Unsettled: The Problem of Loving Israel

Holy Land

The modern state of Israel was born on May 14, 1948. But why? Why did a new nation come to be -- there, at that time, with the goal being a Jewish state? You might think the answers to this rest in thousands of years of history -- and I'll get to that in a moment. But there was something very particular about the much more recent past that led to the creation of Israel. As much as Israel is an ancient land, as a nation it is the product of changes in the world that began in the late 1800s.

At that time, the strongest power in the area of what is now Israel was the Ottoman Empire. Based in Turkey, the Ottomans ruled much of what we now call the Middle East. When Ottomans took over the region in the 1500s, they did not agonize over the rights of the Mameluks they conquered, just as the Mameluks had no hesitation about overrunning the Ayubbids, who had themselves defeated the prior victors, and so on back beyond recorded time. When one conqueror lost, the next strong power took over.

The Ottomans were Muslims, but not Arabs. Islam, the religion of the Muslims, is a faith anyone can join. In fact, part of the appeal of Islam is the brotherhood it offers to all peoples. The Ottomans were Turks and they ruled over the Arabs, non-Arab Muslims, Christians, and Jews who lived in Palestine. Muslims living in the area of Palestine had no reason to think of forming a nation of their own. From their point of view, if they were part of a larger unit, it was their particular family or clan, or the broad union of all Muslims, or of all Arabs, or of the peoples of the Ottoman Empire.

Sari Nusseibeh, for example, is a modernPalestinian professor of philosophy whose memoir, Once Upon a Country, I will refer to again and again. He traces his roots to a female ancestor who fought beside Mohammed and her brother, who was given the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher when the Muslims conquered Jerusalem in ad 638. When Sari was growing up, the lineage of the Nusseibehs defined who they were far more than their allegiance to any state or government.

When Mark Twain visited the Holy Land in 1867, the region looked terrible to him: a "hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land." Apparently, no one lived there. "There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent -- not for thirty miles in either direction....One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings." Some Jews have seized on this as proof that Palestine was empty beforethe modern Jews arrived. But they are surely wrong. Historians estimate that about four hundred thousand Arabs, Muslims, and Christians actually lived there at the time. I suspect Twain's words are a response to how people lived their lives.

Twain had grown up amid American hustle and bustle, paddle-wheel steamers going up and down the Mississippi, hopeful miners rushing out west. The nation he knew was just entering the age of the railroad and the factory; it was the world center of ambition and drive. The Holy Land was a place of heat and dust where there was none of that energy. You could tell you were coming to an Arab village when you saw olive trees -- whose branches always lookancient and wizened, like the bent backs and thin arms of old, old men -- and spiky clumps of cactus plants. Every village had its flocks of goats, and generations of hungry animals had eaten away all the grass cover. The hills were brown, the pace slow. Even land near water, which might have been used for farming, was swampy -- a perfect breeding ground for malaria.

Where there was good land, a Jewish commentator noticed thirty years after Twain, an Arab was sure to be working it. Sari's mother's family, for example, kept lush, fragrant orange groves. But in general people did not come to this dusty, dry region to farm. They came to pray. There were villages and even cities when Twain arrived, but they were not organized around business, like New York or St. Louis or San Francisco. Instead, Muslims, Jews, as well as every variety of Christian, lived near holy sites, many of which were (and are) in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is so central to Jews, Christians, and Muslims that it is unlike any other place on Earth. According to some traditions, it was the site of the Garden of Eden, and Adam himself was buried there. Observant Jews believe that Abraham brought his son Isaac to a hill in Jerusalem to be sacrificed, before God told him not to; the last Jewish temple stood on that same site, before the Romans destroyed it in ad 70, leaving only one wall of the larger building complex standing. Jews outside of Israel, remembering the pain of having their homeland destroyed, call that wall the Wailing Wall. Jews in Israel, feeling they are creating a modern Jewish homeland, call it the Western Wall. Christians believe Jesus, carrying his cross, suffered his last hours walking through the streets of Jerusalem before he was crucified near that very hill, and his body was buried in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. When the Muslims arrived, they built their great mosque, the Dome of the Rock, on the same hill, to announce that theirs was the last and greatest of the faiths. Devout Muslims believe that Mohammed visited that very site in his Night Journey, and ascended from there to heaven, where he met Abraham and the other prophets before returning to Earth.

To this day you can walk from the dome to the church to the wall in less than five minutes. When Twain visited, the faithful at these sacred places were paying attention to their prayers to God, not to the world around them. The Holy Land was a collection of sites sacred to various faiths, not anything like a country. But even as Twain wrote about his journey, the age of empires was drawing to a close, and the era of nations was beginning.

Copyright © 2008 by Marc Aronson