June 2019 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.

The Israeli Claim That God Promised The Jewish People Palestine

Frank McGinty

Years ago Tom Roberts of the National Catholic Reporter recommended that CPF retreatants focus one’s energies on a single peace and justice issue rather than scattering one’s efforts thinly. Joe Bradley, our CPF editor, gave me a subscription to ‘The Link,’ a bi-monthly published by Americans for Middle East Understanding. I decided to concentrate on justice for the Palestinians.

I began making phone calls and sending postcards to Senators Bob Casey and Pat Toomey and to Representative Brendan Boyle. My pleas met responses so poor that I pictured myself as the Scriptural sower watching seed fall by the wayside, wasted.

Fran and I joined other CPF members on Friday noon vigils at the Israeli Consulate downtown. Some zealous Zionists demonstrated across the street from us. They called us ‘terrorist lovers”. In time we managed to bridge the polemical divide with one of the Zionists. On the feast of Purim Fran offered a hamantaschen to Milt S ----. He graciously took it and ate it.

Here are excerpts from The Link, AMEU, 12/2000.

Frank McGinty

Father Michael Prior, late visiting professor at Bethlehem University, writes in “Confronting the Bible’s Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine”:

“Often I am asked: how do you a Catholic priest and biblical scholar explain to an ordinary believer the Yahweh- sanctioned ethnic cleansing mandated in some of the narratives of the Old Testament? Is not this also the Word Of God? Such questions have forced themselves on me in a particular way as a result of my contact with the Holy Land, Let me look at the stakes.

Recently a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, signed by over 150 Jewish scholars and leaders, stated:

‘Christians can respect the claim of the Jewish people upon the land of Israel. The most important event for Jews

since the Holocaust has been the reestablishment of a Jewish state in the Promised Land. As members of a biblically-based religion, Christians appreciate that Israel was promised - and given - to Jews as the center of the covenant between them and God. Many Christians support the State of Israel for reasons more profound than mere politics. As Jews we applaud this support.’

Here we see clothed in the garment of piety the Zionist enterprise, which was determined to create a state for Jews at the expense of the indigenous Arab people - a product of the nationalistic and imperialistic spirit of 19th-century Europe……

The Holy War traditions of the Old Testament pose an especially difficult moral problem. In addition to portraying God as one who cherishes the slaughter of his created ones, they acquit the killer of moral responsibility for his destruction, presenting it as a religious obligation.

Every effort must be made to rescue the Bible from being a blunt instrument in the oppression of one people by another. If a naïve interpretation leads to such unacceptable conclusions, what kind of exegesis can rescue it?.....The Catholic Church deals with the embarrassment of having divinely mandated ethnic cleansing in the biblical narrative either by excluding it altogether from public use or by excising the most offensive verses. The disjunctive between this censoring of the Word of God and the insistence on the divine provenance of the whole of the Scriptures has not been satisfactorily resolved.

There is another method that is more amenable to modern sensibilities, one which takes seriously the literary forms of the materials, the circumstances of their composition, and the relevant nonliterary evidence. According to this view, the fundamental tenet of the Protestant Reformation that the Bible can be understood in a straightforward way must be abandoned. Narratives purporting to describe the past are not necessarily accurate records of it. One must respect the distinctive literary forms within the biblical narration - legend, fabricated myths of the past, prophecy and apocalyptic, etc.

The relevant biblical narratives of the past are not simple history, but reflect the religious and political ideologies of their much later authors. It is now part of the consensus that the patriarchal narratives of Genesis do not record events of an alleged patriarchal period, but are retrojections into a past about which the writers knew little, reflecting the author’s intentions at the later period of composition. It is naïve, then, to cleave to the view that God made the promise of progeny and land to Abraham after the fashion indicated in Genesis 15.

The Exodus narrative poses particular difficulties for any reader who is neither naïve nor amoral … It is high time that readers read the narrative with sensitivity to the innocent third party about to be exterminated, that is ‘with the eyes of the Canaanites.’…..

A historiography of Israelite origins based solely or primarily on the biblical narratives is an artificial construct influenced by certain motivations obtaining at a time long postdating verifiable evidence of events. Accordingly, contrary to the opinion of the 150-plus Jewish scholars and rabbis who signed The New York Times ad, the biblical narrative is not sufficient to transform barbarism into piety.

Western theological scholarship, while strong in its critique of repressive regimes elsewhere, gives a wide berth to Zionism. Indeed, a moral critique of its impact on the Palestinians is ruled out. …..

I consider that biblical studies and theology should deal with the real conditions of people’s lives and not satisfy themselves with comfortable survival in an academic or ecclesial ghetto. I am concerned about the use of the Bible as a legitimization for colonialism and its consequences. My academic work addresses aspects of biblical hermeneutics and informs a wider public on issues that have implications for human well-being, as well as allegiance to God.

While such a venture might be regarded as an instructive academic contribution by any competent scholar, to assume responsibility for doing so is for me, who has witnessed the dispossession, dispersion, and humiliation of the Palestinians, of the order of a moral imperative. It is high time that biblical scholars, church people, and Western intellectuals read the biblical narratives of the promise of land ‘with the eyes of the Canaanites’.”

The Link, Americans for Middle East Understanding, 475 Riverside Dr., Rm 245, NY, NY, 10115-0245.