Thursday's Read: Justice and Only Justice

Ateek, Naim. Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation. (Orbis Books, 1989)
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This book stands apart from many of the others on my reading year list. I included it because it is cited often in the literature, and because it addresses a topic that can be elided easily in discussions of Middle Eastern culture and religion: the existence and experiences of Arab Christians. Naim Ateek (نعيم عتيق‎, born 1937), a Palestinian Christian (Episcopalian), writes Justice as a corrective for a broader public that equates Muslim with Arab, and as a call to fellow Christians throughout the world to consider the plight of the Palestinians. In particular, he is concerned at the way that many contemporary Western Christian ministers have come to interpret the Old Testament as pointing toward Israeli Zionist ideologies. The belief that Zionism as realized through the State of Israel is the fulfillment of ancient prophecy leads many Christians to avoid, ignore, or generally be content to be ignorant of the circumstances under which Palestinian Christians live. Ateek wishes, through appeals to liberation theology, to unite Christians under a common cause of justice for the Palestinian people as a whole.

Ateek begins with a brief history of the major events of the Palestine-Israel conflict, emphasizing key turning points including the 1948 war, the Nakbah, the 1967 Six-Day War, and the first Intifadah. It is a cursory review designed more to situate the reader than to explicate or analyze, and thus will be familiar territory for most students of Middle East Studies. (As a sidenote, the notes that previous readers had written in my library copy, including a spirited debate about the Deir Yassin massacre, demonstrate just how ideologically riven this topic is. Proponents of both sides are so retrenched along their battle lines that many in the academy assiduously avoid engagement with the subject anymore.) He then continues with a chapter on the history of Christianity in the Middle East, highlighting the Orthodox-Roman Catholic split, the deep rift engendered by the Crusades, and the continued presence of Christians in the Middle East since the time of Jesus.

Ateek's analysis then moves to the theological as he introduces the social and religious problems Palestinians face, and works to formulate a specifically Palestinian liberation theology. He details the struggle of Palestinian Christians as they seek inspiration and solace from the same ancient scripture, the Tanakh, that informs the legacy and belief of their Israeli Jewish neighbors. Though Israeli Zionist ideologies did not begin as religious - they were far more socialist in their original incarnations - they changed. Especially following the capture of Jerusalem in 1967, religious references and motifs became far more prevalent in Israeli discourse; living and walking in the same places that the ancient Israelites and Canaanites lived and walked thousands of years ago had a compelling, unifying inertia to it. How can Palestinians, Ateek asks, seek full justice (which he defines as a two-state solution), within this heavily, anciently religious context? Through a careful reading of scripture held in common by Christians and Jews, he teases out threads that characterize God as ultimately deeply invested in justice, equality, and fairness. Peace, Ateek argues, is the will of God.