Newsletter:
Vol. 5. Iss. 2
20 June 2004
The Churches and the Holy Land, cont'd.
Prof. Michael Prior
Particularly in the face of the dismal performance of the other guardians
of public discourse, the Churches should give a lead in moral debate. They
should do better than fall into line with ongoing political manoeuvres, which,
in conforming to the demands of the powerful, reflect little contact with
recognisable moral principles. For religious bodies to accord legitimacy to
the expulsion of any indigenous population, and the expropriation of their
lands, as happened, and continues to happen in Palestine, is highly problematic,
indeed scandalous.
For a start, the leaderships of the Churches should insist that Israel ‘come
clean’ on its seminal injustice against the Palestinian Arabs, that
it apologise for it, undo the damage it has perpetrated as far as that is
possible, honour its obligations with respect to the Palestinian right of
return, make appropriate compensation for the damage done, and, on the basis
of confession and restitution, move towards a less ethnocratic polity. Such
exhortations would flow effortlessly from principles of Christian morality,
and would be in conformity with elementary justice. And even more is required.
Yet, all we get instead from the Church leadership is the embrace of whatever
proposal the asymmetric parties to the dispute contrive —the ‘Oslo
Accords’, the ‘Road Map’, however jaded, and however lacking
in principles of justice. It is as if the Christian Church were content to
act on the novel moral principle that the rights of the perpetrators of injustice
and its victims were finely balanced.
