Last week I attended a conference at a seminary in Beirut—we’re still here in Lebanon now—in which three subjects were covered: Islamic Law, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and Christian Peacemaking. I left with many things to think about, and I’m not sure exactly what I would say had me thinking the most or left the biggest impression on me. One statement on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, though, made by one of the speakers—an Anglican minister who had spent many years in the region and who had written several books on the conflict—struck me as important to remember. “The root of the problem,” he said, “is not Islam, but dispossession.”
This is an important point to remember, especially considering the images we see and the news we hear in the United States. When it comes to this conflict and story, we hear on the news about suicide bombings and rockets attacks on Israeli civilian areas, and we hear about Hamas, the Islamic group that governs the Gaza Strip that the U.S. government classifies as a terrorist organization. To a U.S. audience, these are frightening, foreign things to hear about, and as such they can overwhelm all other considerations when contemplating this issue. An American watching the news and seeing images of cafes and discos blown to pieces and civilians heading to bomb shelters—because of suicide bombs attached to or rockets launched by Muslims—probably thinks, “Wow, Islam is a menace, it is the cause of this problem, and they will never give the Israelis peace.” Or something like that.
However, despite all this it is important to remember that the root of the problem is not Islam, but dispossession. I basically already believed this, but have never quite heard the issue articulated so succinctly. Very simply, there is a problem today because Arab Palestinians—Muslims and Christians—lost their homes. There is no problem without dispossession.
As I learned at the conference, 130 years ago the inhabitants of the land that is now the state of Israel were almost entirely Arabs. In the 1880s, Palestinians made up 95 percent of the population, with Jews at 5 percent. By around 1920, due to immigration from anti-Semitic Europe, Jews had become about 10 percent of the population, and by 1947, 31 percent. Palestinians probably weren’t losing their homes yet at that stage, but at the creation of the state of Israel by the United Nations in 1948, they started to. In the months before, during and after the subsequent war between Israel and the surrounding Arab nations, around 750,000 Palestinians left, fled or were forced out of their homes. Dispossession. This flight continued as the years went by, and accelerated again in 1967 with another war between Israel and its neighbors. Today, the population of Israel is 80 percent Jewish and 20 percent Arab. Recently I read there are also today around 5.5 million Palestinian refugees scattered around the world. Dispossession.
Several million of those Palestinians now live in Jordan, so I also know this from experience: I have a friend—a barber whose salon is around the corner from us—whose father’s family was forcibly removed in 1948 from their home in Safed, in the Galilee region of Israel. Nothing is left of the Arab village that once was there. The family of one of my Arabic teachers in Amman was forced out of their home in Jaffa, just south of Tel-Aviv, in 1948. They assume a Jewish family lives there now, and is also taking advantage of the fields of orange and lemon trees they once cultivated. Another friend—an old man who owns a tiny shop near us—remembers fleeing his home in Jerusalem amidst the chaos of bombs and explosions. I’ve met people who fled their homes in what is now Israel in 1948 and escaped to what is now called the West Bank, only to flee again in 1967. I know of people who still have the keys to the homes they left and lost. Dispossession.
I have problems with how Palestinians in general and Palestinians influenced by Islam in particular have gone about fighting for their land, and certainly the Arab states around Israel are no angels. This is a topic for another time. But this whole history of Palestinians being forced from their homes—indirectly out of fear or directly by Israeli forces—is why I think, and why we in the United States need to remember, that the root of this bloody, seemingly never-ending conflict in which both sides are constantly violently reacting to the other, is not Islam. It is dispossession. Dispossession.
3 comments:
2 questions
1. What role does the British and French colonizing of parts of the middle east have on this idea of dispossession?
2. Does this idea of dispossession also exist inside of a country with itself in addition to the country vs. country conflict?
And more questions:
- was the holocaust (and pogroms, too) a dispossession?
- how many other wars, "expansions", etc., involve dispossessions? how far back can we trace the chain of dispossession?
- is Israel's forcible removal of its citizens from settlements also dispossession?
Somewhat more abstract:
- when and why did dispossessed cultures start thinking they had an a priori moral right (or even mandate) to get their old possessions back?
Sometimes I wonder about the western view on the middle east. I suppose we cannot observe the situation without affecting it. But what about international land rights? Perhaps the historical attitude toward land in the middle east focuses more on grudges and power--after all, the rights can be traced back forever to a constant rotation of groups (and empires) anyhow. Rights and boundries are maybe just a modern idea to preserve a status quo that the West has approved---whether Dutch, French, British, American, or otherwise.
Duh, dispossession of Indians and natives in America, why dont you forget this? hopefully you be honest and publish it, not like the other comment!
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