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)

Lost in translation

The BBC’s Hugh Schofield wonders why French books – and especially modern French novels – don’t sell abroad. This is in spite of the fact that France has a thriving literary culture, and despite the popularity of books translated into English from other European languages, notably Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. The authors and readers interviewed by Schofield propose various reasons, ranging from the supposed elitism and intellectualism of French literary culture to the unexciting covers of French novels, and on the other side, the laziness and misconceptions of Anglophone publishers and readers.

I actually quite like French book covers, as well as French bookshops, which are described rather dismissively as ‘cramped and colourless’ in Schofield’s piece. Those unadorned cream covers, enlivened only by the author’s photograph, are surely what makes a book distinctively French - it wouldn’t look right to have a French novel that wasn’t in that familiar Flammarion, Gallimard or Livre de Poche style. I can see a number from where I’m sitting (see photo below), and they bring a breath of the Left Bank into the room. As for French bookshops, I’m rather fond of their uniform rows of identical-looking volumes and studiously highbrow demeanour – all very un-Waterstones, and long may it continue.

I wonder if the absence of modern French writing from British and American shelves has something to do with the fact that the small publisher Harvill (absorbed first into Harvill Secker and more recently into Random House), which was largely responsible in the post-war years for introducing English-speaking readers to contemporary European writers, had a bias towards other countries, such as Portugal, Russia, and the old Eastern bloc - or was it just that there happened to be a number of brilliant translators available from those nations? But then I've just remembered that Harvill published the detective stories of Daniel Pennac, so maybe I've got that wrong. (Perhaps my brother Michael, who used to work for Harvill, will read this and be able to help out here).


Whatever the explanation, Hugh Schofield is basically right in his assessment that a great deal of contemporary French literature remains untranslated into English. If a major Spanish author like Javier Marias or Javier Cercas brings out a new novel, you know it’ll only be a matter of time before an English translation appears, and that it will be enthusiastically picked up by the Sunday broadsheets, as well as by the LRB and New York Review of Books. But there’s rarely an equivalent process, or fuss, over a French literary success, apart from, as Schofield points out, the headline-grabbing Michel Houllebecq.


I confess to having a personal interest here, since I’ve developed a yearning to read a couple of recently-published French novels, and I’ve been frustrated at the absence of English translations. I discovered these books via one of my current favourite blogs – The Catholic English Teacher. I know it won’t appeal to my agnostic and atheist readers, but I think it’s one of the best literary blogs around - and I love the masthead. Despite the title, Roy Peachey, the blog’s author, is remarkably well-informed about a range of contemporary literatures in languages other than English, and especially in French. Having read his recommendations, I’m keen to track down L’art francais de la guerre by Alexis Jenni, which won the Prix Goncourt a couple of years ago, and also the work of Claire Daudin, who as well as being a prize-winning novelist is also an expert on Mauriac, Bernanos and Peguy. However, neither of these authors has yet had any of their writings translated into English.


There’s a particular pleasure in being able to read something, however brief – a short story, an article, a poem even – in the language in which it was written. But as it stands, my French isn’t quite up to it, despite the fact that I have an ‘A’ Level in the subject. You could see this as the fault of the British education system – a failure to teach languages so that people can actually use them – or a reflection of my own laziness and lack of linguistic flair. I did only get an ‘E’, after all. Mind you, I enjoyed sixth-form French: watching Mr Levine pacing back and forth, gesticulating expressively as he went into raptures over poetic passages from Zola.


As I mentioned in a recent post, I had a bit of a Mauriac phase around the time of our visit to Bordeaux last summer. As our driver, Marise, pointed out while transporting us from the station, Mauriac is one of the three local ‘M’s – the others being Montaigne and Montesquieu. My family mock my habit of having to read something by a local author wherever we go: it was Saramago in Lisbon, Hammett in San Francisco, etc.  On this occasion, I read Therese Desqueyroux before we left home, and Le Noeud de Viperes on the way back, both in English translations (sorry, can't seem to do the accents on Blogger). 
However, on our return I was keen to read more by Mauriac and searched online for a collection of his post-war political articles - or Bloc-Notes. (Mauriac, a devout Catholic, was nevertheless a staunch opponent of the Franco regime in Spain and a supporter of the French Resistance.) But I discovered that these were only available in the original French, and reading them has been a bit of a struggle, to say the least. (Those books in the photo above? They all belong to my Other Half, who was a much better student of French literature than I ever was.) 


And so I’ve gone back to basics. Since October I’ve been working my way through Hugo’s French in 3 Months, filling in the gaps created by failing memory. I’ve just reached the end, and after Christmas it’ll be on to the advanced course. Mind you, as I related last week, I made a similar resolution earlier this year with regard to Portuguese, and that fell by the wayside. And then there was the year I took a Pavese novel in the original Italian on holiday, but gave up after a couple of chapters. I love languages, and since childhood I’ve been deeply envious of those who were brought up to be bilingual, but I’m a bit of a magpie – I tend to know a little about a lot and don’t speak or read any single foreign language very well.  We’ll see how it goes.


So, when it comes to contemporary French literature, I’ll have to wait, either for my facility with the language to improve considerably, or for some enterprising small publisher (do they still exist?) to develop a line in translations of modern French novels. Either way, I think I’m going to have to be very patient.

Close encounters with New Left luminaries

This is a kind of footnote to my post about Stuart Hall and the Kilburn Manifesto. It prompted a couple of friends to share their memories of accidental meetings with Hall and other leading lights of the New Left.

First Tom Deveson:

A memory from about March 1967. I am invited out to lunch by Raymond Williams' son who lives on my staircase in Trinity. We arrive in the restaurant and the other people at the table are Raymond, Edward Thompson and Stuart Hall who are writing and proofreading the May Day Manifesto (first-ever version). I feel very young in their company - I was not yet nineteen. 

And from a different decade, Damian Counsell:

Weirdly, long before I met Norm, and completely by chance, I lived in NW6, first as a physics postgrad at Imperial, but also for some years afterwards, in a flat above Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who were both intellectual foes of Norm and personal mates with Stuart Hall. It was only when I first answered the door to Stuart Hall (a frequent visitor) with the immortal words: 'You're Stuart Hall, aren't you?' that I had any real idea who the people downstairs were.

Tom claims that Damian has the better punchline, but I think he's being modest. Tom's experience was surely equivalent to walking into the Red Lion in Great Windmill Street on an evening in 1848 and coming across Marx and Engels arguing over the wording of the Communist Manifesto. Or finding yourself, some time in April 1917, on the 3.15 to the Finland Station and watching an intense, goateed man in the seat opposite putting to the finishing touches to the speech he would make on his arrival.