Main Feature
Palestinian Liberation Theology: A Middle Way in the Current Deadlock?
Paul LeMay, Vancouver
Volume 32 Issue 10, 11 & 12 | Posted: December 19, 2018
In the early days of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee, he delivered the now legendary Beatitudes teaching. Among the phrases shared that day was: Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God. (Mattew 5:9)
The context in which Jesus delivered those words was to a presumably interested crowd, the majority of which were likely Jewish, and who at the time chaffed under Roman military occupation.
Today, it is hard not to notice the many parallels between the political circumstances of those early days and those of today, only now many of the roles have flipped. Today it is a vastly superior Israeli military that controls territory where many besieged Palestinians of both Muslim and Christian faiths live. The ironies could not be clearer.
In the early days of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee, he delivered the now legendary Beatitudes teaching. Among the phrases shared that day was: Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God. (Mattew 5:9)
The context in which Jesus delivered those words was to a presumably interested crowd, the majority of which were likely Jewish, and who at the time chaffed under Roman military occupation.
Today, it is hard not to notice the many parallels between the political circumstances of those early days and those of today, only now many of the roles have flipped. Today it is a vastly superior Israeli military that controls territory where many besieged Palestinians of both Muslim and Christian faiths live. The ironies could not be clearer.
In early April, I received a call from ICN Editor Pat Jamieson asking me if I’d consider covering the visit of Anglican priest Naim Stifan Ateek to B.C.’s lower mainland during the third weekend of April. As he described the assignment, I found myself beginning to contract. Father Ateek was the former Anglican Canon of St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem (located less than 200 meters from the Garden Tomb from which Jesus is believed to have resurrected), and Ateek had written a book entitled A Palestinian Theology of Liberation.
Acquainted as I was with the seemingly never-ending political thunderstorm that is the Israeli-Palestinian issue, I was somewhat disinclined to stick my nose into the matter; and for good reason. Over the years, I’ve learned that most people tend to identify either with the plight of the Palestinians or the Israelis, but rarely both. In fact, trying to converse with someone who has already made up their mind on the question is akin to walking through a minefield.
Moreover, as one who hopes to visit Israel one day, I wasn’t keen to see my name assigned to anyone’s particular watch list. But as the Beatitudes make clear, therein too lay the Christian call to be a peacemaker. So I found myself reluctantly agreeing to cover his visit.
WEST VANCOUVER
Father Ateek’s first event on the 22nd of April took me to the rather charming St. Francis-in-the-Wood Anglican Church in scenic West Vancouver. In his Sunday sermon, Fr. Ateek read from Luke 19: 41-44. “And when He (Jesus) drew near and saw the city (from the Mount of Olives), He wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side, and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
Those words seemed rather prophetic in light of Jerusalem’s divided status today, especially as relates to Israel’s security wall. Though Jesus could foresee things were deteriorating in his own day, Ateek wanted to focus on why over 2,000 years later such things were in a similar state of affairs.
In his view, it is because people still do not know the ingredients that make for peace. Without such knowledge, they cannot internalize those ingredients. To tackle the question, he suggested there were two prerequisites for peace: The first of these was understanding the requisites for experiencing not only the presence of God, but the nature of God. Is God a god of war or one of peace? Ateek asked.
Part of our problem today said Ateek is anchored in our conflicting views of God. People are killing one another under the mistaken view that at least three different Gods are involved, a Jewish God, a Christian God and an Islamic God. While Muslim extremists kill Jews in the name of God, Jewish extremists also kill Christians and Muslims in the name of God. Yet Ateek reminded those gathered that extremists represented less than five per cent of the populations involved, a relatively tiny minority, and that most people in the region simply want to live in peace with their neighbours.
Yet that said, he did not shy away from implying that many of our “tradition-bound” understandings and teachings about God tend to be quite tribal, resulting in a deep form of ignorance about the actual nature of God. This shortfall has bred racial prejudice, hatred and discrimination. As an example, he cited Psalm 144: “Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight: My goodness, and my fortress; my high tower, and my deliverer; my shield, and he in whom I trust; who subdueth my people under me.”
Among a number of other psalms, he said he still has difficulty reading it given what it says. From a Christian perspective, he said that any view of God that celebrates violence and war was detestable, and that we needed to remind ourselves that God's power was and is expressed in acts of mercy and peace, and this is what we are called to remember and defend.
To help bring the point home, Ateek made reference to German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) who faced this very problem head-on in the 1930s. He saw how the Nazi’s portrayal of Jesus as a conqueror merciless in his actions, was something that had to be resisted. For Bonhoeffer, Jesus was one who loved and cared for all people equally, whether Samaritan, tax collector, prostitute, leper, or in Bonhoeffer’s case, someone of the Jewish faith, because we all belong to God in our diversity. Said Ateek, this was and is a very crucial Christian teaching.
The second prerequisite to peace, according to Ateek is justice, such that peace is the fruit of justice. Of course, this is where matters can get a tad more positional. Since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was itself seen to be part as the righting of an age-old injustice of the Jewish people being scattered to the four winds by the Romans, we should not ignore Israel’s right to exist. But in righting this wrong, another was sadly created: the displacement and in many cases, the forced resettlement of many Christian and Muslim Palestinians. Result? The injustice correction double-bind we find ourselves in today.
LIFE STORY
To illustrate just how real this question was to him personally, Father Ateek shared parts of his own early life story. Ateek was one of 10 children originally from a town called Bisan, now called Beit She’an in northern Israel. His father was an Eastern Orthodox Christian whose family could trace its roots back to the original Christian converts in the time of Jesus.
In that time, Bisan was one of 10 prosperous Roman capital cities. Although Ateek’s father was a goldsmith and silversmith by trade, the family had long operated a fruit orchard as well. His father converted to Anglicanism in the early 20th Century as a result of an evangelizing effort by British missionaries when the British Empire came to occupy Palestine after the First World War.
When he was only 11 years of age in 1948, his family life was disrupted after the newly defined borders of Israel were internationally declared. Soon afterwards, those whose goal it was to secure these new lands – those he candidly called “Zionists” – arrived without prior notice and occupied the town.
A few days later, their father and their neighbours were told they had to leave town. As his father was deeply involved in his church community, he brought together a small inter-faith delegation which then visited the militia’s commanding officer to say they would offer no military resistance, and that all they wanted was to be able to retain their property and to go on with their lives in peace. Their pleas were summarily rejected and they were told they would have to gather the next day in the city square where they would be loaded onto trucks and relocated.
The father then asked: And what if we refuse to go? According to Ateek, the military commander said they would be killed. When they gathered all they could carry with them on their person and went into town, the Christians were separated from the Muslims and then taken to Nazareth. This became Ateek’s new home. By contrast, the Muslims were taken to Jordan. In the end, according to Ateek, an estimated 750,00 Palestinians were forcefully driven off their land, and any who openly resisted were killed.
Naturally, such an early life experience deeply etched itself into his memory. Yet for a man whose family suffered the loss of their longtime home, he also knew that many of the new Jewish settlers coming to Israel had suffered no less, having survived the Holocaust during the Second World War. As such, he said he could always empathize with both sides in the matter. Yet this did not deter him from working for justice as defined by international law and United Nations resolutions.
His own personal view is that while Israel has every right to exist, it has no right to occupy land to which it is not entitled under international law. Yet, despite these secular-minded tools at his disposal, Ateek recognizes that part of a lasting solution depends on the people of the region coming to understand that God is all about peace and justice. This is what led him to become one of the co-founders of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. Sabeel is the Arabic word for “the Way”, which is what the Jesus movement in the early centuries was originally called.
QUESTIONS
When the church service was over, the congregation gathered for coffee, tea and cookies and for a question and answer period. One of the first questions asked was whether he believed in a two state solution. His own view was that ultimately there should only be one democratically elected state, though he did think that the two state solution might be a necessary intermediate step if only to build amity and trust between all of the partners involved. Even a federal type of arrangement, with a division of powers, as occurs in both Canada and the US, was an option.
He was then asked: “How do you bring the two extremes together?” Ateek said this required a psychological solution as much as anything else. He recognized that many of Israel's original post-war settlers were deeply traumatized, that many likely suffered from PTSD, and that this compounded the difficulty in addressing the situation. In his view, it contributed to a sort of existential distrust of the other bordering on paranoia. But the only way out of the quagmire was for all sides to pull each other up together, otherwise they will fall apart together.
Eventually, the questions grew decidedly more political in tone with “positional” styles of thinking beginning to become apparent in the language. It was evident to me that this was straying away from the spirit of the very theme Ateek hoped people would keep in mind as they addressed this question, namely God’s nature of love and peace. And therein lay one of the great challenges when people gather to address this kind of highly positional subject matter. When people dig into what they see as the primary source of the problem, this invites a type of emotional myopia to set in, making non-blaming conversations more difficult.
For example, one person stated that the state of Israel was somewhat duplicitous in what it tells the world and what it tells its own illegal settlement settlers in the occupied Palestinian lands, and that there can be no denying that settlers are killing Palestinians on their own land in a type of ethnic cleansing campaign using physical intimidation tactics.
Another heaped blame on the U.S. saying that by providing Israel with between $3-$5 billion in military aid every year, making it one of the strongest military states in the region, this also undercut much of the leverage Palestinians might otherwise have at the negotiation table.
Sensing this kind of polarizing talk was beginning to assert itself, Ateek made a point of saying there were a number of Jewish people both within and outside of Israel who were working for justice in both Israel and Palestine. One such entity is the US-based “Jewish Voices for Peace”, a group that has in the past come to Father Ateek’s aid when he has been attacked by other Jews who wish to vilify the efforts of Sabeel or to portray him as an anti-Semite.
Yet, he wasn’t blind to the fact that the Israeli government was also incarcerating some Jews who were openly questioning the existing occupation policies and the double-speak around no new settlements in the occupied West bank territories.
Asked how he and his allies countered the weight of the huge pro-Israel political lobbying machine in Washington, Hollywood and in big mainstream news media, Ateek merely said: “Thank God for the internet” and that they continued to produce a weekly prayer in this regard. And so it went. Each tense question followed by a gently delivered nuanced answer devoid of any obvious blaming in either his own tone of voice or physical demeanor.
Ateek gave a longer, more extensive presentation about Palestinian Liberation Theology that same evening at St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Vancouver’s Kerrisdale neighbourhood, where he went into considerable more detail about its theological soundness as was described in his aforementioned book, presenting what he described as seven essential dimensions to achieving peace via love and justice together.
He also gave a brief synoptic history of the Zionist Nationalist Movement which got its initial start in 1895 with Theodor Herzl, but which was only officially established in 1897. Ateek underscored the fact that that movement’s earliest guiding principles were very moderate, something many within the Zionist movement appear to have forgotten, said Ateek. “We must expropriate gently… the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the borders.”
The fact that Albert Einstein was once a member of the Zionist movement attests to that fact. Yet once Einstein realized it was beginning to become more aggressive in its approach, he parted company with it. (Those interested in this topic should consider reading Fred Jerome’s excellent book, Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East.)
By presenting this and other historical information in what appeared to me to be a fairly even-handed way, it soon became clear that another player, one I was unaware of beforehand – namely self-described Christian Zionists base in the US – had played a significant role in the 1940s in convincing Herzl to accept no other land but that of ancient Palestine/Israel. Which begs the question: Does this mean that Christians are ideally situated to mediate the on-going political distrust and tensions between Israelis and Palestinians? Or would we just be making ourselves another lightning rod in a never-ending thunder storm of political madness? The answer to both questions is likely yes, as Ateek’s own experience appears to show.
Even with the reasonably balanced effort that Ateek and many others within the Jewish community have tried to bring forward in addressing this topic, they are not without their critics. In fact, when B’Nai Brith learned that Ateek was to teach a detailed Palestinian Liberation Theology mini-certificate course at the University of Toronto on May 2nd and 3rd, the organization launched a campaign to pressure the university to ban him from appearing on its campus, implying he was promoting anti-Semitism.
Such are the challenges anyone faces when endeavoring to address so volatile an issue. Given this fact, it is easy to see how it might take nothing short of a divine miracle for people to transcend their longstanding fears and hatreds to move into a genuine trust and amity if not love of their so-called enemies. And what other choice do we have, for this is “The Way” taught by Jesus.
ICN Board member, Paul LeMay is the author of Primal Mind, Primal Games: Why We Do What We Do and Primal Mind, Primal Games: Dawn Breaks Over Armageddon. Between 2001 and 2002, he was special assistant to Liberal Senator Sheila Finestone, a member of the Jewish Parliamentary Caucus.
Paul LeMay, Vancouver