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The Most Reverend Rowan
Williams
Archbishop of Canterbury
Lambeth Palace
London SE1 7JU
9th September 2004
Dear Archbishop,
I am writing belatedly
in response to the paper you sent as a contribution to the
International Sabeel Conference held in Jerusalem last April on
Challenging Christian Zionism.
I regret to say that Palestinian Christians attending the Sabeel
Conference listened with profound disappointment to your keynote
address to the Conference.
Palestinian Christians had suffered much at the hand of theologies
and interpretations of scripture that provided a mantle of divine
legitimisation to the ideology of Zionism and the political movement
that worked for their displacement from their homeland, and built a
Jewish state on the basis of their exile, and oppression. One of our
constant complaints of was that Christian Zionism ignores our
national rights, and indeed our very existence. The creation of the
state of Israel was done on our land and the ingathering of Jews
from all the world came at the price of exiling and scattering our
people throughout the world. All this was supported by Christian
theologies that ignored or delegitimized us as a people, claiming a
divine imperative based on scripture for the creation of the state
of Israel.
Such views generally side-stepped or totally ignored the Palestinian
people on whose land the state was created. While the Jewish people
were seen to hold a divinely mandated right to people hood, and even
chosen ness, as well as a promise to ownership of the land, by its
creator and ultimate sovereign, the Palestinian people had only
individual and transient rights, at best, as ‘strangers in the
midst’ of God’s people. These issues were not of passing theological
or academic interest to us, but had direct tangible consequences for
us of life and death, as well as of faith.
It was therefore most distressing to us to hear these same views
echoed your keynote address when you also asserted a theological
imperative to recognize Jewish people hood which needed to be
exercised in political statehood in a concrete land inhabited by
others whose people hood is NOT recognized. There were several
references in your lecture to the ‘neighbours’ of such a state,
(presumably Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt), but none to the
indigenous people of Palestine who had necessarily to be displaced
and marginalized to make room for the exercise of Jewish nationhood.
It was unclear where the ‘good news’ in this to the Palestinians, or
indeed the Arab neighbours of the new Jewish state.
To be sure, you did not give unqualified support to the Jewish
state, and affirmed that it is required to act with ‘law and
intelligence’ but one gets the impression that such a requirement is
viewed solely from the perspective of the dominant Jews themselves,
as if Palestinians have no value in and of themselves in the sight
of God, and that the most they can get, is the crumbs of the state
of Israel’s willingness to live up to the requirements of ‘justice
and intelligence(?).
However, if Israel fails to live up to those requirements of justice
and intelligence, then the tragedies , suffering, torture, and
displacement suffered by them would be regrettable,- not because of
what the Palestinian victims are suffering, but more for what this
does to Jews- that is their failure to live up to their role as
God’s people.
Your lecture did not support eschatological or prophecy-driven
interpretations, yet you affirmed, theologically, the need for a
Jewish state as a necessary paradigm to the world of a community
living ‘under God’. You even lamented that we did not have the
benefit of such a living example for almost 2000 years. As you seem
to see it Israel, in biblical terms, is still a gift to the
community of nations.
In doing so, you not only bracketed out 2000 years of history, but
also the entire teachings of Jesus and the New Testament, with
respect to the Kingdom of God, the removal of the barriers of
distinction between Jews and Gentiles, Jesus’ emphatic separation
between Church and State, (“My kingdom is not of this world”) which
is the basis for the Christians’ critical attitude towards politics,
states and nationalism in the modern world. The concrete challenges
with which Jesus responded to those zealots who yearned for an
earthly kingdom and the restoration of power to the Jews, by
pointing repeatedly to His Kingdom, which is open to all and not
just to the “children of Abraham, according to the flesh” are also
side-stepped as we are brought back to the Old Testament covenant of
tribal possession and conquest of the Land.
By utilizing the “tormented meditation in Romans 9-11” and rejecting
the Supersessionist or replacement approach, you appear to be left
with the Old Testament model of the covenant, tempered perhaps by
the requirements for justice towards the “alien in your midst” but
nothing more. Unfortunately, you were not present to explain to us
what happens to the indigenous population when such a model state is
established on their land.
What rights, if any, would such indigenous non-Jews (Christian or
Moslem) have in a professedly Jewish state?
Is discrimination against them (necessary in both theory and
practice if one sets out to create a Jewish state) legitimate, and
divinely mandated?
Is Palestinian nationalism and people hood dangerous, or even evil
because it resists elimination and marginalization within the divine
scheme of creating the ‘paradigm state’?
Are Palestinians the Amaleks to be exterminated, or Canaanites to be
simply reduced to ‘hewers of wood, and drawers of water’?
Is their resistance to this scheme legitimate self-defence, or
sinful rebellion against God’s plan that must be harshly repressed?
Are they ( or the Christians among them) required to graciously
vacate their homes, fields, shops, villages in favour of Jews to
whom God is granting this land to be their home, since it is obvious
that ‘ to be hospitable, you must have a home’?
I would welcome the opportunity to discuss these questions with you
in person, as and when you are in Palestine again, or if it is
possible to visit you in London.
On behalf of the indigenous Palestinian Christian community, I would
urge you to give a lead in challenging the heresy of Christian
Zionism which dares to justify in God’s name, an apartheid regime
that will, if unchecked, lead to a Holy Land devoid of local
Christians within 20 years.
Yours in His Grace,
Jonathan Kuttab
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