ABSTRACT The Dilemma of Justice: How Religion Influences the Political Environment of Post-1948 Israel and Palestine Sasha A. Ross Thesis Chairperson: Marc H. Ellis, Ph.D. This thesis examines the historical context, ideological traditions, and structures of power that animated relations between Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians during the twentieth century. Cognizant of the “prisms of pain” that have come to symbolize both Jewish and Palestinian identities, this thesis assumes that identities are in constant flux and are often determined by that which they negotiate against. Its first section considers some historical forces, specific inter-group events, and internal political tensions that intensified the early Jewish and Arab national projects against the British and later pitted each group against the other. The second section examines the values enshrined in the sacred texts of each monotheistic tradition and the extent to which such have influenced the political engagement between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It concludes that because religion can be used as a political tool of repression, a prophetic spirituality common to all three traditions is necessary for any sustainable project of social transformation and political reconciliation. The Dilemma of Justice: How Religion Influences the Political Environment of Post-1948 Israel and Palestine by Sasha A. Ross A Thesis Approved by the Department of Church-State Studies Derek H. Davis, Chairperson Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Baylor University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts Approved by the Enter Dissertation or Thesis Committee Marc H. Ellis, Ph.D., Chairperson Derek H. Davis, Ph.D. Chris Marsh, Ph.D. Gary Hull, Ph.D. Accepted by the Graduate School December 2005 __________________________ J. Larry Lyon, Ph.D., Dean Copyright © 2005 by Sasha A. Ross All rights reserved CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iii PART I, Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION: Opening Considerations . 1 2. ARAB NATIONALISM AND PALESTINIAN STATELESSNESS . 18 3. JEWISH NATIONALISM AND ISRAELI STATEHOOD . 59 PART II, Chapter 4. PALESTINIAN BETWEEN AL-NAKBA AND THE INTIFADA: Finding a New Political Imagination among Palestinian and American Chris- tians. 88 5. POST-HOLOCAUST JEWISH IDENTITY: The Allure and Sin of “Holy His- tory” after Auschwitz . 119 6. REFORM AND RENEWAL WITHIN ISLAM: Modern Muslims Reformers, Post-colonial Authoritarianism, and the Crisis in Modern Islamic Thought . 139 PART III, Chapter 7. CONTEXTUAL FAITH: Is Religiously Motivated Political Activism Prag- matic given the Fragmentation of Religious Nationalism? . 163 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 177 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis is an attempt to understand the conflict between Israelis and Palestin- ians in the complexity of its historical, political and religious contexts. Several individuals have assisted me in the writing process of this thesis, three of whom I owe a particular debt of gratitude: my father, Gary Ross, from whom I first understood the American constitutional separation between church and state and the value of the written word; my undergraduate honors advisor Charles Teel, from whom I first learned about liberation theology, as well as the meaning of “avuncular”; and my undergraduate history advisor, the late Clark Davis, from whom I came to understand the value of a critical analysis of history as much as identity. A hero of the history department who passed away long be- fore his due, I dedicate whatever is worthy in this thesis to the legacy of Dr. Davis. I would like to thank all of my graduate professors, and especially Dr. Marc Ellis and my thesis committee, whose contributions to my academic journey and the academic caliber of Baylor University are without parallel. I learned much from each and particu- larly appreciate their help in the editing of this thesis. While not an official reader of this thesis, Dr. Caleb Oladipo, formerly of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, also provided crucial assistance. This writing of this thesis was assisted by journals and books made available through the library collections of the Dawson Institute and the Center for American-Jewish Studies at Baylor Universtiy, as well as those of the Library of Congress and The Palestine Center in Washington, DC. Travel assistance was kindly provided for a presentation of the paper that became chapters two and three below by the Baylor University Graduate School. Lastly, my early study of the contemporary history in the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy toward Is- rael and the Palestinians was strengthened by my participation in Bayor University’s 2002 Model Arab League team. iii To all those raised in the foothills of the prophets, as enemies and trespassers to the modern state, and strangers unto themselves. Justicia vincit iv CHAPTER ONE Opening Considerations The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. ~ Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting The context for a historical study of the political and religious dimensions of the twentieth and twenty-first century conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is found in the complexity and costs of nation-building, that quintessentially modern political enterprise. The urgency and depth of tragedy found in the study lie in the pattern of anxiety and prejudice that have grown out of what is, at its core, an ethno-religious contest for political sovereignty and geographic continuity. This situation and its human ramifications lead even the most informed observers to often ask, Why? Palestinians are one of the few remaining people in the world denied the right of self-determination and whose territory, twice reduced, remains occupied, thirty-eight years later. Israeli Jews, both secular and observant, are the people whose government has expelled and occupied Palestinians, despite the particular Jewish experience of social alienation and political disenfranchisement which led to the systematic destruction of over six million Jews under the National Socialist regime in Germany. This story between Palestinians and the state of Israel and of Palestinians is not just a critique of state power; it is simultaneously a critique of religious belief and the authority some draw from exclusive readings of religion to commit cruel and ruthless acts that contradict the ethical foundation of prophetic justice shared among Judaism, 1 2 Christianity, and Islam. The tensions between the Self and the Other and between the individual and corporate dimensions of identity can be found in the biblical story of Abraham, his two wives (Sarah and Hagar), and his two sons (Isaac and Ishmael, respectively). The biblical resolution of those tensions was no more obvious than that of their contemporary manifestations. Palestinians define their identity by starting with the cultural, political, and historical assertion that a Palestine people and territory exist. They move to the fact that every ethnic group of people has a right to be recognized and afforded protection under international law. They add that their disenfranchisement began with England’s role in the demise of the Ottoman empire and that, as Arabs, they had nothing to do with the European anti-Semitism that led Jews to immigrate to historic Palestine in the late 1800s and early 1900s.1 Palestinian definitions of their identity—as made by Palestinian geographer Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, for example—note the political effect of language and the ability of the rising Israeli nation-state to erase the Arab history of the region through its renaming of places, roads, buildings, even sacred locations.2 The political act of naming and thereby claiming a territory as one’s own has influenced and pre-determined the conflict in various ways, not only through the streamlining of Hebrew and the use of biblical names that were in line with the Zionist vision but also through the categorical denial 1. Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979; 1992). Said writes that “the question of Palestine is therefore the contest between an affirmation and a denial, and it is this prior context, dating back over a hundred years, which animates and makes sense of the current impasse between the Arab states and Israel” (8). See also Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11. 2. This effort was matched, if not superseded, by the effort in the 1940s and 50s to create a new Israeli culture through the recreation and homogenization of the Hebrew language and its replacement of both Arabic and English in Jerusalem. See Pappe, 169-170. See also Jewish philosopher S. H. Bergmann’s first-person observations of changes (“a fearful danger”) underway in 1949 Jerusalem, as quoted in Tom Segev’s 1949: The First Israelis, 287. See also the story of the Arab village of Ein Houd, which was scat- tered by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and repopulated in 1953 by the Israeli government as a Jewish artists’ cooperative community called Ein Hod. See Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). 3 that other names—seen here in the symbolic importance of international law as much as the continuity of Arab-Palestinian culture—are accurate, such as the debate between the words “West Bank” versus their ancient Hebrew appellation “Judea and Samaria.3 The idea that the Palestinian territories are occupied is often denied through