The root answers back: A reply to Christians now turning from Israel

In the first of these two words I named a sound — the new and sorrowful sound of Israel’s own friends beginning to drift — and I traced it to its root, which is the old error of replacement wearing the costume of our age. But to name a thing is not yet to answer it. A warning shows a man where the cliff edge lies; it does not reason him back from it. So let me now do what that first word did not, and take up the arguments themselves — not the caricatures, but the real claims, made by real and often sincere people. There were three voices in the room I described: the host with the microphone and the grievance, the student catechized by her feed, and the populist who asks what any of it has to do with America. Let each speak in turn, and let the root answer back.

The first voice says that Zionism is colonialism, and the Jew in his land a settler. It is pronounced now with tremendous confidence, as though it were a settled finding of scholarship rather than a slogan, and it is repeated so often that the repetition itself begins to feel like proof. Set the slogan beside the record, though, and it falls apart in the hand.

A colonist comes out from a mother country to plant its flag on a distant shore. He arrives a stranger and he rules as a stranger, and behind him stands the empire that sent him. Now look at the Jew who returned to the land of Israel and ask which of these things is true of him. He came home to the one place on earth his fathers had come from — the land named in his prayers three times a day for nineteen hundred years, the land whose hills still carry Hebrew names because it was Hebrews who first named them, the land his people, contrary to the myth, never wholly left. Through Rome and Byzantium, through the caliphates and the Crusader sword and the long Ottoman centuries, a Jewish presence clung on in Jerusalem and Hebron, in Safed and Tiberias — driven from one town to the next, taxed and harried, but never extinguished. There was no mother country behind the returning Jew, for the land itself was the mother country. There is no other people on the earth for whom this ground is a homeland and not merely a possession: every empire that ever held it governed it from somewhere else — from Rome, from Damascus, from Baghdad, from Cairo, from Constantinople — and in the end went home. Only one people ever called it home and had nowhere else on earth to go. Call the man who returns to it after a long and bitter exile a colonist, and you have not described him; you have merely emptied the word of meaning.

And notice which story is the true invention. The teeming ancient Palestinian nation, sovereign in its own land until the settler came — that is the tale contradicted at every turn by the record, and contradicted first of all by the Arabs of the Mandate themselves, who in 1919 called the country not Palestine but Southern Syria and petitioned to be joined to Damascus. The young activist who has never read a page of the Mandate records repeats the charge because everyone around her repeats it, and mistakes the echo for evidence. The accusation of colonialism is not history. It is history turned upside down and handed to the young as though it were a discovery.

The second voice is gentler, and to me it is the saddest of the three, for it belongs so often to the young and the sincere. It says: I follow Jesus, and Jesus stood always with the oppressed; Israel is the oppressor; therefore to follow Jesus I must stand against Israel. I honour the instinct even as I grieve the conclusion, for the instinct beneath it — that God takes the side of the wronged — is true. It is the abuse of that truth that I resist.

For the gospel does not hand us a ledger and command us to sort the nations into oppressor and oppressed and pin the halo on whichever side the age has already chosen. The habit of dividing humanity into a guilty class and an innocent one, and reading every quarrel through that single lens, is not a Christian habit at all; it is an older and colder philosophy that has merely borrowed the language of compassion. The gospel knows no innocent class. It knows sinners, and it knows a Saviour. It tells us something harder and far better than the activist’s ledger: that every man is a sinner in need of grace, and every man — Jew and Arab, Israeli and Palestinian — is loved by the God who made him. To take a political grievance, baptize it, and call it Christ is not discipleship. It is to trade the Lamb of God for the spirit of the age, and to mistake the exchange for growth.

And when the student reaches, as she is taught to reach, for the single verse — Galatians and its “Israel of God” — and says, there, Paul makes the Church the new Israel, she has been handed a reading her own text will not bear. For the Paul who wrote that line is the very Paul who asked, a few chapters into Romans, whether God had cast away His people, and answered himself in something close to horror: God forbid. The man does not abolish Israel in one letter and defend her irrevocable calling in the next. The gifts and calling of God, he tells us plainly, are without repentance — without recall, without reversal. A gospel that needs the Jew to be finished in order to make room for the Church is not reading Paul. It is overruling him.

And justice — real justice, the kind that costs the one who does it something — does not require you to believe a falsehood about who stood in the land first, nor to fall silent when the people you have appointed the oppressed send their rockets and their gunmen against the children of the people you have appointed the oppressors. A justice that runs in only one direction is not justice at all. It is fashion, wearing justice as a robe.

The third voice is the newest in the room, and it does not come from the left at all. It belongs to the man who counts himself a friend of the ordinary citizen and an enemy of foreign adventures, and he asks, with a shrug meant to sound hard-headed, what any of this has to do with America.

To him the answer is older than America, older than the Church — as old as the call of Abraham. I will bless them that bless thee, God said to the father of the nation, and curse him that curseth thee. I do not wave that verse as a magic charm, as though a nation might buy its safety cheaply and keep its conscience in escrow. I offer it as a pattern — a pattern God has kept with a consistency that ought to sober any honest student of history. The nations that opened their gates to the Jew have, over the long run, flourished in the opening. The empires that expelled and butchered him have their epitaphs already written: the Egypt of the Pharaohs, Babylon, Rome, the Spain that chose the Inquisition over its own most gifted people, the Reich that made its hatred an industry and did not outlive it by a dozen years. There is a ledger here, and it is not kept by men.

America, more than any nation of the modern world, has lived inside that blessing — has sheltered the Jew, recognized the reborn state, and stood beside it — and has been, by any honest reckoning, blessed as she blessed. And if the man will not hear the promise, let him hear the plainer arithmetic of interest, for it points the same way: Israel is the one dependable democracy in a region of tyrannies, the ally that shares America’s enemies and America’s intelligence, the friend that has never once asked an American soldier to die in her defence. To cut her loose is not hard-headed realism. It is throwing away a friend to please men who hate you both. So to ask what Israel has to do with America is to ask what the oldest promise in the book of beginnings has to do with the nation that has lived, more than any other, inside its terms. The truly hard-headed answer is that it has everything to do with her.

So here, at last, is what standing looks like — now that the arguments are answered and no one need hide behind them. It is not cheerleading; I said so in the first word, and I hold to it. It is not the silent endorsement of Israel’s every act. It is something plainer and more costly than either. It is refusing the slogan in the very moment it would be easiest to nod along. It is knowing enough of the history to answer the host, enough of the gospel to answer the student, and enough of the promise to answer the populist. It is, in the end, refusing to be the brother who watched.

For behind all three voices there stands one older figure, and Scripture has already named him. Edom stood on the far side of the road on the day of his brother’s calamity — stood, and looked, and did nothing — and for that watching he was judged. History does not forget the bystander; it only pretends, for a little while, that he was not there. The root still bears the branch. The gifts and the calling are still without repentance. And the day of Jacob’s trouble will still put to each of us the question it once put to Edom: what did you do while your brother bled? Answer it now, while it is only an argument in a room and not yet a reckoning. Boast not against the branches. And now that you know why — stand.