I had a dream of doing one single blog entry that would encompass all of my political beliefs so I could get them all down I one place and, in keeping with this blog's original purpose, never have to explain myself again. I would just give people the link and let them read it and get back to me. But then when I decided to start by defining terms, I was going to end up with around 20 pages of definitions, so I've decided to instead just keep putting things down as they come up (sort of), and if I change my opinion on something I'll do an edit. Today's topic, which has actually been brought up on and off for the past several months, is Israel, and why I, unlike a lot of people with bumper stickers it seems, don't stand with it.
It's really hard to know where to start
this explanation, because all my various opinions on US foreign
policy and my own religious attitudes are connected to it. I'm just going
to have to start somewhere, and if you find it a bit confusing, it's
probably a result of the fact that this is a complex issue, and I
must admit I'm nowhere near the writer I used to be.
I think it's probably better if I state the religious part
first, because the political part comes from that.
I have had several discussions with
American Christians who for one reason or another think that the Jews
are still God's chosen people. Now I have to admit that this is
strictly an interpretation question. After years of study, I'm no
closer to being able to answer the question of God's opinion towards
Jews in a post-Christian world. The Bible makes it clear that
Christians are supposed to be spiritual successors of the Jews,
sanctified through Jesus under the new law as the Jews were through
Moses under the old law. There are also several passages that state
that Christians are co-heirs with the Jews, and supposed to
become “spiritually circumcised” in ways that make it look like
both doctrines are supposed to continue. There are also several
passages that state that Christians are supposed to put aside Jewish
doctrine and tradition and separate themselves to Christ regardless
of what the Jews do.
Now, my interpretation for a long time
has been that there was a lot of muddying of the waters in the first
century. Most of the Christians in the churches the scriptural
letters are written to were Jews, and the conflict that Paul in
particular writes about the most is how Jewish Christians and Gentile
Christians are supposed to make things work side-by-side. The Jewish
tradition at the time required them to be so separate from the
Gentiles that Jesus wasn't even allowed to enter a Gentile household
to heal someone, and Peter required three visions from God before he
would go preach to a Gentile convert-in-the-making. Plus you had
former Jews and former pagans trying to worship under the doctrine of
Jesus, and there are a lot of cases where the Jews are told they
ought to continue to keep the Mosaic law, while the Gentiles are not,
but are required to give up their pagan traditions. Like I said, it
was a messy time, and it took several letters from apostles to get it
together, so it's understandably a little confusing now.
Going on that interpretation, I don't
think the Jews are God's chosen people anymore. I think their
“chosen” status was transferred to Christians, and that the
promise made to Abraham concerning his descendants no longer refers
to his biological offspring because Jesus transferred it to his
spiritual successors. But I have to admit that you can read the
passages the other way if you're so minded. Now I don't understand
why anyone who thinks that way would be a Christian instead of
converting to Judaism, but that's a question for another day.
Following from that though, if the Jews are no
longer God's chosen people, then Christians are not under any
particular obligation to them; certainly no more than to any other
group. I've stated before elsewhere that I don't think we're on the
right side in the struggle between Judaism and Islam for example.
Muslims have more in common with Christians than Jews do; at least
Muslims accept the divinity of Jesus's teachings even if they don't
accept the divinity of Jesus Himself.
Where things start to separate for me,
though, is when we get to the state of Israel. Let's stipulate for a
moment that Jews really are a special group to God: how does it
follow that Christians have a duty to preserve a country for them? I
can find no scriptural evidence for that at all. In fact, God was the
one who let the original kingdom of Israel split into two states, and
then let them both be taken by foreign powers, warning them in advance it would happen because they'd been so sinful in idolatry without repentance. The Babylonians
conquered Judah and took the tribes of Judah and Benjamin (with some
Levites) into captivity; the Assyrians captured the rest of the
kingdom and annihilated the other tribes. When the Medes and Persians
captured the former Babylonian empire, they let the Jews go back to
their homeland, and the Alexandrian dynasty that took over after that didn't bother them either. But God still let that restored Jewish state get
captured by the Romans just a few hundred years later. After Jesus's
resurrection, just before He ascended to heaven, His own followers
asked if He would restore the kingdom to them. Jesus just sighed and
said they still didn't get it. It seems pretty clear to me God wouldn't have let Israel be conquered a second time, particularly since the Jews had not gone to idol worship this time, unless it had fulfilled its purpose and wasn't needed anymore.
If God really doesn't care whether
there's an earthly Jewish state (which He doesn't seem to, given how
little He's done to preserve one for them), then why do we as
Christians care one way or the other? I'm not anti-Israel, or
anti-Semitic, or whatever other charges you'd care to level at me.
I'm fine with the Jews having their own state. Why not? The Germans
do, the Russians do, the Chinese do, the Arabs do, the Turks do, and
so forth. But why is it our duty as Christians to make darn sure the
Jews have their own state more than any of those other groups? Even
if you buy that they're still the chosen of God, which I don't, why
do the other chosen of God need to risk our own safety, liberty,
lives, global reputation, etc. in defense of any earthly, worldly,
political state? That's not rhetorical. I don't have a satisfactory
answer. I might change my opinion if someone could give me one.
Where things really go their separate
ways for me is when we move beyond the religious questions of how
Christians and Jews ought to behave towards each other and enter the
political world. I have mentioned previously my admiration for Henry
Kissinger, and my endorsement of realpolitik in practice. I ought to
clarify how that applies here before I get into the serious
discussion of why we ought to drop Israel as an ally, but I want to
say one final thing on the nature of religion when it comes to
nations: America is a country; it's not a person. It does not have a
soul to save or lose. As an institution, the duty of the USA and its
government is to its citizens, not to doing the right thing. America
is fully justified in doing evil to others if it serves the needs of
its people, and this applies to every other country in the world as
well. If we want “the right thing” and “the needs of the
people” to coincide, that's up to us. It would take massive
political reform to really make those decisions viable again, but
that's also a topic for another day. For now, just understand that I
don't judge America (or any other nation) as good or evil on the same
criteria that I use to judge myself (or another individual human
being).
To clarify my stated position, I
believe it's right (or at least defensible) for nations to make their
friends and allies based on real world considerations like who has
material resources, who has a strong military, and such rather than
more idealistic concerns like who's torturing their own people or
using the wrong form of government. If you take an honest look at
even our history, let alone world history, what you see is that those
are the sorts of reasons we make those decisions by anyway. Because
America tries to be idealistic, we end up lying to ourselves a lot in
ways other countries don't have to. Once America decides it needs a
country, it has to rationalize that they are a “good guy” nation,
no matter what the reality. A lot of our problems nowadays come from
the hypocrisy this rationalizing caused us during the Cold War. We
propped up or even installed a lot of “bad guy” regimes because
the people we supported opposed communism, and that was enough for us
to tell ourselves they weren't evil. We were even telling their
victims that, while insisting to ourselves that those citizens must
have done something to be slow-roasted by hot coals over wire cot frames a la the
Shah of Iran, or that the ethnic cleansing campaign couldn't have
been as bad as we were hearing, as with Saddam Hussein. If we had
been more honest with ourselves and with other countries then, we
probably wouldn't be involved in a lot of the fighting we're involved
in now. What's more, the war in Iraq, for example, could have been
over and done with by now if we'd been honest about needing to defend
our oil interests – which I see as a legitimate reason for a nation
to go to war – rather than attempting to wrap it up in positive
idealistic motivations. We went to war to avenge
our dead from September 11th (another motivation that's fine on a
national level but personally abhorrent, although not one we needed
to lie about, strangely enough), and to depose the corrupt regime of
Saddam Hussein after we'd spent 30 years supporting it. The thing is, it's now the
idealistic wrapping paper that's holding us in the fight. Saddam's dead;
Bin Laden's dead; al-Qaeda is defunct; the Taliban is all but
destroyed; and we still have our oil. The only thing keeping us there
is the idea that we have to rebuild these “liberated” nations,
which their own citizens still see as us occupying their country and
dictating how they live, which is breeding more of the same violence
we keep saying we have to stop. To put it briefly, you can't put a
fire out with gasoline, no matter how many times you write 'water' on
the gas can.
So, our double-faced attitude to
realpolitik is getting us into more of the same trouble it got us
into in the first place. How does that relate to the state of Israel?
Because America, for reasons going all the way back to our national
attitudes before WWII, has placed Israel squarely in the “good guy”
camp. We used to nationally support the phrase “ethnic
self-determinism”; the idea that any and every ethnic group ought
to be able to form its own state and govern itself. Hitler used this
very argument in his own defense of his initial expansions: “The Sudetenland is full
of Germans who would like to be part of Germany. If Czechoslovakia
would let them vote on it, they'd vote to leave and join Germany.
We're just standing up for their right to be with their own people.”
It was the same argument we used when we supported letting Yugoslavia
break up into its various component pieces, and to some extent to
letting the Soviet Union break up. The thing is, we couldn't stand on
principle and break the Soviet Union up because, unlike any other
country we've dealt with in 70 years, if we tried to destroy the Soviet Union, they had the
ability to destroy us back. If we'd really
been the fervent idealists we said we were, we'd have risked that
total annihilation to liberate the Turks, Uygurs, Bulgars, Magyars,
Romani, and various non-Russian Slavs that were all held by the
Soviet regime.
When it comes to a country that is
every bit as dangerous as we are, we realize it's not worth dying
for. When it comes to a collection of countries that, even combined,
couldn't attack us even if their lives depended on it, well, we'll back
our ally no matter what. We'll bravely stand on our side of the
respective oceans and tell the whole Middle East that whatever Israel
does, we're behind them. Alone, Israel is like any other country
in the region. With its good buddy the USA standing behind it, it's
more or less granted superpower status by association.
Now, I've already talked about why,
morally, I don't think there's any reason for the Christians to help
the Jews over any other group, but I don't see why America has any
moral obligation to support the state of Israel where it is on
ideological grounds either. A brief look at the Internet says there
are around 6,212,000 Jews in Israel as of 2014; compared to 6,500,000
in the US (some estimates as high as 6,750,000). It would honestly
make more sense, if the US wants to support an independent Jewish
state, for us to declare one somewhere here than to keep supporting
them over there. I could get behind that, morally and politically.
There is nothing wrong with us giving up some of our land to create a
Jewish state; particularly since we have more Jews than Israel does!
On top of which, Israel was created by the UN by giving them someone
else's land. It was just proclaimed, just like that. No one ever
thought to ask any of the people already living there if they minded
being part of a specifically Jewish state that was going to set up
right there where they already lived. This violates that same
principle of ethnic self-determinism, because the majority Arab
ethnic group that was going to be displaced didn't have any say in
the matter. It wasn't like the division between India and Pakistan,
for example, where both sides agreed that there needed to be separate
states, they worked out a treaty, and they separated. This was
flat-out strong-arming: one group told a second group that a third group got to have
their land, and a fourth heavily-armed group was backing them up.
Imagine some people you've never met show up unannounced and start
moving into your house. The homeowner's association said they could
because the people you bought the house from had stolen it from your
new housemates' great-great-grandparents. And if you have a problem
with that, you can either move out or just be quiet, because the
police are enforcing their claim over yours. So from its foundation
right up to the minute, we've been nothing but hypocritical on the
subject.
So, to summarize, I don't agree with
the US continuing to support the state of Israel where it is on any
level. God gave it to them in the Old Testament, but then God also
took it away in the Old Testament. The UN, citing ethnic
self-determinism, gave it to them in violation of ethnic
self-determinism. The US, citing a shaky interpretation of the Bible,
continues to support this when it would honestly make better sense
politically to side with their enemies, and be more justified morally
to give them some of our land instead.
