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Jonathan Power 2007
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The view from Bethlehem

 

By

Jonathan Power
TFF Associate since 1991

Comments directly to JonatPower@aol.com

December 27, 2007

BETHLEHEM - Perhaps the biggest single irony of Western history is best understood by standing in the town square of Bethlehem, allowing one’s gaze to pass over the roof top of the Church that covers the stable where Jesus was supposedly born, and let one’s eye drift into the blue sky beyond and thinking: how on earth could it be that the Christians, whose belief in the divine centre around Jesus’ crucifixion carried out by Roman soldiers but done at the behest of the Jewish populace, could turn round nearly two millennia later and say to the Jews in effect: we buy the argument that you are God’s chosen people and this land is your land and we are going to turn it over to you as your “national home”, even though the Arabs or their forefathers have been living here since the Romans kicked the Jews out of Babylon after demolishing the Temple in AD 70. This is what British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, did in his famous Declaration, strongly backed by prime minister Lloyd George, a religious man who saw the Jewish cause as one that must be supported by Christian charity.

The British had taken Palestine following the break up of the Ottoman Empire during World War 1. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 at best was an emotional cause, at worst a political adventure. The next generation of British politicians and colonial administrators, faced with a bloody Arab revolt that they had to mercilessly repress, felt that the British had made an awful mistake.

A more recent irony: How could it be that the Jews of today could elect as prime minister in the year 2001 Ariel Sharon, when they had been voting for a peace candidate barely two years before? Sharon’s most successful campaign trick was to walk with a muscular entourage across the courtyard of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, the sacred Islamic territory from where Mohammed ascended to heaven for a night, and claim this as Jewish territory for ever because down below are the remains of the Temple that the Romans destroyed. In helping provoke the second Intifada and thus undermining the democratically elected government of Palestine to the great advantage of the militant Hamas, he showed both his irresponsibility and his total contempt for 1300 years of continuous Muslim presence. How would Christians have felt if he had strutted across the Piazza in front of St Peter’s and made a speech that slighted Christian claims to that piece of earth? How would the Jews have felt if the Palestinians had suspended political banners from the Dome at the top of the hill down over the sacred Wailing Wall below? Is there no sense of consistency or basic justice in the Israeli body politic? What is the point of subscribing to a religion of values if one can be so easily led by the nose by an unscrupulous politician out for power and vainglory and careless of human life that gets in his way? And aren’t the Jews as a rather small religious group the ones who have the most to lose if religious tolerance is undermined?


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Christians are meant to turn the other cheek. The Jews have long been satisfied with an eye for an eye. But both religions have stressed the need for justice and for consideration of how those one is dealing with might feel. “Do unto others what you want them to do to you” is part of both Old and New Testament teaching. Neither Balfour nor Sharon appears to have possessed a profound notion of the core values of their religion. 

The Jewish notion that they can have this land and no one else can is so wildly anachronistic by any Western standards or historical experience that it is amazing that in 1917 it got the time of day. If every ethnic group in the world asserted so vigorously ancient yearnings to exclusive possession, the world would become totally chaotic in short time, and nowhere quicker than North America itself. But why should Israel get a free pass today? If the Jews want to believe that Temple Mount (on which the Dome of the Rock is built) is “the focal point of creation” and that in the centre of the hill lies the “foundation stone” of the world and that here “Adam came into being” they may be allowed to believe it. But that the arbiters of the United Nations, including the U.S., Russia and Europe could go along with this myth at the expense of traditional Palestinian centuries-old occupancy rights is almost impossible to digest. And the worst of it is that even the most liberal voices in the Western political world calling today for Israel to compromise seem to accept that even if the Palestinians recovered all of the pre 1967 territories on the West Bank they would still only have barely 20% of the land that the United Nations divided into Jewish and Arab states in 1948 when the British withdrew.

 

Copyright © 2007 Jonathan Power

 

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Jonathan Power can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com


Jonathan Power 2007 Book
Conundrums of Humanity
The Quest for Global Justice


“Conundrums of Humanity” poses eleven questions for our future progress, ranging from “Can we diminish War?” to “How far and fast can we push forward the frontiers of Human Rights?” to “Will China dominate the century?”
The answers to these questions, the author believes, growing out of his long experience as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the International Herald Tribune, are largely positive ones, despite the hurdles yet to be overcome. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, London, 2007.

William Pfaff, September 17, 2007
Jonathan Power's book "Conundrums" - A Review
"His is a powerful and comprehensive statement of ways to make the world better.
Is that worth the Nobel Prize?
I say, why not?"

 

Jonathan Power's 2001 book

Like Water on Stone
The Story of Amnesty International

Follow this link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book written for the 40th Anniversary of Amnesty International

 

 

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