Posted by Benjamin on: 03.12.2008 /
I grew up in a fundamentalist, right wing, independent Baptist church. One of the things we were taught was that it was right and “Biblical” for Jews to have a state in Palestine, and that therefore we, as good American Christians, ought to promote the existence, welfare, and possibly even the expansion of the state of Israel. The Palestinians never really got mentioned.
So I’ve had to undergo a bit of a reeducation process. Among other things, I now realize that things are never that simple, that finding a best way forward to MTWABP in Israel/Palestine is a hell of a tall order. It *seems* to me that both world and U.S. media and political ideation and action about the whole thing is rather enormously tilted in favor of the Jews and against the Palestinians. But this is of course a seeming, and I haven’t quantified it.
Recently I found a website that attempts to quantify it, called IfAmericansKnew.org. Here are some of the stats they cite.
Since Sept 2000:
So I realize that this site is clearly pro-Palestinian and to some extent anti-Israel. But I’m wondering: is this stuff true? I mean is is possible that from some kind of objective perspective, the average Jew in Israel has it … perhaps *as much* better than the average Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza as the average American has it better than the average … Liberian? Is it true the narrative is so tilted in favor of the clear winners and against the clear losers? If so, why is that? And should it even matter to me? Am I, as one of the richest people on the planet, obligated to do, or even to think, anything about that situation? Your thoughts?
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Comment by: joe
1 03/12/08 2:32 AM | Comment Link |Yes. One side of the fence/road most people lead reasonably respectable middle class lives, on the other most struggle.
Whilst that is an exaggeration to some extent (there are a lot of poor people in Tel Aviv, for example), it is plainly obvious when you travel around.
Comment by: Rachel
2 03/12/08 8:32 AM | Comment Link |Benjamin, that was my experience as well, growing up in a church that was only slightly less fundamentalist than yours. I place the blame for this bad theology squarely on premillenial dispensationalism. This theological framework only dates back about 150 years to an obscure Plymouth Brethren preacher named John Darby. It was popularized in our parents’ time by the dreadful book The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, and more recently by the Left Behind series. PD teachers rarely, if ever, inform their flock that they are teaching them through the lens of a specific bible interpretation system, or that that system is not at all part of historic Christian orthodoxy. Yet it has had a wide-ranging influence in the United States, both religiously and politically, and it seems that only recently is it being widely subjected to the critical scrutiny it deserves.
Comment by: Benjamin
3 03/12/08 8:55 AM | Comment Link |Rachel,
Indeed, I’ve only recently started learning about dispensationalism. I guess it’s fairly amazing how widespread it is in such a relatively short time. Or maybe not. =)
Is it predominately American?
Comment by: David H
4 03/15/08 10:03 PM | Comment Link |One of the guys who works for me is Palestinian. He has told me about his grandfather, now living in Jordan, who was one day evicted from his family home by Jewish settlers (this was in the 1960s). The home had been in the family for generations, but people showed up at the door and said everyone must leave. The last time the grandfather was in Israel, probably close to 20 years ago at this point, he was not permitted to even go to the neighborhood in which he was born and lived much of his life.
I was also raised with the belief that Israel had some divine right to the land in Palestine. That began to change in college when I had as classmates David and Jonathan Kuttab, Palestinian Christians who are now prominent voices for Palestinian causes that are not aligned with either Hammas or Fattah. David is a Journalist and Jonathan is a lawyer. When I began to talk with my parents about what I was learning and reports I was reading regarding what was happening there they refused to believe me. They simply couldn’t accept that what was happening in Israel wasn’t a) exactly as it was reported in the news and b) according to God’s plan.
One story that hit me hard was from the BBC about a Palestinian family the owned an olive grove. One day they woke up to find tents put up by settlers all over the grove. They went to the police and were told those moving in there had every right. With the help of some Christian peace activists (Mennonites among them) they mounted a protest that included Palestinian leaders from the neighboring town, several American Christians and a large Israeli contingent. As they were marching toward the grove they were stopped by Israeli police and military. The Americans and Jews moved to the front of the group as a shield for the Palestinians. The leader of the soldiers told them they would have to disperse. They refused and the soldiers, according to the BBC story, stormed the group wielding batons. Several people were seriously injured, many of the Palestinians were arrested and, according to a first person account I read, the arm of an outspoken American woman was purposefully broken because she did not obey an order to stop talking. I found one reference to this event in the US press. It noted that there had been a riot in a small Israeli town.
A photo I advocated for use in my newspaper also sticks with me. It is of an older woman weeping in a market square. Stalls were crushed all around here and she had a small basket of oranges next to here. Apparently, during an Israeli West Bank incursion over a bombing the drove tanks into a market square and destroyed all the stalls. The attached story said the tanks also went to a nearby Palestinian-owned orange gove and drove over it until all of the trees were destroyed.
By most accounts Israel is a first-world nation, with all that entails. Only a few steps across the border into places like Gaza there is a third-world nation, where people don’t have access to the decent jobs or medical care. The people there live a subsistence existence that often hinges on menial labor in Israel. But, and this is a big but, the situation is not one-sided in the other direction either. The bombings and other violence that became so common-place during the second intifada is remarkably terrible (we had reporters and photographers there for a while and I have seen the photos and read the stories). A dry recitation of the numbers killed, wounded and jailed don’t establish a clear picture because those killed by suicide bombers on buses or in supermarkets are just as dead (under similar horrible circumstances) as those sitting in their homes when an Israeli tank shell hits. The viewpoints on how to solve the issues that have led to this violence there are almost irrevocably divergent. The only thing on which both governments appear to agree (even though recent polls indicate an apparent majority of both peoples wants peace) is that only violence answering violence will bring a suitable resolution.
As for whether the attitude toward Israel is peculiar to Americans, there was a thing called British Israelism that gathered some adherents in the early 1800s up until just after WWII. The gist is the British people are directly descended from either the lost tribes of Israel or even the tribe of Judah. While never exactly mainstream it collected enough elite, intellectual believers to color British policy toward Israel for nearly 100 years prior to the creation of the Jewish state. It is considered theologically linked to dispensationalism and advocates some of the same attitudes and policies, but comes to them from a slightly different vector.