This evening I would like us to consider the problem of extremism as it is played out in the politics and religion of the Middle East. Blessed indeed are the peacemakers: but in the Middle East they are really up against it; not least because – if you will allow me a second quote from the New Testament – some of those, and among them some of the most influential, claiming to be peacemakers, are in reality ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’.
Last week I offered you a rather patchy patchwork of what I consider to have been some of the most significant historical factors and figures that, taken together, have constrained the region into its present shape, its atmosphere, its attitudes, and current realities. On the basis of my research and conversations, I asserted that whilst the region has often been at war within itself, the worst and most of its troubles arise from ‘Western’ interference of one sort or another. In recent years of course, that Western interference has been led by America. Successive presidential policies, forged confidently in Washington, have been played out disastrously in the region; primarily, as
I alluded to last week, by reason of their umbilical attachment to American domestic politics, especially in election years.
In stark contrast to, for example, America’s cold war policies, there has been no overarching or consistent approach to the region, to the extent that, if one were to attempt to identify the American diplomatic approach to the Middle East – an area, remember, where oil, Israel, and the arms industry are so significant, the hallmark of that diplomacy would have to be described as inconsistency and discontinuity, resulting in the waste of billions of dollars and thousands and thousands of lives. Vacillation, shifting policies, misadventures, and economic and cultural imperialism together with broken promises, have fed the anti-Americanism which I encountered so frequently in the cafes and buses and trains of Syria and Turkey - to mention but two of the region’s countries.
And yet I found people wanting to trust America, wanting to believe the rhetoric about peace, democracy, justice, etc. Sadly, it was because the Shiia’ Muslims in Iraq believed that Bush could and would deliver, that they rose up against Saddam Hussein, only to be hunted down and executed; it was, at least partly, because the ordinary Iranian Muslims listened to Obama and saw in him a beacon of light that they came out onto the streets in their hundreds of thousands in 2009 to protest against their oppressive fundamentalist regime; as was also the case with the Egyptian masses just recently. The oppressed and the idealists of the Middle East want to believe that the sole power in the world which alone has the capability of bringing peace to the region genuinely wants to live up to its own proclaimed ideals – as these were first enunciated to the Arab nationalist movements immediately following the 1ST WW - but America has been either unwilling to do so, or unable, or both.
Now of course a huge part of that inability or unwillingness has been compounded by the extremists, wherever they may be, from the mosques ad ministries of Tehran and the refugee camps of Gaza, to the synagogues of Jerusalem and the settlers of eretz Israel and the churches of the American Bible Belt. It is to these and other flies in the ointment of genuine attempts to bring peace with justice to the Middle East that I turn this evening. Again I can only present to you some of those groups and individuals whom I consider to be key players in the appalling saga of self-interest and injustice that is still the politics of the Middle East, and where the future of Palestine remains, with little doubt, the central issue, the boil that must be lanced if ever there is to be peace in the region.
Western liberals, in my experience, tend to have an overly rosy view of human nature and of what human beings are capable of, left to their own devices. Unfortunately, we inhabit a world where many fail to understand let alone live by the tenets of such western liberal optimism. And so they are often deeply shocked by the unreasonable and unreasoning stance of extreme factions in the Middle East. But as Saddam Hussein, when first captured, said to his CIA interrogator after his interrogator had listed some of the appalling crimes he had committed, ‘You guys just don’t understand; this is a tough neighbourhood’.
So in this ‘tough neighbourhood’, in order to give you a fuller flavour of their raison d’etre and their modus operandi, I have chosen the following advocates of extremism:
At one end of the spectrum, The Iranian Regime, Al Qaa’ida, and Hizbollah: at the other, the Israeli Right Wing and in particular the Zionists, and then, most worryingly to my mind in a way, in terms of the diminishing prospects for peace, the Christian Right in America, and in particular a fast growing organisation called ‘Christians United For Israel’, whose tentacles have already reached some of the churches of Europe.
But what creates or elicits such extremism?
I think we need to start with a rough working definition of extremism for the purposes of this talk. For me, this evening, an extremist is someone or some group who adheres so dogmatically to his or the group’s perspective or agenda that they are unwilling either to face facts or to countenance alternatives. For such as these, violence is very often a means justified by the end, whether they themselves perpetrate that violence or allow others do so on their behalf. I don’t think this an unreasonable working definition for our purposes this evening, but I’m afraid it covers quite a range of key players and their supporters on the religious and political map of the Middle East.
A couple of quotes from either end of the spectrum:
‘The black ink of the religious scholar and the red blood of the martyr: what can be more beautiful?’ Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, mentor of Osama Bin Laden.
‘Whoever thinks that Islam is a religion of mercy does not understand Islam.’ Ayatollah Mezbah Yazdi, spiritual mentor of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, President of Iran.
This from a Jewish journalist. ‘What shocks me is the new younger generation of Israelis that enjoys killing Palestinians. It is a settler society of hunters of Indians, hunters of natives.’
And this from an Israeli Rabbi. ‘The Israeli establishment reduces the great Jewish tradition into an excuse for persecuting others.’
So then, what creates such extremism in the Middle East?
On the one hand, for decades people were not allowed to want or to aspire to anything, and not just the Palestinians who had known only the refugee camps of Lebanon. Generation after generation elsewhere was taught by autocratic regimes, some of them, like Israel and Egypt, and at times both Iraq and Iran, bolstered by American dollars, to exchange freedom for security. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a useful pretext to impose emergency laws, ban democratic elections, smash oppositions, and violate human rights. And so it should not be a surprise to us that Bin Laden, when he appeared on the scene, was perceived by many young Arabs as a hero; not because he gave real answers to their problems but, rather, because they saw him as fighting for what they could interpret as their dignity. In this context, the invasion of Iraq came as a slap in the face: it was shocking and humiliating for Arabs to observe the US waging war in the name of democracy even as it was befriending and propping up despotic regimes.
On the other hand, Zionism was a distressed and oppressed people’s proud and defiant response to centuries of contempt, humiliation, and periodic bouts of deadly oppression that culminated in the systematic extermination of millions of Jews during the Nazi holocaust. The Israeli state was the would-be phoenix to rise from the Jewish embers still smouldering in the blood-soaked earth of another continent. For most Jews it was the one and only consolation to hang on to when the madness and horrific losses of the death camps finally came to an end.
One would like to think that the motive was the positive one of achieving justice and safety for one tormented people in their historic homeland, not the negative one of doing damage to another people. Yet, in effect and without any sense of shame on the part of many, especially their leaders, this is precisely what it did do. Last week, when considering the Sykes-Picot agreement and the lines in the sand drawn by the European powers, I asked you to imagine your response, as a native, to such a line being drawn through the middle of Brenchley High Street. Imagine now being forced out, if you were lucky enough to survive, at gunpoint, of the village where your family has lived for hundreds of years, never to return.
Back to the Palestinians, who, initially, did not set out to damage anyone. They merely wanted for themselves what, with considerable justification, they felt was their entitlement. While their Arab brethren were achieving independence in neighbouring countries, the Palestinians – knock-on victims of Nazi atrocities – were paying a heavy price for losing out in the geo-political lottery. As one Israeli Peace Now movement member put it to me, ’What the Nazis did to us we are now doing to the Palestinian Arabs.’
Dispossessed, degraded, and derided – something I felt the recent Channel 4 production of ‘The Promise’ captured so accurately – the Palestinian’s only fault was simply to be in the way of another anguished people’s desperate survival strategy. The difference in terms of the outcome was, again quite simply, the strength of Western support for the Jews - a combination of dollars, salved western consciences, and an eye, albeit a short-sighted one, for future strategic and economic gains.
We must not forget that to a very significant degree, the genesis of the Palestinian-Israeli clash lay in the endemic prejudices and discriminatory practices of European societies, our own societies, made worse by the double-dealing and contradictory pledges made to Arabs and Jews by Britain and France as they carved up the post-Ottoman Middle East between them. Then, when initially honest broker America turned into far from disinterested backer, the dye was well and truly cast.
The Israel Palestine issue cannot be compared, as it often is, to other struggles, such as South Africa or Northern Ireland. The crucial point here is that Israel behaves like occupiers behave, and Palestinians behave like the occupied behave. Ending the occupation is the only way to change both behaviours: but, sadly, there are powerful extremists whose dogmatic agendas prevent such a thing happening.
Let’s take a brief look at Iran: I think there may be a few surprises for some of you. The present Iranian Regime, now over 30 years in existence, lost any kind of moral or social legitimacy when it violently suppressed the Iranian Green Movement in 2009. The Greens were protesting because there had been no significant improvement in Iranian life since the deposing the Shah in 1979, and the elections had just been rigged, yet again, in favour of the Hardliners.
The Shah had been deposed because life was miserable for all except the rich: the revolution had brought everyone together in common cause. But Khomeini and his supporters were better organised than anyone else – a hugely important factor in attempting to discern where the Egyptian and other ‘Arab Awakenings’ will go - and won control in a referendum offering one simple choice: ‘Islamic Republic – Yes or No?’ Khomeini then literally wrote himself or new role into his new Islamic Constitution as Rabah (supreme) Ayatollah (spiritual leader) – even though none of the other Ayatollah’s supported him. Hardliners remained in power even though there were frequent protests and a growing, of necessity underground, opposition. But in 97 and 2001 the Reformist Khatami was elected president, endeavouring to bring in democratisation and a reducing of tensions in the region by forming closer ties abroad.
But this was a step too far for the Hardliners, who thrived on Iran’s insularity and opposition to the West in general and the US and Israel in particular. And because the Hardliners held most of the posts in the organs of government, the duties of which were to protect the Islamic Republic, they were able to influence the election by determining who was allowed to stand and who was not! Consequently, in the 2005 parliamentary election, following their overwhelming success in the previous 2001 election, 2,185 Reformist candidates (including 76 sitting members and the President himself) were prevented from standing on the grounds that they were not sufficiently loyal to the revolution.
What we have to realise is that Iran is not a one man dictatorship but an oligarchy of Shii’a Fundamentalist clerics and laypersons who operate within a complex system with inbuilt safeguards to ensure the continuance of the fundamentalist Islamic character of the regime. Islam has many interpretations but through force of will, good organisation, and the unashamed use of violence, the Hardliners seized and continue to hold power. Yet it is in fact a very unstable oligarchy characterised by ruthless in-fighting between the three rival fundamentalist elites - Hardliners, Expedients, and Reformists, and even amongst the Hardliners themselves. A lot of the differences between them can be explained, as is so often the case in the Middle East - and as we see playing out in Syria even as I speak - by personal, family, and tribal rivalry. In the ‘tough neighbourhood’ of the Middle East, once you gain power, you do not cede it lightly.
Although Khomeini’s Constitution had given executive, legislative, and judicial power to the Supreme Leader, it also created an elected President, an elected Majlis (parliament), and an elected Assembly of Experts. The President and his Cabinet who run the government are part of the Regime headed by the Spiritual Leader. The unwritten rule is that the President must defer to the Spiritual Leader; but Ahmadinejad, president in 2005 and again, controversially, in 2009 has recently been contesting this unwritten rule. It will be interesting to see how long he lasts.
The election of the Supreme Leader is itself an interesting process. Let the Chairman of the Assembly of Experts himself explain it to you. ‘God appoints the Supreme Leader, but because the people do not have the ability to discern, the people choose the clerical experts to find the Supreme Leader whom God has already chosen, and then they will introduce him to the public.’ Not so very different then from selecting senior posts in the Church of England, if perhaps a little more transparent.
The Supreme Leader holds sway because he alone appoints the head of the Judicial Branch (a kind of watchdog on any criticism of him) and also appoints 6 of the 12 clerics to the ‘Council of Guardians’ – the other 6 being appointed by Head of the Judicial Branch, whom of course the Supreme Leader has appointed. This Council of Guardians has a veto over all candidates for the presidency, parliament, or the Council of Experts. Indeed, the Regime can abrogate any legal agreement with the people if it is seen to harm Islam. Khomeini, in setting up the constitution, even directed that the Regime is allowed to suspend or violate any Sharii’a Law, even including the Five Pillars of Islam, if doing so is deemed necessary to preserve and prolong Fundamentalist rule.
The Supreme Leader also appoints the head of the police, the army, and the Iranian Republican Guard Corps, the official coercive apparatus of the state.
Considering what they are up against, that there even exists a Green Movement in Iran, is a miracle on a par with the existence of a growing underground Church there, which numbers over a million and which has been facing so much persecution in recent years – largely of course because many are converts from Islam and have joined the evangelical network of house churches which are seen as and publicly attacked as tools of Western imperialism. That these churches have attracted so many converts speaks volumes about the amazing faith and courage of their members. Repression has certainly increased generally in Iran since the 2005 election in which not only was Ahmadinejad elected but also some very canny female candidates who got in on a Reformist ticket only to announce their real agenda after the election, declaring themselves against Iran signing any one of the four variations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – including those versions accommodating Muslim demands that the UDHR be subject to Sharii’a law - but for polygamy, segregation in education, compulsory wearing of the hijaab (wider meaning ‘modesty, privacy, or morality’ : the word in the Quran for head covering is ‘khimaar’ or ‘jilbaab’), and the execution of apostates, dissidents, prostitutes and homosexuals. Obviously a branch of the sisterhood not to be messed with!
Former IRGC members now hold nearly half of the parliamentary seats and believe that large scale massacres of the population are legitimate tools to preserve Fundamentalism. They fear collapse through reform and assassinate Reformists both inside and outside of Iran. For them Israel is not only a convenient but a vital bogeyman in order to remain in power – as of course is the case, reciprocally, with the Iranian bogeyman in Israel for the Zionist right wing to remain in charge.
A quote, the source of which I cannot trace, is pertinent here. ‘Perhaps nothing proves the untruth of the Islamic Republic’s promise of Utopia than the Tube footage of the bloodied faces of Iran’s guiltless young people asking merely for their votes to be counted.’
The Hardliners have grown in strength, especially since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They were able to play upon people’s fears of the US on their doorstep and effectively sealed the fate of the Reformist elements amongst the Fundamentalists. But it is not all doom and gloom in Iran. More and more people are not only fed up with hardline Fundamentalism, more and more young people are educated and have access to the internet. 60% of students are now female when 60 years ago there were practically none. The hardline Regime is fearful of dialogue and rapprochement with the West because the young – at least those not part of the Regime and its various organs - see the West as being reasonable. But if we want to weaken Iran and support the Greens, we must solve the Palestinian problem. An ‘awakening’ in Iran similar to Egypt is possible but it will require disinterested help from the West. It would also weaken Israel’s case for continuing its oppressive policies in the Holy Land; and there’s the rub. Meanwhile, Iranian Hardliners are happy to export their revolution; so I turn now, briefly, to Al Qaa’ida and Hizbollah.
1979 was indeed a watershed. Not only had Khomeini come to power, there had been a fundamentalist insurrection against the Saudi regime at Mecca itself, and the Russians had invaded Afghanistan. Sheikh Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a Palestinian Sunni Muslim scholar and theologian, was expelled from Jeddah and went to Pakistan where he set about organising a jihaad against the invading Russians. He was soon joined by the wealthy young Saudi dissident Osama Bin Laden, who financed Azzam’s jihaad movement, which soon grows into a global concern with a global agenda. (Ironically, at one point in Brooklyn, New York, there existed one of Azzam’s refugee centres actually funded by the Reagan administration.) Azzam, who was certainly involved in the founding of HAMAS, the Sunni Palestinian organisation, saw Afghanistan as the perfect training ground for his global jihaadis. Their experience against the Russians, he believed, would strengthen their TAWAQQUL (reliance on God) and prepare them for jihaad in lands eternally belonging to Muslims, lands theirs by divine right because God had given those lands to the Muslims in conquest – including Palestine but also Spain, which of course explains the bombs at the train station in Madrid. Eventually in 1989, with the Russians gone, he is assassinated following intra-group rivalry about the next stage in the global jihaad. Who killed him and why is hotly disputed but in the same year Al-Qaa’ida comes forcefully onto the scene. (Qaa’ida means ‘foundation’, possibly here in the sense that this movement was what it was the global jihaad was to be ‘based’ upon.) Also known as the ‘International Islamic Front for Jihad against the Crusaders and the Jews’, this Sunni Muslim organisation regards all other Muslims as heretics and bumps them offer whenever expedient opportunities arises. This is why, with so many enemies, we cannot be certain who assassinated Azzam. My own guess was that it was either Israel or, since Azzam had made Palestine the next objective (also Israel’s good reason), Ayman al-Zawahiri, the present new head of Al Qaa’ida, who favoured Egypt as the next objective, and in fact has always been the brains behind the figurehead Bin Laden. To my mind, things are only going to get worse with Al Qaa’ida; but they would have done so anyway, regardless of the assassination of Bin Laden. They are fatalists and they do not care how long it will take them to recover those Muslim lands lost to infidels. Al Qaa’ida is of course Sunni and not aligned to Shiia’ Iran, but Azzam was discovered to have had some at least temporary hatchet-burying association with Tehran.
Turning to Hizbollah, this Lebanese Shii’a organisation, founded in 1980, is respected not only by the Lebanese for making a stand against Israel and for providing extensive social services, but also by the Israeli military itself as a potent threat and for its staying power. Militarily successful, politically astute, and strategically flexible, it has wide support in the Shii’a Arab world. Hizbollah receives political support from Syria but Iran is by far and away its greatest benefactor, from whom Hizbollah receive, weapons, explosives, training, and funding ($400m in 2010). Its ideological leadership is clerical and modelled on similar lines to the Iranian regime. It now plays a very significant part in Lebanese politics. It will be very interesting to see just what happens if there is a significant clash between Al Qaa’ida (Sunni) and Hizbollah (Shii’a). My own view is that they will largely avoid each other for the time being.
Before we move to the other end of the spectrum of extremism, I think we need to consider the root causes of terrorism at this end of the spectrum. For Al Qaa’ida, the cause is almost entirely religious; as it is for the Iranian Regime, albeit that they act largely through surrogates. But for Hizbollah (the Iranian surrogate in the Lebanon), Hamas, and Islamic Jihad in Palestine, it is primarily a reaction to the utter despair and hopelessness of their situation under Israeli occupation, exasperated by increasing land-grabbing by Israeli settlers. This was compounded by what they saw as Western double standards. Not only did sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s cause the deaths of thousands of children, but also US companies were bypassing the sanctions and doing business with the Iraqi elite through third parties - much, I have to say, to the dismay of elements of the CIA attempting to undermine Saddam Hussein there at the time! They also argue that the US war against terror is both counter-productive and morally reprehensible because it focuses on the symptoms and not the causes. They see, up until now at least with Obama’s recent statements, that US goals in the Middle East up until the ‘Arab Spring’ have been simply: to ensure Israel’s regional dominance – remember that every incoming US President has to sign a document confirming that he will uphold the State of Israel’s right to exist; to ensure the stability of oil production in Iraq and the Persian Gulf through the bolstering of local despots; and gradually to incorporate the Middle East into America’s growing economic empire in the face of increasing competition from the Far East. For them the question is, ‘Is Israel simply a criminal ‘protegee’, or is the US in thrall to international Zionism?’ Now some of that may sound ridiculous to us, but it is how so many Arabs, Persians, and Turks, from professor to peasant, see things and why they react and act in the way they do.
Incidentally, while in Turkey I watched a film by a Turkish producer which was a modern day metaphor of just how things are in the Middle East today. At one point in the film, the Turkish policeman sent to New York to extradite a terrorist to enable a ‘proper interrogation’ in Turkey, is on the receiving end of a great eulogy from the head of the FBI about the spread of US democracy in the world, to which he responds with a question that receives no answer. ’Why is it that you Americans only want to bring democracy to oil-producing countries?’
What is more, when an admittedly embittered former CIA operative – this is not in the film, by the way - raises the same issues and question, one does start to wonder. Certainly, for example, the White House was properly briefed before the second Gulf War about weapons of mass destruction, but it was just not politically expedient at the time – nor would it ever have been - to accept such unpalatable truths. Actually, I do believe the US missed a trick there, one which would have released a number of trump cards for them: if the administration had been willing to depose Saddam and then make an early exit, the US would have won back so much of the ground it had lost.
Salim al Hoss, former Prime Minister of Lebanon, writing prophetically in 2005 said this,’ US policies will sow the seeds of popular revolts against oppressive dictators, unleash resistance movements, and stir up feelings of opposition to modern colonialism and exploitation.’
And if I may just make this point before moving on to the other end of the spectrum. Liberal politicians and liberal churchmen in this country who believe that the Fundamentalism we see in Islam is merely peripheral and a travesty of Islam – because they happen know some very nice Muslims in Beirut or Blackburn – have not read their history books nor walked the streets of both those towns with open eyes. It is not social or economic hardship and exclusion here, as is the case in Palestine, that is the cause of extremism but education or, rather, the wrong sort of education. That extremist Islamists see and use this country as a haven for freedom of speech is truly worrying. Theresa May is not far wide of the mark by any stretch of the imagination.
I would like to finish this evening’s talk – and when a clergyman uses that phrase you know there is still some way to go! – with a look at Zionism and at the Christian Right in America. But I think it’s time for a break.
In 2006 Jimmy Carter published his book, ‘Palestine: peace not apartheid.’ He was shunned as an anti-semite for some time, even though his book was on the NYT Best Seller list for some months. In the same year, Mearsheimer and Walt, respectively professors at Chicago and Harvard, published their book, ’The Israel Lobby’, in which they dispassionately exposed the massive power of the pro-Israel lobby and their associated organisations and individuals that secure US support for Israel in a manner, they argue, that is contrary to US national security interests.
They further assert that the resulting conflation of US and Israeli interests encouraged by the Israel lobby has led the US into foreign policy decisions, including the war on Iraq, that have proved disastrous, and that the US might not have taken in the absence of the lobby’s influence.
As the Arab point of view has begun to be heard more in academic institutions in the US, there have been increasing attacks on academics with threats, preventative sit-ins, and loss of tenure of posts in private colleges. The Peace Now movement in Israel has also suffered but opposition in both countries to the status quo has grown, largely due to the amount of information now available from increasing use of the internet. It is difficult for states, not only in Iran and Syria, but also in Israel and America, to conceal the truth. In a 2009 poll of adult American Jews, 47% said that they were sometimes ashamed of Israel and 39% that they felt alienated. That is a phenomenal change. Younger American Jews are saying that Israel is not the centre of global Judaism, the US is not its periphery, they are not ashamed to be diaspora Jews, and, some, that the time is not yet right to return.
The 2008’9 Gaza War was undoubtedly a turning point in people’s attitudes and sympathy towards Israel both within and without the country. Whatever one thinks of Goldstone’s UN Fact Finding Mission’s report on the Gaza war in which both sides were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, some aspects of which he, a South African Jew, has since retracted, the sheer disproportionality in the use of violence is the thing that has most shocked those usually sympathetic to Israel. Hamas, who undoubtedly used the incursion as an excuse to assassinate a number of Fatah opponents and Palestinian Authority personnel in the pay of Israel, simply refused to co-operate with the UN; Israel only subsequently. The whole reporting process was , as most observers acknowledge, a mess.
But the document issued by 30 Israeli soldiers entitled ‘Breaking the Silence’ certainly gave substance to the claims that disproportionate violence was used. It was a fairly fatal dent to Israel’s righteous self image. And yet General Gadi Eisenkot, Commander of the Gaza incursion, supports the so-called ‘Dahiya Doctrine’ –‘we will yield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction’ - justifiably applied, he argued, to areas of Gaza on the basis that all Arabs should be accountable for their leaders’ actions. 13 Israelis were killed: 2 civilians and 11 soldiers, 4 by friendly fire. There were 1434 Palestinian deaths, of which 960 were civilians including 121 women and 288 children.
Since the Gaza War, not only has the questioning of the use of such disproportionate violence increased both inside and outside Israel, but US policies and its lack of serious intention – at least until now perhaps with Obama? – to resolve the Palestinian issue are seen across the globe as perpetuating a cycle of violence and political instability.
In Israel the extreme right exercise such power that former Knesset Speaker Abraham Burg was last year forced to raise questions about the very nature of Israeli democracy.
But the Right – I must add that extreme nationalists also operate on the left of the Israeli political spectrum - have succeeded in turning the questions round. For example, that it is not the Israeli occupation that causes terrorism but that terrorism in Palestine necessitates the occupation. There is of course a long and seamless history of such attitudes stretching back to Yitzak Shamir’s Lehi or ‘Stern Gang’ and Menachim Begin’s Irgun. Begin boasted that it was his massacre of the Arab civilians at Dar Yasin in 1948 that prompted thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes.
Eretz Yisrael or Greater Israel has always been a non-negotiable with the Israeli Right, and they have sought to ensure this by a gradual takeover of the Israeli Defence Force. The national religious community in Israel is 15% of the population. In 1990 just 2% of the officers of the IDF were religious Jews. But in 2007 this had grown to 30%. The combat infantry units have become increasingly religious-led and increasingly religious-manned.
The army was once a bastion of secular Jews: no longer. Why is religious Zionism marching into leadership of the army? Answer – so that the army cannot or will not evacuate the settlements. Such West Bank colonisation is not only the greatest threat to any peace deal, it would create chaos and anarchy at home. The chant of the Peace Now movement ‘Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies’ is heard less and less as the Right, especially the new young immigrants become increasingly violent towards any opposition.
It’s all pretty scary stuff and does not augur well for the future; and yet there have been some really healthy signs and actions recently from more moderate voices within political, religious, military, and intelligence circles which give some hope that extremist views and policies will not automatically prevail. But the extremists in Israel receive some of their most ardent support from the final group I am going to talk about this evening, ‘Christians United For Israel.’
CUFI was founded in America by Pastor John Hagee in 2006 and immediately attracted 9000 members. In 2009 it had 300,000 members, by 2010 428,000 members, today over 525,000. They are both politically and financially influential. The issue of their extremism pretty much boils down to this: when people take one verse of the Bible, take it out of context, fail to interpret it by comparing it with other or subsequent relevant verses, and build a whole theological edifice on it, what is produced is a very unstable entity.
Think of it as an inverse pyramid.
This essentially is what CUFI have done with the case of their blind support for Israel, based as it is – it’s their principal watchword or reference – on Genesis Chapter 12 verse 3, or at least the first half of it. God is speaking to Abram before he becomes Abraham –the one blessed by God – in terms of the promise he is making him to him if he and his descendents will remain faithful to him.
V2 ‘ I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. V3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’
Now quite apart from the fact that Pastor John Hagee (who has made personal millions of dollars from his ministry, despite a number of scandals) fails to point out that the promise is actually to Abram and his seed, foreshadowing the covenant God makes with him and which is dependent, as the prophets keep having to remind God-less Israel, upon their faithful choices – such as being true to him and practising true religion - and which, though not annulled, is superceded by the covenant inaugurated by Jesus, he conflates the earthly Jerusalem with the Heavenly Jerusalem, a distinction held by the prophets and Jesus and many orthodox Jews to be of the utmost significance with regard to whether or not Israel will be blessed.
Nothing about swords having to be beaten into ploughshares before the Heavenly Jerusalem can come. Nothing about the plight of Palestinian Christians. Hagee takes his very narrow interpretation and asserts from it that those who do not bless the State of Israel, as she is today –remember, with a Jewish religious, as opposed to secular or atheist, element of 15% of her population – should be cursed.
Of course it’s very easy to find a biblical principle or quote in order to justify the latest plan, just as the use of certain catch words and phrases – which CUFI use in remarkably similar fashion to their opponents at the other end of the spectrum (The Ikhwaan, for example, ‘Islam is the solution’ – with that you really don’t need an Arab Alastair Campbell to spin it!) such as ‘chosen by God’. It takes one back to the old confrontations between the Crusaders and the Saracens, and the pithy cry from both sides whenever something, however terrible, was proposed ‘’God wills it!’
Or again, the use of Deuteronomy Chapter 7 to justify driving out other nations. But what about Deuteronomy 8 and God’s warning about what will happen if pride, unfaithfulness, and irreligion take hold? Conveniently side-stepped!
There is an ‘end of the age’ tradition in America going back to the 17th C when the New World of America was seen as ‘The New Jerusalem’, ‘The New Israel’. With CUFI the subtext is theology but the purpose is overtly political. And so the ‘special interest or break out’ groups at last year’s annual CUFI conference were mostly on issues such as: terrorism, the danger of Iran, Israel’s economic miracle, the new settlements (one supported by CUFI members to the tune of $6million), etc. But most groups apparently usually ended up talking about Iran with whom CUFI seem fixated. There was a live link to Bibi Netanyahu, and one of the main speakers was Elliot Abrams, formerly ’Special Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy in the Bush Administration.’
Everything at the conference was delivered; question and answer forums or challenges were not encouraged or even provided for: the expectation was that all would agree with the party line. As for ‘peacemakers’? Such are to be cursed, not blessed. Last year Pastor Hagee published his book, ’Can America Survive? – 10 prophetic signs that we are in the terminal generation.’ And due out in October 2011 ‘Earth’s Final Moments – powerful insight and understanding into the signs that surround us.’
Now we can laugh or we can cry; and yes, he personally has been plagued by scandals with women and money, etc. But what he delivers obviously appeals to and motivates what one academic attending the 2010 conference described as, ‘not ignorant bible-thumping stereotypes; more, middle-class, better educated; more Tea-Party people with CUFI serenity instead of Tea-Party outrage.’ They also have Kidi, teenage, and university campus programmes which teach that you cannot be a proper Christian unless you love the present State of Israel.
The irony of course is that just as American Jews are really beginning to question, not Israel’s right to exist, but her policies in sustaining and extending that right, so an increasingly powerful Christian lobby pledges to stand with Israel, right or wrong. And it is remarkable how ordinary people in every land can be lead to speak ‘with one voice’ (another CUFI slogan), if reminded that they are following the divine plan, that God is on their side.
The trouble is of course that extremism breeds counter-extremism. Where it will all lead to and to what degree the recent ‘Arab Spring’ will be able to deflect it amongst the Arabs, and whether Obama, if he secures a second term, will be willing and able to stifle it sufficiently both at home and in Israel are questions we will consider in the fourth talk. But next week, my title is ‘Religion – cause or convenient excuse?’
