wfn.org | Long-time U.S. Mideast Resident Offers Analysis of Crisis

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For additional information, contact
Lewis R. Scudder Jr
MECC Limassol:              
P.O.Box 4259
Limassol, Cyprus
Phone: +357 (5) 326 022
Fax: +357 (5) 324496
Email: scudder@spidernet.com.cy
Web: www.mecchurches.org

JERUSALEM, April 30, 2002--Following is an background article written by 
Lewis R. Scudder, editor of the NewsReport of the Middle East Council of 
Churches, that provides an analysis of the current crisis in the Holy Land.

Scudder has lived in the Middle East most of his career, serving as a 
missionary in the Gulf, an ecumenical pastor in Turkey and currently as a 
staff person of the Middle East Council of Churches.  He is a minister of the 
Reformed Church in America.  His office is in Cyprus.

By Lewis Scudder 

For the past half century, during the last two years, but especially since 
Israel launched its full scale offensive of March 28th, 2002, a dismayed 
world has watched, mesmerized, as the dust devil of conflict rips through 
Palestine -- a vortex of colliding identities and religiously embellished 
ideologies born out of very different cultural energies. 

The elemental forces now swirling in geographical Palestine emerge from the 
ragged transition from the imperial to the post-imperial age, from the era of 
'great wars' through the 'cold' and into 'the days of terror', from a world 
of discrete parts into a global ecumenium that none yet truly understands. 

The tragedy these forces are playing out is internationally infectious and 
can be traced to the fact that each is largely self-referenced.  In other 
words, the human bond that unites each to the other is being denied or 
ignored.  That is very dangerous. 

The forces of which we speak have many different names and tap many different 
sources for fuel.  It would be tedious to trace them all back to their 
origins, although that would not be pointless had we the time, because what 
we mainly lack now is common ground for understanding.  

Out of the collapse of feudal Europe and the rise of industrialized nation 
states sprang a western notion that national identity must be concentrated 
within narrow definitions if states hope effectively to compete for power.  
Christianity was tapped to justify this, provide its religious mystique, and 
camouflage with its piety the crass drive for power and economic control.  
And, because it did not fit this pattern, western Judaism found itself 
increasingly the odd body, the suspect alien, and the focus for pogroms that 
reached their apogee in the Holocaust.

In the conviction that this degenerate European system represented the model 
for human realization, Zionism was born.  Essentially it was Jewish 
assimilation on a massive scale, a mirror image of that force which had 
rejected the Jews. In parallel, out of the petrifaction of empire garbed in 
Islamic pretensions, the East was victimized by its inability to maneuver and 
adapt to a Europe suddenly on the move. 

Country after country fell to western imperial expansion.  This too was an 
alienating experience.  Weighted by its own ungainliness, the imperial world 
order moved toward its collapse in the Second World War, and was replaced by 
an ideological conflict, the Cold War.  But sufficiently impressed by 
appearances, with some custom tailoring,' Third World' countries tried on the 
old European formulas for size. 

The effort never quite worked. In the Middle East the sense of alienation 
persisted.  These societies found themselves reacting in two ways.  The first 
was Arab nationalism, patterned on western philosophical and political 
models; the other was Islamism, the assertion that Islam is the defining 
element of national identity.  

Islamism, at its root and especially after 1967, was inspired by the Zionist 
experiment.  It is an effort to overcome alienation through asserting the 
mirror image of that which has victimized and alienated the Palestinian 
people.  The Zionist experiment was launched against a society that had been 
weak to start and was further weakened by imperial meddling.  

In 1948, the region awoke to realize it was losing an inalienable part of 
itself.  Over the half century since, Palestinian and Israeli identities have 
shaped each other.  In 1948 large numbers of Palestinians, avoiding the 
violence of war, were stranded in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza.  

The UN recognized their right to return (Resolution 194); Israel did not.  
They became refugees.  To preserve its ideological self-confidence, from the 
days of David Ben Gurion through the regime of Israeli Prime Minister Golda 
Meir (1969-1974) official Israel outright denied that any 'Palestinian 
people' existed.  The term, 'Palestinian', did not exist in Israeli 
vocabulary.  Indeed, some Arab nationalist ideologues said much the same 
thing.  

It fell to the autonomous Palestinian national movement launched in exile by 
Yasser Arafat to assert a Palestinian identity that came into being by force 
of circumstance as much as anything else, and must be reckoned with both by 
Israel and by the Arab world. In the reshuffling of the Middle East that 
followed the Six-Day War of 1967, Arafat's FATAH organization emerged as both 
a military force and an identity-shaping influence that assumed increasing 
significance.  It became the keystone for today's Palestine National 
Authority and 'Chairman Arafat' has been elected as 'President Arafat'. 

Zionism and Palestinian nationalism both emerge out of suffering.  The 
contexts of their respective suffering are similar but not the same.  In the 
present configuration, Israel exists to collect the debt western civilization 
owes the Jewish people for Anti-Semitism. 

Palestinians, for their part, see themselves to be victims of Zionism and the 
western milieu in which it was bred.  They and their Arab allies, 
furthermore, see western powers (in their forefront the United States) as 
Israel's principal allies without whom Israel would not have existed and 
cannot not continue to survive. 

Because of historic ties and the focal significance of the city of Jerusalem, 
the whole Arab and Islamic world has been caught up in the vortex of this 
struggle. Western societies, still trying to come to terms with their 
consciences over the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, have agonized long over 
how to reconcile themselves to the one or the other or both parties in the 
conflict. 

The baggage of their cultural, ideological and religious past is an awkward 
impediment.  Particularly in the United States this malaise opened the door 
to Zionist political pressure groups that knew how to manipulate public 
opinion, religious sensibilities and the machinery of government.  
Ideological ambiguities notwithstanding, since Britain faded away as a world 
power in the 1950s (foreseen already by Zionists in 1942), the United States 
became the base of Zionist power, and Israel's most generous and steadfast 
supporter. 

Somewhat ironically, this now also means that it is the only world power in a 
position effectively to intervene to draw the conflict to a close.  Beginning 
in the late 1970s, the conflict over Palestine entered a new phase.  It was 
augmented in the late 1980s when, buoyed up by the 1987 Intifada, 
Palestinians felt confident enough to launch a diplomatic offensive directed 
toward resolving their long alienation and exile. 

It was a kind of pragmatism that, even within Palestinian society, had its 
opponents, but it prevailed.  Pressed by the same Intifada, a new pragmatism 
in Israel came to see things in much the same light.  It led to American- and 
European-sponsored meetings between Israelis and Palestinians in Madrid, Oslo 
and Washington that worked out formulas for negotiation, the term 'peace 
process' came into vogue, by 1993 the Palestine National Authority began to 
function, and among ordinary Israelis and Palestinians a new optimism was 
born. 

Two forces, working off of each other, have served to derail that process and 
betray that optimism.  The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 
1995 by extreme Zionist elements marked the beginning of the slide into the 
present violence.  Subsequent political momentum on the Israeli right 
(Benyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak succeeding each other as Prime Ministers) 
led, in the end, to the election of Ariel Sharon. 

Sharon, a hard line Zionist, is a man of violence with a long-standing and 
petulant animosity toward Arafat.  Through his deliberate desecration of the 
al-Aqsa Mosque, he ignited the second Palestinian Intifada, and, in an irony 
hard to understand, was elected to end it.  It was like pouring gasoline on a 
fire with the hope of extinguishing it.  Under him violence in Palestine has 
blossomed. 

The other force derailing the peace process has been Islamist extremism, at 
first encouraged by the Israeli government as a counter to Palestinian 
nationalism.  Fed by dissatisfaction with the manifestly flawed Oslo 
Agreement, movements like Hamas and Islamic Jihad gained momentum in the 
1990s. Independent of the Palestine National Authority (and, more often than 
not, in opposition to it), these movements, like their erstwhile mentors, 
have tapped energy off the prevailing sense of Palestinian frustration and 
despair, and have devoted major effort to keeping the pot of violence 
boiling. 

They have been the main recruiters and trainers of those young Palestinians 
who have fulfilled suicide missions within Israel.  As Sharon's government 
continues its campaign to completely demoralize the Palestinian community, 
achieve thereby the kind of 'ethnic cleansing' doctrinaire Zionism 
prescribes, and, with every measure taken, spur on the suicidal response of 
the Islamist fanatic fringe, the world has begun to wake up to the fact that 
a major disaster is in the making that cannot be contained within Palestine. 
Something decisive must be done and quickly. 

The events of September 11th, 2001, demonstrate that Islamist fanaticism 
draws a great deal of its drive from the conflict in Palestine.  Unless the 
United States and the international community can find the political will to 
act, restrain the Israeli government and de-fang the Islamist fanatics, as 
Thomas Friedman observed recently in the New York Times (April 3, 2002),  
"... Osama [Bin Laden] wins, and the war of civilizations will be coming to a 
theater near you." 

Now even President George Bush, beyond insisting upon an immediate cease fire 
and Israeli withdrawal, has observed (April 4 & 6, 2002) that Israel must 
return to its pre-1967 borders, end its military occupation, withdraw its 
settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and make way for a Palestinian state 
with its capital in Jerusalem.  The formula is simple, widely recognized, and 
endorsed by the summit of Arab states (March 28, 2002).  What it requires is 
Israel's agreement that it exists in a Middle East into which, willy-nilly, 
it must eventually integrate or from which it will inevitably disappear.  

And it will be by that fundamental change in orientation that the Islamist 
force of denial will lose the mainstay of its credibility.  At this point, 
sadly, and on the very day that the Arab summit's peace offer was made, Hamas 
and Sharon have signed in blood a concord for war.  Without being obliged to 
do so, the Sharon government will not be sidetracked from the deadly course 
it intends to run. 

The capacity to oblige Sharon in this matter rests in the hands of the United 
States.  The Middle East Council of Churches' open letter of April 3rd 
concluded by urging the American president to "choose life."  It remains to 
be seen whether he or his administration will do that, or whether, as now 
seems more likely, the American administration, while making noises of pious 
disapproval, has cut sufficient slack for Sharon to complete his campaign at 
an accelerated pace. 

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