Reading the Hebrew Bible in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Rivera-Pagan, Luis N.

"The Bible ... unlike the books of other ancient peoples, was ... the literature of a minor, remote people--and not the literature of its rulers, but of its critics. The scribes and the prophets of Jerusalem refused to accept the world as it was. They invented the literature of political dissent and, with it, the literature of hope."

--Amos Elon, Jerusalem: Battlegrounds of Memory

"The Bible is ... an incendiary device: who knows what we'd make of it, if we ever got our hands on it?"

--Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Unearthing Forgotten Memories

The dreadful plight of the Palestinian nation since the 1948 and 1967 armed victories, military occupation, and territorial expansions of the newly created state of Israel, (1) should be of prime consideration for any theology with emancipatory horizons that truly cares about the sufferings and aspirations of subjugated peoples and victimized communities. (2) As the eminent African American author Alice Walker recently noted after visiting Gaza, "whatever has happened to humanity, whatever is currently happening to humanity, it is happening to all of us. No matter how hidden the cruelty, no matter how far off the screams of pain and terror, we live in one world. We are one people." (3)

The Palestinian situation brings to the fore several crucial theological and hermeneutical issues. The search for justice, liberation, and peace is essential to any authentic religious piety. The laureate Jewish-American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, at the end of his novella The Penitent, avers, "There is a great element of protest in all religion. Those who dedicate their lives to serving God have often dared to question His justice, and to rebel against His seeming neutrality in humanity's struggle between good and evil. I feel therefore that there is no basic difference between rebellion and prayer." (4)

My purpose in this essay is to discuss briefly six hermeneutical dilemmas fore-grounded by the project of reading the Hebrew sacred scriptures in the context of the actual conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. They have to do with the following topics: Exodus and conquest; captivity, displacement, and exile; the Promised Land; the chosen people of God; the city of Jerusalem; and, finally, peace and reconciliation.

These conflictive issues are unavoidable if we are to engage genuinely in the hermeneutical circle of looking simultaneously and dialectically to both the biblical Hebrew testimonies of faith and the plight of the peoples that presently inhabit Palestine. (5) In the confrontation between Israel and Palestine, this circular and emancipatory hermeneutical perspective is vital due to the frequent reference to the Bible by Israeli intellectuals and political leaders in their quest to devise a transcendentally endowed national ethos. (6) According to Anita Shapira, a well-known Israeli scholar, "Zionism ... took the Bible to its heart as the story of the formation of a nation ... The Bible accorded the tender Jewish nationalism the mythic-historical foundation for conceiving the consciousness of the nation's singularity in its bond to the land of the forefathers. In an almost obvious way it [the Bible] served as proof of the 'naturalness' of the Zionist solution for the Jewish problem." (7)

In the interpretative perspective we are adopting, the essential imperative is to remember and radicalize the prophetic words written by the imprisoned Dietrich Bonhoffer, in a note surreptitiously preserved by his friend Eberhard Bethge: "We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled--in short, from the perspective of those who suffer." (8) This hermeneutical horizon, in constant critical and creative dialogue with contemporary liberation theologies and postcolonial theories, (9) is strikingly analogous to Edward Said's representation of the intellectual as a person who unearths "the memory of forgotten voices ... of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless." (10) Its original source is an admonition on countless occasions reiterated by the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, itself: "Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute ... defend the rights of the poor and needy" (Prov. 31:8-9).

Exodus and Conquest

Liberation theologies all over the world have focused on the biblical Exodus story as a key emancipatory hermeneutical paradigm. (11) Yet, they have usually evaded the sinister dimensions of its accompanying story: the conquest of Canaan and its concomitant destruction of the Canaanite communities. (12) Edward Said noticed this omission ("the injunction laid on the Jews by God to exterminate their opponents") in a critical review of Michael Walzer's much-read book Exodus and Revolution, which he indicts as "so undialectical, so simplifying, so ahistorical and reductive." The exalting view of the Exodus biblical as a process of redemption of the Hebrew slaves oftentimes eludes the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the indigenous Canaanites and "minimizes, if it does not completely obliterate, a sense of responsibility for what a people undergoing Redemption does to other less fortunate people, unredeemed, strange, displaced and outside moral concern." (13) This critical perspective might lead to read the Exodus/conquest biblical narratives "with the eyes of the Canaanites". (14)

Palestinian theological hermeneutics is able to foreground this usually silenced ominous dimension of the Exodus story, both in its biblical context--the atrocious rules of warfare that prescribed forced servitude or annihilation for the population encountered in Israel's route to the "promised land" (Deut. 20:10-17)--and in the present historical circumstances wherein the Palestinian people are harshly mistreated by the state of Israel. The narration of the massacre of the inhabitants of Jericho is chilling and dreadful: "Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old" (Josh. 6:21). (15) From a Palestinian perspective, the Exodus story can be read contrapuntally, the way that Edward Said, for example, analyzes Albert Camus's occlusion of Algeria and the Algerians in several of his most important literary texts (La Peste, L'Etranger), though they take place in that specific Maghreb nation. (16)

In the biblical narrative of the Israelite invasion and conquest of Canaan, the indigenous communities were perceived as potential sources of ethnic, religious, and ethical contamination. The Hebrew tribes thus claimed divine right to displace, expel, and exterminate them: "As for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them ... just as the Lord your God has commanded" (Deut. 20: 16f). (17) A similar commandment is given to King Saul regarding the complete extermination of Amalek: "Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey" (I Sam. 15:3). The divine mandate is to destroy even the historical remembrance of its existence: "You must blot out the memory of Amalek under heaven. Do not forget" (Deut. 25:19). Saul provokes God's wrath by not fulfilling completely this genocidal decree. Regarding the Midian kingdom, the divine order is to kill all its male inhabitants, including "the little ones," and all the women who have "known a man by sleeping with him" (Num. 31:17). Only the "young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him" are to be spared. The God of grace, blessing, and redemption mutates into the God of wrath, curse, and devastation. (18)

Later writings will attempt to explain and justify the annihilation of those peoples, adducing their intertwined vices of idolatry and moral aberration. "For the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them was the corruption of life" (Wisdom of Solomon 14:12; see also 12:3-7 and 14:27). The purpose of these vindictive texts and genocidal commandments is to protect Israel from possible contamination by the collusion of religious impurity and moral perversion prevailing in the Canaanite nations. It constitutes a divine declaration of anathema (herem) against peoples whose impurity might pollute God's elected nation. An analogous attitude can be found in the process of reconstructing Jerusalem and the temple, as narrated by Ezra 9-10 and Nehemiah 13: 23-30, resulting in the merciless expulsion of the foreign wives and their children in service of the xenophobic principle of ethnic purity as an absolute prerequisite for moral integrity and religious fidelity. (19) These are truly, in Phyllis Trible's apt phrase, texts of terror. (20)

Dreadful resonances of this lethal and discriminatory outlook are found in the writings of some Spanish theologians and jurists during the 16th-century Iberian conquest of the Americas, (21) in several admonitions of British theologians regarding the Native Americans of North America, (22) in the way certain South African Boers preachers looked at Black Africans, as well as in the proclamations of many contemporary Zionists who quote those biblical texts to legitimate their aspiration for a Greater Israel (Eretz Israel) sanitized from any possible "contamination" by Palestinians. (23)

The Hebrew Bible is thus transformed into a sacred vindicating source for the conquest of Eretz Israel, as a divinely awarded patrimony exclusively for the Jewish people, which also legitimates the dispossession of the new Canaanites, the Palestinians. The Tanakh, in this interpretative scheme, plays a twin role: it serves to construe the unity of the nation of Israel across millennia, from Abraham to David Ben-Gurion, and it gives to that national community exclusive proprietary rights over the land of Canaan/ Palestine. The ultimate goal of this specific hermeneutics might just be to masquerade ethnic cleansing and displacement with a prestigious biblical justification. As Nur Masalha, a distinguished Palestinian scholar and writer, has affirmed, "Inspired by a fundamentalist interpretation of the Old Testament, especially the books of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Joshua, their discourse [the Zionists'] presents ethnic cleansing as not only legitimate, but as required by the divinity." (24) The Bible defeats, in this perspective, the second part of the 1917 Balfour Declaration that committed the British government to "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people ... it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities." (25)

We are, thus, obliged to consider carefully and critically the ominous dimensions of the Exodus biblical narratives if we are to be faithful to the divine covenant of doing righteousness and pursuing justice. Otherwise, one might be complicit in evading the nefarious narrative proximity of the Exodus story and the tragic fate of the indigenous population inhabiting "the promised land that flows with milk and honey."

Captivity, Displacement, and Exile

From the painful memory of the al-nakha (the "great catastrophe"), Palestinian theology is able to highlight the biblical topoi of exile, displacement, dispersion, and captivity, the crucial historical matrices of the biblical scriptures, as meaningful loci of theological enunciation and reflection. The heart-breaking experience of devastation, dispersion, and dislocation are at the core of the Hebrew sacred scriptures.

Prayer

   How lonely sits the city
   that once was full of people!
   How like a widow she has become,
   she that was great among the nations!
   She that was a princess among the provinces
   has become a vassal.
   ... Judah has gone into exile with suffering
   and hard servitude;
   she lives now among the nations,
   and finds no resting place. (Lam. 1:1, 3)

The Hebrew Bible seems to have been composed, edited, and reconfigured after the traumatic experience of the Babylonian exile. It is from the sufferings entailed by national defeat, devastation, the destruction of the holy places, and exile (galut) (26) that the biblical sacred scriptures emerge, fueled by the need and desire to remember, to preserve the memory of God as the ultimate source of liberation and of the desperate but obstinate hope for a peaceful return to the lost homeland. (27) Contrary to other ancient Middle East sacred scriptures, written by courtly scribes and characterized by their laudatory paeans to the national authorities, the Bible arises from the tragic experience of exile and captivity and evokes the flaws and misdeeds of the Israelite and Judean monarchs. They are sacred scriptures precisely because they surge and arise from a displaced people, who recall with profound sadness the devastation of their homes and places of worship and their forceful uprooting, but who do not abdicate their divinely inspired hopes for restitution. Exile, deportation, and captivity become the subterranean sources of liberative theological meditation and creativity of the remembrance of God as the liberator." (28)

In the gospel according to Luke, the destruction of Jerusalem and the painful displacement and dispossession of its inhabitants, after the defeat of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans (66-70 CE), are constantly alluded to as a reason for the profound sadness of Jesus, who mourns with heart-breaking lamentations the tragic fate of the people:

As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God. (Luke 19:41-44)

Defeat, exile, and dispersion constitute the historical matrices also for the New Testament, the Christian sacred scriptures. (29)

It has been an expatriate Palestinian, Edward Said, who with his typical literary eloquence, has described, like perhaps nobody else since the biblical psalmist, the plight and grief of exile, the painful dilemma of displacement: "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted." (30) It situates the exiled person in a strange situation of being perennially "out of place," to refer to the title of Said's personal memoir. (31)

Israeli policy on Palestine has been neatly encapsulated in the formula "maximum land and minimum Arabs." The deportation and removal of the Palestinians has been a tragic but almost historically unavoidable consequence of the ideological structure of Jewish Zionism as a theological colonial nationalism. Those who for almost two millennia suffered the plight of exclusion and disdain in their national resurgence and quest for a homeland have become, paradoxically and ironically, the perpetrators of new acts of dispersion and exile. And they do it in the name of their sacred traditions and their heritage of perseverance in the difficult predicament of diasporic displacement.

The Zionists' various strategies of dispossession and expulsion (usually sweet-termed as "transfer") have been radical: their goal has been not only to reclaim what they consider Israel's ancestral homeland, not only to dislodge the Arab indigenes, but something deeper: to erase the memory of the former presence of the ousted communities, to eliminate all the vestiges of a non-Israeli Palestine. The Palestinian indigenous inhabitants were expelled, their houses looted, destroyed or appropriated, their agricultural fields confiscated, their holy places desecrated. A cartographic discourse of Hebraization and Judaization was systematically put into place to obliterate traces and remnants from the Palestinian birthplace and to establish a new hegemonic experience of the land, intimately associated with Hebrew biblical resonances. (32) Its intended objective was to eradicate the Palestinian people's historical ties with its homeland, truly an ideologically motivated memoricide. As Ilan Pappe, the dissident Israeli historian, has asserted: "The human geography of Palestine as a whole was forceably transformed ... This transformation was driven by the desire to wipe out one nation's history and culture." (33) Palestine is a palimpsest of memories wherein Israeli leaders pretend to inscribe an exclusive Jewish narrative, wistfully reconnected to the biblical geography and history, while simultaneously trying to occlude all the remnants and vestiges of the centuries old former Arab communities. That project of erasure, however, is not always totally successful, as Hanna Musleh's fine documentary film Memory of the Cactus--A Story of Three Palestinian Villages (2008) so graphically demonstrates.

Exile, an important feature of human historical experience and a vital source of the biblical sacred scriptures, becomes in Palestine a crucial philosophical and theological concern. Exile is, in the poetic words of Mahmoud Darwish, a "journal of an ordinary grief." (34) In many Palestinian hearts and souls the nostalgic sadness inscribed in Darwish's verses resonates with uncanny familiarity:

Prayer

   There is no place on earth where we haven't pitched our tent of
      exile ...
   Longing is the place of exile. Our love is a place of exile.
   Our wine is a place of exile
   and a place of exile is the history of this heart.
   How many times have we told the trees
   of the place to wipe off the invader's mask
   so we might find a place? ...
   Poetry is a place of exile. (I See What I Want to See)

The Promised Land

The geographical territory that Christians traditionally call Holy Land, (35) Muslims name Palestine, and Jews designate as Israel has been during many centuries a source of passionate and violent conflicts, truly a land of blood and tears. (36) In the name of Yahweh, Allah, or Christ, ferocious warriors have bitterly clashed and fought for its possession and dominion.

God's promise of the land of Canaan to Abraham, according to the Hebrew sacred scriptures, is a basic tenet of the Zionist claim that the entire land of Palestine belongs by divine right to the Jewish people, more precisely to Israel as the Jewish state. (37)

Genesis 12:1-7 ("To your offspring I will give this land"), 15:18-21 ("To your descendants I give this land"), and 17:1-8 ("I will give to you, and to your offspring, the land where your are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding") reproduce several versions of God's promise to Abraham that Canaan will be the everlasting possession of his progeny. This is the biblical mythical/historical basis for Israel's claim of proprietary rights over the land of Palestine. (38) As Hanan Porat, one of the founders of Gush Emunim ("Bloc of the Faithful") movement and a conservative Israeli politician, once asserted, "For us the Land of Israel is a Land of destiny, a chosen Land ... It is the Land from which the voice of God has called to us ever since that first call to the first Hebrew: 'Come and go forth from your Land where you were born and from your father's house to the Land that I will show you.'" (39)

There is, however, an inner paradoxical tension in this biblical divine promise. Supposedly, in its fulfillment "all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Gen. 12:3); yet many communities and nations already inhabit the land where Abraham is "now an alien." What, then, might be the destiny of the peoples and nations that are supposed to be blessed by the conquest and perpetual occupation of their land by Abraham's descendants?

The dispossession of the Palestinians has been defended by attributing to them the alleged decadence and defilement of the land before its redeeming Jewish colonization. The Promised Land has been transmogrified, according to this argument, into a Wasted Land. Mark Twain's pejorative description of Palestine, included in his book The Innocents Abroad (1869), has been quoted by several Israeli leaders to justify the displacement of the indigenous population.

   Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of
   a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies ...
   Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have
   nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high
   honor of the Savior's presence ... Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
   stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and
   is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer
   there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the
   wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel, is
   gone ... Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be
   otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? (40)

When Theodor Herzl, one of the main founders of political Zionism, wrote, in The Jewish State, "Palestine is our unforgettable historic homeland," (41) two conflicting perspectives were brought to a horizon of violent confrontation. On one side, the Jewish people, scattered, ghettoed, and disdained in the melancholy of exile, forever preserving in their Diaspora (Golah) the memory of Zion as its birthright homeland by divine concession and liturgically proclaiming annually that they will gather again "next year in Jerusalem." (42) On the other, the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine, perpetual victims of successive foreign empires, upholding their profound sense of ancestral belonging and who could also claim, "Palestine is our unforgettable historic homeland." Whose, then, is the Promised Land? As it happens so many times in human history, that question has received contradictory answers, supported simultaneously by deeply rooted religious convictions and aggressive military strategies.

Palestinian theologians have been able to respond critically to the employment of the Hebrew Bible to justify Israel's policies of appropriation and exclusion, under the theological pretext that Palestine is supposedly the land promised by God to its biblical ancestors. After all, it is impossible to evade or sideline the prophetic core of the Hebrew sacred scriptures, with their indissoluble linkage of the knowledge of God and the deeds of justice (Jer. 22:16) and the emphasis on solidarity and compassion with the most vulnerable sectors of society--the poor, the widows, the orphans, the strangers (Jer. 7:4-7)--as the main expression of faithful obedience to God's will. According to the Hebrew prophets, the possession of the land is indissolubly connected with a covenant between its inhabitants and God: a pact of justice, mercifulness, and solidarity. The violation of that covenant forfeits the right to posses the land. All the biblical narratives, be they juridical, historical, or prophetic, strongly express God's disavowal of Israel's endemic structures of social injustice and, therefore, call their hearers/readers to engage in resistance against them.

How can the Tanakh be quoted to justify the aggressive military actions of the actual state of Israel when those same sacred scriptures constantly rebuke and condemn the authorities of biblical Israel due to its unjust policies and oppressive actions? (43) Compare the condemnation of king Jehoiakim in II Chronicles 36:5 ("He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD his God") with Jeremiah's invective against the same monarch's social policies: "your eyes and heart are only ... for practicing oppression and violence" (Jer. 22:17). Both critical assessments take place under the shadow of the ominous Chaldean threat, perceived by the scribes in charge of narrating the history of Israel as a divine punishment against that nation's oppressive social structures (II Chron. 36:14-17). As Walter J Houston has noted, "This is the point on which the logic of the prophetic rhetoric pivots. YHWH destroys oppressors; the oppressors denounced in the oracles of judgment were representative of the Israelite kingdoms; this accounts, in the structure of the prophetic books as wholes, for the downfall of those kingdoms." (44)

There is a dialectical relationship between the biblical promise of land and the communal commitment to justice. As Alain Marchadour and David Neuhaus have appropriately written: "mishpat [justice] and tsedaka [doing righteousness] ... summarize the requirements for living out God's will on the Land and they bear witness against and denounce the violations that are too often committed by Israel." (45) They are probably right when they emphasize that the issues at stake in the prophetic denunciations of Israel's conduct "have less to do with offenses committed against God ... than with injustices inflicted on the poor" (46)

The Chosen People of God

The theme of the "chosen people of God" has been a classic theological quandary. The first biblical confession of faith begins thus: ""A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, ... When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression" (Deut. 26:5-7). This is evidently an etiological narrative; it is an account of the origin of a special people, the people of God. But the question arises: Who are the authentic descendants of that wandering Aramean, ancestor of a divinely "chosen people"?

In Palestine, two conflicting views regarding this matter clash. Many Zionists allege that the Jews, wherever they are, and whatever their ethnic, cultural, or linguistic heritage (Ashkenazi or Sephardic; Yiddish, Russian, or Arabic speakers), constitute the elected nation endowed with the divinely decreed legal obligations (the Halakhah) and privileges (mainly the possession of Palestine, as Eretz Israel). They constitute a privileged genealogy of the biblical patriarchs. Israel's laws of return and nationality are based upon this premise of an ethnological distinction. (47) The term ethnocracy has been coined to describe this perspective. (48) This is, in the words of Shlomo Sand, "the active myth of an eternal nation [Israel] that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land." (49) God's promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are perceived as a divine legitimizing source for Israel's charter of exclusive national privilege for the Jewish people, but also as the transcendental justification for the displacement and opprobrium suffered by the Palestinians. Ironically, the theological nexus of a divinely elected people and an ancestral homeland, so intensely insisted upon by several Israeli advocates, seems uncomfortably evocative of the German Nazi Blut und Boden ideology, so fateful during the 20th century for the European Jewish communities.

The history of Israel, from this perspective, is transfigured in a series of constructed narratives devoid of the disturbing presence of the Palestinian indigenous communities. The Palestinian indigenes are occluded, for they do not to belong to God's elected nation. They are not only displaced from their homeland; they are dislodged also from true history, or at least from the historical drama that occurs between God, the divinely chosen people, and the Promised Land, as construed by so many Israeli scholars and politicians.

A new people of God, the Sabras, the New Jews, are conceived as the only genuine historical agents in the "redeemed" land of Ancient Israel. The history of the "Others," of the Palestinian communities is marginalized, silenced. (50) Not only their land is confiscated, their bodies expelled, and their civic rights curtailed; their historical memory is also expunged, excised. The dominant collective narrator tries to impede or expunge other alternate and subaltern narratives. (51) Or, at least, that seems to be the prevailing project of identity politics in mainstream Israel, especially after the decline of the old socialist and leftist ideological dimensions of Zionism.

There is, however, a different perspective. The already-quoted biblical first statement of faith does not necessarily emphasize an alleged biological ancestry. Its crucial point is that there was an enslaved, subjugated, and exploited people and that God, after paying compassionate attention to their sorrowful cries, liberates them. It is not the flesh, but the socio-historical fate of Abraham's seed that defines the belongingness to God's elected people. The concept of "chosen people of God," therefore, does not allude to an absurd DNA genetic analysis, or ethno-racial lineage. (52) It rather evokes a hermeneutic of oppression and liberation. The people of God are those who oppressed, in a seemingly hopeless situation, pray, hope, and struggle for liberation and redemption. (53)

What happens in Palestine is a reenactment of the traditional confrontation between two different perspectives: the consciousness of the victors and the consciousness of the victims. In a complex historical irony, "the classic victims of years of anti-Semitic persecution and the Holocaust have in their new nation become the victimizers of another people, who have become, therefore, the victims of the victims." (54) But the Bible, let us not forget, tells the story of a God who stands with the victims against their victimizers.

Shlomo Sand, the Israeli dissident scholar, has asked a pertinent question: "To what extent is Jewish Israeli society willing to discard the deeply embedded image of the 'chosen people' and to cease ... excluding the 'other' from its midst?" (55) This change might be required not only to strengthen the democratic character of Israeli society, which is Sand's objective, but also and mainly to deepen its ethical texture. Reinhold Niebuhr contrasted, in a North American theological classic text, "moral man" with "immoral society," (56) but God's Torah, according to the Hebrew prophets, requires a social life according to the strict norms of mishpat and tsedaka, justice and righteousness. (57) It prescribes a "moral society," a society where solidarity and compassion constitute the main rules for judging the conduct of the authority and power. Belonging to God's "chosen people," therefore, is not a privilege or a badge of honour, but rather a difficult to satisfy and formidable challenge, as the prophet Amos hinted when he told Israel:

Prayer

   You only have I known
   of all the families of the earth;
   therefore I will punish you
   for all your iniquities. (Amos 3:2)

The sacred scriptures have always proved to be a perilous minefield for all those who attempt to use it to legitimize or justify acts of conquest, domination, or exploitation. (58) As the Israeli writer Amos Elon has eloquently emphasized: "The Bible ... unlike the books of other ancient peoples, was ... the literature of a minor, remote people --and not the literature of its rulers, but of its critics. The scribes and the prophets of Jerusalem refused to accept the world as it was. They invented the literature of political dissent and, with it, the literature of hope." (59)

Decades ago, German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch asserted provocatively that reading the Bible should be an imperative for every one whose life is devoted to the quest of liberty and justice for the oppressed. (60) To the astonishment of many Marxists, he insisted upon the basic prophetic and subversive character of the Bible. Bloch's heterodox assessment of the revolutionary potentialities of the Bible was written before the books usually considered as originators of liberation theology, authored by James Cone, Gustavo Gutierrez, or Hugo Assmann, were published. This is the hermeneutical key to recognize the authentic people of God. For, as Gutierrez has affirmed, "The entire Bible, beginning with the story of Cain and Abel, mirrors God's predilection for the weak and abused of human history." (61) God's truly chosen people, therefore, is defined not by genetic inheritance, but by obedience of the divine command:

Prayer

   Give justice to the weak and the orphan;
   maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.
   Rescue the weak and the needy;
   deliver them from the hand of the wicked. (Ps. 82:3-4)

Israel's Zionists reiterate emphatically the restorative promise of Amos 9:14f-15:

Prayer

   I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,
   and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them;
   they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,
   and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.
   I will plant them upon their land,
   and they shall never again be plucked up
   out of the land that I have given them,
   says the Lord your God.

But they tend to silence and occlude the severe critiques that same prophet Amos utters against Israel for her deeds of wickedness and injustice, actions that nullify its self-designation as "God's chosen people."

Jerusalem, Sacred and Sanguinary

As Naim Ateek has underscored, "the history of Jerusalem has been written with blood." (62) In its long and tempestuous history, Jerusalem has been both blessed and cursed due to its recognition as sacred by the three Abrahamic monotheistic religions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity). For centuries they have considered it a "holy city," sanctified by the divine presence. Medieval cosmography and cartography situated Jerusalem as both the geographical and spiritual centre of the world. It was perceived as the navel (omphalos) of the world, the axis mundi. (63) This tradition arose from a literal reading of Ezekiel 5:5--"Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem; I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries all around her." The following verse, however, indicates the conflictive character of the history of this most holy city: "But she has rebelled against my ordinances and my statutes, becoming more wicked than the nations and the countries all around her, rejecting my ordinances and not following my statutes" (Ez. 5:6). The blessed sacred city of God has become, so is the prophetic judgment, a cursed city of sin, where corruption and injustice prevails,

Prayer

   How the faithful city
   has become a whore!
   ... Your princes are rebels
   and companions of thieves.
   Everyone loves a bribe
   and runs after gifts.
   They do not defend the orphan,
   and the widow's cause does not come before them. (Is. 1:21, 23)

Jeremiah's admonitory words regarding the mystification of the Temple are, in this context, unforgettable: "Stand in the gate of the Lord's house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord"' (Jer. 7:2-4). If the religious rituals and liturgical ceremonies performed in the sacred sites displace obedience to the Torah and its norms of justice and righteousness, then the worship of God transmogrify into veneration of a Satanic idol and a source of dreadful strife.

The constant destruction and devastation of Jerusalem--by the Babylonian or the Roman armies--its nostalgic remembrance, and the expectation of its restitution are the religious and historical matrix of the Bible. The Israeli author Amos Elon has magnificently described how the intense religious feelings evoked by Jerusalem (where the Church of the Holy Sepulcher [or Church of the Resurrection as called by Eastern Christians], the Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock, and the Al-Aqsa mosque are located) has transfigured it in the active imagination of countless believers, pilgrims, holy warriors, and crusaders into a dangerous, cruel, and bloody land, like perhaps no other city in human history. (64) Jews, Muslims, and Christians have claimed that it was there, in old sacred Jerusalem, where Adam and Eve were fashioned at the beginning of biblical times, where the stone for the unfulfilled sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham was located, and where Muhammad ascended to heaven. In his typical provocative style, James Carroll avers that for "Jews and Christians both, the destruction of Jerusalem is what ... defines the heart of our religion." (65)

Many Jews, Christians, and Muslims have invoked the famous sorrowful words of the nostalgic biblical hymn to the lost city: "How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy" (Ps. 137:4-6). A magnificent lament, indeed! But let us not forget the revengeful last verses of that paean to the sacred city, when the lament is transmuted into vindictive and cruel hatred: "O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!" (Ps. 137:8-9).

Paradoxically, the sacred nature attributed to Jerusalem has been for centuries a reason for extremely violent and sanguinary confrontations. Its sacred sites--the Wailing Wall, remnant of the destroyed second Temple of Yahweh, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Al-Haram Al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary), enclosing the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque--places of worship to the divine Spirit, creator and redeemer, have frequently mutated into zones of hatred and warfare. Pilgrims, crusaders, and jihadists have arrived at its famous gates "with love in their hearts, the end of the world in their minds, and weapons in their hands." (66) Naomi Shemer's song, "Jerusalem of Gold," composed in the context of the 1967 conquest of East Jerusalem and the old city and which has become sort of a second Israeli national anthem, expresses the outburst of the contemporary nationalistic aspiration of Jerusalem as exclusively a Jewish sacred city.

Prayer

   Jerusalem of gold, and of light and of bronze,
   I am the lute for all your songs.
   The wells are filled again with water,
   The square with joyous crowd,
   On the Temple Mount within the City,
   The shofar rings out loud.

Pope Urban II's famous and fateful speech at the Council of Clermont (27 November 1095) is a classic expression of the heinous mixture of the sacred and the sanguinary whenever the matter of contention happens to be Jerusalem. The Pope calls the Frankish knights, so proud of their warring traditions, to rescue Jerusalem, the city honoured by the death and resurrection of Christ, from the impure hands of "an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God."

"Oh, most valiant soldiers ... Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race ... Jerusalem is the navel of the world ... This the Redeemer of the human race has made illustrious by His advent, has beautified by residence, has consecrated by suffering, has redeemed by death, has glorified by burial. This royal city, therefore, situated at the centre of the world, is now held captive by His enemies, and is in subjection to those who do not know God ... She seeks therefore and desires to be liberated, and does not cease to implore you to come to her aid ... Accordingly undertake this journey for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the kingdom of heaven ... It is the will of God! (67)

Do we have the spiritual and intellectual resources to reconfigure the debate in such a way that the concepts of "holy city" and "holy land" might become a basis for dialogue, reciprocal respect, understanding, and solidarity among the three great Abrahamic monotheistic religions? In the book of Revelation, the main core of the eschatological "new heaven and new earth" is a "new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (Rev. 21:2). This "new Jerusalem" will become a "home of God among mortals" (Rev. 21:3). (68) Jerusalem, in the biblical apocalyptic perspective, will be the sacred city where the nations, at the end of times, will gather to praise and worship God in peace (Zech. 8:20--"Many peoples and strong nations shall come to seek the Lord of hosts in Jerusalem, and to entreat the favor of the Lord"; Isaiah 56:7--"these I will bring to my holy mountain ... for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples").

As the Palestinian Kairos so movingly affirms, "Jerusalem is the heart of our reality. It is, at the same time, symbol of peace and sign of conflict ... Jerusalem, city of reconciliation, has become a city of discrimination and exclusion, a source of struggle rather than peace." (69) The fate of the diverse peoples inhabiting and sharing Palestine depend, in large part, upon the success or failure of the endeavour to allow peace to prevail upon conflict and strife in Jerusalem. Yehuda Amichai's poem "If I forget thee, Jerusalem" faithfully mirrors the nostalgia that too many Jews, Muslims, and Christians deeply feel for their beloved holy city:

Prayer

   If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
   Let my blood be forgotten.
   I shall touch your forehead,
   Forget my own,
   My voice change
   For the second and last time
   To the most terrible of voices--
   Or silence.

Peace and Reconciliation

Palestinian theology, maybe more emphatically than other liberation theologies, emphasizes the intertwining of justice and reconciliation, truth-telling and forgiveness, prophetic denunciation and peacemaking annunciation, severe critique and hopeful aspiration. The ultimate purpose of the prophetic denunciation is neither the destruction nor the humiliation of the enemy, but the fulfillment of Isaiah's forecast of a new creation, a world free of bellicose violence and devastation, where the conflicting communities --Palestinian and Israeli, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim--"They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat ... They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord--and their descendants as well" (Is. 65:21-23). And war will be no more: "they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more" (Is. 2:4).

This a dream shared by many Israelis and Palestinians, be they Jews, Muslims, Christians, or non-believers. A dream of peace and reconciliation. It is the aspiration of two peoples with severely wounded memories: the memory of the Shoah and the memory of the Al-nakba. (70) Rightly has Judith Butler highlighted: "Exile may be in fact be a point of departure for thinking about cohabitation." (71) The traumatic and heartrending experience of devastation, persecution, and exile, suffered by both Jews and Palestinians can and should be construed as historical reasons for dialogue rather than conflict. This hopeful aspiration promises to become a main tenet of creative Palestinian theologies. (72) As the Palestinian Kairos concludes, "We say that love is possible and mutual trust is possible. Thus, peace is possible and definitive reconciliation also. Thus, justice and security will be attained for all." (73)

Whenever Christians recall Jesus's first public exposition of who he was and what his mission was, according to the gospel of Luke (4:14-21), with its easy to recognize reference to Isaiah 61:1-2, (74) attention should be paid not only to the concordances between both texts, but also to a significant and crucial omission. Jesus concludes his elocution with the proclamation, in his being and deeds, of "the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:19), a time of liberation of the oppressed and captives, an obvious quotation of Isaiah 61:2a. But he leaves out the prophet's ominous ending--"and the day of vengeance of our God" (61:2b). Jesus's being and mission is therefore liberation and reconciliation, not liberation and violent retribution or vengeance. (75)

Certainly, one can find, in many religious canonical scriptures, ominous and sinister images of divine exclusion and sacred violence against those who allegedly contaminate the integrity and purity of religious, national, or ethnic identity. Israeli punitive wars, Christian Crusades, Islamic Jihad, oppressive servitudes, despotic hierarchies, and intolerances of all kinds and types have claimed legitimacy by alluding to sacred texts. They have, too easily, "found justification for savagery in sanctified appeals to the will of God." (76) The idolatry of the "Word of God" has been used to devastate solidarities, consciences, hopes, and human lives. (77) But, those "texts of terror" are neither the decisive nor the predominant ones in most religious myths and symbols. Genuine religious thought, reflecting on the destiny of human history, does not emphasize the sinister symbols of Armageddon and their horsemen of terror, but the hopes for human liberation and universal reconciliation.

In the delicate and sensitive process of dialogue and reconciliation taking place between Israel and Palestine, Christians should be aware of the suffering and pain caused by the not too subtle anti-Semitism ensconced in the way some of the New Testament writings, like the gospel of John, (78) construe Jesus' fate, intensified by the way those texts have been read and applied during two millennia, in which the Jews were accused of "deicide." (79) However, this deplorable history of Christian Judeophobia should not be a pretext for ignoring the human rights violations of the Palestinian people by the modern state of Israel. Sadly, the West has gone from one kind of anti-Semitism to another, from Judeophobia to Islamophobia. The dreaded "other" is not any more the Jew, but the Muslim. Either kind of anti-Semitic depreciation is a nefarious obstacle in the project of achieving peace with justice. (80)

That project of reconciliation and righteousness has been complex and, to say the least, tortuous. It requires, today more than ever before, intellectual understanding and ethical empathy regarding the wave of anti-Judaism that between the Dreyfus affair and the Shoah rendered unsuccessful the sophisticate attempts by the Diaspora Jews to achieve emancipation and assimilation into European culture; but, also and simultaneously, of the sufferings of the Palestinian people caused by the Yishuv, (81) its Zionist nationalistic ideology, and its military actions that led to a merciless ethnic cleansing. The first were victims of the infamous" final solution," the genocidal culmination of centuries of exclusion and persecution, perpetrated by heirs of the Christian Western civilization, memorialized in the sad and sober elegance of Yad Vashem. The second are the sufferers of the wrath and vindictiveness of the children of Yahweh, their return to Zion, and their reliance in the kind of strong-armed attitude once expressed in the hard to read words by Moshe Dayan, the renowned Israeli military strategist, "our life's choice--to be prepared and armed, strong and tough, lest our fist would lose grip of the sword and our life would cease." (82)

As Miroslav Volf, with his characteristic lucidity, has emphasized, in a telling and critical conversation with Elie Wiesel, wounded memories do not necessarily lead to exclusion. They may, contrariwise, become a shared source for the humanly dignifying act of reciprocal recognition and embrace. (83) What Sigmund Freud, in Moses and Monotheism, claims as a distinctive peculiarity of the Jewish people, namely that "they defy oppression, that even the most cruel persecutions have not succeeded in exterminating them," (84) can be similarly predicated of the Palestinian people. (85) Both national communities have faced oppression and persecution; both carry a painful fissure at the heart of their collective identity; both face the sometimes attractive temptation to indulge in a rigid path of coercive and coercing exclusionary identity; both also resolutely hope and pray for peace and reconciliation.

Edward Said, in an article published less than a year of his demise, emphasized the requirement to avoid exclusionary attitudes vis-a-vis the "others": "Purifying the land of 'aliens', whether it is spoken of by Muslims, Christians, or Jews, is a defilement of human life as it is lived by billions of people who are mixed by race, history, ethnic identity, religion or nationality." (86) Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations in the United Kingdom, who as a Jew confesses that he carries deep within himself "the tears and sufferings of my grandparents and theirs through the generations," and that "the story of my people is a narrative of centuries of exiles and expulsions, persecutions and pogroms," admonishes Israelis not to convert that history into a justifying narrative of violence and injustice against the Palestinians. "Until Israelis and Palestinians are able to listen to one another, hear each other's anguish and anger and make cognitive space for one another's hopes, there is no way forward." (87)

The sacred vision of liberation and reconciliation, foreseen in the hallowed scriptures of the three great monotheistic Semitic religions, requires from Israeli and Palestinian civic and religious leaders rigorous critical consciousness and the disposition to pay the price that such an attribute frequently entails. (88) This dream of deliverance and peace, so meaningful for Israeli and Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and Jews, is also shared by many of us, goyim, who in Gentile lands hope and pray that the time might come when in Palestine "justice and peace kiss each other" (Ps. 85:10). (89)

Prayer

   Stripped of my name and identity?
   On a soil I nourished with my own hands?
   Today Job cried out
   Filling the sky:
   Don't make an example of me again!
   Oh, gentlemen, Prophets,
   Don't ask the trees for their names
   Don't ask the valleys who their mother is
   From my forehead bursts the sword of light
   And from my hand springs the water of the river
   All the hearts of the people are my identity
   So take away my passport! (Mahmoud Darwish, Passport).

DOI: 10.1111/erev.12204

(1) Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (London: Roudedge, 1980) and Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For the 1967 war that forged the military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, see Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

(2) See Luis N. Rivera-Pagan, "God the Liberator: Theology, History, and Politics," in In Our Own Voices: Latino/a Renditions of Theology, ed. Benjamin Valentin (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2010), 1-20.

(3) Alice Walker, "Overcoming Speechlessness," Tikkun (September/October 2009), 35-36.

(4) Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Penitent (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), 169. Singer is a magnificent narrator of the Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Europe violently wiped out by Nazi anti-Semitism during the Second World War. See his Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to The letter Writer (New York: The Library of America, 2004).

(5) On the concept of hermeneutical circle, see the first chapter of Juan Luis Segundo, The Liberation of Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1976).

(6) Nur Masalha, The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-colonialism in Palestine-Israel (London/ New York: Zed Books, 2007).

(7) Anita Shapira, The Bible and Israeli Identity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2006), 3, quoted and translated from the Hebrew by Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London/New York: Verso, 2008), 195. See also Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (New York: Verso, 2009), 255: "Jewish nationalism had undertaken an almost impossible mission--to forge a single ethnos from a great variety of cultural-linguistic groups, each with a distinctive origin. This accounts for the adoption of the Old Testament as the storehouse of national memory."

(8) Dietrich Bonhoffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (London: Folio Society, 2000), 16.

(9) Relevant in this context is Fernando Segovia's sharp and critical exposition of the theoretical convergences between postcolonial studies and anti-imperial biblical hermeneutics: "Mapping the Postcolonial Optic in Biblical Criticism: Meaning and Scope," in Stephen D. Moore and Fernando Segovia, Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections (London/New York: T & T Clark, 2005), 23-78.

(10) Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectuals (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 35, 113.

(11) Jose Severino Croatto, Exodus, a Hermeneutics of Freedom (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1981); and George V. Pixley, On Exodus: A Liberation Perspective (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1987).

(12) One notable exception was the late Irish priest and theologian Michael Prior. See his essay "Confronting the Bible's Ethnic Cleansing In Palestine," The Link (Americans for Middle East Understanding) 33:5 (2000), 1-12.

(13) Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985). Said's review appeared as "Michael Walzer's 'Exodus and Revolution': A Canaanite Reading," Grand Street 5:2 (1986), 86-106. It led to a bitter and acrimonious exchange between both eminent intellectuals [Michael Walzer and Edward Said, "An Exchange: 'Exodus and Revolution,' Grand Street 5:4 (1986), 246-59] which ends with the following denigrating comments by Said: "Walzer's extraordinarily myopic and ungenerous envoi ... is little more than a catalogue of his qualifications for prolonged servility to a strong Israel. A courtier, an amateur mythographer, a champion of the strong. A small frightened man who is completely unequal to the question of Canaan-Palestine, and barely adequate for the easier bits of Exodus."

(14) Michael Prior, "Reading the Bible with the Eyes of the Canaanites: In Homage to Edward Said," in A Living Stone: Selected Essays and Addresses, ed. Duncan Macpherson (London: Living Stones of the Holy Land Trust and Melisende, 2006), 273-96.

(15) The biblical narrative destruction of Jericho ends with a solemn curse against whoever might attempt to rebuild the city (Joshua 6: 26). Jericho, however, has been able to survive its too many catastrophes and curses, as anybody who has visited it can verify.

(16) Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 66-67, 169-85.

(17) Due to constraints of space, I am sidelining an important issue: recent archaeological studies have undermined the historicity of the Exodus/Conquest biblical narrative. See Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2002). Their general conclusion is that the new archeological discoveries "have cast serious doubts on the historical basis for such famous biblical stories as the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt and conquest of Canaan, and the glorious empire of David and Solomon" (3).

(18) I am well aware that these genocidal commandments are theological and literary constructions and that such heinous acts of genocide did not take place as narrated. But the fact that they were inscribed in the Bible gave them a sacred authoritative status to be misemployed in posterior conflicts between "believers" and "infidels."

(19) A recent first-rate study of these texts of Ezra and Nehemiah on the expulsion of the foreign wives has been written by Elisabeth Cook Steicke, La mujer como extranjera en Israel: Estudio exegetico de Esdras 9-10 (San Jose, Costa Rica: Editorial SEBILA, 2011).

(20) Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).

(21) Luis N. Rivera-Pagan, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster--John Knox Press, 1992).

(22) David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2002), 275: "To subdue them [the original inhabitants of North America] and take their land was regarded as a divine duty similar to the Israelites' conquest of Canaan; on occasion I Samuel 15: 3 could be applied directly to the colonists' conflict with the Indians--'Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have.'"

(23) See Donald Harman Akenson, God's Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992) and Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997).

(24) Nur Masalha, Bible and Zionism, 157.

(25) I am quoting the Balfour Declaration from Michael Prior, Zionism and the State of Israel: A Mora! Inquiry (London: Routledge, 1999), 13.

(26) The Hebrew word galut expresses the condition and feelings of the Jewish people uprooted from their homeland and subject to alien rule. The term is essentially applied to the history and the historical consciousness of the Jewish people from the destruction of the Temple to the creation of the State of Israel. According to Zionist orthodoxy, the loss of a political-ethnic center and the feeling of uprootedness turn Diaspora (Golah) into Exile (galut).

(27) Daniel L. Smith-Christopher! Biblical Theology of Exile (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002).

(28) See George Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text" (1985), in his No Passion Spent Essays 1978-1996 (London: Faber, 1996), 304-27; Hans de Wit, En la dispersion el texto es patria: Introduccion a la hermeneutica clasica, modema y posmodema (San Jose, Costa Rica: Universidad Biblica Latinoamericana, 2002); and Leonardo Boff, Teologia desde el cautiverio (Bogota: Indo-American Press Service, 1975).

(29) One must be aware, however, that Luke's interpretation of the destruction of Jerusalem and the defeat of the Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire, as divine punishment for the rejection of Jesus and his crucifixion (Luke 19:44; 21:20-23), would become an important leitmotif for Christian anti-Judaism. Eusebius of Caesarea, for example, wrote, regarding the devastation of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE: "Thus the penalty of God pursued the Jews for their crimes against Christ." Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), Vol. I, Book II, ch. 6, 125. Such a Judeophobic theology of divine vengeance would reap horrendous consequences in the 20th century.

(30) Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 173.

(31) Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 1999).

(32) See the study of such a process by the Israeli scholar and politician (he was deputy mayor of Jerusalem in the seventies) Meron Benenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2000).

(33) Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006), 216. I am borrowing the term "memoricide" from Pappe, ibid., 225-34.

(34) Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Archipelago Books, 2010).

(35) Only in Zechariah 2:12 is the expression "holy land" found in the Hebrew Bible. "The Lord will inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land" (NRSV). In Roman Catholic versions this verse is usually located in Zechariah 2:16: "Yahweh will take possession of Judah, his portion in the Holy Land" (NJB).

(36) See Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2002) and more recently, from Jerusalem, Alain Marchadour and David Neuhaus, The Land, the Bible, and History: Toward The Land That I Will Show You (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

(37) I have in mind the Jewish political Zionism as well as the fundamentalist and apocalyptic Christian Zionism, so widespread in Anglo-Saxon evangelical circles. On the first, with its sometimes convergent sometimes divergent inner trends, see Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London/New York: Verso, 2008). On the second, Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? (Downers Grove, II.: IVO Academic, 2005) and the doctoral dissertation of Robert O. Smith, "More Desired Than Our Owne Salvation": The Roots of American Christian Affinity for the State of Israel (Ph.D. Dissertation, J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, Baylor University, 2011).

(38) The definition of the precise boundaries of the allegedly divinely "promised land" constitutes a tortuous exegetical debate among different Zionist factions. The most extremist position, on the basis of Genesis 15:18 ("from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the river of Euphrates"), claims, as belonging to Eretz Israel, extensive territories belonging today to several neighbouring Arab nations.

(39) Quoted by Nur Masalha, Bible and Zionism, 138.

(40) Accessed in http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/mtwain/bl-mtwain-innocents-56.htm. Twain visited Palestine in 1867 and his travel book The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869, was one of his most widely read writings.

(41) Quoted by Marchadour and Neuhaus, hand, the Bible, and History, 127.

(42) The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (14 May 1948) begins thus: "ERETZ-ISRAEL [the Land of Israel] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom." See the entire Declaration at: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace+ Process/Guide+to+the+Peace+Process/Declaration+of+Establishment+of+State+of+Israel.htm.

(43) According to the Old Testament scholar Jorge Pixley, of the 39 kings of Israel and Judah mentioned in the biblical chronicles of the two separated kingdoms, only one, Josiah, is considered to do "what is right in the sight of the LORD" (II Kings 22:2). Jorge Pixley, Biblia, teologia de la liberation y filosofia procesual: el Dios liberador en la Biblia (Quito, Ecuador: Editorial Abya Yala, 2009), 24.

(44) Walter J. Houston, Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice in the Old Testament (London: T & T Clark, 2006), 94.

(45) Marchadour and Neuhaus, Land, the Bible, and History, 19.

(46) Ibid, 76.

(47) Israel's 1950 Law of Return and its posterior amendments can be accessed and read in http://www.mfa.gov.il/ MFA/MFAArchive/1950_1959/Law+of+Return+5710-1950.htm and the 1952 Nationality Law at: http:// www.israellawresourcecenter.org/israellaws/fulltext/nationalitylaw.htm. See Edward Said's critical appraisal: "Whereas any Jew anywhere is entitled to Israel citizenship under the Law of Return, no Palestinian anywhere, whether born in Palestine before 1948 or not, has any such right. I refer here to over two million Palestinian refugees, those people (with their recent descendants) who like the Canaanites were originally driven out of their native land by Israel on the premise that they were 'explicitly excluded from the world of moral concern.'" Edward Said, "Michael Walzer's 'Exodus and Revolution'," 103.

(48) See Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

(49) Sand, Invention of the Jewish People, 22.

(50) On the diverse ways in which the history of a colonized people is marginalized and silenced, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). Regarding Palestine, see the significant critical study by Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (London/New York: Routledge, 1996). Whitelam indicts Western biblical scholarship of complicity in the academic silencing of non-Israelite Palestinian history. "[It] has been silenced and excluded by the dominant discourse in biblical studies ... Biblical studies is, thereby, implicated in an act of dispossession which has its modern political counterpart in the Zionist possession of the land and dispossession of its inhabitants. As a people without history--or deprived of that history by the discourse of biblical studies--they become unimportant, irrelevant, and finally, non-existent" (3, 46).

(51) "The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging is very important."Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii.

(52) See Shlomo Sand's trenchant critique of the "Jewish genetics" claiming scientific credentials in several Israeli universities, invention of the fewish People, 256-280.

(53) See Marc H. Ellis, Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004); Naim Stifan Ateek, Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989); Hamid Dabashi, Islamic liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (London and New York: Routledge, 2008); Michael Prior, Jesus the Liberator Nazareth Liberation Theology: (Luke 4. 16-30) (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995).

(54) Said, Question of Palestine, xxi.

(55) Sand, Invention of the Jewish People, 312f.

(56) Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Scribner's, 1932).

(57) "The terms mishpat (justice) and tsedaka (righteousness) appear together about 30 times in the Bible." Marchadour and Neuhaus, hand, the Bible, and History, 49.

(58) Richard A. Horsley (ed.), In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008); Norman K. Gottwald (ed.), The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1983).

(59) Amos Elon, Jerusalem: Battlegrounds of Memory (New York: Kodansha International, 1995), 19.

(60) Ernst Bloch, Atheismus im Christentum (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968).

(61) Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1988), xxvii.

(62) Naim Stifan Ateek, A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2009), 140.

(63) The 1581 Heinrich Bunting's cloverleaf map still depicts Jerusalem as the axis mundi unifying Europe, Asia and Africa, when traditional medieval cartographic was already outdated by the new discoveries.

(64) Amos Elon, Jerusalem: Battlegrounds of Memory. See also Karen Armstrong, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996); and Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2011).

(65) James Carroll, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 110f.

(66) Ibid., 1.

(67) The citation comes from Robert the Monk's version of Urban II's speech. It can be accessed at: http://www. fordham.edu/halsall/source/urban2-5vers.html.

(68) Revelation 21:1-4 conveys a reconfiguration of Isaiah 65:17-19: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And 1 saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.'"

(69) A Moment of Truth: A Word of Faith, Hope, and Love from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering (Jerusalem, 15 December 2009), 1.1.8.

(70) The bibliography on the Shoah is boundless and extremely difficult for any finite individual to master. A recent significant scholarly contribution is Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Na% Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). On the Al-nakba, see Walid Khalidi, editor, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2006); and Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006). For its background in the Zionist political project prior to 1948 see Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).

(71) Judith Buder, "Who Owns Kafka?" The London Review of Books 33:5 (3 March 2011), 3.

(72) Naim Stifan Ateek, Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theolog) of Liberation, ch. 7 ("A Dream of Peace"), 163-75; Mitri Raheb, I Am a Palestinian Christian (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), conclusion ("I Have a Dream"), 112-16; Naim Stifan Ateek, A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation, part III ("The Peace We Dream of"), 153-87.

(73) A Moment of Truth, 9.1.

(74) Isaiah 61:1-2: "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn"; Luke 4:18-19: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

(75) See Bosch, Transforming Mission, 108-13.

(76) Carroll, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 164f.

(77) See Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997); Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (New York: Knopf, 2000); Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (London: Verso, 2002).

(78) Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (New York: Random House, 1995).

(79) See for example, John Chrysostom, Discourses against Judaizing Christians (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1979).

(80) The contemporary meaningful pluralities within Islamic culture are disclosed in the books of Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Freedom and Orthodox): Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent Is Vital to Islam and America (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

(81) Yishuv is the Hebrew term for the Jewish community in Palestine prior to the declaration of the state of Israel, including the pre-Zionist era (Old Yishuv) as well as the Zionists of the late Ottoman Turkish rule and British mandate eras (New Yishud).

(82) Quoted by Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 193.

(83) Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996). Born in Croatia, Volf experienced the painful and violent fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia, torn apart, among other things, by the different wounded memories and religiosities of the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian nations.

(84) Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (Letchworth, Hertfordshire, UK: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1939), 146.

(85) See Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003).

(86) Edward Said, "Real Change Means People Must Change: Immediate Imperatives," CounterPunch, 21 December 2002, at: http://www.counterpunch.org/said1221.html.

(87) Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations (London: Continuum, 2002), 189f. On this subject, it is also to be welcomed the recent book by the Jewish-American Rabbi, Michael Lerner, Embracing Israel/Palestine: A Strategy to Heal and Transform the Middle East (Berkeley, Cal.: North Atlantic Books, 2012).

(88) For a vivid example of the hardships that such a rigorous critical consciousness might entail for the intellectual who dares to embody it, see Ilan Pappe's memoir, Out of Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (London: PlutoPress, 2010). His life and academic work provide an outstanding example of rigorous critical consciousness, a living rejection of the nationalistic principle attributed to another scholar/politician of a similarly small nation surrounded by enemies, the Croatian Franjo Tudjman, who once said to a colleague and compatriot: "Of course one should write the truth, but only when it is not contrary to the national interest." Quoted by Slavko Goldstein, "A Turning Point for Croatia," The New York Review of Books 58:11 (23 June 2011), 61. Another committed intellectual, who constantly displayed a rigorous critical consciousness regarding the mistakes, flaws, and misdoings, in his case of the Palestinian leadership, was Edward Said. See the fine eulogy of Said by Nur Masalha, "Cultural resistance and the Secular Humanist Challenge: Edward W. Said, Zionism and Rethinking the Question of Palestine," Bible and Zionism, 279-309.

(89) Luis N. Rivera-Pagan, "Desafios teologicos del conflicto palestino-israeli," Signos de Vida 55 (March 2010), 6-9.

Luis N. Rivera-Pagan is professor emertus of ecumenics at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of Pi Violent Evangelism.