Dexter Van Zile26 Elul 5783 – September 12, 2023
Western intellectuals on the Left generally view the external history of Europe and North America as a bloody trip of displacement, genocide, and oppression. Western colonialists are somehow more evil than others. In the Middle East, this means leftist intellectuals see Israelis and Palestinians through the lenses of guilt, remorse, and self-hate, themes all three books under review richly manifest. Indeed, they embody the very worst elements of storytelling about Christian support for Israel.
In Palestine in the Victorian Age, Polley, a London-based activist who received a Ph.D. in 2020 studying under Ilan Pappé at the University of Exeter, documents how Protestants from England and the United States wrote about the Holy Land during the mid-to-late-1800s. In Polley’s words, these Protestants with “Holy Land on the Brain” wrote about Palestine to affirm their pre-existing ideas about the reliability of the Bible and the superiority of the Protestant faith over Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism. In so doing, he argues, they prepared the ground for the establishment of the Jewish state, which he believes dispossessed the local Arab population of their rights in the land. In Polley’s account, what started out in the 1850s as a “Peaceful Crusade,” paved the way for catastrophe—Israel’s establishment—a century later.
Polley begins by describing the work of American Biblical scholar Edward Robinson, (1794-1863) who, in 1838, traveled to and studied the region with the help of his colleague American missionary Eli Smith. In his travels and the texts that resulted from them, Robinson exhibited disdain for Catholic and Orthodox holy sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Instead, he looked to the empty spaces and deserted villages to find archeological links to locations mentioned in the Old Testament and, thus, affirm the accuracy of the Bible. By asserting Jewish ties to the Holy Land, according to Polley, Robinson’s writings legitimized the return of Jews to Palestine and the ultimate establishment of a Jewish state.
Polley claims Robinson worked to “obscure Palestine’s non-Biblical history” (i.e., its Muslim history) by falsely asserting, for example, that “the sculpted lions on the Lion’s Gate in the eastern wall of the Old City ‘[show] at least that it was not originally the work of Muhammedans.’” He reached this conclusion about the Ottoman-era sculptures based “on the unfounded belief that all Islamic art was nonfigurative.” Other travelers, Polley recounts, superimposed visions of the Second Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount when gazing at the Haram al-Sharif, thereby, in his words, predating
by over a century the post-1967 efforts of right-wing settler organizations to rouse support for the construction of a third temple in the Haram, backed by some American Evangelicals.
Polley also accuses English Protestants of using the 1856 Nablus uprising to promote anti-Muslim bigotry. He finds that writers used the uprising, precipitated by the death of a young boy at the hands of Anglican missionary Samuel Lyde, to portray Muslims in the Holy Land as preternaturally violent and hostile as the uprising resulted in the deaths of several local Christians and the ransacking of local churches. According to Polley, the response to the uprising was what he anachronistically describes as “Islamophobic” because Western commentators doubted that a missionary was guilty of murder. The author laments that Muslims had no chance to explain themselves.
Polley’s logic invokes a supposedly bad act perpetrated by a Westerner to excuse Muslim violence against religious minorities in the Middle East. Thus, he suggests that anti-Christian violence in Nablus resulted from outrage over Western advocacy for the rights of Christians, who as dhimmis were subjected to mistreatment under Ottoman rule. Polley characterizes this outrage as European “imperialism of the Tanzimat.” In Polley’s schema, efforts to improve the status of beleaguered Christians in an environment of Muslim supremacism and privilege amounted to Western colonialism and supremacism, which justified Muslim rage.
Some Christians portray Western support for Israel as a cause of anti-Christian violence in the Middle East.
This logic parallels that used to excuse Islamist violence against religious minorities in the modern era. Some Western and indigenous Christians, for example, portray Western support for Israel as a cause of anti-Christian violence in the Middle East. At the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference in Bethlehem in 2014, American missionary Joseph Cumming declared that Westerners must understand
that when Christians in the West are supporting an occupation which Muslims see as unjust, some Muslims … will react against that by taking out their hostility on innocent Arab Christians.[1]
Under this logic, asking Muslim rulers to protect or tolerate the rights of religious minorities encourages legitimate (or at least understandable) violence against said minorities.
Polley, Cumming, and the authors reviewed portray Muslim violence as a variable dependent solely on Western misdeeds and not a result of Islamic doctrine or Muslim agency.
Polley suggests that problems in the Holy Land accelerated when Christian theological support for Jewish settlement in the Holy Land changed to a more practical approach geared toward serving British interests in the Levant. He focuses on Laurence Oliphant (1829-88), a former member of the British parliament. Oliphant, who served briefly as superintendent of tribal affairs for the British government in Quebec, wrote about the U.S. government’s dealings with its indigenous population in an 1855 book, Minnesota and the Far West.[2] In it, he approved of policies that forced Indian tribes to assimilate into the U.S. economy and culture. To Polley’s dismay, Oliphant then promoted similar policies toward Bedouins in the Levant. Rendering Oliphant more sinister, Polley portrays off-hand remarks about the beauty of Druze women as “a product of his deeply repressed sexuality.”
Polley argues that the writings he surveys may not have reached wide audiences but still had a significant impact on English policy. In his view, they paved the way for the Balfour Declaration, thereby becoming “active partners” in the destruction of Palestine. Thus does Polley rehearse Edward Said’s Orientalism,[3] which came out forty-five years ago and portrays Western writings on the Middle East as a crucial component of Western imperialism.
Content retrieved from: https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/dvz/biden-courts-iran-as-it-wages-a-multi-front-war-on-the-u-s/2023/09/12/.