I’ve just returned from a 10-day trip to Israel. During the first part of the trip, I was part of a delegation of law professors hosted by the World Jewish Congress (WJC). After that I stayed on my own at St. George’s College in Jerusalem to tour some of the Holy Land sites.
I came away with multiple conflicting emotions, thoughts, and experiences. Part of the trip was about the law, politics, and human cost of the October 7 attacks, the war in Gaza, and the deeper historical conflicts in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Part of the trip was about my spiritual pilgrimage to the Holy Land sites. I want to write about the conflict first.
My visit came a bit more than two years after the horrific October 7 attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas and about two months after a ceasefire in the war through which Israel has leveled much of Gaza in response to the terrorist attacks. In the U.S. and Europe, as well as in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere in the middle east and around the world, many have accused Israel of genocide in its prosecution of the war. On some American college campuses and political or cultural circles, support for Israel is viewed as barbaric. Many Jewish people in Israel, the U.S., and elsewhere, meanwhile, argue that these criticisms of Israel are rooted in antisemitism. Antisemitic rhetoric and violence is alarmingly on the rise in the U.S. and around the world, as the attack in Australia last week so monstrously demonstrated.
The tours and meetings arranged by the WJC presented us with Israel’s side of the story. We toured a kibbutz attacked by Hamas, led by a survivor, and the site of the Nova Music Festival massacre, also led by a survivor, and we met over a few long days with various Israeli government and military representatives. The overall narrative was that Israel was forced to respond to the gross brutality of the Hamas attacks; that efforts to limit civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure in Gaza are enormously complicated by Hamas’ dispersal among the population and vast tunnel network; and that reports from the U.N. and other sources about Israel’s restriction of food and medical supplies into Gaza are distorted by Hamas propaganda and antisemitic bias.
My stay in Jerusalem after the WJC delegation events ended was with people associated with a predominantly Palestinian Christian congregation. In addition to my unguided wanderings through the Jerusalem old city, I took a tour of Bethlehem, which is in the West Bank and is administered by the Palestinian Authority, with a local Palestinian Christian guide. My driver for that trip, and later to the airport in Tel Aviv, was a Palestinian Muslim living on the Israeli side of Jerusalem. So, while I didn’t have any sort of official briefings I received from the Israeli side during the WJC delegation, I did see and hear from at least some people on the ground on the Palestinian side. The overall narrative was of a long history of oppression and exclusion of non-Jewish Palestinian people by Israel. From this perspective, the anger behind the Hamas attacks was not surprising even if the attacks were atrocious, and the current Israeli government is using its response to the attacks to pursue a longer-standing policy of apartheid and genocide.
As I begin to discuss my feelings about the conflict, I’ll note first my priors going into the trip. For quite some time I’ve been committed to Jewish-Christian and Islamic-Christian dialogue. In relation to Jewish-Christian dialogue, as a theologian, I’ve thought carefully about how to develop a post-supersessionist theology — that is, a theology that recognizes the Christian Church does not replace Israel as God’s covenant people.
Any movement towards post-supersessionist theology must recognize the awful and often violent history of antisemitism that has been part of Christianity from at least the Second Century on. That history fed into Naziism and the Shoah. The brave witness by a relative minority of Christians in Germany that opposed capitulation to Naziism, reflected in the Barmen Declaration and the martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pointed towards a different path.
As part of my commitment to non-superessionist theology, I have long believed, and still believe, that it was good and just and necessary to create a homeland for Jews after the Shoah. Looking back at my archives on this site, I found my impressions upon visiting the Auschwitz death camp in 2011. That sense of never forgetting the Shoah has motivated me for many years and remains one of my guiding stars in theology, law, and politics. I can’t dismiss the tangible story of the Hebrew Scriptures involving a people and a land and the possibilities that opened up after the devastation of the Shoah. A politics or theology that sees the state of Israel as fundamentally illegitimate, therefore, will not likely convince me.
Non-supersessionist theological commitments, however, are quite different from dispensationalist theologies that are gung-ho about the modern state of Israel as part of a roadmap for the “end times.” I grew up in dispensational churches, but that never really was, and is not now, my theology or my politics. “Israel right or wrong” is no better than “America right or wrong” — and sadly those two idolatrous sentiments often go together in contemporary American evangelical Christianity. That is all miles from my sensibilities.
Granting the legitimacy of the state of Israel, for example, doesn’t mean I think the way the settlement in Israel happened, either starting in 1947 or at later times, was always right or just concerning the Palestinian people. The creation of the state of Israel and the settlement of Jewish people in the land from the diaspora often displaced existing Palestinian residents without due process, compensation, or any effort to negotiate ways of living together. The subsequent history involving cycles of violence involved many atrocities from the Israeli side. The ugly concrete and barbed-wire wall that now runs like a still-open wound between Israeli and Palestinian territories testifies to this ongoing pain.
And, of course, the establishment of the modern state of Israel as a Jewish state, while understandable from the post-Shoah perspective, raises enormous potential problems for Israeli Muslims and Christians, as well as for secular Israelis and those of other religions. At the same time, I learned from meeting representatives of the Druze community that the experience of living in Israel as a religious minority can be positive, and I learned from secular Israelis that the meaning of the state’s “Jewishness” is contested. I also learned even more about the incredibly fractious nature of Israeli politics. The hard-right ultra-Orthodox religious minority political parties comprise a small minority on the spectrum of Israeli political opinion — albeit, in the current context, a minority with disproportionate sway.
Returning from this trip, I find myself holding irreconcilable narratives that each feel to me at turns deeply compelling and deeply flawed. I remain convinced of the justice and legality of the formation of Jewish state after the Shoah. I don’t believe “genocide” is the right legal or moral category for describing what is happening in Gaza and I agree with my Jewish friends that many if not most of the campus protestors and hipsters chanting “from the river to the sea” are naive fools who have been duped by antisemitic propaganda. And I can’t countenance even for a moment any suggestion that the October 7 atrocities were in any way understandable or excusable.
But I grieve with my Palestinian friends, not least with Palestinian Christian communities, over all they have had to bear, and I loathe Islamophobia as much as I do antisemitism. It is not, it can’t be, antisemitic to agree that the Israeli government should be held accountable to jus in bello principles when an entire region has been completely leveled and a civilian population decimated; it is not, it can’t be, antisemitic to agree that Israel is far from blameless historically on the Palestinian question; and it is not, it can’t be, antisemitic to view information about casualties and aid coming from official Israeli government sources with the same jaundiced eye as information coming from the American government, or any government.
I’ll unpack all this some more, including some of the history and law as I understand it, in future posts.