A Fatal Obsession With Israel

DVZ..
CAMERA Snapshots..
24 May '13..

The Church of Scotland has been obsessed with the Jewish claim to the land of Israel for quite some time. In 2003, the denomination, which has been losing members hand over fist since the mid-1950s, issued a document titled “Theology of Land and Covenant” in 2003 that declared the land of Israel a “threat” to the Jewish people because of the rules that come with the land promise as outlined in the Hebrew scriptures.

And while this 2003 document intensely interrogates Jewish claims to the land of Israel, it gives short and distorted shrift to Islamic teachings regarding the land of Israel and the Jewish people. The report states “There is no place in Islamic theology for any particular people to be special to the land – to the abandonment of others.”

Here the Church of Scotland ignores Muhammad’s deathbed call for the expulsion of Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula, where there should only be one religion – Islam. This call was invoked by Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah in March 2012 when he said it was "necessary to destroy all the churches in the region."

The Church of Scotland also ignores another important issue – the theological impossibility of Jewish freedom and sovereignty in land previously governed by Muslim rulers – the modern state of Israel included. This is a violation of the Islamic nomos or sense of order as demonstrated by Mustafa Abu Sway, an associate professor at Al Quds University in Jerusalem, in 1991.

"Theologically there is no possibility of accepting a Jewish state. But Jews should trust Islam. They will be treated justly in an Islamic state, because they'll be under the protection of Allah," he said to Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi. ("Holy War, Holy Peace," The Jerusalem Report, Feb. 28, 1991)

Professor Abu Sway offered a blunter assessment of Israel's existence at an interfaith conference held in Jerusalem in 2003 and covered by Gerald McDermott for Books & Culture, published by Christianity Today, Inc.

Mustafa Abu Sway remarked, to audible gasps from Jews in the audience, that he wished the state of Israel "would disappear." (Books & Culture, March-April 2003)

The Church of Scotland has also ignored Muslim doctrine regarding Jews (and Christians) and the impact this doctrine has in the modern Middle East, but has maintained its obsession with Jewish self-understanding. This obsession manifested itself with the recent publication of yet another document about Jewish land claims. The document, approved by the Church of Scotland’s recent General Assembly is titled “The Inheritance of Abraham? A report on the ‘promised land.’”

The Moral Crime of The Church of Scotland’s War on Judaism

...The moral crime committed by the Church of Scotland—and I use that phrase deliberately—is rooted not just in the trashing of centuries of Jewish learning and scholarship, nor the wholesale fabrication of a Jewish “crime” in the form of the “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians. More than all of that, this report is a declaration of war against Judaism itself. If the “Temple is finished,” then the only form of Judaism that is acceptable is the one subscribed to by collaborators like Mark Braverman, who want us to adopt an eternal posture of repentance and shame.

Ben Cohen..
The Algemeiner..
12 May '13..

In a recent, exhaustive study of anti-Semitism, the German scholar Clemens Heni explains the significance for Christian theology of the story of Ahasver, a Jewish shoemaker in Jerusalem who, legend has it, refused Jesus a resting place as he made his way to Golgotha bearing the cross on his back. Ahasver’s punishment, says Heni, was to wander the world for eternity, an image that formed the basis for what the Nazis famously called “der ewige Jude”—“the eternal Jew.”

“The attribute ‘eternal’ cries out for redemption,” writes Heni. “For Christianity, it embodies the refusal on the part of the Jewish people to accept the coming of Jesus as the Son of God.” Of course, as Heni points out, this was a particularly strong theme throughout the Middle Ages. What’s notable, though, is that this same noxious depiction of the Jews is enjoying a new lease of life in certain sections of the Church today.

At the beginning of May, the Church of Scotland published a document entitled “The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the ‘Promised Land.’” Now, doing what I do, I spend a great deal of time reviewing anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic literature, and I like to think that I am passed being shocked. Reading the Church of Scotland report, was, therefore, something of a rude awakening; so immersed is the text in anti-Semitic clichés and malicious distortions of Jewish theology that I wondered whether I had been transported back to a time when people didn’t wash or brush their teeth, had a lifespan of 30 years or so, and spent their time on this earth living in fear of Jewish devils.

The purpose of the report is to dismiss the claim that the “Hebrew Bible”—heaven forbid that these people should use terms like Torah or Tanakh!—provides grounds for a privileged connection between the Jewish people and the “Promised Land,” which we Jews sinfully refer to as “Eretz Israel.” What follows is frontal assault on Jewish “exclusivism” that deploys the tired old trick of citing a Jew—in this case, Mark Braverman, an arch opponent of Zionism—in order to protect the text from accusations of anti-Semitism.

But anti-Semitic it most definitely is. Some choice excerpts:

Jews were restored to the land of Israel, irrespective of the Church of Scotland.

...In the 19th century the Church of Scotland thought it knew best for the Jews. It surveyed them and sent missionaries to prey on their weak and infirm, sick and elderly. Although there was a whole world of hundreds of millions of people, it made the conversion and thus the destruction of the Jewish people a main pillar of the Church. This text continues this tradition.

Seth J. Frantzman..
Terra Incognita/JPost..
08 May '13..

A recently publicized document set to be debated by the Church of Scotland General Assembly on May 18 claims: “As long as Zionists think that Jewish people are serving God’s special purpose and that abuses by the state of Israel... don’t invalidate the Zionist project, they will believe themselves more entitled to the land than the Palestinian people.” The document goes further, attacking the Jewish people, their “disobedience,” and arguing that “the promise to Abraham about land is fulfilled through the impact of Jesus, not by restoration of land to the Jewish people.” It has been produced by the Church and Society Council of the Church of Scotland, with the cooperation and support of the World Mission Council, two of the five main councils of the Church, as such it has not yet been ratified by the full Church. NGO Monitor points out that the document may have been influenced by the Palestinian- Christian activist organization Sabeel, however an examination of the Church’s historical role in Israel reveals disturbing issues.

In 1869 Scottish adventurer John MacGregor was navigating the upper reaches of the Jordan river. An excellent marksman and canoe enthusiast, he had come to see the biblical land. In his recollection The Rob Roy on the Jordan he describes an argument between his Arab attendants where one shouted, “Dogs, brutes, pigs, Jews!” MacGregor notes that “men in Palestine called their fellows ‘Jew,’ as the very lowest of all possible words of abuse.”

He pondered the irony that “the Jews in this very land, their own, were once the choice people of the world.”

Later MacGregor came to Tiberias which he noted was “chiefly remarkable for the exceeding filthiness of its streets and especially in the Jews’ quarter. How any civilized European Jew can see his people degraded as they are in Tiberias and then come back to his gilded home in the west and leave his brethren to wallow... is beyond conception.”

The Scottish adventurer wondered how, despite “their patience, pluck, learning, science, art, military prowess” the Jews “never ask the world for what the world would give them for free, their own beloved Palestine.”

MACGREGOR INCLUDED in his book an excerpt from a speech given by the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem in July 1860: “With respect to the Jews, 160 adults have been baptized in Jerusalem, whilst a number of the younger Jews have received the first germs of the truth of the Gospel.”

These accounts provide a window into the dual activities of Europeans in the Holy Land in the 19th century.

While some like MacGregor were well disposed toward the Jews and hoped for their return, others saw the role of the church in Palestine as a vehicle to missionize.