Occupation Therapy Part #3: Peeling Back the Onion of Occupation

Occupation Therapy: Peeling Back the Onion of Occupation: Part 3 

(Please note: This blog does not advocate violence or the destruction of any people or their homes. Besides the factual, verifiable historical information posted in this blog, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.)

            "It doesn't matter what map of Palestine you show me. If Israel is on it, Palestine is occupied." Alistair, a fellow Christian, made this declaration to me during a church coffee hour discussion about the war between Israel and Gaza.

            His bold statement shook me to my Lutheran roots, and I responded, “You know, Alistair, if you believe this, then you’re siding with Hamas that Israel shouldn’t exist!

            “I don’t know about that,” Alistair continued, sipping his coffee. “But there are protests in New York and all over the world—against the occupation, right? You know how it goes: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

            Before I could comment, he quickly added, “The October 7th massacre did not happen in a vacuum. It’s about the frustration Palestinians are experiencing because of the occupation. Showing me your maps doesn’t convince me.”

            “But, Alistair,” I protested, “You’re a peace-loving Christian, aren’t you? Surely you don’t approve of the grisly violence that occurred during the October 7th massacre, do you?”

            Without answering the question, Alistair said, “I am for peace, but there can’t be peace without justice.

            I wondered how I could help Alistair understand that—as a Christian—there is great harm in throwing around and even promoting this Palestinian/Hamas propaganda. Bearing false witness about Israel’s existence obstructs the very justice and peace that he advocates. 

          Alistair drained his coffee and set down the cup with a parting shot. “You’ve got to understand that Hamas isn’t the problem. Israel is the problem. Just like in South Africa, Israel is a colonizer, and the Palestinian people are living under apartheid.”

            Unfortunately, Alistair isn’t the first Christian I’ve encountered to reject the legitimacy of Israel's existence. Twenty-five years ago, another minister, Robert, whom I highly regarded, even admired, came into my office. Something on the news sparked a discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and with a tone of frustration, he said to me, “Who gave Israel a state there anyway?”

            Alistair’s presence at the coffee table was soon replaced by Hera, another member of our congregation, who has attended many of my lectures on the history of Second Temple Judaism. From these classes she learned that Jesus lived as a Jew in what was then Judea. Jesus never rejected his Judaism or the land where he lived.

            “Alistair looks a little upset,” Hera said. “What were you talking about?”

            “We were discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” I said.

            “Oh boy,” she sighed. “The October 7th massacre was horrible, wasn’t it? Really awful.” She sipped her tea. “If Israel would just relent and allow the Palestinians to have a state, you know, the idea of a two-state solution. That would be the Christian thing to do, right?”

           Hera was talking about a different idea of occupation. Still, I thought, she blames Israel for the lack of a Palestinian state.

            Why is it, we Christians find it so easy to latch on to ideas that blame Israel?

            I decided to ask Hera some questions. “Do you remember how Israel came into existence?”

            “Oh, sure,” she replied. “Well, I don’t know all the details, but the UN gave them a state because of the Holocaust.”

            This was another common error about Israel’s birth.

            As coffee hour ended, I stood mulling over what many mainline Christians had shared with me—especially their thoughts about the state of Israel. I realized that, before the most recent war became headline news, mainline Christians probably had not thought much about Israel at all. 

            For some Christian theologians, Israel only became an instant interest right after it was created in 1948. The Holocaust did not change Christian theology—yet! According to Christian theology, the return of Jews to Israel, was an apocalyptic event that wasn’t supposed to happen until the Second Coming. It was after the creation of the state of Israel that these same Christian theologians began to wonder if their widely agreed upon theology of anti-Judaism had anything to do with the attempted total destruction of Europe’s Jews.

            Now seventy-nine years since the end of World War II, it seems the existence of Israel is considered through the lens of its conflict with the Palestinians.

            As I drove home from church that Sunday, I began to wonder if my fellow mainline Christians were aware of the deep-seated antisemitic trend emerging from within the conflict. Did they know that—despite the Palestinian leaderships refusal to accept offers of a two-state solution—terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah were using highly successful propaganda techniques to call for the extinction of Israel?

            Mainline Christians might deny that they are responding to a clever dissemination of propaganda, but the tradition of promoting antisemitic hatred and conspiracy theories began well before World War II. Through Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda, this antisemitic rhetoric gained a powerful foothold not only in Germany, but also throughout the Arab world.  

            As unbelievable as this may seem to nay-sayers, new historical archives, opened in the recent past, reveal a full disclosure of this transfer of Nazi anti-Jewish, and antisemitic propaganda to the Middle East.

            Hitler worked closely with his ally, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who re-broadcast Berlin-based anti-Jewish conspiracy theories in Arabic to the nearly illiterate Arab world of that time.

            Both Hitler and Husseini collaborated to extend the Nazi policy of eradicating Jews to the Middle East Arab world. By doing so, they also wanted to solidify Husseini as the head of a pan-Arabian Empire.

            However, pan-Arabism wasn’t possible if Jews had a homeland in the Arab world.  Hitler’s genocidal strategy seemed like a feasible way to stop that trend.

            The Axis defeat during the war, did not eliminate the lies and the vitriolic hatred toward the Jews; instead, these were now deeply embedded in the Arab world. With the defeat of Nazism, Jewish hatred was transferred—Nazi propaganda style—and adapted to Islam. In other words, antisemitism had not been defeated. It was alive and well and spreading in another context. 

            I knew Alistair and Hera probably didn’t know any of this; the information is fairly new. Most readers of this post might not be aware of this shocking exposure of the Nazi range of influence either. More about this will be forthcoming in other posts.

            Nazi propaganda was crucial in spreading lies about Jews, which facilitated the creation of multiple discriminatory laws against Jews, and the eventual murder of six million Jews. Hitler’s dissemination of key violent parts of a treatise written by Martin Luther, Germany’s son, “On the Jews and their Lies,” was very clever in reinforcing Nazi policies in Christian Europe.

            To accomplish his ends, Hitler chose these words of Luther:

            “What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?

1. First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools…

  2. Second, that their houses also be razed and destroyed…

  3. Third, that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies,        cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them…

  4. Fourth, that their rabbis be forbidden to teach on pain of loss of life and limb…

  5. Fifth, that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished…

  6. Sixth, that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them…by it they have stolen and robbed from us all they

possess…

  7. Seventh, putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands… and  letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow…”

            The Israeli war with Hamas is still ongoing. Mainline churches, once again, are buying  the propaganda about Israel, using inflammatory terms like: occupation, colonization, Jewish theft, apartheid, conspiracy theories, and a slew of other lies as the Nazis did in     the 1930s.

            After World War II, many churches confessed their complicity in the Holocaust.   I wonder what we will be confessing after this war, and whether mainline Christians will        even be given a second chance with Israel.

           Are we now witnessing an extension of Europe’s World War II’s “War against the Jews,” (the same title of Lucy Davidowicz’s classic work on the step by step horrors leading to the Holocaust) in the Middle East? A common Nazi slogan says that the “Jews are our misfortune.”  

A popular slogan today, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is equally dangerous because it advocates the destruction of the collective Jew, Israel, in favor of a Palestinian state.

            Meanwhile, Let’s keep peeling away the onion of occupation.

For more on the purpose of this blog, please see: PURPOSE STATEMENT (click here)