The Mis-Education of a Young Evangelical
by Dexter Van Zile (October 2011)
For the past year, audiences of Christians in the United States and Great Britain have been treated to an anti-Israel extravaganza, With God on Our Side. Produced by Rooftop Productions in 2010, this 82-minute movie purports to be a documentary about Christian Zionism and its impact on the prospects for peace between Israel and its adversaries in the Middle East.
The underlying issue that Harrell struggles with is theodicy, or the question of how one reconciles suffering with the existence of a kind and loving God who cares for humanity. For Harrell, the question that evolves during the course of the film is how God could endorse the creation of the modern state of Israel the way Christian Zionists say He does despite the impact it has on the Palestinian people.
One is the state of Israel, its ideology of racial supremacy and its subsequent crimes committed against the Palestinians. It is because Zionists have always sought to equate their colonial project with Judaism that some misguidedly respond to what they see on their televisions with attacks on Jews or Jewish property.
factually-challenged and hostile text Whose Land? Whose Promise? What Christians are Not being Told about Israel and the Palestinians (Pilgrim Press, 2003); Stephen Sizer, who has railed against Israel and the United States on Iranian state television, and Norm Finkelstein, a Jewish hater of Israel and his fellow Jews who has referred to Abe Foxman, the leader of the Anti-Defamation League as “the Grand Wizard,” a title usually applied to the leader of the Klu Klux Klan. He has even referred to Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as a “clown.”
These are some of the people Speakman has unleashed on the evangelical community.
Distorted History
splashing it across the screen along side a profile shot of Ben-Gurion himself. Speakman’s use of this fabricated quote fits in nicely with the jaundiced and one-sided historical summary of the Arab-Israeli conflict he offers in With God on Our Side. The fact that it is uttered by Harrell, who lamented his lack of knowledge about the Arab-Israeli conflict before summarizing its history, reveals just how much of a corrupting influence the movie will have on viewers who trust the narrative it offers.
aspect of Palestinian mass media for decades. If Speakman were an honest documentarian, he might have asked Ayman to address this reality, but if he did, it didn’t make it in the final cut.
At one point during the film, Harrell speaks with Saleem Munayer, a Palestinian Christian who leads a reconciliation group, Musalah, who falsely suggests Palestine was effectively free of Jews since the sacking of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. He does this with the following narrative:
interview with Ari Shavit, Ami stated:
No honest documentarian would omit this reality, but Speakman does.
Some of the most troubling testimony comes from Deana, a young Palestinian mother living in the West Bank who complains about the impact of the security barrier on her life and the life of her friends. She tells the audience:
Later, Deana complains of being delayed at a checkpoint into Jerusalem before giving birth to a child, describing how the male soldiers sent for a female soldier to determine that she was in fact pregnant before letting her through. She also complains that her permit to enter into Jerusalem was only good for the day before she was supposed to give birth to her child. One woman died in childbirth at a checkpoint. Clearly, the barrier has had a negative impact on her life. The impact is summarized as follows:
stunning collection of misstatements of fact. For example, in Whose Land? Whose Promise? Burge falsely asserts that Arab-Israelis are denied access to political parties, military service and union membership in Israel. And like the movie in which he appears, Burge himself has himself has put words into David Ben-Gurion’s mouth that he did not speak to demonstrate that the Israeli leader was intent on perpetrating an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Burge writes: “In a letter to his son in 1937 he [Ben-Gurion] wrote, “We will expel the Arabs and take their place.” It’s a compelling quote, but it’s fake, just like the one described above.
Other speakers at the conference included Dr. Zahra Mustafawi, a daughter of Ayatollah Khomeini who sent an open letter of support to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah during the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006. In her opening remarks to the conference at which Rev. Sizer spoke, Mustafawi made the following statement, which is emblematic of the hostility toward Israel expressed by Islamic extremists throughout the Middle East:
These days the Zionists in an illegal state called Israel, are celebrating the 60th year of their aggression against the nation of Palestine as well as the crime of occupying their land, killing them and obliging them to leave their land. They are celebrating the cruel attacks they had against Palestinians and many old people, children, women and innocents were killed and a lot of orphans are left, so, this is their nature to celebrate the crime and at the same time expecting Germany to be ashamed of so called Holocaust.
If Sizer truly is committed to peacemaking as he says he is in With God on Our Side, what exactly was he doing at a conference such as this? And what was Speakman thinking when he allowed Sizer to appear in his film given his willingness to appear at a conference organized by Holocaust deniers?
None of these problems are revealed to the viewers of With God in Our Side. In the movie, Burge and Sizer look and sound like responsible and knowledgeable theologians whose beef with Christian Zionism is rooted not in politics, but theology.
Sizer asserts that the belief that Jews are the chosen people is used to accord Israelis a free pass for their treatment of people in Southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.[xi]
If Christians should, as Ron Dart says, repent for their animus toward Jews and the abysmal treatment Jews have suffered at the hands of Christians, can they ignore, with good conscience, Muslim animus toward Jews and the abysmal mistreatment of Jews in Muslim-majority countries?
The question of ultimately loyalty does not present itself with nearly the same force toward advocates of Palestinians or other groups within the Christian Church, because these groups have not been historically related to the denial of Jesus Christ as the resurrected Son of God and the Messiah. Advocating for the Jewish people and their institutions invites the accusation of Judaizing that advocacy that advocacy for other people or groups simply do not invite. The fact that Christian teachings have been used to demonize the Jewish people is apparently of less concern than the possibility that one of their fellow Christians is somehow Judaizing the Christian faith. We are known by our stumbling blocks.
Once again, this Christian obsession with the Jews and their place in the household of God distracts us from a more important question about the nature of the God we worship.
If God loves all people and does not privilege any group of people over another would He ignore the murderous hostility directed at Jews in the Middle East by Muslim extremists in groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah? Would God find Palestinian terrorism against Israel as unremarkable as it is in With God on Our Side? Is God so offended by the Jewish refusal to follow Jesus Christ that He is willing to use Islamist violence as a scourge against their state to bring them to heel?
There are a number of other contradictions in With God on Our Side that undermine its credibility as an honest documentary. First off, in its anxious treatment of Christian Zionism, WGOS emphasizes the power of religious belief to promote conflict. Of course, religious belief does promote conflict, particularly in the Middle East where Christians in Iraq and Egypt and Jews in Israel endure acts of violence at the hands of Muslim terrorists who purport to be working on behalf of an all-compassionate and merciful god. But instead of acknowledging this reality, With God on Our Side focuses attention on Christian Zionism.
Another contradiction evident in the movie is the manner in which it heaps moral and ethical claims on modern Israel because of the connections of the Jewish people to the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish religion and Jewish history. The movie does not, however, provide any guidance as to what people can reasonably expect from the Palestinians.
But from that two paths can be taken. The path of deeper compassion, of mercy and justice and peace or the tradition of Berlin walls that exclude people who are not like us.
Dart will not want to admit it, but this narrative gives Palestinian and Arab terrorists sanction to commit further acts of violence against Israel. It also ignores a number of other realities, including the fact that Israel has been attacked from nearly every bit of territory from which it has withdrawn from since the Oslo Accords and that Lebanese and Palestinian terrorists have received substantial support from Iran, whose leaders can not assert in any way shape or form that they have been oppressed by Israel. The fact is that there is theological and ideological component to Arab and Muslim antisemitism and the terrorism it inspires that cannot be blamed on Israeli policies and yet, neither Dart nor any of the other commentators in this film can be bothered to address this reality.
The film offers a number of other messages that need to be unpacked.
Zion’s Christian Soliders?, Barbara Rossing’s The Rapture Exposed and Donald Wagner’s Anxious for Armageddon. These texts are written out of a desire to assail Christian Zionism as a theology, but do not do a particularly good job of analyzing or measuring the impact of Christian Zionism as a political movement. Israeli researcher Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, is apparently working on an academic analysis of Christian Zionism as a “spoiler” to the peace process from the perspective of international relations. This line of study is inspired by Stephen John Stedman’s article “Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes” published in the academic journal International Security in 1997. In this article, Stedman reports that the greatest risk to peace processes comes from “spoilers—leaders and parties who believe that peace emerging from negotiations threatens their power, worldview, and interests, and use violence to undermine attempts to achieve it.”
Clearly, the Christian Zionists do not have the influence With God on Our Side portrays them as having. Speakman, Burge, Sizer et al, may disagree with Christian Zionist theology and politics, but the movement is simply not the all powerful and malign influence on American politics and foreign policy that With God on Our Side portrays it as being.
Robert Bellah in his landmark essay, American civil religion is a conglomeration of beliefs regarding the American people and the role they are called to play in human history. These beliefs include a sense that the American people are “an almost chosen people,” who live under the providential care and judgment of God and consequently have a positive role to play in the course of human history. These beliefs, which are obviously rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures, portray America as the “New Israel.” While this civil religion is periodically assailed, with some justification, as a form of idolatry used to justify bad acts such as the extirpation of the Native Americans under the rubric of manifest destiny, these beliefs have, in other instances played an important role in sustaining the American people as they withstood the onslaught of Nazism in the 1940s and Communism in the aftermath of World War II.[xv]
The impact of this civil religion on American history cannot be underestimated. During times of crisis, presidents have invoked aspects of this religion to invigorate and direct the American people. For example, Abraham Lincoln relied on the notion of God sitting in judgment of the American people to give meaning to the battles of the Civil War that cost thousands of people their lives. Declaring that slavery was a great national sin, Lincoln characterized these battles as part of the price that the American people had to pay for tolerating slavery in their country.
Given the role Hebrew scriptures have played in establishing, sustaining and correcting the actions of this civil religion, it should come as no surprise that the United States has a special relationship with both the Jewish people and their homeland. The American people derive no small measure of their self-understanding from the Hebrew scriptures, and as a result have a special relationship with the Jewish state whose historical roots also go back into these scriptures. This relationship is further underscored by the role the U.S. played in defeating the Nazis and assisting in the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Given this history, America has a huge stake in the continued safety and well being of the Jewish state and its destruction would pose a serious threat to the credibility of American civil religion.
Dexter Van Zile is Christian Media Analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
here and here.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/06/18/is-it-possible-to-understand-the-rise-in-anti-semitism/.
[iii] See Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, Yale University Press, 2009.
http://blog.camera.org, accessed 9 September 2011.
[v] The film provides no information as to what type of seminars Deena ran in Jerusalem.
[vii] Burge, 2003, 176.
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=6&x_article=1371.
http://int.icej.org/media/jerusalem-declaration-christian-zionism
[xiii] John J. Mearscheimer, Stephen M. Walt, 2007, 138-139.
[xiv] Ibid, 139.
To comment on this article, please click here.
here.
If you have enjoyed this article and want to read more by Dexter Van Zile, please click here.