Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Another great posting, this time focusing on the founding of the State, and how things might have been different if the Jews really were running things:
Many people think that Jewish lobbying, pressure and influence dragged a reluctant Uncle Sam into the Middle East. Think again.
Now it's true that American opposition to Zionism has a long and distinguished pedigree. In the 19th century, American missionaries built a network of colleges and hospitals across what was then the Ottoman Empire and what today we call the Middle East. The missionaries and their students helped develop modern secular Arab nationalism. The idea was that if Arabs stopped thinking of themselves as Muslims and Christians, but developed a communal inter-religious identity, this would allow Christian Arabs to play a larger role in political life and, the missionaries hoped, one day open the doors to present the gospel to the Muslims. Many of the great leaders of Arab secular nationalism, including the (French-educated) Michel Aflaq, founder of the Ba'ath Party that once ruled Iraq and still rules Syria and whose beautiful tomb in Baghdad (at right) was built by Saddam Hussein, were Arabs of Christian origin.
For these missionaries, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine looked like a disaster. It radicalized and fragmented Arab politics and introduced the motifs of religious struggle that to this day divide, for example, the Palestinians between religious parties like Hamas and secular ones like Fatah. Zionism was especially polarizing in modern Syria, Lebanon and Palestine -- where some of the highest concentrations of Arab Christians were. Moreover, the American missionaries in the Arab world identified with the Arab struggles for independence first from the Ottomans, and later from the British and the French. They generally had a great deal of respect for Arab culture and looked to establish a close relationship between the United States and the rising Arab peoples. The missionaries and their successors believed that the smart choice for the United States in the Middle East was to make friends with the Arabs; American support for the Jews was a foreign policy disaster that ran clearly counter to our obvious national interest...
Thank You for posting this! I love your blog!!
Steve
Common Cents
http://www.commoncts.blogspot.com
Interesting, I wasn't aware of the extent and details of this history. This is the graph, for me, that is revealing:
"The missionaries were more like the development establishment and the Ford Foundation of today than like Campus Crusade for Christ, and the young people (more than half of them women by some counts) who went into missionary service were more like Peace Corps and development workers. They were, in other words, very much like the people in America today who are least likely to sympathize with Israel in the Middle East: well connected, well educated intellectuals and professionals from a high WASP and usually New England, background. They generally had a wider knowledge about foreign affairs than most other Americans, and were interested in and concerned about development, democratization and women’s rights. Their connection to Christianity was closer than that of their descendants; they believed that the promotion of social equality, economic development, rights for women and transparency in government were all intrinsically connected to the promotion of Christianity, but the missionaries and their allies were liberal upper-middle-class professionals from the mainline denominations and their descendants and heirs are very much with us now — and they still tend not to like Israel very much."
Establishmentarians first and foremost, enamored of the powers of this world and enamored of their would-be noble role in the world. For correctives, see Bonhoeffer, see Watchman Nee, among others.
Fascinating piece, I also hadn't known about the missionaries and this dovetails well with the articles about the Presbyterians.
Also though, there are a few minor quibbles about American Jewish acceptance of Zionism, which are illuminated in the article's comment thread.
Especially, Reform was not really Zionist until later in the 20th century, when the situation in Europe became truly dire.
In reality the missionaries had no idea of the culture of Islam.
And just this past week we have an example of inter-religious identity between Nigeria's Muslim North and the Christian South.
The other interesting thing, part of the whole business with the Presbyterians, is the apparently large numbers of Armenian Christian immigrants into the area after WWI, who are specifically regarded by the Presbyterians as good (the Jews being bad of course).
Now - people claim there was no immigration into the Palestine Mandate except for the Jews - various Arab influxes being regarded as nonexistent or insignificant - yet the Presbyterians themselves admit large numbers of Armenian Christians arrived.
So what is that? They ate hummos so that's ok then?
http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c37_a18110/News/National.html