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 19th 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 19th-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 19th-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:
- 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.”
- 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.