Regional Synod of Canada - Reformed Church in America

Pioneer Christian Monthly

Date - June/88

Contributor - John Opmeer

Title - Israel at 40 - Dark Clouds Over the Promised Land

Topic - Israel

Forty years ago, on May 14, 19481 a group of hard-nosed dreamers gathered in a museum in Tel Aviv, and boldly proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel A tiny Jewish nation was launched on the rim of a vast Arab world. The people of the covenant - in a very human way had returned to their promised land.

It was the fulfilment of an impossible dream. "Next year in Jerusalem", Jews had prayed for 1,900 years. Theodor Herzl had started the modem Zionist movement in the 1890's. It's dream? The creation of a homeland for the Jews, on the ancient soil where Abraham settled, David defeated Goliath, and Isaiah prophesied the coming of the Messiah. The gathering Zionist momentum had received a final push from the horrors of the Nazi death camps. The survivors of the holocaust were determined that now was the time to establish a place where Jews would be safe once for all from the whims of the other nations. The United Nations agreed, and by vote of November 29, 1947 carved out a small piece of land in Palestine as a preservation for the Jews.

But could a nation really come to life again after 2,500 years? Could a Jewish state be created in a land occupied by a nationless but proud people, the Palestinians? Most importantly, would such a nation have any chance of survival in a hostile sea of Arabs?

The dreamers said yes. They had steel in their blood. With messianic fervor they planned the building of nation for the hunted and haunted descendants of Jacob, a nation bound together by Jewish culture and the Hebrew tongue, and steeped in Jewish ideals of righteousness and justice. Israel, said David Ben-Gurion, would be a "light unto the nations"!

The young nation had only one day to celebrate and dance in the streets. The next day, five Arab armies invaded the small Jewish corridor, determined to wipe out the Zionist dream once and for all. The ferocious Arab attack gave the vastly outnumbered Jews the best motive for all-out war: sheer survival. Against impossible odds, and at great cost in lives, the dream survived. The "righteous nation" would live!

Forty Years later

Today, four decades after that momentous birth, the dream shows signs of wear and tear. According to some, it is beginning to unravel at the edges. What happened to it?

First, there is the stubborn refusal of the surrounding Arab nations (now minus Egypt) to recognize the right of Israel to exist, thus robbing the Israelis of peace in their land. Then there is the prolonged occupation of the West Bank, casting the "light unto the nations" in the role of occupier. But most of all, there is the lingering contradiction inherent in having an Arab population in the promised land!

In a telling remark, then prime minister Golda Meir once put the unraveling of the dream in perspective when she said that she could forgive the Arabs for what they had done to the Jews, but could never forgive them for what they had made Jews do to Arabs! Israel is facing a national crisis, not because it fears defeat by its enemies but because it fears defeat of its ideals. It is a crisis of conscience.

There were cracks in the original dream from the beginning. "A land without people without land" had been a popular slogan among the early settlers. Was it preoccupation with their dream that had made them ignore the reality of the Palestinian presence? They treated the Palestinians as 'no people', welcome to live in their midst, but not supposed to dream their own dreams of nationhood. As for those who had fled to the West Bank of the Arab nations, Israel took a hard line. It had absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been pushed out of Iraq, Syria, etc., so why couldn't the much richer Arab nations do the same for their fellow homeless Arabs? But the Arabs sensed the political value of the refugee camps. As Shipler observed, "The Palestinians bought the Holocaust symphony from the Jews, to play their own way" !

The Palestinian presence would continue to torment Israel and its dream. 'Me Arabs lost the 1948 war, but "gained" the refugee camps. They did it again in 1967. The hour of Israel's greatest military triumph "gained" the Palestinians an even more powerful cause for troubling Israel and its dream: the capture of old Jerusalem and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank by the Israelis. The objective truth is that it is the Arab nations, with their refusal to negotiate the West Bank for peace, who are mostly responsible for Israel's prolonged occupation of the West Bank. But the fact of the continued occupation has greatly added to the Palestinian nationalist movement. It has allowed them to turn the vocabulary around and portray the Jews as the oppressors and themselves as the oppressed! Worse yet, the talk of many Israelis of incorporating the West Bank into "Eretz Israel" (the land of Israel) has put an impossible strain on the original dream of a "Jewish" nation. How can a nation of 3 million Jews remain "Jewish" if it includes a minority half of its number and growing fast?

The seeds of disorder present in the original dream have produced a further bitter harvest in the P.L.O. The P.L.O. was formed in 1964, three years before the Israeli takeover of the West Bank. It is obsessed with its desire to destroy Israel and reclaim all of Palestine for the Palestinians. For the P.L.O., Palestine is a "paradise lost" that must be regained by a holy war. The incessant terrorist attacks carried out by the P.L.O. on Israeli civilians have nothing directly to do with the occupation of the West Bank, since they aim at the liberation of all Palestine. But they are made to look more justified by that occupation. The terrorist tactics have not brought the Israelis to their knees. But in a way, it has done far greater damage: it has radicalized the nation! It has put young Israelis in the position of routinely searching Arabs, roughing them up, and occasionally blowing up their houses for suspected terrorist activity. In the process, the "righteous nation" lost its luster!

Wounded Spirit

After forty years of incredible success but a vain search for peace, the Israeli spirit is "wounded and weary", as Shipler put it. Israel wants to celebrate its achievements, but it does not really have the heart to do it. The nation has become the scene of an ongoing debate between heart and mind, between the ideal of the "righteous nation" and the harsh reality of a military nation obsessed with its self-preservation. Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, once talked about his pioneer parents who had come to the land in the early 20's. They came to build a just society. But they are no longer able to reconcile the almost daily scenes on the T.V. screen with their Jewish ideals. "What happened to our dream?" they asked their son.

The people of the covenant have indeed returned to their promised land. A miracle worth celebrating. But the promised land was not empty, and that has come to haunt the dream and the dreamers. Israel has grasped for the peace which only the Messiah can bring. It has made a valiant effort, but it has not succeeded. Hence its soul-wrenching; hence also its militant protection of its dream. But what else can it do? It cannot fight and win forever! Nor can it trust its life to international guarantees. Only God, the covenant keeper, is big enough to bring a solution.

Postscript: a Messianic perspective

The article could have stopped here. But the last sentence raises, of course, a new question: does God have any further plans for the Jews? What about the Messianic perspective on Israel? Didn't the prophets foretell the return of the Jews to their promised land in the end-times? Are there not biblical arguments for holding the West Bank, as part of the territory promised to the descendants of Abraham?

The biblical arguments may excite many evangelical Christians, but few Israelis! The messianic fervor that surfaced in the settler movement after 1967 has failed to capture a national audience. If a small part of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, will be kept by the Israelis, as seems likely, it will be for historical and security but not for biblical reasons. Israel at forty, is only vaguely aware of its prophetic destiny!

In contrast, many Christians fervently believe in Israel's prophetic future. Some of them feel that Israel should keep the West Bank. Or they have been excitedly speculating about the sprouting of the fig tree (Matt. 24:32), and when the last generation" began, at 1948 or 1967! As Christians in the Reformed community, we can leave the speculation to others. But we must pay attention to what the Bible has to say about the future of Israel: restoration as a nation; times of great hard ship in the land; national revival at the coming of the Messiah. If prophecy means anything at all, Israel still has an unfulfilled prophetic destiny.

It is God who planted the dream of return to the promised land in the hearts of the Jews. It is He who made them long for a "righteous nation". He has protected them in many ways on their ancient soil. Miracles have taken place. But Israel will reach its destiny only in God's ways, not by its own might. As the still young nation is slowly beginning to figure this out, we as Christians have a role to play. It is time for us to pray fervently for the "peace of Jerusalem" (Ps. 122), that Israel may understand that without the Prince of Peace of Isaiah 9 it will not find what it is longing for. And we may pray that the day may come soon that the eyes of all Israel will be opened to perceive Who brought them back to their homeland, and why. For on that day, all Israel will be saved (Romans 11:26)!

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