UNIVERSAL JUSTICE: IN DEFENSE OF OFFICIAL CATHOLIC ZIONISM* By Drew Christiansen, S. J. Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Global Human Development

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1 UNIVERSAL JUSTICE: IN DEFENSE OF OFFICIAL CATHOLIC ZIONISM* By Drew Christiansen, S. J. Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Global Human Development Since I last spoke here in April there have been many developments on the Israeli-Palestinian front: The Israeli Knesset passed a fundamental law formally establishing Israel as a Jewish State; there has been ongoing fighting over Gaza; the Trump Administration repeatedly announced it would release its peace plan; it has also gutted financial support to the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA, and liberal activists sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have been extensively interrogated or denied admission to Israel at border crossings. The Crisis of Zionism, dividing Israelis from the majority of Diaspora Jews, announced six years ago by Peter Beinart, has deepened. 1 Then, on Monday in a thunderous act of anti-palestinian hostility, the U.S. announced the expulsion of the Palestinian mission in Washington, and National Security Advisor John Bolton delivered a diatribe against the International Criminal Court, where Palestine is bringing charges against Israel. Unnoticed in this barrage of Israeli/U.S. assaults on the Palestinian cause has been a Philo-Judaic challenge to the Catholic Church s stance toward the State of Israel, which one proponent calls Minimum Catholic Zionism. 1

2 Minimal Catholic Zionism Drawing on the Second Vatican Council s Declaration on Non- Christian Religions, Nostra aetate (1965), Bristol University s Gavin D Costa in a January interview with the British journal The Tablet argued that the Council s affirmation of the continuing validity of the promises made to ancient Israel should extend to the aspiration of today s Jews for the Land (Eretz Yisrael). 2 It worries about the official Vatican position which distinguishes religious relations with the Jewish people from political-diplomatic interactions with the State of Israel. 3 Then, in a March 3 article in The Tablet, under the title Search for the Promised Land, Professor D Costa gave puzzling treatment to the Holy See s premise that relations with the State of Israel are a matter for diplomacy defined by international law rather than a matter for religious warrant. 4 Christian Palestinians question the application of the biblical promise to today s Israel. In his 1993 pastoral letter Reading the Bible in the Land of the Bible, Patriarch Emeritus Michel Sabbah asked, Does the Bible, as the Word of God, give the right to the Jewish people today to appropriate the land for themselves and, in so doing, to dispossess the Palestinian people? 5 Drawing on the religious history of the two peoples and three religions, Patriarch Sabbah turned the tables on the idea of the Promised Land. Today, if one of the three religions were to claim, in the name of religion, a political right to the land, he wrote, then the other two religions would have the same right, to the same 2

3 claim, for the same reason They are all descendants, physical or spiritual of Abraham, to whom God promised the Land. 6 In fact, D Costa takes steps to distance himself from extremist Zionist positions in Israel and America. He accepts much of the Vatican position: that borders should be settled by negotiation in conformity with international law, for example, and that the freedom of Jerusalem should be ensured by international guarantees. 7 He even concedes that a Palestinian homeland is a matter of justice, granting that it is as important as the Church s rapprochement with Judaism. 8 In their 11 th pastoral letter released at Pentecost this year, the Council of Catholic Patriarchs of the Middle East wrote about Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. Friendship with the Palestinian people is not a difficult thing, they wrote. It means treating them on the basis of justice, equality, international resolutions, and the exigencies of the Palestinian people, which are the least a people can ask--to live in their own land (Translation mine.) 9 Those elements of justice are missing from today s radical Zionism. In biblical theology, however, justice was essential to covenantal Judaism, and ancient Israel s failure to act justly was repeatedly at the root of the people s alienation from God. 10 With a view to the last 70 years of Israeli-Palestinian history, the last 30 years of settler expansion, and the warrant for further expansion in the new fundamental law making Israel a Jewish state, observers must ask how firm and deep is Professor D Costa s acceptance of the justice elements of Catholic position. 3

4 I. A Theological Response In the brief time allotted me, I would like to make a rejoinder to Minimal Catholic Zionism in two parts: First, I will sketch a biblical theological argument for the official Catholic position on religious warrants attached to claims for the Land. I will make the case that post-exilic Judaism and the New Testament provide backing for a non-exclusivist, universalist understanding of the Land. Secondly, I will trace the groundwork for a theological understanding of the Vatican s diplomatic approach to today s State of Israel rooted in universal human rights. (1) Jewish-Christian Universalism I am conscious that the issue of the Land in Christian theology is more complicated than I have the opportunity to elaborate here. 11 There are universalistic elements in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, but they are overshadowed by the exclusivist texts. By contrast the post-exilic prophets have a universalistic vision of Jerusalem and the Land. The prophetic view with justice at its center, I would underscore, is held by the majority of American Jews today. 12 For Prophetic Judaism and Christianity universalism is the prevailing outlook. As my late confrere Bill Spohn used to say that during the exile Jews, deprived of the land, had to learn to live with God in a new way. That new way is summed up in Jesus reply to the Samaritan Women, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this 4

5 mountain (Mt. Gerizim) nor in Jerusalem... God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth (Jn. 4: 21, 24). After the exile and return, prophetic Judaism re-envisaged the Land as the stage for the salvation of all peoples. All the nations of the earth will stream to it/ many peoples will come to it, reads Isaiah (2:2). 13 Psalm 87 is the high point of this tradition. It reads in part: Among those who know me I mention Rahab, Babylon; Behold, Philistia and Tyre with Ethiopia This one was born there, they say. (Ps. 87:4) One translation reads, Jerusalem is our mother. The inclusion of Babylon and Philistia, Israel s historic enemies, illustrate how allinclusive the prophetic vision of the Promised Land, represented by Mt. Zion, is. Christian Zionists would do well to learn and adopt prophetic universalism as the proper Christian form of Zionism. While there is evidence that early on Jesus understood his mission to be to the lost sheep of Israel (Mt. 15:24), the burden of the New Testament is also universalistic. People will come from east and west and north and south, reads Luke s Gospel, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God (Lk. 13:29). In continuity with the post-exilic prophetic tradition Election is transmuted into a universal call, and the virtues of the Land are transferred to the eschatological Kingdom of God where justice rules. Justice, the bond of the covenant, is now to be realized 5

6 among the people gathered in the new family of God gathered around Jesus. What seems lacking in D Costa s Minimal Catholic Zionist position, however, is not only the prophetic shift to universal inclusion, but also the acknowledgement of the countless acts of injustice against the Palestinian people perpetrated over the last seventy years and more. Israel today is not a covenantal state, but instead the projection of human will in keeping with Revisionist Ze ev Jabotinsky s Iron Wall strategy on which a Jewish ethnocracy is being constructed. 14 The ethnocratic character of the state is emphatically evident in the new Basic Law [of] Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People by virtue of its authorization of unlimited Jewish settlement of Palestinian territory. 15 (2) A Political Theology of the Diplomatic Option Catholic theology, in contrast to Evangelical thought, does not draw exclusively on biblical sources for its justifications. It draws equally on tradition and especially church teaching. The two documents that establish the basis for Vatican diplomacy, including treaties with Israel, Palestine and Jordan, are Vatican II s Gaudium et spes, the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, and Dignitatis humanae, the Declaration on Religious Liberty. 16 The two documents affirm that the object of all government is the defense and promotion of human dignity through the protection of human rights. 17 They likewise insist on the equality of all before the law. 18 The Declaration on Religious Liberty, moreover, stresses that religious liberty must be understood in light of the complex of 6

7 rights that give public form to human dignity. 19 Nostra aetate, Vatican II s Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, I submit, should not be read on its own. It ought to be read in light of centrality of human rights to The Declaration on Religious Liberty and the Vatican Council s fundamental commitment to serve the world through the defense of human rights. 20 Accordingly, any Catholic who would grant priority to members of one religious tradition over others, as Minimal Catholic Zionism would do, is out of tune with the mind of the Council. 21 Catholic affection for the Jewish people and our respect for the historic blessings they once received need to be understood in light of modern human-rights thinking and the prophetic universalism that stands behind it. It twists Catholic teaching to argue that the promises given the Jewish people in antiquity provides warrant to ignore concrete injustices committed by Zionists against the Palestinian people from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. Overlooking the actual history of Israeli-Palestinian relations becomes a tacit authorization for the ongoing expropriation of Palestinian lands, the diminishment of Palestinian rights, and potentially the expulsion or transfer of the Palestinian people from their land. 22 To paraphrase the prophet Jeremiah, Minimal Catholic Zionists may cry Justice, justice, but there is no justice. 7

8 *This paper was presented as a panel presentation for a forum on Palestinian Christians at Georgetown University s Awaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding September 12, See Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism (Holt/Times, 2009). 2 The relevant passage from Nostra aetate, no. 4, drawing on Rom. 9:4-5) reads: the Church ever keeps in mind... the covenant, the legislation (the Law), and the worship and the promises... The D Coste interview appeared in the January 13 issue of The Tablet. See 3 See Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews, Notes on the Correct Way to Present Jews and Judaism in preaching and catechesis of the Catholic Church (1975), VI. 1, which in a laconic passage reads: The existence of the State of Israel and its political options should be envisaged not in a perspective which is in itself religious, but in their reference to the common principles of international law. 4 On the challenge of Minimal Catholic Zionism, see 5 Sabbah, Reading the Bible in the Land of the Bible in Michel Sabbah, Faithful Witness: On Reconciliation and Peace in the Holy Land, Drew Christiansen, S. J. and Saliba Sarsar, eds. (New City, 2009), no Ibid. 7 Gavin D Costa, Search for the Promised Land, The Tablet, 4 Mar 18, 8. 8 Ibid. 9 Council of Patriarchs of the Middle East, Eleventh Pastoral Letter, Les chretiens d Orient aujourd hui: appréhensions et espérances, 20 May 2018, no The centrality of justice to the covenant is a leitmotiv in Karen Armstrong s Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (Knopf, 1996). 11 See Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge, Second Edition (Augsburg, 2002) and W. D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (California, 1974). For a contemporary secular Jewish perspective on the issues, see Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolution and Religious Counter-revolution (Yale, 2015). 12 See Beinart, note 1 above. 13 Also, see Is. 56: 6-8, 60:11-14; Zec. 8: 20-23). 14 On Zabotinsky and the Revisionist basis of Israel territorial policy, see Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Norton, 2001). For cases of Zionist land-grabbing before Israeli independence, see Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Penguin, 2007). For a rich description of the ethnocratic dimensions of Israel s development, see Jo Roberts, Contested Land, Contested People: Israel s Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe (Dundurn, 2013). 15 See 16 For three of these treaties (The Fundamental Agreement with Israel, 1993; the Legal Personality Agreement, 1999, and the Basic Agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization, 2000), see Marshall J. Breger, ed., The Vatican-Israel Accords: Political, Legal and Theological Contexts (Notre Dame, 2004). The Basic Agreement with the PLO was succeeded in 2015 by The Comprehensive Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Palestine. See 8

9 17 Gaudium et spes (Henceforth, GS), no. 73, and Dignitatis humanae, (Henceforth, DH) nos. 1, GS, no. 29, and DH, no DH, no G.S., no See 22 On Israeli dispossession of Palestinians from the Land, see Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (OneWorld/Oxford, 2006). The provision of the new law declaring Israel the state of the Jewish people authorizing the expansion of West Bank settlements is the extension of this century-long campaign. In addition, see Jo Roberts, Contested Land, note 11 above. 9