Human Trustees

After two cataclysmic world wars, over fifty nations gathered in San Francisco in April 1945 to create a new international organization, known as “the United Nations.” After two months of hard work, the UN Charter was written, which specifically called for the formation of three main bodies: a General Assembly, a Security Council, and an Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). It was ECOSOC that mandated a committee to draft a document that would clearly define the notion of human rights, spell them out, and then serve as a basis for future work to establish a body of international law.

Three years later, the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the General Assembly, with 48 members voting yes and none opposing it—though eight nations abstained. The very first paragraph of the UN Charter had been honored:

We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom . . .

The concept of international law goes back to treaties between nations of the ancient Middle East, but as a legal system, the idea was first developed by the Romans. Still, the notion of a world system consisting of sovereign states working together on some common rules and norms didn’t appear until the European Renaissance. Yet these discussions were mostly limited to questions of war, non-belligerence, and peace. Today’s concept of international law, as seen from the above quote, begins with the idea of human rights, “the dignity and worth of the human person,” which extends to “nations large or small,” and covers questions of justice and mutual respect along with a global effort to expand human flourishing. This was the great push for international development when decolonization was happening in real time.

What is known as the International Bill of Human Rights comprises the 1948 UDHR and the two treaties or covenants adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1966, the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Nations that have ratified these covenants are obliged to respect, protect, and fulfill these individual rights. Examples of negative rights would be that the State may not torture you or force a particular job on you; or stop people, businesses or political parties from using hate speech against you or your group. Examples of positive rights would be that the State holds private firms accountable to pay their employees a fair wage for their work and to pay men and women the same salary for the same work. Maybe one reason nations like the United States never ratified the ICESCR, is that it stipulates that the State “must provide budgets to make sure everyone can access medicines” and be able to afford decent housing.

The Swiss businessman Henri Dunant personally witnessed the carnage of the 1859 Battle of Solferino in Italy, which led him to found the International Red Cross and rally people behind a conference to draw up rules for modern war. This became the first Geneva Convention (1864), “for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field.” Another Geneva Convention in 1929 dealt with the treatment of prisoners of war, but all of this was updated and expanded in the 1949 Geneva Conventions ratified by 196 nations. It includes four conventions (treatment of the wounded; the victims of maritime warfare; treatment of prisoners; and for the first time, the treatment of civilians in wartime).

You may be wondering how all of this connects to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the May 14, 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, a shaky coalition of fighters from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon decided to invade. Deeply divided among themselves and distrustful of the Palestinian leadership, they were defeated by the Israelis in the matter of months. The resulting armistice agreements of 1949 allowed Israel to hold most of the British Mandate territory, while Egypt took over the administration of Gaza and Jordan that of the West Bank.

When hostilities heated up again with its Arab neighbors, Israel preempted their attack in June 1967 and won a decisive victory in 6 days (hence, “The Six-Day War” from their perspective). This time, Israel decided to hold on to Gaza and the West Bank and the small territory belonging to Syria, the Golan Heights. Then on November 22 of that year, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, calling on the Israelis to withdraw from these territories they now occupied militarily. Six years later, after the so-called Yom Kippur War (the Arabs attacked by surprise on the Jewish Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur), which Israel nearly lost, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 338, calling Israel to withdraw from those territories a second time.

Significantly, Resolution 242 asserted “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security.” Besides scores of resolutions over the years by the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council condemning Israel’s actions in the Occupied Territories (this was not possible in the UN Security Council, as the US routinely vetoes any resolution condemning Israel), the General Assembly adopted a resolution drafted by the Palestinians in September 2024, calling on Israel to end “its unlawful presence in Occupied Palestinian Territory” within 12 months. It passed with 124 votes in favor, 14 against, and 43 abstentions. This means almost two-thirds of the world’s nations favor a two-state solution to this ongoing crisis.

But it is not just continued military occupation that contravenes international law in the case of Israel (57 years so far), it’s also the transfer of its own population into that territory—this Amnesty International page provides a useful summary on the issue of Israeli settlements. In particular, it cites Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory.” The list of human rights violations and actions by the Israeli military that routinely breach international law on this page is breathtaking. We lived as a family in the West Bank for three years in the 1990s and I can attest as an eye witness to many of these indignities done to Palestinians. And these have only intensified and multiplied over the years.

But the barbarity of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the current war in Gaza goes beyond anything all of us could have imagined. The atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7^th, 2023, cannot justify in any way the collective punishment of a whole population by continuous bombing of civilian areas and dozens of forced transfers in various parts of Gaza since that day. Close to 90 percent of Gaza’s buildings have been reduced to rubble—rubble that covers up thousands and thousands of bodies yet uncounted.

But there is more. Prof. Boyd Van Dijk, an Oxford University professor and author of Preparing for War: The Making of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs in April 2025, entitled “Israel, Gaza, and the Starvation Weapon.” Writing as I do at the end of July 2025, the international community as a whole is increasingly outraged by pictures of starving children and adults in Gaza. Most of the 140 who died of starvation so far (88 of those children), have died in the last two weeks. One third of the population is in the fifth stage of starvation, the last stage before death. How can one not conclude that this massive, unfolding wave of starvation is precisely the intent of the occupier? Even the American State Department has concluded that there is no validity in the Israeli allegation that Hamas is stealing the aid from its people.

Yet already in November 2024, the International Criminal Court (established by the 1998 Rome Statute) “issued international arrest warrants not only for the leaders of Hamas but also for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Why? The prosecutor, Karim Khan, accuses them of a rarely invoked war crime, mentioned in the Rome Statute as including “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” and in particular, by “willfully impeding relief supplies.” The total blockade of Gaza since March, apart from just a trickle of aid at seemingly random points by an aid organization set up exclusively by Israel and the US, while IDF soldiers shoot at them (over a thousand killed so far), has led to massive starvation that worsens every day.

One small ray of hope today: because of the international outcry, the IDF says it will stop its attacks for several hours in different areas every day and let more international aid come in. But you cannot blame this Gazan journalist’s disbelief. Mohammed Mohisen posted this today: “Gaza is drowning in aid in the media. On the ground, starvation endures.” Why?

1. 1. 1. Israel controls every step of the process for the food in these trucks to actually reach hungry people; the red tape is phenomenal and most of it rotted in the past few months, giving the Israelis the excuse to destroy it.
      2. Israel in most cases doesn’t allow any military protection of the aid convoys coming in. As Mohisen points out, “the trucks follow the same known paths familiar to every thief and gang in the area.” Today, he writes, “only a handful of trucks reached the storage centers. From the outside, people think the borders are open and Gaza is being fed. The starvation is as brutal as ever. Each truck is stolen with Israeli approval or collusion.” Read on, and especially about how some luxury fruit like mangoes and bananas are sold in the market for $100 a pound. All the prices are exorbitant, affordable only by the few rich and those in organized crime.
      3. This is all “a media trick,” while people cannot afford flour, sugar, milk and infant formula. Yet the doctors, the few journalists left (they have been Israeli targets from the start), and a few others are speaking out, taking pictures (like the one at the top) to expose Israeli propaganda for what it is.

In my next post, I will show that the dehumanizing of Palestinians and a violent campaign to terrorize them and drive them out formed an integral part of the Zionist plan, almost from the beginning. Just as I have written with candor in this blog about our American genocide of the native population in our country and our shameful treatment of the Africans we brutally enslaved and then oppressed through Jim Crow laws, and, despite the Civil Rights Act, continue to discriminate against by allowing a network of systemic racism to stand—I believe we must speak the truth if we want to see justice, peace and reconciliation to happen. And thankfully, many Israeli historians and activists today are speaking out.

My last blog post dates back to February 2024—over 16 months ago. I had put off long enough serious work on my latest book project, The City Where All May Flourish: The Holy Spirit in Mission and Global Governance. That manuscript was accepted for inclusion in a Brill Publishing series, “Theology and Mission in Global Christianity,” and the review process has begun. To know more about this project, have a look at my article coming out this month in the Missiology journal (also available in Resources).

Here I begin a series of shorter posts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and my primary concern is to show that the brutally systematic crushing of the Gazan population (2.3 million) in the current war against Gaza following Hamas’s horrendous attack on Oct. 7, 2023 (close to 60,000 killed so far—men, women and children; their forceable displacement multiple times; the destruction of their homes, medical infrastructure and most all of their food sources) is part of a longstanding Israeli plan to “erase” the Palestinian people living in the Occupied Territories (Gaza and the West Bank), either by forcing them to emigrate to various other nations, or by subjugating them to such an extent that they acquiesce to their second-class, colonial identity.

In this first post, I simply make the point that the dehumanization of Palestinians goes back at least to the 19^th century, long before the founding of the Israeli state in 1948.

About a year ago, Adam Yaghi contributed a piece to Religion Dispatches, in which he contends that “the desire to annihilate Gaza wasn’t born on 10/7” (the day in 2023 that Hamas launched its horrendous attack on the Israeli communities just outside of Gaza). You begin to see this dehumanization of Palestinians if you read some of the 19^th-century travel logs, the most famous of which was Mark Twain’s 1869 650-page book, The Innocents Abroad, Or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (Subtitle: Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City's Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land: with Descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents, and Adventures as They Appeared to the Author).

Part of Twain’s humorous satire was directed at Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim Palestinians, something he could easy to get away with, since most of the “pilgrims” (Christians going on a Holy Land pilgrimage) accompanying him on this luxurious cruise were Protestant. Here’s how Yaghi describes Twain’s take on them:

“Though espousing a secular worldview, Twain paradoxically presented Palestinians as morally and spiritually corrupt, and therefore dispensable. The holy city of Jerusalem—symptomatic of the rest of multifaith Palestine—he imagined as ‘mournful, and dreary, and lifeless.’”

Setting the tone for much subsequent literature on Palestine, Mark Twain’s secular eye only noticed a land that, as Yagi puts it, was either “underdeveloped or empty.” For Twain, “Palestinians, portrayed as silent heathens or indigenous savages who hinder progress, had to go.” Indeed, this was “a land infested with marauding Bedouins, overtaken by disease, superstition and poverty.” In Twain’s words, “a thankless and impassive race.” Then he takes an Islamophobic jab, stating that even men with shaved heads would be “careful to leave a lock of hair for the Prophet to take hold of” because “a good Mohammedan would consider himself doomed to stay with the damned forever if he were to [die without it].”

Yet there is an even more troubling dynamic at work here—and you might have noticed it in the above expression “indigenous savages.” Twain intentionally connects indigenous Americans to the native population of Palestine, and thereby betrays his cultural and ideological roots. “Manifest destiny” and the American genocidal settler colonialism that almost annihilated the native American population are the lens through which Mark Twain reads the Palestinian context he very superficially witnessed in a week or two. He is writing this, it turns out,  just as American “dime novels” were becoming popular in the United States. In their first incarnation in the 1860s these ultra cheap novels under 100 pages were all about American Indians and their way of life, but their treatment was just as cartoonish as his description of Palestinians life:

“In portraying Palestinians as stereotyped Indians, scalping and whooping on horseback, Twain was equating indigenous people in Palestine and the Americas. The colonial solution to both was implied. In the absence of effective stewardship, colonial logic dictated that only Euro-American settlers could transform this unsettled land into a paradise. Indigenous Palestinians were unworthy of it and should be eliminated or displaced, just like the Native Americans to which this discourse compared them.”

Yet Twain’s racist humor and colonial ideology didn’t stop with his writings. It was eagerly picked up by advocates of a much more powerful 19^th-century ideology: Christian Zionism, which in due course helped to produce Jewish Zionism. American and British Protestants of the time were largely influenced by a new reading of the Bible called “dispensationalism,” that is, the dividing up of sacred history into different eras (or dispensations), each one marking a different way God chose to deal with his people. In this scheme, the return of Christ is imminent, putting an end to the current dispensation of God dealing primarily with the church. When Christ returns, he will set up his 1,000-year reign in Jerusalem. This means that Christians have a mandate to make sure the Jewish people return to the land of ancient Israel!

Adam Yaghi mentions two British writers whose books on Palestine were written about fifty years apart, with similar titles and with similar Christian Zionist tropes:

1. 1. 1. Alexander Keith, The Land of Israel: According to the Covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and with Jacob (1844). He used an expression that was often quoted, well over a century after him: Palestine was “a country without a people” ready to welcome “a people without a land.” Most famously, Golda Meir (Israeli prime minister, 1969-1974) quoted this, as if it were a historical fact. Ironically, it’s only an aspirational “fact.” You have to get rid the Palestinians entirely for it to be “fact.”
      2. Robert Laird Stewart, The Land of Israel: A Text Book on the Physical and Historical Geography of the Holy Land Embodying the Results of Recent Research (1899). Both Keith and Stewart “created a foundational myth that fueled a Zionist discourse bent on using force to establish a settler-colonial Jewish state in Palestine and attracted a Euro-American political elite in support of it.” Stewart was especially instrumental in this process:

“Palestine was, according to Stewart, the ‘land of the Patriarchs,’ ‘the Prophets,’ ‘the Sacred Poets,’ ‘the Apostles,’ and ‘David and Solomon.’ Palestine was not the land of the ‘Moslem hordes from the desert,’ Stewart argued, or the property of ‘the Arabs or their successors [read: Palestinians], and co-religionists, the Turks.’ The message was simple: under nomadic Palestinian and corrupt Ottoman Islam, Palestine fell to ruins, but it will prosper in the hands of Euro-American Christians who will restore it by establishing a settler-colonial Jewish presence. Stewart’s geography of Ottoman Palestine Judaized the land and erased Palestinian belonging all in service of the Western Christian colonialist project.”

That old dream of blotting out the Palestinians from this Western-supported Jewish colony of Israel is seemingly unfolding before our eyes, Yaghi says. In the next installment I will touch on a theme central to my current book—the founding of the United Nations, the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the emergence of international law.

An article I wrote in 2023 is finally seeing the light of day, or getting published, as the case may be. I had delivered a paper at a joint conference of the Evangelical Missiology Society and the International Society for Frontier Missiology in October 2022 (read it here). That was my second draft of thoughts I had entertained for three years at that point. The first draft was a book proposal written to the main editor (Prof. Kirsteen Kim) of the series, "Theology and Mission in Global Christianity," at Brill Publishing (Leiden, The Netherlands) already in 2019. Her answer was a tentative green light ("Let's have a look at it when you've finished").

It all started at the end of 2018 and the beginning of the next year. Protests were exploding in many parts of the world and spilling out into the streets as people aired their grievances about economic hardship, but most of all about the lack of government transparency and oppressive policies enacted without any regard for their own wishes and demands. In other words, they were witnessing a rise in autocracy. Pictures of crowded protests and brutal police repression filled the pages of the news media reporting on places like Hong Kong, Chile, France (the yellow vests), Sudan, Iraq and Lebanon, and more. [see my blog post of March 2020 on this, and my 2-part series on the massive protests in Algeria where I lived for nine years in the 1970s and 1980s ("Algeria and the Postcolonial Straightjacked"; "Algeria: The Hirak Phenomenon").

Was God the Holy Spirit stirring the hearts of people and, building on deep aspirations instilled in them at creation, was he pushing the needle toward greater democracy? In terms of political theology, is there a connection between human flourishing, good governance, and the values of God's Kingdom as announced and lived out by Jesus Christ -- values to be fully implemented in the New Jerusalem that one day will come down from heaven? The last two chapters of the Bible describe the nations of the world pouring into that city and contributing their own unique gifts for the well-being of all in this completely renewed creation of God, where tears, sorrow, disease and death are no more, and where God takes up residence for the first time.

This article lays out the main themes of the book, which is now being reviewed and should be published in 2016 (The City Where All May Flourish: The Holy Spirit in Mission and Global Governance). It's title is "Mission and Global Governance: Convergence of Pneumatology and Human Flourishing."