Palestine and Israel, Introduction: Justice Is Rarely a Two-Way Street

by John Ellis

On April 29, 1956, Ro’i Rotberg, regional commander of the security forces for the kibbutz Nahal Oz, was killed in a planned ambush. On horseback, Rotberg attempted to chase off a group of Palestinians from Gaza who were reaping wheat from the kibbutz’s field. He was shot by hidden assailants and then severely beaten. Before carrying his body across the border to Gaza, a group of Arabs that included Palestinian farmers and an Egyptian police officer shot Ro’i Rotberg a final time. Not content with killing the young Israeli soldier, “His murderers took the body, mutilated it, and then handed it over to U.N. observers.”[1]  

IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan delivered the eulogy at Rotberg’s funeral. Considered one of the most important speeches in modern-day Israel’s history, the eulogy contains the hauntingly prophetic confession, “For eight years they have been living in refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we are turning the land and villages where they and their forefathers dwelt into our possession.” In his concluding paragraph, Dayan warns, “We will make our reckoning with ourselves today; we are a generation that settles the land, and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken. This is the fate of our generation. This is our life’s choice – to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.”

For the last one hundred years, the tiny strip of land hugging the Mediterranean’s eastern shore, known throughout history by a variety of names, has existed in a near constant state of violent upheaval. Some would argue, and not necessarily incorrectly, that the Levant has been experiencing violence since Joshua, the ancient Israeli judge, led the army of Israel across the Jordan River near the end of the Bronze Age. While it’s true that tracing the history of the area backwards through the Ottoman Empire, Crusades, Roman conquest, inter-testament period, and the ancient nation of Israel reveals a region rocked by havoc and torn by conflict for thousands of years, the last one hundred years have been a time of especially intense strife driven by meta geopolitical concerns that have largely rendered the inhabitants as pawns in a violent game. Currently, Israel finds itself embroiled in what some scholars are already referring to as the Third Intifada.

On October 7, 2023, continuing the series of Intifadas going back to the First Intifada that extended from late 1987 into 1993,[2] the terrorist organization Hamas launched a series of attacks on Israel. This Third Intifada has largely involved the wicked slaughtering of civilians, the taking and torturing of hostages, and numerous untold atrocities by Hamas. Israel responded swiftly as the IDF began conducting military strikes into Gaza almost immediately. As of this writing, over 25,000 Palestinians, including many women, children, and babies, have died as the result of the IDF’s relentless campaign to destroy Hamas, hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians have been displaced, rendered homeless.

Here on the home front, politicians have denounced Hamas and pledged support to Israel, one of the most important allies America currently has. Even closer to home, white evangelicals have responded en masse with unequivocal expressions of support for Israel. “I Stand With Israel” buttons popped up all over white evangelicals’ social media profiles shortly after Hamas’ terrorist attacks. Just a couple of days after October 7, one prominent white evangelical parachurch organization boldly declared, “This is a moment when it’s not only possible but necessary to speak out with moral clarity.”

But is it? Is moral clarity even possible in this situation? Or rather, do attempts to provide moral clarity result, albeit unwittingly, in moral obfuscation instead? I write “unwittingly” because we rarely have the ability to hear the voices silenced in our received historical record; voices, if heard, who would throw into doubt the belief that our view of history is objective and that we are capable of a moral clarity that allows us to stand in judgment of both past and present.

In his magisterial book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Haitian-American historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot laments, “The distinction between what happened [in history] and that which is said to have happened is not always clear.”[3] The argument he builds from his lament is a sophisticated, coherent, and cogent unpacking of the platitude that history is written by the winners; or as Trouillot puts it, “history is a story about power, a story about those who won.”[4] It’s rare that the stories of history we’re told account for, much less provide a voice for, all the actors involved. Our collective Western belief is that “history requires a linear and cumulative sense of time that allows the observer to isolate the past as a distinct entity.”[5] For us, history is largely just a collection of facts. The thought rarely enters our mind that the facts fed us and how they’re arranged for us may create a narrative that is less than truthful.

I don’t know if Michel-Rolph Trouillot was familiar with the Soviet-era Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, but his words resonate with the latter’s teaching on the dialogical nature of truth. Theologian Kevin Vanhoozer provides a helpful summation of Bakhtin’s theory that “contra monologism, the diverse textual voices cannot be contained within a single abstract consciousness … truth emerges from the different views.”[6] Explaining the problem, Bakhtin writes, “A monologic artistic world does not recognize someone else’s thought, someone else’s idea, as an object of representation. In such a world everything ideologically falls into two categories. … In the monologic world: a thought is either affirmed or repudiated.”[7] For his part, Trouillot writes, “[A]n overall sketch of world historical production through time suggests that professional historians alone do not set the narrative framework into which their stories fit. Most often, someone else has already entered the scene and set the cycle of silences.”[8] The way history is often taught, especially in the West, pushes the narrative – the historical record – into the framework of the monologic. The historical narrative of Palestine and the modern nation of Israel is no exception. Only those voices that affirm the community’s received “truth” are admitted into the historical record.

Interestingly, the words spoken by Moshe Dayan at the funeral of Ro’i Rotberg allow historical actors who are generally unseen and unheard to enter the scene and speak into the historical narrative about the modern nation of Israel. Maybe you missed that voice the first time you read it. Read/listen again, noticing in Dayan’s words the clear counter-narrative to much of what white evangelicalism accepts as received history concerning the modern nation of Israel: “For eight years they have been living in refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we are turning the land and villages where they and their forefathers dwelt into our possession.”

Who are the “they” that have been living in refugee camps? And did the Jewish settlers have the right to “[turn] the land and villages where they and forefathers dwelt into [their] possession”?

Those two questions sit at the historical center of my objective with this series of articles. And those two questions are better asked as a series of three: 1. Did the world – specifically Western nations – owe Jews their own nation-state? 2. If, yes, did the land for that nation-station need/have to be Palestine? And 3. Was the creation and development of the modern state of Israel accomplished justly?

Although those questions may appear straightforward at first blush, they are not. The complexities involved increase with each subsequent question. And the complexities are such that it’s difficult – and unproductive – to tackle each question as standalone discussions. It’s better to view my three questions as entry points into a larger, more complex, and controversial conversation that has divided much of the world for the past one hundred plus years. I also believe that together the three questions create a framework that helpfully summarizes the debate. That’s reductionistic, of course, but I’m not planning on leaving it at that. To begin, and I ask of you to please embrace reductionism one more time, my short answers are “probably” to question one, “a very qualified maybe” to question two, and “absolutely not” to question three.

Because it would be unhelpful, as well as a continuation of my reductionism, to attempt to tackle each question one by one, my approach in this series will be integrated. While I will attempt to build a narrative thread using the three questions as the spine, each article in this series will speak to varying degrees into all three. With the first article, I’ll provide a brief history of both political Zionism and Christian Zionism. The subsequent articles in this series will be: The Balfour Declaration’s Foundation of Deceit (which will be divided into two parts published separately because of the chapter’s length); The Versailles Treaty’s Codified Racism (two parts); The Trauma of the British Mandate (in three parts); the Arab Uprising of the 1930s; The Jewish Revolt of 1947; The Nakba; and a conclusion. Lord willing, I will be posting each subsequent article every Friday morning from today through the middle of May.  

To be blunt, my conclusion will likely prove unsatisfactory for many. Moral clarity is unattainable for the whole of this discussion, I believe. The historical, theological, and ethical complexities lead me to conclude that temporal solutions will inevitably and unfairly silence the voices of some. The task regarding Palestine and Israel for stateswomen and men demands much empathy in the making of hard decisions in a story that reveals that justice is rarely a two-way street. My prayer is that my work with this series of articles will enable fellow followers of King Jesus – my brothers and sisters in Christ – to discover a Spirit-filled empathy that acknowledges that moral clarity is often fool’s gold concerning Palestine and Israel while eschewing simplistic geopolitical perspectives and solutions.

Looking at the historical narrative, a through-line-of-action is apparent: anti-Semitism meeting the imperialist interests of Western nations combined to create a perspective that views Palestinian peasants as pawns in a rigged game no one bothered to ask them if they wanted to play. Justice is rarely a two-way street, and the historical lot of both Jews and Palestinians bear this unfortunate truth out. The fighting today is part of the consequences of sins committed yesterday. Sitting from our perch in America, we need to be careful about on whom we place the blame. While Hamas and their terrorist actions are clearly evil, the rest of the story is not as cut-and-dry as your favorite pundit or parachurch organization would have you believe. In this story, there are precious few good guys. And for the innocents that do exist throughout the story, their voices deserve to be heard. And that’s my goal.

As I conclude this introductory article that’s designed to prepare you for the story I’m going to tell over the course of this series, I want to give the last word to a brother in Christ, Munther Isaac, who faithfully serves King Jesus as a pastor at Christmas Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem:

“In many Christian circles, my being a Palestinian means that I am dismissed as irrelevant, or even an obstacle to God’s plan for the land of my forefathers. … Being a Palestinian means that I am disqualified from sharing about life in Palestine in many Christian gatherings or even from leading Bible studies in Christian conferences! For many of us Palestinian Christians, these judgments have made us question whether or not God actually loves us as Palestinians. It has caused us to wonder whether God deals with different people in different ways based on their ethnicity, nationality, or religion, or whether we are somehow second-class children of God. Are we at fault because we have the wrong postal address and the wrong DNA?”[9]

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[1] Tom Segev, A State At Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 553.

[2] The Second Intifada began in September 2000 and lasted until the Sharm El Sheikh Summit in February 2005.

[3] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 3.

[4] Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 5.

[5] Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 7.

[6] Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 270.

[7] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 79-80.

[8] Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 26.

[9] Munther Isaac, The Other Side of the Wall: A Palestinian Christian Narrative of Lament and Hope (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2020), 1-2.