Caught in Between

Rating:
Summary: A Bishop's view of the Palestinian struggle
Review: Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal combines a personal biography with an inside look at living as an Arab Christian in Palestine over the turbulent history of the past 55 years. The Bishop's experience as the Vicar of Christ Church in Nazareth gives an inside look at the lives of the Arab people and provides a fresh perspective on the issues of Palestine.

Rating:
Summary: Full of contradictions
Review: If Riah Abu El-Assal is a peaceful Palestinian Arab leader, we are in serious trouble.

Here is a man who claims to abhor violence, laudable to be sure. He also states, at the end of chapter 10, "The road to peace lies in recognition of the realities, including the reality that is Israel, and I will do nothing to harm the cause of peace." Equally praiseworthy.

Yet this book is full of contradictions.

Born in 1937 in Nazareth, Bishop Abu El-Assal fled with his family at age 11 in 1948 to Beirut, where his father refused to register the family as refugees. They fled of their own accord, not as the result of any battle or threat thereof, or the author would have made great use of the details.

Yet with neither firsthand experience of being forced off the family's land, nor reputable sources, El-Assal describes Al Nakba, the Catastrophe, as "expulsion of the Palestinians from their lands by the victorious Zionist forces...." (p. 51)

Here is a man whose wife's family had in the 1930s emigrated from Lebanon INTO Palestine, where Jewish development had created strong demand for labor. El -Assal himself returned to Nazareth from Beirut in 1949 with his sister Suad, who was then 13. Some time later, his father also returned. He took Israeli citizenship in 1959. He successfully reclaimed and repossessed his family's home.

In other words, neither the Bishop of Jerusalem nor his wife's family has any basis to claim that anything was stolen from them. Yet he does. In fact, throughout the book he claims that the entire land of Israel was "stolen" from Palestinian Arabs, without references to back up this claim. The 151-page volume contains only 15 footnotes, not one of them citing legitimate scholarly material to prove the claim.

(I tend to believe no such scholarly material exists, for I have looked and found none. On the other hand, several books seem to prove just the opposite. These include H.B. Tristram's Land of Israel (1865); Arieh Avneri's Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement 1878-1948 (1984); Kenneth W. Stein's The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (1984); Samuel Katz' Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine (1972) and Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial (1984).)

Abu Al-Assal also attempts to deflate the importance and severity of the 1948 invasion of Israel by seven Arab armies by claiming that most of the fighting was done in Palestinian areas. This is misleading at best. For had not those armies swept into the area, there would have been no fighting at all. Much of the fiercest fighting, moreover, was in the Negev, which the partition plan had designated for Israel. As it was, the war took substantially more Jewish lives, a total of 6,373--nearly 1% of the entire Jewish population. Jewish casualties, moreover, included 600 kidnap victims whom Arab forces mutilated beyond recognition.

Though a citizen of Israel, El-Assal cheered on Gamel Nasser in 1956. He has repeatedly broken Israeli laws and has quite negative feelings for the state. He traveled many times on a Vatican passport to enemy states, including Lebanon and Jordan (before the peace). He twice traveled to Tunisia to meet with Yasser Arafat, before Israel had relations with the PLO. Afterwards, he resented being detained from international travel. He dislikes Israel, its Jewish symbols, and its internal policy of accepting any Jewish person as a citizen of the Jewish homeland. While he admires the beauty of the Israeli national anthem HaTikva (The Hope), he writes that the Zionist movement's hymn, expressing a Jewish desire for a homeland, "is not mine, and never can be."

He claims to be for two separate states, Israel and Palestine, but argues for an Israel that is secular and bi-national. In other words, he considers Jewish desire to nurture a Jewish homeland a bad thing.

Given that El-Assal is an Anglican Bishop, one would expect to find in his book some evidence of closeness with God. Abu El-Assal mentions his "calling," of course. Yet I was surprised to find no real expression of spiritual awareness, love for God, Christ, or mankind. Perhaps I missed it but I don't think so.

In fact, the author actually makes statements I would have thought un-Christian. In a discussion of the different Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Easters, for example, he recounts the story of a father who tells his son on the first that people are crying "because Jesus was crucified." When the son asks who did it, the father says, "The Jews and the Romans were responsible. Damn the Romans." The boy replies, "Damn the Jews." At the second service, when the people weep again, the boy asks, "Dad, Dad, do you mean the Jews and the Romans have done it again?" No, the father tells him, it was the Greek Orthodox. (pp. 59-60)

Granted, this tasteless story is supposed to be a joke. But no person of Jewish faith would find it funny. Neither should an Anglican Bishop. The Roman Catholic Pope and Church, at least, have apologized to the Jewish people for centuries of teaching that the Jewish people were responsible for the death of Jesus. So should all churches.

There are many other weaknesses in this book, not least of all its complete failure to denounce anti-Semitic Arab propaganda taught to each new generation, making meaningful dialogue between the Jewish state and Arab Palestinian people all but impossible. Like too many people, Al-Assal is willing to completely overlook institutionalized Arab hatred of Jews and the Jewish state, meanwhile making blanket condemnations of Israel's supposed evils--which he cannot and does not prove.

One hopes for true and honest Palestinian Arab peace partners to emerge from the ongoing 53-year conflict. But like many other supposed Arab men of peace floated in the last nine years, Abu Al-Assal in this book seems hoisted on his own petard. He herein contradicts his own seemingly peaceful pronouncements with words of deceit and hate. Alyssa A. Lappen