Ever the Victim, Never the Aggressor: A Response to the “Evangelical Statement in Support of Israel” (10-17-23)

by Bruce N. Fisk - November 29, 2023

With the “Evangelical Statement in Support of Israel” (ESSI), we condemn the October 7 attacks of Hamas that killed and captured innocent Israelis and internationals. We call on Hamas to release captives immediately and cease targeting civilian populations.

We also agree with ESSI that these events have a context—historical, ideological, theological, and geopolitical. Astonishingly, however, every element of context that ESSI highlights depicts Israel as victim and target, never as aggressor and occupier, much less as international humanitarian law-breaker.

By implying that the hostilities of October 7 extend back to the time of Abraham, ESSI embraces the myth that today’s conflict is ancient and religious rather than modern and political, a conflict principally about European Jews fleeing persecution and establishing a national homeland in Arab-majority territory.

During the war of 1948, Zionist forces expelled Palestinians from home and land. The new state of Israel prevented the return of 750,000 war-time refugees, 200,000 of whom became stranded in Gaza. Israel has subjected the West Bank and Gaza to military control since 1967. Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 changed only the means, not the fact, of control over a Palestinian population that now numbers well over 2 million. We do not reduce Hamas’ culpability when we recognize and lament decades of Palestinian suffering.

ESSI unhelpfully implies that Palestinian resistance to subjugation amounts to antisemitism. It is not antisemitic for Palestinians to pursue self-determination. Indeed, a people’s struggle “for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation” was affirmed in 1982 by the United Nations.

ESSI points to Israel as a rare example of “democracy” in the region. The state of Israel, however, sees itself as “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The national movement called Zionism, as defined by Israel, aims for the sovereignty of Jews in the Land. The right of national self-determination in Israel belongs only to Jews. Meanwhile, in the months prior to October 7, hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews had been demonstrating against judicial reforms they deemed to be fundamentally anti-democratic. Nor should we forget that 50% of those under Israeli control are not Jewish. Sadly, the status quo today is “one unequal state in which millions of Palestinians lack basic rights.” Israel is a flawed democracy. But democracy for whom?

ESSI rightly condemns “violence against the vulnerable.” But the only vulnerable ones who seem to merit ESSI’s moral consideration are Jews, whether killed (1,200 Jews and other foreigners) or taken captive by Hamas. But since October 7, Israel has killed close to 15,000 Palestinians, almost half of them children. Many thousands more have been injured or lie buried under rubble. Israel’s attacks have displaced hundreds of thousands and deprived millions of life’s necessities. ESSI includes no call to protect vulnerable Gazans, referring only obliquely to “the dignity and personhood of all persons living in the Middle East.”

We do not call Evangelicals to sever friendship with Jews, but we must stand with peoples, not states. As Gaza’s human catastrophe worsens; as Israel’s actions in Gaza promise to out-crazy Hamas (as Thomas Friedman recently put it); as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands to gain, politically and personally, from perpetuating the war, we should be demanding protection for Gaza’s masses as well as release of Hamas’ hostages, and calling our leaders to pursue solutions diplomatic, not genocidal.

Jesus calls his followers to be peacemakers. May God bring peace to Gaza, to Israel, and to all peoples of the Middle East.

———-

Bruce N. Fisk, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow with the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East, and co-founder of Curiously Global.