Against the Stream

Michael Oren on Who Has a Right to the West Bank

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Michael Oren, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, was recently interviewed by The New Yorker. During his interview, the reporter pressed Oren on the question of what right Israelis have over the areas the currently constitute the West Bank and Gaza. While he punted (a bit) on Gaza, he was pretty clear on the West Bank:

So you think that you, as a Jewish person born in New York, have a right to be anywhere in Israel—

Absolutely.

Plus the West Bank, plus Gaza.

Absolutely. Not Gaza. We can debate whether Gaza is part of the land of Israel.

O.K., Israel plus the West Bank.

Even if you wanted to include Gaza, I’d say absolutely, yeah. The question is what is smart. What’s possible.

Who gave you the right to live anywhere you want in the West Bank? That’s what I am trying to understand.

Absolutely.

Where did you get that right?

It’s my heritage for three thousand years. It’s the same exact right I have from where I am talking to you. I am talking to you from Jaffa. I live in Jaffa. The same right I have to live in Jaffa I have in [the settlement] Beit El or Efrat, or in Hebron. Exact same right. Take away one right, the other right makes no sense. By the way, P.S., most of the lands of pre-1967 Israel are not even in the Bible. Haifa is not in the Bible; Tel Aviv is not in the Bible.

So, the argument seems to be that, as a Jew, Oren has the right to live anywhere within any of the area historically controlled by Israel, based on some idea of "heritage." It's a strange and very weak argument. It's not at all clear what heritage means here or why "heritage" confers any kinds of "rights" of any kind. Furthermore, this kind of argument is of course susceptible to the obvious reply: If Jews have a right based on their heritage, then why do the Palestinians have any less of a right.

It's interesting to note that I've been arguing with a Twitter troll on this point for much of the day, and it's clear to me that the only way this argument works is if they can somehow deny that there have been Arabs living in the area of modern Israel and Palestine for millennia. They get to this conclusion mostly through acts of special pleading and attempting to play semantic and demographic games. Such arguments don't withstand the slightest scrutiny, but that doesn't prevent them from being argued vociferously, as though their conclusions were self-evident and the natural outcome must necessarily be the right of Jews, and only Jews, over the entire extent of Greater Israel.

If the argument were the more modest claim that Jews had the right to live in the modern state of Israel because Israeli law allows it, that would be a far more defensible claim. However, that would not allow for the more expansionary proposals that argue, as Oren does above, in favor of the right of any and all Jews to any and all areas in any and all of what Israel has ever claimed for itself, as far back as 3,000 years.

Since this is an obviously absurd argument, and can't be reasonably defended, the interview does not improve from there:

O.K., I just want to understand this because I don’t want to misunderstand it. You are saying there are Palestinians living in various areas of the West Bank right now—

There are, indeed.

—which may or may not at some point become a state. But you are saying that, wherever they are living, they have less right to be there than you as a Jew born in New York.

I didn’t say that. Don’t impute words to me I didn’t say.

I’m sorry, I thought you just said that.

No, I did not say that in any way. Listen, I don’t think I want to continue this interview. I don’t think this is a constructive interview. You can do with it—I would like to request you withdraw it. I don’t think you are actually interested in anything I have to say. And that’s been my experience with The New Yorkerall the time. You guys are just into delegitimization. You are not really interested. Why don’t we call it quits right here, and I will pull this interview? I am relying on you to do that, as a journalist.

I think what honestly happened here is that Oren got out over his skis. He realized that he couldn't defend the implications of his argument and so had to run away from the interview as fast as he possibly could. And who could blame him?

In fairness, he never quite says that he has more right to live in the West Bank than a Palestinian who was actually born there, or that the Palestinians have less right. But it's certainly a reasonable inference from his arguments. If Jews, by virtue of their "heritage" have a right to, as Oren argues elsewhere in the interview the entirety of Greater Israel "down to the last millimeter." Many thousands of those millimeters are of course already occupied by the bodies and the lands of other, non-Jewish human beings. And so this principle necessarily implies that Oren's right as a Jew to that land outstrips that of the Palestinians already living there. The only concessions Oren is willing to make on this point are purely pragmatic.

Also of note in this interview is Oren's contention that the Two-State solution is not supported by anyone in Israel today, except for those on the "moribund" left, leading to annexation as the predominating position of the vast majority of Israelis. Whether Oren is right on this or not I have no idea. But if so, it raises once again the underlying contradiction at the heart of current Israeli policy: It cannot continue to be both Jewish and democratic if it continues these current policies. It ultimately has to choose, if it abandons to the Two-State solution, whether it will be a state of all of its citizens, or whether it will be an apartheid state. Given the moral and political contortions this leads to, is it any wonder that there are those who would propose to cut the Gordian knot and suggest deporting the Palestinians wholesale. Of course, as an act of ethnic cleansing, this would be a humanitarian violation of the highest order, and undermine fatally any claim to national morality that Israel would otherwise be capable of claiming.

James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr in Conversation

A few days ago, Fred Clark at Slacktivist posted a video of James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr being interviewed in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.

Fred also points to a Commonweal interview where Niebuhr comments on the white evangelicals of his own day, in words that are equally germane today:

One of the ironic facts of American history is that both slavery and post-slavery injustice prospered in the states that were formed by two kinds of idealism — a Jeffersonian idealism and evangelistic Protestantism. All the horrible racial cruelties that are practiced in Alabama and Mississippi are done by people who have been “converted” five, six, seven, or eight times. …

Then along comes Billy Graham for his great evangelistic meeting. His manner is bland and he’s a great biblicist. He speaks in a convincing way and, while the choir sings softly, he tells the people to pray and to give their heart to Christ and sign the decision card. He tells them in the words of St. Paul that “if any man be in Christ, he will be a new creature.”

This is fantastic, because it shows the weakness of Protestantism — individualism. It deals with collective sin, particularly the race question, in purely individualistic terms. You can’t overcome race prejudice by simply signing a decision card. Yet Billy Graham tells them that if they sign the decision card they will become “color-blind.” Why is it that we see no evidence of the color-blindness when these people leave the evangelistic meetings?

Fred comments: "What Niebuhr condemns here as “individualism” is the idea of religion — of “salvation” — without justice. He was as unconvinced of the possibility of such a thing as the prophet Isaiah was. ... Evangelical individualism, he believed, divorced love from justice, turning it into something sentimental and gormless and vapid."

Jurgen Moltmann and the Problem of Authority

Cameron Coombe, a doctoral student at the University of Otago in New Zealand draws our attention to this passage from Moltmann:

I grew up during the German dictatorship and as a young man spent five years in barracks and prison camps (1943-1948). I have therefore personally experienced authority and power as not especially healing—in fact, the reverse. Quite early, I believe it was in 1947, a sentence from Abraham Lincoln fascinated me: ‘I do not want to be any lord’s slave nor any slave’s lord.’ As a theological student, I was hesitant and mistrusting of the then-dominating theological schools of Bultmann and Barth, of Gogarten and Althaus. I felt myself oppressed by the pressure for ideological consent that was placed on one if one wanted to ‘belong.’ I could not march well in step with others, and so I became a divergent thinker, a nonconformist in that theological school to which I owe the most: the Barth school

A few things strike me about this passage.

First, the linkage, which is always there in Moltmann, between his biography and his theology. While many theologians (and here I think of Pannenberg in particular) like to pretend to be doing theology at 1000 feet, concerning themselves little with the concrete setting in which their own theology is formed and takes place, Moltmann has always been forthright about the dependence of his theology on his own personal story, particularly his experience in World War II and as a prisoner of war. Given the role that those experiences played in his conversion, it would be hard for him to be theologically honest without reference to those points, but he's never been shy about it.

Second, his general view of authority as that which should be viewed with suspicion. I'm particularly struck by the idea that "authority and power" were "not especially healing" in his experience. And certainly the kind of top-down authority structure that the Germany in which he grew up represented could and should give anyone a healthy suspicion of authority.

Third, the connection he makes between that and his own theological formation, in particular his desire not to be a metaphorical "slave" to anyone else's theological program. And that nevertheless, his affinities lie closest to the Barthian approach. This conforms well with what Douglas Meeks once told me, that he thought the best way to understand Moltmann was as a "liberal Barthian." It's certainly true that even insofar as his affinity is for the Barthain school he's definitely a "divergent thinker," and the battles between Moltmann and the Princeton Barthains to which I was a witness were at times impressive.

St. Hereticus and the Gospel of Americanism

Travis McMacken (of the excellent Helmut Gollwitzer book), reminds us of Robert McAffee Brown's alter ego St. Hereticus. For many years, St. Hereticus was a regular contributor to Christianity and Crisis, lampooning American Christianity and the peculiarities of modern theology.

In particular, Travis notes Hereticus's article on "Americanity" which seems very current these days:

Although this is a religion of fairly recent origins as world religions go (it is less than two hundred years old as I count time), it has in recent years become, so its adherents would claim, the most important. It cannot with total accuracy be called a world religion, since there are still a great many people in such colonies as Europe, Asia, Africa, the Far East, the Near East, and the Arctic and Antarctic regions who have not yet been converted by its missionaries, though in the last named region there have been some indications recently of a shift in sentiment among the Penguins.*

Of particular note is Hereticus's description of Americanity's understanding of monotheism and idolatry. He writes:

Wherein lies the great appeal of this religion? Most significantly perhaps in (1) the assurance with which it can claim to be the final hope of mankind; (2) the exclusiveness with which it can assert in the name of its deity, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” which in a briefly and more up-to-date translation goes, “America First”; (3) the wisdom of its benevolence program and almsgiving, which demands only that the recipients subscribe 100 percent to the creed of Americanity; and (4) the dedication of its priest-group, all of whom are prepared that heaven and earth should quite literally pass away before one jot or tittle of their creed be modified.

Hereticus (and Brown) were often prophetic, but at the time that he was writing, this was no great revelation of some future state of American religion. The first religion of America has always been America. And the unique theology of America has always been as it was described by H. Richard Niebuhr:

A God without wrath brought a people without sin to a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.

Thus has it ever been. The challenge of Christianity in America is always to distinguish itself from American Christianity.