The incidental Palestinian

This week’s Torah portion, Emor (Lev. 21:1–24:23), includes instructions about the mo‘adim or times of meeting between Israel and the Lord.

The word mo‘adim first appears in Genesis 1:14: “Then God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons [mo‘adim].’” The Lord ordained the holy times from the beginning to remind all the generations to come of the original wholeness of the creation and God’s promise to renew it. Thus, Shabbat opens the list of mo‘adim in Leviticus 23, because it is a memorial of creation (Exod. 31:17), which anticipates “the time to come . . . the day that will be all Shabbat and rest for everlasting life” (b.Tamid 33b), when the goodness of creation will be restored at last.

Every festival partakes of this prophetic quality of Shabbat. The instructions for Shavuot include, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field when you reap, nor shall you gather any gleaning from your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the stranger: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 23:21–22).

Moses had already told the Israelites to leave the gleanings for the poor a few chapters earlier (Lev 19:9–10), so why does he repeat it here? Because Shavuot is the festival of the grain harvest, and for the harvest to be holy, it has to be conducted with regard for the poor and the stranger. The poor have a rightful share in the harvest, even though they don’t own any land of their own, because they too are created in God’s image. The Israelites might be tempted to think that the festival is all about pilgrimage and worship, a day to forget everything else and bring the offering to God—a day when those who don’t have anything to offer are incidental to the real action. But no, Shavuot anticipates the conditions of olam ha-ba, the age to come, when there won’t be any more hunger or poverty, and no one will be incidental.

This principle applies not only to the festivals, but throughout our lives. We’re to remember the outsider, the one we might consider incidental, especially at the joyous times when we’re most likely to forget about them, but also throughout our everyday lives as well.

The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai brings this principle to life:

Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David’s Tower. I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker.

“You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head.”

“But he’s moving, he’s moving!” I said to myself: Redemption will come only if their guide tells them, “You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.” (cited in Israel: A Spiritual Travel Guide, by R. Lawrence Hoffman)

Perhaps Amichai overstates the case, as poets are entitled to do. The arch from the Roman period does have some importance, but he’s right to point out the living human being resting up from his heavy load. It’s wrong to make this man incidental. This is a principle deeply imbedded in Jewish ethical thinking, and especially in the example of Messiah himself, who spent so much of his time around the incidental people of his day, like sinners and tax collectors.

As I’ve been writing statements and blogs in support of Israel, I’ve been aware of how easy it is to make Palestinians incidental to the whole story. We can get so focused on the “Roman arch” of Israelas the fulfillment of biblical promises and as the legitimate Jewish state, that we forget all about the Palestinian guy sitting there with his heavy load. I know, the load is largely imposed by his own misguided leaders, and yes, Israelis have their own loads to bear too. But innocent Palestinians are suffering from the heavy security measures and endless complications of life in the West Bank. I’m not sure what do do with this yet, but real, biblically-inspired advocacy for Israel has to include concern for justice for all parties. “Zion shall be redeemed with justice . . .”  (Isa 1:27).

Methodists, divestment, and Tutu

On May 2, delegates at the United Methodist Church general assembly voted against two proposals to withdraw church investments from companies doing business with Israel. These divestment proposals were intended as a way to pressure Israel to withdraw its military presence from all areas that most of the world considers to be Palestinian territory, which includes parts of Jerusalem itself, as well as most of ancient Judea and Samaria.

The UMJC had joined with three other international Messianic Jewish organizations to warn the Methodists against divestment (http://imja.org/address-to-umc/), so we’re thankful that the church made the right decision. But the battle is hardly over. The Presbyterian Church (USA) votes on virtually the same proposal in July, and other mainline Protestant denominations will keep on considering similar moves. In addition, the Methodists did pass “a strongly worded resolution denouncing the Israeli occupation and the settlements, and calling for ‘all nations to prohibit the import of products made by companies in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.’” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/us/methodists-vote-against-ending-investments-tied-to-israel.html?_r=2&ref=us)

Now,  ”prohibit[ing] the import of products” means a boycott, and that’s part of the anti-Israel strategy: to employ the same means–boycotts, divestment, and sanctions–that helped overturn the apartheid regime in South Africa. So anti-Israel advocates are determined to stick the apartheid label on Israel. Just before the Methodist vote, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu made this strategy explicit in an op-ed piece in the Tampa Bay Times (the Methodists were meeting in Tampa), claiming “that Israel becoming an apartheid state or like South Africa in its denial of equal rights is not a future danger . . .  but a present-day reality,” and speaking of the “colonization,”  ”occupation and subjugation of Palestinians.” (http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/justice-requires-action-to-stop-subjugation-of-palestinians/1227722.)

Now arguing that Israel is NOT an apartheid state is like responding to the question, “have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Furthermore, Israel’s critics systematically set two other rhetorical traps: 1) they describe Israeli policies in Judea and Samaria as expressions of Israeli racism rather than as conditions within a complex military-political deadlock; 2) they never deal with the history of the deadlock. In other words, why does Israel maintain a military presence in these Arab-majority population areas? Israel’s opponents think that simply by labeling this as “the occupation,” they’ve proven that it must be ended immediately, regardless of history and context–and regardless of the fact that it’s from the unilaterally unoccupied Gaza Strip that Israel endures an endless barrage of rocket fire aimed at its civilian population.

So, rather than argue against details of the “apartheid” and “occupation” accusations, I’ll simply suggest that Rev. Tutu is ignoring history. I can’t really engage his criticism because it begins with a false premise. The white presence in South Africa resulted from a colonial incursion; the Jewish presence in the Eretz Yisrael resulted from a return to an ancient homeland. The increasing waves of Jewish returnees in the late 19th-early 2oth centuries joined a Jewish remnant in the ancestral homeland that had been there all along, and that was growing steadily since the 1500s. Furthermore, these returnees didn’t seize land by conquest, but by purchase and legal settlement.

Tutu and his ilk claim that Israel has blocked a two-state agreement with the Palestinians and must be pressured back to the negotiating table through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. Again, this view ignores history. After WWII, the world community recognized that the Jewish settlement in pre-state Israel had as much claim to the land as its Arab inhabitants (which had significantly increased  since the expansion of the Jewish population). That’s why the UN voted to partition the land into a Jewish-majority area and an Arab-majority area, with Jerusalem (and its Jewish-majority population) left as an international zone. The Jews reluctantly accepted this two-state solution and the Arabs rejected it, attacking Israel and losing a chunk of territory in the process. Likewise, after the 1967 war, when Israel took control of areas of Judea and Samaria formerly held by Egypt and Jordan, the Arab nations declared regarding Israel, “no negotiations, no peace, no recognition,” effectively rejecting a two-state solution again. Finally, at what should have been the culmination of the 1993 Oslo process, Yassir Arafat walked away from an once-in-a-lifetime offer for Palestinian statehood by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

I, for one, see the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians as a tragic deadlock, unsustainable, and bad for both Israelis and Palestinians. But there’s no silver bullet to fix it, and I suspect those who are promoting the silver bullet of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions have an unspoken agenda that does not include recognition of Israel as the legitimate homeland of the Jewish people.