Mixed Messages on Israel Anniversary

Alan F.H. Wisdom
June 5, 2008

On May 14, 1948, as Great Britain relinquished its mandate over Palestine, Jewish leaders there proclaimed the modern state of Israel. U.S President Harry Truman, overruling many of his top advisers, was the first to recognize the new nation.

Israel’s Arab neighbors immediately launched a war to destroy the nascent Jewish state. Israel survived that war and has survived three more wars and thousands of terrorist attacks over the intervening decades.

Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were displaced in the 1948 war. The plight of the Palestinians has become a permanent grievance. And many actors in the region—Syria, Iran, and the Hamas movement that controls Gaza—are still committed to the destruction of Israel.

This May, Israel celebrated the 60th anniversary of its independence. Ordinarily, a birthday is an occasion to offer congratulations and best wishes. Although sorrows and regrets may be acknowledged, it is not usually appropriate to spoil the party by dwelling on the negatives. If one cannot sincerely rejoice with the celebrant, it is better to remain silent. With that commonsense wisdom in mind, it is enlightening to compare two Christian statements on Israel’s anniversary.

The IRD issued a press release affirming, “Israelis have good reason to celebrate today, and U.S. Christians can join them.” IRD President Jim Tonkowich observed: “Israel is the longest-lived democracy in the Middle East. It enjoys a vibrant, multi-party system, an independent judiciary, and freedoms of speech and press. Jews, Muslims, and Christians practice their faiths with few restrictions.”

“After the Holocaust,” Tonkowich recalled, “Israel provided a refuge for Jews from around the world. Yet Israel’s Arab minority is freer than the Arab majorities in most surrounding countries.”

“U.S. Christians differ in their understanding of Israel’s place within God’s plans for human history,” the IRD president recognized. “But the vast majority does glimpse some kind of divine Providence in Israel’s existence and preservation. We are grateful for President Truman’s courageous step in 1948 and proud of our nation’s role as one of Israel’s few reliable friends.”

The IRD statement noted the continuing travails of both Israelis and Palestinians: “Our joy is tempered by sorrow. We are mindful of the unresolved conflicts and unrelieved sufferings that date back to 1948.” It closed with prayers “that Israelis, Palestinians, and all their neighbors may finally know peace, security, self-determination, and justice.”

Selective Sympathy: Mourning with the Mourners, But Not Rejoicing with the Joyful
A different approach was taken in a “Joint Declaration by Christian Leaders on Israel’s 60th Anniversary,” publicized mostly in religious left circles. Signers of the declaration were a mixture of longtime pro-Palestinian activists and some mainstream evangelical leaders. They did not seem in a mood to rejoice at Israel’s anniversary. Instead they tried to use the occasion to separate themselves from fellow Christians who were more favorable toward Israel.

The joint declaration delicately “recognize[d] that today, millions of Israelis and Jews around the world will joyfully mark the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel.” Many would “celebrate the wealth of cultural, economic and scientific achievements of Israeli society, in all its vitality and diversity.” But the endorsers notably refrained from saying that they would join in the celebration.

The declaration quickly shifted its attention to “millions of Palestinians living inside Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the worldwide diaspora [who] will mourn 60 years since over 700,000 of them were uprooted from their homes and forbidden from returning, while more than 400 villages were destroyed.” It left the impression that Israel was responsible for all this destruction. It did not mention the Arab regimes that attacked Israel, encouraged Palestinians to flee the battle zone, and then refused to integrate the Palestinian refugees into their societies.

The signers clearly shared the sorrowful mood of the Palestinians, as they lamented: “Many lives have been lost [on both sides of the Mideast conflict], and there has been much suffering. The weak are exploited by the strong, while fear and bitterness stunt the imagination and cripple the capacity for forgiveness.”

A Curious Confession
The declaration insisted that “it is vital,” in the pursuit of peace, to “hold both of these responses [Jewish and Palestinian] together in balanced tension.” It then proceeded to make a one-sided confession: “We acknowledge with sorrow that for the last 60 years, while extending empathy and support to the Israeli narrative of independence and struggle, many of us in the church worldwide have denied the same solidarity to the Palestinians, deaf to their cries of pain and distress.”

This confession was curious, since “many of us” does not include many of the declaration’s signers, whose empathy and support has been extended far more to Palestinians than to Israelis. Quite a few of the endorsers have ties to the Sabeel Center that promotes a pro-Palestinian “liberation theology.” [link to Faith & Freedom, February 2008, pp. 10-11.] Yet they do not confess their own pro-Palestinian bias. Instead, they confess the pro-Israel bias of other Christians. This is a familiar tactic of the religious left: the harsh condemnation of another’s alleged political sins, cloaked as if it were a humble confession of one’s own sin. It is not the way that friends help friends celebrate a birthday.

The declaration concludes with an apparently balanced commitment “in prophetic word and practical deed to a courageous settlement whose details will honor both peoples’ shared love for the land, and protect the individual and collective rights of Jews and Palestinians in the Holy Land.” But so many details about the declaration and its endorsers indicate that they do not grant equal honor to both sides. In particular, they did not honor Israel on its birthday, as they would have honored almost any other nation.

Skunk at the Picnic
The joint declaration was drafted by two young pro-Palestinian journalist-activists, Ben White and Philip Rizk. Its most prominent endorsers were two fixtures of the religious left, Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu of South Africa and Mairead Corrigan Maguire of Ireland. It was also endorsed by several prominent evangelicals, including senior executives of the World Evangelical Alliance, World Vision, Youth with a Mission, Open Doors, and Fuller Seminary.

Perhaps the agenda behind the declaration was best revealed by Prof. Gary Burge of Wheaton College. In a remark prominently posted on the declaration website, Burge called it “a necessary and timely reminder that for 60 years Israel’s ‘celebration’ of statehood has come at a high price for millions of refugees and occupied residents of the West Bank and Gaza.” The evangelical academic concluded, “It is not without reason that Palestinians call 1948—Israel’s birth—the ‘catastrophe.’” Clearly, Burge thought Israel had no right or reason to “celebrate” the “catastrophe” of its birth. He, with many of his co-signers, was determined to be the skunk at Israel’s picnic.