Avdat

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.

The Syndrome

One of the more interesting essays in Grossman's Death As a Way of Life is about Pope John Paul II's pilgrimage to Israel and Palestine in 2000.  As an American on a Christian pilgrimage to the Jewish state I often wondered what I and people like me look like to the natives.  So as I read I imagined Grossman was writing about my pilgrimage.

Turns out the curiosity goes both ways.  There was extraordinary interest in the worship services that the Pope presided over because most Israelis have little if any experience with Christian worship.

This took me aback.  It's easy to think of Israel as something like New Jersey, a place where lots of Jews and Christians live together.  That's because the Christian tour experience in Israel is so skewed.  You hit all the places sacred to Christians, throw in the Wailing Wall for good measure, and stay in hotels where everybody speaks English.  Sure the road signs warning "Camel Crossing Ahead" are exotic, but they're also in English, in addition to Hebrew and Arabic.

But Israel is actually a Jewish state.  Believe it or not, you might miss that if you ever go.

The other thing I wondered about during my pilgrimage was, "What is it like to live every day in the Holy Land?"  I remember one evening in the little Negev Desert town of Mitzpah Ramon.  It sits on the lip of a vast crater, the Grand Canyon of Israel.  We walked from our hotel to the crater to see the stars.  Along the way, you'd hear dogs barking, or catch the blue flicker of a TV set in someone's home.  And I'm thinking, "Here I am, in the Holy Land!  This might be the very spot where Balaam's ass flung the hapless sorcerer to the ground!  And in that house somebody might be watching American Idol."  (Which they get on cable in Israel.) 

Grossman writes that the whole idea of the Jewish state is to give Jews the opportunity to just, you know, live their lives.  Not be "The Jews" as Christ-killers, or "Jerusalem" as the heavenly city, or Israel as a metaphor, but people who live on their own land, farm it, pay taxes, defend themselves, are born, marry, and die.  In one sense you'd have to "get over" all that history.

But there's no getting over it.  About Jerusalem, writes Grossman, everyone is hypersensitive.  It is all that history for all those religions and so much more.  About a hundred or so pilgrims per year lose their minds in Jerusalem.  Some people label this experience a diagnosable mental disorder.  And the permanent residents of the city are a prickly lot, prepared to take umbrage at anyone who fails to give due consideration to Zion's "towers, ramparts and citadels."

I'm not sure if this post has any real point, other than you can visit a place and not really visit it, and meet people but not really get to know them.

Don't wanna fight no more

Israel is on my mind this week.  It was two years ago that I made a pilgrimage there.  And, this week marks the Jewish state's 60th anniversary.  There's been extensive media coverage, and of an unusually reflective nature, given that the coverage isn't driven by a suicide bombing or other violent incident.

Let me recommend this Jeffry Goldberg article in The Atlantic.  It uses the rift between leading Israeli writer David Grossman, whose son Uri was killed in the war against Hezbollah in 2006, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, to paint a picture of Israel as a mass of contradictions. 

In many ways, Israel represents the most successful 20th century struggle of any people for political self-determination.  But given the specter of a nuclear Iran and the demographics of the region (Palestinians in the Occupied Territories will soon outnumber Jews living in Israel), Israelis have never been more pessimistic about their future.  Also, the seemingly only viable solution, withdrawal from the territories, is impossible because there's no political will in Israel to take on the Jewish settlers in the territories.

Is this cowardice?  Or is this paralysis?

I think that fear and inertia are primarily spiritual problems.  After all, sin, for Paul, is more than a list of transgressions.  It is an enslaving power that shackles its victims.  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict cries out for prayer.  And redemption.  Diplomats have shuttled between capitals.  Peace plans and road maps have been placed on the table.  There's no shortage of advice.  But there is a shortage of courage and will.  One has to draw from deeper wells than foreign policy think tanks for those virtues.

A lot of people think that the Israelis and Palestinians will only make peace when they're utterly exhausted by war.  But peacemaking is hard work.  Exhausted people can't make peace.  In the preface to Grossman's collection of essays titled Death as a Way of Life, he writes, "In this struggle, the battle lines today are drawn not between Israelis and Palestinians, but rather between those who are unwilling to come to terms with despair and those who wish to turn it into a way of life."

Fatigue breeds despair.  Israelis and Palestinians need the vitality that it takes to make peace, not a war-weariness that cannot be slept off.  They need the engagement and even pressure of our diplomats, but more than that, they need our prayers.

Fix the foolishness

I reach into my "They'll know we are Christians by our love" drawer and pull out... a palm frond!

Dozens of Greek and Armenian priests and worshippers exchanged blows at one of Christianity's holiest shrines on Orthodox Palm Sunday, and used palm fronds to pummel police who tried to break up the brawl.

The fight came amid growing rivalry over religious rights at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built over the site in Jerusalem where tradition says Jesus was buried and resurrected.

It erupted when Armenian clergy kicked out a Greek priest from their midst, pushed him to the ground and kicked him, according to witnesses.

When police intervened, some worshippers hit them with the palm fronds they were holding for the religious holiday. The Eastern Orthodox churches follow a different calendar from Western Christians and celebrate Easter next Sunday.

Two Armenian worshippers who attacked the Greek Orthodox clergy were briefly detained by Israeli police. Scores of Armenian supporters then protested outside the police station during the questioning of the two, beating drums and chanting.

The Holy Sepulcher is shared by several Christian denominations according to a centuries-old arrangement known as the "status quo."

Each denomination jealously guards its share of the basilica, and fights over rights at the church have intensified in recent years, particularly between the Armenians and Greeks.

Here's one of my favorite pictures of the Holy Sepulchre.  Our tour guide told us that in the mid-19th century, somebody put this ladder up to do some repair work, which was subsequently interrupted.  Then the Greeks, Copts, Armenians and other claimants to the church agreed that no part of the Church could be changed unless all agree to it.  So the ladder has remained there to this day, a small monument to Christian disunity. 

And perhaps it's the most valuable relic on the whole site!  After all, it is wooden.  How does a wooden ladder survive 150 years of exposure to the elements without some sort of divine intervention?

No monks exchanged body blows when we were there in May of 2006, but some in our group saw a fight between two tour guides.  Each was vying to get their respective groups closest to Station 12, the part of the Church which encloses Golgotha.  It was reported to me that one guide was shoving the old ladies in his group up to the railing. 

When I think about my visit to the Holy Sepulchre, and reads news stories like the one quoted above, I can't help but wonder if the cast of Clean House needs to make a road trip to Jerusalem.  Mark will probably want to start by getting rid of this chandelier.  It shouldn't be too much of a problem.  The Church boasts a rather roomy (by Old city standards) courtyard in which Trish can set up a Yard Sale.  Speaking of lighting, Matt will want to brighten up the dreary interior by installing some skylights in both domes.  Expensive? Yes.  But Trish will make a killing selling relics to the tourists.  And we'll leave it to Niecy to crack monks' heads together.

Munich

If you're looking for reviews of the latest movies, then this is definitely not the blog for you, but I will mention that we got around to seeing Munich the other night, and it's a fine film.  In case you're unfamiliar with the plot, it centers on a Mosad agent named Avner (Eric Bana), and four others who are dispatched to assassinate eleven Palestinian militants after the Black September raid on the 1972 Olympic Village that resulted in the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes.

The movie raises questions about to what extent the Jewish state should embody the values of the Jewish people and religion, and the tension between Israeli Jews and Jews in the diaspora.  It will also wind you up, as all good thrillers do, especially the ones in which the hunters become the hunted.

I walked away from it feeling something like emptiness.  I think that Spielberg and Kushner want the viewer to understand that vengeance hollows out the souls of both societies and individuals.  There's simply no return to normalcy after a person or a people set out on such a mission.

Those were the days

The Daily Lectionary has been marching through Ezra and Nehemiah this week.  It's the story of how the exiles were permitted to return home once the Persians arose to defeat the dreaded Babylonians.  Wednesday's reading was particularly illuminating.  When some podunk Persian governor hinders the repatriation efforts, the Jews appeal to the king, who promptly busts his subordinate's chops.

So, given the saber rattling in the news, it's interesting to read about a time when the Jews' chief patrons in the Middle East were... the Iranians.

Blessed are the warmongers

Brother Cal thinks that the upcoming Middle East Peace Conference is Munich all over again, and Israel is Czechoslovakia:

According to one report, "the drafters are planning to call for a withdrawal by Israel to the 1967 lines," thus making Israel more vulnerable than ever to heavily armed Arab states and Palestinian enemies and leaving it completely exposed to infiltration from the East. Would the U.S. come to the aid of Israel should it again be invaded? Probably not, since that might hurt our "image" in the Arab world.

Set aside, for a moment, the laughable notion that this administration is too deferential to Arab opinion.  Just who is going to invade Israel if it complies with U.N. resolutions and returns to its 1967 borders?  Both Jordan and Egypt have signed peace treaties with Israel.  That leaves Syria, a shell of its former Soviet client state self, and of course the Palestinian panzer divisions and vaunted PLO air force, right?  Um, No.  Israel lived within the green line for 20 years, surrounded by stronger and more numerous foes, and held its own with minimal U.S. aid.

Israel is big enough to take care of itself.  They don't need Brother Cal's help.  In fact, the atrocities of suicide bombings the Israelis have endured is evidence of Israel's relative strength vis a vis the Palestinians.  It's because they don't have tanks or jets that some Palestinians took to strapping bombs to themselves. 

Israel is the 800 pound gorilla in the Middle East.  If anything, it is they whom we need to lean on in order to move the peace process along.  Israel, and Israel alone, can end the occupation, and thus create a climate in which Palestinians can tend to their personal and cultural goals alongside Israel.

That is, if you really want peace in the Middle East...