At daggers drawn with 'demonized flesh' (4)

Alan Ireland

Murray Dixon and the specter of Christian Zionism

PART FOUR - Theology and fraud

Needless to say, it is not that "the Arab" is not an individual, but that the Christian Zionists are determined not to see him as one. As a non-person, as "a naughty child who throws stones", his subordination can be made to seem essential — as can the firm, paternalistic hand that ensures he accepts, but remains relatively harmless in, his assigned role of Ishmael. This is the role of the violent outsider (Gen. 16:12) and wanderer (Gen. 37:25) who, ipso facto, cannot be attached to land, and whose claims of attachment must therefore be a subterfuge. For this eternal reprobate, this sensual antagonist of the more favored, intellectual Isaac, there can be no peace except the peace of capitulation. At every turn, he is to be policed by prurient scholars, draconian bureaucrats and casually callous soldiers of the Israel Defence Forces. Even his awareness of himself is to be shaped by the definitions of others.

But the Christian Zionists have another reason for ignoring the individual: With their eyes on the Tribulation, the Rapture, the Battle of Armageddon and other chiliastic events, they have little time for minutiae. They prefer the panorama — the cosmic, inexorable scheme of things, in which the individual is subsumed. They talk grandiloquently of peoples and "nations": those abstract entities that will be collectively rewarded if they act to Israel's benefit and collectively punished if they don't. (I put the latter term in quotation marks because the biblical idea of a nation is not analogous to the modern concept of a state.)

There is little room for law in all this, because legislation tends to deal with discrete, concrete cases. The last person a Christian Zionist wants to know about is poor, dispossessed Abdullah from, say, Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon, who still treasures the deeds of his property in Palestine (as it was until 1948) and the key to his now non-existent front door. So he elevates the whole issue of land ownership in Israel / Palestine to the rarefied level of theology. Hence the reference to the Israelis' and Palestinians' "strong but conflicting theologies of the land" in ITAC's press release, dated July 29, 2006, dissociating itself from the Anglican Peace and Justice Network's call for (among other things) "the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from all occupied areas . . . [and] the immediate dismantling of the separation wall . . . wherever the wall violates West Bank land."

Talk to a Christian Zionist in New Zealand about how 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and land in 1948, and he will respond by making one, or both, of two claims: (1) That the Palestinians left "voluntarily" in response to radio commands from their leaders (another myth, as Christopher Hitchens shows in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, Verso, 1988) and deserved to lose their homes; (2) that roughly the same number of Jews lost their homes in Arab countries before and after the creation of Israel on May 14, 1948, and that this loss evened things out. But the latter argument is an argument from abstraction, not from justice. It collapses if you go to Abdullah and tell him that he should accept his lot, because a Jewish family in, say, Libya, was forced to flee. He is perfectly entitled to respond that he feels very sorry for the Libyan family, but that their case has nothing to do with his. It is a degenerate morality that bases itself on putative parallels and symmetries of wrongdoing. (Like the "doctrine of equivalence", which was applied so perniciously during the Bosnian War, it is simply a means to avoid acknowledging gross injustice.) One also has to remember that many Jews in Arab countries, especially those in Morocco, were not forced to flee, but were encouraged to migrate to Israel by Zionist organizations. Indeed, both population movements circa 1948, whether forced or induced, were only to Israel's advantage. Since then, there have even been payments for Jews. According to Stephen Spector in Operation Solomon: The Daring Rescue of the Ethiopian Jews (Oxford University Press, 2006) American Jewish agencies agreed to pay $35 million for 14,310 Ethiopian Jews in May 1991.

The mother of all frauds

Another writer recommended by Prayer for Israel members in New Zealand in the late 1980s was Joan Peters, author of the ferociously footnoted From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (Harper & Row, 1984). Tollan urged me to read this 600-page work, which alleges the Palestinian refugees of 1948 were not really refugees — Peters often places the word in quotation marks — because they were nearly all recent immigrants who had entered Palestine to reap the rewards of the prosperity generated in that "desolate" land by the success of the Zionist enterprise in the 1920s and 1930s. It was exposed as a fraud by a graduate student at Princeton called Norman Finkelstein, who spent an entire summer in New York Public Library checking its facts. Writing in the December 21, 1984, issue of Middle East International, he said:

From Time Immemorial is probably the most spectacular fraud ever published in the English language on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In a field littered with crass propaganda, forgeries and fakes, that is no mean distinction. But Peters' book has thoroughly earned it. The fraud falls into two basic categories. First, the demographic study of population shifts within Palestine is a transparent and vulgar hoax. Second, the evidence Peters adduces to document massive illegal Arab immigration into Palestine is almost entirely falsified . . . Numbers are fabricated, quotations are wrenched from their context, crucial qualifying phrases are deleted without even the use of an ellipsis . . .

Interestingly, the book was dismissed even in Israel, where the review in Davar said its main defect was its embarrassing use of discredited Israeli hasbara (propaganda). In England, Albert Hourani, of Oxford University, described it as a "ludicrous and worthless book" that raised only one "mildly interesting question": Why had it come "with praise from two well-known American writers" (historian Barbara Tuchman and novelist Saul Bellow)? Alas, where Israel is concerned, Americans tend to throw all their critical faculties overboard. In America, Zionism is not just a political creed, it is a disease.

Manifest Destiny — that cowboy hubris that masquerades as idealism — could not stop when the New England colonists reached the Pacific coast. It had to find a new frontier where American exceptionalism and romantic nationalism could flourish anew, if only vicariously. Note how, in both Israel and the US, much is made of the confiscation of land from those who, because of their alleged neglect of it, have disqualified themselves from ownership. "Redskins" / Palestinians who "resist progress" are forced to run for their lives, as in the left of the painting by John Gast [viz. Part One]. For the others — the "natives" who accept the new reality, the new "facts on the ground" — there is a paternalistic offer of education into "our" civilization, in a process that eventually sees their vestigial culture relegated to the theme park. This is the God-ordained mission civilatrice of the late 19th century, immortalized by Rudyard Kipling and other pith-helmeted imperialists. It is the apotheosis of Eurocentrism.

[Image: Gunboats sail down the Nile to "restore Sudan to civilization", in another illustration from Edward VII: His Life and Times. The caption incorrectly states the gunboats are bombarding Khartoum. In reality, they are off the village of El Egeiga, during the advance of British and allied forces before the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. The sketch was made by H C Seppings-Wright, war artist for the Illustrated London News, who also depicted what has been described as "a bloody demonstration of the superiority of machine guns and artillery over older weapons".]

Among those still extolling Joan Peters is Rachel Neuwirth, a Los Angeles-based analyst on the board of directors of the West Coast Region of the American Jewish Congress, whose article A Win-Win Solution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict (MichNews.com, July 26, 2004) makes the predictable assertion that "there never was a Palestinian nation, or country, or people, or language, or religion, which was distinct from the existing Arab countries in that region". This is essentially what Golda Meir said on June 15, 1969, when she declared:

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

Neuwirth's "solution" to the Palestinian "problem" is also predictable: that a nation be created for the Palestinians in Saudi Arabia. This suggestion is essentially the same as Herzl's magisterial proposal of 1892: "We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly."

In other words, Neuwirth's article is nothing more than a reiteration of the Zionist program, under which a combination of specious legalisms, harassment and terrorism is used to expel the Palestinians from land that is coveted by Jewish immigrants. ("Transfer" is the current Zionist euphemism for this process of dispossession.) Palestinian property rights are negated not only by the Palestinians' alleged neglect of the land but by the fact they lived in a "region" (as defined by others) rather than a "nation" (as defined by others), and by the fact they share, to some extent, such things as language and religion with people of adjoining countries. The only thing that is surprising about this colonial-era arrogance — which springs from the notion of terra nullius or "empty land" — is that anyone is still taking it seriously.

Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
—From The White Man's Burden, Rudyard Kipling, 1899

Scares and alarums in Southland

No discussion of Christian Zionism in New Zealand would be complete without a mention of the rural worthies of Mosgiel, Southland, who got together in 1993 to form the Abraham Company. This group of "Christian men" believed "The Devil and his forces are working through false religions like Islam to deceive and destroy the people of the world" (Page 2 of the company's policy statement). They were particularly upset by the presence of halal slaughtermen in New Zealand, which was a sign that "a great evil has taken hold of our land". The solution, which apparently came from the Almighty himself: "To feed his people: the nation of Israel", rather than the Iranians and any others imposing on us the "laws and regulations laid down in the Koran". A new, "massive market" was foreseen in the Middle East as "millions of Jews . . . return to Israel from the Soviet Union" (which had already been dissolved on December 8, 1991). But possibly most interesting was the farmers' fear of what might happen if New Zealand failed to eject the Evil One:

". . . the forces to which we are submitting are destructive to agiculture. By giving them power in our land, we are opening our agriculture to destruction. Already there have been difficult climatic conditions in areas where halal slaughtering has taken place. In some places there have been severe droughts, and in others there has been too much rain (Amos 6:4-9) . . . Since Moslems who pray over the lambs are not praying through [Jesus], they are not reaching God. They are really praying to the spiritual forces behind Islam: their prayers are really a curse. As a result we can expect our freezing works to have more trouble than usual . . ."

My daughter, who became mentally unwell in her mid-20s, once remarked to me on how close the Christian Zionist vision is to the psychotic delusion, in which the sufferer feels himself beset by evil, and sees signs and portents in a multitude of insignificant events and phenomena. To her observation, I would add that, contrary to popular supposition, unsoundness of mind isn't easily identifiable. Its victim can be as clever as Derek Prince undoubtedly was, and can speak with impressive conviction. A preposterous logic can be meticulously enunciated, as the person strives mightily to make his warped perception the norm.

In any consideration of the commonality of chiliasm and psychosis, one is drawn to the paranoia of Paul in Ephesians 6:11-12:

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

In how many psychologically insecure people have these words struck a responsive chord? One, evidently, is Australia-based Daniel Shayesteh, a former "leading Muslim political leader" (sic) in revolutionary Iran, who quotes it at the head of his alarmist article The West has not seen the worst of Jihad yet, which is posted on the Exodus from Darkness website. Shayesteh, a Muslim apostate who has carved a lucrative career for himself on the lecture circuit, is typically reductionistic. Asked, in an interview, "What do people learn about the Middle East conflict in your speeches?" he replies: "The Middle East conflict is the killing decree of Allah against Jews and Christians. It is not the conflict of two nations, it is the conflict of Islam against non-Muslims."

How convenient is a message that expresses life's complexities in a simple formula, that reassures the intellectually lazy that no further thinking is necessary. How doubly convenient is a message that reinforces a supremacist ideology whose protagonists have not only dispossessed the Palestinians, but implicitly delegitimized any argument they might advance for restitution. One can only lament the devaluation of the intellect that this implies; and one can only marvel that such an abject surrender of reason to the idée fixe is characterized as an "exodus from darkness".

The absurdity of the claim that there is a "killing decree . . . against Jews and Christians" is revealed when one looks at the provisions in Islamic law for the accommodation of such Ahl al-Kitâb or People of the Book in the Islamic polity. One finds, for example, the Ottoman millet system, under which "each community was responsible for the allocation and collection of its taxes, its educational arrangements, and internal legal matters pertaining especially to personal status issues such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance" (Encarta Encyclopedia). Though this system was not perfect — is any human system? — it "functioned well until the European concepts of nationalism and ethnicity filtered into the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 19th century". "Filtered" may not, however, be the right word. In many cases, a sense of nationalism was deliberately inculcated in the minorities of the Ottoman Empire by the Great Powers who, from the 18th century, established themselves as the minorities' sponsors or protectors. Russia was particularly active in this regard, as it "sought to undermine Ottoman strength from within . . . in order to fulfil her dream of self-aggrandizement towards the warm waters of the Mediterranean" (Minorities and the Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, Salâhi R Sonyel, Turkish Historical Society Printing House, Page 449). One is thus forced to the ironical conclusion that the West is largely responsible for the breakdown of the millet system, and therefore for the rise in competitiveness, rather than cooperation, between the different religious blocs. The Balkanization of the Middle East after World War I, which saw different ethnic and interest groups (with the exception of the Kurds) segregated in highly militarized nation states, is the deplorable result of this.

The cruelest irony

Christian Zionists who accuse their critics of being in the employ of the "father of lies" should look to their own record. For no one has been more industrious in the doctoring of texts to remedy perceived deficiencies in the truth than Christians. Among the most flagrant of these doctorings are (a) the interpolation of the "Christ passage" in Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews between the time of Origen and that of Eusebius, presumably to strengthen the shaky historical basis of Christianity, and (b) the interpolation of the verse referring to the "three heavenly witnesses" (1 John 5:7), to buttress the doctrine of the Trinity. This verse, which reads For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one, first appeared in Latin manuscripts around CE400. It was removed from the Bible after historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), classical scholar Richard Porson (1759-1808) and others pointed out that it was spurious, but can still be found in reprints of the King James version.

Christianity is a Hellenistic mystery cult, invented by the parvenu Paul and developed in the canonical gospels to meet the needs of perplexed, world-weary pagans of late antiquity. It owes its survival, in part, to the extirpation of the "Jerusalem church" in the Jewish war of CE66-70, which removed all authoritative opposition to Pauline Christology. This Christology transforms the "Jesus of history", a Jewish messiah (or messiah manqué), into the "Jesus of faith", a Greek christ. It replaces a wholly human upholder of the Law with a human-divine savior figure whose venal followers reach out to, and seek an accommodation with, the Roman power. Although it represents a radical departure from messianic Judaism, and a betrayal of the people it falsely accuses of responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus, it seeks legitimacy by anchoring itself in the Judaic tradition. It is thus a usurper, rather than a fulfiller, of that tradition, and has always been resolutely rejected by all but the most ignorant Jews.

It is tempting to describe Christianity not only as a lie, but as the most successful lie in the history of the world. But as Jewish scholar Hugh Schonfield reminds us in Those Incredible Christians (Hutchinson, 1968), "Our own moral judgments must not be applied to the literary productions of antiquity, where it was not considered at all improper to forge, interpolate and slant documents in a good cause".

Nevertheless, one can appreciate the incredulity of educated Jews when the Christian Zionists try to sell this travesty of Jesus back to them as the genuine article, often through a process of "contextualization". This means making Christianity superficially appealing, by giving it all the trappings of Judaism. Rabbi Tovia Singer describes a typical scene:

No Sunday services take place here; this congregation meets only on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings. You will never see a cross or an altar; there is an Aaron Hakodesh (holy ark) with a star of David adorning its velvet cover, and a Bimah (stage for prayer services) in the center of the sanctuary. The majority of the men who worship here wear kipot, and their tzitzit hang down the sides of their pants. This congregation's rabbi, among many other functions, reads from the Torah and makes Kiddush every Shabbat. Most of the women are modestly dressed. Joyous shouts of "Shabbat Shalom" and "Baruch Hashem" can be heard as young couples greet each other. The sanctuary pulsates to a modern Israeli musical beat.

If this sounds like a description of a traditional Jewish house of worship, think again. The above is actually a description of any one of the hundreds of Messianic "synagogues" which flourish throughout the world. Confused? Many are.

Indeed, the deception is breath-taking in its scale and audacity. And it is even more amazing when one realizes that it is being perpetrated, in the case of the Christian Zionists, by people who ostensibly support the state of Israel — even as they attempt to "bring [Jews] to faith in Jesus as their Messiah". This would not be a problem, of course, if Israel recognized "Messianic Jews", i.e. Jewish converts to Christianity, as Jews. But it doesn't. As long ago as 1962, in the case of the Polish Jew Oswald Rufeisen (1922-1998) who converted to Christianity and became the Carmelite monk Brother Daniel, the Supreme Court ruled that such a person, even if born to a Jewish mother, should not be recognized as a Jew by the state of Israel. (Rufeisen v Minister of the Interior [1962] 16PD 2428.) "Through the eyes of the court, these people have chosen to cast themselves out of the Jewish religion and should not come [to Israel] under the Law of Return," Malka San, a lawyer for the Ministry of the Interior, has said.

"Of course, they can come as tourists." Such a person can also enter Israel under the Law of Entry and acquire Israeli citizenship through naturalization — as Brother Daniel eventually did. This option is, however, theologically unacceptable to the Christian Zionists, who insist their proselytes be accepted by the state as Jews who have simply "[come] to know Jesus as their Redeemer" (letter from Murray Dixon, Challenge Weekly, March 4, 1993). In an attempt to sneak this subterfuge through, the potentially offensive term "Christian" is not used in Christian Zionist publications for Jewish consumption.

This stand has resulted in two charges against the Christian Zionists: (1) That they are attempting to redefine Judaism, and (2) that they are attempting to impose this redefinition on the state of Israel. And since the adherents of any faith have the inalienable right to define their own beliefs, and to decide who is and who isn't a believer, the Christian Zionists have been further accused of "Christian chauvinism" and "cryptic anti-Semitism". The latter charge is cruelly ironic, in view of CJM / ITAC's trumpeted determination to expose anti-Semitism in all its "guises".

Thus, the position of the Christian Zionists in Israel is highly anomalous, and would be untenable if Israel were not indebted to them for their unpaid role as mouthpieces for Israeli political propaganda, molders of Western public opinion, and raisers of vital funds.

This explains the otherwise incomprehensible attempt of Murray Dixon — and of a cabal of writers of "letters to the editor" in New Zealand during and after the July-August 2006 war in Lebanon — to detach Hezb Allah from the people of Lebanon, and to portray it as an alien, intrusive, oppressive force. If, as Dixon claims, his knowledge of Israel is vastly superior to that of non-resident observers, he knows that this is not true. But he also knows that Israel's destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure was primarily designed to divide the Lebanese people by persuading a majority of them that Hezb Allah was responsible for their suffering — that Hezb Allah had brought the punishment upon them all by capturing two Israeli soldiers and killing a total of eight others in a cross-border raid [9]. (That this incident was no more than the casus belli for a war planned by Israel since 2000 is forgotten [10], as is the fact that Israel violates Lebanese sovereignty without compunction.)

In conclusion, one marvels that so many Western Christians [11] have come to pursue their spiritual ambitions through the state of Israel in a way that is clearly inconsistent with the positions and aspirations of the Jewish people. Unsurprisingly, their greatest successes in the field of evangelization have been among those most vulnerable: the Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, whose grounding in Judaism is often tenuous. As Dixon boasts in the letter cited above: "Every one of the 30 congregations in the land report additions from the recent influx of Russian and Ethiopian immigrants. One congregation recently baptized a group of 22 Russian Jews while another baptized 16 Ethiopian Jews. Now these new immigrants are out on the streets testifying . . ." According to Yad L'achim (an Israeli anti-missionary organization), there were in 2002 more than 5000 converts from Judaism in more than 38 different groups — the products, in the words of S. Alfassa Marks, founder of Judaic Alert News Service, of a "stealth approach" by evangelicals to "their ultimate goal . . . the eradication of the Jewish people through assimilation to Christianity".

Recommended reading

In 2002 I took the liberty of copying Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial by Kim Chernin. This article can still be read at Tikkun magazine, but only by those who have subscribed. I liked this article because I, too, was once wildly enthusiastic about Israel. Like most people who grew up in England between 1940 and 1960, I saw it as a place of shining ideals, where an entirely new kind of society was being created. I thought that way until 1967, when I started to read about what had really happened since the beginning of the Zionist enterprise.
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[1] ICEJ, the most influential Christian Zionist organization, was founded in West Jerusalem on September 30, 1980, in a response to the co-ordinated withdrawal of the last 13 embassies still based in the city. This pullout followed the Knesset's passing of the Jerusalem Bill, in which Israel unilaterally declared the city to be its exclusive, undivided, eternal capital. ICEJ organised the first International Christian Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1985. It claims to have a staff in more than 80 countries, where it draws its support from charismatic, evangelical and fundamentalist churches. In New Zealand, it is now based in Auckland.
[2] Tony Higton in A Response to Stephen Sizer's criticisms of CMJ and ITAC.
[3] In early 2006, the church had about £2.5 million of its £900-million share portfolio in Caterpillar. The company says it has not provided the bulldozers directly to Israel, but to the US military which has sold them on. (Source: Stephen Bates, religious affairs correspondent, The Guardian.) It was a Caterpillar bulldozer that killed American peace activist Rachel Corrie at Rafah, Gaza Strip, on March 16, 2003.
[4] Australian John Laffin was born in 1922 and died in 2000. His books on Islam are The Dagger of Islam (1979), and Holy War: Islam Fights (1988). All that can be said in Laffin's favor, I think, is that he is occasionally entertaining. This is from Page 90 of The Arab Mind: "Sex is so important that the Bedouin, who are expert trackers, stress that they can not only distinguish between the trails of a man and a woman but can tell whether the woman is a virgin." Another similar book, which has attracted similar criticism, is Londonistan (Encounter Books, 2006) by Melanie Phillips. Writing in Australian Jewish News, Joff Lelliott says: "Major problems with the book stem from a poor use of sources. Melanie Phillips takes any statement by radical Muslims and simply extrapolates, arguing that it is representative of Muslim opinion generally. Furthermore, the book lacks almost any proper research . . ."
[5] In 1986, Dr Choudhary was vice-president of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand. At present (in 2006), he is a Labour Party list MP.
[6] My copy was originally in the Awatapu College (high school) library in Palmerston North.
[7] ". . .practices such as clitoridectomy, and/or removal of the labia . . . are a grave violence against the person and are strictly forbidden in Islam." — The Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam.
[8] This was settled out of court. A "Muslim rejoinder" to the two-hour television documentary The Sword of Islam was published by the Listener on October 24, 1987.
[9] According to the first AP report, filed by Joseph Panossian at 5.41am on July 12, 2006, "The militant group Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during clashes Wednesday across the border in southern Lebanon (emphasis added), prompting a swift reaction from Israel, which sent ground forces into its neighbor to look for them".
[10] "In the six years since Israel ended its military occupation of southern Lebanon, it watched warily as Hezbollah built up its military presence in the region. When Hezbollah militants kidnapped two Israeli soldiers last week, the Israeli military was ready to react almost instantly. 'Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared,' said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-
Ilan University. 'In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal . . .' " — Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service, July 21, 2006.
[11] See Messianic Kiwi Jew ministers in Israel.
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Article first appeared here: islamnz.com
URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2012/09/24/title-166