Christianity today reviews three books on Israel, including Jimmy Carter’s execrable “analysis.”
Carter is not an anti-Jewish ideologue. His views are not irrational, they are just unbalanced—driven by an unquenchable private need for vindication. He cannot let go of the fact that the only part of his Camp David Accords of 1978-1979 which has lasted (and that just barely) is the achievement of a Peace Treaty and exchange of diplomatic recognition between Israel and Egypt. He proclaimed at the time that the three parties (the United States, Egypt, and Israel) were committed under the Accords to persuade the Palestinians and all the Arab nations to resolve their quarrel with Israel along parallel lines. Because Israeli and American opinion can be affected by the disquisitions of former presidents and because Arab opinion cannot, Carter has been working out his frustration regarding the failure of the larger hopes for “Middle East peace” against the former ever since, seeking to shame us all into setting things straight.
But Carter’s Camp David formula was built on a fantasy: that the Arab world’s complaint against Israel has to do with geography. The creation of the State of Israel is an intolerable reversal of the judgment of the Prophet Muhammad that, for their refusal to heed his voice, “humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them [the Jews] and they were visited with wrath from Allah” (Sura II: 61; cf., Sura III: 112). It is for this unforgivable assault on the credibility of Islam that Israel cannot be permitted to stand.
This one, on Cross on the Star of David: The Christian World in Israel’s Foreign Policy, 1948-1967, is fascinating.
Among the themes which figured in early dealings between Israeli authorities and the churches were titles to property, missionary activities, the right to run schools and other facilities, and the right of representatives of the churches who are not citizens to travel in and out of Israel or to reside and to work in Israel. Of interest to historians of foreign policy are the connections that Israeli authorities made between settlement of these local issues and the behavior of parent church bodies in Europe as well as attitudes of nation-states which had among their citizens large numbers of members of certain churches which in the past had behaved as their protectors.
The recorded exchanges between the many parties to these negotiations make for colorful reading. Even more colorful are internal memoranda and diary entries which Bialer has located and quoted. We are shown a great deal that is not pretty. Here is Foreign Minister Sharett on his negotiations with Vatican principals (from the pope down) over the latter’s refusal to recognize the State and its determination to wreck Israel’s chances for survival by imposing “international status” upon Jerusalem: “[This is for them] a matter of retribution, the squaring of an account concerning something that happened here in Jerusalem, if I am not mistaken, 1,916 years ago when Jesus was crucified… . [They are saying] that the Jews need to know once and for all what they did to us and now there is an opportunity to let them feel it.” Here is Cardinal Tardini, the Vatican’s Secretary of State: “I have always been convinced that there was no real need to establish that state… . Its existence is a constant source of danger of war in the Middle East. Now that Israel exists, there is, of course, no possibility of destroying it, but every day we pay the price of this mistake.” As for diplomacy: “There is no possibility of contact or negotiations with the killers of God.” This is the kind of history that grownups like, because it requires us to make our own judgments about motives and meaning.
I think that one should go on my reading list.