What is the definition of a miracle? For many people
today this word has been watered down to basically mean anything cool that
happened in their favour. But the word has a much more technical and specific meaning
than this. As The online dictionary notes, a miracle is “an extraordinary and
welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is
therefore attributed to a divine agency: "the miracle of rising from the
grave."[1]
By this definition the re-establishment of the nation of Israel is not even
close to being able to be claimed as a miracle. It can be explained by
thoroughly natural and "scientific" means. It is no more difficult to explain
than the establishment of the colony of Botany Bay. In fact, it had overlapping
interests with just such a colony, as both were established by the British
Empire which had its own imperial ends in mind.
It would not even qualify for the second definition of
miracle, “a remarkable event or development that brings very welcome
consequences: "it was a miracle that more people hadn't been killed"
· "industries at the heart of the economic miracle."[2] Because it has not brought
very welcome consequences, and it is not a remarkable, in the sense of unique,
event. The fall of the Ottoman Empire saw many ancient peoples rise up in the
Middle East and claim both their national sovereignty and their national
identity, and none of those nations had more international money and backing
than the nation of Israel. In that sense, it is the least remarkable of the
bunch, because it was given the most outside help to succeed. The 19th
and early 20th centuries were the era of rising nationalism, and we
saw the forging of many such small nations across the world out of the ruins
of once great empires, many did not get such generous aid.
What is remarkable though is just how un-Christian this
event was, even though many Christians celebrate it as a fulfilment of prophecy
and therefore a miracle. How many Christians are aware of how much the
establishment of Israel was supported and enacted by the socialists that many
Christians rightly see as the antithesis of their faith? Pappe notes, about the
affiliation between Jewish social groups and English socialists,
“The affiliation bore fruit
very quickly; in the very same year the group achieved a real coup: the Labour
Party Conference voted unanimously in favour of the resolution, 'Palestine for
the Jews'. It was proposed by Jacob Pomeranz, the secretary of Poale Zion.[3] The following year, a
similar resolution, proposed once again by a Poale Zion delegate, was carried
unanimously once more. And when Labour first took office in 1924, the secretary
for the colonies, James Henry Thomas, a completely unapologetic imperialist,
told the House of Commons that the
government had determined 'after careful consideration of all circumstances, to
adhere to the policy of giving effect to the Balfour Declaration.' Labour
supported the League of Nations' Mandate that gave Britain control of Palestine
and was wholeheartedly committed to the establishment of 'a Jewish autonomous
Commonwealth' in the country. The wishes of the Arab population, both Muslim
and Christian, counted for nothing. There was to be no self-determination for
the Palestinian people. But the Palestinians began to make their voices heard,
even if they were ignored in London.”[4]
Paole Zion was a socialist group.
How many Christians who doggedly say that the recreation
of the state of Israel was a miracle, are aware of the fact that socialists of
many sorts were largely responsible for getting the Mandate for a “Jewish Zion”
established? And that they did this explicitly with no care at all for what the
Christians in Palestine thought about the matter? How many Christians know this
fact? They completely disregarded any Christian considerations. How many miracles in the Bible are you aware of that God did for
unbelievers against his own faithful people? God does miracles for all sorts of
people, but not for unbelievers against believers. This would undermine the
very basis of understanding what a miracle was. A miracle is often the divine
favour of God on his people in the midst of earthly trials. His people are
those who call on his name and believe in him. To what degree can this apply to
Jewish and Gentile socialists who were unbelievers, many of whom bordered on
being communists and in some cases actually were communist?
I will come back to this in some later posts, because I
think once you understand the process through which Israel was re-established
you can only conclude that it was not only not miraculous, it is an example of
the manipulation of state craft at it most revealing.
But what is also interesting is that another myth, the
idea that there are no Palestinians and that the land was just there to be
taken, is so blatantly historically wrong. It is actually quite embarrassing
that there are Christians that assert this idea. I find this embarrassing,
because it has often been levelled at Christians that we just simply deny
reality and plain observable facts, and I have spent much of my life arguing
that we do not. But on the issue of Palestine many Christians observably do deny
what actually happened, and will even make such proclamations from public
platforms and not be even a little embarrassed by telling what are actual,
demonstratable and provable lies.
Just look at what Pappe notes about the Palestinian
resistance to the establishment of a Jewish Zion, from the very moment that the
British announced their intentions to create it,
“PALESTINE RESISTS
On the first anniversary of
the Balfour Declaration, Palestinians demonstrated in large numbers all over
Palestine against it. From that moment onwards, a consolidated Palestinian
national movement led by younger generation of urban professionals and intellectuals,
alongside traditional heads of rural and urban clans, commenced an
anti-colonialist struggle. For nine years, 1920-1929, their activity consisted
of petitions, and participation in negotiations with the British government,
while building a democratic political structure, where parties could elect
their representatives to an annual national conference. The consensual position
was clear: total rejection of the Balfour Declaration, and opposition to Jewish
emigration to Palestine, the Zionist purchase of land and colonisation. They
demanded that Britain adhere to twin principles, on the basis of which the West
had promised to build a new world after the First World War. The first was
democracy and the second was the right of self-determination. The Palestinian
leaders felt that while these principles were respected in Palestine's
neighbouring countries, such as Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, they were not
implemented in Palestine.
Matters came to a head in
April 1920 in Palestine following several provocations on the part of the
British government and the Zionists including the dismissal of the Palestinian
mayor of Jerusalem and the installation of a Zionist deputy mayor. On 4 April,
Palestinians congregating for the Nabi Musa festival started rioting and
ransacked the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. In 1921, there were riots in Jaffa
and Penh Tikva, driven by the widespread feeling that the British
administration prioritised Zionist interests over the interests of all Palestinian
inhabitants.
An uneasy peace followed for
a few years until violence erupted again in 1929, triggered by a large Zionist
demonstration at the site Of the Western Wall - where the Prophet Muhammad tied
up his mythological steed Al-Buraq before he ascended to Paradise in the Muslim
tradition, and the wall of the Temple in the Jewish tradition. Palestinian
Muslims retaliated and by late August 1929, there were confrontations across
Palestine, including Jerusalem, Safed and Hebron.
But this uprising wasn't
just about a holy site. More than a decade after British rule began in
Palestine, local society could feel the negative impact of the Zionisation of
the country: workers were driven out of the labour market and farmers were
evicted or forced to emigrate to towns where makeshift slums began to appear.
They either lost their land when it was sold by their landlords to the Zionist
movement or had to seek a new future due to poverty in the countryside, caused
both by Zionist settlements there and by British disinclination to invest in
rural areas. About 8,000 Palestinians were evicted in these early stages and
thirteen villages were depopulated.
The eruption of violence on a large scale in Palestine in 1929 led to a rethink in London about British policy towards the country. The land without people, which was how Palestine was perceived by Zionist leaders and those supporting the colonisation of Palestine, turned out to be full of people who categorically rejected the transformation of their homeland into a Jewish state and were even willing to engage in an armed struggle against the endeavour...
...The rethink was informed by
a royal commission of inquiry headed by Lord Shaw, which in 1930 recommended
severe limitation on Jewish immigration and an end to Zionist purchase of
lands, and suggested that Britain would help build a state that respected the
Palestinian majority in the land. This was a total U-turn from the Balfour
Declaration and it became a White Paper, authored by Sidney Webb, now secretary
of state for the colonies. Another inquiry, the Hope-Simpson commission, also
affirmed its support for a reorientation of British policy in Palestine.”[5]
Of course, this reversal of British policy in response to
Palestinian resistance was again itself reversed. The British Mandate went on
to strongly favour a Jewish Palestine. However, the point still stands that the
rising up of a national Palestinian resistance against conquest of their land
by Britain and European Jewish immigration shows that the land was not empty
and that the Palestinian national identity existed long before 1948.
Some people might say, even if it existed as early as 1920, or 1890, or thereabouts, that is still much too modern a time for it to be considered with any serious weight in the face of an ancient nation like the Jewish people. However, you must understand that though the formation of nations often happens at the collapse of empires, this knowledge of a shared identity long predates the fall of those empires. It is just not until those empires fall that the people can do much about it.
Mixed empires fall apart
and become nations. Areas that were once provinces become national boundary
markers. Brittanica and Germania became Briton and Germany, as did many other
Roman provinces become nations made up of the dominant people group who lived
in their respective regions. The same is true for Palestine. The same is indeed
true for Israel, as well though. Both these nations rose up at the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire, and based their establishment in part on pre-existing
peoples and connections to the region.
Prior to the 19th century there was no
influential movement to re-establish Israel as a Jewish nation, and certainly
not in Palestine. The nationalism of Jews was awakened in emphasis at the same
time that the nationalism of many other countries was. And it is for these
reasons that we should see the establishment of the modern nation of Israel
through a geo-political lens, not a prophetic lens. It is a result of the same
call of nationalism that was being fostered across the world. Indeed, this
emphasis on nationalism and self-determination was actually stoked by the
British and Americans in particular, and promised to the people of the Middle
East, and in fact the whole world, in the wake of World War 1. To turn around
and then deny this to some people groups makes dishonest men of all who say
they believe in self-determination.
In Palestine/Israel we have two nations in conflict, both
with long standing claims on the land, both with religious claims to ownership,
and both who have been willing to fight for the land. At this point the
Israelites are largely victorious, they have conquered much of the land by
conquest. But as with all other conquests of lands in history, the people who
have been conquered don’t just disappear, and in Palestine the conquered have
made their presence known and felt since the conquest begun. A true miracle
would be for these peoples to live in peace in this land together. That we could not
explain with human reasoning and science. What we have seen happen is exactly
what we would expect to happen if two nations sought to fight over the same
land. It is not miraculous, or remarkable, it is the way of nations throughout
history, and we will likely see it many times again before the Lord returns.
List of References
[3] A
Jewish Zionist group the sought to synthesize Zionism with Socialism, c.f.
Pappe pp.55-60.
[4] Ilan Pappe, 2024, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, Oneworld Academic, pp59-60.
[5]
Ibid. pp60-61.
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