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Activist Episcopal Laywoman Rebuts Theologians on Middle East War
By Odessa Elliott
I have read both Robert Sanders' and Michael Green's comments on the situation in the Middle East, and it seems to me that, while there are weaknesses in their theological position, their knowledge of history seems deficient.
Neither discusses the reasons the United Nations established the State of Israel in 1948. Dr. Green writes: "According to this view, the return of the Jews to Israel in 1948 is theologically irrelevant."
Does he also think Jews immigrating to Israel was also illegal? Given his resume, he must be old enough to remember what happened, after large numbers of Jews came to live in Israel. At the instruction of neighboring countries, ruled by Muslim governments, their nationals living within the borders of Israel, fled from their homes, in the belief that their country of origin would take them in. It is this group of persons who discovered they had no "right of return."
The hated of Jews by Muslims predated the creation of the State of Israel by some twenty years. Groups of Zionists took advantage of PM Balfour's 1921 declaration that they could immigrate to the terrify that Britain was ruling as The Mandate of Palestine. They lived in kibbutz located on semi-arid land that no one had been living on. They irrigated the land, and "made the desert bloom." The Muslims, their antipathy toward Jews inflamed by envy, massacred the residents of one such community in 1928.
The movie "Exodus" tells the story of a ship-load of refugees from Europe who were turned back from the Mandate by the British, who apparently were unwilling to risk a Muslim uprising, and preferred to let the Jews take their chances in finding a safe haven elsewhere.
It is impossible to understand this intense hatred, unless one knows that the centerpiece of Mohammed's "religion" was the teaching that Ishmael had been cheated out of his birthright by Isaac. The angel told him that Abraham and Hagar had visited Mecca; and that a black rock had fallen out of the sky at that time. Mohammed, after he returned from Medina with a large army of nomadic Arabs, built a shrine over that rock. The pilgrimages to Mecca celebrate this "holy history.
Christians joined Constantine in discriminating against Jews, after he made Christianity "legal." That's a pretty long history of anti-Semitism, and we should be thankful John Paul II was given the grace to apologize for it to the Jews.
Sincerely,
Odessa Elliott
--Mrs. Elliott retired in 1999 as a program officer for Trinity Grants and editorial assistant at The Christian Century. She was one of the first ten women to be appointed as a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship and studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
