catapult magazine

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discussion

Israel and Palestine

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ndykzr
Apr 03 2002
01:55 pm

I was listening to NPR’s talk of the Nation in the car either last week or the week before and one of the guests was talking about something similar to what Grant was saying.
The guest, and I wish I could remember his name was saying that historically the region has always been in the middle of political battles between nations to the north of Isreal and nations to the south. There has always been conflict, and there probably always will be. But one thing that would go a long way to resolving the conflict he said was that both the Isrealies and Palestinians need to stop framing the conflict in religious terms – talking about God given lands, and start talking in more political terms. This as he said would then move the conflict from a religious level to a political level where compromise could be reached.
I am not so sure about this strong devision of church and state as the guest was insinuating, but I thought it was an intriguing idea, and I wished I knew more history about the region.
I guess what I am really trying to say is that I think Grant is on to something.

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sgassanov
Sep 21 2002
02:39 pm

Grant, I am quite intrigued by this line of argument. This reasserts the importance of reading Arendt for me.

A further twist on the issue: Miroslav Volf’s “Exclusion and Embrace” is a brilliant Christian argument against what you are detecting as “set-apartness” of Nazis, Jews, Palestinian zealots, IRA, Armenian nationalists, etc. He argues that though it is not possible (or desirable) for us, as historically limited and socially circumscribed creatures, to escape our identification with particularities of our ethnic history, clannishness, etc., as Xans we are called to embrace our enemies. Maybe because the blood of Abel is still on our hands, it is so difficult for us to forgive and embrace.

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jonner
Sep 23 2002
12:12 pm

Yes, intriguing indeed. Although i must admit that I don’t really sense this in the palestinians (extremists or otherwise) in the same way that I do with jews. In my experience, most palestinians want a state not because they need a place where they can be set apart and live their uniquely palestinian culture. No, they simply want a place to live. A place that does not have a government whose constitution includes special rights for a certain ethnic group. I think palestinians are motivated more by self-determination than by “set-apartness”. Even the extremists like hamas and islamic jihad are motivated more by nationalism than by relgion, (although they use plenty of religious symbolism). Perhaps i’m not understanding your use of “set-apartness” correctly though.

Sam,
you mentioned armenian nationalists. how do they fit into this theory of “set-apartness”? (i must confess that I know very little about nagorno-karabakh). But you might be able to add some valuable insight from that conflict to this discussion especially since the armenians claim to be christians. In fact there seem to be quite a few similarities between the Israel/palestine conflict and the armenia/azerbaijan conflict.

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grant
Sep 25 2002
05:31 am

What I’m talking about when I say “set apartness” is a sort of nationalistic identity that depends on putting other cultures and human beings outside of their own nation. Though there may be many Palestinians who don’t hold this nationalism, I think that there are many Palestinians who will not be satisfied with their own state until Israel is completely driven out of “their” land. The kind of Palestinian state that people are talking about would be founded on a principle of apartness that will not fix the problem, but only bandage a still-bleeding wound. States, like people, must learn to get along with one another, must deal with eachother’s differences (not avoid them). Any state that is defined by the elimination of other cultures goes against Christ’s message and is bound to fail. This is what’s so revolutionary, I think, about Abraham Kuyper’s ideas that a Christian government must not force everyone in the state to be Christian, but will allow for various religious perspectives within that Christian state. This perspective does not identify Christianity nationalistically (tribally); rather, it is a Christianity thought in terms of the way we go about the business of living in a diverse world, in the reality of day-to-day life.

As a sidenote, I read the Tower of Babel story again recently and was reminded of the link between the God of the New Testament who gives His church the gift of the Spirit to unify it and the God of the Old Testament who realized the importance of dispersing people by breaking up their languages. The speaking in tongues aspect of Pentecost points in a very clear way to the Babel story. God does not necessarily support blanket unity (unity of language, culture, tongue etc., the “set- apartness” that the Jews longed for even before the NAZI holocaust). In fact, our human cultural differences are God-intended and may be a way in which we are to learn how to love eachother.

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jonner
Sep 25 2002
06:02 am

Thanks for clarifying Grant.

I agree that the proposed solution of two separate states (one for palestinians and one for jews) is far from ideal. In my mind the ideal solution would be a single state, completely democratic and pluralistic with no constitutional provisions favoring one ethnic group over the other or establishing a particular religion as the basis for national law (whether islamic or jewish). But this is from me, a person steeped in western ideals, postmodernism, etc.

To a jew or muslim, a nation must by definition be governed by the laws of their religion. Both the torah and the qur’an spell out specifically how a state is to be governed, and what the laws should be. Their religion isn’t just about faith, it’s about the entirety of life. How then does one remain faithful to their religion without a large degree of “set-apartness”?

To say that these people should not try to be set apart is essentially saying that they should abandon their religion, is it not?

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grant
Sep 25 2002
12:49 pm

Exactly. I think Jews will continue to have problems like this as long as they resist the gospel message. Paul, along with Jesus, was trying to convince the Jews that faith in the Creator God was always about the inclusion of the Gentiles, but many Jews clung (and still cling) to the fantasy that God would show the world how special the Jews really are in those last days. The Jews interpreted the prophecies of the end times in terms of a military conquering of all nations; but Jesus was saying that this conquering, which he himself was setting into motion, is the salvation of all people through the son of David (through the Jews). N.T. Wright explains the mindset of the Jewish people around the time of Christ quite well in “The New Testament and the People of God”. The struggle for dibbs on who really deserves to be called the people of God was raging in New Testament times and still continues today. I am swimming in the postmodern environment too and would want to shy away from noisily lifting up the name of God as my own possession, but I have no problem suggesting that the Jews change their religion.

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sgassanov
Sep 27 2002
07:01 am

Very interesting discussion! I am reading I. Berlin’s “The Crooked Timber of Humanity” and he detects two conflicting trends in the history of ideas. One dates back to the Pre-Socratic aspiration for an ideal ‘regime’ that would correspond to the ‘essence’ of men, and, hence, usher in what some would call heaven on earth. The other trend is more recent; it is the French Enl’t and the subsequent Romanticism of Herder, etc., that insists on self-determination, expression of self-will, irreducible plurality of men that cannot be accommodated under some mythical ‘heaven on earth’. (C. Taylor traces something similar in his essay “Politics of Recognition”)

It seems to me, Grant and Jonner, that your discussion highlights the mutual incommensurability (to throw in a big word) of these trends. Now, Grant, you seem to be suggesting that Kuyper’s vision was to somehow transcend beyond this vicious dialectic and work toward a social and political vision that would accommodate the dynamic that animates both trends. That is, Kuyper’s is a vision of an ‘optimally’ structured society, maximally open to the diversity that characterizes the modern condition. If this is what you mean, this is interesting indeed! Though I am quite sympathetic to such line of argument, I remain riveted by the fact that the entire Reformational tradition, Kuyper included, has tended (as I do) to view the irreducible plurality (what Rawls calls the fact of simply pluralism) as a manifestation of religious antithesis. Our society is pervaded by deep and thoroughgoing differences that are irresolvable, in some ultimate sense. So, the Reformational posse has tended toward a pluralistic models of society and political community. What concerns me, however, is that there is still a deep-seated conviction that such state of affairs (incommensurability and pluralism) are a result of sin and brokenness. It needs to be accommodated, politically and socially (the alternative of coersion is unacceptable), but we do so willy-nilly, it seems. We (Christians, Reformed) insist that there will come a day when those fundamental differences will cease to be. This kind of ‘covert resentment’ is in sharp contrast to someone like I. Berlin, or Arendt, or Rawls, who view plurality of visions of the good as endemic to humans. So, we remain open to an accusation that we are still after the old Greek myth about some ideal constellation, pristine garden when difference shall be no more. Are we denying the fundamental ‘human condition’?

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grant
Sep 27 2002
08:46 am

Ok, yeah, well I am becoming more and more convinced that the unity we’re striving for in the Church is not necessarily a total (totalitizing) oneness, not the kind of oneness that eliminates all difference(s). This is what was so striking about the Babel passage the last time I read it. The people building the tower were unified, but God didn’t like this. God thought it would be better to break the people up with different languages because they were unified under the wrong goal. “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them”, God says in verse 6. Then God confuses the people with different languages and we transition—almost immediately—into the whole Abram narrative. The story of Abram initiates a slew of sub-stories and sub-plots concerning the difficulties of becoming a stranger in strange lands, of the complex negotiations between people with different languages, gods, laws, customs etc. “Who is to judge between us?” is a common question in such situations and we gradually learn (throughout the Old and into the New Testament) that, in a world of diverse peoples, the only unity worth its weight comes in a confessional community that humbly bows before the righteous judgement of the one true God.

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JabirdV
Oct 08 2002
05:54 pm

Here is an interesting link about the Israel – Palestinian History:

http://www.khouse.org/articles/currentevents/20020601-416.html