Israel’s birthright – real or imagined?: Chuck Stephens
Key topics:
Historical claims and origins of Israel and Palestine
Political and religious influences on Zionism
Shifting global perspectives on Israel’s legitimacy
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By Chuck Stephens*
Figuring this one out is rather like peeling an onion. Layers come off, leaving you to dig in further. In recent years, conservatives in general and Republicans in the USA have championed Israel’s claim to that territory at the east end of the Mediterranean Sea – the “Levant”. On the other hand, liberals and socialists have tended to listen to the so-called “indigenous” people, who they call Palestinians.
The size of this territory variously called Palestine and Israel throughout history has ebbed and flowed. At times it was a kind of colony of Europe where certain crops could grow that don’t grow in northern Europe – like cotton and sugar. But alas! America was discovered and the Levant was basically forgotten as the source of those crops. During those times, the Levant was reached through its west-coast ports. But at other times, such as the period of Arabization following the rise of Islam, the trade routes ran east. They even filled the ports with rubble to prevent the outlook towards Europe.
The proximity of Egypt is also very significant. For centuries, even millennia, Egypt was the regional superpower. At its most expansive stage, the Levant was part of Egypt, just as Sinai has been perennially. Until the Six-Days War, that is. When the modern state of Israel suddenly conquered Sinai and the Gaza Strip. Until that war in 1967, these two were both part of Egypt. In 1983 the Yom Kippur war was fought by Egypt to win back Sinai, but the Gaza Strip remained with Israel.
Now the tectonic plates are shifting. Liberals and socialists on the Left have become very pro-Palestinian. Amazingly, one-third of the Jews in New York City voted for Mamdani. Who would have guessed? But let us not forget that there are 1.7 billion Muslims in the world and only 15 million Jews. New York City is the biggest Jewish community outside of Israel. Bernie Sanders, the elder radical Leftist in America, is Jewish. He is contemptuous of the special relationship between the USA and Israel – the status quo.
And now there are signs from inside the conservative movement that questions are bring asked by the likes of Nick Fuentes about American support for Israel. One tends to think that "Republican and antisemitic" are oxymoron, but deep questions are being asked about Israel’s authenticity and the wisdom of backing it against all odds.
There are two takes on who the Levant really belongs to. The Palestinians claim to be indigenous and claim the name “Palestine” goes back to antiquity. On the other hand, the Jews come from Judea (the southern kingdom) and Samaria was the name for the northern kingdom of Israel. At one point under King David and King Solomon, the two kingdoms had not yet split, and that is generally called the golden age of Israel. Even though Muslims and some liberal theologians dispute this, there is plenty of extra-Biblical and archaeological evidence to support this claim. However, in general, that was a mountainous kingdom along the ridge which separates the Mediterranean Sea from the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. Israel – Judea and Samaria – were along that ridge, running north to Galilee.
Old Testament Israel did not engage much with Greece or Rome, which only arose much later. Abraham had migrated out of Mesopotamia very possibly as a climate refugee from the desertification of Ur. Later, his descendants migrated down to Goshen on the east side of the Nile Delta. From there, Moses led them across Sinai into Arabia (east of the Gulf of Aqaba). Eventually they wandered north from there and crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land.
Telling this story is a reminder that they conquered this space from its original inhabitants. One major difference between Jews and Samaritans is that Jews kept themselves apart whereas Samaritans inter-married with local people. This process of homogenization has been going on for yonks. So let us peel the skins off the onion…
The most recent support base for Israel has come from Christian Zionists. This movement goes back over a century to efforts to convince Jews in Europe and America to return to the Levant. That movement was called “Zionism” and it was conjoined by a particular and peculiar eschatology (i.e. theology of the End Times) promoted by John Nelson Darby. He was a key actor in the Plymouth Brethren, not to be confused with the Pilgrims. His views were mainstreamed by Scofield in the early 20th century and popularized by Hal Lindsay’s book The Late Great Planet Earth.
But these “dispensationalists” were not the originators of Christian Zionism. It goes back another 400 years, but not much further. The Calvanist “Geneva Bible” of 1560 included margin notes about rebuilding Judea and Jerusalem. That was the era of the Puritans, who conveyed these ideas to America. The second president of the USA was John Adams. He had been George Washington’s Vice President. His term ended in 1801. In 1819, he wrote: “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.” He was writing to Mordecai Noah, who went on to actively promote this dream. It took root. Mark Twain famously traveled to Europe and the Levant on the first-ever tourist cruise from America to the Levant. In his book The Innocents Abroad, he called Jerusalem a "mournful, and dreary, and lifeless" place.
Peeling off onion skins…. Mark Twain visited the Levant in 1867 when it was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. World War I and the Balfour Declaration were still a long way off. The Ottomans were the third Muslim empire to rule the Levant consecutively, since the rise of Islam and its Arabization. That started in the seventh century. Eventually, most of North Africa was Islamicized and Arabized. Then Egypt – now Muslim – assumed control of the Levant again, under the Mamluke Sultanate. So the onion skins peel off like this – British remit first (League of Nations mandate), preceded by Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), preceded by Mamluke Sultanate (Islamic Egypt), preceded by Arabia following the rise of Islam.
During this long period of Muslim rule – from the seventh century to the end of the nineteenth century, there were a number of Crusades. Christians from Europe kept looking for access to the Silk Route, places that could grow crops like cotton and sugar – it was not all about religion. But with the Portuguese circum-navigating Africa to the Far East and the Europeans “discovering” America, this dynamic faded away. Maps of the Levant during this period changed regularly with military trends.
Before the Muslim era, Israel was part of the Eastern Empire of Rome. After the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, the Empire moved its capital to Constantinople (now Istanbul) and was really more Greek Orthodox than Roman Catholic, which came later - in Western Europe.
Peeling off the onion skins deeper, we come to Augustus Caesar deciding to form another province between two existing Roman provinces – Egypt and Syria. For this he ordered a census, and Joseph Panther, who worked as a carpenter in Nazareth, had to relocate temporarily to his hometown of Bethlehem, to be counted in this census.
This onion goes deeper still – the Babylonians took out the southern kingdom (Judea), after the Assyrians took out the northern kingdom (Samaria). Way back then, until Alexander the Great defeated the Persians, The Levant was more where the sun set, not where it rose. The term “Levant” is very Euro-centric and it was not ever thus in either Israel or Palestine. Its natural habitat was being constantly caught in the cross-fire between Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia and Turkey.
During all these eras, there were Jews in Israel. Of course many lived in self-exile as well, but there is no record of them ever being driven away. Not by the Emperor Titus, who destroyed Jerusalem, certainly not by the Byzantines, not even by the Muslim regimes. (They may have been coerced to covert, but not to leave.) But Jews emigrated and were treated shabbily in many places – like the pogroms in Russia and the holocaust in Germany. So there was a rising awareness that they needed a safe space to defend themselves, and this gave rise to Christian Zionism in due course.
To conclude, one can see that the Jews were immigrants – going back to Abraham and Moses. But then so were the Palestinians, going back to the Philistines of the Old Testament and even further to the Peleshet or sea intruders, who were thumped by Ramses III in the battle of the Nile Delta. The survivors were settled in what we now call the Gaza Strip, which was part of Greater Egypt at that time.
Perhaps the greatest good that the modern State of Israel has done is to establish a functioning Democracy in a region where autocracy has been the norm as long as anyone can remember. What would the Middle East be like without this scion? What would the world be like if the core values of Western civilization were not embedded in that region? This is not about eschatology or historical property rights. It is about freedom and justice.
*Chuck Stephens: Desmond Tutu Centre for Leadership