The Ancient Roots of The Palestinian Problem

Interior of a Palestinian Christian

home in the mid-19th century

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he plans to promote legislation that will constitutionally establish the country’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people.  This will effectively scuttle the two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and it plays into the favor of those Orthodox extremists who, believing that the Land of Israel was given by God to the Jewish People and exclusively for the Jewish People, want non-Jews to be expelled because their presence defiles the sacredness of the land given them by God.  (It needs to be clarified that not all Orthodox Jews favor the establishment of a Jewish State as they believe that only the awaited Messiah has the divine authority to restore Israel.)  

The posting that I did recently on Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Teaneck New Jersey and his suggestion to relocate the Muslim Noble Sanctuary from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount to “Saudi Arabia, Syria or wherever it is wanted” as well as his encouragement to push the Arab/Palestinian population from Israel/Palestine is symptomatic of this sort of thinking.  After all, it makes sense—the Arabs are latecomers to the Promised Land.  What claim do they have to live in this land that God promised to Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, and gave to Joshua and the children of Israel more than 3200 years ago?

There is some confusion about the Palestinian people and that leads to this racist misconception.  We call them Arabs because they speak Arabic, but their ethnic identity is a bit more complex.

There were native Syrian peoples living in the lands that today are called Israel and Palestine more than 12,000 years ago.  They began as nomadic tribes with their domesticated sheep and goats, but gradually settled down on the rich soil and began raising crops. Like other peoples in the “Fertile Crescent”—that geographic strip that runs northward from Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the East and then crescents south along the coast to Egypt, there was a flourishing civilization in the region some six millennia or more ago.  At this time—c.4000 BC—various tribes such as the Jebusites, Hittites, and Amorites migrated into the land and established their own settlements side by side with those already there. These people are often referred to as “Canaanites” but that term can mislead us to think of them as a single homogenous people. In fact, these various peoples tended to have distinct settlements with a minimal amount of inter-marriage except among the ruling class where inter-tribal marriage forged political alliances.  While they may have borrowed various cultural elements from one another and even borrowed the worship of various gods, they tended to remain distinct from one another with their own rulers and socio/legal traditions. 

Sometime around 2300 BC the Phoenician peoples made settlements along the coast.  Through this period these people tended to be even more unique than the various Cannanite tribes and the Phoenicians, being a sea-going people, branched out westwards into the Mediterranean establishing trading posts and colonies in what is today Sicily, North Africa, and Spain. 

The Israelite exodus from Egypt and their entrance into the land is usually dated between 1250 and 1200 BC.  The Israelites found the land already occupied by the aforementioned peoples but throughout the period of the Judges gradually carved out territories for themselves where they established their own towns and villages.  One of the chief concerns of the Judges, of Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, and later of the Prophets, was to prevent cultural assimilation with their non-Israelite neighbors and maintain their distinct tradition, Law, and religion.  This met with mixed success as we see with the infidelities of David and Solomon as well as the criticisms of the later kings for idolatrous practices by the prophets. 

The Israelites were not the last people into the land.  Only a generation after the Children of Israel entered the land of Canaan, the Philistines came and established settlements along the seacoast.  A century later the Arameans came in. 

The Assyrians, the Babylonians, and then the Persians invaded the land in 722, 587, and 540 BC respectively.  The difference with these invasions is that the invaders came to conquer but not to settle, and so they did not leave the imprint on the ethnic makeup of the land that the various settling peoples had.  The Greeks under Alexander the Great would be the next invaders in 333 BC.  They were followed by a small but not insignificant Armenian invasion around 100 BC.  In 63 BC the Romans annexed the land as a “client kingdom” under the Hasmonean dynasty until Herod Archelaus, son of Herod the Great, ruled so badly the kingdom was taken from him and formed into the Roman Province of Iudaea. 

During the period of Greek domination under the rule of the Antiochean Seleucid Kings who ruled the land after the death of Alexander the Great, the policy had been to homogenize the diverse peoples, cultures, and religions of the land into a single Greek culture.  While most of the various peoples dwelling in Syria/Palestine/Judea acceded to this plan and began to cede their unique cultural identities, the Jews, under the leadership of the Macabees, resisted this Hellenization and did so to the point of martyrdom. 

Mark 7:26 has an interesting description of a woman as “Greek, a Syro- Phoenician by nation.”  This indicates that while there was a certain amount of assimilation, particular ethnic identities survived.  One group that was distinct that we have not yet mentioned are the Samaritans.  The Samaritans were Israelites who never accepted the hegemony of the Temple at Jerusalem but had (and have today) their own Temple on Mount Gerizim in what is today Israel.   They were regarded as heretics by the Jews for whom the Temple at Jerusalem was the only place where sacrifice was to be offered.   The Samaritans, a small community today, have retained their distinct ethnic identity to the present day. 

the Jews were expelled from the land of Judea after the failure of the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 AD.  While small groups were able to remain in the Galilee, most of what is today Israel remained without Jewish inhabitants until the late 19^th century and the Zionist movement which encouraged Jews to return to the ancient land they claim as their patrimony. 

Under Roman Rule the remaining population continued to homogenize and as the Roman Empire gradually slid into its Byzantine Identity in the fourth and fifth centuries, Christianity gave an even more unifying force to the once distinct peoples.  Christianity was not totally unifying, however, as the segment of the population that was descended from the various Canaanite peoples and who tended more to be rural, followed the West Syrian liturgy known as the Liturgy of Saint James, while the Byzantines—townsfolk and predominately descendants of the Greeks and the Romans—followed the Greek Rite that would come to be called the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom.  The Armenians retained their distinct identity with their own liturgical rites as well as some basic doctrinal differences with both the Greeks and the Syriacs. 

In the seventh century, invaders came up from the Arabian Peninsula bringing Islam.  While they seized control of the land from the Emperor at Constantinople, they did not force either Islam or the Arabic language on the local population.  Indeed the native population remained overwhelmingly Christian for centuries and Aramaic, the common language of the land in the time of Jesus, remained the ordinary language of most of the population. 

What one had then in the land was a base population that was, except for pockets of Druze and Samaritan minorities, predominately Christian divided into their different villages according to their specific liturgical/ethnic peculiarities: Syrian, Melkite (Greek), Armenian, Maronite and with an Arab Muslim ruling class.  During the period of the Umayyad Caliphate at Damascus, Christians often held key administrative posts.  The father of Saint John Damascene, for example, was a court official of the Caliph. 

Non-Muslims were free to practice their religion but they did have to pay an extra tax, the jizya.  This tax was an exemption from serving in the military, participation in which was limited to Muslims.  Over a period of time, of centuries, more and more of the population converted to Islam, in part to avoid this tax.  Nevertheless, at the time of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, almost half of the Palestinian population, descendants of these Greek-Syriac peoples who themselves were descended—at least in part—from the ancient Canaanite peoples—were still Christian.  They were about half Greek Orthodox, with the other half divided between Roman Catholics and Melkite (Byzantine) Catholics.  There were also significant Armenian and Syriac Orthodox communities and a smaller Coptic Christian community.  As the situation in Israel made life more and more intolerable for the Palestinian peoples, many emigrated to the United States, to Canada, to Australia and to other parts of the world where they would not suffer the limits of freedom and opportunity imposed on them by the unabashedly apartheid policies of the State of Israel.  The Christians, being mostly townspeople and merchants, have found it easier to emigrate than the Muslims who, being predominately farmers, are more closely tied to the land and orchards their families have operated for centuries and which are now being confiscated and turned into “settlements” for the refugees that have flooded Israel from Russia and other Eastern European countries.  

Yet More on the Great Schism

A Celebration of the Eucharist in an Orthodox

Church "We did not know if we were in heaven or

still on earth."

Sorry about the hiatus.  We have been without internet for several days and then I was involved in doing some moving which is always a strain on time and energy.  But things have settled down a bit and I would like to get back to the matter of the schism that has divided the Orthodox Churches of the East from the Catholic Church of the West.  I mentioned in the previous blog that the first thing we Catholics have got to get over is the idea that the Greek Church was in some way or other at one time “under” the Pope.  It never has nor had been.  The Churches of Rome and of Constantinople, and the various local Churches of their respective patriarchates, had been in communion with one another since apostolic times.  That communion was fractured in the ninth century when Pope Nicholas I, as senior patriarch of the Church, had excommunicated the Byzantine Emperor Michael III for having deposed the Patriarch Ignatios and replaced him with Photius but the Pope was acting as senior patriarch protecting the rights and authority of a brother patriarch, Igantios.  Ignatios, as a matter of fact, was restored and when, after the death of Ignatios,  Photios was elected in his own right to the Patriarchal Throne there was no breach of communion with the Churches of the West.  In fact, according to some historians, Photios’ son succeeded to the Papal Throne as Theodore II, one of the few good popes of the late ninth  century.  (He had a very short reign, only twenty days, in 897.  His death may be a witness to just how good a pope he was in a time when a fair number of evil men coveted the Throne of Peter and achieved it by very unscrupulous means.)  This time, however, the schism would be of greater and more serious duration.  
     Part of the problem is that the Byzantine Empire was in the early stages of what would be a fatal decline.  Actually, by the time of the schism o f 1054 the decline was pretty advanced, though it could—and would—get far worse.  For over four centuries the Empire had been being whittled away by first the Arabs and then the Turks.  Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch had all fallen to the Caliphate.  Most of Asia Minor—modern day Turkey—was no longer under imperial control.  It would be another four centuries before the Empire fell completely but the effects of its diminution were already being felt.  Long-term fatal illnesses in empires, like humans, often lead to denial.  The smaller and weaker the Empire became, the more pretentious and even arrogant its claims to sovereignty.   And while it was shrinking, it remembered that while its dominion may be shaky, Rome was not little more than a clump of ruined temples and theatres in a malaria-ridden cattle field.  It was time for “old Rome” to give up its pretensions to Patriarchal Seniority and allow “new Rome” (Constantinople) its rightful dominance in matters ecclesiastical as well as civil. 
     “Old Rome” was not about to do any such thing.  Granted, the Vatican Basilica was already falling down around their ears and cows wandered grazing around those churches standing among the ruins of Caesar and Marcus Aurelius’ capital, but like a delusional old dowager whose once-expensive dresses were now patched and who no longer could afford the luxury of the beauty parlor, but who claimed yet to be the grand dame of the town’s first family,  the Popes of Rome in the squalor of the Lateran reminded anyone who would listen that they were the successors of Saint Peter to the plenitudo potestatis.  Conflict was inevitable where claims of ego were the agenda of the hour. 
     The conflict had been building over time, but the immediate conflagration was ignited when the Patriarch, Michael Caerularius wrote to the Bishop of Trani, an Italian See that had connections both to Rome and to Constantinople.  The Patriarch accused the papacy of introducing “judaizing” practices into Christianity, most notably the use of unleavened bread into the Eucharist.  (The practice in the Church, both East and West, had long been to use leavened bread for the Eucharistic celebration, but in the tenth and eleventh century the West gradually began using unleavened bread—as would have been used by Christ at the Last Supper.  The concern for the form of the bread itself corresponds to an increasing appreciation of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist that began as a result of the Eucharistic controversies in the Abbey of Corbie in the ninth century.  But note, there was no continuing tradition from the Last Supper of using unleavened bread.  Leavened bread had become the norm and then the West began introducing unleavened bread.) 
     There were other issues as well—the West had made an unilateral change in the Creed of the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, proclaiming that the Holy Spirit “proceeded” from the Father and the Son whereas the Conciliar formula said only that the Spirit proceeded from the Father.  This is a very difficult theological point to explain, but suffice it to say that the issue was that the West had altered a formula of faith and altering a formula of faith challenges the orthodoxy of the doctrine.  This in fact is a far more significant problem than leavened/unleavened bread. 
     A third issue was that the West was beginning to impose celibacy on the clergy while in the East married men were allowed to become deacons and priests (though not bishops, at least until they were widowed).
     The Pope, Leo IX, resented the Patriarch’s sending a letter of complaint to a Bishop in the West and the Patriarch’s request that the letter be forwarded to the other bishops of the Western Church.  Leo saw this as an attack on his authority over his own patriarchate and he sent a delegation to Constantinople demanding an acknowledgement by the Patriarch of Papal Supremacy.  This would have been an innovation—the Pope may have been first but he was first among equals.  The Patriarch was not going to give in on that point.  The head of the legation, the Cardinal Bishop of Silva Candida, Humbert, marched into the Hagia Sophia during a Patriarchal Liturgy and, in the name of Leo IX, laid a bull of excommunication on the altar.  The Patriarch then in turn excommunicated the Legate.  The Patriarchal Sees of Rome and Constantinople were no longer in communion with one another, nor were the various Churches comprising their patriarchates.   As far as I can ascertain from my sources, the Patriarch’s pronouncement of excommunication was directed only towards the Legates and not towards either the Pope nor the Western Church.  As for the Bull that Humbert laid on the altar—it was not valid for it was issued in the name of Leo IX and Leo was, unknown yet in Constantinople, dead.   Well, more on this in the next entry.  But the chief point we need to pay attention to is that the schism of East and West is not a rebellion against Papal Authority for the Pope never did have authority over the Eastern Churches.  It was a break of communion as the unity of the Church was shattered as Churches equal in dignity and authority set themselves on different courses.