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All Things Considered Commentary
National Public Radio
Middle East Conflict
Ellen Charry
December 2000
We can understand political struggle when it is over resources and economic opportunity. But that does not help us when it comes to the Middle East conflict. In the West Bank Palestinians and Israelis are fighting over arid, fruitless, and hoary land. Why is it seemingly impossible for people of ancient and venerable cultures, wanting to protect their families from harm and live in peace with their neighbors, to come to terms? Why is this rock-ridden terrain of fig and gnarled olive trees that no one is eager to develop a war zone?
We quite miss the point unless we recognize that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is also a Jewish-Islamic struggle, a battle between two religions that claims the hearts of current combatants, even though some of them claim to have overcome religion. God has a funny way of lingering in a corner of the heart.
Although an Israeli presence in the Golan may hold strategic value in such tense circumstances, religious settlers in the West Bank are not there for that reason. They believe that every bit of biblical land rightfully belongs to the Jews. Although most Jewish Israelis are secularists, their national historic literature is the Bible. Children in Israel do not study Israeli history in school; they study Jewish history; that is the Bible that Christians call the Old Testament. Religious Jews, naturally, are likely to live out their obedience to God more aggressively than are the less devout. Still, although Jews may choose to ignore their religious heritage, they cannot de-Judaize themselves. They can at best become bad or unobservant Jews.
The Bible teaches that God gave the land on which native peoples dwell to Israel, and that, when necessary, it should be taken from them by force. Deuteronomy, located in the most sacred part of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, tells the people that God will deliver military victory over their enemies and that they are to blot out their memory from under heaven.
A thousand or so years later, the Prophet Muhammad received a revelation from God through the angel Gabriel that suspended all prior revelations. The Jewish and Christian revelations had been corrupted and are now to give place to Islam. Islam's political expression is the Ummah, the final and authoritative multi-ethnic multi-racial religio-political entity that is to unite Muslims in a single Islamic geo-political theocracy ruled by a single leader. Islam is militantly missionary. Obedience to God goes hand in hand with political control wherever the Ummah spreads.
In the Islamic state, religious minorities, known as dhimmis, are to be tolerated in an Islamic state, and forced conversion to Islam is prohibited, but dhimmis are subject to special minority taxes, and are prohibited from propagating their faith. In the Ottoman Empire, dhimmis were permitted to administer their own laws governing personal relationships concerning religion, family, and communal education under the millet system. This isolated them culturally from the dominant Islamic culture. Israeli Jews who lived in Islamic countries have not forgotten their experience.
From an Islamic perspective, the dhimmi status that by rights Jews should occupy under Islamic domination is now reversed! Muslims are under the control of a theologically and politically illegitimate Jewish state in which Christians and Muslims are captive and minorities. This upside down world affronts Islam.
What can be negotiated here when centuries of loyalty to ancestors, and ultimately to God course through one's veins? What treaties can be honored, what bargaining chips traded when one's identity is at stake? What can be offered in return for the dignity embedded in those jagged rocks, ancient olive groves, and instructions and promises of God? The combatants in the Middle East have staked their lives on their honor--it is not for sale.
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