American Mid East policy based on biblical ignorance
This week, the U.S. moved its embassy from Tel Aviv on Israel’s Mediterranean coast to Jerusalem. The move fulfilled one of President Donald Tweet’s campaign promises. The president sent his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to represent the American Empire.
Jerusalem epitomizes all that’s wrong with U.S. foreign policy.
Kushner had no foreign policy experience at all, prior to being appointed the White House’s “senior advisor” with particular emphasis on Middle Eastern issue. But, he is Jewish.
His grandparents, Reichel and Joseph Kushner, were Holocaust survivors who came to the U.S. in 1949. His wife Ivanka converted to Judaism before her wedding to Kushner. That seems sufficient to validate his role.
Rightly or wrongly, the U.S. seems to me to suffer from a massive guilt complex over the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were murdered.
As I read history, the Holocaust had no influence on the American entry into World War II. Until then, American industries continued to make handsome profits off their association with their German counterparts. They were not deterred by Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism.
Indeed, the horrors of the Holocaust were barely known until late in the war, when Allied forces liberated death camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Since then, the U.S. has suffered from a kind of national post-traumatic stress syndrome. From the outside, I sense that Americans believe they have a personal right to hold prejudices against AfroAmericans, Latinos, women, gays, Muslims, and government. But not to be anti-Semitic. In any discussion of prejudice, the analogy will always come up: “If you substitute ‘Jews’ for (fill in the blank with any of the groups listed above), would your views still be acceptable?”
That reaction tends to come from the left, from human rights and civil liberties groups.
The right relies on a different authority. It treats the Bible as the final word on anything related to Jews. And, by extension, to anything related to the Middle East.
This attitude is particularly common among white evangelicals, 80 per cent of whom voted for President Tweet.
Even though the Bible is not a primarily Christian book. Only one-quarter of it deals with the life and teachings of the man considered the founder of Christianity. But the whole bible is considered an authoritative Christian text, although Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion; rather, he wanted to revitalize Judaism.
Jesus was, in a sense, a Protestant within Judaism, just as Martin Luther was a Protestant within Catholicism.
Let’s be clear — the bible does state that the legendary King David chose Jerusalem as the capital of the new nation he had formed from the warring tribes descended from Jacob’s sons. That’s a selective reading, though. It ignores the bible’s own testimony that David chose that site specifically because it did not form part of traditional Jewish territories.
Jerusalem existed as a town long before David took it over. The name is recorded in an Egyptian text dating around 1000 years before David. It was a mixed community — Jebusites, Amorites, and Hittites, the ancestors of today’s Palestinians.
No doubt the Jebusites had their own histories, justifying their right to occupy this place. But those records are not in the bible. And in American foreign policy, only the bible matters.
Any rational examination of the bible would recognize that it is the story of one particular group of people, one relatively small but intensely competitive set of twelve familial tribes. Even the bible acknowledges that they were interlopers, outsiders who immigrated first from the Euphrates river basin and then later from Egypt, who took over territories already owned by other peoples.
But, because of the bible, vast numbers of people believe that God gave this land to the Jewish people — and who the hell are you to question God’s intentions?
Ironically, if I were a Jew, I would have deep suspicions about evangelical support. Because a prominent stream of evangelicalism views Jerusalem as the site of the second coming of Christ, the place where he will return to earth to impose a 1000-year reign of peace and justice.
At that time, Jews will either convert instantly to Christianity — or will vanish off the face of the earth, with other unbelievers.
To me, that sounds like yet another form of anti-Semitism. Even if it is based on biblical texts. The bible is not even a history. It is a book about one group’s relationship with God. It should not be treated as a text for international policy.
Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca