I lead a quiet life. While I do get around a bit, I always love returnning to my calm sanctuary, an island of civilized sanity in a world gone stark, raving mad. My wife has learned to put up with my ways, and to appreciate, I suppose, that things could be much worse. I have a dog who adores me. And then of course, there are the books. Church is close at hand and heart. I work as much as I want to, doing that which I absolutely love. Friends and acquaintances consider me “colorful,” and seek out my company. My young scions are making their way in other worlds, each flourishing in his own way. I can tune out the noise. The television remote has an off-button which keeps at bay the orange-haired menace and his minions. I can make the unpleasant world seem very far away.
Unlike so many Americans, I understand that you can also live well outside of these shores–very well, in many cases. But I am in no way dismissive of the fortunate particularities of the time and place in which I have been set down. I balk at saying “I am blessed,” as that truism has become nothing more than a trite evangelical sentimentalism in these parts. I will just say that I am very fortunate, in a material sense, and never want to become complacent and smug about it.
And so, it breaks my heart to see the country that, on the one hand makes possible the gentle and even genteel life I lead, on the other hand as a warmongering hegemon, raining down death and destruction on unfortunate others. This is the very thing we are doing. I listen to the words teleprompted to our President, echoing the self-serving and malignant nonsense of Madeline Albright who talked of us as the indispensable nation. A Roman Caesar couldn’t have said it better; nor an Egyptian Pharaoh, nor a Mongol Khan. The words could have just as easily been mouthed by that great fool, Woodrow Wilson, who spoke of making the world safe for democracy, and the war to end all wars; or even that lesser fool, George W. Bush, with his Axis of Evil and Freedom Agenda. It is all of a piece.
In our enfeebled national understanding, Vladimir Putin and Hamas and Iran (or is it China?) have been fused into one all-encompassing Other, the Tyranny du jour. We never seem to tire of constructing Tyrannies for our Democracy–and more importantly, our Military Industrial Complex–to wage war against; for Indispensable Nations require Indispensable Villains. And so our bombs rain down on the Donbass and Gaza. I cannot speak for the bombs that rain down on Ukraine and Israel, I can only speak to the evil that we do. And there is quite a bit of saber-rattling in the Far East, for why have a two-front war when you can have a guerre à tois? In one sense, I am almost glad my boys live elsewhere, for I do believe there is a comeuppance for nations as arrogant as ours, and perhaps they will be spared that.
This brings me to the present war on Gaza, a subject I approach with trepidation. These are strange times. Can a person not condemn nihilistic terrorism on one hand, and genocidal policies on the other? Apparently that is not allowed today. To be absolutely clear, I abhor terrorism, and this category definitely includes Hamas. But then, I am not fooled by the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu either. To believe that the rise of Hamas is in no way connected to the very particular Israeli policies pursued with ruthless consistency since 1967 is to be blinkered almost to the point of blindness.
I grew up in a culture where even the slightest hint of criticism towards Israel would be met with bafflement as to how anyone could possibly oppose them. For many, standing against the State of Israel was in fact, taking a stand against God Himself. If the criticism attained a wider audience, then charges of anti-Semitism would be sure to follow. It is all very tiresome, and as Douglas Murray is fond of saying these days: I just don’t have time for it.
To begin with, I would not know how to be anti-Semitic. I oppose policies and ideologies and militaristic nationalist enthusiasms, right and left. But I cannot think of an instance where I have found myself being in opposition to specific peoples, whether Jews or anybody else. I grew up in what has to be considered a racist part of the country–the South of the 1960s and 70s. But I never really looked at the world in racialistic terms; or if I did, it was fleeting. And I am uncomfortable when I hear it espoused today. People are people, and it has always been thus. Americans may be grasping, Turks may be humorless, and Russians may be enigmatic, but we are all the same, really: a desire for peace and security for our families, a warm hearth awaiting us at the end of the day, and maybe a few days at the beach.
My concern is not really even against the State of Israel, but rather my own country. Without our fulsome and unwavering support, the State of Israel could not be what it is today, or do what it has been doing. We are their great enablers. Without the U.S., it is hard to see them beyond their 1967 borders, certainly not the Greater Israel of today.
So what I find myself philosophically opposed to is the concept of Zionism. As a nation among nations, Israel has a right to exist as much as anyone else. But I do not believe they have some sort of transcendent right to exist any more than any other country, whether it be Ecuador or Ethiopia. In other words, I reject the idea that the Jewish people have a prior deed to the Palestinian real estate which transcends all others already there. I do not believe any of the conditional promises made to the Old Testament Hebrews remain unfulfilled.
But again, this would be of no concern to me whatsoever, if it were not for the crucial role this country has played in imposing that understanding on the region. I am not referencing the American Jewish community, but rather our evangelical Christian Zionists. My opposition to Zionism may be no deeper than the fact that I am not a Southern Baptist.
We were not a religiously observant family, but those were the waters we all swam in. I remember one relative (by marriage) who was simply obsessed about Israel. “B” was an outwardly pious Southern Baptist, as long as it did not actually entail going to church. A classic hypochondriac, she would attend church long enough to convince the congregation of her frailty. Then she would retire to her sickbed, a “shut-in” open to congregational visits, consolations over her various perceived illnesses, and, of course, food; for decades.
I never knew B to hit a lick at a snake, as the old saying goes, or to do anything in particular for anybody. She preferred to wake up at noon. She loved to watch TV preachers who expounded on the myriad variations within Premillennial Dispensationalism, as long as their shows didn’t come on in the mornings. B would get an intense gleam in her eyes if the subject of Israel and/or the “End Times” came up. And if you didn’t bring it up, she would. I believe it was the Shah of Iran who was the Antichrist in those days. We took it all in stride, a source of ongoing interfamilial humor. B was, unfortunately, not unique–there is a type of Southerner, often Baptist, whose faith consisted solely of speculations on Revelation and the “End Times.”
I was dubious of the Baptist Church, which was always lurking just in the background, on the perimeters of my world. It never appealed to me–always too Late Great Planet Earth-y for me. After I moved back to East Texas from college, my sister’s husband invited me to hear their “new preacher,” which was always their evangelical hook—"Wait till you hear our new preacher!” Cornered, without an excuse at the ready, I accompanied them one night to their revival. It was a stem-winder lesson on the “End Times,” the “Rapture,” and the assorted framework of beliefs that held that construction together. This was a long time ago, so long ago that it was back when he was still speaking to me. I think I must have been twenty-two years old at the time, and the sermon was certainly effective, just not in the way he expected it to be. The Baptist church was everything I remembered it to be, and I have, except for the occasional funeral or wedding, never been back.
Instead, I joined up with the Restorationist church of my dad’s people, at least on his mother’s side. I met my wife there and spent a little over twenty-five years with them. We claimed not to be nondenominational, but rather undenominational. This was believed to be true because: 1) our hermeneutic was the correct one; 2) we “went just by the Bible,” and of course, nobody in Protestant history had ever thought of that before; and 3) we said so. I never bought into this foundational underpinning, but largely kept my mouth shut as long as I could. In my observation, we still quacked and waddled just like the other waterfowl in the Protestant pond. But I will have to hand it to my old church: we were decidedly not Pre-millennial. Charles Darby meant nothing to us. We avoided Scofield Reference Bibles. The words “rapture,” and “Great Tribulation,” and “Thousand-year reign,” were not in our vocabulary.
We did not talk about it much, nor did we have a fully fleshed-out eschatology. And yet, we did espouse a basic idea of our death consisting of the separation of the soul from the body, then a paradisiacal period in which we await the General Resurrection, followed by the new bodies and the new heavens and earth. A hallmark of this restraint was seen in our funerals, in which noone was “preached into Heaven.” That, sadly, is much less true than it was then. In no way did any notion of the modern nation of Israel intersect with that understanding.
And then a little over twenty years ago, I began transitioning to something about eighteen hundred years older. My conversion to Orthodoxy required as much unlearning as it did learning. But my view of the “End Times” required hardly any change at all. The view was very much the same: a little better articulated, as you would expect, but basically a similar framework of belief. The Orthodox stance is as free of Christian Zionism as my old Restorationist Protestant church.
But now, there is another dimension added. The Orthodox Church has a 2,000 year old stake in the region. The people who suffer under the yoke of Zionist policy–Palestinian Arabs–can just as easily be Orthodox (or Catholic) Christians as Muslims. True, the percentages are small, and due to the persecution, continuing to shrink. But when Israelis look at them, they do not see a Christian, but rather a Palestinian. I have always been amazed that American Christian Zionism is such a one-way street: it is all about Evangelicals bending over backwards to accommodate the Israeli state, whereas there is no reciprocal behavior on their part towards Christians.
On October 7th, I happened to be at a luncheon of the Jamestowne Society in Dallas. I had heard nothing of the events of the day. But an old man, near the end of the meeting, arose and interrupted the speaker, asking everyone “to pray for Israel.” I did not yet know what had happened, but I knew exactly the context in which the request was made: that of the secular state of Israel being the harbinger of God’s plan for the Second Coming. Since I believe none of that, I always resent it’s imposition, the assumption that everybody believes that way. I will pray for the Israelis, as I will for the Palestinians, and the Syrians, etc. I have never prayed for a nation.
Back in 1994, I read Sir Steven Runciman’s trilogy on the Crusades. This is a seminal work, and whether you agree or disagree, Runciman is where you start a study of the Crusades. I have never forgotten his enchanting tale of the fragile little kingdoms of Outremer: Jerusalem, Edessa, Antioch, Tyre, etc. He is the best of story-tellers, and he sweeps you along in a tale full of romance, but of ultimate doom. My fear is that this Jewish nation, so absolutely essential to the beliefs of much of evangelical Christianity, is of the same nature as the Crusader kingdoms, just without the romance.
My personal experience in the region is limited. I toured the region in 2008. I started with Syria, mainly because George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did not want me to do so. I loved the country; this was three years before we helped destroy it. From Aleppo, I worked my way south, through the Christian Valley and the Crak de Chevaliers into northern Lebanon. I travelled down through the Bekaa Valley and into the heart of what I later learned was Hezbollah territory. It was a somewhat surreal experience that I wrote about here.
Then back to Damascus where I would later meet my nephew, for whom I thought this experience might be transformational. Oh, well. We ventured into Jordan and from there made plans to cross into the West Bank. The plan was to enter through the King Hussein Bridge, where a driver would meet us, drive us down the Israeli highway that cuts through the West Bank but doesn’t allow access, and then into Jerusalem. There we would go through the Wall into Palestine again, then through Bethlehem out to Mar Saba Monastery.
We were able to do that, but only just. American evangelical tourists arrive in Tel Aviv, are whisked to Jerusalem where they tag some of the Holy Sites, perhaps even a visit to the Israeli Jordan River complex for a rebaptism, then back to more approved sites before flying back home, where they will sing the praises of Israel to their home congregation. The vast majority of them, in so doing, never see the Wall, much less meet an actual Palestinian. My nephew and I saw a glimpse of Israel in a way that an American tourist never does: through the eyes of Palestinians.
There was a long wait at the Jordanian side of the border. It was full of Palestinians, myself and nephew, and an American working for an NGO. We had time to strike up a conversation in the waiting room, and later on the bus. He was from Fort Worth and had a military background, if I remember correctly. He lived in Amman and was charged with training the Palestinian police department in Ramallah. He was largely stymied by the Israeli governemnt in what he was allowed to do with them, telling me that they did not even allow Palestinian police to have bullet-proff jackets. I remember him saying over and over again, Americans just don’t know what is going on over here. They have no idea.
We were bused to the Israeli side of the border, where there were even more delays. The Israeli soldiers rifled through every piece of Palestinian luggage. We attracted even more attention because we had no luggage. The border guards were incredulous that we would be going to the West Bank on a day trip. And my nephew, even darker than myself, looked suspicious to them. He was taken away for 45 minutes and interrogated in a secret room somewhere. I tried to be casual about things and pulled my pocket journal out and started catching up on my daily notes. An Israeli soldier with a machine gun came over, took it and flipped through it, then instructed me not to do that in the border crossing.
We made the connection with our driver and proceded according to plan: down the highway with no exits into Jerusalem from the east, with the Israeli settlements spreading out on each ridge like the pinchers of a lobster; through Jerusalem and the Wall and back into the West Bank; then a quick visit to Mar Saba and a brief stop in a Bethlehem Christian shop; then a mad dash back to the border as the Israelis closed the border crossing at 3pm in the afternoon.
That day made an impression on me. I wish I rememberd more about Mar Saba, or the conversations I had with our Palestinian Christian driver, or the American I chatted with in the border crossing. But I have never forgotten one thing he said, for it is now more true than ever: Americans have no idea.
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I enjoyed this story so much. You are right Americans have been lied to about what is going on. We have been lied to about history among other things. Organized religion i do not believe in. I do beleive in reading the Bible and Jesus. Thank you for confirming what I suspected over in Palestine.