Avdat

Return of the one state solution?

Back when I read Counterpunch, I became a fan of a one state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It seemed the only way to honor the legitimate religious and historical claims of both parties to the land and its sacred sites.

But I soured on it because some of its advocates sounded frankly anti-Semitic. Plus, given the fact that peaceful and prosperous Canada and Belgium have nearly split recently along ethnic and linguistic lines, putting Israelis and Palestinians together in one, happy, multi-ethnic nation-state seemed like a pipe dream.

But I wonder if a two state solution is any more realistic. I think that there are something like 150,000 Israelis living in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It took the TVA forty years to move only a third of that number for the lakes that they created. Moving that number of people seems like an impossible task, especially given the trauma Israelis experienced over evacuating the paltry sum of settlers from Gaza a few years ago.

Not to be trivial, but this stage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reminds me of season three of Battlestar Galactica. After the attacks and the failed experiment on New Caprica, each side has perpetrated so much evil on the other that reconciliation seems impossible. But given the fact that the  Cylon-Human offspring Hera lives, and that Baltar's sleeping his way through the female Cylon skin jobs, and that the mysterious final five may well be lurking in the fleet, each side's dream of getting shed of the other looks increasingly unlikely.

That's where Israelis and Palestinians are, locked in a death grip that neither party can disengage from. The Cylons and the humans managed to turn that death grip into an embrace. It's easy to do that with a TV show. But as hard as it would be to do in the real world of the Holy Land, it may be the only viable option.

Will the real Yoderians please stand up?

This Craig Carter post and the comments raises the question, If you're a pacifist, are your ethics for you or for everyone else? Some of comments insist that John Howard Yoder's pacifism, although it presupposes a churchly context, does not preclude Christians from strongly censuring state-sponsored violence, especially gratuitous or pre-emptive violence. Carter says that pacifism is not an ethic for nation-states, that commending non-violence to states is naive, and when free church people do so they forsake the Yoderian pacifism that rises out of their thick ecclesiology for the dread "liberal pacifism." The rejoinder is that Carter is not the Yoderian pacifist he claims to be, that he is advocating a two-kingdoms ethic that limits the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately the debate gets hashed out on the fraught terrain of Israel's security and its relationship with Gaza and Iran. Carter's politics are clearly neo-conservative, and I think his critics have the better of him when they point out that it's hard to get from Yoder to Israeli jets bombing Iran's nuclear facilities. But Carter's sidebar indicates that he's moving away from Yoder and really digging Augustine these days. I think it's questionable whether Augustine is a firm foundation for the kind of foreign and domestic policy today's Republican Party stands for, but whatever. It's his journey, not mine.

But I also wonder if a dual ethic for Church and State always amounts to placing the state beyond the reach of Christ's Lordship. We recently took up Church-State issues in my medieval church seminar, which gave me a chance to read a little bit of Bernard of Clairvaux's Treatise on Consideration, which sort of scrambled my categories regarding war and peace, and Church and State.

The setup: A century before Bernard, Peter Damian said that Church and State exist in a non-hierarchical, symbiotic relationship, and if each does their duty well, then each will preserve the other. Then along came Hildebrand, who asserted (in hysterical language) that the Church was morally superior to the State; therefore the Church is entitled to rule as a super-state in Christendom, even to the point of popes deposing kings.

Now Bernard also believed that the Church was morally superior to the State, but for that very reason the Church (read--the Clergy) ought not get involved in secular affairs. It's too sordid a business. But he was no Anabaptist, nor was he a two-kingdoms quietist. He thought that the Church ought to direct the State, but from a distance. Hands that wield the sword are not clean enough to be raised in prayer. But hands that wield the sword need someone to raise clean hands on their behalf, so that the sword executes justice and not tyranny.

It's a dual ethic that doesn't place the state beyond the reach of Christian ethics. But it does so by treating the violence endemic to statecraft not in ethical terms but in terms of holiness and purity. Soldiering or trying cases is like burying the dead or making leather goods was in ancient Israel--absolutely necessary, and defiling. A holy place, attended to by holy persons, is also absolutely necessary. So everybody does their respective job, and God preserves the society. Which gives you what is, from our vantage point, the utterly weird paradox of a man like Bernard, who'd no sooner be a soldier than be a prostitute, and yet who preached a crusade.

Of course this is unworkable for our contemporary context for all kinds of reasons. A major reason is that in a democracy everyone's a citizen, which means that everyone's a potential soldier. If everyone's a potential soldier, it's hard to think about the military in terms of a necessary but necessarily stigmatized social subgroup. The idea that some people need to renounce violence in order to perfect the practitioners of violence is kept alive, I suppose, in the military 's quaint requirement that chaplains not be armed, but nobody else is articulating that kind of non-violence.

So I don't really know why I'm bringing this up, except to say that a dual-ethic hasn't always meant giving the State a moral free pass, and that studying Church History continues to shuffle the theological deck of cards that the contemporary context has dealt me.

Where's the Palestinian Gandhi?

Gershom Gorenberg wonders. Some of the more fascinating paragraphs include:

So why not adopt the strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience, the methods of Gandhi? That question has been asked for years, by moderate Israelis and by Westerners with sympathy for both sides. It comes packed with assumptions. It implies that Israelis accept a civilian death toll like that in Gaza only when they believe it is the unavoidable price of self-defense. It presumes that Israel remains a society whose citizens would not long allow their government to use deadly force against masses of nonviolent demonstrators. And it suggests that if Palestinians succeeded in shedding the image of terrorists and appeared internationally as saints, they would succeed in bringing unbearable Western pressure against Israel.

But even if patronizing, the question remains valid: Sainthood can work. Britain abandoned India; Montgomery's buses were desegregated.

As an Israeli, to imagine [a Palestinian Gandhi or MLK] is disturbing for another reason: This is a fantasy of a political savior who comes from the adversary's side because one's own has no answers. Israeli politics has become a junkyard of broken ideologies. The outgoing government of Ehud Olmert succeeded neither in negotiating peace nor in bringing quiet to the Gazan border with military force. Meanwhile, settlement construction continued, deepening Israel's entanglement in the West Bank. In February's election, a majority of Israelis voted for parties that offered no expectation of an end to the conflict. We have failed to manufacture hope. Let the Palestinians do it.

And,

In a 1978 book, Tin Soldiers on Jerusalem Beach, Israeli psychologist Amia Lieblich described a young Israeli man in a group therapy session. He talks about a recurring dream of being with his parents, before his own birth, in their home in Poland, as German soldiers pound the door. "The knocking is the most frightening sound I have ever heard. You have to kick the door with your nailed boots and rap it with the butt of your gun to get the right blend. .  .  . When I was on a patrol searching for Arab terrorists in an Arab village, I was the one to knock like that on doors." In the dream, he says, "Outside the door I am a man .  .  . I have a rifle and lots of ammunition. I am with my unit, we are together. We are the victors," wearing Gestapo uniforms. He is horrified both by being strong and being the victim. If the whole country could have been put on the couch, it might have spoken like this.

It's well worth your time.

Gaza withdrawal

This is starting to look like some bizarre parody of the Iranians getting shed of the hostages just before Reagan took office.

The war in Gaza

I've been loathe to blog about the war in Gaza because, as I mentioned a day or so ago, if one waits to speak up against violence until after hostilities have commenced, one has waited too long. Not to mention my ignorance. I'd stopped paying attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so I'm not informed about what failed to happen during the recent lull that precipitated this new round of earnest fighting. But this press release from the International Crisis Group provides helpful background and reasonable recommendations for a way forward.

And I'm not really up for fighting the old battle against being labeled an anti-Semite just because one does not endorse Israeli military and foreign policy. But I will reiterate a few points I've made over the years:

• Anti-Semitism is a generalized prejudice against Jews as Jews. It cannot be equated with criticism of Israeli policy. If criticizing the Israeli government amounts to anti-Semitism, then the Hebrew prophets were raging anti-Semites. Not to mention a good number of Israeli Jews, since Israel is a democracy, and democracies have both ruling parties and opposition ones, and it falls to the opposition to, you know, oppose. To criticize.
• Supporting Israel does not mean supporting a neo-conservative vision of Israeli foreign policy that would reserve diplomacy for friends and exalt military force as the first and only resort for dealing with enemies. One ought to be able to have a practical debate about the limits of the efficacy of violence without being subjected to the charge of anti-Semitism. And, if the evidence shows that taking up arms in this instance in this way does not further Israel's long term interests, it would not be supportive of Israel to fail to say so.
• In debating this conflict, we would all do well not not lapse instantaneously into reaching for the most pungent historical metaphor. I'll admit to falling victim to this tendency a bit myself. Much better to stick rather close to the situation at hand, the righteousness of the tactics, the plausibility of the strategy, and the question, "What is the best way forward to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, since these folks are going to be neighbors for the indefinite future, whether each party likes it or not?"
• It goes without saying that indiscriminate attacks on civilians are war crimes, completely unjustifiable, and ought to be vigorously condemned by all civilized people everywhere.

Stuff

You are in a fix, Gentle Reader.  You've been snapping toys together all day; they don't work; the kids are bored stiff, and you're having to peel them off the wall. You're starting to wish that you could go into work tomorrow, but you've already taken it for vacation, and no way is your spouse going to let you get off that easy. No, your parents are coming tomorrow, and you will not be allowed to abandon the bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh to them.

You need a distraction, but the blogosphere is shut down.  Nothing's a-Twittering. Is there a better time for Yours Truly to come out of blogging hibernation?  I ask you.

So here's some random observations:

• You've gotta admire President Bush's cat-like reflexes when that reporter threw a shoe at him. I know that boxing is a sport in the NC Senior Games. Texas too? I think we've found an avocation for the soon-to-be ex-President. The Secret Service might have misgivings, but I think if you put the man in the ring it'd be hard to land a punch on him.
• I didn't go to church last night, and I don't feel a bit guilty about it. At that Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before where I wait tables I closed Tuesday and opened Christmas Eve. And Mrs. Avdat waited up for me Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.  We were beat. And seeing's how I've not only attended but led 14 Christmas Eve services in a row, I felt not the slightest sense of slacking off.
• I'm enjoying being a lay person. Sundays are completely different. Worship is worshipful. In some part this is due to our autistic son being in a good place right now, able to endure everything but the sermon, during which we excuse ourselves and wander about the church for a while. Certainly it has a lot to do with sitting with my family, actually praying instead of leading the congregation in prayer, actually listening for God's Word rather than proclaiming it, and so forth. My afternoon naps are pleasant, not at all like the near-drowning-in-my-own-drool sleep brought on by post-sermonic regret, and exhaustion.
• Why am I so relaxed? I think that, in part, it's due to the fact that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. If you aren't doing what you're supposed to be doing, life is hard, even if you're tolerably good at what you're doing, and well-compensated for it.
• In part, it's due to the fact that being a pastor is an extremely stressful undertaking. 46 Sundays per year (4 off for vacation, 2 for ConEd) for 14 years makes at least 644 opportunities for deciding whether to please God or please man. Odysseus only had to sail between the Scylla and the Charybdis once. Ministers have to thread that needle week after week after week. It's a terrible burden, the true weight of which I'm only now aware of having borne for so long. And there are men and women out there who have borne it much longer and continue to do so.
• Here's an interesting plea for outside intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The nature of the corner that the Israelis have painted themselves into is a choice between a perpetual low-grade war against the Palestinians under their authority and civil war within the Jewish state. Barring the sudden emergence of a Lincoln or Sadat on the Israeli political scene, it will take significant American and international pressure on the Israelis to do the right thing for the wrong reason, i.e., not so that the sons of Abraham and Ishmael can live together in perfect harmony, but because the Israeli economy cannot stand the inevitable black eye of having to put down another active intifada.
• A lousy idea to boost the economy: a national sales tax holiday. I've already blogged about the strange allure of what amounts to a 6-8% off sale, although I can't seem to find the link to it. Given that we're in this jam in part because we've been riding a paper profit/conspicuous consumption feedback loop, you'd think that we need a better plan than "Buy stuff you don't need with money you don't have."
• Isn't it great that John McCain isn't going to be President? Can you imagine tacking this economy with a freeze on discretionary spending and a new round of tax cuts for the masters of the universe who threw sand into the gears of the global financial system?

P.S. I have nothing to say about the Rick Warren flap because I never can think of anything substantive to say about symbolic issues.

Psychotherapy by proxy

I can't get Gershom Gorenberg's book on the birth of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza off my mind.  My review is here.  In short, the settlements weren't the result of any government policy.  They happened in the absence of a government policy as politicians, bureaucrats, military officers and citizens acted in an ad hoc manner to colonize the Occupied Territories.  Eventually there was a showdown between the government and the burgeoning settler movement, and the government blinked.

It can be read as a damning indictment of Israeli political cowardice.  But for me it increased my sympathy for the impossible situation Israel finds itself in 41 years after the Six Day War.  Like the Labor governments of Levi Eschol, Golda Meir and Yitzak Rabin, I would rather let things ride, avoid conflict whenever possible, and postpone hard decisions until the last possible minute.  I can see so many sides of an issue that I become paralyzed by its multifaceted allure.  I didn't expect that a work of contemporary Middle Eastern history would become a tool for my own personal self-assessment, but it did.

The voice of a man and not a god

Lee noteswith regret the hawkish tone of Barack Obama's recent speech to AIPAC. 

What caught my ear was Obama's endorsement of an undivided Jerusalem.  In fact, East Jerusalem is full of Arabs.  If one has an interest in maintaining the Jewish character of the state of Israel, much of it ought to be forfeited to the Palestinians for demographic reasons. 

It's a great example of how the facts on the ground butt up against the Israelis' historical and cultural attachment to the land between the Green Line and the Jordan River.  This in spite of Israeli attempts to establish facts on the ground with Jewish settlements smack dab in the middle of a sizable Palestinian population.  The conflict grinds on because you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Unless, as Gershom Gorenberg writes, Obama engaged in a little deception, meaning "physically undivided," while knowing that the AIPAC crowd would hear "politically undivided."Gorenberg calls this "disingenuous and damaging." 

I'm reminded of a scuffle over the confession of faith that we Presbyterians wrote to celebrate their reunion in 1983.  There were those on the committee who would walk away from any confession that did not call God "Father."  There were also those on the committee who would walk away from any confession that did call God "Father." 

The solution?  This mutually agreed upon phrase:  "We trust in God, whom Jesus called Abba, Father."  This language absolutized the metaphor for the former group, and relativized the metaphor for the latter.  So in the end, nobody walked away.

Now is that disingenuous, or is that the creative use of language that greases the wheels of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence?  Is Obama pandering, like any politician we love to hate, or is he clever, clever, clever, like any politician must be to succeed?

Establishing facts

I'm nearly finished with Gershom Gorenberg's The Accidental Empire, a fascinating history of how the West Bank and Gaza Strip came to be dotted with Jewish settlements in the aftermath of the Six Day War.  As the title implies, the Gordian Knot both sides find themselves in wasn't tied by a formal government decree.  The government never developed a strategy for the land or its Palestinian residents.  Individual Israelis, private citizens, government officials and military officers, thinking that "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission," filled the policy void with brick and mortar.  Lacking an overarching strategy, the government found it increasingly difficult to say No to the settlements.  As Goremberg observes, even governments usually have to have better reasons than "Because I said so."

Many factors contributed to Israeli policy paralysis.  When a week's worth of fighting left Israel controlling twice as much real estate, and a whole lot of Arabs, no one was more surprised and flummoxed than the government.  The newly acquired land offered Israeli access to biblical sites and a buffer against Arab tanks.  But in the long run it threatened to undermine the Jewish majority in lands under Israeli administration.

It's interesting to view the recent fury over Jimmy Carter's book about the West Bank and Gaza, the mere title of which provoked such consternation, in light of Gorenberg's history.  In the late 1960s Israeli government officials themselves were comparing their control of the West Bank and Gaza to an equally odious African regime:  Rhodesia. 

So what do you do when the dowry's nice (the land), but you aren't so sure about the bride (the Palestinians)?  For every cabinet minister there was a plan.  The Labor governments of Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir could never find consensus.  Nor did they particularly want to.  Why risk the government falling?  And with their American patrons preoccupied with Vietnam, there was no external pressure to do so.

Zionist pioneers came to Palestine under Turkish and British rule, often in defiance of immigration policy, to establish facts.  Living, breathing Jewish settlements in the Holy Land would eventually necessitate international recognition of a Jewish state.  These immigrants were secular, even atheistic, often communistic and anarchistic in their creation of the kibbutzim, the communal farms where even the children were raised collectively. 

The '67 war gave the Zionist pioneer spirit new life.  Yet the kibbutzim did not yield up its children to establish new outposts in the Occupied Territories.  It fell to Orthodox Jews, many of whom had been skeptical of Zionism, to fill the land, and the policy void.  In a time in which the New Left was rising in democracies everywhere, made up of the comfortable children of "the greatest generation" with something to prove, in Israel a New Right arose.  They too had something to prove.  Their absorption of Zionist nationalism, or rather, the sacralizing of Zionism, is a major and fascinating theme of the book.

So the pattern was repeated.  Only this time the facts were being established in defiance of Jewish governors, rather than Brits or Turks.  "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," and flouting the rule of law in the name of the people who live under it was a noble task, one that neither the State nor public opinion had the will to say No to.

Oddly enough, the disastrous Yom Kippur War gave the Settler Movement a boost.  Possessing the territories, it turned out, was not a sufficient buffer against Arab aggression.  And the settlements didn't help but hurt the war effort, for they had to be evacuated under enemy fire.  And confidence that the Messianic age was near, fed by the overwhelming success of the Six Day War, would seem to wither in the face of heavy casualties and a partial Israeli pullback in the Sinai. 

But Gorenberg observes that various apocalyptic movements have reconstituted themselves in the face of even worse evidence to the contrary.  Doubt chases certainty.  In the case of the religious Zionist settlers, it chased them up into the hills around the Palestinian cities of Nablus and Jenin.  And they're there to this day, like Jacob and Esau struggling together in the womb.

Gorenberg writes well.  He tells a story of war, bureaucratic inertia and diplomatic intrigue through compelling biographical sketches: 

• Moshe Dayan, the general and cabinet minister who liked to plunder women almost as much as he liked to plunder archaeological sites;
• Eshkol, the PM, of so many minds on the issue that Goremberg likens him to a walking parliament;
• the melancholy writer and '67 vet Amos Oz, opposed to the settlements;
• the wrathfully reactionary Golda Meir, and many others. 

The book offers no predictions of a blueprint for the future, but it's invaluable as an information source for how we got into this mess we're in. 

Hermeneutics

Via the Huffington Post, here's a bit of Rev. John Hagee's "Adolph Hitler, servant of the Lord," sermon:

Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: "'And they the hunters should hunt them,' that will be the Jews. 'From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.' If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can't see that."

He goes on: "Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said 'I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.' So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.

"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

Now there's a couple of problems here that recall my earlier post about Hart's The Doors of the Sea.  First, Hagee does not preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  He more or less collapses the two.  With Hagee there is no hermeneutical leap, certainly not over something as broad and deep as Lessing's ugly ditch of history.  The hunter equals Hitler.

This is especially tempting for people with no historical consciousness who've been to the Holy Land.  When you read "Zion," you think the Western Wall.  When you read "The Abomination that causes desolation," you think The Dome of the Rock.  When you read all the prophetic material about the Babylonian captivity, you think 1948 and 1967.  You fail to see that the Bible, while not about today, is nevertheless relevant for today.  You think it's about today.

I find myself lapsing into this kind of thinking, especially after visiting Israel.  This week's OT lesson is God's words to the servant to rouse the exiles and lead them home,"to apportion the desolate heritages." You can't help but think of this miracle that the Zionist pioneers wrought, a miracle you've seen flowering in the Jezreel Valley. 

Only, in 1948 and 1967 the heritages weren't desolate.  They were full of Arabs who'd lived there from time out of mind.  There's the rub.

Secondly, Hagee's neo-Calvinst determinism collapses the distinction between world history and God's providence.  It's one thing to say that God can bend evil toward the good.  It's quite another to say that God sins in order that grace may abound.

Now obviously there is some relationship between the Holocaust and the founding of the modern state of Israel.  A time line will show you that the latter came on the heels of the former. 

The architecture of the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem suggests a relation.  You move through this prismatic shaped structure that's built in the side of a mountain, switching back and forth between rooms exhibiting unspeakable horror, until you arrive at the end, a balcony that overlooks suburban Jerusalem.  You, emotionally exhausted, survey Jewish homes scattered on the hills around Zion, as numerous as the sands of the seashore, and you intuit a relationship. 

Maybe the relationship is that the Holocaust makes the Jewish state a necessity.  Maybe the relationship is that God rescued a remnant from his covenant people in the European diaspora. 

But the problem with Hagee's straight lines is the crooked God that such lines yield.  His hermeneutics lack subtlety.  There's no room for mystery, for hope, for hard questions. Only an evil God whose marionettes like Hitler propel a pre-determined plot forward, and no innocent victims, just those who defied God's will and suffered the consequences.  Certainly not a good God whose sovereignty is hoped for and provisionally demonstrated in creation and resurrection.  Certainly not a God who hears the cry of innocent blood shed.