wfn.org | Old Testament "war stories" wound Palestinian Christians

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Note #6164 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

24-August-2000
00302

Old Testament "war stories" wound Palestinian Christians

Promised Land ‘unchosen' grow weary of constantly reprising role of "the
conquered"

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Cedar Duaybis was a 12-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl
when Haifa became an Israeli city and she became an Israeli overnight.
	It was 1948. Her family intended to go to Beirut, Lebanon, and ride out the
political turmoil and violence, but one of Israel's first acts as a nation
was to close its borders.
	Inside Israel, Duaybis was not even allowed to say the word, ‘Palestinian.'
	"We believed it was only temporary," she says, recalling that her parents
packed up and moved to Nazareth to live with relatives and to stay out of
the way of Israeli soldiers. "We thought it would be two months till the
fighting died down. Now look; it is 52 years later. My parents are dead. My
grandparents are dead. I have grandchildren now.
	"I want to live in peace."
	Duaybis is not talking just about peace in the land, although that is part
of what she wants. Her life would be much simpler if the military barriers
that sequester Palestinians in disconnected little West Bank enclaves
disappeared. She'd like to see the checkpoints removed, where armed Israeli
soldiers routinely turn down her requests to make the short bus trip from
the Palestinian town of Ramallah to nearby Jerusalem. Sometimes she cannot
get permission to go to Sunday worship.
	But what Duaybis wants even more is spiritual peace.
	She wants to be comfortable as a Palestinian and as a Christianin a world
where most politicians -- and virtually all Jewish and Christian
fundamentalists -- behave as if Palestinians are somehow left out of God's
covenant and God's will is the progressive confiscation of Palestinian land
in Israel.
	"The name ‘Israel' meant one thing before 1948, and another after," says
Duaybis, who grew up in a 1,200-member congregation in Haifa with David and
Joshua as her Biblical heroes -- unaware that her own story would coincide
so well with the stories of the people David and Joshua conquered, residents
of a land that God promised to somebody else.
	"The whole world was rejoicing that the prophecies were being fulfilled
right before their eyes," she says, looking back. "But what about us? How
could we then stand up and say ‘no,' say that this was wrong, that this
(displacement of Palestinians to establish Israel) couldn't be from God?
	"We were not theologians . . . but what kind of a God would do this? If it
truly was from God, why have we felt the brunt of it?" she asks, remembering
that the West over-spiritualized the establishment of the Israeli state, and
the Christians among the displaced weren't able to critically assess the
Biblical narratives of Israel until years later. After all, the missionaries
had taught them to read the stories literally.
	Only after years of soul-searching and questioning have the people whose
lives resemble those of the people conquered by David and Joshua been able
to question the stories' meaning.
	Do the violent texts mean that God found the Canaanites, the Philistines,
the Jebusites and the Amorites expendable? Was it an order from God that set
Joshua to murdering women, children and even donkeys to clear and clean the
land? What does such an interpretation mean for people expelled centuries
later from the same land for the sake of God's ‘chosen?' Does God wage ‘holy
war?'
	"The Old Testament does not treat us well, not justly," says Duaybis, who
believes that the ancient Arab inhabitants of Palestine are the progenitors
of today's Palestinians. "But in the events that happened in our country in
1948 . . . we were looked upon as the bad guys. I never thought it could be
a reality. But in ‘48, what happened is in Joshua."
	She means expulsion. But she also means massacre -- which movies and books
about the establishment of Israel are careful to omit.
	But Palestinians remember Deir Yassin, the village where the Hagannah, the
official Israeli army, led by former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, killed
100 to 250 civilians. And they remember Kafr Kassem, where Israeli border
police killed 47 women, men and children who were returning home from the
fields.

	A pastoral problem

	Because of those memories, reading the Hebrew scriptures is a pastoral, not
just a theological, problem. The ancient words cause pain because Israel's
policies have brought the progressive confiscation of Palestinian land and
the ongoing violation of human rights rather than the salvation promised in
scripture.
	"We had a helluva time," says Fuad Bahnan, a Palestinian minister who was
expelled from Jerusalem when the modern Israel was created and who then
pastored refugee congregations in Ramallah and Nablus in the 1950s, when
Palestinians were swarming onto the West Bank and into Jordan. Bahnan was
allowed to return to Israel briefly to visit his dying mother -- only
because he had secured a Vatican visa.
	"Any mention of Israel caused emotional flare-ups in the pews, because it
reminded people of ‘the catastrophe,'" he says. ". . . People are not so
determined today, but there are still some staunch extremists who do not
like to hear the word ‘Israel' at all. One of them, I am sorry to say, is my
wife."
	Bahnan, who now pastors a predominantly Middle Eastern congregation in Fall
River, Mass., says he often reminds his listeners that the present-day
nation of Israel and the "spiritual" Israel of the Old Testament are two
different things.
	The "spiritual" Israel includes all oppressed people, he contends. He
points out that the Jews were a minority population in a non-Jewish world,
and God cast God's lot with the underdogs.
	Even so, the question of how to interpret the Old Testament upsets many
Palestinians so much that they just don't bother anymore.
	"Some of the texts are very painful, very difficult to follow, you know?"
says Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran minister who pastors the 220-member Christmas
Lutheran Church in Jerusalem. "Pieces in the Book of Joshua, some pieces in
Judges. On the other hand, we have beautiful pieces that, I don't think,
anyone would want to miss, like the psalms and the prophets. "The Old
Testament is like an oriental bazaar: You can find almost anything there.
	"Some are very good. Some are very ugly."
	The Rev. Naim Ateek, a Palestinian pastor and scholar, doesn't want to see
the Old Testament abandoned, particularly the prophetic texts that undergird
much of the work of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in
Jerusalem, a Christian community that studies faith and politics.
	Ateek espouses a selective use of texts in preaching -- eliminating those
that portray an exclusivist God or a God who endorses violence. Instead, he
says, use the stories that are inclusive. Christ, he says, fulfilled the Old
Testament, and consequently, the message is no longer about one people, one
nation or one land.
	 And the violence? 
	"With the women's movement, with feminists, we learned to be selective,"
Ateek says. Even the Gospel of Luke stops Jesus mid-sentence when he reads
Isaiah 61 in a synagogue, he says, allowing him to proclaim the year of the
Lord's favor, but skipping the next line -- which proclaims "the day of
vengeance of our God."
	"We can use much more from the prophets, from the prophetic material. . . .
Jesus stands in that line," he adds. "But the whole war tradition is
something that we need never use. We need to be much more critical in
choosing the lectionary."
	Ateek gets squeamish about divinely-sanctioned killing, even famous
passages such as the one in Exodus where God sends an angel in the night to
kill the Egyptians' first-born sons.
	Duaybis takes comfort in knowing that she may approach a Bible text with
some suspicion. She calls it "reading through Palestinian eyes," the eyes of
the conquered.
	"What happened to the Canaanites was . . . wrong," she says, pointing out
that some archeologists suspect it may even be fictional. "In Jericho in
Joshua 6, it says they killed everybody, the women, the children, donkeys.
And I don't believe that is true. There is no way it could be from God.
	"We just respond ‘Thus saith the Lord,'" Duaybis says of worshipers when a
Bible text is read. "But I don't believe God orders killing. . . . The God I
know in Jesus says to love your enemies. This doesn't go with that. ... You
have to read the Old Testament in light of the New."
	She hammers her point home by adding that Moses' liberation of the Hebrew
slaves only leads to bondage for another people -- something seldom
acknowledged from the pulpit.

	Dilemma for preachers

	Mary Mikhail, the president of the Near East School of Theology in Beirut,
is acutely aware of the preaching dilemma. She has watched a generation of
students wrestle with a theological mess that she thinks is a direct result
of a political crisis -- a crisis of displacement and loss, justified by
Biblical language.
	She says she had no problem with the word "shalom," for example, until the
Israeli Defense Forces used "Shalom-Galilee" as the code-name for its plan
to occupy Lebanon, a county that is still officially at war with Israel
after 22 years, although Israel pulled its troops out in May.
	The political climate gets so hot that the organizers of one of Lebanon's
best-known cultural festivals were forced to censor the lyrics of a choral
rendition of the Song of Songs this summer because they referred to "the
mighty sons of Israel, all girt with swords, and experts in war."
	"The Old Testament has been used by Israel and by others," says Mikhail,
who believes the political manipulation of language has backfired in the
pulpit. Israel's claim to Palestinian land is rooted in the Old Testament
texts, so pastors approach them with care, or just give up and stick to the
Gospels.
	"It is an impossible quandary," says the Rev. Ben Weir, a Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) missionary who spent his career in the Middle East. "It is a
very serious problem that people are trying to understand. There is a great
deal of anger and hurt . . . not only among Palestinians, but Arab
Christians.
	"What happens in Palestine affects them, affects their local politics," he
says, referring to some of his ex-congregants. "In Syria, Lebanon. I've
heard it time and again. Some go so far as to say that they no longer
believe in the God set forth in the understanding of scripture, in the
traditional church.
	"They become secular nationalists. Some are so extreme they join terrorist
groups, believing that the only way out of this impasse is to bring the
house down and hope for something better."
	Mikhail struggles to recover a God she can recognize. While she doesn't
tell students that they're required to preach the Old Testament, she does
advise them to study it critically, perhaps, to de-mythologize it.
	"I don't think we need to preach what happened for Jericho to fall down,"
she says. "The archeological evidence proves that didn't happen. But we do
need to look at what the message is for us from stories like that."
	For Mikhail, the Old and New Testaments are inseparable for Christians.
"The God of the Old Testament," she says, "is a God of righteousness,
justice and love. ... Such a God suffers by Israeli aggression."
	Raheb, one of a younger generation of scholars, takes a similar stance.  He
articulates his views in his 1995 book, "I Am a Palestinian Christian,"
published by Augsburg Fortress Press.
	He isn't interested in clipping offensive texts from the lectionary.
	"If you take out the scissors, you are trying to put makeup on the history
of religion, and the history of religion is a history full of exclusion
preached in the name of God," he says. "Not just in the time of Joshua. It
is a phenomenon we are still facing. . . . There are lots of Joshuas in our
time. There is still preaching (of) exclusion, even ethnic cleansing, in the
name of God. Our role as pastors is to empower people to deal with these
texts responsibly."
	Raheb is interested in reading the texts through eyes that saw the stories
of childhood biblical heroes be politicized by the events he saw unfolding
around him as an adult -- conquests by military leaders like Begin and
Yitzhak Shamir.
	"I think Palestinians can help the Christian world read the Bible from the
margins," he says. "It is usually read from the center -- starting with
Abraham and ending with Jesus. And the good guys are always on the right
side. But the experience of Palestinians says that is not the case. And how
we read is not from the perspective of those who entered the land, but those
who . . . lost most of the land.
	"How do you read good news, when it is actually bad news for you because
you are on the wrong side?"
	Raheb, like Bahnan, believes that the Bible chronicles God's passion for
underdogs, and that the Old and New Testaments tell a story of persecution,
beginning with a Jewish minority and ending with small Christian communities
in a pagan Roman world.
	From the very earliest texts, he argues, God demands justice from the
powerful and promises justice to the powerless -- giving Palestinians a way
to find succor in texts that tell terrible stories.

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