Breaking my silence?

‘It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.' – Alice in Wonderland

I’ve always felt an affinity with French-Moroccan author Marcel Benabou, who wrote a book-length treatise on why he hadn’t written more books: Pourquoi je n'ai écrit aucun de mes livres. In the same spirit, this is a blog post about why I haven’t written any blog posts recently – well, nowhere near as many as I used to write (only 20 posts in the past three years, whereas in 2009 alone I wrote more than 200).

My principal excuse for inactivity is that this is primarily a political blog – and my political beliefs are currently in a state of extreme flux. So what’s new, you may ask? Hasn’t this blog charted repeatedly (and probably tediously) my movement from youthful Tribunite Labour left-wingery, through Gramscian Marxism, to critical support for New Labour? Didn’t I once claim, in my normblog profile no less, that I started this blog ‘to help me work out what I think’? And wasn’t it precisely the experience of writing this blog that helped me to clarify the anti-totalitarian liberal-social-democratic politics that has characterised my thinking for most of the blog’s life?

Yes, but this feels different. The change in my political outlook feels more seismic this time. I’m reluctant to articulate the change too precisely, for fear that the sands may have shifted again in a few months, and I’ll have to recant any positions I espouse here. So how to characterise the change? Maybe it’s enough to say that these days I find myself reading Standpoint and The Spectator more frequently, and with more pleasure, than The New Statesman; that I tend to haunt websites such as Front Porch Republic and Ethika Politika; that having hero-worshipped Thomas Paine for years I’m much more sympathetic to his nemesis Edmund Burke; and that I now find Chestertonian distributism more attractive than any form of socialism. 

That last item is a partial clue as to why my views have changed. My re-engagement with religious faith in the past year or two has certainly made me more 'conservative' on some social issues, and while my re-awakened faith has helped to keep my passion for social justice alive, it has also made me more open to different ways of imagining and achieving it. But it’s not just about religion. Another way of describing the change in my politics is to say that my growing disillusionment with certain aspects of contemporary leftism – whether it be kneejerk anti-westernism in foreign affairs or ‘big state’ paternalism at home – has led over time to a questioning of the foundations of progressivism per se.

To put it another way, and please forgive this brief philosophical excursion by someone who’s by no means an expert in these matters: it’s partly about questioning the adequacy of the Enlightenment tradition. Like many others who have featured in my blogroll sidebar over the years, I began blogging partly out of a sense of alarm at the rising tide of irrationalism and moral relativism in contemporary political discourse, particularly on the Left – manifested in contorted attempts to ‘understand’ terrorism, a refusal to condemn misogyny and racism if espoused by non-westerners, and the abandonment of a sense of universal human rights. In this context, post-Rushdie, post-9/11 and post-Danish cartoons, it seemed important to rush to the barricades (or at least, the blogs) to defend the gains of the Enlightenment. Indeed, it became something of a badge of honour when, in a burst of tortuous illogicality, Madeleine Bunting (‘Our Maddy of the Sorrows’, to quote the late great Norm), one of the torchbearers for the anti-rationalists, condemned writers of our stripe as ‘Enlightenment fundamentalists’.

But what if an appeal to Enlightenment principles is not enough to roll back the tide of postmodern relativism? And going further: what if the Enlightenment, rather than being the solution, was itself the genesis of the problem? On the first point: it could be argued that the Enlightenment, for all that it began as a critique of religious thinking, actually depended on unspoken but deeply shared religious foundations. For example, its defence of reason, liberty and progress was founded on certain assumptions – that history has a purpose, that every human life is of value – that are inexplicable outside a Judaeo-Christian worldview. It could also be argued that, as those shared religious assumptions have weakened in the last two centuries, so the Enlightenment principles that were (implicitly if not explicitly) founded on them have also been shaken. In a post-religious world, and in the postmodern marketplace of ideas, the principles of the Enlightenment appear no more and no less ‘universal’ than any others. Bunting is not alone in her critique: plenty of more serious postmodern thinkers have argued (spuriously, of course) that Enlightenment ideas are 'merely' a reflection of the interests of a particular group of privileged, white and probably imperialist men belonging to a particular (and particularly oppressive) society and culture.

Which bring us on to the second point: that the Enlightenment may actually share some of the blame for this descent into the slough of moral relativism. How so? Well, once again, I’m not a philosopher, but I was struck by this paragraph in Rodney Howsare’s brief introduction to the ideas of the modern Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar:

For Kant, and the moderns in general, the notion that the unifying center of a thing really does appear in the individual thing was denied. When I see this particular tree, therefore, all I see is the appearance of this particular tree. If any generalisations are to be made about it, they will have to come from the side of the subject. This means that the classical transcendental properties of Being—unity, truth, goodness, and beauty—must no longer be conceived as properties of Being, but as characteristics attributed to Being from the side of universal subjectivity. All postmodernity has to do to achieve nihilism, it would seem, is to deny any universal subjectivity. Postmodernism is not so much an alternative to modernism as its reductio.

We’ve strayed somewhat from our discussion of the direction of contemporary politics. But what I take Howsare to be arguing is that it was the Enlightenment’s denial of transcendence and objectivity that paved the way for the postmodernist critique that eventually sank its claims to universality: in other words, Enlightenment thinkers sowed the seeds of their own destruction. This makes it increasingly difficult to ground a critique of the creeping relativism and irrationalism of much contemporary political thinking in a call for a return to Enlightenment principles. What is needed instead, perhaps, is a deeper kind of return: to a way of thinking grounded in a sense of the sacred and of an objective moral order. (I can imagine the objections already being tapped out on the keyboards of my more secular-minded readers...)

These are the kinds of issues I find myself wrestling with these days, as I struggle to find new foundations for my political thinking, and an alternative to the Enlightenment rationalism that has been the source of my politics for so long. I’m going to make a determined effort to use this blog, once again, as a vehicle for working out what I think. You may notice some changes – in the kinds of themes and issues I discuss, the sources I turn to, and the links that appear in my sidebar. If you were a fan of the ‘old’ Martin In The Margins, you may not find the new incarnation quite to your taste, in which case you should feel free to move on and I shan't be offended. But I rather hope you’ll stick around and share the next stage of the journey.

Christian anti-Zionism: an update

You wait ages for a clear example of growing Christian hostility to Israel to come along - as evidence of a new anti-Zionism in the churches - and then two arrive together. In my two-part post before Christmas, I used an article in the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, itself inspired by Oxfam’s current campaign focused on Gaza, as the starting-point for my analysis of the reasons behind the increase in anti-Israel sentiment among Christians. But barely a week had passed before news emerged about an even more egregious instance of partisan ecclesiastical posturing on the Middle East: Bethlehem Unwrapped, a Christmas ‘festival’ at St James’ church in Piccadilly, which had as its centrepiece what purported to be a lifesize replica of the ‘separation wall’ surrounding the ancient city.

I don’t propose to offer my own critique of this controversial campaign here, except to say that it seems to me to be guilty of precisely the same sins of which I accused Elena Curti’s Tablet article, the Oxfam Gaza campaign, and (some time ago) the ‘If Greenbelt was Gaza’ event. That’s to say, the festival at St James’ manifests the same obsessive focus on the supposed sins of the Jewish state to the exclusion of all other contemporary issues; its treatment of the issue is appallingly one-sided, dishonest and misleading; and it completely obscures, and indeed shows no interest in the voices and perspectives of Israelis, and in particular of the Jewish victims of Palestinian terrorism.

There’s no need for me to say any more, since others have already responded with far greater eloquence than I’m capable of. Douglas Murray bemoans the ‘absolute moral squalor’ represented by the installation at St James’, reminding us that the church has form on this issue, having previously hosted an event where participants sang ‘versions of carols which decry the Jewish state’. (‘Once in royal David’s city / Stood a big apartheid wall’ ran one particularly execrable parody.) Murray condemns the obvious one-sidedness of the current campaign, in which ‘the visitor is invited to believe that all the problems of Bethlehem’s Christians today stem from Israel’s security fence’, while no reference is made to the fact that ‘Christians are being gradually cleansed from their historic homeland by Muslim Palestinians,’ or to the wave of persecution of Christians in every other country in the region except Israel.

Barry Shaw takes up the theme of the problems faced by the Arab Christians of Bethlehem, since control of the city was handed over to the Palestinian Authority, ranging from death threats to actual physical violence from Muslim extremists. Barry comments:

How sad it is that this church, the British Methodist Church, and many other Christian leaders are blindsided in their pursuit of a perceived Jewish enemy that they fail to come to the rescue, or campaign for, their co-religionists, persecuted by those who they actively and expensively support. 

Melanie Phillips has written an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, wondering how he can reconcile the message of love in his Christmas Day sermon ‘with the fact that one of your churches, St James’s Piccadilly, chose Christmas to turn itself into a church of hate?’ Listing the lies about the security ‘wall’ embodied in the church’s campaign, Philips describes the ‘stunt’ at St James’ as part of a ‘wider anti-Israel bigotry in your church’, going far beyond this particular campaign.

One of the most powerful responses to the wall has been from Kay Wilson, the victim of a horrific Palestinian terror attack two years ago that left her friend Kristine Luken dead. She has written a letter to the organisers of the campaign, in which she describes the fake wall as ‘hopefully just a result of your own ignorance and generalisations concerning the complex situation here in the Middle East.’ Wilson adds:

Nevertheless, like all walls, it serves as a facade and a barrier. If your wall was scrutinised, one would see that underneath the whitewashed surface that concerns itself with Israeli policies, there are blocks of anti-Semitism.

Denis MacEoin has also written to the ministers of St James’ church, and his letter is notable for its generosity of spirit and for going out of its way to understand the motivation behind the campaign - but it’s no less scathing for that. Having acknowledged the positive work that St James has done in the past, Denis goes on to excoriate the church for having constructed ‘a mendacious wall on its premises in order to make an ignominious political point, something I would not have believed your church capable of. It is mendacious because it pretends the entire separation is a wall, when the wall covers about 1%. It is mendacious because it does not mention the 30 or so security walls and fences that have been built by other countries, many much longer than Israel’s.’

Denis continues:

It is mendacious because it carries no message to explain why it is there, when it is explicitly there to deter violent attacks from the West Bank into Israel. It is mendacious because it carries no statement alerting onlookers to the fact that the barrier has already saved thousands of lives. Or does saving lives really not matter to Christians? Or are Jewish lives not as important as the lives of suicide bombers and other terrorists? If you seek fairness ­and I suspect you do in a muddled way ­why did you not contact the Israeli embassy, who could have loaned you something apposite: a bus, on board which passengers died when a suicide bomber detonated himself?

Finally, Alan Johnson of BICOM took part in a debate at the climax of the Bethlehem Unwrapped festival last Saturday (transcript not yet available, as far as I know), and also debated Rev Lucy Winkett, rector of St James on BBC Radio 4's Sunday programme - the segment starts about 37 minutes into the programme.

An update on the update (8th January): You can read an abbreviated version of Alan Johnson's powerful contribution to the end-of-festival debate here.

Understanding the new Christian anti-Zionism: Part 2

In the previous post I wrote about an example of the growing hostility towards Israel among Christian groups. In this post, I want to suggest a number of factors that might explain this phenomenon. But what about my title: is it really fair to talk about a new Christian anti-Zionism? We’ve become used to talking about (and laughing at) Christian Zionists: those rather odd, mostly American fundamentalists who support Israel uncritically because they believe the return of the Jews to their homeland is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a sign of the coming End Times. But Christian anti-Zionism – does such a thing really exist?

Let’s be clear. What I’m talking about here is not the occasional criticism of particular Israeli government policies. Rather, as I noted in the last post, I’m concerned with some Christian groups’ persistent and obsessive focus on the Israel/Palestine issue, to the exclusion of more serious human rights abuses and instances of human suffering elsewhere in the world. And, in focusing on that issue, the wilful tendency to take the side of Israel’s enemies and to characterise Israel in a way that comes close to undermining its legitimacy.

So what explains the growing strength of this attitude among Christians? Here, in no particular order, are some of the factors I think are at play:

Missionary guilt

Much of the recent hostility to Israel comes from liberal Christians who have imported from their counterparts on the secular Left a view of the world that is largely motivated by post-colonial guilt. The anti-imperialist Left is driven by a powerful desire to disavow the West’s colonial past, and in the process they tend to blame the developed world for the problems of its former colonies. Just as Victorian imperialists saw the world through a simple binary framework –  West good, the rest bad – so their anti-imperialist successors simply reverse the poles and adopt a worldview in which Britain, Europe and the US are the source of all that is wrong with the world, and the once oppressed ‘Others’ – whether African, Asian or Arab – are innocent and passive victims. But liberal Christians overlay this secular Left perspective with what we might call post-missionary guilt, which drives a constant quest to compensate for their predecessors’ imposition (as they see it) of western values on the rest of the world. At the same time, some progressive Christians share with some secular liberals a certain weariness and disillusionment with modern, consumerist western society and a tendency to idealise, exoticise and romanticise the non-western world (the much-missed Madeleine Bunting of the Guardian was the mouthpiece par excellence of this tendency).

Liberal Christians, like their secular counterparts, make the mistake of imposing this simplistic, bipolar framework on the Middle East conflict, and reducing a complex historical dispute with multiple causes to a black-and-white case of a white-ish, western-looking nation oppressing a non-white, non-western ‘indigenous’ group. Anything that doesn’t fit into this model – such as the long history of Jewish residence in Palestine, or Arab anti-Semitism – is simply excluded from the narrative.

Heroes and villains

Layered on top of this is a specifically Christian tendency to moralise political issues. What I mean is that some religious people, when intervening in political debates, tend to look for parties who can act as simple carriers of good and evil, praise and blame. In a moralised universe, any situation that is unjust must have a party that is responsible for the injustice and can be prophetically preached against, and a victim who can act as the object of Christian pity and charity. This kind of moralising discourse is not much use in political situations where there are multiple shades of grey and where there isn’t a single, straightforward root cause. Thus there is no room in this approach for the kind of complex chain of causation one finds in the Middle East – no room for an acceptance that the Palestinians might have brought some of their sufferings on themselves, by their refusal to recognise Israel’s right to exist, by deliberately failing to resettle refugees in order to shame Israel, or by carrying out attacks that precipitated the building of a security fence. 

As in secular anti-imperialist thinking, there is a reluctance in Christian anti-Zionist discourse to attribute agency to the victim group – in this case, the Palestinians. If Palestinians act in a particular way – whether throwing stones at Israeli soldiers or blowing up Israeli bus passengers – it must be because they are ‘reacting’ to something that Israel has previously done. As Pascal Bruckner has written, this refusal to allow non-western peoples their own autonomous motivation is a kind of narcissism (everything is about ‘us’ – the ‘west’ ). And as I’ve noted before, it’s ironically a kind of post-colonial racism, a refusal to allow the ‘other’ to be anything but a pure victim.

I had a friend at university who was one of the nicest people you could hope to meet. He was a Christian of a very undogmatic kind, from a public school background, and known for his acts of selfless generosity. But he shocked me when he argued that the problem with socialism was that it would do away with the need for charity. So working-class people needed to remain poor, just so that people like him could be charitable towards them! Something similar seems to be going on with Christian attitudes to Israel/Palestine: it’s as though the Palestinians are the latest group that are required to play the role of pure victims in a certain kind of Christian narrative. Dare I say that this sometimes seems to be more about Christians (and others) needing to feel sympathetic and righteously indignant than about the real needs of the objects of their pity?

Sacred and secular

As well as simplifying the Israel/Palestine issue by moralising it, some Christian groups also misrepresent it by ‘sacralising’ it – by turning it into a religious argument. Christian commentators on the conflict are often quick to move it on to religious territory, where they clearly feel more at home. Their first rhetorical move is to assume that the justification for Israel’s existence is purely religious, and that this is how Israelis justify both the foundation of their state and their government’s current policies, including occupation of the disputed territories, a.k.a. the West Bank. Having made that assumption, they can draw on their biblical knowledge and theological resources to take that argument apart, and fulminate about misinterpretation and misuse of holy Scripture. At the same time, they can paint Israelis as intolerant religious fundamentalists drawing on an outdated understanding of the Bible (unlike open-minded progressive Christians, of course).

The only problem with this line of argument is that, at least in my experience, Israelis and supporters of Israel very rarely draw on religious arguments to justify their state’s existence or actions. Perhaps a few ultra-Orthodox fundamentalists might do so, but the most common arguments for Israel are determinedly secular – based on the longstanding presence of Jews in the land, the need for a refuge from persecution, whether in Europe or Arab countries, and the right to a homeland of their own. Having recourse to religious discourse in this way seems like a neat way of sidestepping those compelling secular arguments, and moving the argument on to territory where you think you can put one over on the other side.

Not ‘getting’ it

This brings us on to another factor that I often think is influential in shaping current Christian attitudes to Israel. To put it simply, I think a lot of Christians just don’t ‘get’ Israel, and if they do, they don’t really like what they see. What I mean is that modern, pluralist and fairly secular Israel doesn’t fit some Christians’ image of what the Holy Land should be like. Hence the desperate need to squeeze Israel into a pre-determined religious framework that doesn’t quite fit. Israel was fine, on this view, when it was full of noble pioneers sharing their worldly goods in kibbutzes, but it’s not so easy to identify with its people now that, in many ways, they’re just like us. We’re back to that need for the ‘Other’ to fit the stereotypical image that we’ve created for them. By becoming modern and westernised, the Jews have foregone the right to play the part of the idealised Other, so Christians (like secular Leftists) need to look for another group that can be romanticised: step forward 'the Palestinians'.

And we shouldn’t forget that many Christians just don’t ‘get’ Jews, generally. A lot of Christians don’t know any Jewish people and find it hard to understand Jewishness: is it a religion, a race, what is it? I write as someone who grew up in a suburban Methodist setting and didn’t meet a single Jewish person until I went away to university: I remember having many of the same questions, and experiencing the same puzzlement, about what it meant to be Jewish. In the gap created by this ignorance, there’s inevitably a tendency for lazy stereotypes to form.

And that brings us on finally to…

The ‘a’ word

No, I don’t think that the current spate of Christian hostility to Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic. However, I do think that as Christian hostility to the Jewish state increases, it’s something we can’t avoid talking about. The legacy of Christian anti-Semitism is so deep, of such long duration, and so recently disavowed, that I think Christians should be extremely careful that ancient, barely-submerged attitudes don’t get inadvertently drawn on when criticising what is, after all, the world's only Jewish state. We're back to my starting-point: if we're not going to use the 'a' word, how else are we to describe this singular focus on Israel's supposed sins and this one-sided refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Israeli perspective? I'll leave the last word to the late Norm Geras, writing in a 2009 blogpost about attitudes to Israel's actions in Gaza:

In the outpouring of hatred towards Israel today, it scarcely matters what part of it is impelled by a pre-existing hostility towards Jews as such and what part by a groundless feeling that the Jewish state is especially vicious among the nations of the world and to be obsessed about accordingly. Both are forms of anti-Semitism. The old poison is once again among us.

(You can find Part One of this post here)

Understanding the new Christian anti-Zionism: Part 1

Now that I’ve resumed more or less regular posting, I can keep a longstanding promise. A few years ago I wrote about Greenbelt, the annual Christian music festival, its obsession with the situation in Gaza, and what I saw as its worryingly one-sided representation of that issue. In the course of the debate that followed in the 'comments', I undertook to write something that would try to explain the increasing hostility to Israel among some Christian groups. I felt I was in a good position to do this, both because of my own Christian background, and because I used to be fairly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel myself. This is the first post in a two-part series in which I'll try to fulfil that commitment.

In the period since I wrote that post, attitudes have, if anything, hardened, with anti-Israel campaigning migrating from fringe groups to the mainstream churches. A recent example of this was the Methodist Church seriously debating whether to boycott Israeli goods and institutions – something that particularly aggrieved me, as someone brought up in the Methodist tradition but who is also a critical friend and supporter of Israel.

As I was casting about for a text on which to base this post, the latest issue of the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, dropped fortuitously through the letter box, bearing this front cover:

The cover image promoted a major story inside the magazine by Elena Curti, describing the sufferings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Taken together, it seems to me that the image and the story exemplify many of the key components of recent Christian attitudes to the issue of Israel/Palestine. Let’s start with that photo, which is typical of a certain kind of pro-Palestinian iconography. The whole complicated and intractable conflict is reduced to, and symbolised by, two figures: Israel is represented by an armed soldier, the Palestinians by a young child. Not only that, but the child is foregrounded and looking at the camera, as if making a direct appeal to the reader, while the soldier is lurking in the background, hand-in-pocket, nonchalant and impersonal. 

It’s pretty clear what this is supposed to tell us: the Israelis are the aggressors, while Palestinians are simply innocent victims. It’s not that the image is necessarily ‘untrue’, but it’s obviously partial and selective. Think, for example, of the very different meanings that might have been conveyed by a photograph of Israeli children cowering under school desks during a Palestinian rocket attack. Or imagine if, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a magazine had carried a picture on its cover of a Catholic child walking past a British soldier. Readers might justifiably have felt that the image represented a simplistic and one-sided view of the conflict, sidelining IRA atrocities and the reasons why British soldiers were present in the first place.

Similarly, my problem with Curti’s article in The Tablet is not that what she writes - about the everyday sufferings of Palestinians as a result of the separation fence and the occupation - is necessarily a lie. I’m not qualified to dispute the substance of the piece, and indeed that’s not really the point of this post. But there are a number of things that are remarkable about the article, and I think they are typical of much recent Christian coverage of the issue. Firstly, there's an exclusive focus on the sufferings of the Palestinians. There's not a word about the sufferings inflicted on innocent Israelis by the aforementioned rocket attacks from Gaza, or by suicide bombers targeting restaurants and buses – the very actions that prompted the need for the security fence and the restrictions on goods entering Gaza in the first place. Nor is the mainstream Israeli point of view given any space in the article: the only Israelis whose voices get represented are a fringe group who oppose their government’s policy. Curti makes not the slightest attempt to provide a balanced perspective, or to put the suffering of Palestinians in any kind of wider context. You’ll search in vain here, not only for any reference to the ongoing campaign of aggression against Israel by Hamas, but also for any mention of the tons of supplies allowed into Gaza by Israel every day, or to the blockade of Gaza by its other neighbour, Egypt, or indeed to the sufferings inflicted on ordinary Palestinians by the increasingly authoritarian regime of Hamas.

And then there’s the underlying question: why choose to put Gaza on the front cover and make it your lead story at this particular time? I suppose one explanation is that Christians have an understandable interest in the Holy Land, especially at this time of year, and stories that try to find parallels between the Nativity story and the current situation there have become a staple of Christmas coverage – often, it has to be said, with a simplistic anti-Israel inflection. The more immediate pretext for the Tablet story is that Gaza is the focus of this year’s Christmas campaign by Christian Aid. If you follow the link to the charity's website, you’ll find further evidence of Christian obsession with the issue, and yet more one-sided treatment of it. On the day that I read this article in The Tablet, the television news was dominated by images of the desperate plight of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, as winter temperatures begin to plummet. One wonders why this urgent issue, or the continuing need of the victims of the floods in the Philippines, or any of the other myriad and more pressing needs around the world, are not the concern of Christian Aid this Christmas – rather than yet another campaign focused on Gaza, in which a complex conflict is reduced to a cartoon in which Israel is the only bad guy?

How are we to explain this current Christian obsession with Israel/Palestine, often to the exclusion of other more urgent issues? I’ve already suggested one reason – the natural concern of Christians with the land which gave birth to their faith – but this hardly accounts for the increasingly partial and one-sided attitude to the issue shown by Christian churches, charities and campaigning organisations. In the next post, I’ll share my personal analysis of the reasons for this emerging Christian anti-Zionism.

(You can find Part 2 of this post here)