Dr. A. Clare Brandabur

Sabeel is an organization shaped by the vision of Father Naim Stifan Ateek, author of Justice and Only Justice, designed to foster a theology of liberation for Palestinian Christians. When a friend in Washington e-mailed to me here in Jordan the Program for this year's Sabeel Conference to be held from February 11 to 16, 1999, I saw that Edward Said was to give the keynote address, and included Professor Ibrahim Abulughod, Father Elias Chacour (author of Blood Brothers), Marc Ellis (author of Beyond Innocence and Redemption), Professor Rosemary Ruether (co-author of The Wrath of Jonah), Rev. Don Wagner (co-author of All in the Name of the Bible and founder of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign), Rev. Michael Prior, author of The Bible & Colonialism) among many other distinguished scholars, I determined to attend.

The packed auditorium of Bethlehem University, on Friday evening February 13, greeted the arrival of Professor Said with a sustained standing ovation, testimony to the sense of history shared by all those present. Bethlehem University's choir performed the familiar hymn to Jerusalem in which many of the audience joined... "and all who would might enter and no one was denied. . ." praying for a unitary and peaceful Holy City, now a city of bloodshed, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

Edward Said's brilliant lecture and his subsequent talk at Birzeit University have been printed and broadcast on TV. In this personal report, I wish to focus on other less publicized sessions of the Sabeel Conference including an exchange of ideas which has particular relevance at this historic moment when the Oslo agreement is being used to speed up the confiscation of Palestinian land and to turn the remnants of the "peace process" into a shameful hoax.

Rev. Michael Prior: Can Christians Worship A Vindictive God who Commands Genocide Against Whole Peoples?

Having heard Father Michael Prior present a paper at the Jerusalem Day Conference in Amman in October of 1996, I knew the work of this Roman Catholic Priest, historian and theologian, who spent last year as a visiting professor Bethlehem University. Father Prior addresses the vexed problem: for Christians who accept the Old Testament as the revealed word of God, how are we to confront the repeated commands of Yahweh that his followers massacre entire peoples? This is, Father Prior insists, not merely a permission, but an explicit command. In one instance (First and Second Samuel) a Jewish King incurs the wrath of Yahweh when he fails to exterminate ALL of the Amelekites, and though he hastily "hacks" the Amelekite King to pieces before the Lord, he nonetheless loses his kingship and suffers further punishment when the Lord sends an evil spirit to torment him.
Father Prior's two recently published books were available at the conference: The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique, Sheffield Academic Press Ltd, Mansion House, 19 Kingfield Road, Sheffield S11 9AS, England. A second book edited by Father Prior, Western Scholarship & The History of Palestine contains important essays by fellow participants in the 1996 Jerusalem Day Symposium in Amman: Keith Whitelam (Western Scholarship and the Silencing of Palestinian History), Thomas L. Thompson (Hidden Histories and the Problem of Ethnicity in Palestine), Michael Prior (The Moral Problem of the Land Tradition of the Bible) and John Quigley (The Right of Return of Displaced Jerusalemites). This book also contains in an addendum the authors and titles of papers presented at the Jerusalem Day Symposia held in Amman (except for the first in 1989 which was held in Kuwait) together with the names of members of the Jerusalem Day Committee and the Committee's address in Amman from which copies of these papers are available: PO Box 940639, Amman 11194, Jordan.

Two Jewish Views: The Inclusive and the Exclusive

Another session dealt with Zionism and Jewish attitudes toward the Holy Land. One of the speakers was Dr. Marc Ellis who spoke of the "end of Jewish history", saying that Israel, in its aggressive and exclusive claim to the Holy Land at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people, represents a complete break for him with the Jewish tradition into which he had been born and in which he had his education. Ellis favors an inclusive Holy Land in which Arabs-- Muslim and Christian-- and Jews live together side by side, sharing the land and its history. Marc Ellis advocates an analogy: in Beyond Innocence and Redemption he argues that, just as the Christian European community could not go forward until it had faced and repented its role in the murder and dispossession of Jews, so the Jewish community of today cannot go forward until it recognizes and repents its role in the murder and dispossession of the Palestinians.

However, also on this panel was Rabbi Jacob Milgrom, an American academic who holds views very different from those of Marc Ellis, and who has come to live with his son in a Jewish settlement on confiscated Palestinian land. Though I found his views outrageous and distressing, I wish to express my unbounded admiration for the openness and tolerance of the Sabeel hosts: included in the audience, in addition to Rabbi Milgrom himself were other Jewish settlers who, like him, wore the knitted skullcaps of the devout Jews whose settlements occupy Palestinian land. Rabbi Milgrom was introduced by Rev. Ted Keating, SM, panel moderator, as a Zionist who has come, after his retirement, to live in one of the Jewish settlements near Bethlehem. The Rabbi spoke in English interspersed with sonorous quotations from the Old Testament in Hebrew. "The earth is mine, sayeth the Lord, and you are all merely travelers and wayfarers." So the question of the ownership of the land of Palestine is, for the Rabbi, a question that only God can solve, and the Jubilee Year provides, according to Old Testament custom, a time when debts are forgiven and land is restored to its rightful owners. But who are the rightful owners?
When asked for specifics about what land he would be willing to concede to the Palestinians, the Rabbi professed this question too deep for his limited wisdom, something only God can resolve. Clear in his address, however, was the overwhelming presumption, based on the past Divine preference for the Jewish people which he regards as unquestionable according to his reading of the Sacred Texts, that this difficult problem would resolve itself in favor of the Jews.

At this point one Palestinian woman remarked that no one had apologized to her for the loss of her homeland, and Rabbi Milgrom seemed unwilling to do so. However, another Jewish settler in the audience raised his hand and said that he was prepared here and now to make such an apology, that he apologized to all the Palestinians. Still there was no clear statement of what part of Palestine these settlers were prepared to return to the Palestinians, and this man's words seemed hollow in the absence of any decision that he would resign his holdings in the Occupied Lands and take the next plane back to Brooklyn.

Though I knew I was out of order, I made a speech from the floor, saying that the Yahweh of the Old Testament was a genocidal maniac, unacceptable for a Christian to worship, that, though on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I was a recovering Roman Catholic, on all other days I was an atheist precisely because of the idea of God represented by the learned Rabbi. I cited James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which, at the famous Christmas dinner scene, Stephen's father laments "My dead king Parnell" whom the priests had hunted down; when Aunt Dante says "the priests were always right! They were for God and for Ireland!" their guest shouts "Then no God for Ireland, No God for Ireland!" The meaning is that, if this is the Irish Church's idea of God, then he is not having any.

Jesus was right to teach us, I said, to pray "deliver us from evil" because the abomination of desolation is sitting in the Scriptures, and we must liberate God from the Old Testament. To me this is in fact the real meaning of a theology of Liberation for the Palestinian crisis. The Moderator finally shut me up and let Rabbi Milgrom answer. He said that those genocidal commands a) had never been carried out, and b) they occur in only one book in the Old Testament. To which I did not have the chance to answer (beyond shouting "No, look in I and II Samuel and the Psalms" before I was shushed again.) The fine balance of the carefully modulated ecumenical dialogue was disturbed, though I am extremely grateful that I was allowed to speak at all.

Because I did not have the opportunity to reply to his somewhat indistinctly muttered defenses, I would like to answer them now. I address this to Rabbi Milgrom not as my friend but as my adversary. That he may be well-meaning I cannot rule out, though he must see the bloodshed and theft and violence, the beating and torture of children and the demolition of houses every day before his eyes, living as he has chosen to do on land which, according to International Law belongs to the Palestinians but which, according to Rabbi Milgrom's reading of the Old Testament, is in the land Promised by Yahweh to the Jews.

It is true that recent archaeological research seems to suggest (Thompson, Dever, et al) that violent Joshua-style conquests perhaps did not occur literally as they are said to have happened in the Old Testament legends. This is, however, completely irrelevant to the fact that such myths have been and continue to be manipulated to dispossess the Palestinian people. From Theodor Herzl to Golda Meier and Menachem Begin and Netanyahu, the false claim to an exclusive divine right to the land of Palestine has been based on spurious interpretations of these very texts, and the rituals and totems of the Israeli military expansionist colonial state--like Masada and the myth of Solomon's temple and Rachel's tomb as exclusively Jewish possessions --provide carte blanche for Israelis to treat the Palestinians as the Jews were treated by the Nazis. It is these "Promised Land--Divine Right" myths which the settlers invoke daily as they expropriate or destroy Palestinian houses and beat up or shoot dead Palestinian children.

The consequences of this misrepresentation, this manipulation and cynical abuse of biblical texts, are tragic for all concerned. As Marc Ellis reiterated (something he has said frequently in his books), "We (i.e. the Jews) have become almost everything we loathed in our oppressors."

As to Rabbi Milgrom's objection that these genocidal commands occur only once in the Jewish Bible, that is simply false as a scholar of his stature should know. They occur in Deuteronomy, I and II Samuel, in Joshua, in Judges, and they recur repeatedly in Psalms. I refer readers to Father Prior's book, The Bible & Colonialism: A Moral Critique for detailed documentation of the biblical texts and their understanding among Jewish settler communities in present-day Palestine.

Rabbi Milgrom, your Old Testament Yahweh is a bigot and a genocidal maniac, and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as you understand him, is not my God.

From Bethlehem I went to Gaza to visit friends who are infinitely worse off now, in their double-walled prison, than they were ten years ago, with no access to the sea since Jewish settlements employing Thai laborers have usurped miles of coastline and Palestinian fishermen are shot at by Israeli gunmen even when they fish within the severely circumscribed areas remaining to them. Children's medical conditions remain untreated, malnutrition is rife.
Leaving Al Quds to return to the Bridge, just beyond Bethany on the road to Jericho (where "A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among robbers"), I passed a huge uniformed Israeli force with bulldozers and military jeeps engaged in the destruction of Bedouin homes, while the women tried to salvage blankets and lead away children. My driver was unwilling to stop so I could take photos because, he said, would lose his license, so I could not even witness with the camera this logical outcome of the exclusive claim to the Holy Land by the 'Chosen People'.

Dr. A. Clare Brandabur
English Department
Yarmouk University
Irbid, Jordan