A Mixed Message from Elias Chacour

HOUSTON—It’s no fun to quibble about the message of one who has endured and accomplished as much as Father Elias Chacour. However, he delivered a mixed message to the Presbyterian Global Fellowship Conference in Houston on August 17. This Israeli citizen and Melkite Catholic priest, now the Archbishop of Israel, has been through a lot as a Palestinian Christian, yet he lacks most of the bitterness that some persons with his experience brandish like a badge of honor.

Folksy, straight-talking, often humorous, and delightfully Middle Eastern in manner, Chacour spoke much that was excellent and only some that was tangentially troubling. What Chacour didn’t say, however, was probably the most telling.

“I have a small problem with Israel,” confessed Father Elias Chacour. “Israel was created in my country, Palestine, when I was nine years old.”

“I want to introduce the huge problem of Israel-Palestine,” Chacour began. “I am a Palestinian.” With that, he opened his coat: “See, I have no bombs.” People laughed as he broke the ice.

“I am also a citizen of the state of Israel—a second-class citizen, but a citizen,” Chacour ventured. It was typical of the rest of his speech: give a little hope, but finish with some sardonic bite. And then he turned to his main subject. “I have a small problem with Israel,” he confessed. “Israel was created in my country, Palestine, when I was nine years old.” And thus began Chacour’s story about hardship and his response—the same story told in his book Blood Brothers.

Welcome Parts of the Message
For those accustomed to hearing Israel and Palestine described with a politically hard-nosed, pro-Palestinian slant, with Israelis typically characterized as all evil all the time, Chacour’s speech sported many refreshing elements of generous candor, such as:

• “The Jews are human beings, and as such they are entitled to a homeland and freedom of expression.” It was good to hear the right of the Jews to remain.
• “The conflict that is still raging all over the Middle East about Palestinians or Israelis … is about identical claims of two nations on the same territory. Who is right? The one who has the courage to say, ‘The other one is also right.'” This is a wise and generous observation!
• “We cannot accept and endorse suicide bombers.” This straightforward repudiation, without qualifications or excuses, is again refreshing to hear from a Palestinian.
• “If you want to build peace, it does not mean you need to be peace contemplators. You need to get up and do something.” Chacour’s insistence on action and responsibility brought hope that intractable problems just might be resolvable after all.
• “If so far you have been a friend of the Jews—and I hope you are; it’s good to take the side of the Jew—but who told you that being the friend of the Jew means being an enemy of the Arab?” Exactly! Seeking fairness and justice does not mean championing one people at the expense of another.
• “If your [pro-Palestinian] friendship means to encourage us [Palestinians] to hate the Jews, to reject the Jews and not recognize them, that would make you one more enemy, and we do not need any more enemies.” It would be good if this advice were taken to heart by some Presbyterian activists who seem more bitterly opposed to Israel than truly helpful to the Palestinians.
• “Israel is in danger. The worst enemy of Israel is Israel, and you have to give up the doctrine of an invincible army. Only God is invincible!” There is great wisdom in remembering the Old Testament warnings against trusting in horses and chariots rather than in the God of Israel.

Chacour also brought inspiring word of his work to provide education in his village, an education that includes the university level now. His labor has been dogged and determined and not without frustration and opposition. Yet he has kept plugging along with his ministry, without recrimination, hatred, or violence tainting his response. This is as refreshing as it is commendable.

Mixed and Troublesome Parts

The speech would have been stupendous, had Chacour kept in a remarkably generous mode. But he didn’t. He allowed himself at times to traipse into statements that seemed more self-serving than entirely accurate. He is quite obviously a partisan observer and critic, and he let his biases show. For example:

• “The [Israel-Palestine] problem started when the freedom of expression [Israelis] wanted for themselves started with them granting me no freedom of expression.” That complaint appears a little overstated, a little Middle Eastern hyperbole. Chacour is a citizen of Israel. He does travel and speak, as he was speaking to the Presbyterian Global Fellowship. He writes books and articles. He preaches. He teaches. While there may be some restrictions on freedom of expression in a country threatened by its neighbors all around, Chacour obviously is given some freedom of expression. He is surely freer to criticize the Israeli government than his fellow Arabs in nations like Syria or Egypt would be to criticize their governments.
• “The country [the Jews] wanted for themselves meant that my people became refugees…. How can I agree? And that is the core of the problem of Palestinians and Jews.” Yes, one group got displaced for another sixty years ago, and the displacement continues today with Israeli settlements on the West Bank. It is a hard, tragic reality, with strong measures of injustice and unfairness. And yet it is hardly a one-way street. At the same time that many Arab Palestinians fled their longtime homes inside what became Israel, hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to abandon their centuries-old communities in places like Baghdad, Damascus, Alexandria, and the West Bank. Such displacements are almost the norm throughout history. Ask the Armenians about their former homeland sometime. Ask Native Americans! Ask Scots Presbyterians removed from the highlands of Scotland! The core of the problem doesn’t lie with the Israelis alone. The problem has shared etiology and common pathology.
• “God does not go to war; God does not kill…. That’s why I have a problem with Joshua going into the Holy Land and massacring the residents of Jericho.” One must erase an enormous part of the Bible to make such a sweeping statement as this! Certainly God wills peace, but shalom is far more than a passive resignation to injustice, as when a malicious dictator or bullying neighbor inflicts a totalitarian regime on a suffering people. Total pacifism has never been a broadly accepted Christian doctrine. Our just and powerful God does sometimes appear in the awful guise of “the Lord of Hosts.”
• “We [Palestinians] have lost everything. Why? Because our Jewish brothers and sisters were persecuted in barbarous ways in Europe, and we had to pay the bill.” Chacour attributes Israel’s statehood simply to the Holocaust. The world community felt sorry for the Jews, and so it plopped them down in the land belonging to the Palestinians. Yes, there’s a measure of truth to that narrative. But it doesn’t tell the whole story of the ethnic roots of two peoples in the land. Among the crucial facts omitted: the continuous presence of a Jewish community for millennia, the movements of Arabs and other peoples over the centuries, the lack of an actual Palestinian state prior to 1947, the promises of a Jewish state long before the Holocaust, and much more. The nation of Israel isn’t solely responsible for the plight of Palestinians, since even fellow Arabs have had a hand in exacerbating the Palestinians’ misery.
• “I invite you all to be friends of the Palestinians. We welcome you to take our side. Why not? It’s healthy. For once you would be on the right side.” While Chacour wore a bemused smile as he invited people for once to be on “the right side,” the Palestinian side, he was actually contradicting his statements previously about not taking sides. So which is it? Take sides? Or seek peace and fairness all around for both sides?
• “Be the voice of the poor; be the voice of the oppressed.” This invitation is both biblical in part and troublesome in part. It sounds an awful lot like liberation theology, which fails as it tries to exalt anything any group claiming oppression wants or does. Such theology makes God a tool of particular political and economic “liberation” movements, rather than himself being the author of the only true and lasting liberation of all humankind. In this view, people are deemed wise simply because they are poor. Their causes, no matter how they further them, are considered just, simply because the persons pursuing those causes are the underdogs. The ways such thinking can deviate from orthodox Christianity are legion! The Fall didn’t fail to afflict the downtrodden, who can perpetuate petty, self-serving, devious, and damaging beliefs and activities no less tainted by sin than those of an oppressor class. We all sin; we all err.

Sometimes the magnanimous statements Chacour would grant, out of his generosity, he would then take back or slightly spoil, out of his partisanship. His speech took on the feel of a generous “Ya gotta love the Jews!” with a gratuitous “even though they’re the bad guys and we’re the innocent victims” thrown in as a kicker. It was a double message, pleasant at first taste, but with a bit of a bitter taste left after the first sweet sip.

The Message Left Unsaid
As Chacour told his stories, I was originally impressed. Terrible things had happened to his father and his family. He chose a positive response, rather than bitterness. He eschewed violence or retaliation. He expended his energy as a pastor, educator, and community builder. It’s a great story, and Chacour tells it with interest and even humor. But it wasn’t complete.

Nowhere, for instance, did Chacour speak about the actions and attitudes of Israel’s Arab neighbors: how they attempted to destroy Israel at its birth and several times later, how they encouraged the Palestinians to leave their villages in 1948 so as to facilitate war against Israel, how they have refused after three generations to assimilate the Palestinian refugees but prefer to keep them on display for political purposes, how their state media still regularly promulgate vicious anti-Jewish propaganda.

Chacour did not get into the complicated land-ownership situation prior to the creation of Israel after the Second World War: how many Zionists had legally purchased land from Palestinian landowners; how laws were passed that made the sale of land to Jews punishable by death; and how many Palestinians who “just want to return to their land” did not own the land but were instead tenants, often victimized by their own people. (See “Whose Land Is It?“).

In no way did Chacour adequately explain the dire situation in 1967, when Israel found itself surrounded by hostile armies from countries far outnumbering its tiny population and bent on wiping the Jews off the map of the Middle East. Nor did he give any credence to the need today for a security barrier to protect Israelis from random and horrific terrorist attacks, and how that barrier has vastly reduced both Israeli and Palestinian deaths.

Chacour failed to adequately mention the willingness of Israel to give up land for peace: how Israel offered to return 98 percent of the land taken in the 1967 war, with compensation for the other 2 percent, and the offer was rejected by the late Palestinian President Arafat, or how Israel unilaterally cleared its settlements from Gaza. Nor did Chacour admit the failings of the Palestinian Authority government, ranging from thuggish corruption to the bloody hostilities between the Fatah and Hamas factions.

Chacour’s narrative carefully bypassed these troublesome aspects of Palestinian reality, concentrating instead only on injustices committed by the government of Israel. For instance, he blamed Israel solely for Palestinian Christian emigration overseas, which threatens to empty the Holy Land of its Christian population. He didn’t mention the pressure and even violence from Islamic extremists, who can make life a living hell for Christian Palestinians.

An incomplete telling of a story is not a basically honest telling. The parts conveniently left out are strategically important, if we are to receive an accurate picture of what is happening and why it is happening. While Chacour’s talk was welcome and refreshing because it didn’t wax hostile and it retained a measure of equanimity, it was ultimately disappointing because it was both enigmatic and incomplete.

There is much more story than Elias Chacour told, not just in length but in breadth. And so we listeners were left with a not entirely accurate picture, because Chacour neglected some key parts of the puzzle.

One cannot help liking and even admiring Elias Chacour. There is so much right that he is doing, and so much potentially wrong that has not fallen into, even with much opportunity or even provocation to do so. And yet, yet—one would hope for an even more holistic portrayal from him of the full, unabridged story of two peoples in the Holy Land, both with strengths and weaknesses, shining nobility and wretched failings. People like all the rest of us.