MysteriousFaith

The Agony of the Gaza Strip Withdrawal

Over the last week the world has been transfixed by the events of the Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian Gaza Strip. Studying the emotions of the Israelis being forced out of their homes and wrestling with the implications of the Israeli government’s withdrawal is important for a number of reasons. Some of the insights that will come are related to organized religion, some the challenges to occupying powers looking to restore autonomous rule, and perhaps most importantly, how to restore meaningful independence to a people ravaged by economic and political isolation. Seeing the events of the last week as positive takes enormous courage; frankly, more courage than a pragmatist such as I has. As has been pointed out by others, the current Israeli policy towards the Palestinians has several similarities to the Bantustan methodology employed by the South African apartheid government in its attempt to present its policy towards black-Africans as being equitable when the government’s real intentions could not have been less sincere. The Bantustan approach, which took small disconnected sections of black-populated South Africa and gave them meaningless autonomy, in fact only served to make clearer the inequity black-Africans lived under. A cursory analysis of the Bantustan policy upon its inception would have looked at the government’s public emphasis and attempted to argue that the government’s intentions were sincere; the truth was that the South African government hoped it could weather the global storm from the apartheid system coming under increasing scrutiny without significant changes to the role and social status given its black population having to be made. The reality of the Bantustan policy was a government looking to make minimal meaningful internal changes but to communicate to the outside world that these moves were of significance.

Is the Gaza Strip situation something similar? Possibly. Experts on the current Israeli-government, of which I am not one, will have to comment on what the real motives are for the government’s withdrawal from Gaza. Motivation may include a deep realization that the government can not sustain the costs of holding territories where the Palestinian people overpopulate the Israeli population on the order of several million people. It is possible, and for this we should hope, that the move is a sincere effort at extending the olive branch to the Palestinian people in the hopes of engendering a lasting peace both with the Palestinians and the broader Muslim community. The most disingenuous reason is a strategic calculation that the Palestinian population will implode, creating a level of political and economic chaos that serves to illustrate to the world that Palestinians have no hope of self-government. Such an object lesson would become a heavy burden for future Palestinians to disprove to themselves and a global community who might otherwise argue for their rights of independence. Most darkly, a Palestinian self-government implosion would provide new ammunition to the colonialists and imperialists of our day who would have us believe Muslim culture is incompatible with the noble ideas of democracy, personal freedom and secularism. It is unfortunate that the Palestinian situation can not be only about the hopes and aspirations of the Palestinians themselves; because of the political, social and religious dimensions to this conflict it seems a distant hope to see the Palestinian issue as only extending to them personal questions of liberty and territorial autonomy.

For people distanced from the Israeli/Palestinian question, what is most important is to realize what is necessary for the Palestinian situation to improve. Palestinians desperately need self-rule, and not in the form Yassir Arafat provided. At over 60% unemployment and as the most densely populated area in the world, the Gaza Strip’s economic problems and basis issues of sustenance must take priority. Less important is the over two billion dollars of aid the Israeli government is asking America to pay for (primarily to fund resettling the many religious zealots who lived in the Gaza Strip) and more important is funding those projects that will create jobs and feed the teeming masses in the Gaza Strip.

Israel faces a difficult internal political issue as it brings the settlers back into their society. Many of the people who settled in the Israeli occupied territories were religious ideologues who viewed their choice of home as being significant in forcing Israel to accept its Divinely ordained obligation to occupy the Promised Land. Always vocal opponents to the Israeli withdrawal, the settlers are now being forced (in many cases quite literally at gunpoint) back into the mainstream of Israeli society. Pulled from the deep roots they had put down, the homes they had built, and communities they had fostered, these people are now angry. What will happen to this anger? Will it simply disappear with time? More than likely this will not happen, and the anger will begin to shape internal Israeli politics for the worse. Those who have courageously fought inside Israel for a peaceful withdrawal from the Palestinian Occupied Territories must now work for two additional things: first, productive dialogue with their more fundamentalist citizens who feel they have been betrayed and second, with their Palestinian neighbors as they work towards meaningful self-rule and economic development.

Of absolute fascination to Christians should be the ability to take arcane sections of the Old Testament dealing with making Canaan the Israelite “Promised Land” and set the reality of this supposedly Divine promise into today’s ethos and worldview. Many Christians can afford to push away complications to their faith based on the Canaanite genocide because contemporary comparable situations are hard to come by. This is not so when looking at the much simpler issue of people being dislocated from their homes. While too few Christians can afford to be honest about the difficulties in arguing for the Canaanite genocide to be of God, fewer still are willing to look past the probable man-made extrapolation of God’s supposed commandment that the Canaanites be exterminated and simply wrestle with a God that would have a group of people kick another group of people out of their homes. Where we can not conceptualize the implications to genocide, we can the dislocation of people from their home. We can equally visualize the problems with God playing the role of cosmic real-estate agent. Among the thorny problems of Christian theology, the ineffectual approach God supposedly takes to introduce His chosen people to their promised land simply could not be more problematic. Justifying the Old Testament’s moments of genocide and nationalism typically rest on a view of people that says comparatively we are more advanced than they. If we accept this, we then accept that today’s people are able to be less emotional, less nationalistic, and less violent than people in ages past. With this justification in mind we then roll back today’s emotion, nationalism and violence into epochs past when people were more emotional, nationalistic and violent. People then were no more capable of handling genocide and being booted from their homes than people now; it was wrong now to dislocate the Palestinian people and it was wrong then.

This week’s coverage by various media outlets of the Gaza withdrawal by Israel is an insightful moment of the impact sacred literature has on contemporary politics. The question of Israel, something I have written about on MysteriousFaith in the past, is one of the stark presentations of how the part of the Bible many Christians struggle to integrate into their world view. Last Sunday’s C-SPAN Washington Journal had James Zogby, the Founder and President of the Arab American Institute graciously handle the various calls from Christian Americans who literally quoted chapter and verse to him of God’s promise to the Israelites of their “Promised Land.” Zogby, as does Sam Harris in a very worthwhile presentation on C-SPAN BookTV, suggesting that if we are to take God as some sort of “cosmic real estate agent” we are going to have to work towards Israel controlling all of the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. Think things are complicated now? Wait until Israel takes over parts of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Just like the past events in Iraq that were positive have to be hailed as positive, so do the events in Israel that are equally positive. Withdrawal from Gaza by the Israeli government and removing the settlers was an important move. But its significance is not sufficient as a stand-alone act. What is important is that the withdrawal be followed up by those internal politics and external motivations that will allow the Palestinian people to develop a real country and a non-theistic identity.

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• August 22, 2005

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