Christ at the Checkpoint

This week I'm attending a conference in Bethlehem called 'Christ at the Checkpoint'. Aimed at Western and local evangelicals, it comprises theological and social-political teaching, cultural events, and a broad range of visits. My hope is that I can begin to enter into the problematic and highly nuanced thought world of a Palestinian evangelical.

I ve

ry much respect the organisers' decision to include in the conference programme today's trip to a community in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc. It shows not only a genuine desire for delegates to be exposed to the cacophony of narratives in the land, but also a confidence in the ability of the Palestinian case to withstand that of Zionists, event at their most fundamentalist extreme.

To a large extent they were vindicated. Speaking to delegates as we left, many if not most were scept

ical of the settlers’ spurious assertions. During our meeting in the synagogue, our settler guide Robert made the rather outlandish case that a one state solution would still retain its Jewish majority and could therefore be genuinely democratic. He also asserted the common refrain that Palestinians before 1967 were not identified as Palestinians but Arabs, despite one of our Palestinian friends (b. 1944) stating that she had Palestinian on her birth certificate and always saw herself as ‘Arab Palestinian’. His colleague from Chicago further implied that Arabs left their villages in 1948 voluntarily, which just happened to create the world’s biggest refugee population. These notions did not seem to hold much sway.

What I did notice was the immediate connection the (American-born) settlers were able to make with the Euro-Americans in the audience, and for this they can hardly be blamed. The wisecracks, the identification of common ground, the speaking styles, stances and gesticulations. They were all conspicuously like ours. By the end of the talk there was a slightly unsettleing atmosp

here of congeniality, and several nodding heads greeted absurd comments relating to the alleged disparity of violence, such as the implication that suicide bombings arrived out of nowhere (no mention of Goldstein), the claim that the first intifada was essentially violent and so on. In the face of the very obvious, very tangible power surplus Israel has in the land, to which all delegates have been exposed, I can only put the believability of the fantastical down to the familiarity, the ‘insideness’ of our settler interlocutors, or in short, to racism.

One of the things that has been particularly interesting at this quite remarkable conference is exploring the inside-outsideness of Palestinian evangelicals themselves. While many of them have been arrested, deported and targeted by Israel for their involvement in nonviolent direct action, their evangelical theology and institutional independence may make them appear rootless in the land, foreign, and suspicious to the established churches and the Muslim majority. This isn't helped by the fact that many of them seem to cultivate a distinctly Western personal image which must look slightly odd to their compatriots. But by far the most significant factor is the fact that Christian Zionism is, at its monied and powerful extremes, almost exclusively evangelical, and people here know it. Association with Western evangelicalism's militaristic image puts great pressure on Palestinian evangelicals.

But there is a suggestion that this pressure can be and has been powerfully productive. One Palestinian evangelical, Daniel, told me tonight that defensiveness may be a reason for the fact that arguably the most rigorous theological critique of Zionism and the practices of the state of Israel has emerged out of this tiny minority wing of the Protestant Palestinian church. There may well be some truth in this. At the conference I have heard remarkably rich exegeses of biblical texts by young Palestinian theologians such as Alaa Zayed and Yohanna Katanacho, and their mentors such as Salim Munayer. (Naim Ateek and Mitri Raheb are yet to come on the programme.)

Palestinian evangelicals are articulating a position of resistance to the theology of Christian Zionism through, rather than despite, their characteristic dedication to a biblicist approach. While the undeniable shallowness of mutual respect between many traditional and independent churches is a tragic missed opportunity to learn from each other in the face of mighty opposition, defensiveness may also be a catalyst for the kind of biblically-framed, Christocentric argument that some Western evangelicals demand before they will even consider appeals to justice, mercy and peace-making for their own sake. This may make Palestinian evangelicals extremely useful, not only to the church in the holy land, but to the whole Palestinian cause, as changing minds in America remains one of the most important tasks it faces. Perhaps Palestinian evangelicals are uniquely placed to rise to this enormous task.

You can download the papers here.

[Images: residents of the Efrata settlement address conference delegates in the synagogue; author Colin Chapman and Jim Schutz of the International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem at Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem.]