This is an angry book. The author is deeply aware of the injustice and tragedy imposed on his fellow Palestinians. While I was reading it, the news was full a sermon with of the horrendous bombing of Gaza. But the book seeks to make two things clear. One is that Palestinians falling all are not to be defined either as victims or as terrorists, around. and the second is that the struggle between Israel and if one is not a Palestinian. Palestine is part of the land’s history: 2500 years of rule by successive empires (Assyria, Rome, Byzantium, Ottoman, British, and now Israel on behalf of the American empire).
The author is Pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church of Bethlehem, and parts of the book read as if they were sermons preached to his congregations, encouraging them to see in both Old and New Testaments specific messages for themselves. human rights are sacred, not a message of victory, or The interpretations of the Biblical text are often profound and revealing – even shocking – and some of the author’s anger is against Western biblical scholars who seem to have ignored Am Haaritz, ‘the People of the Land’, who have lived in the region ever comfort themselves with the expectation of a Messiah. since Biblical times.
It is the Palestinians who are these people, he asserts, neither the Muslims from Arabia nor the Jews them. from Europe. Now both Jewish and Christian Zionism Brotherhood, and of its offshoot, Hamas, but now, as claim divine rights, just as, down the ages, empires have ruled by force, and justified their actions with ancient texts: the treatment of indigenous peoples for we learn, as the early Church had to, not to expect a instance. Terror has always been an instrument of empire, yet state terrorism is seldom referred to as such; instead, those fighting to free themselves from oppression are the ones labelled ‘terrorists’.
Raheb tells of an old Palestinian woman who, waiting for hours at an Israeli check-point in the crowded, smelly heat, raises her hands and implores: ‘Wenek ya Allah?’ (Where are you, God?). The God in which the people of Palestine put their faith – from the time of the Assyrian Empire to the present – ‘seems to be weak and not up to the challenge of empire’. The gods of the other nations – gods of temples and glory – were fitting deities for conquering empires, but ‘this God appeared to be weak compared with other gods – on the losing end, just like his people’. And in the New Testament, Jesus was
‘brutally crushed by the empire and killed like a
freedom fighter’. These are selective of the text, which I often found rather forced until I imagined myself to be a Palestinian listening to it as
the bombs
Then I felt what a valuable insight this is, even
It means (continues Raheb) that defeat by the empire is not an ultimate defeat. Empires always come to an end. The survivors remain, as children of the resurrection. The meek inherit the land. Palestinians are not to be defined as victims, but by the new vision in which resurrection follows crucifixion, and the Spirit draws together a diverse community of ‘every nation under heaven’ – a message of freedom where
empire, or military might.
Oppressed people may give up hope, or they may fight with no possibility of winning, or they may
The Pharisees of Jesus’ time believed that God was punishing them for not keeping the law, so they kept the law ever more strictly, for then God would save This is also the programme of the Muslim
then, it results in a narrow, rigid and oppressive society. For Christians the Messiah was Jesus, and if
‘Second Coming’, then ‘Christians need no longer wait for direct divine intervention, because the intervention has already taken place… the ball is now in the court of humankind’.
I felt that the book transcended the present horrors with a vision of justice, love and wonder to be shared by Palestinian and Israeli, and by Muslim, Jew and Christian. The problem is not just Israel’s. Any solution will have to be regional, even global, and statehood for Palestine may not be part of it. And only ‘creative resistance’ (non-violence) can achieve it.
David Paterson is a Church of England priest, former vicar of St Peter’s, Loughborough. He is a SOF trustee and runs the Oxford SOF group.