not repeat Judaism’s call to land ownership nor does he express criticism of the foreign occupation. He never elevates Jerusalem to such a degree that it becomes a focal point of Jewish nationalism. He even anchors his work in Galilee, a region looked upon with scorn by Judaeans.

Jesus seems to follow a different tack. In his theological outlook, blessings do not simply accrue to those Jews living in the land. He points to Damascus and Sidon and the stories of Elijah and Elisha as models of distributed blessing for nations outside the land (Luke 4). But it is not simply foreign lands that might be blessed; it is the poor and the landless. Surprising reversal was a hallmark of Jesus’s teaching. Those who are last will become first; those who are rich will become poor. Those who fight to possess the land will be trumped by the meek. In his most explicit saying about land and inheritance, Jesus says that the meek will inherit the land.

The well-known Old Testament scholar in Atlanta, Walter Brueggemann, describes this as a poignant scandal at the heart of Jesus’s land theology. Those who possess the most and who are most invested in Jewish territorialism resist Jesus forcefully.¹² Jesus in this respect is the great ‘rearranger’ of the land. And his opponents know it.

Brueggemann finds moving symbols of these choices in modern Israel. There is Masada and there is the Western Wall (formerly called the ‘Wailing Wall.’) The first represents militarism, the second patient longing and prayer. As symbols they represent timeless choices that pertained to Israel in the first century, the Middle East today, indeed each of us. We may grasp or we may wait; we may seize those places we claim to be ours by divine (or racial or national) right or we can suspend our desire in faith.

The Church rejects the territorial zeal of Judaea

The first hint we have in the Church’s story is what happens on the Day of Pentecost. Early Christianity is born at Pentecost and immediately converts a roll call of Diaspora Jews who are in Jerusalem (Acts 2:9–11). From the east: Parthians, Medes, Elamites (Persians), Mesopotamians and Arabs. From the west: pilgrims from Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Rome and Crete. From the southwest: Jews from Egypt and Cyrene in Libya. The main account of Luke’s history moves away from Judaea and introduces us to Paul, the ultimate Diaspora Jew. In the Book of Acts, we follow him as he meets with synagogue gatherings throughout the Diaspora: Pisidian Antioch (13:14), Iconium (14:1), Ephesus (18:19, 26; 19:8), Philippi (16:13, 16), Thessalonica (17:1), Berea (17:10), Athens (17:17) and Corinth (18:4, 7). He knows churches in Diaspora cities and later writes letters to many of them: Colossae, Thessalonica, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, Philippi, Crete and Laodicea on the River Lycus. Note that the Book of Acts has him travelling through Troas and Syrian Antioch more frequently than Jerusalem.

Even the lesser-celebrated letters of the New Testament, such as 1 Peter, reflect this Diaspora orientation. Peter’s first letter writes to ‘the exiles of the dispersion’ located in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia – all cities in Asia Minor. Johannine scholarship similarly locates the Fourth Gospel and the three letters of John in a Diaspora cultural milieu (Western Asia? Ephesus?) where Jewish-Christian life must contest with the philosophical temptations of the Greek world. Even the Apocalypse is addressed to Churches exclusively located in western Asia Minor.

What may we draw from this? Early Christian mission did not see itself limited to the province of Judaea that gave it its birth. The Christian community did not interpret its identity as linked to Judaea or even to Galilee as Jesus had done. Indeed the witness has gone out from Jerusalem – in Jewish thinking, the centre of the Jewish world – nevertheless, the recipients of the witness are welcome to remain where they are. No Christian convert is called to support a Holy Land territorialism. The political interests of Judaea never rival any other region.

Luke’s story provides a window, an important window, into how an important Christian such as Luke – a man working with Christianity’s leading spokesperson (Paul) – might think about the Holy Land. This is what many scholars of antiquity call a ‘geographical horizon’ that determines how an ancient writer is constructing his or her world.¹³

At no point do the earliest Christians view the Holy Land as a locus of divine activity to which the people of the Roman Empire must be drawn. They do not promote the Holy Land either for the Jew or the Christian as a vital aspect of faith. No Diaspora Jew or pagan Roman is converted and then reminded of the importance of the Holy Land. The early Christians possessed no territorial theology. Early Christian preaching is utterly disinterested in a Jewish hope devoted to the restoration of the Land and the preservation of Jerusalem. The kingdom of Christ began in Judaea and is historically anchored there but it is not tethered to a political realisation of that kingdom in the Holy Land. Echoing the message of the gospels, the praxis of the Church betrays its theological commitments: Christians will find in Christ what Judaism had sought in the land.

The intriguing question posed by the apostles in Acts 1:6 – ‘Lord will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ – unfurls a host of questions alive in the first century. Israel had sought its own restoration as a prerequisite for the day when all of the world would be subjected to its dominance and judged by God. This is precisely the sort of thinking that (according to Josephus) drove the rebels who took over Jerusalem in 66 CE (War 6.312–315). It was thinking that surfaced even among Jesus’s original despairing followers (Luke 24:19–27). ‘We had hoped that he would redeem Israel’.

Jesus’s correction of the apostles (‘It is not for you to know the times or the seasons …’) should not be taken to mean that Jesus acknowledges the old Jewish world view and that its timing is now hidden from the apostles. Instead Jesus is acknowledging their incomprehension. He in effect says: ‘Yes I will restore Israel – but in a way you cannot imagine’.

The key is that they will receive power when the Holy Spirit enters them and they become witnesses to the world (Acts 1:8). In some manner, the initial restoration of Israel has already begun inasmuch as Christ, the new temple, the new Israel, has been resurrected. The great theological shift in Jewish history had taken place already on Easter morning. Now the great witness to the Gentiles could begin. Now the new eschatological reality of God’s drama would unfold in the Christian community. Oxford New Testament scholar Peter Walker adds:

Israel was being restored through the resurrection of its Messiah and the forthcoming gift of the Spirit. The way in which Israel would then exert its hegemony over the world would not be through its own political independence, but rather through the rule and authority of Israel’s Messiah… . Jesus’s concern, now as before, was not for a political ‘kingdom of Israel’, but rather for the ‘kingdom of God’ (Acts 1:3).¹⁴

To say it a different way: the solution to Judaism’s woes was not to be found in political remedies; it would be found in a new community formed by the Messiah and the Messianic Spirit sent from God.

Therefore the Holy Land was the source of Christianity’s legacy but no longer its goal. The political concerns of the land were a part of Christianity’s history, but no longer formed its mission. The new mission would be the restoration of the world, not the restoration of Jerusalem and the land. The call to belief and obedience would thus pertain not simply to Jews but to ‘all the nations’ (Rom. 1:5) who now live within that field, that domain having God’s claim upon it.

The details of this are worked out carefully in the Book of Acts. The great mission of Pentecost, the great speech of Stephen that rejects the territorial exclusivity of Judaea, and the final work of Philip to Samaria and Peter to Caesarea each prepare us for the final model of Paul. The work of God is not the restoration of a divinely sanctioned Israel. It is the restoration of the entire world. The hope of Israel is to be found in its Messiah – Jesus Christ – and not in political agendas that were debated in Jerusalem.

These early Christians would have been astonished if they came upon men and women who promoted a Christian variation of Jewish Holy Land theology. There is no evidence either within the Hellenistic mission of the Church or within the communities growing up around Judaea that theological obligations required a political commitment to Jerusalem or the land. Thus there was no theological provincialism in early Christianity.

The Church never forgot its heritage in Jerusalem or Judaea, and as Paul’s third missionary tour demonstrates, the apostle wanted to keep fresh connections between Judaea and the Churches in the West. But Paul’s interest here is in supporting the Christians in this part of the world – not in supporting the political welfare of these hills and mountains.

But there was no room for a view that elevated Judaea’s political interests above all others, or that looked on Judaea as bearing unique spiritual or theological importance. Remarkably, even the location of Jesus’s birth, ministry, death and resurrection were not venerated in the early Christian period. This wasn’t until centuries later. The Church was forward-looking – Jesus had been raised and was elsewhere at God’s right hand! His story was not a story about Judaea and its renewal. It was a story about his resurrected life, his Spirit among his Churches and what he was up to in the Roman provinces of the Mediterranean world. Above all – as we shall see – it was a story about how God was reclaiming His entire creation, which meant the redemption not simply of the nation of Judaea but the entire world.

Paul rethinks ‘Abraham’s Children’ and the land

There is little doubt that Paul would have understood the deep passions that flowed beneath Judaea’s national concerns for the land. We know a great deal about Paul’s Jewish commitments: he was born into a Diaspora Jewish family in Tarsus of Cilicia and at some point arrived in Jerusalem to continue his education under the well-known Gamaliel. Here Paul excelled, embraced the party of the Pharisees, and considered himself well above his peers in his zeal for matters pertaining to the law (Gal. 1:14; Phil. 3:4–5). Paul believed that God’s ongoing faithfulness to Judaism had been realised through the remnant of Jewish believers in Christ located in the Church. On this basis he could add: ‘Has God rejected His people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendent of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin’ (Rom. 11:1 RSV). When he defends himself to his critics at Corinth, he bristles at their charges: ‘Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I’ (2 Cor. 11:22 RSV). Paul viewed himself as a devoted Jew – sincerely committed to matters central to Jewish identity and life. In the first century it would have been impossible for such a man to be unaware of Jewish territorialism.

Yet a few surprising observations follow quickly on the heels of these thoughts. First, for Paul – and here we may have a vital clarifying insight into Paul’s view of the land – Jerusalem and its temple are places that enjoy historic respect but cannot claim a universal or lasting theological significance. Paul is pragmatic when he returns to Jerusalem, and his chief interest is in consulting with apostolic leaders there and unifying his Gentile mission with the Church of Judaea; but his writings betray another posture, a thoughtful and determined movement away from Judaea as an important theological locale. For Paul, Jerusalem is no holier than Ephesus or Rome in the great plan of God. Second, given Paul’s Jewish commitments, it is striking how rarely Paul refers to the land or even Jewish nationalism in his writings. This begins with Paul’s limited interest in geography. He never recalls the geographical particulars of Jesus’s life, nor does he refer to locations of importance when reciting the foundational events of the gospel (note 1 Cor. 15:3–8). Did he ever visit the Galilean villages so important to Jesus? Did Bethlehem interest him? Surely Paul knows that Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, but he does not say so. The resurrection is of undeniable importance to him (Rom. 4:24–25; 6:4–9) and yet where it happened is less so. Paul refers to neither Galilee nor Judaea. And the term ‘Israel’ is used exclusively for the name of a people, never a place. Judaea seems to be just one more location on the map: Romans 15:19 is typical of how he refers to the Holy Land: ‘So from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ’.

Third, in Romans Paul is eager to list the advantages enjoyed by Judaism. In Romans 3:1–4, for example, Paul reminds his readers how the Jews were entrusted with the word of God. In Romans 9:4–5 Paul goes further: ‘They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ’. But among the privileges rehearsed again and again in the first-century Jewish world, the Holy Land stood out as one of the premier promises of God given through the patriarchs. And yet here Paul omits it.

Fourth, Paul is willing to rethink major categories in Jewish belief, and he begins with the temple in Jerusalem. This was the ultimate place of holiness and revelation, the focal point of Jewish affections. Yet Paul is willing to argue that the Christian Church represents a new ‘Temple of God’ (1 Cor. 3:16–17; 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:16). You have to let this one sink in.

The British New Testament scholar N. T. Wright comments:

To Western Christians thinking anachronistically of the Temple as simply the Jewish equivalent of a cathedral, the image is simply one metaphor among many without much apparent significance. For a first-century Jew, however, the Temple had an enormous significance; as a result, when Paul uses such an image within twenty-five years of the crucifixion (with the actual Temple still standing), it is a striking index of the immense change that has taken place in his thought.¹⁵

Clearly something is afoot in Paul’s thinking. The historic devotion reserved for Judaea, Jerusalem and even the temple has undergone change. What God has done in the Spirit, and what has been realised in the Church, has irretrievably altered Paul’s understanding of a holy location, indeed Holy Land.

Fifth, the more profound index of how Paul is rethinking the categories of Jewish thought come with his treatment of Abraham in Galatians and Romans. The significance of Abraham as the most important ancestor of every Jew is without question. Tied to this were the land promises that were generally anchored to Abraham in Genesis. Thus if you were a child of Abraham by race you inevitably were heir to the great land promises in the Holy Land.

But here is Paul’s unexpected salvo. Paul challenges the exclusivity of racial descent from Abraham. Children of Abraham consist of people – Jews and Gentiles – who share Abraham’s faith. And the promise of God, he notes, comes to Abraham and his seed (singular) and this seed is Christ (Gal. 3:16). Thus Christ is the true heir of Abraham and his promises. And if we belong to Christ, we too are attached to Abraham and the promises given to him.

Again, for the non-Jewish Christian, it is hard to imagine the impact of this theological subversion. Paul has upended one of the chief arguments for exclusive Jewish privilege in the Holy Land. In other words, what Paul did for the temple he has now done for Abraham and his promises: he has reinterpreted their importance and questioned their traditional roles. For Paul the Body of Christ represents the true Temple of God – and that same body now can lay claim to Abraham in a manner before unheard.

If you want a glimpse of just how striking Paul’s rethinking of this could be, just look at Romans 4:13. Here Paul refers directly to the inheritance of Abraham. This was the gift of Canaan, the Holy Land and Israel! And yet look at what Paul actually says: the promise to Abraham was that he would inherit the entire world. How can that be? This is not in Genesis. But it can be true in only one way: the family of Abraham now includes the Gentiles – Gentiles living throughout the world: Romans, Greeks, Cappadocians, Arabs – and they now, inasmuch as they belong to Christ, also belong to Abraham. God’s new claim is not for the restoration of Judaea. It is not for a political rebuilding of the Holy Land. God’s new claim is for the entire world; His people in Christ will be instruments of that claim.

But certainly Paul would have been surprised, shocked even, if he learned that Christians in Corinth or Ephesus had taken up a Holy Land theology akin to his former rabbinic friends in Jerusalem. Paul would have been surprised if Christian Churches began to reflect a Jewish outlook on territorialism. Indeed, Christians were connected to the great ancestor Abraham by faith and by virtue of their joining the family of God. But at no time did these Christians contemplate the implications of the land promises of Abraham.

As Jewish nationalism began to swell in the 1950s and 1960s, some among Paul’s Churches might have been tempted to see this call of religious patriotism – a call to defend holy land – as a requirement for Christians. Paul would have stopped such sentiments forcefully. The lens of the Incarnation had now refocused things completely. Christian theology had no room for ‘holy places’ outside of the Holy One who is Christ. And above all, Paul would have seen as aberrant any Christian territorialism wedded to first-century politics. A religiously fuelled regional nationalism did arise in the first century in Judaism and it eventually delivered Jerusalem to the Roman armies. But nothing of its type ever surfaced in Paul’s Churches thanks to the apostle’s instruction.

The new vision: ‘we have a new country’

This is my final observation. When we step outside these teachings from Jesus, Acts and Paul, these Holy Land debates virtually disappear. The documents associated with the author of Hebrews, James, Peter, John, Jude – even the Apocalypse itself – demonstrate a striking neglect for concerns over land and religious holy space. In these writings, conventional religious geography on Earth per se slips from view. I say ‘conventional’ because most of them do invest in a locale for Christian hope: Heaven or a heavenly renewal of this world.¹⁶ And in the Book of Revelation, Heaven will bring its properties to the Earth for its final renewal. In fact it becomes an impediment to the deeper realisation that a ‘better country’ awaits the believer who is trusting in God. Three ideas surface again and again in these books.

First, there are no discussions of Judaea or Jerusalem as the site of ultimate commitment, affection, or veneration. Jerusalem and its temple are seen with suspicion, and discussions such as those in Hebrews or the Apocalypse point to the inadequacies of anything going on at the temple. The ‘city of God’ has now been relocated to something newly built by God, and the struggle for the city in Judaea is abandoned. This view may have resulted from the final destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE when both Christians and Jews were forced to rethink the meaning of the land much like Augustine was forced to do following the Visigoth sack of Rome in 410 CE. But such a conclusion is unnecessary since these books could well have stemmed from before 70 CE. The Christian theological detachment from Jerusalem was already well underway before the Roman armies arrived at the Holy City.

Second, the world view of these Christians is the world view of the exile. ‘To the exiles of the Diaspora’, writes 1 Peter 1:1. ‘To the twelve tribes of the Diaspora’, records James 1:1. Peter implores his followers to follow a moral life calling them ‘aliens and exiles’ (1 Pet. 2:11) and reminds them that the life lived now is that of an exile (1:17). Christianity has here adopted one motif from its Jewish roots and developed it eagerly: as Israel lived without a land both in Egypt and in Babylon, so too, Christians are likewise landless. Thus the Book of Revelation uses Babylon as its reigning symbol for the imperial world that persecutes the Church. In its litany of those who have been faithful, Hebrews describes generic experiences that merge the historic to the present. Believers have been stoned, beaten, imprisoned, left destitute and found ‘wandering over deserts and mountains’, living in ‘dens and caves of the earth’ (Heb. 11:37–38). They have ‘fed for refuge’ (6:18a). Nevertheless these exiles have hope (6:18b). But the Church replaced the Jewish hope of a Holy Land and its ‘rest’ with a new hope for heavenly rest provided uniquely by God.

This leads us to the third and final element characteristic of these letters. They build a world view that is at the same time deeply invested in the practicalities of life in the empire and yet it is also profoundly eschatological. They live in this world and yet they have their eyes on another. They do indeed have hope but it is not invested in the political restoration of Judaea, or the reform of the empire. They continue to be exiles. They do not talk about the re-establishment of a Jewish nation independent of Rome, nor do they see events in Judaea as critical to the realisation of this hope. They have an eschatology, but its key elements centre on Christ and the world – not Judaism and Jerusalem.

To illustrate, just look with care at how the Book of Hebrews handles the land or Jerusalem. Veneration for Jerusalem and its temple is gone. The letter defects interest from Jerusalem to a heavenly city prepared by God. ‘For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come’ (13:14). Hebrews writes that the heavenly Jerusalem is the destination of people of faith and the new pilgrim destination of the believer.¹⁷ Even Abraham never saw ‘the promised land’. Are we serious? Abraham walked this land from end to end.

Ironically, even though Abraham stood in Shechem, Bethel and Hebron, Hebrews can say that the patriarch only saw the land and greeted it from afar (11:13). How can this be true? Because Abraham sought something greater: a homeland (11:14, Greek patris). This is the only use of this word in the New Testament letters (cf. Mark 6:1; Luke 4:23, etc.), and its appearance here is poignant. In Jewish writing it refers to the land given by God, the Holy Land that could be lost in exile or death (Jer. 22:10; 2 Macc. 13:10). But Hebrews says that our ‘homeland’ has changed. It is not on the Earth. The argument is sustained in 11:16 where Hebrews continues: ‘But as it is, they long for a better patris – which belongs to heaven’. Believers yearn for a ‘better country’ where the greatest promises of God might be found.

If there were any doubts that a thoughtful critique of territorial theology was at work among the early Christians, Hebrews puts them to rest. The author of this book and those who embraced its understanding of the world would never be inclined to see the politics of Judaea as an appropriate venue for Christian interest. Nor would they anticipate a divine reclamation of Judaea or a revival in Jerusalem as a component of their eschatology. Their call: ‘We seek a better country’ – a patris, a homeland which God alone is going to build.

Summary

So what have we learned? Judaism today as well as 2,000 years ago had to make up its mind regarding the Holy Land. And as Walter Brueggemann has suggested, Jews have always struggled with two options: Masada and the Western Wall. The first fights for a claim on the land, the second waits patiently in prayer asking God to deliver it. In my mind, the settler movement and many of Israel’s leaders have camped at Masada and taken politics and force into their own hands.

From Matthew to Revelation, the New Testament denies any political vision such as this for the Holy Land. The earliest Christians did not deny the historic value of the Holy Land. This is the land of Jesus, the locale of remarkable revelations. And this is neither anti-Judaism nor a denial of Jewish roots. And yet I am confident Christian leaders like Paul and Peter would have been astonished to think that any Christian would imagine supporting a Zionist vision for the Holy Land out of some religious obligation.

The early Christians had this very opportunity. It came in mid-century, about 60 CE. Careful political plans were made, swords were sharpened, Gentiles were threatened, and everyone in the Holy Land was put on notice. Israel would be rebuilt and purged. War finally erupted in 66 CE. And here is the key point: The first-century Christians said ‘No’ to invitations for enlistment.

And I would urge, perhaps this ‘No’, this refusal to be enlisted in the political rehabilitation of ancient Israel, ought to be the Church’s voice today.

Notes

  1 Pappé (2007).

  2 Boyarin (1994: 252).

  3 The results have been published in both the United Kingdom and the United States entitled Jesus and the Land: How the New Testament Challenges Holy Land Theology. The present chapter employs materials from this publication (Burge 2010).

  4 See the classic treatment of Ethelbert Stauffer, ‘Christ and the Story of the Tribute Money’, in Christ and the Caesars (Stauffer 1955).

  5 See note 4 above.

  6 France (2007: 166).

  7 Hagner (1993: 92).

  8 Herrmann (1964: 759–761).

  9 For some interpreters, the term ge should remain ‘Earth’ and refer to the Jewish hope of a regenerated world. See Romans 4:13.

10 Brueggemann (2002: 164).

11 Ibid., 162.

12 Ibid., 164.

13 Scott (1994: 483–544).

14 Walker (1996: 292).

15 Wright (1992: 70) cited in Walker (1996: 120).

16 Wright (2008) warns against Western Christian tendencies to promote a disembodied heavenly life that is escapist.

17 Johnson (1978: 239–251).

3 Orientalism in Christian theology

Magi Abdul-Masih

Introduction

In 1999, I travelled to Palestine-Israel for a study tour that lasted for twenty-five days. I saw for myself the oppression Palestinians endure under the State of Israel. And while I was not surprised at the silence of the world political leaders, I was very surprised at the silence of the theological community in the English-speaking West, mainly the United States and Canada. I summarised my reflections in an article ‘The Challenge of Present-Day Palestine to Contemporary Theology’ published in Studies in Religion 29, no. 4 (2000: 439–451). Ten years ago, I saw the challenge not only as another justice issue with which our world is replete, but also as a more radical challenge on the level of method and basic assumptions. In other words, in the theological community the conflict is seen primarily as an ethical issue of justice. And that is correct. However, this way of viewing the conflict sees it as an external issue. I am proposing a self-critical approach where the conflict revises the internal theological structures of thought manifested in our method and assumptions.

On a methodological level, the challenge the Palestinian–Israeli conflict poses to contemporary theology could be viewed in terms of a dynamic theological method, or ‘hermeneutical method of critical correlation’ which ‘entails bringing together the present and the past, bringing into conjunction our present situation and the tradition’.¹ Here I am speaking of the mainline Christian tradition. Thus, the ‘negative contrast experience’ of the Palestinians’ of loss of life, land and dignity can be brought to bear on our contemporary theological formulations. Those theological formulations would impact all levels of our theologies: systematic (such as the doctrines relating to Jesus, God and the Trinity), ecclesiological and biblical research.

However, when trying to apply this theological hermeneutic to the conflict, I faced a theoretical problem. While it was possible to critique certain formulations and even come up with corrections, such as the claim that Jesus is not only Jewish but also Palestinian, I lacked a methodological tool by which I could do a more comprehensive and unified analysis. I stalled for a few years, not knowing how to go forward. In other words, I lacked an analytical tool to uncover and systematically examine the basic and unspoken assumptions in theology and theological method.

A possible solution to my hermeneutical impasse presented itself when I encountered Edward Said’s works. Said’s analysis is indispensable for an understanding of the general atmosphere in our times and its ramifications on the global level. Although Said’s work is self-consciously secular, humanistic and non-religious, I read him because I was interested in the intersection of unspoken assumptions and world views on the one hand and politics on the other, especially after 9/11. It was then that it became clear to me that Edward Said’s understanding of Orientalism could be the theoretical tool that I needed to do the analysis of contemporary English-speaking Western Christian theology. This makes further sense as the prevalent world view permeates not only religious and the theological realms but also the political.

This chapter, then, is a preliminary attempt at using the theoretical framework of Said’s Orientalism to analyse contemporary theology and its theological method. I will explore the different manifestations of Orientalism in theology and its ramifications for theological method and hermeneutics. The contention of this paper is that not only is there Orientalism in various mainline Western theologies and, more specifically, in the representation of Jesus, but also that Orientalism present in theology plays a role in the political arena, especially in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict.

Proposed theoretical method of critique

The theoretical method of critique I will employ in this article to examine Western theological conceptions in light of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is principally the same method applied by postmodernists to modernism.² That is to say, the primary goal of the critique is to uncover the power relations in doing theology and the resulting repressive political and social structures. The method could be summarised in three steps. The first step is a critique of foundationalism, that is, the desire to articulate a foundation or essence from which and upon which all the phenomena studied rest. Foundationalism could also take another form; namely, the form of an unspoken assumption that need not be proven or tested, but is taken for granted. In other words there is no one premise that can function as the starting point.

The second step in the postmodern method is a critique of universalism or totalism, defined as the desire to generalise a theory or stance and make it all-encompassing. Such totalisation theories tend to reflect the power of the speaker and are repressive.

The third step in the postmodern method is the critique of mystification. This is the belief that only experts in a field have competent or relevant knowledge. Thus, it addresses such mystifications as science, reason and democracy.

In sum, the postmodern critique I intend to use in my reflections on theological method and Christian theology in light of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict comprise three premises:

1 No one system of knowledge is absolute.

2 No one subject of knowledge is total.

3 No intellectual discourse is pure.

In other words, similar to the postmodern criticisms of modernity, my analysis aims at uncovering the ideologies of power in systems and discourses in Christian theology and method. I will approach this general goal through the specific lens of Edward Said’s Orientalism as the most appropriate critical category since it is the negative experience of oppression of Palestinians by the State of Israel that I wish to use.

Manifestations of Orientalism in theology

In Edward Said’s words:

[The] principal dogmas of Orientalism exist in their purest form today in studies of the Arabs and Islam. Let us recapitulate them here: one is the absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, and inferior. Another dogma is that abstractions about the Orient, particularly those based on texts representing a ‘classical’ Oriental civilisation, are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. A third dogma is the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalised and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and even scientifically ‘objective’. A fourth dogma is that the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared or to be controlled.³

It may be difficult to find direct and ‘manifest Orientalism’ in theology. However, I am exploring ‘latent Orientalism’ which I claim is expressed in silence.⁴ But silence about what? This silence and its presuppositions are what I will explore in what follows.

Jesus’s identity

In our present time, mainstream Christian theologians in the English-speaking West will not speak about Jesus Christ’s identity without speaking about his Jewish identity.⁵ This inclusion of Jesus’s Jewish identity is a deliberate correction to what occurred in Western Christian theology prior to and during what happened in Germany in the twentieth century. In Germany, in 1939, the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life was founded. Its mandate was to produce anti-Semitic propaganda to support the policies of Nazi Germany.⁶ The institute, in return, was supported by many churches, pastors and theologians throughout Germany. The institute wanted a ‘Jewishless’, i.e. Aryan, Christ; Germany wanted a ‘Jewishless’ Germany. The attempt to cleanse Jesus of his Jewish identity paved the way for Germany to cleanse itself and Europe of its Jewish population. In other words, both the political and the religious establishments recognised the immense power of an alliance between religion and politics. Theological reflections on the representations of Jesus can either support or critique the political powers that be.⁷

However, Jesus was not simply a Jew. He was a Palestinian Jew. There is a silence about Jesus’s Palestinian identity. And those who mention Jesus’s Palestinian identity hold that his Palestinian identity is theologically irrelevant. Although I do not say that the stance is intentional or malicious, nevertheless, it has dire effects on Palestinians. The above mindset reveals interesting suppositions about history and culture, not to mention power relations.

Jesus’s homeland

Jesus’s homeland is rarely called Palestine. In theological books, Palestine as the birthplace of Jesus has no theological significance.⁸ In religious studies books, the location of Jesus’s birth, ministry and death is called by many names such as the Holy Land, Judaea, Galilee, or more specifically Jerusalem and Bethlehem; but it is rarely called Palestine. Palestine is only mentioned in the context of the modern State of Israel.⁹

It is difficult to convey the enormous impact this seemingly simple omission of a name has for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In effect, this simple omission of a name erases a whole land and its people from the surfaces of books and equally from the face of the Earth. In other words, a simple renaming of the land is a very powerful tool for the rewriting of history. The power of naming, renaming and defining reflects the power relations between those naming and those named.¹⁰

New Testament research

The silence about ‘Palestine’, and/or its theological irrelevance is also prevalent in New Testament and in Hebrew Scripture research. An example of a New Testament hero is Paul, a Roman citizen whose first language is Greek; his mindset is Greco-Roman. This is all accurate, yet one critical detail is missing: he is Syrian. That is, Paul also shares the Eastern mindset and practices. Paul, in short, represents an ancient Middle Eastern society whose cultural offspring are the Syrians of today.

Manifestations of Orientalism on the methodological and hermeneutical levels

Religion as a set of ideas set apart from its cultural milieu

Another corollary of the previous point is the issue of the relationship between religion and its cultural milieu. Jesus is a Jew; but, what kind of a Jew is he? Jesus is a Jew but rarely is his specific cultural background mentioned. Religion is inculturated. Jesus is specifically a Palestinian Jew. There is no such thing as a first-century Jew. For the Egyptian Jews, the Roman Jews and the Mesopotamian Jews were different in their expression of their religious traditions.

An example of a cultural habit in Palestine that took a religious significance is the Palestinian everyday meal where family gathers and friends drop by. It was made sacred, called the Eucharist and equated with the Jewish Seder meal. The meal itself, with its habits of eating from the same plate, reclining and remembering the one departing, are Palestinian habits and not parts of the Jewish tradition.

History stops with the ancients and knowledge is exclusive to books and experts

For the Orientalists, history stops with the ancients, whose histories are found between the leaves of books written by other Orientalists. The implications of this abstract and professionalised understanding of history for theology are immense. It means that for biblical and theological research, the experts are the Orientalists.

Even those who realise the importance of the cultural context, rather than the abstract understanding of history, seem to limit themselves to ancient contexts rather than both the present and the ancient. The Context Group, which began in the United States in the 1980s, does biblical research using social scientific methods, especially anthropology. Their work is very valuable in elucidating ambiguities in the Bible. However, they limit themselves to the anthropology of the ancients as the context of study with little reference to the contemporary natives of the land from which the Bible arose. This is a good example of history stopping with the ancients.

To the experts, living cultures are unimportant for the task of research, especially in theology. Furthermore, the deposit of knowledge resides with the experts. Experts in ancient languages, archaeology and history make up the people who are consulted. If I wish to know the meaning of the Eucharist, I consult books, whether they speak about the Jewish meal or about what others spoke about the meal. However, since the inception of these disciplines, they were based on Orientalist suppositions. The assumption is that it is only the Western expert who can bring the ancient East back to life; it is the Western expert who can represent the East. There is no need to turn to the contemporary natives of the Middle East: they are incapable of representing themselves; furthermore, they have been polluted by the modern world.¹¹

Ramifications for hermeneutics

Living traditions and cultures

I think there is another option, and that is to revise previous assumptions about history and culture. History and culture do not stop with the ancients, but are continuous with the present living cultures and traditions. This is illustrated by a programme that was looking into the Greco-Roman myth of the Golden Fleece. The scholars seem to have fathomed the details of the myth but for one point: the Golden Fleece itself. Why was it golden? Why, if the issue were gold, would one want a golden fleece and not a golden crown or a golden robe? Books were not of any help. Finally the researchers decided to go on an actual journey and followed the track of the myth to a remote place in Georgia. There, the natives collected and purified gold using a sheep’s fleece.

In other words, from a cultural perspective, Jesus shares with the contemporary Palestinian in agricultural villages, the weather, the landscape, the geography and the values connected with an agricultural society; in short, the culture. Jesus also shares with the contemporary Palestinian the political reality of occupation. Jesus was living under the Roman occupation and Palestinians today are living under the Israeli occupation. Not only are Palestinians today heirs to Jesus’s cultural tradition, but they also share similar political realities. Their present-day lived experiences can shed light on some of Jesus’s actions and sayings. I am not saying that the Palestinian culture froze in time or that it did not undergo change, but rather that the change occurred within a continuity. The best metaphor is that of language: for example, one cannot claim that the English language in the time of Shakespeare is the same as the English language today; however, it still remains English and not French.

A new hermeneutical method

Abraham Mitrie Rihbani, a Syrian who moved to the United States in 1891, received his PhD, worked as a Presbyterian minister and died in 1944, wrote in his book, The Syrian Christ, that reading the gospels is like reading a letter from home. The images and messages are culturally familiar. Rihbani’s observation nicely illustrates the main problem with contemporary approaches to reading biblical texts deriving from a Middle Eastern context. The core of the hermeneutical problem in the mainstream Western Christian traditions is the distance in time and space; that is, the cultural and historical distance between the world of the text and our world. This is further aggravated by relying completely on the expertise of books. To solve this problem, one has to go to complex hermeneutical theories and methods to overcome this chasm.

However, the distance in time and space between the New Testament and present-day Palestinian culture is less acute because of the continuity in culture and history. That can offer us another way to understand Jesus and the New Testament. For example, if we wish to understand the Eucharist more deeply, perhaps we should go to Palestine and experience a meal with the Palestinian natives.¹² To understand the Eucharist properly, one has to set it in its wider culture of hospitality and generosity, where one can drop by at any time of night and day on one’s neighbour and still be warmly welcomed and fed with abundance. Similarly, the abundance in the parables of the kingdom makes better sense in the context of a Palestinian meal. In a Palestinian house, in particular, or in an Arab and Middle Eastern house in general, if one or two people are invited to dine, a meal for ten is set on the table. To better understand the parables of the New Testament, scholars should spend a year living in the remote Palestinian agricultural areas. The story of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet would have a different meaning if scholars lived with the Bedouins of the Negev.

The above suggestions do not imply that the Middle Easterners in general, or Palestinians in particular, have been frozen in time. I am claiming, however, that history and culture have changed within a continuity. In other words, there is a cultural continuity between the first-century Palestinians and the twenty-first century Palestinians, even as we also speak of the differences.

‘Dialectical’ perspective rather than ‘clash’ perspective of the Orientalists

My suggested approach to the assumptions behind mainline Western Christian theologies is indebted to the postmodern emphasis on particularity. Postmodern deconstruction emphasises the particular and the contextual in contrast to the ideology of the universal. Postmodern critics contended that when the emphasis was on the universal, the place and effect of the historical conditioning is lost. But the more devastating effects of exclusive concern for the universal were its ideological ramifications of exacerbating one-sided power relations. Those in power represented the universal, the normal and the sensible. That applied not only to the dominant religious tradition, namely Christianity, but also to the dominant cultural tradition, namely the Western. Others were to conform to those standards, even if force was needed. Europeans’ treatment of native North Americans is a case in point, the colonisation project as a civilising endeavour is another.¹³

The postmodern critique, with its emphasis on the particular, the contextual, the historical and the cultural, is not without problems, however. For if the ongoing tension between the particular and the universal is lost, we end up with an essentialising difference. If we then add an Orientalist attitude of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, with ‘us’ being the superior and ‘them’ the inferior and the jealous, we have a chasm that cannot be bridged and the result is the ‘clash of civilisations’.¹⁴

I claim that our hermeneutical dilemmas and the language of the ‘clash of civilisations’ result in the loss of the creative and imaginative tension between the universal and particular; knowledge from books and experts and knowledge from experience; ancient traditions and living traditions; past and present. The ramifications are no less political than hermeneutical.

Political ramifications

The silence and/or the unimportance of Jesus’s homeland, Palestine, in theology or biblical studies, had dire effects on the Palestinian people in particular, and Arab and Islamic nations in general.¹⁵ Iraq has lost close to two million people in the last sixteen years; Afghanistan has lost close to 200,000 people. Palestine, in its Occupied Territories and Gaza, suffers from the longest and most brutal occupation in modern times.

But how do we get from silence about Palestine in biblical and theological research to brutality in Iraq and Afghanistan and oppression of Arabs and Muslims? I envision the argument, even if subconsciously, to go thus: If the humanity of Palestinians is not good enough for Jesus, then maybe the humanity of Palestinians is not good enough for anyone. Palestinians are below or subhuman. This understanding is solidified by the news in which Palestinians are portrayed as terrorists who are mainly Muslims. It follows that Muslims and Arabs are terrorists and subhumans. Or maybe the argument goes really in the reverse direction: Palestinians are Muslim Arabs, and all Muslim Arabs are terrorists, and that is why Jesus is above being one of them even in name. Being a Palestinian is a scourge from which we scholars would like to cleanse Jesus. So it is all right for Israel to cleanse that same scourge from Jesus’s land. Jesus was purely a Jew and his land should also be purely Jewish. This cleansing tactic is not new in history; after all, we attempted to cleanse Jesus of his Jewishness and thus cleared the way for Germany to clear Europe of Jews.¹⁶ We dare not forget that representation is power. Any reading, interpretation, or theological exercise is at the same time ethical, political and ideological. The exercise has ramifications for real people in real time and place. Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs are not collateral damage, nor are they virtual reality we can eliminate on games machines or in movies.

Why the silence?

I will propose that there are two interconnected reasons that contribute to the silence of mainline Western Christian theologians about the conflict in Palestine-Israel. One is Western guilt about the Holocaust and the second is the Jewish–Christian dialogue.

That the Western world has been shaken deeply and feels responsible for the Holocaust is something that is evident at every turn. I will talk only about the ramifications of the Holocaust on Christian theology. All our major doctrines of Christ, the Trinity, grace, missions and the Church, have been critiqued and reformulated in light of the atrocities of the Holocaust, and rightly so. However, another thing happened: unconditional support was extended to the victims of the Holocaust even when the tables turned. The State of Israel is the fourth most powerful military player in the world. This guilt is coupled with a moral paralysis that not only refuses to critique the State of Israel and its supporters out of respect for the Holocaust victims, but also does not mention the unmentionable, the Palestinian. It is almost as if Palestinians are responsible for the Holocaust, especially after 9/11.

The second reason for the silence of the mainline Christian theologians is as a result of Jewish–Christian dialogue. In itself, it is a very positive move and sorely needed after the Holocaust. However, it has become what Marc Ellis terms the ‘ecumenical deal’.¹⁷ ‘We, on the Jewish side’ will talk to ‘you, on the Christian side’ as long as you do not mention the State of Israel. Thus, neither the Christian theologians nor the Jewish theologians actually raise a critical voice against the atrocities against the Palestinians, nor the relationship of certain understandings of Judaism or Christianity to the same atrocities. The situation becomes a bit more complex when any criticism of the State of Israel is represented as anti-Semitism.

Conclusion

It is seems that in our contemporary theology we Christians have taken seriously the postmodern critique of modernism: foundationalism, universalism and mystification.¹⁸ In other words, we have criticised the desire for grand narratives, the desire to make these grand narratives universal, and the desire to claim that others cannot understand them because they reflect very complex realities only known by the experts. This development recognises that these ways of representation have lead to injustices around the world and that any reading of scripture or representation of others is first and foremost an ethical and political choice.¹⁹ The results are feminist theologies, ecological theologies, black theologies, liberation theologies, gay and lesbian theologies to name but a few. However, a blind spot still remains with a few exceptions such as Michael Prior and Mary Radford Ruether. When it comes to the representation of the Palestinian in theology, especially of Jesus and his land, we seem to fall back on the grand narratives of the colonialist period. And to add insult to injury, the representation is directed by the last colonialist project of the period, the Zionist agenda.

Notes

  1 Haight (1999: 40–50).

  2 Adam (1995: 1–34).

  3 Said (1994: 300).

  4 Ibid.

  5 Brown (1994); Fredriksen (1988); Haight (1999); Hellwig (1983); Lane (1975); Sanders (1993); Sloyan (1983); Wiley (2003).

  6 Heschel (2008).

  7 Ellis (1997: 88–89).

  8 See note 5 above.

  9 Corrigan et al. (1998); Fisher, M. P. (2008); Ludwig (2006); Young (2004).

10 King (1999).

11 Said (1994: 233–235).

12 Ibid., 328.

13 Ibid., 172, 237, 244.

14 Huntington (1993: 22–49).

15 Said (1994: 306–308).

16 Heschel (2008).

17 Ellis (1994).

18 Adam (1995: 1–34).

19 Aichele et al. (1995: 1–15).

Part II

Historical perspectives

4 Christian reactions to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem (637 CE)

Maher Y. Abu-Munshar

Introduction

Jerusalem has a special place in the hearts and minds of the followers of three of the major monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Throughout Jerusalem’s history, the followers of these religions have spared no effort or cost in their attempts to conquer that city. It has been argued that the adherents of these different faiths lived together in Jerusalem under Muslim rule in an atmosphere of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. Nonetheless, the members of a diverse society are unlikely to react in a united manner to something as momentous as a foreign force occupying their lands. The political, religious, or economic circumstances of the different components of the society were bound to affect their responses, which might range from acceptance, even approval, to point-blank rejection of the occupation and outright resistance to the invading forces. As El-Awaisi argues, most scholars agree that the Muslim campaign to conquer Aelia (Jerusalem) began during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad and culminated in the conquest of the walled city of Jerusalem in 16 AH/637 CE, five years after Muhammad’s death when the second caliph, ‘Umar Ibn Khaṭṭāb (who died in 24 AH/644 CE), was in power.¹ Before the arrival of the Muslims, Aelia was mainly a Christian region ruled by Byzantines, with most of the inhabitants having converted to Christianity shortly after Emperor Constantine professed his Christian faith in 312 CE.

The central question I raise here concerns how the Christians of Aelia viewed the Muslims and their conquest. In other words, did they welcome their new rulers? Can one assume that all Christian groups and sects in Aelia responded similarly? Whereas Muslim historians and some more recent Syriac writers contend that the Monophysites were one group that welcomed the Muslim conquest because of the persecution they suffered under Byzantine rule, other scholars now argue that all the Christians, including the Monophysites (who saw Christ purely as a deity rather than both a deity and a man), were hostile to the Muslim conquest. In this paper I attempt to look critically at Christians’ reactions to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and to question the findings of those writers who claimed that Christians collectively hated, rejected and resisted the Muslims.

Jerusalem on the eve of the first Muslim conquest

The first Muslim conquest of Jerusalem by Caliph ‘Umar arguably represents a turning point in the history of that region.² This conquest, which the majority of Muslim and non-Muslim historians believe took place in the year 16AH/637CE,³ dramatically changed the structure of Jerusalem’s population.⁴ For a brief examination of the religious status of the Christians in Aelia and the circumstances under which the Muslim army was able to conquer the city, it is helpful to look back to the pre-conquest period.

As I mentioned earlier, when the Muslims arrived, Aelia was a predominantly Christian region under Byzantine rule. After his conversion in 312CE, Emperor Constantine promoted Christianity throughout the empire, and in 324CE it became the official religion.⁵ As time passed, Aelia’s Christian population increased dramatically, but it was a heterogeneous community comprising a number of sub-communities affiliated with the various Churches and sects that had grown from the body of the Imperial Byzantine Church.⁶ The congregants of these Churches and sects consisted of Arabs and non-Arabs alike. They came from various places, spoke different languages and adhered to different cultures and civilisations. Linder believes that the Christian population in the region can be broadly divided into two main classes – a high-ranking, influential and propertied upper class, whose members conversed in Greek and followed Greek cultural practices, and the lower classes who spoke Syriac.⁷ Although they shared the same religion, namely Christianity, they were divided into a number of different sects and groups.⁸ The Greek Orthodox, or Melkites, were the largest and most influential of all the Christian congregations in Jerusalem, but there were other important groups as well.⁹ These included the Jacobites,¹⁰ Copts,¹¹ Abyssinians (also known as Aḥbāsh), Armenians,¹² and Maronites.¹³ This separation into many sects and groups caused instability in Aelia’s Christian community and, in the fifth century CE, the Monophysites and the Byzantine emperor entered into serious disagreements over whether Christ was purely a deity, which the Monophysites believed, or whether his divine and human natures coexisted.¹⁴ In the seventh century, Emperor Heraclius (610–641CE) attempted to resolve the schism that the Monophysites and Chalcedonians had created in 451CE and suggested the compromise of monoenergism. This combined the Chalcedonian belief that Christ had two natures with the Monophysite view that he had but one ‘will’. The definition of the term ‘will’ was deliberately left ambiguous. The patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria, and the Armenians accepted the idea of monoenergism, but the patriarch of Aelia and Pope Honorius I in Rome did not.¹⁵

Consequently, when the Monophysite Christians in Aelia resisted Emperor Heraclius’s attempts to impose his interpretation of Christianity on them, they suffered religious persecution.¹⁶ Emperor Heraclius also ordered the central government to adopt his beliefs, but his attempts at compromise merely increased the dissension. The Christians who opposed the emperor’s views were persecuted and tortured.¹⁷ Moreover, the Christian emperors were highly intolerant,¹⁸ perhaps partly because they wished to use Christianity politically as a unifying force to bind their subjects to the government. Thus, quite apart from the persecution of those who failed to accept the particular beliefs of the imperial regime, at the time of the Muslim conquest, the lives of Aelia’s Christians were beset with conflicts, disputes and disagreements.

Before the first Muslim conquest of Aelia, Arabs who had emigrated from the Arabian Peninsula and Yemen were living in al-Shām (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine) and were well established on both sides of the River Jordan. In fact, they formed the majority of the local population.¹⁹ Some Arab tribes had been living in Palestine since before 2000 BCE,²⁰ and, as Shahid points out, the Judhām, ‘Āmilah and Lakhm tribes comprised most of the Arab population in Palestine before and after the Muslim conquest.²¹ ‘Athāminah provides a detailed description of the geographical distribution of the Arab tribes in al-Shām.²²

Reactions to the Muslim conquest

Scholars differ among themselves on the views of Aelia’s Christians towards the Muslims and their conquest. Jāsir, for instance, who briefly discussed the issue in his book Tārīkh al-Quds, concluded that the defeated Christians showed the victorious Muslims no sign of welcome whatsoever.²³ He disagrees with historians who claim that the Christians welcomed the Muslim conquerors, and cites evidence of Christians fiercely resisting the Muslim army at the battle of Mu‘ta (8AH/629CE) prior to the conquest of al-Shām. However, Jāsir then goes on to say that the Christians of Aelia changed their attitude toward the Muslims after the battle of al-Yarmūk (15AH/636CE) once they recognised the full strength of Muslim power and that their defeat was inevitable.²⁴ Arguing along the same lines, al-Tel claims that, despite their religious disagreements, the Christians of al-Shām generally opposed and tried their best to resist the Muslim conquest. In fact, he adds that the Christian Arabs of al-Shām lent their support to the Byzantine armies in all the battles they fought against Muslims. Al-Tel refutes as gross exaggerations the claims by Hitti and al-Shammās that the Christians welcomed the Muslim conquest. He goes on to say that the accounts by Hitti and al-Shammās deal with Muslim policy towards the conquered people (Christians) after the conquest rather than the attitude of those people toward the conquest at the time of the military operations.²⁵ Finally, al-Tel agreed with Jāsir that Arab Christian attitudes changed after the Byzantines were defeated, especially at the battle of al-Yarmūk.²⁶ Moorhead, whom van Ginkel cites and who shares the view of al-Tel and Jāsir cited above, ruled out any Monophysite disloyalty and challenged the view that during the Muslim conquest the indigenous Christians supported, or at least failed to oppose, the Muslim armies. He went further, arguing that large numbers of Monophysites fought against the Muslims.²⁷

In fact, I disagree with Jāsir, al-Tel and Moorhead on the grounds that it is impossible to make blanket generalisations about how the Christians of Jerusalem viewed the Muslim conquest. As I mentioned earlier, different groups of people belonging to a range of different religious sects inhabited Jerusalem. To assume that all of them had the same attitude towards the Muslim conquest because they took part in certain military engagements against the Muslims is insufficient grounds for accepting the claims of Jāsir, al-Tel and Moorhead. I would argue that the war situation at that time may have given some of them, whether Arab Christians or others, as conscripts into the Byzantine army, no option but to engage in military operations.

Similarly, Constantelos argues that the Christians in Jerusalem adopted a negative attitude to the Muslim conquest.²⁸ He relied for his claim on reports by some Byzantine Greek literary sources that Patriarch Sophronious, in his sermon on the Day of the Epiphany in 636 CE, had lamented the destruction of the churches and monasteries, the sacked towns and villages, and the fields laid waste by the Muslim conquerors. Interestingly, Schick rejected this claim on the grounds that there is evidence that the destruction the Muslims caused is slight, and conspicuously contradicts the hostile accounts recorded in the above sources.²⁹ In fact, he went further by specifically stating that the Muslim conquest of the region was not characterised by extensive destruction.

Runciman, unlike Jāsir, al-Tel and Moorhead, maintains that the Christians in Aelia warmly welcomed the Muslim conquerors because the latter had spared them the persecution they had endured under the Byzantines.³⁰ He quotes the Jacobite patriarch of Antioch, Michael the Syrian, in the days of the Latin kingdoms, reflecting on the situation of his people at the time of the first Muslim conquest: ‘The God of vengeance, who alone is the Almighty … raised from the south the children of Ishmael [the Muslims] to deliver us from the hands of the Romans’.³¹ Runciman adds that even the Greek Orthodox community felt disinclined to complain about their fate because they were not subjected to the persecution they had feared and, despite having to pay the jizyah (a per capita tax imposed on non-Muslims), the taxes the Muslims imposed on them were much lower than those they had had to pay under the Byzantines.³² Interestingly, a well-known Muslim historian called al-Azdī narrates that one of the signs of welcome from the Christians was when the Muslim army reached the Jordan Valley and Abū ‘Ubaydah pitched camp at Faḥl, whereupon the Christian inhabitants of the area wrote to the Muslims, saying:

O Muslims, we prefer you to the Byzantines, though they are of our own faith, because you keep faith with us and are more merciful to us and refrain from doing us injustice and your rule over us is better than theirs, for they have robbed us of our goods and our homes.³³

A well-known Italian historian and Orientalist called Caetani took the view that the fear of Emperor Herculius’s religious compulsion, coupled with a strong aversion to Byzantium, made the promise of Muslim tolerance appear more attractive than an association with the Byzantine Empire and a Christian government. He went further to say that, once the initial terror caused by the arrival of an invading army had passed, a profound turnaround took place in favour of the Muslim conquerors.³⁴ Armstrong agrees, concluding that it was not surprising that the Nestorian and Monophysite Christians welcomed the Muslims and found Islam preferable to Byzantine rule.³⁵

Discussing the issue from a different angle, Sahas asserts that the theological stance of the patriarch who believed in the unity of Christ versus the Byzantine emperor who believed in the Chalcedonian principle of the dual nature of Christ (both God and man) can explain Aelia’s surrender to the Muslims.³⁶ I am inclined to believe that the religious dispute between the patriarch and Byzantine emperor, outlined above, was one reason for surrendering to the Muslims, for it allowed the patriarch to challenge Byzantine supremacy. The chronicler Theophanes expressed his disagreement by saying: ‘Sophronios died after adorning the church of Jerusalem by word and deed and struggling against the Monothelete heresy of Heracleios and his companions Sergius and Pyrros’.³⁷ Sahas, moreover, argues that Sophronious regarded the Muslims and Caliph ‘Umar as protectors of Aelia and its holy places from the domination of the Jews, who were the Christians’ enemies.³⁸ He claims that the conquest of Aelia provided the Christians with an opportunity to contain the Jews, with the help of the Muslims, through the concessions granted to them in ‘Umar’s Assurance of Safety.³⁹ However, El-Awaisi’s latest study of ‘Umar’s Assurance flatly rejects this claim.⁴⁰

Hitti takes a different approach, claiming that the Christians of al-Shām in general, and Aelia in particular, saw Islam as a new Christian sect and not a religion. The Christian–Islamic controversy was therefore based on rivalry rather than on a clash of fundamental principles.⁴¹ For this reason, when describing the extent of intra-Christian disagreement and the ensuing Christian optimism towards the Muslim armies, Butler quotes Ibn al-‘Ibrī:

When our people complained to Heraclius, he gave no answers. Therefore the God of vengeance delivered us out of the hands of the Romans by means of the Arabs. Then although our churches were not restored to us, since under Arab rule each Christian community retained its actual possessions, still it profited us not a little to be saved from the cruelty of the Romans and their bitter hatred against us.⁴²

Butler comments on how sad it was to read that the Christians welcomed Muslim rule and saw it as a heaven-sent deliverance from the rule of fellow Christians. He adds that this in itself demonstrates the futility of the emperor’s plan for Church unity and claims that it contributed to his downfall.⁴³

Runciman discusses how, after the first Muslim conquest, Christians, Zoroastrians and Jews all became dhimmis (protected people) under Muslim rule. They were allowed freedom of religion and worship in return for paying the jizyah. He adds that each denomination or sect was treated as a ‘semi-autonomous community’ in Jerusalem, with the religious leader of each being responsible for the group’s good behaviour under the caliphate.⁴⁴ Armstrong goes further, contending that the Muslims established a system that enabled Jews, Christians and Muslims to live together in the city for the first time.⁴⁵ She states that this was the result of the Muslim rulers’ inclusive vision of Jerusalem, a vision that acknowledged the presence and devotion of other religions, respected their rights and celebrated plurality and coexistence.⁴⁶ El-Awaisi, arguing along the same lines, claims that the Muslims did the Christians of Jerusalem a favour by freeing them from their Byzantine oppressors. Likewise, their presence also allowed the Jews to re-establish themselves in the area.⁴⁷

Another commentator, Karlsson, agrees that the Christians welcomed the Muslims, saying that they preferred living under the rule of their ‘cousins’, with whom they shared the same language and customs, than under the authority of Greeks, Romans or Persians.⁴⁸ Al-Ḥamārneh also contends that Christians, especially the Arab Christians, saw the Muslims as rescuing them from Byzantine oppression, which was why they helped them in the war.⁴⁹ He also claims that the Jacobite movement, which had actively opposed the injustices of Byzantine rule, suddenly became quiescent, a situation he attributes to the Muslim conquest, which he says brought peace and tranquillity to the Eastern Christians who for a long time had suffered persecution at the hands of the state and a high tax burden. Moreover, al-Ḥamārneh discussed the view of the Nabateans (who were Christian Arabs) of the Muslim conquest, arguing that they not only considered the Muslims their liberators but also allied themselves with them.⁵⁰ He added that because the Nabateans blamed the Romans and later the Byzantines for destroying their state and influence, they worked as spies for the Muslims against the Byzantines.

Hourani agrees that the Christians welcomed the Muslim conquerors, but for different reasons.⁵¹ He believed that most of the Christian population did not mind whether their rulers were Persians, Greeks or Muslims, provided they were secure, lived peacefully and were not too heavily taxed. He goes on to say that for some, the replacement of Greeks and Persians by Muslims even offered advantages. This was because those who opposed Byzantine rule for theological reasons might find it easier to live under the Muslims, who were mostly Arabs like themselves. Shams al-Dīn and Fletcher believe that the persecuted Monophysite Christians of al-Shām could well have seen the Muslims as saviors.⁵² Tibawi agrees, stating that the Christians who benefited from Islamic tolerance welcomed the Muslims as heaven-sent.⁵³ Jāsir included the Armenians among those who welcomed the Muslim conquest, on the grounds that it removed them from the ongoing conflict between the Byzantines and Persians.⁵⁴ In addition, the Muslim conquest stopped Byzantine Church interference in Armenian religious matters. Watson commented on the good treatment the Christians of Jerusalem received from the Muslims, saying that during the early years of Muslim rule, the Christian inhabitants in that region appear to have been on excellent terms with their Muslim rulers.⁵⁵ Linder confirms that they were treated well by pointing out that each community in Jerusalem maintained its unique theological and linguistic social character, adding that no one could exercise any oppression or coercion over another.⁵⁶ Consequently, he concluded, mutual tolerance between the different Jerusalem communities was the general order of the day.

Interestingly, in discussing the issue, al-Azdī introduced new material derived from information acquired from a Byzantine soldier by the name of Jurja, who had converted to Islam.⁵⁷ Jurja had told the Muslims that, taking into consideration their language and ethnicity, the attitudes of the people of that region towards their Muslim conquerors were split into two broad groups and, within the second group, three subgroups. The first group consisted of the Byzantines who felt obliged to fight the Muslims not only on the grounds that they were seen as the enemies of Christianity but also because they needed to protect their territories from Muslim occupation. Therefore, this group’s attitude toward the Muslim conquest was wholly negative. The second group, of which there were three subgroups, consisted of Christians of Arab origin. Although the first of the subgroups was not particularly committed to either Christianity or Islam, their attitude was positive. Those in the second subgroup, who were Christian by religion and Arab by origin, preferred the Byzantines and therefore helped fight the Muslims. Finally, the third subgroup, also Christian by religion and Arab by origin, felt more of an affinity with the Muslims who shared their ethnicity than with the Byzantines who shared their religion. They therefore adopted a neutral stance and, as Jurja reported, welcomed the Muslim conquest. Commenting on al-Azdī’s account, Abū al-Rrub added that the Arabs who followed the Monophysite doctrine adopted a neutral stance, whereas those who followed the Chalcedonian principle joined the Byzantines to fight the Muslims.⁵⁸

This classification and the different attitudes towards the Muslim conquest of that region clearly show why, for example, Muslims favoured the Jacobites over the Melkites who supported the Byzantine state.⁵⁹ Nevertheless, Kennedy refutes the allegation that the Muslim preference for the Jacobites resulted from the latter’s positive attitude toward the Muslim conquest.⁶⁰ He argues that first the monothelite (pertaining to those who believe that Jesus Christ had two natures but only one will) and then the iconoclast (pertaining to those who challenge established dogma or conventions) controversies of the early Islamic period severely weakened relations between the Byzantines and Melkites. He also held that the Melkites’ great wealth, the splendour of the buildings they had inherited from their imperial posts, and the urban nature of their Church did nothing to improve the poor relations between Muslims and Melkites. The Jacobites, by contrast, were poor rural people and so, Kennedy argues, the Muslims were happy to leave them alone in their villages.

I am inclined to believe that a considerable number of Christians in al-Shām in general, and in Jerusalem in particular, were welcoming of the Muslims, especially when they received favourable treatment from them. Al-Balādhūrī reported that the Christians preferred the Muslims because of their tolerant attitude and because they were prepared to help them stand up to the Byzantines.⁶¹ Furthermore, according to al-Balādhūrī, when the Muslim armies were unable to provide full protection to some cities in al-Shām and had to withdraw when it became apparent that the Byzantines were preparing to attack, they returned the jizyah they had collected from the dhimmis. I argue that historical, cultural and ethnic affiliations, in addition to the sociopolitical and religious conditions in which they were living under Byzantine rule, all played an important role in the Christians’ acceptance of their Muslim conquerors.

Furthermore, I argue that the Assurance of Safety that ‘Umar granted to the people of Aelia reassured the Christians of Jerusalem that the Muslims were going to base their treatment of them on respect and security, and that this laid the foundation for future policy. Any other behaviour would have violated the fundamental understanding that had been reached between the two faiths. The main points of the Assurance of Safety were personal and financial security, freedom of belief and worship, the right to be protected and defended by the Muslim state, and freedom of movement.⁶² Indeed, ‘Umar’s Assurance provided a useful textual guide to the conduct of relations between Islam and Christianity that was applicable not only to the era of Muslim expansion, but also to later centuries and, by inference, to our common future.

Along the same lines, El-Awaisi argues that ‘Umar’s Assurance significantly contrasts with the destruction, killing and displacement that had characterised the region’s history until then.⁶³ He describes the Assurance as the jewel of the first Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and a beacon for developing Jerusalem’s unique and creative vision.⁶⁴

‘Umar’s arrival in Jerusalem and the Christians’ response

It is historically proven that Sophronious, the patriarch of Aelia, insisted on the presence of Caliph ‘Umar when he surrendered the city. It is also clear that the patriarch had refused to negotiate with ‘Umar’s commanders during the Muslim siege of the city. As life in Aelia became more difficult, Sophronious informed his people that he would surrender the walled city to the Muslims if the caliph had the name ‘Umar and fitted a certain description.⁶⁵ His reason was that he had read this in Christian holy books. Caliph ‘Umar arrived in Aelia, with the simplicity and humility of appearance and manner characteristic of early Muslims, to receive the submission of the Holy City in person. He was advised that his demeanour would not impress locals who were used to seeing richly dressed and well-guarded kings and emperors.⁶⁶

Two well-known non-Muslim historians, Eutychius and Theophanes, recorded ‘Umar’s arrival in the walled city of Jerusalem and described how they saw Sophronious’s response to the Muslims and to the Muslim conquest. According to Eutychius, as soon as the gate of Aelia was opened, ‘Umar entered with his companions, and the Greek Orthodox patriarch escorted him around the city.⁶⁷ They then went and sat in the atrium of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. When the time for Muslim prayer came, ‘Umar told Patriarch Sophronious, ‘I wish to pray’. The patriarch replied, ‘Amir of the faithful, pray in the place where you are’. When ‘Umar replied, ‘I shall not pray here’, the patriarch led him to the church. But ‘Umar told him, ‘I shall not pray here either’, and he went out onto the stairway before the door of the Church of St Constantine, in the east. He prayed alone on the stairway. Then, having sat down, he told Patriarch Sophronious, ‘Do you know, O Patriarch, why I did not pray inside the church?’ ‘Prince of the faithful’, said the patriarch, ‘I do not know why’. ‘Umar replied, ‘If I had prayed inside the church, it would have been lost by you and would have slipped from your power; for after my death the Muslims would take it away from you, together saying, “‘Umar prayed here”’. ‘Umar then asked for a sheet of paper on which to write a decree that read: ‘the Muslims shall not pray on the stairs unless it be one person at a time. But they shall not meet there for the public prayer announced by the prayer call’. Having written this decree, he gave it to the patriarch.

Theophanes, on the other hand, saw the situation very differently. According to his account:

In this year Oumaros [‘Umar] invaded Palestine and, after invading the Holy City for two years, took it by capitulation; for Sophronios, the bishop of Jerusalem, received a promise of immunity for the whole of Palestine. Oumaros entered the Holy City dressed in filthy garments of camel hair and, showing a devilish pretence, sought the temple of the Jew – the one built by Solomon – that he might take it as a place of worship for his own blasphemous religion. Seeing this, Sophronios said, ‘Verily, this is the abomination of desolation standing in a holy place, as has been spoken through the prophet Daniel’.⁶⁸

From the above text, it is apparent that Eutychius believed that a good relationship existed between the two important figures, ‘Umar and Sophronious, and his writing reveals a welcoming attitude to the Muslim conquerors during the time of ‘Umar. Conversely, it is quite clear that Theophanes adopted a rather biased and hostile stance towards Caliph ‘Umar, the Muslims and Islam in general, which is reflected throughout his chronicle. Theophanes’s hostile tone somewhat contradicts the insistence on the part of the Christians that Caliph ‘Umar should come in person to conclude the capitulation of Aelia.

Conclusion

The delay of the conquest of Jerusalem until 16AH/637CE and the long duration of the siege led against the walled city clearly show that the Byzantine political authorities in Aelia were opposed to the conquest. Nevertheless, there were Christians living in Jerusalem at the time who did not support the Byzantines and who held a positive view of the Muslim conquest. The majority of these Christians were, of course, of Arab origin, and their shared ethnicity was ultimately more important than their religious affiliation with the Byzantines. In other words, Christian Arabs felt more social and cultural affinity with Arab culture than with Byzantine culture. More importantly, these Christians perceived the first Muslim conquest as a liberation from the domination of unsympathetic groups of their own coreligionists – the Byzantines. In this conquest, this attitude was primarily related to the bitter theological disagreement between Aelia’s Christians and the Byzantine emperor, and they looked to the Muslims to restore their religious privileges.

Notes

  1 El-Awaisi (2007: 42).

  2 Ibid., 63.

  3 Al-Tel (2003: 109–120).

  4 El-Awaisi (2007: 63).

  5 Abū ‘Iayān (1993: 134).

  6 Linder (1996: 122).

  7 Ibid., 142.

  8 Abū ‘Iayān (1993: 127–133).

  9 Linder (1996: 122).

10 The Melkites and Jacobites shared a common heritage. Both accepted the Nicene Creed as their profession of faith and, although the Jacobites rejected the Council of Chalcedon, their Christology was not heretical. They called themselves Syrian Orthodox because their worship was conducted exclusively in Syriac. The Byzantine Orthodox, or Melkites, worshipped in Greek (Hamilton 2003: 107).

11 The presence of Copts in Jerusalem can be traced back to the first century CE (Jāsir 1989: 65).

12 The Armenian presence in Jerusalem can be traced back to the Christian era (Rose 1993: 3).

13 Jāsir (1989: 57–73).

14 Hamilton (2003: 103).

15 Runciman (1987: 12–13).

16 Ibid., 12.

17 Ibid., 13.

18 Ibid., 6.

19 Donner (1981: 95).

20 ‘Athāminah (2000: 1).

21 Shahid (1984: 339).

22 ‘Athāminah (2000: 6–9).

23 Jāsir (1989: 117).

24 Ibid., 119.

25 Al-Tel (2003).

26 Ibid., 232–235.

27 Cited in van Ginkel (2006: 172).

28 Cited in Schick (1988: 220).

29 Ibid.

30 Runciman (1987: 20).

31 Ibid., 21.

32 Ibid.

33 al-Azdī (1970: 111).

34 Caetani (1910: 813–814).

35 Armstrong (1996: 232).

36 Sahas (1994: 65).

37 Theophanes (1997: 471–472). This extract contains alternative spellings of ‘Sophronious’ and ‘Herculius’.

38 Sahas (1994: 71).

39 Ibid., 54.

40 El-Awaisi (2007: 103).

41 Hitti (1957: 143).

42 Butler (1978: 158).

43 Ibid., 158–159.

44 Runciman (1987: 21).

45 Armstrong (1996: 246).

46 Armstrong (1997: 19).

47 El-Awaisi (2007: 105).

48 Karlsson (1996).

49 al-Ḥamārneh (1999: 77–78).

50 al-Ḥamārneh (1982: 4).

51 Hourani (2002: 23–24).

52 al-Dīn (2001: 5); Fletcher (2003: 16).

53 Tibawi (1969: 11).

54 Jāsir (1989: 71).

55 Watson (1912: 140).

56 Linder (1996: 152).

57 al-Azdī (1970: 169).

58 al-Rrub (2002: 144).

59 Kennedy (2006: 334).

60 Ibid.

61 al-Balādhūrī (1987: 187).

62 Hamami (2000).

63 El-Awaisi (2007: 55).

64 Ibid.

65 al-Wāqidī (n.d.: 322).

66 Ibid., 333.

67 Eutychius (Sa‘īd Ibn Baṭrīq) (1905: 17–18).

68 Theophanes (1997: 471). See Matthew 24:15. This extract contains an alternative spelling of ‘Sophronious’.

5 Albert Hourani, Arab Christian minorities and the spiritual dimension of Britain’s problem in Palestine, 1938–1947

Todd Thompson

I believe that ultimately politics must be explained in moral terms, that the relationship between the members of a community, and between different communities is fundamentally a moral relationship, that nations rise and maintain themselves by their virtues and that in the judgment of history nations are judged for their shortcomings and sins.

Albert Hourani, 20 November 1951¹

Introduction

In 1991, a surprising book entered the New York Times bestseller list. From 7 April to 16 June Albert Hourani’s (1915–1993) A History of the Arab Peoples enjoyed a solid run as one of the top twenty non-fiction books in the United States.² For a lengthy tome packed with dense prose that one friend and colleague deemed ‘almost unreadable’, this was something of a surprise.³ The book debuted at number twelve and peaked at number three, failing to overtake an insider’s account of the Hollywood film industry and a poet’s meditation on masculinity and manhood.⁴

In retrospect, the book’s surprise success, which served as a capstone to Hourani’s career, likely had much to do with the auspicious timing of its release in the wake of the First Gulf War. But whatever the reasons for its bestseller status, the book secured Hourani’s public reputation as one of the premier contemporary interpreters of the Arab world. Early reviews were glowing. Perhaps the most well known Arab-American intellectual at the time, Edward Said, spoke of Hourani’s opus as one of the first truly post-Orientalist works of Arab history. In a word, the book was ‘redemptive’.⁵ ‘Here at last’, Said enthused, ‘is a genuinely readable, genuinely responsive history of the Arabs’.⁶ These words of praise were particularly significant coming as they did from one whose own scholarship had positioned ‘Orientalist’ discourse in the ‘liberal’ academy’s equivalent of the ‘Axis of Evil’.

Yet, in light of Hourani’s acknowledged intellectual debts to Orientalist scholars and his early involvement in British imperial politics, Said’s enthusiastic commendation raises intriguing questions not only about Hourani’s own intellectual development, but also his position vis-à-vis the traditions of Orientalist and postcolonial thought. During the 1930s and 1940s, Hourani served both as an analyst of Arab nationalism for the British Foreign Office and as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause for the Arab League-sponsored Arab Offices. Surprisingly, Said makes no mention of Hourani’s early political or intellectual activities in his classic work Orientalism even though he devotes considerable attention to one of Hourani’s scholarly mentors, H. A. R. Gibb.⁷ Even those who have focused on Hourani have preferred to focus on the writing of the mature historian rather than the work of the youthful activist.⁸

As a result of this imbalanced approach, not only has an important chapter in the history of British Orientalism remained obscure, but so also have the specific political and religious dimensions of Hourani’s thought on nationalism. While a few scholars have explored certain aspects of Hourani’s political advocacy for the Arab nationalist cause, they have shown little interest in the fundamental spiritual concerns underlying his work.⁹ Yet, if the early period of Hourani’s intellectual productivity came to be treated as a part of the intellectual history of an evolving British Orientalist tradition, then how might the relationship between Orientalism, Arab nationalism and British imperialism need to be reconsidered? Furthermore, how might scholars have to rethink the disjuncture commonly posited between Orientalist and postcolonial thought?¹⁰

This essay will argue that Hourani’s views on Arab nationalism in general and Palestine in particular should be understood as the product of a combination of British and Arab influences peculiar to the early twentieth century. The most important of these were Hourani’s immigrant upbringing in a Liberal nonconformist environment in Manchester and his exposure to the nationalist ideas of leading Arab Christian intellectuals in Lebanon. In Hourani’s ideas about Islam and Arab politics one can detect the prominent influence of British liberal imperialism and one particular strain of Arab Christian nationalism. These separate strands of thought converged in Hourani’s insistence that the British Empire help encourage the development of a liberal form of Arab nationalist identity open to European ideas and inclusive of Christians and other minorities in the Middle East. For Hourani, British imperial policy was not simply about the pursuit of national interests or the maintenance of power. It was primarily about the encouragement of proper moral and spiritual relationships. Moreover, Hourani believed no political problem in the Arab world had done more damage to such relationships than the problem of Palestine. Thus, Hourani urged Britain to support Palestinian self-determination because he believed it would promote the wider cause of moral and spiritual reconciliation between Arab Muslims on the one hand and Europeans, European culture and Arab Christians on the other. Given Hourani’s subsequent influence amongst expatriate Arab intellectuals in the United States and Britain, he could be seen as a missing link between the interwar liberal Protestant Orientalism of H. A. R. Gibb and the post-1960’s secular-humanist anti-Orientalism of Edward Said.¹¹

The essay will begin by considering Hourani’s early life and university education at Oxford. It will go on to assess the importance of his time serving as a teacher in Beirut and an analyst for the Foreign Research and Press Service in Oxford. Each of these experiences was crucial in forming the assumptions behind Hourani’s advocacy for Palestinian self-determination, consideration of which will constitute the final section of the essay.

Early years and Oxford

Hourani was the English scion of first-generation Lebanese immigrants to Manchester in the early twentieth century. Through the ministry of an American Presbyterian missionary by the name of William W. Eddy, Albert’s grandfather became the first Orthodox Christian convert to Protestantism in the village of Marj’ayoun in the southern part of Lebanon.¹² This was a decision that would come to shape not only the early spiritual and intellectual formation of Albert’s father Fadlo, but also of Albert himself.

Although Fadlo was orphaned at an early age, the Presbyterian missionaries took responsibility for his education and sent him to study at the newly established Syrian Protestant College, which had opened in Beirut in 1866.¹³ Many of the teachers as well as the founder and first president of the College, Daniel Bliss, made a major impact on Fadlo. Although he showed no interest in the finer points of Calvinist theology, his education gave him an abiding love for the classics of both Arab literature and Protestant devotion.¹⁴

In 1891, Fadlo immigrated to the great industrial city of Manchester, then a bastion of Victorian liberalism and nonconformity. At the time, the culture of the city represented perhaps the closest old English equivalent to the New English society that had sent forth the American missionaries to Syria.¹⁵ Although Fadlo would make twenty-four return visits to his Middle Eastern home before he died, he quickly warmed to Manchester and soon set up his own cotton exporting business downtown on Major Street.¹⁶ Fadlo also joined St Adrian’s Presbyterian Church in Didsbury where he served as an elder for many years. During Albert’s childhood, the Hourani children became accustomed to a weekend routine that involved a combination of what Albert’s younger brother Cecil called ‘“Levantine Saturdays”’ of Middle Eastern feasts and merriment and ‘ “Scottish Sabbaths” ’ of hymns, sermons, Sunday roasts and quiet reflection.¹⁷

Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras dissenters from the established Church of England such as the Presbyterians formed part of the core of the popular support of the Liberal Party.¹⁸ Since Fadlo found his spiritual home amongst the former it was quite natural in Manchester that he also found his political abode among the latter. Away from work, Fadlo could often be found lunching or playing cards in the Venetian Gothic surroundings of the Reform Club. Known affectionately as the ‘Lighthouse of Liberty’, the establishment was an all men’s social club for Liberal politicians and Liberal Party supporters.¹⁹ The prominent statues of the famous Liberal politicians Richard Cobden, John Bright and William Gladstone located throughout the city were also a source of delight to Fadlo. This intense pride in Manchester’s liberal nonconformist heritage passed from father to son during the course of Albert’s upbringing.²⁰

While Fadlo had begun to put down roots in England, he remained well connected to his ancestral home in Lebanon. During Albert’s childhood, Fadlo’s cotton export business in Manchester brought frequent Lebanese Arab visitors to the Hourani household from various parts of the world.²¹ In addition, Fadlo’s political activities provided further connections to the Middle East. During the First World War, he served as secretary to the Manchester Syrian Relief Committee, a predominantly Arab Christian expatriate organisation that voiced support for ‘Syrian’ self-determination in opposition to Ottoman imperial rule. The Committee’s expansive vision of Syria encompassed modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine-Israel. As Committee secretary, Fadlo discussed Arab aspirations with Sir Mark Sykes, visited Prime Minister Lloyd George at Number 10 Downing Street to congratulate him on the British occupation of Jerusalem and consulted Amir Faisal about aid to newly liberated territories in the region. He also met the famous ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.²² In the household of Albert’s youth, largely uncritical pride in English political institutions went hand in hand with support for the Arab nationalist cause.

Yet, Fadlo and the family’s hybrid identity was not simply a matter of politics and commerce. It penetrated into the very fabric of their life together. Fadlo ensured that each of the children received both an English and an Arab name (Albert’s Arab name was Habib).²³ This gave the Hourani children the option of donning an English identity when they circulated amongst the English majority who lived largely separate lives from the Arab immigrants of Manchester. The distinct communities were so isolated that Albert later became fond of likening the neighbourhood of his youth to a ‘“millet”’ of the Ottoman Empire. However, in his own experience, it was the English who played the part of the Muslim rulers and the Arab immigrants who played the part of the separate, but tolerated, religious minorities.²⁴ While business transactions between the English majority and the Arab minority occurred, Arab respect towards the English was mingled with fear of prejudice.²⁵ These experiences left Albert with the impression that his father was ‘torn’ by the question of his children’s identity, feeling some ambivalence about their prospective assimilation despite his obvious attachment to England.²⁶

The millet-like structure of Manchester limited the educational options of the Hourani children. While Fadlo had hoped to send his boys to a well-respected private English school in Manchester for their early education, the school refused to accept ‘non-English’ boys. In response, the enterprising Fadlo founded Didsbury Preparatory School, which catered to a mix of Middle Eastern immigrant families.²⁷ At the age of thirteen, Fadlo sent Albert to Mill Hill School, a boarding school in London founded in the nineteenth century to cater to nonconformists.²⁸ In comparison to other public schools at the time, Mill Hill witnessed little bullying, rejected the idealisation of sports and encouraged serious interest in literature and the arts.²⁹ Albert and his brothers George and Cecil found the environment congenial and Albert won a scholarship in history to Magdalen College, Oxford, as his studies reached their conclusion.³⁰

Despite his family’s background, when Albert matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1933 he was the least interested of his brothers in the Middle East. His real passion was the study of English literature and history. The evolution of England’s political institutions held a particular fascination for him that would persist throughout his life. Instead of pursuing history, however, Albert opted for the BA course in philosophy, politics and economics and chose to focus primarily on philosophy in his final year. At the time, however, history still remained central to each of the three subjects. Economics at Oxford was the history of economic thought from Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall. Politics was the history of modern British politics and the evolution of Europe’s international relations. Philosophy, Albert’s ‘dominant interest’, was the history of philosophical thought from Descartes to ‘modern’ British empiricism.³¹

This course of study left its imprint on Albert in several ways. Magdalen College philosopher T. D. Weldon served as Albert’s initial guide into the world of philosophy. Although Weldon later became associated with the agenda of the new ‘analytical’ philosophers, idealism remained an important aspect of Albert’s Oxford experience.³² Albert’s confessed admiration for the idealist philosopher R. G. Collingwood, who first introduced him to German historical thought, is indicative of his intellectual inclinations during this period.³³ Collingwood was an outspoken defender of a rationalist form of Christianity and an admirer of the virtues of medieval thought.³⁴ In Speculum Mentis, he had praised the unity of the ‘medieval mind’ and criticised the fragmented character of the post-Renaissance ‘mind’.³⁵ As a solution, he proposed a ‘new interpretation of Christianity’ akin to a ‘revived medievalism’.³⁶ This analysis of the problems facing what Collingwood considered the universal, ‘absolute mind’ became important for both Gibb and Hourani’s characterisations of the particular dilemmas facing contemporary Islamic and Arab thought.³⁷ Influenced by the idealist supposition of the existence of ‘mind’, Hourani would later go on to portray the ‘Arab mind’ as a divided entity that required Britain’s aid in understanding the ‘West’ before it could become whole again. These idealist leanings would also place Albert in the same general philosophical orbit of the nationalist Arab Christian intellectuals Charles Malik and Constantine Zurayq, whom he would soon encounter in Lebanon.³⁸

At Oxford, Albert socialised in largely British circles. He counted amongst his friends Julian Asquith, the grandson of the former Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, and Anne Palairet, daughter of the British diplomat Sir Charles Michael Palairet. During the Second World War the friends reconnected and met regularly in Jerusalem.³⁹ Both Asquith and Palairet were practising Roman Catholics and may have had some influence on Albert’s decision to eventually abandon the Protestantism of his youth for Rome. However, Albert himself traced the origins of his conversion to the experience of reading Augustine with Charles Malik in Beirut in the late 1930s.⁴⁰ In any case, by the early 1940s another of Albert’s close Oxonian friends, the Egyptian Charles Issawi, sensed something was afoot and placed a fifty-dollar bet with Albert’s brother George that Albert would eventually convert to Roman Catholicism. Issawi duly collected his winnings in the early 1950s.⁴¹

Despite the communal isolation of Albert’s youth, Issawi was his first ‘Middle Eastern friend’ in England. Issawi was also the first friend with whom Albert discussed Arab politics.⁴² The two met during Albert’s second year at Oxford and quickly became close companions. They were both members of the University’s Labour Club and, as Issawi explained, Albert inclined more to the relatively new political party’s left than to its right.⁴³ The ideological underpinnings of the Labour Party owed a debt to the rise of the ‘new liberalism’ in England with its emphasis on the positive role of the state in ameliorating social injustices rather than just protecting individual liberties.⁴⁴ Like Albert’s later defection from Protestantism, his abandonment of his father’s Liberal Party represented more an affirmation of what he thought best in the British liberal tradition than a wholesale rejection of that tradition’s past. Although Albert did not formally affiliate with the Liberal Party in the 1930s, he still considered himself a political ‘liberal’ in the broader sense of the term.⁴⁵

During this period of Albert’s life, T. E. Lawrence, or ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ became a hero to him and to his generation. For students at Oxford, Albert acknowledged, Lawrence was ‘a great figure in our imaginations and in our lives’.⁴⁶ Like many of his contemporaries, Albert treasured his 1935 edition of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He also ‘accepted, almost without question’ Lawrence’s account of his life and role in the ‘Arab Revolt’ since the ‘myth’ of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ had yet to be challenged in any substantial way.⁴⁷ As with later generations who would recall their experiences of the deaths of figures like John F. Kennedy or Kurt Cobain in vivid detail, the death of Lawrence in 1935 made a deep imprint on Hourani’s mind that would not soon fade.⁴⁸ In light of Hourani’s attachment to England and his growing interest in the Arab world at the time, one can easily see the appeal for him of a quintessentially ‘English’ hero with a public reputation built upon exploits in ‘Arabia’.

In 1936, Albert concluded his undergraduate career at Oxford by earning the highest first of his year. That same year he had begun to take an active and sustained interest in Arab politics for the first time. The catalyst was Palestine. Spurred on by the Higher Arab Committee, Palestinian Arabs had engaged in a general strike and in civil disobedience to protest Jewish immigration. These actions received a great deal of coverage in the British press and they won Albert’s interest and sympathy.⁴⁹

When opportunity came for Albert to continue his studies at Oxford, he registered as a candidate for the DPhil. In light of the recent events and his interest in Lawrence, he determined to study British policy towards the Arabs during the First World War, which had become a matter of great controversy and debate. Although he never seriously began work on the dissertation, he did receive £100 from Magdalen College, which he used to travel to the Middle East for the first time. This trip led him to employment at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and placed him at the centre of the intellectual ‘renaissance’ in Lebanon shaping nascent Arab nationalist thought and reshaping Arab Christianity.⁵⁰

Malik, Zurayq and the Arab predicament

Albert’s two-and-a-half-year stint in Beirut in the late 1930s was an intellectually formative experience for him. While he taught history, literature and international relations at AUB, he became involved in a reading group led by the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik. Malik was a Greek Orthodox Christian who had studied philosophy under Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard and Martin Heidegger in Germany. At the conclusion of the Second World War, Malik would gain renown as the key figure in the creation of the United Nation’s landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Later on, he would play a more controversial role in the Lebanese Civil War.⁵¹

In the reading group, over the course of two years, Malik led everyone through the foundations of classical Greek thought in Plato’s Republic and classical Christian thought in St Augustine’s Confessions.⁵² He believed that one could trace a continuous intellectual tradition from Greece and Rome to Europe and that there was something eternally valuable in European thought. In his view, European culture contained a significant deposit of truth. ‘In the authentic, positive European tradition of thought and being’, Malik claimed, ‘we will find the truth as nowhere else in the world’.⁵³ Albert enjoyed the stimulus provided by Malik’s company and soon came to regard him as ‘the greatest intellectual figure in the Arab world’.⁵⁴ Albert would later confess, ‘my mind was formed in a way more by Charles than by anybody else’.⁵⁵ From these sessions with Malik, Albert developed a belief in the fundamental place of culture in the struggles and conflicts of the contemporary world. Albert soon came to follow Malik in tracing the roots of the contemporary Arab political predicament to a general cultural malaise.

In Malik’s view, this cultural predicament involved a case of forgotten identity. Although Arabs and Westerners commonly spoke of the differences between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, he thought the terms of such conversations represented a basic misunderstanding.⁵⁶ In short, Malik did not think the Arab world belonged to the ‘East’. ‘Intellectually’, he explained, Arabs belonged ‘to the West’.⁵⁷ Unfortunately, in his view, they had forgotten their true identity. This amnesia was the root of Arab problems. As therapy, Malik recommended the study of the key philosophers of the ‘Western’ tradition including the great medieval Muslim philosophers who had laid the foundations for the establishment of a distinct Greco-Arab tradition of thought. Such study, he suggested, would help Arab intellectuals rediscover the true roots of their culture thereby helping them to solve the more practical problems they faced.⁵⁸

In Malik’s account, science, technology, medicine and politics were simply external expressions of the inner core of a culture or civilisation. He referred to this inner core as a culture’s soul or spirit and equated it with the ideas of philosophers. He believed that the key task of the age for Arabs was to understand ‘the inner spirit of the West’, which entailed intensive study of ‘Western’ philosophy.⁵⁹ If Arabs could achieve this vital inner understanding, they would finally be in a position to solve the external problems that occupied so much of their attention.⁶⁰ Malik’s characterisation of the Arab problem and his recommendation of a solution formed the basis of Albert’s later assessment of the issues at stake for Britain in the Arab world.

Malik found Aristotle to be the vital link between the philosophical traditions of the various Abrahamic religions. ‘In Aristotle’, Malik insisted, ‘Christian, Moslem and Jew, Western and Eastern, ancient and modern, conservative and radical … may agree’.⁶¹ Aristotle had played a fundamental role in the thought of Thomas Aquinas whom Malik considered ‘the philosopher of Catholicism’ (emphasis in original).⁶² As an intellectual tradition, Malik lauded Roman Catholicism as a ‘a very important living force in the world today’.⁶³ Malik was also fascinated by the deep affinities between Aquinas and medieval Muslim philosophers and considered neo-Thomism ‘one of the few contemporary movements of thought … destined to survive the present wide-spread confusion of thought’.⁶⁴ Given Malik’s positive views of the mainstream of medieval and contemporary Roman Catholic thought, it is no surprise that soon after Albert’s time at AUB he began drawing from the political philosophy of the French neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, and recommended the establishment of an Arab form of neo-Thomism as the solution to the problems of Arab intellectual life.⁶⁵

In addition to Malik’s reading groups, Albert attended Constantine Zurayq’s lectures in medieval Islamic history.⁶⁶ At the time, Zurayq, a Greek Orthodox Christian from Damascus, was in the midst of preparing for publication his influential philosophical meditation on the ‘national consciousness’ of the Arabs.⁶⁷ In the book, Zurayq expounded on the purpose of the Arab ‘national mission’.⁶⁸ In short, this ‘mission’ involved the synthesis of the best of ‘Western civilisation’ and the best elements of other ‘civilisations’ with the goal of creating a new unified ‘civilisation’ that would shape the future.⁶⁹ This notion that Arabs had a special mission or task to perform in history complemented the ideas of Malik and surfaced frequently in Hourani’s wartime writings.⁷⁰

Albert also found his encounter with the students of AUB to be transformational. While Malik and Zurayq had helped him refine his philosophical understanding of both the dilemma and purpose of the Arab nation, the students helped him refine his understanding of Britain’s political role in the creation of the Arab dilemma. Many students at AUB came from Palestine and among them were two individuals who would become some of the leading Palestinian intellectuals of their generation: Burhan Dajani, the economist, and Isma’il Khalidi, the historian and diplomat. Through Dajani and Khalidi, as well as many other students of lesser distinction, Albert came to see Britain’s power through the eyes of those it oppressed. The fresh perspectives offered by the students challenged the uncritical picture of a British foreign policy in conformity with the tenets of ‘liberalism’ that he had imbibed from his father.⁷¹

Such impressions of British policy received textual support with the publication of The Arab Awakening by George Antonius in 1938. This was the book that Albert afterward confessed had ‘left an impression’ on him that was ‘never quite … erased’.⁷² Antonius came from a Greek Orthodox Christian family like Zurayq and Malik and, like Albert, his family had its roots in southern Lebanon.⁷³ In his book, Antonius not only provided the most authoritative narrative of the origins and maturation of Arab nationalism up to that point, but he also furnished English translations of Arab copies of the entirety of the hitherto secret Hussein–McMahon correspondence. The documents seemed to furnish irrefutable evidence of Britain’s duplicity during the First World War including its broken promises to the Arabs and its denial of the democratic aspirations of the Arab nationalists.⁷⁴ In particular, the book encouraged Albert to see connections between Britain’s foreign policy and the decline of liberal democratic and pro-Western forms of nationalism amongst Arabs. Antonius convinced Albert that if Arabs were to truly understand ‘the West’ as Malik and Zurayq deemed they must, Britain would need to reconfigure its policies toward Arab nationalists.⁷⁵ If bad foreign policy had turned Arabs away from Europe’s positive intellectual influence, perhaps good foreign policy could win their allegiance once again.

The Second World War and the Foreign and Arab Offices

In 1939, when the Second World War began, Albert was in England on holiday. Because there was a dearth of Middle Eastern specialists available at the time, he was soon recruited to serve in the Royal Institute of International Affairs’ Foreign Research and Press Service, which later became the research department of the Foreign Office. In this capacity he worked under the direction of H. A. R. Gibb, the Oxford Orientalist, and Arnold Toynbee, who was then pondering the completion of his massive multi-volume work on ‘civilisations’ in world history.⁷⁶

In one of his earliest reports for the Institute, Albert focused on the precarious place of minorities in the Arab nationalist movement. He was concerned about the potential of nationalism to curtail the civil and political rights of minorities such as Arab Christians. In his view, the fate of minorities depended on the fate of nationalism and he identified the relationship between nationalism and religion as the key issue. Albert explained that the place of minorities in the nationalist movement would continue to be problematic until there was a ‘change in the conception, which at present prevails in the Arab world, of nationalism as the basis of the State, and of Islam as one of the bases of nationalism’.⁷⁷ The key, he believed, was the development of a liberal, ‘lay’ concept of nationalism, which entailed the ‘gradual secularisation’ of certain aspects of Arab life. In Albert’s view this did not require the end of belief ‘in religion or in a particular religion’, but it did mean renunciation of the idea that membership in a ‘particular visible religious institution’ determined ‘all aspects’ of one’s being.⁷⁸ The place of minorities in the Arab nationalist movement would remain a vital concern for Albert throughout the war.

In 1942, Albert travelled to the Middle East to establish contact with the younger Arab nationalists and to write a report on the movement. The resulting report, entitled ‘Great Britain and Arab Nationalism’, received wide circulation in official British circles in London and the Middle East in 1943 and secured Albert’s reputation as an up-and-coming analyst of Arab nationalism. In the report, Albert worked from the premise that Arab society was in an ‘unhealthy’ and ‘diseased’ state due to the impact of ‘western civilisation’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁷⁹ The report’s insistence on the fundamental importance of the ‘contact of civilisations’ in international relations and the negative effect this was thought to have had on the Arab world was something Albert had borrowed from the work of Toynbee and Gibb.⁸⁰ This analytical framework for making sense of international affairs complemented rather than superseded the viewpoints Albert had already absorbed from Malik and Zurayq.

In response to the impact of ‘the West’, Albert noted the emergence of two divergent strands of nationalism. The first he characterised as Western-oriented and constructive, and the second he defined as critical of the West and destructive.⁸¹ This binary division of nationalisms in such a manner was also a common feature of the thought of Gibb.⁸² After the fashion of Malik in particular, Albert explained that a healthy, constructive nationalism in communion with ‘the West’ would not develop unless Arabs truly understood the ‘spirit of the West’.⁸³ Such understanding was the first task for what Albert called, in good idealist fashion, ‘the Arab mind’.⁸⁴ Here was the basic issue at the root of all other problems in the Arab world.

Albert was convinced, however, that ‘the solution of the political problem’ between Britain and the Arab world was ‘a necessary condition for the accomplishment of the long-term task’ of cultural encounter and reconciliation.⁸⁵ Following Antonius, Albert believed that Arabs had turned away from the model of liberal, democratic nationalism provided by Britain because of their disillusionment with Britain in the wake of the First World War. In his view, the ‘moral relationship’ between Britain and the Arab world had become warped and distorted. The root cause of this perversion was self-interested imperialism, which had distorted the natural order of human relations and threatened to prevent the establishment of a healthy ‘moral relationship’ between Arabs and the European intellectual tradition and a wholesome ‘spiritual relationship’ between Muslims and Christians.⁸⁶

The appropriate ‘moral relationship’ could be restored, however, by the establishment of equality and respect in both personal and political relations between Britons and Arabs. Although Albert granted that Britain possessed vital material and military interests in the Arab world, he argued that these interests could not be satisfied unless Britain fulfilled certain obligations. In practical political terms, Albert believed that the establishment of equality and respect primarily required two things: Britain’s prevention of France’s return to Syria as a military or political power, and Britain’s prevention of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The latter problem would soon become Albert’s primary focus. It was an urgent matter, and he believed that Britain had a few years to solve it at best. There would be no second chances.⁸⁷

In 1945, with the approval of Albert’s British superiors, Musa Alami secured his employment as the chief researcher for the newly established Arab Office. Alami was a Palestinian Muslim and one of the leading figures in both Palestinian and Arab nationalist circles. He had secured financial support from the nascent Arab League for the establishment of an organisation that would represent the views and interests of Palestinian Arabs on the international stage and was pleased to secure Albert’s release from his obligations to the British Government. Alami hoped the Arab Office would quickly gain credibility as the most authoritative voice of Palestinian nationalism and thereby decrease the influence of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, whose friendship with Hitler and Germany Alami considered foolhardy and harmful.⁸⁸

Over the course of the next few years, as an employee of the Arab Office, Albert served as the chief spokesman for the Arab cause in Palestine before both the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry and the United Nations. In writing and in testimony, Albert argued consistently that the democratic rights of Palestinians, Arab and Jew, could be secured only through ‘the establishment of an independent, unitary government, responsible for the affairs of the country’.⁸⁹ Anything short of an independent and democratic Arab state, he insisted, would not satisfy Palestinian Arab aspirations. At stake was nothing less than the future relationship between Arabs and ‘the West’ as well as the fate of Arab minorities. Albert predicted that if the Palestinian problem was not appropriately resolved peacefully in the late 1940s, it would not only threaten to disrupt the peace of the world, but it would also hinder the development of healthy spiritual relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews.⁹⁰

In April 1946, the publication of the Anglo-American Committee’s report on Jewish immigration to Palestine imbued Albert with a sense of desperation and despair. He spared no criticism. ‘It is technically a bad piece of drafting’, he complained, ‘there is no logical cogency and no connection between the conclusions and the facts which are stated’.⁹¹ He also judged the text to be completely bereft of any ‘depth of understanding’.⁹² While he believed ‘other reports had left a residue of eternal truth’, he predicted that the Anglo-American report would not ‘be spoken of many years hence’.⁹³ For an individual with a comparatively gentle and generous manner, this was a particularly damning assessment.⁹⁴ Albert concluded his critique with a very personal refection on the state of Anglo-Arab relations and his own sense of responsibility in what he considered to be an unfolding tragedy.

The issue of the White Paper in 1939 gave all of us hope and for the following six or seven years most of us went around telling our Arab friends that there was a good chance of the White Paper being carried out and that it was worth waiting for. Now the Report has come, and here I speak for myself alone, everything I have done and said during the last ten years is, I feel, completely wrong. I feel in a sense that I have cheated my Arab friends. My first reaction was one of deepest gloom and despair and feeling that the best thing to do was to confess I had failed and that there was no point in going on. Now I realise that there is one last hope for Britain and that is that if the statement of policy, when it comes, returns to the White Paper, then I think there is a possibility of a really sound Anglo-Arab friendship. If the statement of policy does not return to the White Paper then I think that any sort of Anglo-Arab friendship is impossible in our generation … this present political crisis for all of us is also a personal crisis.⁹⁵

With his work over the last few years seemingly unravelling all around him, the only glimmer of hope that Albert could envision was a resolute recommitment on the part of Britain to the policy outlined in the 1939 White Paper, which had set a limit on Jewish immigration and proposed the creation of a unified Palestine composed of both Arabs and Jews.

As time passed and the Anglo-Arab crisis seemed to worsen in the 1950s, Hourani’s analysis continued to sharpen. The ‘dream has vanished’, he lamented, ‘and now we see things as they really are’.⁹⁶ While the dominant trend in most British analysis of the crisis had been to point to the internal defects of the Arab peoples themselves, Hourani suggested that ‘the West’ might need to shoulder a good deal of the blame itself.⁹⁷ In the end, he believed the crisis could be traced to the effects of ‘imperialism’, specifically the unsustainable ‘moral relationship’ between ‘power and powerlessness’ it required and encouraged.⁹⁸

Although Hourani acknowledged the existence of irreconcilable theological differences between Christians and Muslims, he traced the source of hostility in Christian-Muslim relations not to doctrinal disputes, but to the human ‘experience of power’ throughout history.⁹⁹ Power, he added, ‘almost inevitably’ made the possessor of it arrogant and the one who lacked it timid and faint-hearted.¹⁰⁰ Yet, this did not mean theology played no role in Hourani’s assessment of politics in the Arab world. He was convinced that the theology of Christian Zionism had played a crucial part in promoting European and American misuse of power in the region. Several decades after his own disappointing experience working for a resolution to the dispute over Palestine, Hourani asked:

[H]as there not been a failure to understand that all political problems in the Middle East are interwoven with religion … the true attitude to those problems can only rest upon a basis of true doctrine … and a false attitude to them may have disastrous effects upon the whole relationship between the great religions. For example, the support given to Zionism by England and America seems to me to have been due to a false attitude current in Protestant England and America toward the Jewish problem. This has vitally affected the relationship of Islam both with Judaism and with Christianity.¹⁰¹

In Hourani’s view, mistaken use of power had its roots in theological error.

Apart from the question of Arab relations with external powers, Hourani believed the fundamental internal problem to be faced in the Middle East was the relationship between religion and nationalism. During the 1930s and 1940s, he had held out hope that a reformed British foreign policy could play a pivotal role in providing the grounds for a rapprochement between Christianity and Islam and encouraging the development of a moderate version of Arab nationalism. In the 1950s, he called for British evacuation from the Arab world on lines similar to the recent British withdrawal from India.¹⁰² All the while he insisted that Christians paid Muslims ‘the respect’ they merited simply as human beings and resisted approaches to religion that reduced Islam to no more than ‘a fact of sociology or politics’.¹⁰³ Still, Hourani continued to believe in the value of the ‘directly and openly evangelical approach’ and considered the proclamation of the Christian gospel amongst Muslims an inescapable duty.¹⁰⁴ Thus, Hourani’s engagement with British policy in the Middle East in general, and the Palestinian problem in particular, represented an identifiably Christian alternative to Christian Zionism during the crucial years that witnessed the creation and consolidation of the State of Israel. It also reflected the social and political contexts of his time in Britain and the Middle East.

Conclusion

Today Albert Hourani is most often remembered as one of the founders of ‘modern’ Middle Eastern history. He is not often remembered for his youthful support of Palestinian self-determination or Arab nationalism, and he is even less often remembered for his public commitment to Christianity and his deeply theological mind. He himself confessed to being unable to go toe to toe in philosophical and theological debate with the famous Christian apologist C. S. Lewis in the halls and common rooms of Magdalen College after the Second World War.¹⁰⁵ Yet, Hourani once admitted that ‘in the end’, theological discussion was ‘the only interesting discussion’ to him.¹⁰⁶ This intense interest in theology shines through in Hourani’s subtle analysis of the moral and spiritual implications of the relationship between religion, power and conflict in the Arab world in the wake of his political involvement in the region.

The main influences on Hourani’s early approach to Islam and Arab politics were the liberal political proclivities of his family and the nationalist ideas of a coterie of Arab Christian intellectuals including Charles Malik, Constantine Zurayq and George Antonius. These blended seamlessly in his thought with ideas borrowed from figures like the Orientalist H. A. R. Gibb and the world historian Arnold Toynbee. As Hourani became further removed from his wartime work and more absorbed in his academic career, his ideas evolved in several interesting ways that are important to note in this context. While he remained fascinated with the decline of ‘liberal’ thought in the Arab world, he ultimately came to reject the concept of ‘civilisation’ as a useful analytical term in history and international relations because he thought it lacked cogency and meaning.¹⁰⁷ Moreover, even as he avowed that Malik had been the greatest intellectual influence on his life, he became disappointed with the way Malik ‘got lost in politics’ during the latter years of his life in Lebanon.¹⁰⁸ The problem of Palestine also remained a thorn in Hourani’s side, although his last real editorial comment on the contemporary political dimensions as opposed to the historical background came in 1967 and concluded with an ominous warning to all who would ignore the plight of the Palestinian refugees.¹⁰⁹

Yet, throughout all these years of personal evolution, Hourani openly acknowledged, and remained proud of, his intellectual association with Gibb.¹¹⁰ This continued even as the deceased Orientalist was on the receiving end of some caustic criticism with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978.¹¹¹ As a result, Hourani provides an interesting link between the last generation of ‘traditional’, philologically oriented Orientalists like Gibb, and the first generation of students of the Middle East who came to intellectual maturity in the wake of the student protests of the late 1960s, like Said. Although Said was a serious student of Hourani’s work, he never seriously grappled with Hourani’s place in the history of Orientalism. Rather than revise his views about Orientalism, Said simply treated Hourani as an exception to the rule or ignored him altogether. Yet, the challenge Hourani poses to the now conventional account of British Orientalism and its links to imperialism cannot so easily be thrust aside. Scholars today must come to terms with the fact that one of the most incisive critics of Britain’s Middle Eastern policies and one of the most determined defenders of Palestinian and Arab self-determination during the 1940s and 1950s was a paid employee in service to the British Empire who shared common intellectual assumptions with Orientalists like Gibb. The case of Hourani suggests that British Orientalism had a more complex relationship with British imperialism and Arab nationalism than Said’s account admits.

Moreover, there are points to be made not just about Said’s interpretation of Orientalism, but also the way that criticism of imperialism evolved from Hourani to Said. Hourani’s pioneering emphasis on the way that ‘power’ distorted interpersonal, religious and political relationships proved controversial in 1950s Britain and, in many ways, it could be said to have anticipated Said’s own influential analysis of the way ‘power’ affected the production of knowledge. Power was central to both accounts, but whereas political power and its moral and spiritual implications took centre stage in Hourani’s criticism of imperialism, the power of discourse and its political implications took pride of place in Said’s own critique. When considered as a whole, all of this serves as a cautionary reminder that the ‘traditional’ Orientalism of the 1930s and 1940s might not be as disconnected from the ‘radical’ anti-Orientalism of the 1970s as Said would have his readers believe.

Hourani’s youthful writing and political activities also serve to illustrate the broad spectrum of Christian opinion on Zionism. The history of Christian support for Zionism fascinated Hourani throughout his career and in recent years it has received increasing attention.¹¹² From paragons of evangelical ecumenism, such as Lord Shaftesbury in nineteenth-century Britain to the premillennial dispensationalist authors of the bestselling Left Behind series in twentieth-century America, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Christian Zionists have exercised a major influence on Christian and non-Christian views of the Middle East.¹¹³ Yet, although scholars have provided increasingly detailed and nuanced pictures of the Christian Zionist movement, there has been very little consideration of the obverse phenomenon: Christian support for Arab nationalism.¹¹⁴ Even so, any contemporary assessment of the role of Christians in Middle Eastern conflict would be wise to attend to the evolution of this lesser-known impulse within Christian history as represented by figures like Hourani. The concerns of Christians like Hourani remind scholars that the historical actors caught up in the Arab–Israeli conflict have assessed its costs not just in terms of culture, economics and politics, but also in terms of the life of the spirit.

Notes

    1 Hourani (1951). Hourani remained committed to this basic principle to the end of his life calling the phenomenon the ‘moral structure of politics’ in 1951 and theorising it as the ‘moral economy’ of societies in 1993. See Hourani (1993: 52) and (1994: 39).

    2 New York Times bestseller list 1991. Louis (2001).

    3 Louis (2001).

    4 New York Times bestseller list 1991. Phillips (1991) and Bly (1990).

    5 Said (1991).

    6 Ibid.

    7 Although Said’s Orientalism has justly exercised extraordinary influence for over thirty years, critics and admirers alike have acknowledged its flaws as intellectual history. For Said’s views of Gibb see Said (1994: 263, 282, 284). For Said’s acknowledgement of his reliance upon Hourani’s own assessments of Orientalist thought, see Said (1994: 274, 360, 372). For Hourani’s views of Gibb, see Hourani (1980: 104–134) and (1991: 71–73).

    8 For instance, Owen (1997: 7–19) and al-Sudairi (1999).

    9 Hourani’s biographer Abdulaziz al-Sudairi denied that Hourani’s Christian faith had any significant impact on his outlook or work (al-Sudairi 1999: 27). In reply, one of Hourani’s former students, Derek Hopwood, called this observation ‘one of the most unperceptive things’ he had ever read in a biography (Hopwood 2003: 129).

  10 10 Following the work of Edward Said, the term ‘Orientalism’ has become a very complicated word with many different connotations. Because it is an important term in the context of this essay, a few words might be necessary to clarify the particular meaning intended herein. My own use of the word ‘Orientalism’ is both broader than the old pre-Saidian idea of a style of art or an academic subject rooted in philology dealing with the ‘Orient’ and more open than the Saidian notion of a ‘political doctrine’, ‘an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and the Occident’, or a ‘Western style’ of domination or authority ‘over the Orient’ (Said 1994: 2, 3, 204). In the introduction to his book, Said admitted that the conclusions of his work depended not on an ‘exhaustive’ study of a ‘clearly delimited set of texts’, but upon a ‘set of historical generalisations’ (ibid.: 4). According to these generalisations, Orientalism could be understood best against the backdrop of European and American imperialism where it would be seen as a tool of power, domination and hegemony (ibid.: 5, 14). For a long time these generalisations proved explosive, unsettling and stimulating in the best sense imaginable, but now what is required is the exploration of a broader set of works than Said sampled with more sensitivity to the complexities and ambiguities of historical context than he displayed. This is in fact happening, though no one has revisited the intellectual history of British Orientalism in particular, which played such a central role in Said’s own account. In my own definition, Orientalism is sometimes tied to political ideology, sometimes claims a fundamental distinction between the ‘East’ and ‘West’ and is sometimes involved in the practice of domination or the construction of ‘Western’ authority over the ‘East’. However, my fundamental point is that these characteristics do not define Orientalism at all times and in all places. In my definition, Orientalism includes the work of European and American artists, academics, journalists, civil servants, politicians, military personnel and missionaries who claim some expertise on subjects such as the Arab people, Islam and sundry other topics typically associated with the ‘East’ from the eighteenth century onwards. However, I also reserve the right to use the word ‘Orientalism’ in the negative and more polemical Saidian sense when referring to any view of the ‘East’ in more recent times that repeats some of the worst stereotypes associated with the field of Orientalism as I define it. Through this distinction, one can say that while Orientalism as interdisciplinary moniker for a loose field of expertise no longer exists, Orientalism as a set of stereotypes sometimes associated with this old field of expertise still does.

  11 I use this particular set of descriptors of Said to be faithful to his own self-definition in Culture and Imperialism (1993: 224). My characterisation of Gibb as a liberal Protestant is shaped by my reading of his papers deposited in the Bodleian Library and Hourani’s own interpretation of Gibb found in Europe and the Middle East (1980: 104–134).

  12 Cecil Hourani (1984: 59). New York Times (1900). William W. Eddy was the father of the Presbyterian missionary William King Eddy and grandfather of the influential American soldier, spy and diplomat William A. Eddy (1896–1962). For the life of the latter see Lippman (2008).

  13 Cecil Hourani (1984: 3).

  14 Ibid., 2–3.

  15 For thought-provoking discussion of the connections between seventeenth-century English Puritanism and nineteenth-century English Radicalism see Biagini (1992: 31–50). For the interesting connections between American Evangelicalism and British popular Radicalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century see Coffey (1996: 93–119).

  16 Cecil Hourani (1984: 10).

  17 Ibid., 3, 6.

  18 For the connections between dissent, liberalism and Radicalism in nineteenth-century Britain see Bebbington (1982); Biagini (1992); and Larsen (1999).

  19 Cecil Hourani (1984: 11). For the history of the Manchester Reform Club in the age of Fadlo Hourani see Mills, ed. (1922).

  20 Cecil Hourani (1984: 11–12). Hourani (1993: 32).

  21 Cecil Hourani (1984: 3).

  22 Halliday (1992: 161, 172–175) and Hourani (1995: 9).

  23 Cecil Hourani (1984: 9).

  24 Interview with Albert Hourani from 1975 quoted in Halliday (1992: 169).

  25 Hourani (1994: 20).

  26 Ibid., 21.

  27 Cecil Hourani (1984: 9).

  28 Cecil Hourani (1984: 13); Hourani (1994: 23).

  29 Cecil Hourani (1984: 14).

  30 Hourani (1994: 22). Cecil Hourani (1984: 13–14).

  31 Hourani (1994: 22) and (1993: 28).

  32 Hourani (1993: 28). For Weldon’s later ‘analytical’ phase see Deininger (1960: 19–30).

  33 Hourani (1993: 28); Issawi (1991: 4).

  34 Cowling (2003: 182–183); Murphy (2008: 2, 23–25, 36–37); Patrick (1985: 79–80).

  35 Collingwood (1924: 27, 30).

  36 Ibid., 38.

  37 Gibb (1947: 131); Hourani (1980: 121–122).

  38 Hourani viewed the legacy of common intellectual assumptions between Britain and nationalists one of the tangible effects of British imperialism (1961b: 158).

  39 Khalidi (2005: 61).

  40 Albert Hourani to Charles Malik, 28 November, no date [early 1950s], Folder 3, Box 21, Charles Habib Malik Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  41 Al-Sudairi (1999: 27).

  42 Hourani (1994: 22).

  43 Issawi (1991: 4).

  44 For neglected evidence of the continuity between the two traditions see the introduction and essays in Green and Tanner, eds (2007).

  45 Hourani (1993: 32).

  46 Hourani (1995: 9, 22).

  47 Ibid., 11. The myths surrounding Lawrence did not begin to be questioned seriously from until the mid-1950s following the debunking work of Richard Aldington. The reception of Lawrence at various stages of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be followed in Kedourie (1980) and Wyatt-Brown (2009: 515–548).

  48 Hourani (1995: 12).

  49 Hourani (1993: 30); Issawi (1991: 5).

  50 Hourani (1993: 31) and (1994: 23–24).

  51 Hourani (1993: 31–32) and (1994: 23–24). For Malik see Malik (2001) and Cragg (1991: 112, 206–207, 219–220, 222–223).

  52 Hourani (1993: 31).

  53 Malik (1939: 33).

  54 ‘Great Britain and Arab Nationalism’, Albert H. Hourani, March 1943, FO 141/866/149/44/43, National Archives (NA), Kew Gardens, England.

  55 Hourani (1994: 24).

  56 Malik (1939: 28–34).

  57 Ibid., 33.

  58 Ibid., 29–33.

  59 Ibid., 30.

  60 Ibid., 34.

  61 Ibid., 36.

  62 Ibid., 38.

  63 Ibid.

  64 Ibid.

  65 ‘Great Britain and Arab Nationalism’, Albert H. Hourani, June 1943, E 2549/506/65, FO 371/34958, National Archives, Kew Gardens, England.

  66 Hourani (1993: 31–32).

  67 Zurayq (1940).

  68 Ibid., 40, 54–55.

  69 Ibid., 54–55.

  70 ‘Great Britain and Arab Nationalism’, Albert H. Hourani, June 1943, E 2549/506/65, FO 371/34958, National Archives, Kew Gardens, England.

  71 Hourani (1993: 32).

  72 Ibid., 33.

  73 For Antonius see Boyle (2001).

  74 Antonius (1955: 391, 397, 410).

  75 For example see Hourani (1945: 20) and (1954: 389–390).

  76 Hourani (1993: 33–34) and (1994: 24).

  77 ‘Minorities in the Arab World’, Albert H. Hourani, Foreign Research and Press Service, 4 April, 1941, FO 921/117, National Archives (NA), Kew Gardens, England.

  78 Ibid.

  79 ‘Great Britain and Arab Nationalism’, Albert H. Hourani, March 1943, FO 141/866/149/44/43, National Archives (NA), Kew Gardens, England.

  80 ‘Great Britain and Arab Nationalism’, Albert H. Hourani, March 1943, FO 141/866/149/44/43, National Archives (NA), Kew Gardens, England. For Toynbee’s pioneering work on this paradigm see Toynbee (1922) and for Gibb’s utilisation of this paradigm, which went to press shortly before the outbreak of the war, but was only published several years afterwards, see Gibb and Bowen (1950).

  81 ‘Great Britain and Arab Nationalism’, Albert H. Hourani, March 1943, FO 141/866/149/44/43, National Archives (NA), Kew Gardens, England. This is similar to dichotomy proposed by Hans Kohn.

  82 For example see Gibb (1942: 93–94).

  83 ‘Great Britain and Arab Nationalism’, Albert H. Hourani, March 1943, FO 141/866/149/44/43, National Archives (NA), Kew Gardens, England.

  84 Ibid.

  85 Ibid.

  86 Ibid.

  87 Ibid.

  88 Musa Alami to I. N. Clayton, 25 July 1945, 120, FO 371/45239, National Archives, Kew Gardens, England; C. W. Baxter to V. C. C. Saunders, 14 September 1945, 122, FO 371/45239, National Archives, Kew Gardens, England; D. J. Wardley to C. W. Baxter, 14 August 1945, 123, FO 371/45239, National Archives, Kew Gardens, England; E. W. Baxter to Secretary, Minister of Labour and National Service, 21 December 1945, 115, FO 371/45241, National Archives, Kew Gardens, England. For more on Musa Alami see Cecil Hourani (1984: 50–54, 56–57, 60, 64–66); Furlonge (1969); and Hourani (1988: 23–41).

  89 Hourani (1970: 85). Cf. Hourani (1945: 38) and (2005: 81). For explanation of the authorship of the section quoted from The Future of Palestine and background about its preparation see Khalidi (2005: 60–79).

  90 Hourani (2005: 89).

  91 Hourani (1946).

  92 Ibid.

  93 Ibid.

  94 Spagnolo (1992: 2).

  95 Hourani (1946).

  96 Hourani (1953b: 22).

  97 Ibid., 23.

  98 Ibid., 31.

  99 Hourani (1952: 501).

100 Hourani (1953a: 183).

101 Hourani (1951).

102 Hourani (1953b: 42).

103 Hourani (1953a: 180, 182).

104 Ibid., 180.

105 Hourani (1993: 36).

106 Hourani (1961c: 150).

107 Hourani (1961a: 1–34).

108 Hourani (1994: 24).

109 Hourani (1984: 273–80). This is a reprint of Hourani’s article in the Observer from 3 September 1967.

110 For example, see Hourani (1981: xiii–xiv) where Hourani claims that his Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1962) was but a footnote to Gibb’s Modern Trends in Islam (1947).

111 Said (1994: 263, 282–284, 291).

112 For Hourani’s continued interest see Hourani (1992: vii–xiv).

113 See generally Lewis (2009); Spector (2008); and Weber (2005).

114 One interesting exception is Merkeley (2007).

6 The beginnings of a new coexistence

A case study of the veneration of the Prophet Elijah (Mar Ilyas) among Christians, Muslims and Jews in Haifa after 1948

Akiko Sugase

Introduction: folk beliefs as a symbol of coexistence in the Eastern Mediterranean area

Palestine is the birthplace of both Judaism and Christianity, and also the holy land of Islam. Since the conquest of Jerusalem by Umar ibn al-Khattab in 638 CE, Palestine has been a part of the Islamic world. Monotheists in Palestine lived in peaceful coexistence until 1948 when Zionism finally bore fruit with the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel. Due to the breakdown of coexistence, Jews and Arabs – Christians, Muslims and Druze – now live separately, not only in the Occupied Territories, but also in Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often cited as a typical example of religious conflict as many believe that Jews, Christians and Muslims have opposed and killed each other since ancient times.

However, this assumption is not strictly true. As mentioned above, all the monotheists living in Palestine coexisted until the establishment of Israel. This coexistence is not unexpected as they shared the same spiritual roots, the same theories, the same festivals and the same saints. We can observe one of many examples of their coexistence in the veneration of saints. One of the most prominent examples is the veneration of the Prophet Elijah (Mar Ilyas in Arabic), who is revered not only as a great prophet appearing in the Book of Kings, in the Old Testament, but also as a saint who brings rainfall – that is, fertility – and cures all diseases, especially insanity and infertility. He is identified as a Muslim saint ‘Sayydna al-Khader’, and at the Festival of Mar Ilyas celebrated by Christians at Haifa, Muslims and Druze share in the festivities; even local Jews used to join in until 1948.

Unfortunately, some of the festivals venerating saints in Palestine were seriously affected at the time of al-Nakba, during the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent destruction of Arab towns and villages; the Mar Ilyas festival in Haifa also suffered. However, we can find some signs of a new coexistence appearing among Arabs and Jews in changes in the veneration of Mar Ilyas. In this essay, I will use the case study of the veneration of Mar Ilyas as a way of refuting the stereotype of Palestine and Israel as the lands of ethno-religious conflict. All of the monotheists in Palestine and Israel have coexisted for ages in their veneration of a saint who goes by the name of Mar Ilyas or Sayydna al-Khader. Although, without doubt, the situation changed drastically after 1948, it is also true that among the different communities the seeds of a new coexistence have started to take root.

The veneration of Mar Ilyas in the Eastern Mediterranean area

Images of Mar Ilyas: biblical imagery in the context of folk belief

There is no doubt that among all the monotheists in the Eastern Mediterranean area, Mar Ilyas, the Prophet Elijah, is one of the most popular saints. In fact, his popular image is varied, but can be classified in two patterns: the general image according to the Old Testament episodes, and the sacred figure as an object of folk belief.

General image of Mar Ilyas from the Old Testament

Generally, Mar Ilyas is known as a prophet appearing in the Book of Kings, in the Old Testament, and this explains why all monotheists venerate him. The ritual battle for rain with the Canaanite priests on Mount Carmel is his best-known episode, and Ἱd Mar Ilyas, the Festival of the Prophet Elijah celebrated in Haifa, commemorates his success; I will introduce this later in the text.

Mar Ilyas as ‘al-Khader’, and common points with Mar Juries (St George)

In the context of Eastern Mediterranean folklore, Mar Ilyas is identified with the Islamic saint Sayydna al-Khader,¹ meaning ‘the Green One’ in Arabic, and appears in the chapter of ‘The Cave’ in the Holy Qur’an. This mysterious figure is believed to be immortal, as he drank from the Spring of Life, and a traveller of the world over. Though invisible, he stands by everyone who prays in his name.

The reason why these two saints are connected in folklore is not clear, but it is easy to assume that their shared immortality would join them to each other. Mar Ilyas is usually called ‘Mar Ilyas al-Hayy’ of ‘Nabi Ilyas al-Hayy’; ‘Hayy’ means ‘living’ in Arabic, as he was raised up to Heaven alive. There is another saint who is identified as al-Khader, in Arabic. He is also known as Mar Juries (Mar Jirjis, Mar Girgis),² or in English as St George. He is rather popular as a saint identified with al-Khader. The identification of these two saints with al-Khader differs from place to place and depending on an individual’s social background.³

The veneration of al-Khader in the Eastern Mediterranean area

Before focusing on the Haifa case study, I will introduce a few key points concerning the veneration of al-Khader in the Eastern Mediterranean area.⁴ The centre where a saint is venerated is called a maqam in Arabic (plural maqamat). The literal translation of maqam is ‘standing place’, but the real meaning is ‘the place where the saint appeared’. There are more than thirty Maqamat al-Khader all over the Eastern Mediterranean Arab countries, but most of them are found in Palestine and Israel (see Map 6.1 and Table 6.1).

Maqamat al-Khader in the Eastern Mediterranean are classified into two categories: one type of maqam is an Islamic facility (such as a mosque); the other kind is a Christian church. The most famous example of the Islamic maqam is Maqam al-Khader in the Haram al-Sharif in Old Jerusalem; but this is not a site of saint veneration. On the other hand, there are many more examples of churches that are maqamat; representative examples are found in the town of al-Khader, named for the saint (the Convent of Mar Juries, the birthplace of the saint’s mother), Lydda (the Church of Mar Juries, the site of the saint’s martyrdom), Taiybeh (the Church of Mar Juries and the Cave of Mar Ilyas) and Haifa (the Convent of Stella Maris and the Cave of Mar Ilyas). In the context of folklore, the Christian sites are far more important, and Maqamat al-Khader are churches dedicated to Mar Juries or Mar Ilyas, so they accept Muslim pilgrims, while Mar Ilyas even accepts Jews.

Map 6.1 Maqamat al-Khader in Palestine and Israel.

Al-Khader is always related to water. For example, he is venerated as the guardian of sailors and fishermen in the Gulf area.⁵ However, al-Khader of the Eastern Mediterranean, in the guise of Mar Ilyas or Mar Juries, is related to rain and spring water, rather than the sea. He is believed to bring rainfall and cure all diseases, especially mental afflictions and infertility; so, he is thought of as the saint of fertility. Moreover, his relationship with Palestine is usually strongly emphasised; in the Eastern Mediterranean, it is believed that the mother of Mar Juries was born in a village near Bethlehem and the saint himself was also raised there. The village is therefore called al-Khader and this is one of the most famous centres of the veneration of al-Khader. Though Mar Ilyas is not from Palestine – he is believed to have been born in Tishbeh, on the east bank of the River Jordan – he was based in the Galilee area during his time as a prophet.

Al-Khader in the Eastern Mediterranean could be the ancestor of Ba’al, the Canaanite god of fertility. Mar Ilyas inherited the role of Ba’al by surpassing the priests of Ba’al. The famous story of Mar Juries killing the dragon is representative of the Ba’al myth, in which the god killed his dragon sister who, in turn, represented the flood. Interestingly, many Maqamat al-Khader sites were built on the ruins of Canaanite shrines.

Examples in Haifa

When considering examples of sites of veneration of Mar Ilyas, Haifa is a pre-eminent place. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Haifa has replaced the older city of ‘Akka (Acre) as the most prominent city in the region of Galilee. It is also a place where local Arabs and Jewish immigrants have coexisted for centuries. Even though following al-Nakba the city’s Arab population decreased drastically, later waves of Arab immigrants from inland Galilean villages came to Haifa in order to work. Now, around 20 per cent of the city’s population is made up of Arabs who have arrived since 1948. The Melkite Greek Catholic Church is also prominent, as the archbishop of Galilee has been resident of the Haifa since 1904.

There are three holy places of Mar Ilyas in Haifa.

The Convent of Stella Maris on top of Mount Carmel

Stella Maris is a Roman Catholic convent founded in the twelfth century, and is the birthplace of the Carmelite order. Inside Stella Maris, there is a small cave under the main chapel. It is believed that Mar Ilyas hid himself here when he provoked King Ahab’s wrath after his ritual battle with Ba’al’s priests. Inside the cave, beside the cast metal statue of Mar Ilyas, many candles lit by the local Arab Christians are always burning;⁶ they are accustomed to visiting the cave to pray for their families’ safety, and the chapel is a popular place for them to make religious vows (see Figure 6.1).

Table 6.1 Principal Maqamat al-Khader in the Eastern Mediterranean

No.
Location
Dedicated to
Type and religion
Details

  1
Al-Khader
Mar Juries
Church (Eastern Orthodox)
Suburbs of Bethlehem. Famous as the birthplace of Mar Juries’s mother and its miracle. ‘The Chain of Mar Juries’ exists here and is believed to bring good luck. Venerated by both local Muslims and Christians. (All the residents of al-Khader are Muslims.)

  2
Mar Ilyas
Mar Ilyas
Church (Eastern Orthodox)
Near the border of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Venerated by local Christians.

  3
Jerusalem
Mar Ilyas
A part of Haram al-Sharif
Typical ‘Maqam al-Khader’ of Islam. Not currently an active locale for saint veneration.

  4
Taiybeh
Mar Juries and Mar Ilyas
Church (Eastern Orthodox)
Byzantine church remains. Highly venerated by locals, both Muslims and Christians. Acts of animal sacrifice, calling for rain, are often practised. Near the church there is a cave where, it is believed, Mar Ilyas hid himself.

  5
Jifha
Mar Juries
Church (Eastern Orthodox)
There was a holy tree and ‘the chain of Mar Juries’, but both of them were lost. Only venerated by local Christians.

  6
Nablus
Mar Juries?
Mosque
Not currently an active site of veneration.

  7
Lydda
Mar Juries
Church (Eastern Orthodox)
The place of the martyrdom of Mar Juries. His grave is downstairs. On the day of‘ ‘Ἱd al-Lydd’, thousands of Christians and Muslims rush to his grave to make their vows.

  8
Haifa
Mar Ilyas
Church (Roman Catholic) and synagogue (formerly mosque)

1. The small chapel of Mar Ilyas inside Stella Maris. ‘Ἱd Mar Ilyas’ is celebrated each year on 20 July and is popular among all the Arabs in Galilee.

2. The Cave of Mar Ilyas is now a synagogue; it was the Mosque of al-Khader before 1948. Venerated by Muslims, Druze and Mizrahim Jews.

3. Al-Muhraqah. While the legend of Mar Ilyas remains, this place is not the saint veneration site.

  9
Abu Sinan
Mar Juries?
Druze shrine
Located on the steep slopes of the rocky mountains outside of the village.

10
Kufr Yasif
Mar Juries
Druze shrine
Icon of Mar Juries is dedicated on the maqam.

11
Banyas
Mar Juries?
Druze shrine
The place was famous for the veneration of Pan in the Hellenic era.

12
Karak
Mar Juries?
Islamic shrine
This maqam is placed near Karak Castle. When I visited there in 2001, it was closed and the neighbours said it was the Islamic holy place. But Augustinovic mentioned the presence of another Maqam al-Khader owned by the Eastern Orthodox Church.

13
Mahis
Mar Juries
Islamic shrine, formerly church (Eastern Orthodox)
Highly venerated by Muslims and Christians; many icons of Mar Juries are dedicated here.

14
Salt
Mar Juries
Church (Eastern Orthodox)
Venerated by local Christians; famous for its miracle.

15
Sarafand
Mar Ilyas and Mar Jirjis?
Mosque (renovated by Shi’i villagers recently)
Until the renovation in 1999, it had been highly venerated by local Muslims (both Sunni and Shi’i) and Christians (mainly Melkite Greek Catholic from neighbouring villages). As usual, the Maqam al-Khader was shared by Muslims and Christians, and an icon of Mar Juries hung prominently on the wall. But the painting of ‘Ali and the prayer to the twelve Imams replaced the icon during the renovation, and the visits of Sunni Muslims and Christians are decreasing. In 2012,1 found the icon hanging on the opposite shady wall.

16
Jounieh
Mar Jirjis
Small chapel (Maronite Catholic)
Improved as a park-like chapel with a pond about 100 years ago. Venerated by both Muslims and Christians; they collect water from the pond to get a blessing.

17
Izra’a
Mar Jirjis
Church (Eastern Orthodox)
Known as ‘al-Khader’ among the locals. There’s a ‘grave of Mar Juries’ inside the iconostasis. Highly venerated by Muslims and Christians.

18
Damascus
Mar Jirjis
Small chapel (Syrian Orthodox)
Very famous for its miracles in the middle of the twentieth century. Highly venerated by local Syrian Orthodox Christians.

19
Sayydnaya
Mar Jirjis
Church and convent (Eastern Orthodox)
Venerated by both Muslims and Christians. ‘Ἱd Mar Jirjis’ is celebrated each year on 6 May.

20
Aleppo
?
Islamic shrine
Typical ‘Maqam al-Khader’ of Islam.

Figure 6.1 Women light candles to dedicate to Mar Ilyas. Stella Maris, Haifa, 2001.

The busiest day of the year is ‘Id Mar Ilyas’ (Festival of the Prophet Elijah), celebrated on 20 July. This midsummer festival is believed to be the first day on which the clouds start gathering on top of the northern mountains. On the day of the festival, pilgrims rush to the semi-subterranean chapel inside the convent to receive the prophet’s barakeh, or blessing. Some of them rub the statue of Mar Ilyas with their handkerchiefs to bring the barakeh home (see Figure 6.2).
The festival, held by the Roman Catholic Church, is attended by not only by Roman, Greek Melkite and Maronite Catholic Christians, but also by Greek Orthodox Christians who gather from all over Palestine and Israel. Of course, Muslims and sometimes Druze join the crowds. Before 1948, the local Mizrahim Jews also joined the festival; nowadays the Jews pay no heed to the festival.

The Cave of Mar Ilyas at the foot of Mount Carmel

There is another holy place at the foot of Mount Carmel, once owned by a local Muslim family, and called ‘Magara Mar Ilyas’ in Arabic; it is the Cave of the Prophet Elijah or ‘Masjid Sayydna al-Khader’ (see Figure 6.3).

The cave was the Mosque of al-Khader before 1948. Local Muslims and Druze living in neighbourhood villages used to pray here and make their vows. The Christians prefer Stella Maris, but they also show their respect for this holy place.

After 1948, the Cave of Mar Ilyas was converted into a synagogue and began to be called ‘Me’arat Eliyahu ha-Nebi’ in Hebrew (see Figure 6.4). The Arab citizens in Haifa now also simply call it ‘Me’arah’ (the Cave). The site has become a Jewish holy place, especially for the Mizrahim who emigrated, mainly from Morocco, in the 1950s. Muslims and Druze still visit the site. I will address the change after 1948 later in the text.

Figure 6.2 A man rubs the statue of Mar Ilyas to receive barakeh (blessing). Stella Maris, Haifa, 2001.

Figure 6.3 Scarves, string and even plastic bags hang from the ceiling of the Cave of Mar Ilyas. Mt Carmel, Haifa, 2009.

Figure 6.4 Mearat Eliyahu Ha-Nevi, the Cave of Mar Ilyas today. Mt Carmel, Haifa, 2010.

Al-Muhraqah, ‘the burned place’ at the foot of Mount Carmel

Unlike the former two sites located near the residential districts, al-Muhraqah is about twenty-seven kilometres from the centre of Haifa. People believe this is the place that Mar Ilyas sacrificed the burnt offerings to make the rain fall. Today, it is more popular as a place for weekend hiking and camping rather than as a holy site. The real centres of the veneration of Mar Ilyas in Haifa are Stella Maris and the Cave of Mar Ilyas.

Crisis for folk beliefs and the beginnings of a new coexistence

Crisis for folk beliefs in Palestine

Ἱd Mar Ilyas of Haifa, celebrated in Stella Maris, was really a symbol of coexistence between Arabs and Jews. But al-Nakba changed the situation drastically. Stella Maris was reserved as a Roman Catholic convent, but the Jews stopped participating in Ἱd Mar Ilyas after 1948. The festival has shrunk in size, and in 2001 the Ministry of the Interior did not allow the fife and drum band of the local Greek Catholic Boy Scouts to march from Wadi Nisnas, the main Arab residential area of Haifa, to Mount Carmel.⁷

The other Maqamat al-Khader in Palestine also face serious crises. The Maqamat al-Khader that existed outside of the Old City of Jerusalem were destroyed around 1948, as they were located on the Green Line.⁸ With the destruction of hundreds of Arab villages in Palestine during al-Nakba, the saint veneration and customs practised there also vanished or faded away. Nabi Rubin is a typical example: before its destruction in 1948, this town near Tel Aviv had been the centre of the veneration of the Prophet Ruben (Nabi Rubin). Now all traces of such commemoration are gone, and the maqam is left abandoned.

The crisis still continues today, and times have become even more difficult after the failure of the peace process. The maqam of the village of al-Khader, the birthplace of Mar Juries’s mother – which belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church – the land of which was taken over by the Israeli government to build the ‘Apartheid Wall’ (see Figure 6.5).

The number of participants in Ἱd al-Lydd and Ἱd Mar Ilyas is declining, as pilgrims from the West Bank cannot pass through the checkpoints. Political instability and conflict weaken saint veneration. As it is weakened, natural opportunities for coexistence are taken away from the people. The crisis of folklore in Palestine is a crisis for coexistence.

Figure 6.5 Former land of the Convent of Mar Juries. The land is now divided by the ‘Apartheid Wall’ built by Israel. Al-Khader, 2014.

The beginnings of a new coexistence

However, signs of a new coexistence between Jews and Arabs can be seen at ‘Me’arat Eliyahu ha-Nebi’, the former Mosque of al-Khader, converted into a synagogue in 1948. In photographic evidence from the inside this holy site, we can see many strings and scarves hanging from the ceiling. Pilgrims and local people had tied them there when making their vows, but this is not an original Jewish practice; this is the preferred practice of Arabs. Both Muslims and Christians, when making their vows to a saint, tie scarves or string on walls or sacred trees (see Figure 6.6).⁹ Muslims usually prefer green scarves, and Christians white ones (see Figure 6.7).¹⁰

I have visited this place every year from 2007 to 2010, and the number of scarves seems to be increasing. It means that even after 1948, pilgrimages by Arabs have continued, and, moreover, that Jews have been influenced by the Arabs and have begun to borrow their way of making vows!

In September 2010, I interviewed two Mizrahim Jewish women in Haifa. One of the women gave us evidence that some Kazakh and Moroccan Jews are accustomed to visiting the Cave to make their vows, though she herself does not. According to her, in Morocco there are also some holy places dedicated to Mar Ilyas (‘Eliyahu Ha-Nebi’ in Hebrew) that are cherished by the Jews and this is the reason why the Moroccan immigrants easily accept the Arab way of saint veneration in Haifa.

Figure 6.6 A holy tree of Sayydna Al-Khader. Mahis, Jordan, 2009.

The rabbi and the Jewish neighbours of the Cave also confirmed that many Arabs come there to pray; the Jewish neighbours feel it is very natural. A male neighbour said:

This place was once a mosque. I know about it. So, why don’t you open this place to Muslims? Some Christians also respect this place, and so do Druze. We should welcome them and pray together. This is a holy place for everybody.

Unlike the Zionist troops that destroyed Maqam al-Khader of Jerusalem and the Maqam Nabi Rubin, or the Israeli government that took over the land belonging to the Convent of Mar Juries in al-Khader, the Jews praying in the Cave of Haifa are open to non-Jewish participants. Of course, this may be because the Cave is the holy place of Eliyahu Ha-Nebi (Mar Ilyas), the most venerated saint among the Jews.

However, there are Jews who don’t appreciate the saint veneration customs of the local Arabs. Another woman whom I interviewed, originally from Yugoslavia, showed she was repulsed by such local Arab customs of saint veneration. She stated that reading the Torah is the only way to gain a saint’s protection. As can be seen, there are many different views concerning saint veneration, but it is true that there are Jews in Haifa who accept the veneration customs of the Arabs and feel them to be natural.

Figure 6.7 Entry to a small holy place of the Virgin Mary. Sayydnaya, Syria, 2011.

Conclusion: can saint veneration help solve the Middle Eastern conflict?

Everybody knows that Palestine and Israel are home to conflicts that remain unsolved after more than sixty years. Many people all over the world hold to the mistaken assumption that religious differences are the reasons for the conflict. However, throughout this case study of saint veneration, we have seen facts that oppose this assumption. All of the monotheists in Palestine and Israel have coexisted for ages in their veneration of a saint who goes under the name of Mar Ilyas or Sayydna al-Khader. Although, without doubt, the situation changed drastically after 1948, it is also true that among the different communities the seeds of a new coexistence have started to take root.

Of course, it would be naive to think the Middle Eastern conflict could be solved only by saint veneration; but it is important to keep in mind that its power can be a strong force for change. In fact, through the shared veneration of Mar Ilyas, the sense of coexistence with Arabs has surely increased among the Mizrahim Jews of Haifa. Unfortunately, the practice of saint veneration is not so popular among Ashkenazim Jews, but I did once happen to see a Jewish woman of Polish origin who came to the Cave to make her vows. It is possible that the veneration of Mar Ilyas may spread among Ashkenazim Jews in the near future, and a positive spirit of coexistence with Arabs may grow. Conflicts always arise from misunderstandings; before thinking about the way to solve conflicts, we should pay more attention to the local cultures, customs and practices of Palestine and Israel.

Notes

  1 Al-Khader is correct in the dialect of Palestine. In Syria and Lebanon, he is called al-Khidr or al-Khodor. In the standard Arabic, al-Khidr is correct. On Al-Khader veneration as Prophet Elijiah, see Augustinović (1972).

  2 Mar Juries means St George in the Palestinian dialect of Arabic. In Syria, he is called Mar Jirjis and is known as Mar Girgis in Egypt.

  3 As far as I know at the time of writing, Mar Ilyas and Mar Juries are both called al-Khader in the Bethlehem area, but Mar Juries is more popular. In Galilee, Mar Ilyas is called al-Khader only in Haifa. In Lebanon and Syria, it is very difficult to classify by areas.

  4 See Map 6.1: Maqamat al-Khader in Palestine and Israel.

  5 Yajima (1991: 117–135) (Japanese).

  6 See Figure 6.1.

  7 Sugase (2009: 93–96) (Japanese).

  8 The presence of maqamat is mentioned in Canaan (1927).

  9 See Figure 6.6. Regardless of the difference of religions or sects, trees, some already large and aged, have been planted in the holy places and are now called ‘sacred trees’ (shajar muqaddas in Arabic).

10 See Figure 6.7. In the Convent of Our Lady in Sayydnaya, Syria, there is a small place where the local Christians make their vows on the ascent of the front steps. Coming up toward the figure of the Virgin Mary from the marble steps, this place is thought to be holy, and is fenced off. We can see the people showing their respect to this place as many white strings and shreds of cloth are tied on the fence.

Part III

Contemporary perspectives

7 In this world you will have trouble

Christians living amid conflict in the Middle East

Paul S. Rowe

The dramatic developments that have altered the nature of Middle Eastern politics over the past two decades have disturbed the Christians of the region but have also served to motivate their greater participation in public and political life. The rise of political Islam as a dominant force throughout the region raises obvious challenges to the status of non-Muslim minorities in their own societies, since Islamist movements often seek a return to putative Islamic structures that consign Christians to a secondary status at best. At the same time, the decision of the United States and its allies to be involved in more and more direct ways throughout the region has complicated the status of Christian minorities throughout the region. In many cases they have borne the brunt of suspicion that Western foreign policies are deliberately aimed at undermining the faith of Islam and bolstering the Christian and Muslim allies of Western states in the region.

The conflicts of the past decade, most notably the US invasion of Iraq and the disturbances that have followed the Arab Spring in places such as Egypt and Syria, have affected Christians disproportionately. The unresolved Israeli–Palestinian conflict remains a continuing challenge to the Palestinian Christian population as well. Conflict on all levels has led to the internal migration of many Christians within the region, and to the exodus of tens of thousands of Arab Christians to the Western world. Conflicts such as the Lebanese Civil War of 1976–1990, the Second Intifada that arose in the Autumn of 2000, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Summer Lebanon War of 2006, the Israeli incursion into Gaza in late 2008 and the unsettling fallout of the Arab Spring of 2011 in countries such as Egypt and Syria have all contributed to destabilising the region in ways that have affected Christians.

The decline of the Christian population of the Middle East has been remarked in numerous books and news articles throughout the past two decades. In his very readable account of travelling among the region’s Christians published in the late 1990s, William Dalrymple lamented the declining and aged Christian populations of the region.¹ In mid-2009, National Geographic dedicated a cover page to ‘the Christian Exodus from the Holy Land’, and a photo essay described the steep decline of the Christian population in places such as Iraq and Palestine.² Indeed, Christians have borne the brunt of many of the conflicts that have arisen in the Middle East over the past two decades.

However, even as Christians have suffered amid the conflicts that have beset the region, they have become newly active and assertive political actors. Two general motivations undergird the renewal of Christian activity. One is the need for a basic survival strategy for a small and dwindling population that reasserts the right of Christians to remain in their homeland and bring their concerns to bear on public policy, the resolution of conflict and the place of pluralism in political discourse. The second is the renewal of Christian social awareness that has arisen out of revivalism and the influence of an Arab Christian diaspora deeply linked to what is going on in their nations of origin. While ongoing conflict has created an existential crisis for the Christian community, Christians have embarked upon ambitious strategies to remain important minority populations in the Middle East.

In this chapter, I will provide a short survey of the ways in which conflict has affected the Christian populations of the Middle East, highlighting particular places where Christians have felt the deep impact of conflict: Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Palestine. However, the story is incomplete if it focuses solely upon the extent to which Christians suffer amid these conflicts. Conflict has served as a crucible for the development of an organised Christian response in the form of advocacy within civil society for liberal and peaceful solutions to the persistence of armed conflict. It provides opportunities and forces Christians to respond in order to maintain their place and even gain new relevance as political and social actors in their own societies.

Lebanon and Syria

Lebanon was originally created as a state with a bare Christian majority, and remains the Arab state with the largest proportion of Christians. The absence of credible data concerning the relative numbers of Christians in Lebanon makes it impossible to quantify the demographic shifts that have affected the Christian population. Nevertheless, it is clear throughout the past century that the relative power of Christian political organisations has declined, even if individual Christian power brokers remain important due to the power-sharing provisions of the Lebanese National Pact of 1943.

Lebanon’s unique sectarian system elaborated in the National Pact divided power through allocation of particular roles to the various religious sects, including Christian Maronites, Greek Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Armenians and Protestants, in addition to the Sunni, Shiʿi and Druze. This system of government proved brittle and fell apart during the civil war that raged on and off through the years 1976–1990. The civil war arose in part over the need to make constitutional changes based on the erosion of the Christian population as a proportion of the Lebanese sectarian divide – a problem made even more glaring by the influx of thousands of Palestinian refugees after the 1948 and 1967 wars. Christians had declined from 51 per cent of the population, in the last colonial-era census, to a proportion in the order of 25–30 per cent (of a population of around four million) by the 1990s. The Taif Accord, which ended the civil war, redistributed authority within the Lebanese political structure, reducing the representation of Christians in the National Assembly to half and introducing a form of power-sharing between the Christian president and Sunni prime minister.

In practice, however, the Syrian government dominated Lebanese politics through its Lebanese clients. This has benefited some Christian factions while disenfranchising others. In particular, former Israeli allies and the Christian militias that arose during the civil war have been sidelined, if not eliminated. In the wake of the Israeli redeployment in 2000, almost 6,000 members of the South Lebanese Army (SLA) were compelled to flee the country. The SLA was a client militia that was allied to Israel and aided in the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. Its upper echelons included numerous Lebanese Christians, including its leader General Antoine Lahad. About a third of these refugees were resettled in third countries, but the larger proportion was eventually resettled as refugees in the State of Israel.³ The Lebanese Forces militia was disarmed and its leader, Samir Geagea, was imprisoned from 1994 to 2005. The Kataeb (Phalange) Party that formed the political core of the Lebanese Forces was divided and its pre-eminent leader, Amin Gemayel, left the country for exile until 2000. Christian resistance to Syrian dominance was taken up in various ways, including activism led by individual opposition politicians and the Maronite Patriarchate. The Israeli and Syrian pull-outs that took place from 2000 to 2005 created a new environment in which Christian factions gained renewed strength. Nonetheless, the civil war and its aftermath weakened most of the Christian factions and introduced divisions that made it largely impossible for Christians to dominate Lebanese politics as they once had.

After the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005, opposition forces among the Christian population regrouped and became an important core of the anti-Syrian protests that followed. This group came to be known as the March 14 Alliance, dominated by the Sunni-led Future Movement Party of Saad Hariri, son of the former prime minister. While Syrian forces departed Lebanon that year, this began a new period of extreme instability. Outside the March 14 Alliance, individual Christian zuama (sectarian leaders) such as Michel Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement have managed to enter into new power arrangements in a pro-Syrian political bloc. However, the continuation of Lebanon’s sectarian politics has forced Christians to accept the rise of the Shiʿi Hizbullah and Amal movements. During the summer war of 2006, Israeli warplanes attacked targets in Lebanon’s Christian enclaves in addition to their all-out assault on Hizbullah installations and Shiʿi neighbourhoods surrounding Beirut. The war intensified an internal crisis within Lebanon between the March 14 forces and the pro-Syrian bloc dominated by the Shiʿi and the Free Patriotic Movement. Shiʿi blocs benefited by Syrian support and prominent members of the March 14 Alliance suffered from targeted assassination, including the prominent Phalange cabinet minister Pierre Amin Gemayel, who was shot at close range on 21 November 2006. Christian factions within the March 14 Alliance have frequently called for the disarmament of Hizbullah, a position that led in part to armed standoffs between Hariri’s Future Movement and the Shiʿi parties. In May 2008, a pitched battle between the governing March 14 forces and Hizbullah led to the Doha Agreement, which enshrined veto control over the government in the hands of the Hizbullah-led bloc. This in turn led to a crisis that brought down the Future Movement government in January 2011 when Hizbullah refused to cooperate with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which had implicated the militia in the assassination of Rafiq Hariri.

The ongoing political crisis in Lebanon has had an ambiguous effect on Lebanon’s Christians. The Free Patriotic Movement and the Marada Movement, the two major pro-Syrian Christian factions, support the present coalition government. However, the larger Phalange and Lebanese Forces movements have presented the crisis as an attack on Lebanese freedom. In particular, they see the crisis as a threat to the continued participation of Christian factions in the Lebanese government. Amid the tensions that led to the collapse of the government in January 2011, Christian leaders from the March 14 gathering of MPs issued a statement ‘that the severe national crisis from which our country suffers is no longer restricted to political disputes, but has transcended them to reach the essence of the patriotic choices upon which Lebanon was based’⁴ – apparently a reference to the sectarian power-sharing system of the National Pact. Just over four months later, a bomb exploded at a Syriac Orthodox Church in Zahle in central Lebanon.⁵

The breakdown of civil order in Syria beginning in March 2011 only deepened the malaise of Christians in Lebanon. Lebanese allies of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad look askance at the weakening of their long-time patron in Damascus, and Christians remain uneasy about the prospect of a Syrian regime controlled by Sunni Islamists. Even those who have been chilly toward Syrian influence in Lebanon view the changes with concern. For example, in early 2012, Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rai shared his concerns about the implications of the ongoing Arab Spring uprisings throughout the Arab world. In an interview with Reuters, Rai argued that the war portended divisions that could attend the pro-democracy uprisings throughout the Arab world. ‘We are with the Arab Spring but we are not with this spring of violence, war, destruction, and killing’, he stated; he went on to decry violence against Christians in Iraq and to praise the non-sectarian government of Syria.⁶ He situated his remarks amid the various tribulations that had been faced by coreligionists, most importantly in Iraq, over the past decade. The message ran afoul of Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, who declaimed the patriarch publicly in a development that marked a significant break with the usual deference shown the ranking Roman Catholic leader in the country.⁷ Divisions within the various Christian communities and their political representatives seemed likely to continue to deepen and awaited the final outcome of the civil conflict continuing to rage in Syria.

Christians are a large presence in Syria, composing somewhere close to 10 per cent of the population. While Christians participated in the original demonstrations against the regime that began in April 2011, their interest flagged as the opposition movement turned toward an armed resistance. Indeed, as the civil war deepened in Syria over 2012–2013, the rise of Islamist militias among the Syrian opposition highlighted the peril for Syrian Christians should the Assad regime fail. The abduction of two Christian leaders – Paul Yazigi, the Greek Orthodox bishop of Aleppo, and Yohanna Ibrahim, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Aleppo – by rebel forces in April 2013 deepened a sense of religious polarisation amid the civil war. The civil war has also driven large numbers of Christians to find refuge in neighbouring states, including Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Indeed, despite the sizeable number of Syria’s Christians, the war seems likely to drive a significant proportion from the country over the next few years.

Iraq

The Syrian civil war could be seen in some ways as an extension of the armed conflict that raged over Iraq after the American invasion of 2003. The violence has had a dramatic impact on the status of Iraq’s historic Christian community. Christians in Iraq have been dwindling in number over the past century. In the wake of the redivision of the map of Iraq following the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, Christian communities were increasingly dispossessed by rival Kurdish and Arab groups. Attempts by the newly anointed Hashemite monarchy to retain control in northern Iraq led to violence against the community in 1933; many Christians began to emigrate to the West.⁸ However, by the 1980s and 1990s, minority communities in Saddam Hussein’s Baʿathist Iraq had become subordinate partners with the regime. The Baʿath Party was rhetorically committed to a non-sectarian pan-Arabism that downplayed religious differences. While few Christians were represented in the top echelons of power in Iraq (with exceptions such as leading Baʿathist Tariq Aziz), they enjoyed relative toleration. In 2003, there were around one million Arab Christians in Iraq amid a population of about thirty-two million, mixed by sect among the Chaldaean (Eastern Rite Catholic), Assyrian and Syriac Orthodox Churches. They were clustered largely in the central and northern cities of Iraq, notably Mosul and Baghdad.

The American invasion of Iraq, sometimes portrayed in Muslim circles as a modern crusade against a majority Muslim country, in fact had the effect of undermining the tranquillity of intersectarian relations in the country, both relations between Muslims and Christians and among Muslims of the Sunni and Shiʿi sects. Individual Christian leaders and their churches became open targets for violence undertaken against the American occupation and an integral part of the civil war that raged from 2003 to 2008. Christians became primary targets of militant activity, including attacks against places of worship, kidnappings and executions. In August 2004, bombings at churches in Mosul and Baghdad claimed the lives of at least twelve people, with dozens injured. Coordinated attacks in January 2006 in Baghdad and Kirkuk targeted four churches and the Vatican embassy.⁹ In October that year, a Syriac Orthodox priest was abducted for ransom and later beheaded in Mosul.¹⁰ In perhaps the highest-profile incident, Paulos Faraj Rahho, archbishop of the Chaldaean Catholic Church, was kidnapped in February 2008 and found dead a month later in the city of Mosul.

Mosul sits on the edge of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. While Christians have participated equally in Kurdish politics, supporting various Kurdish factions, their position in the border region between the Kurdish and Arab regions of Iraq has frequently put them in a vulnerable position.¹¹ During the late 2000s, many Christians were convinced that they had become pawns in a larger game amid Kurdish attempts to increase their own demographic weight in the region surrounding the city, or to demonstrate the need for Kurdish pesh merga militia units to provide security to the city.¹² Many thousands of Christians have therefore moved internally to the Kurdish region or sought refuge in exile since 2008.¹³ During the years 2009 and 2010, violence against Christians fomented by radical Islamists began to spike. This focused on Mosul, where attacks led to the mass exodus of more than 12,000 Christian inhabitants, according to the Minority Rights Group.¹⁴ Periodic violence and extortion later led to a mass atrocity when, on 31 October 2010, an al-Qa ʿida-linked attack on Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad claimed the lives of fifty-eight people.

The widespread violence and extortion suffered by Christians in Iraq has led to a massive refugee flow to neighbouring states, most notably Syria and Jordan, as well as further emigration to Western states. Reflecting upon the October church attack, the late Anthony Shadid noted that ‘[i]dentities have hardened; diversity has faded’.¹⁵ Thousands of Iraqi Christians have demonstrated their agreement with his assessment through emigration. During the period 2003 to 2007, the violence in Iraq created a huge refugee flow which accelerated after the eruption of sectarian violence following the February 2006 attack on a Shiʿi mosque in Samarra.¹⁶ Christians were disproportionately represented even in the early years: Deborah Amos suggests that they constituted about 15 per cent of the total refugee population.¹⁷ The basic insecurity of Christian minority groups in Iraq continues to threaten the survival of the community itself.

Egypt

The relative stability of Egypt’s Mubarak regime from the early 1980s until the February 2011 revolution provided some relative tranquillity for the nation’s Coptic Christian minority, even as they remained concerned about the potential for the limitation of religious freedoms in that state. Egypt’s Christian minority is the largest in the Middle East by numbers. Assessments of the overall Coptic population are controversial, but it is common for observers to assert that they constitute somewhere around 8–10 per cent of the Egyptian population, or around eight million. By far most Egyptian Christians are devotees of the Coptic Orthodox Church, led by the late patriarch Pope Shenouda III from 1971 to 2012. They view themselves to be the descendants of the original Egyptian population, or Copts – a term that is generally used for Egyptian Christians, even those who are not members of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Under the republican governments established after the Free Officers’ coup of 1952, Christians emphasised their deep roots in the Egyptian state. Throughout the republican era, Copts have been politically marginalised, allowed to hold only a few token political offices. Aside from instances of sectarian strife, such as rioting that arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Christians remained largely quiescent.¹⁸ These riots had led to the internal exile of the Coptic Orthodox patriarch until his release in 1985. Freedom of religion was guaranteed under the constitution even after it enshrined the Islamic shariʿa as the source of Egyptian law in 1981. Christian places of worship were protected, although they were also subject to extreme limitations when it came to renovation, rebuilding or new construction.¹⁹

In the 1990s, Christians became a common target of the Islamist insurgency against the government of Hosni Mubarak, in particular in areas of Upper Egypt where they remain concentrated in small villages and in higher proportional numbers in the cities. Christians were viewed as soft targets that would force the government into a dilemma of defending non-Muslims against the putative defenders of Islam, thereby imperilling the regime’s legitimacy. At the same time, Copts were also frequently subjected to discrimination at the hands of government officials, as was highlighted in the case of widespread torture used against Copts during a murder investigation in the village of al-Kosheh in autumn 1998, an incident which later led to violent riots on New Year’s Eve 1999. The riots and the increasing publicity surrounding the plight of Copts in Western sources contributed to the expansion of Coptic political activity and lobbying in the diaspora as well as at home. Throughout the next decade, the status of Copts became a common irritant in the relationship between Egypt and its Western allies.

By the early part of the last decade, there were promising signs that Coptic grievances were beginning to be noticed by the regime. The Egyptian government declared Coptic Christmas to be a national holiday in 2003, and there were administrative changes to controls on church construction legislated in December 2005. However, at the same time, government patronage of Coptic issues arose as an issue during the 2005 elections. Islamist movements took hold of the increasingly assertive stance taken by Copts at home and abroad as a means of boosting their own profile. In the most notable incident in October 2005, Egyptian newspapers publicised the production of a play at a church in Alexandria that was said to present Islam in a negative light. Following Friday sermons at Alexandria mosques that made reference to the play, somewhere close to 5,000 demonstrators converged on St George’s Church in protest. The demonstration led to a violent riot that contributed to the deaths of at least three people.²⁰ Sectarian incidents persisted in urban and rural areas alike over the next few years, sometimes fuelled by local disturbances over romantic relationships between Muslim and Christian youth, which are frowned upon by both communities. However, in many cases conflict seemed more clearly rooted in sectarian bigotry, for example in an attack on Coptic Christmas celebrations in the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in January 2010, in which six Christians were shot by an Islamist militant as they left Mass.

While ongoing discrimination against Copts was a systematic complaint and they were the subject of occasional extremist attacks, the strategy of the Coptic Orthodox Church has been to maintain its partnership with the regime and to stress the unity of the Egyptian people in the face of sectarian conflict. In the words of S. S. Hasan in her authoritative survey of the sociopolitical place of the Church, ‘the church’s confrontational politics of the 1970s … has given way to accommodation with the state’.²¹ As a result, the Church hierarchy and the patriarchate have remained the most important actors representing the political concerns of Egyptian Christians. It has also supported the Egyptian administration through public statements and it remains committed to a ban on Christian dealings with the State of Israel until the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This has minimised the impact of sectarian conflict at numerous points, but it also tied the fate of the Church to the regime. The Church hierarchy thus faced the unforeseen revolutionary activity that arose in January 2011 with a great degree of trepidation.

The revolution was preceded by the most violent attack on Christians in several years. Storm clouds were already gathering amid growing protests in Tunisia when, on 1 January 2011, a bomb exploded outside the Two Saints Church in Alexandria, killing twenty-four people and injuring nearly 100 others. The Egyptian government very quickly blamed a foreign-based insurgent group based in Gaza and ‘moved with unusual speed and certainty. Within hours, President Mubarak made a televised address urging national unity’. Nevertheless, the incident was viewed as symptomatic of the political paralysis of the Egyptian state.²² The government’s official stance that blamed foreign actors was eerily prescient of its insistence that foreign agitators were behind the widespread protests that began later that month. In the midst of the breakdown of government offices, Al Arabiya television provided reports that linked the bombing to an elaborate plot hatched by the Egyptian Ministry of Interior with a view to ‘discipline the Copts’.²³ Nevertheless, the Coptic Orthodox patriarchate largely remained aloof from the popular demonstrations and sought to rein in Coptic participation, although there were public masses convened that highlighted Coptic participation at Tahrir Square in late January and early February 2011.

Beyond the wariness of the Church hierarchy, Copts participated as equal partners in the 2011 revolutionary movement. This followed on several years of Coptic participation in liberal opposition movements to the regime. A long-standing leader of the Kifaya opposition movement was Coptic activist George Ishak. Among the leaders of the protests in Tahrir Square were several young Westernised Coptic activists. However, individual Copts have also founded partnerships in the past with the Islamist movement, most notably the intellectual and political activist Rafiq Habib.²⁴ Demonstrations in Tahrir Square consistently featured slogans that called Egyptians to unity with Muslims and Christians as ‘one hand’.

Following the February overthrow of the Mubarak regime, the prospects for peaceful coexistence between Christians, newly empowered Islamist elements and the government quickly came under threat. Amid the breakdown of civil order that came after the fall of the government, attacks against Christians were perpetrated in numerous locations. On 4 March 2011, a church was burned to the ground amid an intersectarian family feud in the Upper Egyptian town of Sol. Over the next several days, Copts staged public demonstrations in the streets of Cairo in an attempt to bring their concerns over the incident to the attention of the new military government. The demonstrations led to pitched battles in the streets of Manshiyet Nasr, a Cairo suburb.²⁵ The results of the constitutional referendum held just two weeks later were widely interpreted as a victory for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and this increased the tension felt by individual Copts.

Events since the 2011 revolution confirmed some of the worst fears of the Coptic population. In some cases, Salafist Islamists used Muslim–Christian tensions as a means of increasing their local political profile, as in the case of a mob attack on a church in the Cairo suburb of Imbaba in May 2011. In early October, another incident in which a church was burnt to the ground in Idfu, a town in Upper Egypt, highlighted the continued inability of Copts to construct places of worship in spite of alterations to the ordinance. This sparked popular protests directed at the government’s inability to protect Egyptian Christians. The demonstrations focused on the Egyptian public radio and television headquarters in the Maspero district of Cairo. They culminated on 9 October 2011 with a violent clash between Coptic and Muslim protestors, government forces and vigilantes, in which twenty-five Copts were killed. One journalist reported in the aftermath that ‘[f]or the time being, at least, Copts have put aside their concerns over extremist Islamist groups to focus their anger on the S[upreme] C[ouncil of the] A[rmed] F[orces] which, they say, has consistently failed to address Coptic grievances’.²⁶ The victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in later polls in 2011 and 2012 continued to be a source of concern, though Christian suspicion of the former regime and the military government was sufficient for many to prefer the prospect of an Islamist government. The death of long-time patriarch Shenouda III in March 2012 added to the uncertainty.

The victory of the Freedom and Justice Party, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, in the presidential election of 2012 was initially greeted as an ambiguous prospect for many Christians. The Maspero massacre had chilled relations between the military and Copts on the street and, despite widespread Coptic support for Morsi’s rival, Ahmed Shafiq, the community was reassured by the president’s decision to include high-profile Copts in his administration. However, When President Mohamed Morsi pressed ahead with a decree that gave him sweeping powers over the constitution in November 2012, he lost what little support he had within the Coptic community. By February 2012, the new Coptic patriarch, Pope Tawadros II, was publicly denouncing the actions of the regime in forging ahead with a constitution that he found to be illegitimate.²⁷ Four months later, he was standing beside Egyptian General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi when he announced the overthrow of the Morsi government in response to popular demonstrations on 30 June 2013. The patriarch’s decision to show public support for the general was a controversial one: though most Copts were happy that the army had deposed a president whom they suspected of driving ahead with a sectarian agenda, the pope’s action made them a target of revenge attacks led by the opposition, which carried on throughout the summer of 2013.

Israel-Palestine

Conflict in the traditional Holy Land has implicated and affected Christians within and without the land and throughout the past two millennia. Christianity was born in Jerusalem and spread to the rest of the world through the efforts of the disciples of Jesus, many of whom left for different mission fields according to tradition. However, Christians remained in the land and became the majority after the Roman emperors officially embraced the faith. In the centuries that followed, Palestine became a central focal point of the divisions and conflicts that erupted first among Christians and then between Christians, Muslims and Jews. Divisions within the worldwide community of Christians came to be reflected in numerous ways among Christians living in the Holy Land, not least because each new Church tradition that arose sought to maintain a foothold in the land of Jesus Christ.

Divisions that arose within the worldwide Christian Church have come to be reflected in the many different sects of Christianity in the land. Arab Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are divided almost evenly among Roman Catholics, both Latin and Eastern Rites, and the Eastern Orthodox Church.²⁸ In addition to these Churches, there are small clusters of Armenians, Maronites, Copts, Syriacs and many other Eastern religious traditions represented on the ground. Protestants arrived in the region in the 1800s, and after the return of the Jewish community to the land, a growing number of Jewish Israelis have come to faith in Yeshua (the Hebrew name of Jesus), building a Messianic Jewish community in the State of Israel.

Each of these groups has historic ties to the many conflicts that arose in the Holy Land over the centuries. By the seventh century, the Byzantine, or Roman, Church had become the dominant Christian perspective throughout the empire. Dissenters from ‘Jacobite’ Churches, such as the Coptic and Syriac Orthodox, were marginalised by the official church.²⁹ As reflected by Maher Y. Abu-Munshar in his chapter in this volume, the effect of the Muslim conquest remains controversial – however the Christians remained by and large tolerated under Muslim rule. The Greek Orthodox Church in particular remained influential even after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 637CE, and became what is now known as the Eastern Orthodox Church, in Arabic retaining its link to Rome as Rum Orthodoxia. When in 1095 Pope Urban II declared the First Crusade, the intent of the Roman Catholic crusaders was not solely to dislodge Muslims from the Holy Land, but to retake it for the Roman Catholic Church. As a result, their 1099 sack of Jerusalem witnessed the execution of many Eastern Orthodox Christians in addition to Muslims. The Crusades thus contributed to the dramatic decline of Christian prospects in the region after the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Under the Ottoman Empire, imperial patronage of the Eastern Orthodox meant that Greeks became the pre-eminent Christian sect in most of the holy sites of the land. This persisted until patronage of the holy sites became part of the casus belli, or war aims that framed the eruption of the Crimean War in 1854.

Two of the outcomes of the Crimean War were the Turkish Sublime Porte’s final elaboration of the rights of Christian subjects in the empire under the hatt-i-humayun of 1856 and the restoration of the Status Quo among the Churches declared in 1852. These official declarations established the basic privilege of Christians to equality before the law and equal participation in armed service, as well as establishing their ability to maintain their places of worship. The Ottoman government also restored the responsibilities of the various Churches in the holy sites under an arrangement that came to be known as the Status Quo of the Holy Land in the Treaty of Berlin of 1878.³⁰ Various successive administrations have recognised the Status Quo, which today continues to regulate the way in which custodianship of the holy sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Church of the Resurrection) and the Church of the Nativity is maintained. As any visitor to these sites will know, the Status Quo has laid the groundwork for the division of these holy sites and numerous acrimonious disputes between the clergy who tend to them.

Throughout the conflicts that have beset the Holy Land since the establishment of the British Mandate in 1922, Christians have been pulled in multiple directions. They resisted the establishment of the Israeli state along with their other Arab neighbours during the late Mandatory period. However, during the war of 1948 they remained in higher proportional numbers among the Palestinians who were internally displaced within the State of Israel, and as a result their proportions are higher among Palestinian citizens of Israel than among the wider Palestinian population. Still, the Christian communities were politically separated by the outcome of the first Arab–Israeli War, with large communities residing in Israeli cities such as Nazareth, Acre and Haifa, as well as West Bank cities such as Bethlehem and Ramallah. The division of the city of Jerusalem split many families and many Christians were killed in the midst of the fighting.³¹

The war of 1967 reunited Christians on both sides of the Green Line but also highlighted the distinction between Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as against citizens in the State of Israel. At the end of the conflict, restrictions that had been placed on Arab citizens in Israel were reduced, allowing Palestinian citizens to gain a growing understanding of the plight of those under occupation. By the late 1980s, Palestinian Christians on both sides of the Green Line were demonstrating for the rights of compatriots.³² Some joined the militant nationalist movements and became leaders in the minority factions such as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Others eventually came to lead intellectual movements and the non-violent resistance as prominent leaders. During the First Intifada that arose after December 1987, Christians were an important part of the non-violent tax revolt in Bethlehem and Beit Sahour. Christian activist Mubarak Awad sought to spearhead a non-violent resistance movement prior to his deportation by Israeli authorities in June 1988.

By the early 1990s, a new group of Christian intellectuals and Church leaders was becoming influential in the Palestinian national movement, including secular activists such as Hanan Ashrawi as well as clerical leaders such as Naim Ateek and Mitri Raheb. The Oslo Accords of 1993 led to Palestinian self-rule in areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including most of the centres with large numbers of Christians. However, the new security measures that were introduced by the Israeli occupying authorities in the West Bank also tended to affect Christians negatively since they were forced into cantonal areas of Palestinian self-rule and increasingly cut off from other areas of the West Bank.³³ With the eruption of a second intifada in 2000, violence coupled with the implications of Israeli closure policy led to an extreme downturn in the Palestinian economy. This accelerated the general pattern of Palestinian Christian emigration such that it became a crisis for the community. In reflection upon a survey of Palestinian Christian demographics in 2006, sociologist Bernard Sabella observed that as many as 4,000 out of a population of 50,000 Christians had left the West Bank in the year 2000 alone. He went on to argue that the depredations of the separation barrier constructed by Israel inside the Occupied Territories ‘encourages the exodus of Christians from the Holy Land and from the Bethlehem area in particular’.³⁴

Political conflict in the Second Intifada focused strongly upon the Christian community in Bethlehem, particularly in the midst of the month-long siege of the Church of the Nativity that lasted from 2 April to 10 May 2002. Palestinian Tanzim guerrillas, based in Beit Jala and Bethlehem, attacked the Gilo neighbourhood of Jerusalem; in response, Israeli forces redeployed into the city of Bethlehem as a part of Operation Defensive Shield. Armed Palestinian militants, mostly Muslims, chose to seek sanctuary in the Church of the Nativity at the centre of the city. Clergy based in the church decided for the most part to remain with them as Israeli forces maintained a siege in an attempt to force the militants to leave. Over the course of the month, Israeli forces by and large respected international entreaties to keep from assaulting the church, though there were occasional exchanges of gunfire between the militants and the Israeli military. In the end, the siege came to a negotiated solution whereby most of the militants were internally exiled to Gaza and thirteen were deported to Western states.

The Church of the Nativity siege forced Palestinian Christians into an uneasy partnership with their compatriots engaging in armed attacks. While Christians suffered with other Palestinians the depredations of the Israeli military incursion into Bethlehem, they had become a central focal point of tensions and their church was used by the Palestinian national movement as a symbol for the plight of the nation. The insistence of the Palestinian Authority, led by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah Party, in using the church as a means of extracting concessions from Israel put Christians in a difficult position. Reflecting on the final outcome of the siege, Joshua Hammer writes that:

[m]any Christians believed that Fatah’s use of the church for tactical purposes and the gunmen’s insistence on carrying weapons inside the holy site constituted outrageous acts of contempt…. The Palestinian leadership had tried to present the siege as a shining example of Christian–Muslim cooperation. But it was cooperation enforced at gunpoint, and the Christian community remained bitterly cognizant of that fact.³⁵

It contributed to increasing tensions between the Christian and Muslim communities and the growing uneasiness of the Palestinian Christian population.

Observers of the Israel–Palestine conflict might easily make the assumption that Christians in the region are limited to the small Arab Christian population, but this would ignore the increasingly sizeable number of Messianic Jewish believers in the State of Israel. The story of Arab Christian decline is mirrored by the growth of the Messianic community. From modest beginnings in the 1970s, the number of Messianic Jews has climbed to somewhere near 50,000, spread throughout the territory of Israel.³⁶ Messianic Jews feel the effect of many of the same stigmas suffered by Arab Christians: association with former and current oppressors and a feeling of being a minority within a minority. As Jewish Israelis, however, they tend to have a very strong feeling of identification with the Israeli state. They actively participate as soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces and suffer the threat of suicide bombings and missile attacks along with their compatriots.³⁷ Their identification with the eschatological conviction that modern Israel is a fulfilment of biblical prophecy contributes to their general embrace of a Christian Zionist perspective. On the other hand, in recent years the burden of Messianic Jews to reconnect with other Christian believers from Arab backgrounds has come to be a challenge to the Messianic community, since Churches will often blend Christians from both Jewish and Palestinian backgrounds.

Overcoming the world

The overall picture of Christian decline amid the various conflicts that have beset the Middle East over the last century and with increased potency over the past two decades suggests the growing marginalisation of these groups. Yet in spite of the many challenges that confront Middle Eastern Christians, their social and political influence has become more remarkable.

Lebanon’s Christians have been separated politically and by sect throughout its tumultuous history. Its system of institutionalised power-sharing appears to enshrine the ascendance of Christian communities over others. In practice, bargaining between the various faction leaders has often eroded Christian solidarity even if it provided an impetus for an artificial assertion of Christian solidarity. Christians vote for Christian representatives but they do not necessarily form lasting mass-based political movements. This has changed in some ways since the end of the civil war. In the absence of strong leadership among the factions, the Maronite Patriarchate under Nasrallah Butrous Sfeir took up the task of representing Christian interests in the 1990s. Syrian dominance has polarised the Christian factions but the involvement of the Church hierarchy in seeking reconciliation between the factions has helped to maintain Lebanese unity in the face of numerous conflicts. In the face of the dramatic decline of the Christian population and the breakdown of authority in neighbouring Syria, the Maronite Patriarch appointed in March 2011, Cardinal Beshara al-Rai, has recently made common cause with Hizbullah and pro-Syrian allies.

The dramatic exodus of Iraq’s Christians has been increasingly publicised due to the work of coreligionists abroad, interested journalists and the Church hierarchies who have themselves been targeted by the violence in Iraq. The Middle East Council of Churches immediately responded to the US invasion with an influx of humanitarian aid. The invasion has also provided opportunities for the expanded outreach work of groups such as the Anglican-based Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, led by Andrew White, chaplain of St George’s Church in Baghdad.

The challenge of responding to threats to the Egyptian Church has been the preoccupation of political efforts in the community of Copts in the diaspora, whose support contributed to the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act in the United States in 1998. While Egyptian Church officials and Coptic leaders were largely sceptical of US interference in Egyptian affairs, the activity of Copts in the diaspora has had an effect in mobilising the Coptic community in Egypt toward a more activist stand. The Church has remained reticent to actively confront the regime in the way it did during the demonstrations of the late 1970s, but in other ways it has publicly voiced the concerns of the community in the form of public pronouncements from the patriarch, or widened latitude for critical statements coming from lower-level Church leaders. A more outspoken approach has been adopted by Coptic lay activists such as Youssef Sidhom, the editor of the Coptic newspaper al Watani. Coptic lay activists have become more actively involved in demonstrations in favour of Coptic rights, as was shown by the public demonstrations launched in October 2011, which were nonetheless put down by force. Nevertheless, Coptic activism has grown substantially in the post-revolutionary period, with prominent Copts taking leading posts in the various opposition movements, as well as prominent positions in the cabinet declared by President Adly Mansour in July 2013.

Among the Palestinians, the swift outflow of Christians from the Occupied Territories has contributed to a growing sense of crisis voiced by the Roman Catholic and other Church hierarchies. In an unprecedented move, representatives of all of the mainline Churches of the Holy Land signed the Kairos Palestine Document that called their coreligionists ‘to stand alongside the oppressed and preserve the word of God as good news for all rather than to turn it into a weapon with which to slay the oppressed’, in words designed to challenge prevailing theologies in the United States.³⁸ The Roman Catholic Church seized upon the issue to declare a 2009 lineamenta to convene a special assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops that took place in Nicosia, Cyprus, in October 2010. Palestinian Evangelicals based at Bethlehem Bible College have hosted two international conferences in March 2010 and March 2012 inviting a range of global Christian leaders to stand with the Palestinian Christian minority. Organisations such as Musalaha, led by Salim J. Munayer who also contributes to this volume, have sought to bring together Palestinian Christians and Messianic Jews in religious solidarity.

Conclusions

The long history of conflict in the Middle East, culminating in the past two decades of conflict and change, has had a generally negative impact on the Christian community in the Middle East. Relative numbers of Christians have been declining in virtually every Arab state. Conflict has affected them disproportionately as they have become collateral damage amid conflicts between Israel and its neighbours, US forces and insurgents in Iraq, and between Islamists and secular governments and dictatorships in the region. In each case, Christians have been alternately targeted, suffered at the hands of one or both sides, and chosen available opportunities for departure. The ongoing conflict in Syria is only the latest in a number of challenges for the Christian populations of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Though the challenges of conflict are clear, it has also provided an impetus for the expansion of Christian efforts over the past two decades. The increased activism of Christian groups, represented both by their official Church hierarchies and lay associations, has demonstrated the resilience and determination of Christian laypeople and the Churches to remain an important force in the region. Christian populations, long supporters of Arab nationalism and liberalism, have remained the most pivotal group in seeking resolution of internal and international conflict in the region, acting as proponents of the national cause among the Palestinians, as social activists in Egypt, and as bellwethers of the persistent conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. While conflict contributes to the threat of demographic decline, it has also gained increasing notoriety for Christians to operate as Christians in Middle Eastern contexts. On one side, this is a positive step for the Christian community, which continues to engage in social renewal and political activism as a result and challenges the notion that the ancient Churches are in inexorable decline as institutions. In many locations, this has cultivated an expansion of ecumenical activity among the Christian Churches. A more negative aspect is the way in which the renewal of Christian activism strengthens the dividing line between Christians and non-Christians, highlighting suspicion that Christians remain a voice for Western interests. To the extent that Christians are able to continue to provide a constructive voice to their desire for coexistence in peaceful and liberal societies, they may be able to survive the multiple changes that have arisen amid armed conflicts and the Arab Spring.

Notes

  1 Dalrymple (1999).

  2 Belt (2009).

  3 Herzog (2009: 586).

  4 Daily Star (Lebanon) (2010).

  5 Galey (2011).

  6 Stott and Nakhoul (2012).

  7 Daily Star (Lebanon) (2012).

  8 Rassam (2005: 145–146).

  9 BBC News (2006).

10 Luo (2006).

11 Romano (2010: 68).

12 Kramer (2008).

13 Lamani (2010: 99).

14 Lalani (2010: 13).

15 Shadid, A. (2010).

16 Sassoon (2009: 10–14).

17 Amos (2010: x).

18 Farah (1986).

19 Rowe (2007: 329–350).

20 BBC News (2005).

21 Hasan (2003).

22 Slackman (2011).

23 Al Arabiya News (2011).

24 Habib is profiled as a participant with the wasat Islamist current of the 2000s in Scott, R. M. (2010: 57).

25 Nkrumah (2011).

26 Ezzat (2011).

27 Ahram Online (2013).

28 Bailey and Bailey (2002: 152–153).

29 ‘Jacobite’ is a term sometimes used for those Churches that rejected the finding of the Council of Chalcedon (451 ce) on the nature of Christ; the Churches are named for the prominent Church leader, Jacob Baradaeus.

30 Molinaro (2010: 39).

31 One such story is related by Awad (2008: 37–59).

32 Peleg and Waxman (2011: 56).

33 The implications for one family are described in the diary of an American married to a West Bank Palestinian in Jones Nasser (2003).

34 Sabella (2006: 50–51).

35 Hammer (2003: 250).

36 Several profiles of Messianic Jews are provided in Fisher, J. (2008).

37 For example, one Messianic Jew shares her story of meeting with Palestinians shortly after suffering the loss of a close friend in McRay (2011: 32–33).

38 Patriarchs and Heads of Churches, Jerusalem (2009).

8 Christians working for peace in the Middle East

Efforts and expectations

Peter E. Makari

One of the first points a political scientist, historian, economist or sociologist with an area studies specialisation will make is that not all the countries, or context, within their area are the same. While there are certainly characteristics that link the various countries of a particular region – such as language, religion, cultural practices, economic relations, political alliances and of course geography – there is sufficient diversity to begin to explore the ways that communities and nations are differentiated within that region. Certainly this is true in the Middle East, where the countries of the region are indeed linked through culture, language, geography and historical developments – including the advent and eventual predominance of Islam (in most cases), the role of the Ottoman Empire and implications of its breakup, the involvement of the European powers after the First World War, and the interest of the United States, especially in the last half century.

At the same time, the current contexts of Christians throughout the region are sufficiently different that an exploration of these divergences is necessary. So, first, it is too facile to think of the Christian communities of the Middle East as homogenous, regionally or confessionally. Second, while the title of this book implies a singular conflict, there are various points of tension that should be explored in relation to the situation of Christians in the countries of the Middle East. While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most prominent, each Middle Eastern Christian community experiences degrees of conflict, and their agency therefore varies. In this chapter I will focus on the cases of Egypt, Iraq and Israel-Palestine.

From the constant coverage of the peaceful demonstrations in Egypt starting 25 January 2011, the world became quite familiar with Tahrir (Liberation) Square in central Cairo. It is the home of the Egyptian Museum, the Arab League building, the original campus of the American University of Cairo, and several hotels, as well as small businesses and residences. On the southern side of Tahrir Square in Cairo is a large and imposing edifice that spans the entire end of the square and is at least thirteen stories tall. The Mugamma’ building is a sandy colour, and curved on the Tahrir side, straight on the back, as it runs along Shaikh Rihan Street. It is full of government offices and employees dealing with all kinds of bureaucracy, including visa renewals, citizenship issues, police and fire administration offices, tax offices and many others. It is constantly filled with people needing signatures on documents, moving from one office to another to accomplish the complicated task of closing a particular file or completing a form or application process. It is a symbol of massive government bureaucracy, and embodies the centrality of government in daily life.

There is a legend that, one day, President Nasser was riding on a parade through the city, and as his car was passing through Tahrir square he noticed a prominent church building in clear sight on the southern edge of the square. According to the story, Nasser’s response was to order the construction of the Mugamma’ building, effectively removing the church from the landscape of Egypt’s main square. The church, located behind the Mugamma’ building, is the largest Protestant church in Egypt, in size and attendance, the Qasr ad-Doubara Evangelical, or Presbyterian, Church. I cannot confirm the veracity of the story of Nasser’s reaction or possible construction order, but the symbolic presence of the building thus reaches beyond the bureaucratic dimension. For some, it may reflect the government’s efforts to marginalise, or minimise, the visible Christian presence in Egypt; for others, more optimistically, it can represent the efforts of the government to protect and shield Christians from other, more odious currents in Egyptian political and social life. In either case, the question of the role of Christians in the modern Middle East is embedded in this image.

Many commentators, if asked to address the future of Egypt’s political trajectory before the events that began with demonstrations in January 2011, might have begun with a profile of the entrenched rule of President Hosni Mubarak, the helpful role his government played with respect to the US war on terror, and the threat of political or militant Islam to that stability. The debate in the pages of most newspapers on the North American side of the Atlantic had been limited to the topic of a regime known to engage in unsavoury methods to maintain its control on power. The Muslim Brotherhood would always be mentioned as the most organised opposition force in Egyptian political and social life, even though it has been banned as a political actor. Such a focus on the question of the Muslim Brotherhood’s potential role in the ‘new’ Egypt remains front and centre. The relationship between the previous regime and the Muslim Brotherhood was one characterised by public animosity and private tolerance, as the Brotherhood was viewed by the regime as tame, compared to other more militant and radical Islamic groups and organisations. Publicly, though, the regime managed effectively to promote the idea among moderate Egyptians, and especially the Christian community, that if full democracy was implemented, radical Islam would emerge victorious, and that government and society would be dominated by an Islamic flavour and, perhaps, law. The demonstrations in Tahrir and throughout the country have, to some extent, belied that claim, but the sectarian relationship in Egypt is, of course, more complicated than that. The two parallel chains of events – revolution and transition on the one hand, and sectarian tension on the other – in Egypt in 2011 illustrate this complexity, and the internal nature of conflict in the country.

The Christian community in Egypt is large by regional standards. Of the overall population of Egypt, estimated at over eighty million, the Christian community makes up between 8 and 12 per cent, putting it around eight million. Even though religious affiliation is listed on Egyptian identity cards, there is still no definitive statistic of the number of Christians in Egypt. The Churches’ estimates of numbers tend to err on the higher end of the range, while government and others have an interest in downplaying the total number of Egyptian Christians, with political implications at work. No matter the exact number, the Egyptian community represents more than half of the Christians of the Middle East. It is an overwhelmingly Coptic Orthodox community, but there are upwards of 300,000 Protestants and some have estimated more than one million Catholic Christians in Egypt as well, although the number is probably much closer to 150,000–200,000.¹

The main issues for Christians in Egypt have to do with civil and political rights. Starting with the treatment of the Christian history of Egypt in school textbooks, these issues extend all the way to debate over whether a Christian can run as a candidate for president. In the last few years, a few noticeable changes have taken place in favour of Egyptian Christians, including the designation of Coptic Christmas as a national holiday and the decision to delegate the process of approval for church construction and repair from the office of the president to the office of the provincial governor. Regarding the church construction and repair issue, some have argued that while it may become bureaucratically easier for a decision to be made faster, provincial governors may have a stronger anti-Christian bias than the president, so the decision actually may not have been helpful.

Two parallel storylines since the beginning of 2011 exemplify the underlying issues contributing to tensions in Egypt. On the one hand, the predominantly peaceful demonstrations resulted from the lack of economic opportunity and of political expression in Egypt. Basic issues of unemployment, underemployment and wages, especially for young adults, rose to the fore. Political inclusion and participation, which had been lacking in any meaningful way, was also a central demand. Neither of these demands – the economic and the political, nor the demonstrations themselves – was sectarian in nature. In fact, the opposite is true – sectarian cooperation has been exemplified during the demonstrations with Muslims protecting Christians while they prayed in Tahrir Square, and vice versa. The demonstrations were not organised by the Muslim Brotherhood, or any other explicitly religious organisation. Even though the Brotherhood decided to participate, only later becoming part of the opposition movement, it did not come with a unified position, as intra-Brotherhood debates continue. As for the Christian communities, they have been variously participatory. The Coptic Orthodox Church leadership, in the early phases of the demonstrations, voiced its support for the Mubarak regime, while the Coptic Youth Organisation was actively involved in the anti-regime demonstrations, illustrating a generational division in the Church, and reflecting a broader generational divide in the broader Egyptian society. It was only after 11 February, when Mubarak’s resignation had been announced, that Pope Shenouda III issued a statement in which the Church:

salute[ed] the honourable youth of Egypt, the Youth of January 25, who led Egypt in a strong, white revolution, and sacrificed for this cause, precious blood, the blood of the nation’s martyrs, who have been glorified by the Egyptian leadership and Armed Forces, as well as the entire population.

The Church went on to ‘salute the brave Egyptian Army, and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in its communiqués, for securing Egypt, internally and externally’. Addressing the main issues it sees for Egypt, the statement made clear its support for

Egypt [as] a civilian democratic state, to select its members of parliament with free and fair elections, and to be representative of all the sectors of the population. We endorse the call of all Egyptians in combating poverty, corruption and unemployment, and in resisting chaos and vandalism, and the reinforcement of safety and security, and the principles of social justice and national unity.

It concluded by offering its prayer for Egypt.² This statement steered clear of any sectarian issue, but offered a positive voice from the Church’s leadership regarding the future of the country. Even so, segments of the Coptic Orthodox Church have been disappointed with the leadership’s reactionary positions.

The Protestant Churches of Egypt, an official institution representing the interests of the sixteen registered Protestant denominations in Egypt, issued three statements over the course of the eighteen-day demonstrations. The first, albeit brief, was issued on 4 February, and made the simple appeal

to all groups of the great people [of Egypt] to unite, to stand together, and to stand in a single row against any force that attempts to harm Egypt, to undermine its security and safety, to assault its public and private property, and to damage the economy of the country.³

The second statement, issued on 9 February, asserted that the ‘church … is an integral part of the community, and the church feel[s a] national duty in service of its community for a better life for all of its citizens’. It went on to assert

appreciation for the courage and the decency of the youth’s movement on January 25, and legitimacy of their demands for freedom of expression and the desire for change and reform; … support and respect for the constitutional legitimacy as a guarantee of the security and safety of the nation; … emphasis on the necessity and inevitability of a democratic and civil state, whereby citizenship is the only foundation in dealing with citizens in the community; the absolute rejection of all forms and images of corruption, and the need to hold all who are corrupt accountable, regardless of their positions; … and the desire and willingness of the [Protestant] Community to participate in the ongoing national dialogue regarding the future of the country, and to do so from a nationalistic perspective and not a religious one.⁴

Finally, on 17 February, the Protestant Churches of Egypt ‘announced its full and absolute support of the achievements of the youth of the 25th of January in accomplishments that contributed to the fulfilment of a people’s revolution that eliminated all of the forms of corruption’; stated that it had been arranged that the organisation’s hospitals in Cairo and Tanta be open for the treatment of the wounded of the past events, free of charge, in addition to providing full support to the families of the victims and the injured; expressed, quite clearly, its full support for a civil state, and its absolute rejection of the establishment of religious parties; stressed the basic human rights, such as the right to education and freedom of expression, and also freedoms of belief, worship for all.⁵

These statements exemplified the engagement of the Protestant Churches, of which the Presbyterian Church is the largest member. The statements also encapsulated the basic issues the Christians are facing in Egypt today: the concern over the nature of the state, the struggle for equal rights, their continuing readiness to participate actively in the life and welfare of the nation, and a concern for those whose rights have been denied. These expressions are unencumbered by the more complex relationships the Coptic Orthodox Church and its leadership have had [with the government] over the course of modern Egyptian history. Some have said that the 2011 revolution in Egypt, which highlighted the role of the youth, might also prompt a revolution within various institutions. That is indeed playing out within the Muslim Brotherhood as the old guard and the younger Brothers debate the platform for the possible establishment of a new political party, and the expressions of the Coptic Orthodox leadership was disconnected from that of the Coptic Orthodox Youth.⁶ The case of Egypt remains critical as these issues move toward some resolution in the coming months there, and the Christians of Egypt want to participate in the debate openly, promoting a peaceful healing and reconciling role.

The second storyline’s most recent chapter began on New Year’s Eve, 2010, when al-Qadisain Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria was the victim of a car-bomb attack during Mass. Many feared that this heinous act was the announcement of a new wave of sectarian strife in Egypt, and that the country would plunge into a religious fitna or crisis. A week later, when Christians celebrated Christmas, Muslims stood outside churches in Alexandria and Cairo to protect Christians; some even went inside during the service to demonstrate their full solidarity. The sectarian crisis seemed to have been averted. A little over two weeks later, the 25 January demonstrations commenced, and sectarian tension was put to rest. It was later suggested, when some documents were discovered in the former regime’s files, that the Mubarak government was behind the New Year’s Eve car bombing, a revelation that further united Christians and Muslims in their struggle.⁷ With the resignation of Mubarak, the political events continued to maintain centre stage, until the burning of a Coptic Orthodox Church in Sol, in southern Cairo. This act was presumably undertaken as a result of tension that arose after the discovery of a Christian man’s relationship with a Muslim woman, the violent confrontation of their families and the resultant burning of the church. This second chain of events simply illustrates that sectarian unrest in Egypt has not been resolved, in spite of common political cause, common efforts to end such strife and signs from both communities that this kind of conflict has no place in the new Egypt. The ability of the church to promote peace in such a dynamic is hindered, as religion is perceived to be the source of the problem.

Egypt is often referred to as a bellwether of the region. While that is not always the case, it certainly has been a leader and important indicator of trends and currents. Of course, in the period of struggle against colonialism and the development of pan-Arabism as an ideology and political programme, President Nasser was a regional symbol. Even today, it is not uncommon to see posters with Nasser’s picture on them in the streets of various Arab capitals. The most concrete example of pan-Arabism put into practice was the formation of the United Arab Republic, consisting of Egypt and Syria, to which the intellectual roots of pan-Arabism can be traced. The role of prominent Arab thinkers such as Michel ‘Aflaq in developing the idea of Arab identity cannot be underestimated. If the current uprisings are seen as youth-inspired and driven, the movement of Arab nationalism in the 1940s–1960s was also youth motivated. The establishment of the Ba‘ath Party, based on the ideas articulated by Aflaq, its founder, focused on comprehensive Arabness, ‘one Arab nation with an eternal message’. Albert Hourani puts it this way:

The national tie between an individual and his nation was the basis of political virtue, and for him, whose language is Arabic and who lives in the Arab land … and believes that he belongs to the Arab nation, that tie could only be an Arab one. It excluded all national attachments to small units, local or religious, and included all Arab countries on the same footing…. [F]or ‘Aflaq, the essence of Islam was its revolutionary quality, and later, it laid more emphasis on the need for social revolution. Arab independence, Arab unity, and social justice could not be achieved apart from each other; socialism was an essential part of Arab nationalism.⁸

Much has been made of the fact that Michel ‘Aflaq was born into a Greek Orthodox family. His development of Arab nationalism has contributed much to the sense of inclusion that recent generations of Christians across the region have toward their Arabness, but certainly the question of identity is complicated. Multiple identities – such as Arab, Muslim or Christian; historical heritage such as Egyptian Pharaonic or Lebanese Phoenician, Mediterranean, African or Asian – are all at play, and one’s primary association has an impact on their involvement in political life and social relationships.

The patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, to which Michel ‘Aflaq’s family belonged, is His Beatitude Ignatius IV Hazim. He was one of the founders of the modern ecumenical movement; he remained an ecumenical leader in Syria and the Middle East until his passing in December 2012. He felt especially free to voice his opinion on a number of matters related to the situation of Christians in the region today. In an audience with American Church leaders, three years ago, he stated: ‘[t]he situation of Christians is positively different than it was twenty years ago’. At the same time, he lamented that Christians in the Middle East are ‘an ensemble of minorities’ which renders their effectiveness less than ideal.⁹ He observed that the situation of conflict between Armenian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox in issues of custody and worship in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is sad. Even so, the Greek Orthodox Church takes seriously its sense of vocation to engage in the issues of society today, especially the response to the crisis in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.

The conflicts the Christians of Iraq face are in fact quite different than those of the internal political and economic, and domestic sectarian, conflicts the Christians of Egypt face. In Iraq, the nature of tension and conflict has been dynamic over the past three decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, it can be described as a conflict involving outside powers and Iraq. In the 1980s, it was Iraq and Iran; in the 1990s, it was the international community of the sanctions regime on the one hand, and the Iraqi regime on the other, in which the people of Iraq were clearly the victims. Since the 2003 invasion took place, the nature of the conflict in the Iraqi context changed, involving adversarial parties both outside and inside Iraq. The overriding current character of conflict in Iraq is one of governance, immediately related to the US-led invasion in 2003, and the subsequent occupation. Gross insecurity and instability have characterised the prevailing situation there for the better part of the past decade. It is important, though, for us to acknowledge that the nature of conflict Iraqis have experienced has evolved significantly over the past thirty years, and the role and involvement of Christians in promoting peace and justice has also changed accordingly.

The 1980s were dominated by the Iran–Iraq War, and the increasing hold on power Saddam Hussein consolidated. The Christian community was just as much a part of the conflict as others, losing members and suffering the ill effects of the war. The conflict between Iraq and Iran was sometimes framed as one to contain Shi‘i Islam in the form of the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran, following the 1979 revolution there. The 1990s started with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the US-led military campaign, Desert Storm. The imposition of a no-fly zone in the northern territories and the installation of the sanctions regime on Iraq were designed to contain Saddam Hussein. The campaign to monitor and inspect Iraq for chemical weapons and weapons of mass destruction led to the imposition of an internationally supported sanctions regime which, during the 1990s and early 2000s, forced Iraq’s transformation from a rich, scientifically advanced and intellectually stimulating culture and society into a poor country, practically indistinguishable from a host of so-called Third World countries around the world. The inability of Iraq to import much needed food, medicine or medical supplies, various school supplies (such as pencils, the graphite in which was said to contain ‘dual-use qualities’) and parts to repair infrastructure that had been damaged or destroyed, resulted in the de-development of the country, and the elimination of its middle class, which included many of its Christians. Iraq went from being a generous donor to the UN’s World Food Programme to being a needy recipient. The oil-for-food arrangement could have been adequate to address these issues, but its management did not implement it in such a way as to ensure delivery of basic needs to those who suffered most. As a result, during the time period from the mid-1990s to 2003, Iraqis who could leave to pursue better opportunities did. This was true of all religious communities, but the Christians were hit especially hard.

Despite the hardships of a devastated economy, lack of adequate nutrition and heath, and a host of other problems, the Christian community, which was estimated at between 650,000 and one million, and which made up roughly 4 per cent of the overall population of Iraq remained in the country. It was able to continue to carry on its communal life with the same freedoms it had enjoyed for many years before, even while suffering economically. It had freedom to worship and to congregate; churches in Iraq would typically be full on Sunday, with various meetings and events taking place throughout the week. Christians were safe to walk from home to church, school, work and stores throughout the country; they, like Iraqis generally, had a sense of basic security on that level. On another level, though, the entire population lived under an atmosphere of fear and suspicion given the methods and practices of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The situation of Christians, it has been argued, was no worse than that of other groups in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s rule, though, in fact, it may have been somewhat better. It would not be uncommon to find a small placard on the side of a church organ, for example, that read: ‘This organ is a gift of our country’s leader, the President Saddam Hussain’. This relative freedom for Iraq’s Christian community is sometimes explained by the fact that Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, needed to cull the support and favour of other minority groups in Iraq to preserve his rule in a society in which Shi‘i Islam is the majority. Such a relationship served both the regime and the Christians. For that period of time, the Christians did not complain of maltreatment or any kind of discrimination, at least openly.

During the sanctions period, the Christian churches took on two roles in particular. The Middle East Council of Churches, cooperating especially with the two largest Churches, the Chaldean Catholic and the Syrian Orthodox, were deeply involved in providing humanitarian relief to Iraq’s Christians and Muslims. Nutrition, potable water, medical assistance and other basic needs were all lacking, and the Churches, through regional and global church connections, attempted to contribute to the extent possible to offering relief to those needs. Such efforts persisted throughout the 1990s. The second role was to communicate with the global Christian community the reality of life under sanctions. Because of the connections the Iraqi Christian community had, it was able to access the international community and relate the reality in a way that contributed to a greater knowledge in the West about Iraqi Christianity, as well as the detrimental – some would say devastating – impact of sanctions on all people. This educational role, the Iraqis hoped, would lead to global advocacy to lift the sanctions and allow Iraq to start to rebuild, as the sanctions were affecting the people of Iraq more than the leadership they intended to target.

The attacks of 11 September in the US provoked rumblings from Washington, DC that the United States had its sights on a response that would include regime change in Baghdad, despite the lack of a connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attacks, and a lack of evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq despite years of inspections. In the post-9/11 context, and up until March 2003, the role of Iraqi Christians vis-à-vis the global community remained one of advocacy: advocacy to end the sanctions and to preclude potential war. Christians anticipated a war that would overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime, and they worried about the consequences of that change. In February 2003, mere weeks before the invasion took place and war began, Iraqi Church leaders issued a statement in which they made one last appeal for war to be avoided. Presciently, they claimed war would lead to a situation of instability, and they expressed their fear that religious extremism of two stripes – Islamic and Christian – would be introduced to the country. The war that began soon after changed the nature of conflict, and the role of Christians.

The new circumstances have involved an outside occupying force, led by the United States, on the one hand; and on the other, adversarial parties in Iraq who have been identified as non-state groups and organisations, including radical Islamic groups such as al-Qa‘ida in Iraq. The latter have perpetuated violence, in most cases against the occupying forces and the emergent Iraqi government, but also against Iraqis themselves who are not sympathetic to their world view, especially Christians. There is much evidence, gleaned from testimony of Iraqi Christians who left Iraq, and those who remained, that the infusion of radical Islamic groups has been especially violent and harmful to the efforts to promote stability, threatening the security of the Iraqi people. These groups have specifically targeted churches and Christians, including several tragic and fatal attacks on Iraqi churches over the course of the past few years. Iraqi Christians who have fled to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria report that they were threatened in their own homes, required to pay a large ransom, forfeit property, and/or that they leave Iraq immediately or they would be killed. While the numbers of Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons (IDP) has exceeded four million – or roughly 16 per cent of the population – the number of Christians within this refugee and IDP population has been disproportionately high. A significant proportion of the Iraqi Christian community has therefore left.

Attacks on Christians, which have been constant since mid-2003, are cited by some to demonstrate the ingrained animus Muslims have toward Christians, and the violent way that this attitude is manifested. Another interpretation, which is less prominently discussed, is that the Christians are not attacked for their Christianity per se, but because they are associated with the policies and actions of the West, and particularly of the United States, which is understood to be Christian. This interpretation is further strengthened by the concurrence of Christian missionary efforts to proselytise Iraqi Muslims, and who entered Iraq on the heels of the invading forces in 2003. These attempts at converting Iraqi Muslims have neither been coordinated with nor recognised the presence of the Iraqi Christian community. Such proselytism is being carried out by religious radicals, about whom they warned in the February 2003 statement. These actions furthered the perception that a motivation of the invasion was to confront Islam in particular, and establish a foreign presence in Muslim lands. According to this second interpretation, then, attacks on churches and Christians are attacks on a proxy or symbolic representation of the West and the United States. Iraqi Christians serve that proxy role even though they are fully Iraqi and have advocated against precisely this invasion and occupation. Unfortunately, the attacks have been brutal and deadly.

Even so, many Christians, including their leadership, have remained in Iraq. In February 2010, the leaders of the Christian Churches of Iraq formed an assembly called the Council of Christian Church Leaders of Iraq. It ‘includes all patriarchs, archbishops, bishops and heads of churches in Iraq from the fourteen Christian communities registered in Iraq since 1982, belonging to the Catholic, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, as well as Protestant traditions’. So far, in terms of their public activities, they have issued statements denouncing the continuing attacks on churches, and calling for protection for the Christians of Iraq. The main purpose of the council is ‘to unite the opinion, position, and decision of the churches in Iraq’ on issues related to the Churches and the state. The council intends to do so ‘upholding and strengthening the Christian presence, promoting cooperation and joint action without interfering in private matters of the churches or their related entities’. It also seeks to promote interreligious relations in a more proactive way, ‘highlight[ing] the importance of Christian education and of dialogue with the Muslim community in order to “promote the acceptance of the other” ’.¹⁰

The transformation of the nature of conflict from national and international to one of religious sectarianism was significant. The attitude of Christians dramatically shifted from fully participatory to one of fear, and that situation remains today. But it is not without hope. Father Louis Sako, Chaldean bishop of Kirkuk, recently delivered a paper in which he outlined the steps necessary to move from this state of fear to one of hope. First, he asserts that religious and national extremism have no place in the future of Iraq. Islamic radicalism is dangerous to Christians and to Muslims alike. He goes on to claim Christian rootedness in Iraq for two millennia. ‘Christians do not refuse to live in a context of Arab and Islamic culture, but do refuse to live under a shari‘a order.’ Second, he states: ‘surely there will be no stability without true reconciliation and political harmony. Political divisions are reflected negatively in the street’. He concludes with the idea that a nation needs to be built based on unity, a nation of laws, not one of sectarian divisions.¹¹

Just as Bishop Sako envisions reconciliation and cooperation with Iraq’s Muslims, Christians throughout the region are engaged in interfaith dialogue, to promote a culture of peaceful relations and to protect against sectarian strife. One such example is the Arab Group for Muslim-Christian Dialogue. In 2001, it adopted a covenant called ‘Dialogue and Coexistence: An Arab Muslim–Christian Covenant’. In its text, it reads, in part:

The citizens of the united nation, both Muslim and Christian, must join in dialogue and work together to address internal issues and to solve … problems. … Muslim–Christian dialogue … sets out fully aware of the dangers in the argument that ‘bloody frontiers’ divide Christianity and Islam worldwide. This is an argument based on the notion of the clash of civilisations, masking with a religious patina western plans for domination. Over against this, on the world stage, Arab Muslim–Christian dialogue intends to affirm a united Arab position, both Muslim and Christian, defending common Arab causes, first among which is the cause of Jerusalem. But a distinction must be made between Arab Muslim–Christian dialogue, and the dialogue between Arabs – Christians and Muslims – and other cultures, western and non-western.¹²

This covenant comes from a group that includes a variety of Christians from the various countries of the Middle East and their Muslim compatriots, as well as Druze. It is a group whose members meet regularly on issues of human rights, citizenship, tolerance and other relevant matters. Their positions reflect a regional awareness and involvement, and their statements promote justice and peace from the perspective of a group defined by their religious identity. Even so, they do not promote one community’s agenda over another’s, and their focus is on the common good. Their first major conference was on Jerusalem, in 1996, about which they wrote in their final statement:

We have taken our stand. We are committed to the cause of Jerusalem, and so we issue our call: We call upon Muslims and Christians the world over to take their stand for the legitimate rights of the Palestinians; We call upon all churches and all institutions and organisations in the Muslim world to adopt the liberation of Jerusalem as their highest priority…. In so far as we are able, we will be the united voice of Jerusalem…. We will work together, Muslims and Christians, until Jerusalem becomes the city of reconciliation, justice, and peace for all.¹³

The importance of Jerusalem to Christians and Muslims – as well as Jews – throughout the Middle East, and indeed worldwide, cannot be understated.

Our third case, then, is perhaps the most complex of the three, that of the Palestinian Christians and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is one that involves many issues including security and sovereignty, borders, settlements, refugees, demography, the status of Jerusalem, access to holy sites, to Jerusalem, to natural resources such as water, to heritage resources such as religious sites, and free movement within and between the West Bank and Gaza. Put in these terms, the conflict is political and economic, between Israel and the Palestinians, but also involves neighbouring countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Often, however, the conflict is framed in terms of religious identity, a conflict between Jews and Muslims, as the majority of Israelis are, of course, Jewish, and the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are Muslim. This framing fits nicely with the paradigm of a clash of civilisations. Such a framing not only discounts, but also virtually eliminates from the picture, the place of non-Jewish Israelis who make up a full quarter of the Israeli population, most of whom are Palestinian by heritage. Some of those, of course, are Christian; they identify themselves as Israeli Palestinian Christians. It also glosses over the presence of Palestinian Christians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. While their percentage is a low 2 per cent, and is decreasing in relative size, their numbers remain in the 130,000 to 150,000 range. To frame the conflict in religious terms, then, marginalises quantitatively and qualitatively significant segments of the respective populations.

To complicate matters, some accept the religious framework of the conflict but recognise the presence of Palestinian Christians. This approach has led to the false expectation that the Christian community is somehow removed from the conflict and that it can therefore play a mediating role. When outsiders assert that Palestinian Christians are not located in the conflict, that they might serve as a bridge of reconciliation, this only serves to deny their identity and their suffering, now and historically. After all, they were also affected by Al-Nakba and Al-Naksa – the events of 1948 which resulted in large-scale dispossession and created a massive refugee population of more than three quarters of a million, and of 1967, which resulted in further refugee populations and the occupation of land which continues to this day. Palestinian Christians can, and do, play a peacemaking role, but their Palestinian identity squarely locates them in the conflict.

The impact of this sometimes deliberate misrepresentation is serious. For Israelis to separate the Palestinian Christian community from the Palestinian community as a whole, to treat them in a quietly preferential way as against Palestinian Muslims – by facilitating their passage at checkpoints, by granting permits for movement or travel, or by dealing more favourably with Christian institutions – Israel may attempt to mollify the global Christian community who have concerns for Christian sisters and brothers in Palestine (and for the situation of Palestinians generally) and thus reduce international attention to Palestinian grievances. It also may attempt to generate Palestinian Muslim hostility toward Christians in an effort to divide the community against itself. Likewise, if Palestinian Muslims were to regard Palestinian Christians as somehow separate, denying their Palestinian identity and cutting them off from the larger society, they risk alienating them and pushing them to emigrate, thus reducing their presence further. If played out to its logical conclusion, such a reduction in Christian presence could lead to a true dynamic of Jewish–Muslim conflict, compounding the Israeli-Palestinian national political framing with a religious one.

There are several categories of Christians who are involved in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, both global and local. One category of non-local Christians involved in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are what are sometimes referred to as the ecumenical Churches, including Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, United Churches and others. Many of these Churches trace their own involvement in the Middle East back to the eighteenth-century missionary movements. In most cases, their original missionaries, who spread across the region from Turkey to Lebanon and Syria, Palestine and Egypt to Iraq and Iran, would have been considered evangelical, although Ussama Makdisi argues they were not Christian Zionists because they were more focused on the conversion of Muslims than of Jews. Moreover, they did not seek the ingathering of Jews for the purpose of bringing about Armageddon.¹⁴ These churches helped form churches in the region through their mission activities, Churches such as the Synod of the Nile of the Presbyterian Church of Egypt, the Union of Armenian Evangelical Churches in the Near East, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land, and the various Episcopal dioceses of the Middle East. Most of their faithful were originally Orthodox Christian, ready for a reformation of their own Churches. Exposure to the Protestantism of the missionaries resulted in the establishment of the new Churches.

These Churches, therefore, define their concern for the Middle East in terms of their tie to 2,000 years of Christian history, 200 years of mission history, relationships – some organic and others through partnership – with the local Churches, and their concern for peace and justice. As a result, these ecumenical Churches have tended to be sympathetic and supportive of the viewpoints of local Christians, and have been outspoken, especially since 1967, on issues of occupation, resolution of the refugee crisis, the status of Jerusalem, and borders. They have typically upheld international law and human rights, which they understand through their reading and interpretation of Christian scripture that tends to focus on the social gospel, justice, peace, service and human rights, and the dignity of all people.

A second group is the Premillennial Dispensationalists, more commonly known as, and who self-identify as, Christian Zionists. A movement among the evangelical community originating in the United Kingdom, and concentrated heavily today in the United States, Christian Zionism is a theology that reads the texts of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles in such a way as to understand that the Second Coming of Christ depends on certain events or dispensations. These include the ingathering of the whole Jewish community into the lands of biblical Israel. Without going into the longer theological explanation, the movement supports the policies of the modern State of Israel to control as much of the land as possible, in order to bring about Armageddon. At that time, faithful Christians will be saved, and all the rest will be condemned for eternity. The theology is at first glance friendly to Jews who seek the complete redemption of biblical Israel, but is actually quite anti-Semitic, as it uses the return of the Jews to Israel to bring about the Rapture. Christian Zionists are known for wielding political and financial influence: their organisational and mobilising ability to lobby in Washington, DC, thus having an impact on US foreign policy in a way that does not promote peace between Palestinians and Israelis; their readiness to understand the so-called war on terror as being fought in the Middle East, against Islam, with Israel on the front line; and their lack of meaningful recognition of the presence, rootedness and grievances of faithful Palestinian, and Arab, Christians. Christian Zionists, therefore, are one Christian category involved in the conflict, seeing themselves as promoting the ultimate good of the eschaton through unconditional support for Israel.

Palestinian Christians fall into three subgroups: the diaspora community, Israeli Palestinian Christians, and those of the Occupied Territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian Christians living in diaspora include emigrants who have integrated in to their new homes and who have citizenship, and refugees among the larger Palestinian refugee community. Of the Palestinian Christian diaspora, it has been said that there are more Bethlehem Christians living in Sydney, Australia, than there are in Bethlehem itself. Israeli Palestinian Christians make up approximately 2.5 per cent of the Israeli population today and have been marginalised as a minority within a minority within a minority – Palestinian Christians living among the Palestinian Israeli community, which is a minority with regard to the majority Jewish Israeli community. As a result, they have faced the same problems as Arab Israelis due to Israeli discrimination of Arab Israelis. To some extent this arises within the Palestinian Israeli community also, illustrated during the conflict over the construction of a mosque in Nazareth in the late 1990s, next to the Church of the Annunciation. Members include Archbishop Elias Chacour, recognised globally as a voice and strong advocate for peace and justice.

The Palestinian Christian community living under occupation in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza number fewer than 2 per cent of the overall population, but share the same circumstances of occupation as Palestinian Muslims. They are concentrated in the urban areas, such as Jerusalem, Ramallah and the so-called Christian Triangle of Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. The Christian leadership has been particularly active in advocacy, the people have become more active through the recent grass-roots campaign of the Palestinian Christian community as presented in their Kairos document, and the community has been extensively involved in social service work benefitting the entire Palestinian population.¹⁵

There is not enough time to quote at length the many statements issued by the heads of Churches based in Jerusalem, but the ecumenical witness of the Greek Orthodox, the Syrian, Coptic and Armenian Orthodox, the Latin Catholic, and Anglican and Lutheran heads of Churches has been impressive. Since 1988, they have issued together more than sixty-eight joint statements on a variety of issues they and their faithful face together. These statements include pastoral letters calling for joint prayer and very political statements. They have spoken extensively against the occupation, violations of human rights by Israel, and against Christian Zionism. They have written to international political leaders to enjoin efforts to promote peace. They have written to the international Christian community to draw attention to the situation of Palestinians. They have been tireless in their efforts. Melanie May identifies two strands connecting the statements:

The first is the persistent, and ever more urgent, appeal to the international community [to] stand in solidarity with Christian sisters and brothers in the Holy Land … for prayer, for presence, and for pressure on governments and the United Nations … for assistance and for advocacy.

The second strand is:

hope born of acts of resistance and acts of solidarity…. The heads of churches have bor[ne] public witness to the words of their statements through prayer, fasting, joining boycotts, organising relief convoys, closing churches in protest, and ringing bells on occasions of crisis and at times of celebration.¹⁶

To complement this leadership role, the Palestinian Christian people launched Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth in December 2009. The document is a theological document that states: ‘We believe in a Good and Just God’, and ‘[o]ur hope remains strong’. In the Kairos document, Palestinian Christians express their faith in God and their expectation for a better future. They identify several signs of hope including Christian presence and ecumenical witness, interfaith dialogue, the perseverance of generations and the continuity of memory, and the determination to overcome resentment and be prepared for reconciliation when justice has been restored. They state that the Church’s mission is to pray, serve and be prophetic, speaking for the oppressed, proclaiming the ‘Kingdom of God, a kingdom of justice, peace and dignity’. Members of the Church must demonstrate love to friends and enemies, but resist evils, including the occupation, the conditions and reality of which they describe.

The Kairos document speaks to Palestinians and Israelis – Muslims, Christians, and Jews – saying: ‘Our word is … of hope, patience, and steadfastness’; ‘This is a time of repentance’; ‘Our numbers are few, but our message is great and important. Our land is in urgent need of love. Our love is a message to the Muslim and to the Jew, as well as to the world’. They address the churches of the world with an expression of gratitude for their solidarity, inviting them to visit and see, and imploring them to speak truth about the occupation. They address the international community of nations, calling them to end double standards and to consider sanctions. And they speak to Jewish and Muslim religious leaders reminding them of a common ‘obligation to defend the oppressed and the dignity God has bestowed on them’. They conclude:

In the absence of hope, we cry out our cry of hope…. We believe in God, good and just [and that] God’s goodness will finally triumph…. We will see here ‘a new land’ and ‘a new human being’, capable of rising up in the spirit to love each one of his or her brothers and sisters.¹⁷

Tens of hundreds of Palestinians have logged on to this document on the web page, which also features a letter of support from the heads of Churches of Jerusalem, and statements of support from Churches all over the world.¹⁸ This is an example of strident advocacy based on the belief that peace cannot come without justice and truth.

A few concluding observations:

1 Christians in the Middle East represent a vibrant and vital community of witness, despite political, social and economic challenges.

2 Each context is different. Christians in Egypt and Iraq do not face the same challenges and they live in different contexts. Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian Christians, likewise, all have unique circumstances that inform their efforts and witness. The nature of the conflicts they each face is different–local political, global political, religious, war or occupation – and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not a dominant daily reality for many of them. As a result, their responses should be understood in relation to their contexts.

3 It is a common expectation among global Christians that Middle Eastern Christians, in situations of conflict, should play a peacemaking or mediating role. That is not always possible, since in some cases – as discussed in this chapter – the Christian community is located in the conflict. Such efforts and calls for reconciliation as Salim J. Munayer’s and Naim Ateek’s are therefore especially notable. Reconciliation, of course, involves truth telling.

4 Religion is perhaps the main component of identity in the Middle East. Historic, national, regional and other aspects of identity complement this identity. Religious identity does influence how social interactions take place. Bishops and patriarchs in the Middle East are authoritative not only in the religious realm, but also in the social and political.

5 Christians living in situations of comfort or peace sometimes expect all Christians and Churches to be prophetic in their witness and presence. Again, such a role is not always possible due to political realities and other sensitivities that would put the Christian community in jeopardy.

6 In the Middle East, there are times when Christians are the victim of conflict. Nonetheless, they carry on with their lives and their social witness. They seek support from Christians worldwide for their work and presence, but not to be treated as victims. The expectation of the need for outside protection, and its provision, can have a positive impact, but can often lead to negative reverberations. The cases of Christians in the Middle East illustrate this, as outside patronage can lead to false association with outside political interest, and threats against them as ‘proxies’, especially for the West and interventionist policies.

7 The Christians of the Middle East can and do play an important bridging role, closing the gap in understanding between the Middle East and beyond. They help to educate those in the West, with whom they have ties, about their presence and witness, their context and the issues they face. They do identify with the global Christian community, as well as with their own countries and societies, but often struggle to disassociate themselves from Western policies.

8 The global community, especially the global Christian community, must expend efforts to learn more about the presence and situations of Christians in the Middle East, as well as their interactions with their neighbours of other faiths. Such learning can impact engagement with the Middle East and Islam, through a greater understanding of the way Middle Eastern Christians have managed the complexities and sensitivities of such interrelationships. In the words of Patriarch Hazim, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, based in Damascus: ‘We need each other as incarnate brothers and sisters – not as abstractions. Americans [and Westerners] must know there are human beings in the Middle East whose lives are at stake’, in the implementation of foreign policy.

Whether Egyptian president Nasser built the Mugamma’ building in Tahrir Square to hide the church behind it or not, there is another perspective that must be considered. Viewed from the other side of Shaikh Rihan Street, and the open courtyard outside Qasr ad-Doubara Evangelical Church, the large Mugamma’ is a physical reality that is also a symbolic presence, one that may be helpful. For the church, the Mugamma’ helps not to draw attention to it, and in some ways may offer a degree of protection. In Egypt, the government indeed provides guards for its churches. Christians in the Middle East are united by their pride in their history, which dates back to the time of Jesus and the first Christian missionaries, and their continuing active witness in the societies in which they are native. At the same time, they often do not want to draw unnecessary or excessive attention to their presence. The Mugamma’, in this respect, allows this church to continue to worship and work without that attention, offering some protection from view, especially when the potential for conflict exists, and is sometimes manifest. Christians in the Middle East face many challenges, but respond in faithful, authentic and sometimes unexpected ways.

Postscript – October 2013

In the two and a half years since this keynote address was delivered, there have been some significant developments that merit attention, while some contexts remain disturbingly status quo. The conference was held in the weeks following the Tunisian and Egyptian protests that resulted in the removal of the respective presidents, and while one chapter in those political and social histories had come to an end, the so-called Arab Spring had more in store.

For Egypt generally, and for Egyptian Christians especially, the interim has been tumultuous. In the wake of the protests in January–February 2011, there was hope that sectarian tension would be healed. By October 2011, though, a church in Aswan had been destroyed, and Christians demonstrated at Maspero (the headquarters of the Egyptian Radio and Television Union, in Cairo) in protest at the lack of official recognition of the crime and absence of investigation. The Maspero demonstration was to become deadly when protesters were attacked by security forces and the army. Following parliamentary elections (November 2011–January 2012) in which the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won a plurality of seats with 42 per cent of the vote, and the subsequent presidential elections (May 2012) in which Mohamed Morsi was elected with 52 per cent, the period was marked by an ‘Ikhwanisation’ or ‘Brotherhood-isation’ of Egyptian political institutions, including the process of modifying the constitution. Supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood held high hopes that ‘Islam would be the solution’, according to its slogan. But it appeared as if the experiment was failing – economically, politically and socially, with national unity suffering immensely. These failures led to the 2013 efforts of the Tamarrud – or rebellion – campaign which gathered upwards of twenty-two million signatures to petition for the removal of Morsi – more than the number of people who voted for him in the elections a year earlier. This movement culminated in the 30 June demonstrations of more than twenty million Egyptians nationwide, and the 3 July ouster of Morsi by the military, and after a rather short-term, but impactful, period of rule.

For many, the military leadership’s action was a response to the will of the people which has rescued Egypt from a path that was leading nowhere; or worse, toward the ruin of the country and possible civil war. It was hailed by religious leadership, including the Coptic Orthodox patriarch, Pope Tawadros II, and the Shaikh of al-Azhar, both of whom appeared with Major General ‘Abd al-Fattah Sisi when he made the announcement on television. The result was disastrous and tragic, with the atrocious killing of more than 600 people and widespread destruction, including attacks on Christians, churches, Christian institutions and Christian-owned property and businesses. The July and August violence of 2013 included widespread targeting of Christians and churches, partly because of the visible support Pope Tawadros lent to the military appropriation of power and removal of Morsi. At one level, the crisis has been portrayed as sectarian, with Christians in the anti-Morsi camp, and Muslims in the pro-Morsi camp. This perception does not take into account the many Muslims who protected Christians, churches and Christian property against violent Morsi supporters; nor does it account for the great many moderate Muslims who opposed the direction of the Brotherhood’s programme, as witnessed by the success of the Tamarrud campaign. It is very uncertain what the future of Christian–Muslim relations are in Egypt at this moment, but much work remains.

The major development for Palestinians was the recognition of Palestine as an observer at the United Nations in November 2012. Christian Palestinians, like most Palestinians living in occupied Palestinian territories, welcomed the recognition as a positive step, and participated in the public celebrations the evening of the vote. At the same time, the whole Palestinian community recognised that such progress cannot be a substitute for tangible improvements on the ground, where Israel has continued to build and expand settlements, maintain a system of control on movement and access, and persist in exerting control over all of Jerusalem. In this context, Kairos Palestine has continued to have global influence, and has morphed from a document to a movement of advocacy and awareness raising.

For Iraqi Christians, the context of their life and work remains unstable and insecure. While the withdrawal of US military personnel from Iraq was complete by December 2011, the situation there is still challenging, with continuing violence and disruption of daily life. The crisis in Syria has further complicated the Iraqi context. A portion of the 1.5 million Iraqis who fled to Syria following the 2003 invasion were Christian. With the civil war raging in Syria, many Iraqi refugees in Syria attempted to return to Iraq – among them Christians. While Iraq is no less stable, remaining in Syria was seen as a less advantageous option, spurring return migration.

It is worth noting the situation of Syria’s Christians in this postscript. At the time of the conference in March 2011, protests in Syria were just beginning, and were still peaceful. In May 2011, they turned violent and since then have devolved into a fully-fledged – and tragic – civil war, increasingly understood in sectarian terms. The Christian population of Syria was about 10 per cent before the war, but with more than one third of Syria’s population of about twenty-one million having been displaced – two million of whom have registered as refugees in neighbouring countries – it would be quite difficult to estimate the current demographics. Christians, as a minority community, have enjoyed freedom of worship and religious expression under the current and former Asad regimes, and during the crisis are assumed to be supportive of the regime – guilty by association. The opposition movement is comprised of a conglomeration of organisations and groups, some secular and some Islamist. In September 2013, some of the Islamist groups of the opposition broke from the others and exclaimed that their goal is a state based on Islamic law. While Christian opinion and engagement in the conflict and how to resolve it is diverse, the largest portion of the community is caught in the middle and, like Syrians more generally, simply want the conflict to end. The Churches of Syria struggle to maintain their community, while at the same time participate in efforts to provide humanitarian relief to the many displaced Syrians, regardless of sect, as an expression of their faith and witness. This is an especially difficult and complex crisis with no end in sight. The Christians of Syria face a very uncertain future and a daunting present.

Events of the past two and a half years have perhaps accentuated the sectarian aspects of conflict in the Middle East, at least at some level. While sectarianism cannot be the sole analytical lens through which to view regional conflicts, it is certainly a significant factor, and one that is ever apparent to the communities themselves. Middle Eastern Christians – be they Egyptian, Palestinian, Iraqi or Syrian – continue to be a resilient and steadfast presence, despite historic challenges. Their authentic witness to their faith in their unique national contexts demonstrates that reliance and steadfastness.

Notes

  1 Agence France-Presse (2011).

  2 Makari (2011c).

  3 Makari (2011a).

  4 Makari (2011b).

  5 Makari (2011d).

  6 Morrow and Al-Omrani (2011).

  7 Ismail (2011).

  8 Hourani (1983: 356–357).

  9 Meeting with Patriarch Hazim at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East in Damascus, Syria, July 2006.

10 World Council of Churches (2010).

11 Sakko (n.d.).

12 Arab Working Group on Muslim-Christian Dialogue (2001: 21–23).

13 Ibid., Preface, 9.

14 Makdisi (2010: 113–115).

15 Patriarchs and Heads of Churches, Jerusalem (2009).

16 May (2010: 141–142).

17 Patriarchs and Heads of Churches, Jerusalem (2009).

18 Ibid.

9 ‘The crescent and the cross are the marks on my hands’

The performance of Palestinian unity amid political fragmentation

Alain Epp Weaver

From the gate of al-Aqsa the herald cries:

‘The crescent and the cross are the marks on my hands!’

God is greater than the enemies

Who occupy the Dome of the Rock and crucify us.

Father Manuel Musallam, 8 September 1993¹

With this rhetorical flourish the Palestinian Roman (Latin) Catholic priest, Manuel Musallam, began a speech on 8 September 1993 before an overwhelmingly Muslim and male crowd of thousands of Palestinians gathered in the outdoor courtyard of the United Nations-run school in the Jenin refugee camp. A long-time activist within Fatah, Musallam had been tapped by Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) leaders in the Jenin district to give the closing speech at a rally aimed to consolidate Palestinian support for the just-announced Declaration of Principles between the PLO and the State of Israel. Musallam was preceded by two speakers at the rally. First up was Sari Nusseibeh, an Oxford-trained philosopher from one of Jerusalem’s most prominent families; his dry, analytical discourse on the necessity of peace received scattered, polite applause. Next came a leader of the Jenin shabiba (Fatah youth), who gave a short, passionate defence of the Declaration of Principles, arguing that gaining a foothold in Gaza and Jericho would be but an initial step in an eventual reclamation of all of Mandate Palestine and the return of all refugees: the crowd received his speech more enthusiastically than Nusseibeh’s, but the mood in the audience was nevertheless somewhat restless. Finally, Musallam, dressed in the black overcoat he wore only on special occasions, ascended to the podium amid chants of ‘al-Ab Manuel, al-Ab Manuel!’ (Father Manuel, Father Manuel!). The audience, led by the shabiba, interrupted almost every other sentence of Musallam’s speech with loud and sustained applause, culminating in an ovation lasting several minutes at the end, as Musallam concluded his oration as dramatically as he had begun: ‘If I forget thee, O Palestinian Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning’.

In this study, I analyse public performances of Palestinian nationalist identity by Musallam, with particular focus on this 1993 Jenin speech and on public letters written from Gaza in 2009. Through this speech and these letters one can chart a trajectory stretching from an optimistic embrace by mainstream Palestinian nationalism of the Oslo Accords with Israel to a growing pessimism about the viability of a two-state solution characteristic of contemporary Palestinian politics, a trajectory which has run parallel to the increased territorial and political fragmentation of the Palestinian national body. Musallam continues constructively to perform Palestinian national unity during the post-Oslo period, but that unity has become increasingly aspirational as the bifurcating movements of Israeli settlements, road networks, walls and fences contribute to the disintegration of traditional forms of Palestinian nationalism.

Oslo as threat: rallying to defend Fathawi nationalism

At the time Musallam gave his 1993 speech in Jenin, he had served for over two decades as the parish priest for the village of Zababdeh. Located ten kilometers south of Jenin, Zababdeh is the only village north of Nablus in the West Bank with a predominantly Christian population.² The economic base of the village has traditionally been and continues to be agriculture, with most families cultivating olives, chickpeas, okra and tobacco. Founded in 1834 by three Christian families settling on land sold to them by the two largest Muslim clans of the Jenin district, Zababdeh today numbers approximately 3,500 inhabitants, of whom around two thirds are Christians. Zababdeh’s Christians belong to the Latin (Roman Catholic), Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Anglican communions.³ Zababdeh’s founding families all belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church, but with the establishment of the Latin mission in the village in 1883, Orthodox dominance began to wane.⁴ Interreligious relations in the village tend to be strong; in the years I lived in Zababdeh (1992–1995) and made frequent visits to friends in the village (1995–1996, 1999–2006) I only heard of a handful of conflicts which Christians cast as Christian–Muslim conflicts, and in each case the conflicts involved accusations by Christians that Muslim youth had made inappropriate and disrespectful comments to young Christian women – comments occasionally leading to physical altercations as Christian youth mobilised to defend the perceived slight to the honour of the women in question (and by extension on the honour of their families).

The Latin parish centre, with its modern church building and school, dominates the village landscape. Founded in the late nineteenth century, the Latin school, for most of its existence, served an almost exclusively Christian population. With the arrival of Musallam to the village in 1974–1975, however, the school gradually began to attract Muslim students from the surrounding towns and cities: today nearly a third of the students commute from Jenin and surrounding Muslim villages to the school, which has developed a reputation as a centre of educational excellence.⁵ Musallam, routinely referred to by Christians and some Muslims in everyday interactions as Abuna (‘our father’), had grown up in the Christian village of Bir Zeit near Ramallah and had studied for the priesthood at the Latin seminary in Beit Jala, next to Bethlehem. He was sent to Jordan in the late 1960s for his first parish postings in Zarka (where local Muslims referred to him as the amir, or prince, of the Christians) and in ‘Anjara, where Musallam developed ties with Palestinian fedayeen in the country; his association with Palestinian guerrillas led to his expulsion from the country by the pro-Hashimite Jordanian military as part of the so-called Black September operation by the Jordanians against the PLO fighters between 1970 and 1971.⁶

The Latin Patriarchate then assigned Musallam to serve as the parish priest of Jenin. From 1971 until 1975 Musallam held Masses at the church’s compound in the heart of the city and made frequent pastoral trips to the Christian families in villages around Jenin such as Burqin and Dayr Ghazzalah. During these years, Musallam became a fixture within the cultural and political landscape of the Jenin district, and quickly rose to prominence as a Jenin-area Fatah leader.⁷ Muslims belonging to the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) factions in Jenin would sometimes claim that in Jordan Musallam had been close to the leftist parties, a claim echoed by numerous Christian families in Zababdeh, where the leftist factions were disproportionately represented (as they were in other West Bank towns with a large Christian population, such as Ramallah and Beit Sahour).⁸ Musallam’s extensive political contacts built up the trust necessary for educated Muslim families to start sending their children to a Christian school upon Musallam’s transfer to the Zababdeh parish in 1975. His political involvements also caught the attention of the Israeli military governor for the Jenin district, who routinely demanded that Musallam come in to visit with him and threatened Musallam with arrest when he refused.⁹

Active within Fatah and within broader Palestinian politics for his entire adult career, Musallam thus stands as a particularly colourful representative of Christian immersion within Palestinian nationalist politics. Among the Christian laity who have represented the PLO over the years, one could highlight Kamal Nasir (member of the PLO Executive Committee); Ghazi Khoury (PLO representative to the Netherlands in the 1970s); Ibrahim Souss (PLO representative to France in the 1970s); Zouhdi Tarazi (PLO representative to the United Nations in the 1980s); and Afif Safieh (PLO representative in numerous postings over the years, including Great Britain and the United Nations).¹⁰ Some Christian clergy assumed prominent roles within the nationalist movement. Anglican priest Elia Khoury, expelled in 1969 to Jordan, joined the Executive Committee of the PLO, while Roman Catholic priest Ibrahim Iyad served as a member of the Palestinian National Council.

In the autumn during which the PLO and the State of Israel released the Declaration of Principles negotiated in secret in Oslo, Norway, I had just begun my second year of teaching at the Latin school in Zababdeh. In early September 1993, Musallam asked if I wanted to accompany him and Abu Jamil, one of the school’s Muslim teachers and one of the village’s top Fatah leaders, to al-Najah University in Nablus for a rally. At this rally, Yasser Arafat would address the crowd via phone hook-up concerning rumours of a Gaza–Jericho First agreement. On the drive to Nablus, Musallam was despondent, asking how decades of Palestinian struggle could be traded in for autonomy over Gaza and Jericho. The phased approach of the Declaration of Principles and the Oslo Accords – of accepting quasi-sovereignty in one part of historic Palestine as a stage toward greater sovereignty in the land – appeared, from the perspective of the so-called rejectionist front in the PLO (PFLP, DFLP and others) and from the viewpoint of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which had begun to grow in political strength during the First Intifada and thus to challenge the PLO, as the abandonment of the PLO’s traditional commitment to the total liberation of Palestine.¹¹ Musallam and others attending the rally quite understandably viewed the talk of Gaza–Jericho First as a seismic shift within Fatah politics (even if the Declaration of Principles was arguably the culmination of a shift within Fatah’s ideology that had been building for over a decade).¹² The rally was held in the university courtyard. Dignitaries (who included Musallam, Abu Jamil and, by extension, me) sat in chairs, while members of the Fatah youth movement (the shabiba) set up banners around the edges of the courtyard proclaiming ‘Gaza–Jericho First!’ and praising Fatah and Arafat. Introductory speakers began with several Fatah leaders from Nablus lauding Arafat and Fatah, but the gathering fizzled as the promised phone hook-up with Arafat failed to materialise. On the drive back to Zababdeh, Musallam and Abu Jamil were grim, barely speaking a word.

In the ensuing days, the Declaration of Principles, which set the agenda for the future Oslo negotiations, became official. During those same days, Musallam underwent a public change of heart concerning the Gaza–Jericho First plan – an apparently genuine change of heart, albeit probably not without a healthy dose of realpolitik behind it. On 8 September 1993, Fatah leaders in the Jenin district organised a rally in support of Gaza–Jericho First, Fatah and Arafat’s leadership. The Jenin rally was one of many rallies throughout the West Bank and Gaza aimed at mobilising massive popular support for the recently announced agreement. It was a mobilisation aimed at countering worries that the PLO leadership ‘outside’ the territories had failed to capitalise on the perceived achievements of the ‘insider’-led intifada against Israel’s military occupation. The Jenin rally was less focused on countering Fatah’s political competitors (e.g. Hamas and the leftist factions) given Fatah’s traditional, overwhelming strength in the northern West Bank (opposition to Fatah is minimal in the Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, Jericho and Qalqilya districts); rather, the rally aimed to solidify support for the Declaration of Principles within Fatah.

Mapping Christian–Muslim solidarity amid tragic exile and heroic resistance

Musallam’s speech can be roughly divided into five main sections. He began by narrating a history of the Palestinian nationalist struggle, calling upon exemplary figures of the movement and charting a nationalist geography. From there he proceeded to the argument that the nationalist struggle has culminated in the peace process, and that the peace process in general and the Gaza–Jericho First agreement in particular represent a defeat of Israel’s dream of conquest. Quoting from the Qur’an and celebrating Arab culture, Musallam then urged the audience to lend its support to the peace process by affirming the leadership of Fatah and Yasser Arafat. After further exhortation to his listeners to support peace and leave the armed struggle behind, Musallam called on the audience not to allow differences of opinion regarding the peace process to fracture Palestinian unity. He then concluded with praise of Arafat and a flurry of biblical quotations and allusions calling the Palestinian people to a new beginning in Gaza and Jericho, a new beginning whose trajectory will reach its zenith in Jerusalem.

After his initial poetic description of the Palestinian nation as a body bearing the marks of the crescent and the cross on his hands, Musallam proceeded to narrate a history of Palestinian struggle against overwhelming odds. As he established his narrative, privileged actors and places rose to the fore. Exhorting his audience to ‘lift up your heads’ (irfa’ raasak), Musallam defined the Palestinian people as ‘the people of the trenches and guns’ (sha‘b al-banadiq wa al-fanadiq, or resistance fighters); ‘the granite stones’ (the stone-throwing youth of the intifada; those who build the nation); ‘proud Palestine’s martyrs’; and ‘tents and arms of steel’ (refugees). In sum, the Palestinian people were defined by Musallam by their continual struggle.¹³ The privileged people in this nationalist narrative are those who have fought against occupation and erasure, those who exhibit the characteristic of bunduqiyya (‘the culture of the gun’) central to what Laleh Khalili has identified as the heroic narrative of Palestinian existence.¹⁴ To be sure, guerrilla fighters, activist youth and martyrs occupy a place of honour in this pantheon of resistance figures, befitting the PLO’s historical emphasis that ‘[a]rmed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine’.¹⁵ Alongside sha‘b al-banadiq wa al-fanadiq, however, stand refugees, farmers, mothers and children, all additionally portrayed by Musallam as paradigmatic figures of struggle: they display the value of sumud, or steadfastness, by which ordinary Palestinian experience is incorporated into the heroic narrative of resistance.¹⁶ Certain persons, such as the feda’i (guerrilla fighter, plural fedayeen) or the shahid (martyr, plural shuhada), might occupy privileged positions within the Palestinian imagination, but, when all of Palestinian history is narrated as a struggle, they become paradigmatic rather than exceptional in their resistance; not all Palestinians are fedayeen. However, through their own struggles, either as farmers on the land or as mothers bearing children for the future Palestine, all can imagine themselves as participants in the same nationalist narrative of struggle against overwhelming odds. Peasant farmers (fellahin) in particular assume a significant position within Palestinian nationalist iconography and discourse, highlighting the intimate, affective knowledge Palestinians have of the land from which they have been uprooted and to which they still cling.¹⁷

The shared experience of heroic resistance amid dispossession highlighted by Musallam in his Jenin speech was also commemorated and cultivated in Christian religious ceremonies led by Musallam in Zababdeh, in which Christian rites inscribed the experiences of the village’s Christian families into nationalist terms. Masses on feast days would typically commemorate Naim Khader, son of one of the village’s smaller families killed by the Israeli Mossad while serving as PLO representative to Belgium in the 1980s, along with two Christian youth killed when an Israeli jeep ran into their car in the Jalazoun refugee camp. At these special masses, the gathered congregation would remember its martyrs by a member of the congregation bringing a granite stone to the altar as the priest intoned: ‘In memory of Zababdeh’s martyrs and all of Palestine’s martyrs’.¹⁸

The struggle to which Musallam referred, of course, implies that there are two sides in the conflict over the land of Palestine. The main other against which the Palestinians contend is eventually named as Israel in Musallam’s speech: ‘Today began the fall of Israel’, he states. For the first part of the speech, however, the other of the Palestinian struggle is left unnamed. They systematically tried to eradicate the Palestinian people. They ‘tried to annihilate us’, ‘buried us alive’, ‘erased our heritage’, ‘burned our tents’ and ‘scattered us with fierce winds to all parts of the earth’. These operations of erasure, however, have proven unsuccessful: ‘They occupied Palestine, but they didn’t occupy the Palestinian people’. They, of course, has as a primary referent the Zionist enemy, but the effect of not naming the they as Israeli initially creates a sense of an overwhelming array of forces (Zionist, Western, fellow Arab) lined up against the Palestinians.

Repeating the phrase ‘we fought them’ (qatalnahum), Musallam listed numerous geographical locations which he then valorised as sites of resistance. The place names fall into seven broad categories: refugee camps, sites of massacres, destroyed villages, religious shrines, still extant Palestinian towns and villages, cities of Palestinian diaspora, and prisons. A brief description of some of the places invoked by Musallam outlines the contours of the geographical landscape which the Palestinian nationalist narrative creates and onto which it simultaneously unfolds.

1 Refugee camps feature in the list, such as Jalazoun, ‘Askar, Shati, Balata, Dheisheh. Naming refugee camps both evokes the Nakba of 1948 as well as brings to mind the fiercest battles against the occupation. The dispossession of 1948 remains a decisive event in the Palestinian imagination, prefiguring all subsequent dispossessions, e.g. Israeli occupation of Arab territories in 1967, land confiscation for Israeli settlements and the demolition of Palestinian homes by Israeli troops. Refugee camps function within Palestinian nationalist discourse as ‘memory areas, where the permanence of the homeland is registered in everyday life. Palestinians have created, in the space of the refugee camps, a temporal continuity’ in which they ‘feel at home’.¹⁹ As Rosemary Sayigh notes, Palestinian refugees are often portrayed as ‘more Palestinian’ than other Palestinians, their marginality constituting ‘a latent form of power’ within Palestinian nationalist discourse. Imagined constructions of Palestinian identity gain discursive power and authority by their rootedness in the refugee experience of deracination.²⁰

2 Massacres follow, including Kafr Kassem, Tel ez-Zaatar, Qibya, Deir Yassin, Sabra and Shatilla. Some of these places refer to massacres conducted solely by Israeli forces: the slaughter of scores of civilians in Deir Yassin during the 1948 war; the killing of forty-seven unarmed workers in the Israeli town of Kafr Kassem in 1956; and an Israeli cross-border raid into the West Bank town of Qibya in 1953 which killed over seventy.²¹ Others, like Sabra and Shatilla (1982) and Tel ez-Zaatar (1976), name massacres of thousands of Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon perpetrated by Lebanese Christian (Phalangist) forces with the implicit support of Israeli (Sabra and Shatilla) and Syrian (Tel ez-Zaatar) authorities.

3 Destroyed villages are mentioned: al-Khalsa and al-Lajjun were villages in the Hula and Marj ibn ‘Amr plains, respectively, both destroyed in 1948. Yalu, Bayt Nuba and Imwas were villages in the so-called Latrun salient directly adjacent to the 1949 Armistice Line (the Green Line) and at the entrance to the ‘Jerusalem corridor’: in the aftermath of the 1967 war, Israeli troops systematically razed the villages, expelling the inhabitants towards Ramallah. Imwas has special resonance for Palestinian Christians as a traditional site of the biblical Emmaus where Jesus encountered his disciples after his resurrection. These destroyed villages function as ‘sites of memory’ within an imagined geography of dispossession which provides ‘social cohesion and national identity’ for a Palestinian people uprooted from their land.²²

4 Religious shrines arise as symbols of the struggle, sites such as the walls of Jerusalem, al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (al-Qiyyama, literally ‘the Resurrection’). While the walls of Jerusalem are not religious shrines per se, they do evoke the glories of the Ottoman past and thereby signify Muslim attachment to Jerusalem. Al-Aqsa and the Holy Sepulchre, of course, name the most significant Muslim and Christian shrines in the Holy Land, al-Aqsa being the mosque where Muhammad prayed on his night journey to Jerusalem, and the Holy Sepulchre the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection. Placing religious shrines alongside refugee camps and destroyed villages as sites of Palestinian identity has the effect of relativising the importance of religious particularity in the constitution of Palestinian nationality; Islamic and Christian geography is thus not negated, but rather incorporated into a wider, nationalist geography.²³

5 Palestinian population centres still extant in Israel and the West Bank receive mention: Sulam is a small Palestinian village inside Israel south of Nazareth, while ‘Anze, Jenin, Misiliya and Qabatia are all villages, towns and cities in the northern West Bank.

6 Sites that highlight the PLO in diaspora are mentioned. Beirut and Tunis are the Lebanese and Tunisian capitals where the PLO made its headquarters after being driven from Jordan in the early 1970s. Musallam most likely included Brussels as an indirect way of acknowledging the assassination of Naim Khader, a Palestinian Christian from Zababdeh who was killed by the Mossad while serving as PLO representative in Belgium.

7 Finally prisons feature in the list: Ansar, Jneid, Dimona and Fara’ were all major Israeli prisons which held Palestinians arrested and administratively detained during the First Intifada. Fara’ closed after the arrival of the Palestinian Authority and the redeployment of Israeli troops to other parts of the West Bank. Prisons symbolise both familial separation as well as resistance. Including Dimona on this list also serves as a gesture toward Israel’s nuclear programme, housed in the southern Israeli city of Dimona.

Geographical markers, in the Palestinian nationalist imagination, inevitably evoke elements of the history of Palestinian struggle. Destroyed villages call to mind the Nakba of 1948, as do refugee camps. Prison names direct attention to past and present resistance to the occupation. A Palestinian town inside Israel reminds one of the continued separation of the Palestinian people. All the place names together create a history and geography which belong to all Palestinians, both Christians and Muslims. National unity is thus narrated through a shared history and a shared geography; particular religious elements (al-Aqsa, the Holy Sepulchre) stand as constitutive elements alongside others within this shared history and space.

Musallam concluded his speech with an appeal to the geographical marker of Palestinian nationalism par excellence, Jerusalem. In a nationalist modification of Psalm 137, Musallam proclaimed: ‘If I forget you, O Palestinian Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning’ (emphasis added). With this nationalist appropriation of Psalm 137:5, Musallam makes Palestinian nationalist cartography into the mirror and arguably the competitor of Zionist cartography. Returning to the Gaza–Jericho First agreement is but the initial step in a nationalist project of redemption to be completed only with the return to Jerusalem. The Declaration of Principles thus appears not as a threat to the aspirations of Palestinian nationalism but as the beginning of its fulfilment.

Constructing Palestinian Christian identity in the face of fragmentation

Musallam’s defence of the Gaza–Jericho First agreement, including his conviction that the peace process had brought an end to continued Zionist conquest, sheds light on the hopes many Palestinians felt in the autumn of 1993 – hopes that today have been dashed. Instead of the fulfilment of Palestinian aspirations for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the 22 per cent of Mandate Palestine consisting of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the past twenty years have witnessed the collapse of the peace process; unabated land and water confiscation and settlement construction by the Israeli authorities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; the erection of a ‘matrix of control’ within the Occupied Territories which severely limits Palestinian movement; and the construction of walls and fences inside the West Bank and around the Gaza Strip that divide Palestinians from each other and into increasingly isolated cantons (what some Palestinians, making an analogy with apartheid-era South Africa, call Bantustans).²⁴ The national unity for which Musallam called in his speech, meanwhile, has been severely tested, as the ever-increasing geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian nation has, not surprisingly, gone hand-in-hand not only with economic disintegration but also with sociopolitical fragmentation. During the Oslo years and beyond, Fatah progressively broke down into numerous competing groups and militias, with no coherent political platform or ideology to guide it.²⁵ Political fragmentation within the Gaza Strip accompanied the political separation of Gaza from the West Bank; this fragmentation has been most dramatically reflected in competition between Fatah and the Islamist Hamas movement for control over the political and religious fields.

In 1995, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem posted Musallam to Gaza not only to serve as the parish priest and to direct the parish school, but also to help represent the Church’s interests to the newly formed Palestinian Authority. A frequent guest at Arafat’s compound when Arafat lived in Gaza, and a frequent commentator on Palestinian television, Musallam quickly attained the respect in Islamic religious circles he had enjoyed in the Jenin district, with Muslim religious leaders routinely calling him shaykh Manuel.²⁶ Musallam also represented the Church at meetings with Hamas leaders, including in the wake of the assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin.²⁷ In Gaza, as in Zababdeh, Musallam oversaw Catholic schools to which prominent Muslim families sent their children; in Gaza that included children from families of all political factions, including Hamas.²⁸

In Gaza, Musallam had to face Hamas’s challenge to Fatah’s dominance more directly than he had had to in the Jenin district, where Hamas’s influence has always been minimal. This competition intensified with Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006 and then took a dramatic turn as Hamas staged a pre-emptive coup against Fatah in the Gaza Strip in June 2007. While the Hamas grip on power has remained relatively steady since its takeover of governmental structures in the Gaza Strip, the strength of political factions in general has waned, with a corresponding increase in clan loyalties, including the phenomenon of the rise of some clans affiliated with salafi streams within Islam sympathetic to al-Qa‘ida and critical of what they perceive as Hamas laxness in enforcing shari‘a and its readiness to consider a long-term hudna, or truce, with Israel.²⁹

Loren Lybarger has suggested that in the midst of this political fragmentation, ‘Palestinian Christians are no longer certain about where their collective fate rests. Some still hew to secularism and the secular-nationalist line, seeing no other realistic alternative. For others, the secular-nationalist future no longer seems a secure bet’.³⁰ Lybarger is certainly correct that many Christians were unnerved by Hamas’s recent demonstrations of power. That said, it would be more accurate to say, I believe, that Palestinian Christians share with Palestinian Muslims a deep uncertainty about the future of Palestinian nationalism broadly conceived, be it the Islamist nationalism of Hamas or the secular nationalism of Fatah, in the face of Israel’s successful, colonialist, ‘iron wall’ strategy that has erased the territorial preconditions for a viable Palestinian state.

The construction of Palestinian Christian identity has thus been affected just as other groups by recent political instability, and Christian leaders like Musallam have found themselves joining with the Hamas leadership to re-narrate Christian–Muslim unity and equality within the Palestinian nation. After a Fatah-affiliated militia threatened to attack churches in Gaza in protest against the Danish cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad, a threat most likely made to embarrass the newly elected Hamas government, Hamas leader Mahmoud az-Zahar stood with Fr Musallam in front of Gaza’s Catholic church, pledging to Musallam and the assembled Palestinian media that Hamas gunmen would protect the churches.³¹ When the Rosary Sisters School and convent were vandalised during the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007, Hamas and Fatah pointed the finger of blame at each other. In initial interviews following the vandalism, Musallam expressed contradictory assessments of the incident, sometimes suggesting that elements of Hamas were to blame, at other times pointing to third parties who hoped to draw Christians into the fray of the Hamas–Fatah conflict. One month later, Musallam met with Western reporters participating in a Hamas-organised tour of Gaza, telling them: ‘As Palestinians, we Christians live with Muslims, and we suffer with Muslims. We did not suffer from them. Hamas defends Christians as well as Muslims. We are not talking about a fanatical institution’.³² Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, Musallam insisted, had successfully put down voices in Hamas who wanted to subject Christians and Jews to dhimmi status.³³ Although Musallam stressed that he would always be aligned with Fatah, the events of 2006–2007 led him to see working for Fatah–Hamas reconciliation as the major remaining task of his life’s work.³⁴

Palestinian Christian identity today is thus constructed and performed amid the ongoing fragmentation of Palestinian society, and the ensuing competition of Hamas, Fatah and others for control of the Palestinian political and religious fields. For Musallam, this has meant primarily the continued rhetorical construction of Christian–Muslim unity within the framework of Palestinian nationalism, even as that project has been made more complex by Musallam’s additional role in attempting to bridge the Fatah–Hamas divide. In Gaza, Musallam continued to refer to Christians and Muslims as ‘one people’, and of Arab Palestinian culture as a ‘single civilisation with two religions, that of the Qur’an and that of the Gospel’.³⁵ While Musallam made references to job discrimination faced by Christians in Gaza or to how ‘Qur’anic culture’ stifles freedom of thought, such negative and critical observations are subjugated to the task of constructing Muslim–Christian solidarity through the narrative mapping of shared experiences of exile, dispossession and the violence of military occupation.³⁶ In the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in January 2009, the tragic narrative of Palestinian nationalism moved to the fore in Musallam’s writings. Together, Palestinian Christians and Muslims are like the man waylaid by robbers on the road to Jericho; the international community including the so-called Muslim and Christian worlds walk past the beaten Palestinian nation.³⁷ The suffering Palestinian national body bears the marks of the crucified Christ.³⁸ Together, Palestinian Christians and Muslims in Gaza are God’s people calling out to God for redemption.³⁹ Alongside the tragic narrative, however, the heroic narrative which shaped Musallam’s Jenin speech also surfaced in the form of exhortations to face the future with courage and bravery, even unto death. So, for example, Musallam defiantly proclaimed: ‘Between slavery and death there really is no choice, and if death is forced upon us we’ll have courage in our hearts to die honest, brave, and strong’.⁴⁰ Together, Christians and Muslims demand ‘justice, Jerusalem, and return for Palestinians’, even as the international community closes its ears to those cries.⁴¹

In Musallam’s Cast Lead-era letters, heroic resistance involves a critical reassessment of failed PLO strategies. Whereas in 1993 Musallam vigorously defended the Oslo Accords, by 2009 he had come to see them as deeply problematic. ‘All the negotiations have failed’, Musallam observed:

and we have reached a dead-end because we have accepted to follow a vague decision on the withdrawal from ‘territories occupied in 1967’. We accepted Gaza and Jericho first before we accepted Jerusalem and the settlements first; we accepted Oslo, the road map, the Tenet outlines and the Sharm el-Sheikh agreements instead of international resolutions and legitimacy.⁴²

Oslo’s critics, who had railed against the Accords for minimising the refugee issue at best and erasing it at worst, and who pilloried it for cutting off Palestinian refugees outside of the homeland from the political struggle, have been proven right, Musallam contended.⁴³ For Musallam, ‘occupation’ now meant the founding of the State of Israel, not simply Israel’s conquest of territories in 1967, as repeated references to sixty years of occupation (since the State of Israel’s founding in 1948) make clear.⁴⁴ The staged approach Musallam had accepted and defended in his 1993 Jenin speech has here given way to something closer to Fatah’s original focus on total liberation.

Musallam’s open letters during Operation Cast Lead thus reflect the fragmentation and confusion of contemporary Palestinian nationalism, a state shared by Palestinian Christians who in the past have inscribed their identities within the nationalist framework. The Oslo Accords represented a decisive challenge to the vision of total liberation originally championed by the Palestinian nationalist movement, standing as the culmination of movements within the PLO towards the embrace of a two-state solution as a substitute for the PLO’s traditional goal of establishing a unitary, secular, democratic state in all of Mandate Palestine. Musallam’s Jenin camp speech in 1993 exemplified the effort to reconstruct Palestinian national identity in the face of this new direction. However, with ongoing Israeli colonisation of the Occupied West Bank progressively erasing the territorial basis of the two-state solution, the Palestinian national movement finds itself at an impasse. Palestinian Christians, traditionally active in the construction of Palestinian nationalism, have responded to this impasse in multiple ways. Some have retreated from politics. Others have retreated into sectarian religious identities, mirroring the broader post-Oslo trend of the fragmentation of the Palestinian national body into regional or clan-based identities. Some cling to the two-state framework, despairing of any alternatives even as the likelihood of a two-state solution recedes from the horizon. And still others, like Musallam in his Cast Lead letters, seek to revive and reconstruct Palestinian nationalism by revisiting and critiquing the Oslo Accords as fundamentally flawed. The future of Palestinian nationalism may be murky, yet this much is clear: whatever form Palestinian nationalism takes in the coming years, one can expect Christians like Musallam to be vigorous actors in its formulation and construction.

Notes

  1 From an unpublished speech delivered by Father Manuel Musallam at the Jenin Camp, Occupied West Bank, on 8 September 1993. All translations from the Arabic are mine.

  2 For a history of Zababdeh, albeit one weighted heavily to the story of the Latin mission in the village, see the account by the official historian of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem: Medebielle (1974). A shorter account can be found in Hoade (1973: 693–694).

  3 Individual nuclear families in the village have also been influenced by Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist and Pentecostal missionaries, but no churches have been founded in the village.

  4 Colbi (1988: 124). For a discussion of the increase in Latin missions within Christian communities in the nineteenth century, see Pacini (1998: 261).

  5 For a discussion of how the Latin Patriarchate’s school system multiplies the Church’s influence well beyond what one would assume from the Church’s demographic scope, see O’Mahony (2003: 105).

  6 Musallam (2010: 78–90). All translations from the French are mine.

  7 Musallam publicly denies official membership within Fatah.

I never belonged to a political party. I had been asked to be a Fatah candidate in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. I refused. In Gaza Hamas has proposed that I become a minister. I opposed this with an absolute refusal. There was never a question for a single instant of leaving my Christ in order to follow Ismail Haniyeh or Mahmoud Abbas.

That said, with formal membership in Fatah illegal, it is very conceivable that Musallam could have never become an official member of Fatah, even as he developed close ties to Fatah: after all, Musallam concedes that ‘I was close to Fatah’ (ibid., 75, 180).

  8 While Musallam remained staunchly Fathawi throughout his career, he did make political connections with leftist leaders. Not only were many prominent Christians associated with groups like the PFLP, the DFLP and the Palestinian People’s Party (the Communists), the first Muslim family in Jenin to send their children to the Latin Patriarchate School in Zababdeh were DFLP. Furthermore, once in Gaza Musallam continued to reach out to leftist leaders, including holding a memorial at the Latin Patriarchate School of Gaza upon the death of PFLP leader George Habash (al-Hakim).

  9 Musallam refused to go willingly to meet with the Israeli military governor, as such a meeting could have led to perceptions of collaboration with the Israeli military authorities.

10 El-Assal (1999: 49, 93).

11 Article 21 of the Palestinian National Charter, for example, rejects all strategies that substitute for ‘total liberation’. See ‘The Palestinian National Charter: Resolutions of the Palestine National Council, July 1–17, 1968’ (2008).

12 Yezid Sayigh charts this shift within his magisterial study of Palestinian nationalism. The Oslo Accords exemplified the fact that ‘the discourse of total liberation, the strategies and tactics of armed struggle, and the accompanying organisational instruments and institutional forms had been displaced’; accordingly, ‘the transformation of the PLO from a national movement in exile to a governmental apparatus on its own soil signalled a fundamental shift in the nature and form of Palestinian politics’. See Sayigh, Y. (1997: 663). For some within Fatah (including the shabiba leader at the Jenin rally described below), a mini-state in part of the Occupied Territories represented the first step towards the total liberation of Palestine; for the PLO leadership, however, Gaza–Jericho First meant simply the first step toward a state in all of the Occupied Territories. For a discussion of the phased strategy, see ibid., (343). For Habash and other members of the rejectionist front, this transformation within Fatah meant the ‘abandonment of immutable historic rights’ (ibid., 22).

13 Zababdeh’s Christians had their own martyrs whom they commemorated at significant events. Naim Khader, a son of one of the village’s smaller families, was assassinated while serving as PLO representative in Belgium: while Israel never claimed responsibility for Khader’s death, Zebdawis took it for granted that the Mossad had carried out the killing. Two other youth from the village were killed in a car accident with an Israeli jeep early in the First Intifada. These young men were commemorated during the Catholic Mass on feast days such as Easter and Christmas and whenever Church dignitaries such as the patriarch visited the village. The gathered congregation would remember its martyrs by a member bringing a granite stone to the altar as the priest intoned: ‘In memory of Zababdeh’s martyrs and all of Palestine’s martyrs’. Such rituals were focused internally, for the shaping of the Palestinian Christian imagination.

14 In the heroic narrative, Khalili argues, ‘the iconic, literal, and figurative force of bunduqiyya resides in what is seen as the regenerative quality of violent resistance’ (2007: 216–217).

15 The Palestinian National Charter (2008). See Article 9.

16 Sumud ‘neither requires collective mobilisation, nor adherence to a larger ideology, but in its everydayness, it acknowledges the oft-ignored role of marginalised actors, foremost among them women, in holding the community together in desperate times’ (Khalili 2007: 224–225).

17 For the role of the peasant in Palestinian nationalist discourse, see Slyomovics (1998: xx); and Benvenisti (2000: 78).

18 For more on the transformation of religious ritual into nationalist ritual, see Drew Christiansen on the annual Palm Sunday procession as Palestinian nationalist march: Christiansen (2004: 324). See also Benedicty (1995) for an analysis of similar dynamics in a Lebanese Christian village.

19 Dorai (2000: 94).

20 Sayigh, R. (1998: 23). See also Issam Nassar, who explains that ‘the notion of a Palestinian collective identity, which emerged among the refugees and then dominated modern Palestinian national discourse, was essentially based on the refugee camp experience’ (2003: 45). Amal Jamal concurs that the figure of the refugee has become ‘the archetype of the Palestinian whether he/she lives in a refugee camp, in a rented apartment in Beirut or in a villa in Kuwait’ (2003: 86).

21 For an exhaustive and authoritative account of sixty-eight massacres of Palestinians carried out by Zionist forces during 1948, see Abdel Jawad (2007: 59–127). Abdel Jawad defines a massacre as:

the killing of unarmed civilians or combatants who have surrendered and who have come under the authority of the conquering force, by an armed military or pra-military force. Massacres also involve the use of lethal force in a variety of forms (terror attacks, aerial bombardment, ‘reprisals’, etc.) against civilians, unrelated to military necessity, but nevertheless occurring in the context of a total war and with the aim of producing ethnic cleansing.

(Ibid., 75)

22 Sa’di (2002: 195).

23 Bowman (1993: 431–460).

24 After attending the pro-Declaration of Principles rally on 8 September 1993, I met up with a student sympathetic to the PFLP at a café in the heart of Jenin next to the central bus station. As we watched the procession of cars and trucks filled with celebrating youth waving the banned Palestinian flag, my student sadly shook his head, unable to join in the celebration because he (like the Palestinian-American critic Edward Said, among others) was convinced that the Oslo process would prove to be a dead end. Sadly his scepticism has been proven justified. As John Collins observes: ‘In hindsight it is clear that the promise of Oslo – that it would end the Israeli occupation and pave the way for real Palestinian independence – was as much of a myth as its initial critics said it was’ (Collins 2004: 213).

25 Ibid., 227.

26 Musallam (2010: 152).

27 Ibid., 182, 186.

28 Ibid., 138.

29 See International Crisis Group (2007). See also Musallam (2010: 157).

30 Lybarger (2007: 804). Bernard Sabella echoes Lybarger when he writes of ‘the end of political ideology for a majority of Christians, as it relates specifically to old-established leaders. Christians exhibit a depoliticisation process more than the rest of the population’ (Sabella 2000: 386).

31 Musallam (2010: 184–185).

32 Butters (2007).

33 Musallam (2010: 185).

34 Ibid., 38. The Patriarchate moved Musallam from Gaza to Bir Zeit in April 2009, months after Operation Cast Lead, due to long-standing health problems. While the move constituted a quasi-retirement for Musallam from regularly priestly duties, he remains active in Palestinian politics. Upon his arrival in Bir Zeit Fatah appointed him the director of the Department of Christian Affairs in the PLO-Fatah and as a member of the Islamic–Christian Commission for Defending Jerusalem and the Holy Places. In those roles Musallam regularly meets with Muslim and Christian leaders throughout the West Bank, continuing his work to construct a shared Palestinian identity across confessional boundaries (ibid., 197).

35 Ibid., 153, 154.

36 Regarding job discrimination, see ibid., (159). ‘The Qur’anic culture, to the extent that it is omnipresent, can diminish one’s freedom to think for oneself ’ (ibid., 146).

37 Our people fell victim to robbers. They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead. Mr. Bush saw us, he passed by on the opposite side. Likewise European leaders, both Islamic and Christian worlds came to the place, and when they saw us, they passed by on the opposite side. When will the merciful Samaritan come up[on] us and be moved with compassion at the sight?

(From Musallam’s open letter from Gaza of 24 February 2009: 2)

All translations of Arabic-language letters written by Musallam into English are mine.

38 Musallam, open letter from Gaza, 20 January 2009: 2.

39 Lord Jesus when you passed by Gaza, escaping the threat of Herod we protected you. We fed you. We warmed your slender body. Please, come back to Gaza to help us, giving the Peace you promised. Don’t forget your people: 200 Catholics, 3,500 Orthodox, 30 Baptists, 10 Anglicans and one and a half million Muslims.

(Musallam, Christmas letter, 2009 December: 3)

40 See ibid., 3.

We in Gaza are steadfast and have resolution in our eyes: ‘between slavery and death, we have no choice’. We want to live to praise the Lord in Palestine and witness for Christ, we want to live for Palestine, not die for it, but if death is imposed on us, we will not die except honest, brave, and strong.

(Musallam, open letter from Gaza, 12 January 2009: 4)

41 Musallam, open letter from Gaza, 24 February 2009: 3.

42 Ibid., 4.

43 ‘We accepted internal elections on the basis of the Oslo agreements in the interest of the Palestinians inside the land, instead of paying attention to the Palestinian people as a whole’ (ibid., 5).

44 So, for example, Musallam asked: ‘is it conceivable that any people will accept to remain under 60 years of occupation without resisting?’ (ibid., 3).

10 Researching Palestinian Christian uses of the Bible

Israeli and Israelite violence as a canonical problem?

Mark Daniel Calder

Introduction

The central argument of this chapter is that the use of texts proceeds within a specific social, material and spatial context, and that therefore an exclusive focus upon hermeneutics is inadequate if we want to pursue the broader question: what is the place of the Bible in Palestinian Christianity? An ethnographic vignette sets the scene:

Father Butros is the priest of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Bethlehem. Sitting in his office on a weekday evening in March 2010, I ask him about the distinctives of his Church. In response he makes straight for a hardbound volume of liturgy on his bookcase. Opening it at his desk he sings from the printed page, fingering the script as if inviting me, despite my inability to read Syriac, to follow. Abuna Butros knows these liturgies by heart and recalls that it took him over a year to master the melodies and the associated knowledge of where and when to use them.

Later in our conversation he emphasises the importance of the singing, saying that it gives us a taste of Heaven. More than that, ‘our songs are the songs of angels. We don’t celebrate it ourselves on our own but with the saints and the angels’. He begins to list significant aspects of sung worship: ‘We sing because it draws the singer into the atmosphere of the Mass; it dispels tiredness; a melody can be loved and learned and sung even while doing work, and it is good for the children’. He adds that the deacons sing liturgical and biblical texts with him for two hours prior to the Mass on a Sunday, which also consists mostly of singing by the clergy and lasts for around two hours.

Shortly before this meeting with Father Butros, the first Christ at the Checkpoint Conference was hosted by Bethlehem Bible College, bringing Palestinian and international Christians to the West Bank town to discuss ‘Theology in the service of peace and justice’. The programme consisted of lectures and workshops relating to the political outworking of Christian ethics in the Middle East, especially through the work of reconciliation and non-violent resistance of oppression, and to biblical interpretation. Seminars concerned with the latter topic sought to critique Christian Zionism, a range of political theologies wherein Jewish claims to some of, all of, or indeed more than the territory of British Mandate Palestine are supported with reference to Christianity, especially its scriptures. This is sometimes an unthinking equating of the modern nation state of Israel with the covenant people of the Bible, and at other times a more elaborated theology such as that propounded by Dispensationalist Christian Zionists – though not all Dispensationalists are Zionist, and not all Christian Zionists are Dispensationalist.¹

The Christ at the Checkpoint Conference provides us with an important example of an ongoing conversation between Christian Zionists, their Western critics and Palestinian theologians. Senior Palestinian Anglican cleric Naim Ateek spoke at the conference, and was credited in the conference notes with writing the first Palestinian theology of liberation, a book in which he gives an account of the effects of Christian Zionism upon Palestinian Christian use of the biblical canon:

The God of the Bible, hitherto the God who saves and liberates, has come to be viewed by Palestinians as partial and discriminating. Before the creation of the State [of Israel], the Old Testament was considered to be 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. As a result, the Old Testament has generally fallen into disuse among both clergy and laity, and the Church has been unable to come to terms with its ambiguities, questions, and paradoxes.²

(Emphasis added)

According to Ateek, by providing an ultimate justification for financial and political support for Israel and the settler movement, Christian Zionist interpretations of scripture not only contribute to Palestinians’ material deprivations, but such Zionist readings have also produced an insoluble canonical problem, resulting in the wholesale exile of Palestinian Christians from their scriptures. How might a Palestinian Christian encounter the constant references to the Almighty as ‘God of Israel’ without feeling somewhat alienated?

Ateek’s focus, that of the literature on Christian Zionism by critical theologians, and that of the speakers at Christ at the Checkpoint, is on challenging a misreading of the Old Testament as they see it, and restoring a correct evaluation of the text’s meaning.³ Although others, such as UK-based Palestinian academic Nur Masalha, advocate disuse of these problematic scriptures, effectively conceding, as Ateek regretfully describes it, that the Old Testament is indeed a ‘Zionist text’, the critical response to Christian Zionism is largely seen by proponents as simply a restatement of orthodoxy.⁴ This articulation of a ‘whole Bible’ Christianity that resists Zionist claims to the land has had some success, as is indicated by the size of the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference and the profile of the speakers, among whom were bestselling evangelical authors such as Tony Campolo, Brother Andrew and Lynn Hybels. Indeed, influential Palestinians understand this struggle to be politically significant, if the participation of the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the mayor of Bethlehem, the Palestinian ambassador to France, and dignitaries from the larger Catholic and Orthodox denominations are any indication. It is as if these Protestant Palestinian theologians are on the frontline of an important hermeneutic intifada to shake off the occupation of the textual territory by an alternative interpretative claim on the text, whose proponents mobilise significant resources against Palestinian interests.

In my experience, however, it would be an exaggeration to suggest either that Palestinian Christians in general have stopped using the Old Testament, or that they necessarily encounter narratives of divinely sanctioned Israelite violence in the Old Testament (or indeed contemporary Israeli violence) as a canonical problem. I am not aware that Palestinians en masse encounter something inherent in their canonical inheritance so at odds with their legitimate interests as to make this canon ‘repugnant’, to use Ateek’s word. Clearly, to some Palestinian Christians, this is the case. I met one person, a Palestinian in the United Kingdom, who stopped going to church because ‘they use the Old Testament’, (note, not ‘misuse’, but ‘use’: the textual territory is conceded). I am sure there are others. However, I would suggest that there is less of this sentiment than one might expect if, in general, Palestinian Christians are inescapably burdened with a canonical problem.

In this paper I propose an explanation for the continued use of the whole canon in terms of what the scriptural object may be to Palestinian Christians, beyond a problem to be solved, deploying a broader concept of textuality and with reference to the episode described at the top of this paper. To do so, I will attempt to bridge the gap between the two concerns of Christ at the Checkpoint, between analyses of Palestinian Christian lived experience and their uses of scripture, by viewing scriptural use as part of lived experience.

If, in considering scripture use, we interrogate only interpretations of scripture, such as ‘What do Palestinian Christians do with the concept of “the God of Israel”?’ rather than taking account of the material reality of scripture in the communal lives of Palestinian Christians, we run the risk of misrepresenting Palestinian Christianities, and even of causing harm to Palestinian Christian interests. Although all Christian traditions value right interpretation, the dominant emphasis upon the exercise of unmediated reason over the text, regardless of its ritual use, is arguably an essentially Western Protestant priority based on a particular view of religious subjectivity, which has formed the starting point of dialogue between liberals and evangelicals since the late eighteenth century. For Palestinian Christians there may well be an ongoing strategic need to pursue the interpretative struggle and to challenge Christian Zionist interpretations on their own Western Protestant terms. However, the uncritical adoption of an analytical position relative to the text, which confines scripture use to interpretation, has the potential to obscure other uses of the canon, other Palestinian Christian lives lived with the Bible, and its apparently problematic ‘God of Israel’, such as those rooted in the Syriac Orthodox tradition. These may be less intelligible to the theological reasoning of politically significant Christian Zionists, sharing fewer of their assumptions about what the Bible is, but they are no less part of contemporary Palestinian Christianity for all that.

I will propose that researching the actual use of texts, as well as what is said about them, will broaden our understanding of Palestinian Christians in their diversity and may disclose a different sort of claim to the text from that asserted in the contest over the strength of various interpretations.

The text and the individual, rational subject

In order to analyse Palestinian uses of scripture in social context, it is necessary to consider the sort of objects biblical texts are taken to be in different interpretive communities, such as Protestant and Orthodox Christian communities. Yohanna Katanacho, academic dean at Bethlehem Bible College and one of the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference speakers, told me:

In Palestine, the established churches can benefit from the local Evangelicals because they speak to American Evangelicals and Christian Zionists in terms that are persuasive to them – they treat scripture in a way that is congruent to the Western Evangelical world view.

It is worth elaborating the shared assumptions to which Katanacho refers, in particular the presuppositions about texts in general and the Bible in particular that make Palestinian Evangelicals and Protestants more intelligible to their counterparts in Europe and America than Palestinian Orthodox Christians may be. Asserting the infallibility of the Bible, for example, is not in itself different from the teaching of Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Instead, it is the relationship of (infallible) scripture to the individual subject that distinguishes evangelicals, whether in the West or in Palestine, expressed in the classic Reformation formula of sola scriptura: scripture alone, that is, without the mediation of worldly authority or tradition.

Hence, Brian Malley, in his study of an American Evangelical congregation, elaborates their belief in infallibility, which they themselves identify as a key distinctive of evangelicalism, by pointing out the importance of the individual’s engagement with the text.⁵ Malley concludes: ‘The unit of religiosity here is the individual, and it is generally assumed that individuals are religious because they choose to be. These notions pervade evangelicalism, with its emphasis on individual salvation as a matter of personal faith’.⁶

As Katanacho indicates, this evangelical individualism has an authentic Palestinian expression. When I asked a delegate at Christ at the Checkpoint what it meant to him to be a Palestinian Evangelical, he responded tellingly in the negative: ‘Not to hear what others would say about [the Bible] but to go to the actual text and read it and live by that’.

‘Not to hear, but to read’. Bearing in mind that the Arabic verb translated ‘to read’ would usually imply oration, the silence insisted upon by this opposition of hearing to reading is indeed deafening. The paradigmatic example of evangelical reading, as expressed here at least, would be the individual alone with the codex.

Insomuch as the interpretative struggle over problematic scriptures is aimed at persuading individual believers about the best way to interpret scripture, regardless of tradition and their communities of scripture use, it is a ‘modern’ endeavour. One should not necessarily assume that a postmodern turn in the West has turned this on its head. Indeed, the difference between a modern perspective on interpretation and a postmodern perspective is perhaps only that the modern views individual interpretation as a way of accessing the true authorial voice, rather than reserving all authority over the text’s meaning to the individual reader. Both assume that the text itself is in some way ‘out there’, even if its meaning can be contested or created in use.

This assumption prevails in Western thought beyond the confines of religious discourse. Arguably, this view of the text has dominated in the West since around the twelfth century, when reading became largely understood as something an individual might do silently and in private.⁷ As a result, this privatised subject relationship with the text is now so deeply assumed that any alternative appears deviant or even violent. For example, as Saba Mahmood argues, it is such a ‘rational’ subject’s position relative to the Qur’an that American foreign policy experts look for when identifying potential partners in the pursuit of a cooperative Islam, an Islam with whom they can partner in the political and economic project of liberalism and secularism:

What joins these [Muslim] thinkers and makes them natural allies of the United States in this historical moment is, oddly enough, a shared approach to scriptural hermeneutics. The core problem from the perspective of U.S. analysts is not militancy itself but interpretation, insomuch as the interpretive act is regarded as the foundation of any religious subjectivity and therefore the key to its emancipation and secularisation.⁸

(Emphasis added)

This view, deeply associated with Enlightenment–Reformation conceptions of the inviolability of the rational subject is, according to Mahmood, opposed in the minds of policymakers to a traditionalism that conceives of the relationship between subject and text, particularly canonical text, without critical distance.

Hence, while Malley brings an ‘anthropological theory to bear on a textual phenomenon’,⁹ he focuses primarily on what the text means to the individual Evangelical Christian, and how this meaning is created. According to Malley, it is the ability of the text to bear meaningful content that gives it longevity. Later he writes:

Texts not only say things, but very often also mean things, and usually it is the meaning of the Bible that interests evangelicals.

(‘Meaning’ is here understood as a concept in folk hermeneutic theory. Roughly, we use the term ‘meaning’ to describe the set of inferences most regularly and reliably generated by a text. This set of inferences is reified and treated as a property of the text.)¹⁰

Canon as collective inheritance

This may be the case in Malley’s field, but if it is primarily the meaning of the Bible that interests evangelicals, and if to them a use of the text is legitimate insomuch as it best extracts its meaning, it is possible that something else explicitly or implicitly ‘interests’ other Christians in addition to, or even over and above, meaning.¹¹ In the contest over the biblical text in which evangelicals argue for or against Christian Zionism, the assumption that the right analysis of the text’s meaning by a rational individual subject will yield the strongest claim to it remains largely unquestioned. The implication of a contest over interpretation such as this is that it is our Bible insomuch as we access and accept its true meaning, and those who likewise arrive at and accept the true meaning of it are part of us. If one can show a particular interpretation to be more valid than another, those who hold this interpretation are in turn validated in their relationship to the text; they assert a more valid claim to ownership of the text, whereas the alternative invalidated reading becomes a way of alienating the other from their text and making it, in the minds of their interpretative adversaries at least, less theirs.

However, there was one tentative qualification to this position articulated at the conference by Lutheran pastor and author Mitri Raheb. In his lecture, he repeatedly asserted that it was his ‘forefathers’ who wrote the Bible and ‘to whom the revelation was given’,¹² implying that his continued fidelity to the whole canon, and that of other Palestinians, derived not only from their evaluation of scripture as true or even useful, but also from their special sense of inheriting it. This hints at other reasons for the text’s continued use. In answer to a question from the floor, he neither wanted to reject passages in the Old Testament relating to divinely sanctioned violence, nor could he explain or decisively interpret them to the point of wholehearted embrace. However, they were part of his heritage, they were stories that belonged to his community and therefore he didn’t want to disown them.

It is significant that Raheb eschews Naim Ateek’s label ‘Palestinian Theology of Liberation’ for his work, preferring instead the term ‘Palestinian Contextual Theology’. This seems apt because many Christians encounter the canon as part of liturgies and lectionaries within various congregational expressions of the church, which do not insist or depend upon their assent, their belief, the text’s liberationist potential, or even that they don’t find scripture repugnant, but only upon their willing participation in a canonical order.¹³ Judging by Mitri Raheb’s articulation of his relationship to the canon as inheritance, this is not simply nominalism but an outworking of a different sort of commitment to, or relationship with, the text; a commitment that imagines the text as dwelling within the community of its use, rather than a disembedded text subject to a never-ending conflict of interpretations. Raheb’s approach to the text is, in a sense, an insistence on replacing texts into their communal and communicative contexts, an approach from which I intend to draw as I pursue my research. Before looking in more depth at these contexts as types of dialogue, a fuller understanding of the Palestinian context requires me to highlight aspects of scriptural use that the modern hermeneutic approach outlined above seems to ignore or downplay, but which may be important to the way in which other Palestinian Christians live with and through their canon.

This relates, at first, to a question of objectification: what kind of object do different Christians take the Bible to be? Brian Malley supports our effort by providing useful hints about how Evangelical Christians themselves would define a Bible:

In interviews I inquired systematically whether a Bible might be rendered in various media. A Bible may be printed, read aloud, memorised, or recorded on CD-ROM, but it cannot be danced or shaped out of clay. Could it be a radio transmission travelling though outer space? It could. A video-recorded enactment of the Bible, however, would not be a Bible. Neither would a series of pictures, such as those found in church paintings or stained-glass windows. The Bible is a text: Bibles must be made out of words.¹⁴

In contrast to the apparent assumptions of scriptural hermeneutics, and taking account of the complex relationship of ‘the Bible’ abstracted from a Bible or Bibles in use,¹⁵ I take it as axiomatic that texts such as ‘the Bible’ cannot be taken for granted as essentially a set of words disassociated from the material in which they are produced and used, either in terms of what they are taken to mean, or more broadly in terms of what they are expected to do. This is not to say that there are no similarities about Psalm 23 prayed by a bereaved Christian or sung on the terraces at West Bromwich Albion Football Club (as, for some reason, it is). There are ‘the same’ words. But I am questioning the assumption of textual essence, that we can talk about these as different instances of essentially the same thing, that a dialogue, a communicative event deploying words such as a recitation of a psalm, should be primarily categorised according to its words rather than, say, according to the relationships involved or implied in the dialogue. We may imagine but can never find Psalm 23 in an elemental form, only through materials, bodies and spaces.

This is of course as true for the scriptural uses of Evangelical Christians or Saba Mahmood’s State Department rationalists as for anyone else. According to my experience with several Evangelical Churches, because of the emphasis on the individual’s access to the text, it is customary for people to bring their own Bible rather than to use a pew Bible or simply to listen to a reading. This tangible restatement of the ‘priesthood of all believers’ is so habitually reinscribed that people will often say they feel strange if they haven’t brought their Bible with them to church, even if they can borrow one or simply listen to readings. I would tentatively suggest that the perception of an unmediated text–subject relationship is therefore constituted here through material by the powerful feeling of (not) having one’s own Bible in a church service.

In the light of the Bible’s inescapable materiality, the category of text becomes quite slippery, requiring that readings in church, chants on the football terraces, biblical allusions in mundane speech or visual recreations from the written word are taken account of analytically. Even within the narrower category of writings, there is clear variation in the textual object constituted by different kinds of writing, from mass-printed typeface to intricate calligraphy, each helping to constitute a different kind of textual object in use. Morgan Clarke draws attention to the importance of calligraphic seals in a Shiite tradition of Islamic fatāwā (singular fatwā) to ‘tie particular interpretation to person, to a recognised authority’.¹⁶ Here we have one sort of writing doing something to another sort of writing so that it in turn becomes a different object in use. I shall return to Clarke’s foregrounding of personal authority below, but for now it suffices to note that some differences in writing itself constitute a text and its use differently.

When we move beyond the written or printed text to liturgical interpretations, where worshippers encounter a text not primarily through writing being read at all, but through a chant or sung hymn, the creative production of a textual object in the event of its use is yet harder to ignore. So, when a Palestinian Christian encounters Psalm 126 as a chant, is his or her relationship with the text characterised by critical distance, to the extent that in listening they consciously deny an interpretation of it as relating to the colonisation of Palestine by Zionists, or something quite different, to a significant extent affective and uninterpreted?

I am able to trace a development in my own encounter with the text through the Syriac liturgy. While at first I would be able to identify a particular passage chanted regularly as alluding to Psalm 86, and recall its meaning, I encountered it differently during the annual Mass for the Dead. Father Butros’s pained cry in Arabic ‘istajibni ya rab!’ (Answer me oh Lord!) was not an allusion to scripture, but scripture instead became heard as the voice of the Syriac Orthodox community remembering their departed. My body literally trembled under the intensity of Father Butros’s tortured rendition of the prescribed melody. What might an analyst seeking an account of scripture use make of such an encounter with the text?

Textuality: a paradigm for the analysis of scriptural uses in different cultures

Instead of scriptures existing at a remove from their use, then, perhaps they are universally encountered within a communicative domain in which texts, bodies and spaces constitute each other in a particular event. This is how I would develop Brian Stock’s notion of textuality, which he defines as the pervasiveness of texts within wider oral discourse. Texts are not merely objects of reference but they also influence the way people communicate with each other beyond their explicit citation.¹⁷

In this paper, a broadened concept of textuality, taking account not only of oral discourse but also of material, space and bodies, may be more useful than the concept of a text and its user-interpreter, neither assuming nor excluding the opposition the latter implies between subject and object. The concept of textuality discourages us from imagining the material, the text and the user to be necessarily distinct in any given event of textual use. Following Thomas Csordas, we might choose to prioritise the body analytically as the place where objects begin, where they are perceived into being.¹⁸ However, if the event of textual use is necessarily an embodied communicative act, then it is also a social act (even when this communication is with an imagined author other), which makes space as analytically important as the body. As Tim Cresswell puts it, social interaction does not happen ‘on the head of a pin’.¹⁹ For example, one cannot easily isolate the textual object’s material, say in the case of a sung psalm, from singing and hearing bodies or from the church building with its acoustic and other aesthetic properties. In a textual use event, bodies and spaces are brought into a mutually constitutive relationship with the text-in-use through the objectifying consciousness of the text’s user.

Consequently, an analysis of biblical use in Palestinian Christian social life must do more than consider particular Palestinian Christian interpretations of Naim Ateek’s canonical problem. It should look for different textualities, different networks of relationship which involve texts, relationships which necessarily incorporate more than series of words abstracted from their use. Texts run inseparably through the material, bodies and spaces of their use, and, to make sense of their use, a focus on interpretation is wholly inadequate. I shall attempt to describe the domain of textuality theoretically, and then consider the episode involving Father Butros in its terms.

Sensed textuality

Before becoming an object of cognition and hermeneutic reflection, texts are encountered firstly through material and in space by the body through the senses. Webb Keane usefully proposes ‘an approach to materiality that does not always expect it to provide evidence of something hidden, such as belief ’ and advocates an analysis of the way in which linguistic registers are used to demarcate ritual speech from mundane speech, or even to define a certain speech as ritual or sacred or religious.²⁰ Keane adds: ‘I have focused here on language, but the argument should hold for any semiotic form’.²¹ For instance, how might a person’s relationship with a psalm be influenced by a change in speech register, such as breaking into a chant, a change of register that indicates that ‘“this, now” is a ritual?’²² This change in register could be as simple as opening a bound book or as minimal as paraphrasing a story from scripture in day-to-day conversation.

Sensitivity to important changes in register of words or any other semiotic form is something that may distinguish a person’s development within a ritual community, their becoming more or less ‘in tune’ with significant variations in genre, a tuning which may in turn inscribe a sense of being closer to the notional centre, such as God, and to rightful perception. Perhaps I experienced this in a small way as a response to the priest’s cry to God.

Charles Hirschkind develops a relevant perspective in his analysis of the use of cassette sermons by Muslims in Cairo, exploring how listeners ‘hone an ethically responsive sensorium: the requisite sensibilities that they see as enabling them to live as devout Muslims in a world increasingly ordered by secular rationalities’.²³ He later refers to a ‘moral physiology, the emotional-kinesthetic experience of a body permeated by Islamic faith (imān) when listening to a [preacher’s] discourse’.²⁴ Here Egyptian Muslims are presented as practising, in both senses, a kind of discernment not necessarily comprising analytical detachment.

The use of Islam as an example here is not arbitrary, or due simply to the size of the anthropological corpus relating to Muslim uses of texts, which seems to dwarf similar work on Christianities.²⁵ Father Butros’s use of the Bible takes place within a Muslim majority society and, more importantly, within a Christian tradition with a long relationship with Islam. This relationship with Islam is of course significant to any attempt to construct a genuinely contextual theology, but if we wish to take account of more than discourse, it is worth considering that, in coexisting traditions of textual use, similar aesthetic sensibilities may be cultivated.

In any case, even among Evangelical Christians in the West, Simon Coleman identifies ‘a powerful “aesthetic” sensibility, a coherent system of ecognising the presence of divinity in the visual and the material’.²⁶ Meanwhile, Eastern Christianity provides its own examples of Hirschkind’s ethical responsive sensorium. Gabriel Hanganu describes the actions of nuns in Romania as comprising:

the appropriation of a daily sensory continuum, which informed the nuns’ subsequent perception and interpretation of spiritual matters. A body trained in a spiritually permeated sensory environment was thought capable of both providing enhanced communion with God and activating God’s presence in the world through human activity.²⁷

(Emphasis added)

Inherited textuality

That a person’s sensorium is being formed and refined in relationship with others emphasises the fact that it does not emerge from nowhere but is cultivated in the relationship between an individual and his or her tradition. For this reason, Talal Asad replaces the analytical category of a ‘religion’, in his case Islam, with the notion of a ‘discursive tradition that connects variously with the formation of moral selves, the manipulation of populations (or resistance to it), and the production of appropriate knowledges’ or more simply, ‘an instituted practice’.²⁸ In Asad’s argument, what constitutes ‘Islam’ is the shared practice of pursuing the morally good life with reference to authoritative texts. But ‘reference’ is only part of the story, implying only discourse with its implications of distance between subject and text. Islam could just as well be the shared practice of pursuing the morally good life not least through the rightful practice of the text. This may well be true of several Christian traditions too, and I suspect this is to some extent the case within Syriac Orthodoxy, as we shall see.

Utterance and textuality

Tradition, then, provides the material by which people develop their sensorium toward a good or right aesthetic discernment, and tradition also delimits the rightness, or otherwise, of particular interactions with the canonical text, making some uses of them authoritative, authentic and, indeed, ‘authorial’ (making the text what it is then accepted to be on the basis of some link to the imagined author), and other uses illegitimate. Again drawing on a representation of an Islamic community, this is evidenced in Morgan Clarke’s work on ‘neo-calligraphy’ which describes the significance for Lebanese Shiite Muslims of authoritative transmission of the right understanding of the infallible Qur’an through people considered marāji’ al-taqlīd, ‘sources of emulation’, according to their inheritance of a legitimate pedagogical succession from the Companions of the Prophet themselves.²⁹

Such an emphasis upon the importance of personalised authority seems to relate also to a particular conception of the relationship between writing and meaning. The assumption among Clarke’s interlocutors is that writings cannot be reliable points of reference without the guidance of those who possess something of the authorial perspective on them because of the personal authority of their teacher, and their teacher’s teacher and so on, all the way back to the Prophet himself. The significance of writings and their correct interpretation in Islam is of course immense, but these analyses hint at something quite important about their authoritative communication within the community of the faithful. Whereas, for Martin Luther, a critical factor in the right reading of the Bible was the individual conscience, in various traditional expressions of Islam, the Qur’an cannot stand apart from the practice of the community, and its interpretation is not the individual’s primary responsibility. (Of course, members of Islamic reform movements, both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, may have a different view of the subject’s relationship to the text and may in fact assert that this is exactly the individual’s responsibility.) Instead, a particular form of participation within ritual and other practices, linked discursively to authoritative interpretations of writing, is required. Hence it is practice as well as doctrine; or rather it is felt and practised orthodoxy, with its attendant ‘aesthetic sensibilities’, that makes a tradition internally intelligible and therefore a tradition at all.

Timothy Mitchell relates this to the function of Arabic writing, what it is expected to do, contrasted with the prevailing European view of writing as a ‘mechanistic’ set of fixed signifiers. He asserts that in Arabic the written text is not imagined to be a sufficient means of communication in itself, especially when it comes to the rightful use of the Qur’an, an oral revelation.

In the Arabic script, it is said, the vowels are not normally marked. … But this way of putting it is misleading. The vowel is a peculiar European invention, and is not something ‘missing’ from Arabic. Arabic words are formed by what Arab grammarians call the ‘movement’ of a sequence of letters. Each letter is pronounced with a particular movement (of the mouth and vocal cords), referred to as ‘opening’, ‘fracturing’ and ‘contracting’ [fatḥah, kasrah, ḍamah] … the movement cannot be produced independently of the letter and a letter cannot be produced without a movement.³⁰

Mitchell goes on to show how a view of writing as dependent upon necessarily oral ‘movement’ creates the view of writings as in themselves insufficient and unreliable, denying their ability to stand alone subject to the unmediated interpretation of the silent reader. The denial of ‘silent’ reading and the sufficiency of individual interpretation foregrounds two features of textual use in Arabic (and possibly other Semitic languages such as Syriac): the physicality of utterance and its sociality. The relationship of the subject and the textual object is still critical to making what the text is to be, however the subject here cannot be a dislocated monadic individual but a member of a community, the umma or indeed the ‘Body of Christ’, in which the text is used. This places the notion of belief as ‘felt expectation about the way the world works’³¹ into a social and relational, indeed traditional, context.

Most Palestinian Christians’ first language is Arabic, and so they are inevitably informed to some extent by this view of writing, at least if Mitchell’s analysis is correct. What’s more, ethnographies of Eastern Christianities suggest a similar perspective outside of Semitic language communities. According to Hann and Goltz, ‘Orthodox Christianity is perhaps best seen as a highly reflected pre- and postscriptural oral culture, where oral is understood to mean not a primitive but a superior, because living, mode of communication’ (emphasis in original).³²

Texts, then, though prescribed formulae of words, need not be conceptualised as fixed points of reference in a discursive tradition, but part of the material of an affective, sensorial and practical tradition upon which they are variously inscribed in the immediate and transient instance of their use. There is, in a sense, no text except a text-in-use.

Textuality and dialogue

Texts-in-use silently read, loudly recited or inscribed on the body are, it seems, sorts of communication and therefore promise to disclose a particular dialogic structure. An analysis of any Palestinian Christian use of scripture, or Psalm 23 sung at West Bromwich Albion for that matter, could begin with the question: what dialogue is happening here and whom does it involve?

First, this relates to personal voice: in whose voice is scripture experienced in this instance? We might note the difference between third-person use of scripture, comprising interpretation, citation and textual criticism, and first-person use of scripture, especially in performance of scripture as worship.

I was recently at a Bethlehem Bible College Choir rehearsal, which began with a customary Bible-related exercise: discerning in Psalm 136 five reasons for Palestinian Christians to give thanks to God. The text was scrutinised, and groups reported back their findings with the text referred to in the third person. This kind of Bible study demands, first, objectifying distance from the text. This might be contrasted with a chant of a psalm, such as my encounter with ‘istajibni ya rab!’ in which the user of the text adopts a first-person relationship with it.

However, the dialogic structure of scripture in use is more than simply a case of personal voice. The use of the text, as it is a communicative act, implies dialogue partners to, with and before whom the text is manifested. The Bible study ‘dialogue’ may be viewed as consisting of the participants and ‘the Bible’ as an abstracted voice, while the dominant voices in the event of its use are those of the participants referring to the Bible, especially with the most cogent explanation of it. The nature of the dialogue in any instance may be seen to constitute different sorts of claim to scripture from that of Abuna Butros addressing God on behalf of his congregation.

Bakhtin’s idea of the ‘tertiary nature of dialogue’ may help here, although Bakhtin doesn’t develop the idea very far. The notion is drawn from a later-life fragment and reads with awkward parentheses:

In addition to this addressee (the second party), the author of the utterance, with a greater or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time (the loophole addressee). In various ages and with various understandings of the world, this superaddressee and his ideally true responsive understanding assume various ideological expressions (God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, science, and so forth).³³

This notion of the superaddressee and the simultaneous levels of communication entailed in such a dialogue may nevertheless be useful for providing an account of the complex textuality of Palestinian Christian scriptural use in a given context. Take, for example, a reading taken from Exodus 23:31, in which God tells the people of Israel:

I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Sea of the Philistines, and from the desert to the River. I will hand over to you the people who live in the land and you will drive them out before you.

It may be possible to make sense of a Palestinian ritual performance of this scripture and its immediate dialogue (the God of Israel addressing the people of Israel at the expense of the Philistines) subordinated to a Palestinian meta-voice superaddressing a God who is less involved in the narrative related by scripture than in the use of scripture itself. Various interpretations of the passage may or may not emerge from the text in use, but critically, the imperative to ‘explain away’ the text may not be felt when the text is associated fully with the meta-voice of one’s community of scriptural use, and the superaddressee is ‘absolutely just’.

Who then, in the Bible-study context mentioned above, is the superaddressee of its dialogue? While it is possible to claim that God is imagined to be adjudicating upon participants’ reflections, it tends to be the most reasonable or articulate explanations and interpretations that are most affirmed, rather than those that are addressed most personally to God. It is arguable that in this kind of third-person engagement with scripture, in which the text is referred to as meaning this or that because of x or y, the superaddressee is Bakhtin’s ‘court of dispassionate human conscience’, or reason.

An application of textuality to a Palestinian Christian context

With these considerations in mind we may turn to Father Butros’s unusual performance of liturgy in his study. Firstly, it is worth providing a little context to the episode. Bethlehem is a unique space, politically liminal with the separation wall running through its historic lands, and economically heavily dependent on tourism, a situation which is struggling to recover after dramatic contraction during the Second (al-aqṣa) Intifada (2000–2005). Though cohabiting in Bethlehem, the various Christian denominations, with their respective ecclesiastical heritages in Europe and Asia, are characterised by significantly different textualities, and all have some contact with communities outside of Palestine. Yohanna Katanacho told me: ‘All of the denominations look elsewhere here’.

While we cannot imagine Syriac Orthodoxy to be hermetically sealed off from this wide-ranging interaction with outsiders, it is a denomination historically and geographically perhaps most removed from the textual tradition of Protestant Evangelicalism, notwithstanding close relationships it has formed recently with the Anglican Diocese of Coventry in the United Kingdom. Though the community in Bethlehem was possibly established in the nineteenth century, it grew dramatically at the start of the twentieth century after the community in southeastern Turkey was decimated in the genocide, known by Syrians (as most Syriac Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem self-identify) as the seyfo, or ‘sword’. With regard to broader identity contests within the diaspora, Syrians in Bethlehem have more often articulated their identity as Aramean than as Assyrian.³⁴ Some of the prevailing stereotypes, described by both them and others, include the community’s resilience, close-knit familial ties, industriousness and economic success despite their being ‘refugees’. Indeed, many own businesses in Bethlehem and the nearby town of Beit Sahour. Many, inside and outside the community, assert the existence of distinctive Syriac-Aramaic characteristics, as they might with regard to people from other towns, but not usually in my experience according to other denominational affiliations. This hints at the fact that Syriac Orthodoxy is understood to some extent in ethno-religious terms and, according to one interlocutor, Syriac Orthodox Christians ‘do not convert people, but when a Syriac girl or boy marries another Christian, perhaps they will become Syriac’.³⁵ Very often people remind me that Aramaic, of which Syriac is the liturgical dialect, was the language Jesus spoke; or indeed in one instance, the language Adam spoke. Finally, I have noted some variation in the extent to which Syrians assert their identification with the term ‘Palestinian’, with some actively playing down the Syriac in favour of the Palestinian and all at least appending ‘Syriac’ to their identification as a Christian Palestinian. This will be explored further in my fieldwork.

Now, with regard to the episode above, note how Abuna Butros answers a question about what defines his Church not according to ‘what we believe’, but what we do with the text. Though apparently superfluous in terms of either demonstrating the sound of the liturgical chant or its meaning or its place in the traditional canon, the bound volume of written text was his first thought in answer to the question of what defines his community, even if the full response to my question was exemplified in song. In contrast to the evangelicals in Malley’s study, for whom the Bible is essentially nothing but its words, this episode manifests itself with two material reference points which they would presumably find superfluous, in what is intended as a demonstration of the proper use of the text. We find both ritually formalised utterance (chant) and the physical presence of the codex. In this specific episode, writing doesn’t appear to be a mnemonic for the liturgy (he knows the text already); neither is it a point of reference for discursive citation, nor is it sufficient in itself – it was felt necessary to sing it too. So the presence of the codex may have served to demarcate the performance as in some sense an authentic Syriac Orthodox canonical performance.

As cited above, Webb Keane contested an analytical focus on meaning at the expense of ‘register’ which may demarcate different utterances as, for example, ritual or mundane. With Keane’s admonition in mind, the presence of the codex may have precisely this function, to demarcate ritual performance in a particularly ambiguous setting. After all, Father Butros’s chanted reading was not given in a church service in which the liturgy is performed by deacons and priests according to the established order. This was a private interview with a visitor (me) and the performance was a response to questions articulated by me and implied by my presence. The use of liturgy may therefore have felt somewhat artificial to Abuna Butros, and perhaps the presence of the written text was by way of emphasising that he was engaged in a performance different from, as Keane would have it, mundane utterance.

If the presence of the written word on Abuna Butros’s desk may have demarcated the liturgical performance as other than mundane, it may also have served to give the performance a kind of legitimacy. Authority may be implicit in answers about the distinctives of a person’s tradition. So, if my question to an evangelical interlocutor about the distinctives of evangelicalism was taken to be a question about the legitimacy of individual interpretation, as against ‘what others would say about it’, Abuna Butros’s response may suggest written tradition as a source of legitimacy and authority of his use of scripture, expressed through the material presence of a codex.

Abuna Butros did not, however, simply show me a written text. He sang; he gave utterance to it. Chant is an interesting category related to register which may or may not be viewed as ‘a Bible’ by Malley’s interlocutors, insisting as it does on both particular words and on a particular performance as canonical, and perhaps even as necessary for its fullest realisation. Even if the actual performance is in fact viewed as somehow secondary to its words, and, indeed, for many Syrians, the Bible may be more securely identified with a particular artefact in a particular language (Syriac) than for evangelicals, chant is still a primary place of encounter with ‘the Bible’ in the Syriac Orthodox context. Indeed, bearing in mind Mitchell’s reflections on Arabic, perhaps the written liturgy would have been simply insufficient in demonstrating Syriac Orthodoxy to an outsider, with an authentic performance requiring instead the deployment of the body, that is the voice, toward its orthopractical incarnation.

The sensory/material aspects of scriptural use open out quite naturally onto the dialogic. The immediate problem with the text’s performance is of course my presence, complicating the dialogic structure of its use. Perhaps the deployment of a combination of materials in Abuna Butros’s recitation in his office, codex and singing (I am taking the body and vibrating air to be material), may constitute for him a more authentic dialogue with God and alongside his Church than if he simply showed me the codex or sat and sang for me, a guest. In which case, the liturgical book may then have ‘stood for’ the congregation, for the angels and the saints, or in a concrete way for the Syriac Church through time, a heritage which this performance was, after all, supposed to exemplify. In a sense, the text may have been a mnemonic of a different sort: not so that Abuna Butros could remember the liturgy, but actually so that he could remember (in the sense of memorialising) the Church on Earth and in Heaven with whom, as he explicitly stated, these performances customarily take place, and thereby to associate this unique performance with its customary place.

In the Syriac Church great emphasis is put upon the right performance of a liturgical text. Indeed, it has been suggested to me that a good performance implies rightness of heart. This kind of performance has little to say to human reason, but much to say to the God for whom such a use of the text is imagined to take place, as explicitly stated by Abuna Butros. In contrast to the court of human reason in which a Bible study dialogue may progress, the superaddressee in this case may in fact be one with the immediate addressee, namely God.

This is not to say that beliefs are irrelevant in the text’s use. As one interlocutor told me in his factory, while polishing an item of silver:

The liturgy was written when 99 per cent of people knew God. These are the best words to pray for our church. We shouldn’t change this word or that … but if someone wants to pray but doesn’t believe it in his heart, it will be like he is acting.

However, even in this comment, bearing in mind that we are talking about the liturgy as a whole, it is reasonable to suppose that this belief relates as much to the meta-content of scripture-in-our-voice as to the specific words of a passage.

To be more confident about this conclusion I would have to have learned more about the way in which material differences in a text’s performance are considered significant, or, less semiotically, what is considered to be a ‘good’ performance of a text. Ethnographic fieldwork promises to provide the opportunity to explore the development of ethically responsive sensoria and moral physiologies, both in interlocutors and in myself.

Conclusion

Despite the importance and fervour of interpretative contests between Christian Zionists and their opponents, the texts that may appear problematic to Western readers may not be encountered as problems to be solved by all Palestinian Christians. This is because, I have argued, texts are only encountered as material through bodies in spaces, and because these specific textualities constitute specific dialogues, which cannot be accounted for if interpretation is the only thing that matters to the analyst.

The importance of making an analytical distinction between the dialogic structures of various textualities is not just a concern for the academic anthropologist. Beyond analytical inadequacy, a narrow focus on interpretation may in fact have a detrimental effect upon Palestinian Christian interests. At a workshop at Tantur Ecumenical Centre near Bethlehem, Catholic priest and Bethlehem University faculty member Jamal Khader kept reiterating that: ‘[w]e [the 2 per cent of Palestinians that are Christian] are not a minority’. He was saying, the more we talk about ‘the Christian minority’, the more it removes Christians from the indivisible centre of Palestinian society. Just as it makes no sense to refer to any given Palestinian family as ‘a minority’, so we need not think of Palestinian Christians as such.

With its modern Western conceptual underpinnings, the interpretative contest insists upon a particular dialogue with the outside. If our only focus is on those who can be useful at the frontier, our engagement may be as harmful as it is helpful. The contest of biblical interpretation abstracted from its performance is a struggle largely confined to a borderland, conforming to the requirements of a Western subject-object categorisation. Limiting ourselves to this struggle demands that Palestinian Christians form a bridge between us and the otherwise incomprehensible ‘them’ of Palestinian society as a whole. For Christians, the question is whether confining Palestinians to this borderland in the conversations we choose to prioritise may in fact create their minority status and perhaps weaken in a small way Palestinian Christian solidarity with their non-Christian compatriots. Instead of contributing to the advancement of a Palestinian contextual theology, it removes this theologising from its context and places it on the defensive.

If the contest over the texts’ meaning were at least to begin with the recognition that Palestinian Christians already have a claim over the biblical text because of their faithful uses and performances of it, it would put the canonical problem Ateek describes in its place, without the need to imagine interpretation as decisive in the Bible’s continued use. Perhaps more importantly, as described above, the representation of a particular dialogic structure in scripture use is a representation of a particular sort of claim to it. I am not attempting to argue for something wholly new, but in fact that we listen simply to voices that our interlocutors in Palestinian Christian communities know well. One might contrast the contemporary struggles over interpretation with patristic-era contests over scripture’s meaning. Brian Brock shows how, for example, Augustine’s exegeses of biblical psalms are anchored in a sense of their necessary and proper performance:

[T]he form of Scripture that is called a psalm, and the interpretive ontological claims Augustine brings to this form, work together to question a basic commitment of contemporary hermeneutics: that we can describe a general hermeneutical strategy that is appropriately applied to the biblical texts.³⁶

These alternative claims could be described using a terrestrial analogy. On the one hand, interpretation in the court of human reason consists of a claim according to law: firstly demarcation according to the government of reason, then excavation for its wealth, then resistance of alternative claims. A claim based on performance, however, consists of a faithful tilling of often unyielding soils notwithstanding my individual subjective assessment of its meaning. If the former constitutes a kind of textual intifada, a resistance, the latter has more to do with persistence.

One Evangelical Palestinian friend of mine thoughtfully summed up the way in which different objectifications of scripture constitute different claims to it:

When you interpret only, the text is away from you – you don’t own it. When you chant it you own it. From time to time I go to the Orthodox for a wedding or funeral and when I saw them chant Psalm 91 they were with tears in their eyes. For them if it is about Israel it is about them. The Old Testament is their text as much as the New.

So we see how the apparently knotty problem of ‘the God of Israel’ may not arise, unless of course we insist that it does by our research questions. In the context of a performance like that of Abuna Butros, the question of who owns the text, whom it preferences, even what it means, seems rather obtuse.

Notes

  1 For a useful primer on Christian Zionism see Sizer (2004).

  2 Ateek (1989: 71).

  3 E.g. Ateek (1989); Katanacho (2010); Sizer (2004).

  4 See Masalha (2007).

  5 Malley (2004: 1–2, 22–28).

  6 Ibid., 156–157.

  7 Chartier (1999: 276–278).

  8 Mahmood (2006: 329).

  9 Malley (2004: 9).

10 Ibid., 61.

11 Malley goes on to show that it is in fact the case that a particular interpretative tradition prevails in his field, somewhat independent of the meaning of the words themselves. Nevertheless, in the minds of his interlocutors, ‘meaning’ is what counts. See especially ibid., 66–67, 74–87.

12 Raheb (2010).

13 Rappaport (1999).

14 Malley (2004: 61).

15 Ibid., 49.

16 Clarke (2010: 352).

17 Stock (1983: 7–8).

18 Csordas (1997).

19 Cresswell (1996: 11).

20 Keane (2008: S110).

21 Ibid., S124.

22 Ibid., S119.

23 Hirschkind (2001: 624).

24 Ibid., 628.

25 Hann and Goltz (2010: 5–6).

26 Coleman (1996: 108).

27 Hanganu (2010: 41).

28 Asad (1986: 14–15).

29 Clarke (2010: 353–354).

30 Mitchell (1991: 148).

31 Morgan (2010: 8).

32 Hann and Goltz (2010: 15).

33 Bakhtin (1987: 126).

34 Wozniak (2010).

35 This lack of missional intent has been explained to me in different ways by Syriac Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem. Some see it as unnecessary because of other Christian denominations’ validity and the impossibility of evangelising among Muslims. Others view it as a necessary period of consolidation in the wake of the losses of the twentieth century.

36 Brock (2007: 125).

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Index of subjects and names

Page numbers in italics denote tables, those in bold denote figures.

9/11 1, 45, 51, 125

Abraham 18, 42; children of 38, 40; God’s promises to 4, 15, 20, 21, 38, 39–40

Aelia 55–63

Afghanistan 51

‘Aflaq, Michel 122

al-Assad, Bashar 104

al-Khader, Sayydna (saint) 84–5, 86–7, 97, 97n1

al-Khader (town) 86, 87, 93, 94, 95; see also Maqamat al-Khader

al-Nakba 84, 87, 93

al-Qa’ida 106, 125, 143, 145

al-Rai, Cardinal Beshara 113

Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry 76

Anglo-Arab relations 73–5, 76–7

anti-Semitism 46, 51, 52, 129; see also Holocaust

anti-US sentiment 125–6

anti-Zionism 42, 79; see also Zionism

Antonius, George 73–4

‘Apartheid Wall’ 93, 94

Arab Christians 8, 20, 56, 57, 60, 61, 67, 74, 87, 101, 113; population 113, 115 response to Middle Eastern conflict

Arab Christian intellectuals 8, 66, 70, 72–3, 78

Arab–Israeli Wars see Israeli–Arab Wars

Arab Muslim (s) 67, 127; stereotypes 51

Arab(s) 3, 27, 40, 46, 51, 57, 84; co-existence with Jews 93–7; exile of 28; dehumanization of 51; discrimination of 130; identity of 72, 122; immigrants 69, 87; ‘mind’ 70, 75; minorities 69, 74; nationalism 67, 72–5, 78–9, 122 (see also ‘Aflaq, Michel; Hourani, Albert; pan-Arabism); history in Palestine 28, 57; see also Anglo-Arab relations; Palestinian (s)

Arab Spring 2, 101, 104, 133

Arabic 156, 162–3, 167

Arafat, Yasser see Fatah Party

Armageddon 5, 129

Armenian (s) 56, 60, 64n12; Orthodox 123

Ateek, Naim 6, 16, 21, 111, 132, 153, 160, 169

Augustine 169

Ba’al 87

Babylon 41

Bakhtin, Mikhail 164–5

Bethlehem 47, 86, 88, 112, 130, 165

Bethlehem Bible College 114, 155, 164

Britain: foreign policy 73–4, 75; Imperialism 67, 77, 79; Orientalism 67, 79, 80

Brueggemann, Walter 35, 42

Butros, Abuna 152, 159–61, 164, 166–7, 169

Byzantine (s): Church 60, 64n10, 88, 110; Empire 57–9, 60, 61; Jerusalem 55, 56

Cairo 109, 117, 131

Caliph ‘Umar 56, 59, 62–3

Chalcedonians 56, 59

Chaldean Catholic Church 124

Christ 56; see also Jesus

Christ at the Checkpoint Conference 152–4

Christian–Muslim relations 17, 57–62, 63, 78, 119–22, 126–7, 146, 150n34, 150n37

Christian–Muslim solidarity 119, 121, 146

Christian Zionism see Zionism, Christian

Church of the Nativity siege 112

civil rights 22, 74, 119–21, 127, 149n12

Collingwood, R.G. 70

community 18–19, 66, 93–7, 131–2, 163

conflict 84–5, 115, 117; ethnic 8, 14, 23, 27, 61; religious 59–61, 62–3, 101–2, 122, 123, 125; see also sectarianism; Israel–Palestine conflict

Constantine (Emperor) 55, 56

Context Group, The 48

Coptic Youth Organisation 119–21

Coptics 106–9, 114, 119, 120–1, 134

Council of Chalcedon 64n10, 116n29

Council of Christian Church Leaders of Iraq, the 126

covenant 16, 17, 27, 34, 39, 153; see also Abraham, God’s promises to

Crimean War 110, 111

Crusades, the 1, 110

Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) 139, 140, 148n8

Diaspora 30, 32, 35–6, 41, 51; Arab/Palestinian Christian 102, 130, 142, 153; Coptic 107, 114

Dispensationalism 14–16, 153; Premillennial 129

Dual Covenant theology 14, 16–17

Eastern Orthodox Church 88, 89, 105, 110, 126, 163, 123

economy hardship: Iraq 123–4; Palestinian 112

Egypt 86, 102, 106–9, 114, 117, 118–22, 132, 133; comparison to modern 27

Egyptian Christians 6, 119, 123, 132; see also Coptics

Egyptian Jews 48

Egyptian Muslims 161

El-Awaisi 55, 60

Elijah 35; see also Mar Ilyas

emigration 106, 112, 115; see also refugees

End-times see eschatology

Eschatology 1, 15, 37, 41–2, 113, 129–30; narrow 5–7

“ethnic cleansing” 29, 32, 46–7, 51, 149n21

Eucharist 47, 48, 49

Eutychius 62, 63

Evangelicals 20, 155–6; American 81n12

exile 41–2; of Christians 106, 140–8, 153; of Israel (biblical) 19; of Jews 28 (see also Diaspora); of Palestinians 27–8

Fatah Party 112, 137, 139–41, 145–7, 148n7, 149n12; see also Manuel Musallam

Fathawi nationalism 138–40

Galilee 35, 36, 39, 47, 88

Gaza 110, 112, 127, 137, 145; Israeli incursion into 101; Jericho First agreement 140–7, 149n12; religious demographic 130

Gaza-Jericho First agreement 139, 140

Geagea, Samir 104

‘geographical horizon’ 36

Germany 47, 50–1, 76

Gibb, H.A.R. 66, 67, 70, 74, 75, 79, 80n7, 81n7, 83n80

Good Samaritan, the 23–4

Greek Orthodox see Eastern Orthodox; Melkites

Green Line, the 93, 143

Habib, Rafiq 108

Haifa 84–8, 88; saint veneration 93, 95, 97

Hariri, Rafiq (Prime Minister) 103

Hazim, His Beatitude Ignatius IV 122, 133

Heidegger, Martin 72

Heraclius (Emperor) 56, 58, 59

hermeneutics; biblical 13, 152–69; theological 44–5, 47–50

Hizbullah 103–4

Holocaust, the 51; see also Jews, German

Hourani, Albert 66–80, 80n9

humanitarian aid 114, 124

Hussein, Saddam 105, 123, 124, 125

Hussein–McMahon correspondence 74

Incarnation, the 19, 20, 40; orthopractical 167

Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life 46

Intifada 12, 27, 101, 111, 112, 165

Iran-Iraq War 123

Iraq 51, 102, 105–6, 117, 124, 129; religious demographic of 121; US invasion of 101, 105, 123

Iraqi Christians 106, 114, 124–6, 134

Iraqi Muslims 125

Islam 27, 46, 55, 59, 62, 101, 107, 124, 161–2; converts to 61; cooperative 156, 161–2; Golden Age of 2; Orientalism and 46; political 101, 105–9, 115, 117–18, 135, 140, 145; relationship to Arab thought 67, 70, 74; relationship to Christianity 1, 77 (see also al-Khader); relationship to Palestine 84; Serbian resistance against 27; Shi’i 103, 124 (see also al-Qa’ida; Muslim Brotherhood); relationship to Arab thought 67, 70, 74; relationship to Christianity 1, 77 (see also al-Khader); relationship to Palestine 84; see also Christian–Muslim relations; Muslim(s)

Israel 51, 91; alternatives to occupation of 31–2; ancient 43; army 112, 113, 143; biblical land of 15, 27, 28–43; comparison with modern 35; ethnic 7, 51; foreign policy 5; geography 86, 35; government 93, 95; occupation of 29–30, 55, 112, 140; prisons 143–4; Protestant support for 129–30; religious demographic 128; restoration of 15, 27, 37; State of 3, 5, 51, 52, 78, 84, 108, 111, 137, 147, 153

Israeli occupation 9, 49, 103

Israeli Palestinian Christians 130

Israel-Palestine 110–13, 117; national identity 21–2; worldview 13

Israel–Palestine conflict 44, 47, 84–5, 97, 108, 113, 127, 132; Church’s position on 13–18; Christian response to 8, 43, 101–2, 113–14, 115, 152–3; ethnicity 14, 27–8; parable of the Good Samaritan 23; religious 84; Western response to 44, 46, 51; US involvement in 101

Israeli–Arab Wars, the 27, 80, 111

Israelites 18, 19, 27, 154; God’s promises to 164

Jacobites 56, 61, 64n10, 110, 116n29

Jenkins, Jerry B. 79

Jerusalem 21, 30, 31, 38, 41–2, 111; East 144; holy city of 28, 35, 40; Muslim conquest of 55–62; religious demographic 56, 130; see also Aelia

Jesus 23, 44; ethnic identity of 46–9, 51, 166; homeland of 47, 50, 52, 110; inclusivity of 22, 24; the Jewish Messiah 17; universal character of 16; see also land, Jesus’s teaching concerning

Jewish–Christian dialogue 51

Jewish Diaspora 30; see also Diaspora

Jewish homeland see land, ethnic claim to; land, inheritance of the; land, religious claim to

Jewish nationalism 29, 31, 35, 39, 40

Jews: co-existence with Arabs 94–7; covenantal privileges 17, 27; ethnic cleansing of 32 (see also Holocaust); exile of the 28; German 46–7; Messianic 13, 15, 19, 20, 110, 113; relationship to Christianity 18; restoration of the 4, 15, 27, 37; Roman occupation of the 29, 33; see also Abraham

jizyah 58, 59, 61

Josephus 29, 30

Judaea 41; Roman occupation of 29–32; territorial exclusivity 37

Judaism 3, 30, 37, 42, 55; rabbinical 17; relationship to Islam 77, 84

Kairos Palestine 114, 131, 134

Kett, Francis 15

Kosovo War 26–7

Kurds 115, 116

land 19–21, 34, 141; of Bethlehem 165; confiscation 142; ethnic claim to 20, 22, 27–8, 30, 153; home- 42, 47; identity 26, 27, 36; inheritance of 27, 30, 33, 40; Jesus’s teaching concerning 29–30, 32–5; Paul’s teaching concerning 38–40; of promise 20, 27, 34; ownership 19; religious claim to 27–9, 30, 33; theology of the 30, 40; worldview and 28, 36–7, 41

LaHaye, Tim 79

Last Days see eschatology

Lawrence, T.E. (‘Lawrence of Arabia’) 71, 82n47

Lebanese Christians 103, 104, 113, 132, 143

Lebanese Civil War 72

Lebanese Shiite Muslims 162

Lebanon 102–5; army (SLA) 103; politics of 102–3, 113; religious demographic of 102

Left Behind series 79

liberation theology see Palestinian liberation theology

Luther, Martin 162

Mahmood, Saba 156

Malik, Charles 72, 78

Malley, Brian 155–8, 166–7, 170

Maqamat al-Khader 86, 86–7, 88

Mar Ilyas 84–97, 88, 90, 91, 92, 97n3

Masada 35, 42

Melkites (Greek Orthodox) 56, 57, 61, 64n10, 87

Middle East 117, 118; Christian response to conflict in 8, 28, 117, 124–5; United States involvement in the 101, 117, 125; see also Iraq, US invasion of

Middle East Council of Churches 124

Middle Eastern Christians 101, 113–15, 123; see also Arab Christians; Coptics; Egyptian Christians; Iraqi Christians; Israeli Palestinian Christians; Lebanese Christians; Palestinian Christians

Milosevic, Slobodan see Kosovo War

minorities 168; religious 66–80, 101

Mohamed, Morsi (President) 109, 133–4

Monophysites 55, 56, 59, 60

Mossad 149

Mount Carmel 85, 86, 91, 92, 93

Mubarak, Hosni (President) 121

Mugamma, the (building) 118, 133

Muhammad 55

musalaha 24

Musallam, Manuel 8–9, 137–48, 150n34

Muslim (s) 27, 51, 55, 75, 77, 78, 105; anti-Christian sentiment 125; conquest of Jerusalem 55–63, 110; see also Christian–Muslim relations; Islam

Muslim Brotherhood 109, 118, 119, 121, 133–4

Nabateans 60; see also Arab Christians

Nasser, Gamal Abdel (President) 118, 122, 133

National Geographic 101

Nestorians 59

New York Times 66

Occupied Territories 84, 86, 112, 147

Orientalism 45–52, 66–7, 80n7, 80n10; Protestant 67; British 67, 79, 80

Oslo Accords, the 112, 138–40, 147–8, 150n24, 151n43

Ottoman (s) 27; Empire 69, 110, 111, 117, 143

Palestine 27, 47, 48, 67, 84; fragmentation of 138, 147

Palestinian Christians 17, 19, 22, 101, 111, 112, 114; use of the Bible 152–69

Palestinian Jews 48

Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) 137–43, 147, 149n12, 149n13, 160n34

Palestinian liberation theology 14, 16, 127, 157; see also Naim Ateek

Palestinian (s) 15, 24, 49, 51, 52, 114; nationalism 111, 138, 144–8 (see also Arab nationalism); self-determination 67, 75–8, 112; see also Arab (s)

pan-Arabism 122

Paul (biblical) 17, 32, 36, 37, 41, 47; challenges to racial exclusivity 40; Jewish commitments 38–40; see also land, Paul’s teaching concerning

Pax Romana 30

Pentecost 35, 37

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) 139, 148n8, 150n24

postmodern critique 45–6, 50

Prior, Michael 52

Prodigal Son, the 24

prophecy; interpretation of 14–16

Protestant (s) 118, 119, 120–1

Qumran, sectarians of 31

Qur’an 141, 146, 163, 166

Radford, Mary 52

Rahho, Paulos Faraj 105

reconciliation 6; ministry of 13, 19; theology of 13–24, 152

refugees 127, 142, 149n20; Iraqi 125, 135, 137, 141, 165; Palestinian 102–3, 130, 147

replacement theology 14, 17–18

Rihbani, Mitrie 49

Roman Catholic Church 15, 87, 88, 91, 105, 110, 114, 38

Roman Catholicism 70, 73

Rosenzweig, Franz 16–17; see also dual covenant theology

Said, Edward 45–6, 66, 79, 80n7; see also Orientalism

Sayydna al-Khader 95, 96; see also Mar Ilyas

sectarianism 122, 126, 135, 147

Seder 48

Serbia 27

Shenouda III (Pope) 6, 106, 109, 119

social justice 19, 44

Sophronious 59, 62

South Lebanese Army (SLA) 103

Status Quo 111

Summud 149n16

supersessionism 17–18

Syria (ns) 47, 49, 68, 69, 102–5, 115, 135; religious demographic 30, 104

Syrian civil war 104–5

Syrian Orthodox 64n10, 89, 104, 105, 124, 155, 162, 165–7, 170n35; see also Jacobites; Melkites

Tajfel, Henri 22

Tawadros II (Pope) 109

Temple 39, 40

textuality 154, 159–65

Theophanes 62, 63

Toynbee, Arnold 74, 82n80

United Nations 76, 124

United States 125, 129; see also anti- US sentiment; Iraq, US invasion of

United States Embassy 27

violence 105, 106, 107, 108, 121, 122, 125, 142–3, 154

Wailing Wall see Western Wall

Walk, Peter 37

Washington, D.C. 129

West Bank 110; Palestinian self-rule 112; religious demographic 130, 138–9

Western Christian (s) 20, 39, 43n2, 115, 132, 154–5, 161; theology 44–5; tradition 4–9, 49, 50

Western Wall 35, 42

White Paper, the (1939) 76–7

Whitehead, Alfred North 72

World War I 75

World War II 74–8; see also Holocaust

Wright, N.T. 19, 38, 43n16

Zababdeh 138–9, 140, 142, 148n2, 149n13

Zionism (ist) 27, 32, 42, 52, 84; Christian 4–5, 77–80, 113, 129, 130, 153, 155, 157, 159, 168–9

Zurayq, Constantine 70, 73, 78

Index of scripture

Genesis
21:1–3 | ...................................................... | 24
33:4 | ...................................................... | 24
Exodus
23:31 | ...................................................... | 164
Psalms
37 | ...................................................... | 33, 34
37:3 | ...................................................... | 33
37:4 | ...................................................... | 33
37:7 | ...................................................... | 34
37:11 | ...................................................... | 34
37:21 | ...................................................... | 34
37:29 | ...................................................... | 34
91 | ...................................................... | 169
136 | ...................................................... | 164
Isaiah
58:10–11a | ...................................................... | 18
Jeremiah
22:10 | ...................................................... | 42
Ezekiel
37:12c–14a | ...................................................... | 15
Micah
3:12 | ...................................................... | 16
Matthew
2:6 | ...................................................... | 34
5–7 | ...................................................... | 33
5:3 | ...................................................... | 34
5:5 | ...................................................... | 33
5:8 | ...................................................... | 34
5:12 | ...................................................... | 34
5:18 | ...................................................... | 34
5:42 | ...................................................... | 3
5:44 | ...................................................... | 3
8:5–13 | ...................................................... | 32
8:10 | ...................................................... | 32
10 | ...................................................... | 34
11:20 | ...................................................... | 32
13:5 | ...................................................... | 34
21:5 | ...................................................... | 34
24:15 | ...................................................... | 65n68
35 | ...................................................... | 34
Mark
6:1 | ...................................................... | 42
12 | ...................................................... | 30
12:13–17 | ...................................................... | 33
Luke
4 | ...................................................... | 35
4:23 | ...................................................... | 42
4:25 | ...................................................... | 34
9:24 | ...................................................... | 33
10:25 | ...................................................... | 23
13:30 | ...................................................... | 33
14:11 | ...................................................... | 33
15:20 | ...................................................... | 24
21:35 | ...................................................... | 34
24:19–27 | ...................................................... | 37
John
4:22 | ...................................................... | 17
Acts
1:3 | ...................................................... | 37
1:6 | ...................................................... | 36
1:8 | ...................................................... | 37
2:9–11 | ...................................................... | 35
5:33–39 | ...................................................... | 29
7 | ...................................................... | 36
13:14 | ...................................................... | 36
14:1 | ...................................................... | 36
16 | ...................................................... | 36
16:13 | ...................................................... | 36
17:1 | ...................................................... | 36
17:10 | ...................................................... | 36
17:17 | ...................................................... | 36
18:4 | ...................................................... | 36
19:8 | ...................................................... | 36
Romans
1:5 | ...................................................... | 37
3:1–4 | ...................................................... | 39
4:13 | ...................................................... | 40, 43n9
4:24–5 | ...................................................... | 39
5:18 | ...................................................... | 22
6:4–9 | ...................................................... | 39
9:4–5 | ...................................................... | 39
11:1 | ...................................................... | 38
15:19 | ...................................................... | 39
1 Corinthians
3:16–17 | ...................................................... | 39
6:16 | ...................................................... | 39
6:19 | ...................................................... | 39
15:3–8 | ...................................................... | 39
2 Corinthians
5:17 | ...................................................... | 20
5:18 | ...................................................... | 13
6:16 | ...................................................... | 39
11:22 | ...................................................... | 38
Galatians
1:14 | ...................................................... | 38
3:16 | ...................................................... | 40
Ephesians
2:16 | ...................................................... | 22
Philippians
3:4–5 | ...................................................... | 38
Hebrews
6:18a | ...................................................... | 41
6:18b | ...................................................... | 41
11:13 | ...................................................... | 42
11:14 | ...................................................... | 42
11:16 | ...................................................... | 42
11:37–8 | ...................................................... | 41
13:14 | ...................................................... | 42
James
1:1 | ...................................................... | 41
1 Peter
1 | ...................................................... | 36
1:17 | ...................................................... | 41
2:11 | ...................................................... | 41
3:4 | ...................................................... | 34
1 John
4:20 | ...................................................... | 19
Revelation
20 | ...................................................... | 15
21:1 | ...................................................... | 20
2 Maccabees
13:10 | ...................................................... | 42