Column Bombing in the name of redemption
By ROSEMARY RADFORD
RUETHER
At a recent conference on Christians
in Palestine, Mitri Raheb, pastor of Christmas Church in Bethlehem, spoke on
events in this storied town. Bethlehem and nearby Palestinian towns have been
under continual bombardment from Israeli tanks and missiles in October and
November. Many houses have been destroyed, and the people live in a state of
terror. The house of a 6-year-old friend of his daughter was destroyed, and her
family had to flee. Children have difficulty sleeping and are haunted by
nightmares. Raheb showed paintings done by the children in the churchs
kindergarten, in which they expressed their fears. They showed lines of fire
coming down from the sky and Israeli tanks surrounding the town, while the
people stood beneath.
What is the legacy of this bombing of Bethlehem for its
children? Raheb asked. What hatreds are they storing up in their
hearts that will shape the rest of their lives?
Raheb wondered whether the Christians of the West care about what
is happening to the little town of Bethlehem. Christians sing the
song of Bethlehem every Christmas with tears in their eyes. But do they know
and care about the real town of Bethlehem, plunged into darkness by bombs that
have cut the electricity, gripped by fear with little hope of deliverance?
Raheb reflected on the possible witness of the tiny Christian
minority in this and other Palestinian towns. Perhaps the problem, he
suggested, is that the people of Palestine have been acting as if they were
waiting for some messiah that would come and save them from the Israeli
occupation and its continual attacks and pressures. Christians know their
messiah has already come. Our salvation has already taken place. We are not
waiting for a messiah to come, but must act today to create conditions for
peace. Perhaps this is our witness to the other two religions, Judaism and
Islam.
The recent intifada in Palestine has taken now over 200 lives and
caused more than 8,000 injuries, most of them from bullets directed to the
upper body. I had just come to this meeting from another conference that opened
a new Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University in Waco,
Texas. Jews, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists came together to celebrate the
founding of this new center, which, as Jewish theologian Marc Ellis, the
centers director, put it, would be the first center of Jewish studies in
America that would have the Palestinians at its heart. In his many books, such
as his most recent, O Jerusalem: The Contested Future of the Jewish
Covenant, Ellis has insisted that Jewish ethical traditions can only be
renewed today through solidarity with the Palestinian people and a joint
construction of a just future by Jews and Palestinians together.
Yet some of the Jewish scholars at the conference were having
great difficulty incorporating concerns for Palestinians into their own frame
of reference. One young Jewish scholar spoke of the development of Holocaust
theology in Jewish thought. For Jews, the Holocaust has become a central symbol
of evil visited upon them, while Israel has been seen as its redemption.
Through the state of Israel, Jews have found the place of rescue from the
Holocaust and its possible repetition in the future.
In my reply to this talk, I suggested that reference to the
Holocaust has too often degenerated into a justification of the oppression that
the state of Israel is visiting upon the Palestinians. I cited an experience in
Gaza where I witnessed a group of settlers that had seized the last piece of
agricultural land of a Palestinian village. When asked why they had done this,
they retorted, It is because of what they did to us in the war.
When we argued that the Palestinians of Gaza had not done anything to them in
the Second World War in Europe, they shouted back, It makes no
difference. Everyone must pay. The whole world must pay.
The young Jewish scholar was highly annoyed at my linking of
rhetoric about the Holocaust with the experiences of the Palestinians. He could
see no connections between the Holocaust and the Palestinians, and found it
inappropriate to speak about the Palestinians in the same context as the
Holocaust. Yet he himself had just linked the Holocaust to the state of Israel
as the expression of redemption from the Holocaust. What is the underside of
this redemption? Why are the impoverished and battered people of
Palestine expected to pay the price of this redemption, and yet at the same
time remain invisible in these reflections about the state of Israel as
redemptive?
Can a state be regarded as the embodiment of redemption from some
previous evil, when the price of its creation is the destruction of another
group of human beings? What kind of messiah is this that vindicates one group
as Gods chosen people by imposing continual destruction on another group
of people who cower under their beds while tanks and helicopters shell their
towns? What does it mean for Christians that the little town of
Bethlehem is being bombed in the name of this redemption?
The words of Pastor Mitri Raheb suggest a different approach. A
God who loves all people does not deliver one people from evil by imposing new
evils on another people. Any human enterprise constructed to favor one group by
terrorizing and destroying another group is by definition not
redemptive. Rather it is human sinfulness as usual. To erect such a
state into a messiah is idolatry, not a true discernment of the work of God in
history. New prophets need to arise in Israel, indeed are rising in the voice
of Jewish theologians such as Ellis to denounce this travesty of messianic
hope.
Christians are not called to await such messianic comings. They
have the message of the messiah already in their hearts. They are not to wait
for another messiah. This means they are not to look to American, Israeli or
Egyptian presidents to deliver them from evil, but arise and go about the work
of constructing the conditions for peace today. This peace can only come when
one peoples flourishing is not paid for by the destruction of another
people, but when all people can flourish together.
Rosemary Radford Ruether is a professor of theology at
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Ill. Her e-mail address
is Rosemary.Ruether@nwu.edu
National Catholic Reporter, December 8,
2000
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