Author: Martin Scott

Posting any comment on the above is a challenge. The history, back through the Zionist movement, the anti-Semitism of the West and then add in the Bible, or at least what we term the Old Testament adds layers upon layers. Is there a way forward? In Jesus there is always a way forward. I do not like the term ‘the better of two evils’ as an ethical frame but I do understand what is being proposed by that term. I rather would operate with ‘the most redemptive path’. It is not easy to always advocate the right response in an absolute sense, but we can consider the most redemptive route and then look at it again later and respond with a further response. I think we see that in Scripture and that is the whole basis of a theology of sanctification – ongoing, from glory to glory.

It is not possible to look at the current scenarios in the Middle East without referring to the political powers (Imperialistic colonisers) and such agreements as the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916. A secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France, with assent from Russia and Italy, to define their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire. The land of Palestine was to be controlled by Britain, and then further lands carved out with no respect to ethnicity nor (flavour of) religion. Follow this up with the Balfour Declaration (1917) with the promise to work toward a Jewish state in Palestine (a land with people already within it, a people that were mainly Muslim but included Christians and a small Jewish community). A land with people living within it – who had lived there for centuries – this is so common with regard to colonisation. The common argument has been there were no people living there, or (maybe worse, but really the same) the people were not significant / less than human. Common… And wrong. Wrong historically and wrong ethically, and a blatant trespassing. Anglo-Saxon ‘christians’ going to church Sunday morning then hunting first-nation people (wrongly termed ‘aborigines’) post-church in Australia – such stories can be repeated over and over. (For a year Gayle and I tracked the horrific expulsion of Muslims from Spain; here in ever-so-kind Oliva the church records of Muslims being marched to church on Sunday and ‘converted’ then killed as they were marched out again with the proclamation of a two-fold outcome in that ‘we raised their souls to heaven and filled our own pockets’.)

I am sure that the Palestinians were the offering of appeasement on the altar for the anti-Semitism that had gone on with the pogroms of Europe that aligned with the bloodshed that went before and after with the holocaust.

In the two years following the state of Israel being established (1948) 400 cities and villages were destroyed with some 1 million people being driven violently from their homes (this was not an ’empty land’) with many of those people forced into Gaza. Such activity is in direct conflict to international law.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Palestinians continue to live in an apartheid context and that there is ongoing genocidal activity. (I am not making comments about Israeli citizens of Israel, but of the state of Israel, and I am certainly not condoning any violence that originates from Hamas. More below on that…)

Yesh Din, an Israeli organisation registered with the government in a report in 2020 (58 pages entitled ‘The Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and the Crime of Apartheid: Legal Opinion’) concluded,

That the Israeli regime in its entirety is an apartheid regime. That Israel is an Apartheid state.

It does so sadly and as an Israeli registered organisation.Thank God for the many Israeli Jews who see others as their equal and as human. (The report is found here.)

In response to the Hamas attack of October 2023 Israel’s defence minister said,

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.

Such state responses and statements abound and cannot be justified under the heading of the right of self-defence. Genocide is an appropriate term. Omer Bartov, a former Israeli soldier and a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies wrote in the Guardian that he had become convinced that,

At least since the attack by the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] on Rafah on May 6, 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions .

But the Bible?

Netanyahu has positioned himself as a ‘secular Jew’ but has been willing to use Scripture as justification. The ‘Amalekites’ need to be wiped out and the land promised by God restored to those to whom God gave it. Weaponising the Bible is so common by colonising powers, what greater justification does one have but being the anointed of God?

Christian Zionists such as Tim Walberg (and many, many others could be quoted) who trained at two evangelical seminaries in a town hall meeting (he is now in politics) said that bombs should be dropped on Gaza like Nagasaki and Hiroshima to get it all over with quickly. When asked about humanitarian aid he replied with ‘we should not be spending a dime on humanitarian aid’. (When he replied with those words the UN had already warned that 70% of the population was suffering from catastrophic levels of hunger.)

Random thoughts:

• Two peoples corporately traumatised rarely find a solution.
• If we dig into the OT we find the lex talionis (eye for an eye) – a restrictive law on how revenge is taken, so that any response is equal to what was committed. This is not what is governing the response.
• Jesus advocated a love response that embraced the enemy; he blessed the peacemakers. We have to read from the NT back into the OT. Any apparent change of ethical instruction does not mean that there was a different God in the OT (Marcion’s conclusion), but as followers of Jesus we insist there is no other God than a Jesus-like God. And yes for sure we have to read the OT critically – that is a huge hermeneutical task, but we cannot make God into an image that is not seen in Jesus. (In certain places it seems that Christians vote for a bully who knows how to support their agenda as their God is also a bully who forces an agenda.) ‘You have heard it say, but…’
• Paul said ‘do good to all’ and added ‘especially to the household of faith’. Do good to all… and in Palestine, and currently in Iran where there are so many coming to faith, there are ‘many of the household of faith’ being starved, tortured and killed – with the full backing and indeed encouragement of evangelical ‘Bible-believing’ people. Something is wrong!
• I do not read of any expectation of the land being restored to ‘Israel’ nor of some end-time opening of eyes with regard to the land in the NT. (I date most books prior to AD70 and Revelation late 90s – so neither before nor after the fall of Jerusalem do I find such an expectation.)
• What do I make of 1948 and ‘Israel’? If a return to the land was an act of God it was to be preceded by repentance. Repentance is not what provoked a return. I am told that statistically more Jews come to Christ outside of Israel than inside. The return to the land is a Zionist persuasion – and to be anti-Zionist is NOT to be anti-Semitic. Most Palestinians are not anti-Jews (some of course are) but they are anti-Zionist. Is God at work… for sure but I see no basis to suggest the ‘return’ is something initiated by God. I have been struck by the convivencia that was present for centuries in Palestine. Those from the 3 Abrahamic faiths lived together. That term, convivencia, is a term used of Spain prior to the Reconquista by the Christians. Prior to that the three faiths lived respecting one another in the same space. We have prayed into this often.
• God is present in every situation that we create and works ‘for good’; but the Satan is also at work. If there was one land where reconciliation would be a sign on the earth above all others it would be that piece of land in the Middle East that is in conflict. Jesus was clear that those who murder are not descended from heaven but from the devil who was a murderer from the beginning.
• I do not have answers but do not sleep easily and I long for there to be a Jesus-aligned people who are not looking for an end that is provoked by some made-up Armageddon scenario but a beginning that is in response to an empty tomb.

Gayle has many dreams. The short version of a very long and profound dream she had prior to the current genocide is of a gathering inside a marquee. Support for Palestine becomes central; two groups find commonality – those of Christian faith and those who expressed faith for humanity (humanists)and one group exited – Zionists. Many aspects followed including the appearance of flamingos (now present in Albania) which then ended with an appeal to the banking system to get rid of the professional clothing and play with the children in the grass. We have to see a major shift in the economic realm (war enriches the few) as it is willing to sacrifice the next generation for blessing now (condemned as the sin of Moloch in the OT).

Romans 9-11 definitely stands as a section within the whole book but is not simply unrelated to the remainder of the book. The latter chapters address the inter-relationship of the people from the former covenant who have responded to Jesus as Messiah and those from the Graeco-Roman world who have acknowledged the God of Israel and the work of the cross (deeply practical – a people who are Torah obedient and a people of faith to whom the Torah was not given). And the earlier part of the book has all people have fallen short of the glory of God (of course we read this individualistically but Paul is writing it collectively), with the fullness of salvation available for all. Then these middle chapters are in answer to the faithfulness of God with Paul insisting that ‘It is not as though the word of God has failed’ (Rom. 9:6).

Never one that is easy to follow, but Paul having laid out his case concludes with ‘In this way all Israel will be saved‘. The chapters are dense and that sentence is somewhat dense too!

• He is not predicting some future turning of all Jews to Jesus as Messiah. His language is ‘in this way’ not ‘and then…’ He is not seeking to give a timeline. His slow to build (though dense) argument is to present an ongoing process of a faithful God.
• He is not saying ‘all Jews’ but ‘all Israel’. That is a vital part to note. The term ‘Jew’ and ‘Israel’ are not synonymous. Outside of these chapters in the Pauline corpus his usual language is ‘Jew’; inside these chapters his language is ‘Israel’.
• This distinction of ‘Jew’ and ‘Israel’ is consistent with other authors such as Josephus or Philo. (Josephus (37-100AD), for example, wrote the Jewish Antiquites (a history of Israel) and refers to Israel/Israelites 188 times in the first 11 volumes but does not use those words outside of those 11 volumes; and conversely he uses the term ‘Jew’ only 26 times in the first 10 volumes, but in the remaining 9 volumes he only refers to the term ‘Jew’ (1162 times)).
• ‘Jew’ refers to those who returned from the exile in Babylon, consisting of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin; ‘Israel’ is a larger term relating to the whole 12 tribes, who did not return to the land but were scattered among the nations. Paul expresses the hope of the 12 tribes when he stands before Agrippa – the hope of Israel, and if that hope is to be fulfilled then God has to be faithful. If he has abandoned his people then he will prove to be unfaithful.
• Thus Paul is writing of an ongoing process through which all Israel will be saved, not some ‘end-time’ event.
• Further he has argued (as Scripture does consistently) that Israel is a faith term more than an ethnic term. Those who are not ‘of Abraham’ can become descendants of Abraham, while ‘not all (ethnically) descendants of Abraham’ are of Israel. ‘Israel’ is a term larger than ethnic Israel and at the same time smaller than ethnic Israel!
• The global mission is the means by which all Israel will be saved. All Israel, not simply those living in the land of Israel (those whose designated term was ‘Jews’), but those from among the nations whose ethnicity is rooted in Abraham (those from the tribes who never returned); all Israel in that those who have no ethnic roots in Abraham but are adopted from among the gentiles (ta ethne – gentiles of nations as it was a term used to describe those who are not ethnically descended from Abraham).

The above is a summary of part of my reading of this ‘all Israel’ use in the context of Romans 9-11 and the fuller text is here.

In seeking to narrow down as to what Paul is arguing and thereby exclude certain other meanings I plan to jump to some perspectives on the situation in Palestine / Israel.

Some of you will have read the pdf on the theology behind Paul’s statement that ‘All Israel will be saved’ (available here via the menu under ‘Journals‘) and since then I have read Munther Isaac’s book ‘Christ in the Rubble’. He is a Palestinian Christian pastor (and much more!) living in the West Bank. Deeply informative of the history and sensitive to the issues but very clear. Two aspects remain with me constantly that the creation of the state of Israel by the colonial powers used the Palestinians as the atoning offering for the anti-Semitic history of those colonising powers and the history of the land prior to the modern state was one of convivencia.

Some years back Gayle and I took a year to research then travel throughout the whole of mainland Spain to pray into the years that culminated in the brutal expulsion of the Muslims (1609). With a measure of rose-tinted lenses and a significant measure of reality under the rule of the Muslims there was what was termed convivencia in Spain – those of the three Abrahamic faiths (Christian, Muslim and Jew) co-habited space. We see Spain as the ‘canary in the mine’ (not original to us – a recent history book wrote with this lens on Spain in the context of Europe) so do believe that Spain is key to lead a path back toward genuine convivencia – the vision of the New Jerusalem is that: every tribe… and no temple!

Maybe we are naive and yesterday we had two socially active people with us who do not express faith. I admire their stance and understand the huge measure of pessimism as without faith in the transcendent ‘Other’ how much faith can anyone have in humanity to bring about change. The pope recently called for a ‘Christian humanism’ to rise up. For too long we have seen a divide between a focus on humanity and a theology of God. This is why I wrote Humanising the Divine, though I don’t think the pope was one of the four readers of the widely acclaimed book (widely acclaimed in my head!).

I have at times alluded to what I consider is the most profound dream Gayle had which began with Palestine and the coming together of Jesus-aligned people with humanists in the context of Europe in close harmony and support, coinciding with the exit of Christian-Zionists. The end of the dream pushed for a new order economically. (There were many details in the dream that we have watched play out – including a phase of the appearance of pink flamingos with the question: ‘did you see that?’ Did you see what was happening in Albania???)

Palestine, Israel, convivencia, the Bible, genocide – huge questions. And in real life situations there are rarely ‘here is the answer’ but rather here is the first step… and if the steps can be followed bravely and without fear something redemptive unfolds. I think this is the way God / faith works – from glory to glory.

I read this morning an article: Israeli West Bank settler tells BBC attacks on Palestinians are justified as revenge (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g4djgdyk2o). I am lifting part of the dialogue below:

I think now, after they killed one Israeli, we need to kill all the people in Tal and Sarra, even Jit and Farata,” he said, naming the Palestinian villages closest to the outpost.
I put it to him that he was equating one Jewish life with hundreds or even thousands of Palestinian lives.
“No,” he said, “millions. One Jewish life, it’s 10 million [Palestinians].”
Challenged on the racism of his statement, he did not deny it.
“Yes, I know,” he replied. “But this is the truth, because God chose us [and] because of this you are jealous.”

‘God chose us’… there is the issue right in our face. And Paul quotes Deut. 32:21 that God would make Israel jealous by a nation that are not a people!

So over the coming days I want to reflect on Israel, Palestine with reference to what I wrote in the pdf. And hopefully taking it further, for the vision is of ‘neither Jew nor Greek’… maybe it begins with the original creational binary of ‘male and female’ shifting to be ‘no longer male and female’. The binaries that we so often love are no longer present relationally in Christ (Gal. 3:28; convivencia in its fullness).