The land is holy: keep it that way

Commonweal, April 10, 1992 by Robert G. Hoyt

If "spin control" means getting others to see a situation the way we want it to be seen, it's neither good nor bad in itself; it can be done by fair means or foul, for evil or noble ends, clumsily or with art. We all have it done unto us, we all do it unto others; I'll be doing it here. Cain was practicing spin control when he asked the Lord, "Am I my brother's keeper?" So was Lincoln when he gave the Gettysburg Address. The problem is in distinguishing between the artful but true and the merely tricky.

Israel needs housing to accommodate new arrivals from the former Soviet Union, and must borrow money to pay for it; it wants loan guarantees from the U.S. Treasury to lower interest costs (though, by the time this reaches print, it may have abandoned the effort). The Bush administration says fine, so long as none of the housing goes up in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Enter spin control, focusing in large part, as so often, on motives. Partisans of the Israeli government say that George Bush and James Baker are using U.S. dollars to bully Israel, interfering in its internal affairs and domestic politics, favoring Labor over Likud, putting Israel at risk by ignoring its legitimate security concerns, thereby revealing anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic attitudes. Defenders of Bush and Baker say that Israel is using its clout in Congress to bully the administration into abandoning its own principles, thereby sapping the already feeble peace process and clearing the way toward outright annexation of the territories.

Since 1969, when I visited the region, I have held that Israel can be not less but more secure--and more democratic, truer to the best elements of Judaism and Zionism as I understand them, and even happier--if the peoples of the disputed territories come to know with certainty that eventually (and rather soon) they will be able to govern themselves; particularly if those who now control them can give up control generously and with grace.

A booklet and a paperbound book I've scanned this week have deepened, hardened, and softened these views. The booklet is published in Jerusalem by an Israeli human rights organization called B'Tselem which monitors the behavior of the security forces in the territories. The atrocities it reports are not as murderous as those committed by the current regimes in, say, Syria or Iraq. They are still atrocious; the reports are painful to read. Are these things really happening? The booklet is convincing to me because it conforms to things I've seen for myself and read about elsewhere; because B'Tselem gets its funding from mainstream U.S. and Israeli foundations; because sources are cited and rebuttals are given space; because the booklet's language is restrained, nonemotive; and because, despite their coolly detached style, the Israeli compilers seem to me to be asking an anguished question: "What are we doing to ourselves?"

The paperback book is Voices from Jerusalem: Jews and Christians Reflect on the Holy Land (David Burrell, C.S.C., and Yezhezkel Landau, eds.; Paulist Press, 176 pp., $9.95). I have always approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as essentially a political issue, involving questions both of abstract justice and doable pragmatism; what is fair, what will work. Being perhaps overfamiliar with the misuse of religion to justify the unjustifiable (the Crusaders screamed "God wills it!" on their way to slaughter; the burning at the stake of Jews and heretics had churchly sanction), I have always rejected and resented the claim by religious Zionists that all parts of Eretz Yisrael belong to the state of Israel by divine election. I still reject the claim; why should Palestinians of any or no faith accept subjection in or ouster from their ancestral lands because of a particularist interpretation, one they do not share, of the Hebrew Bible? Why should the rest of the world accept such an outcome? Why should the U.S. help pay for it?

In the space available I can't fully explain why the essays in Voices have "softened" (I can't think of a better word) my once near-scornful rejection of the Zionist claim. What the essayists (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish; American, Armenian, Israeli, Dutch, French) convey is a realization that the Holy Land, despite all the unholy things that go on there, is indeed a holy land; a tiny acreage where events took place that are momentous to all of us. The Christian essayists deepened my grasp of the sacredness of this place for us. The Jewish contributors, who define themselves as religious Zionists, convinced me that the Israeli claim to all of Palestine based on sacred history is not (for these writers at least) a political ploy but an honestly held belief. What persuaded me of their sincerity was their willingness to make territorial compromises for the sake of peace and justice. Giving up the territories, in their view, would be like accepting an amputation for the sake of the health of the whole body. Hanging on to them and continuing to subjugate their population would be a more serious violation of Torah.