EASTER REFLECTIONS: THE CRUCIFIXION OF ISRAEL

Atheists, agnostics and liberal Christians make up much of the Palestinian movement. Do they understand substitutionary atonement?

Atheists and liberal Christians, who tend to take political positions that side with Palestinians, like to dismiss the alliance between the Christian right and Israel as wrapped up in irrational religious booga-booga magumbo.

But we post-Christian progressives who are so confident in our evidence-based and reason-centred approach to the world can demonstrate a fair bit of woo-woo ourselves when it comes to Israel and Palestine.

Atheists and liberal Christians comprise a significant proportion of the Palestinian movement in North America. Mainline denominations like Presbyterians, Methodists and Canada’s largest Protestant grouping, the United Church, have taken strong and public positions against Israel. These are also people who tend to be on the left of the political spectrum so, out of a mindless reactivity, they align against the political and religious right, which is largely pro-Israel.

But in the process of our emphatically rational construction of our position on Israel and Palestine, there is something really quite supernatural happening.

Atheists overtly reject supernaturalism. Liberal Christians, to an extent, downplay literalist rituals and interpretations of liturgy and often welcome debate on issues of supernaturalism, like whether Jesus was the literal son of God or whether the Bible is literally “the word of God” or, less magically, merely “divinely inspired.”

Personally, I have more respect for people who acknowledge that there are questions without answers than people who have answers that can’t be questioned. But I also acknowledge that this questioning leaves us less secure than the certainty our believing ancestors enjoyed. Atheists, agnostics and liberal Christians can find ourselves in uncertain spiritual territory without the roadmap that guided our grandparents.

But are we humans even capable of simply making the conscious choice to abandon supernaturalism and being done with it? Are clever 21st-century rationalists as capable as we’d like to think of shedding vestigial ideas and superstitions that formed the centres of our ancestors’ lives for generations? Could there be some subconscious supernatural residues of religion and its trappings that we fail to leave behind when we reject faith (or even just its literalism)? Is it possible that some of the emotional expressions and spiritual outlets that religion provided may not simply disappear just because we say we don’t believe in them anymore?

At the centre of Christianity is the concept of substitutionary atonement, which is the transference of our guilt or sin onto a vessel that is then sacrificed. Other religions have similar forms of substitutionary atonement but in the Christian example most familiar to most of us, it takes the form of Jesus having died for the sins of those who believe in him.

At a time in history when the world seems more complex than ever, when Good Guys and Bad Guys are not so easily discernible and even the definition of truth is the subject of debate, we find ourselves unmoored ethically, intellectually, spiritually. Coincidentally, it is just this sort of world for which religion has an antidote. Whether our parents or grandparents were conservative Christians, who viewed the Bible as a guidebook to life, or whether they were more liberal Christians, who used biblical stories as metaphors to navigate life and the world, they had this tool. Conveniently, the tool also included a way to rid themselves of guilt and cleanse their consciences through substitutionary atonement.

Lacking the sort of outlet for our guilt that our grandparents had — confession, communion — for some progressives, the quest for dispensation seems to be coming out in our politics.

While we may consciously reject theological falderal, the need to obviate our own feelings of guilt may help explain the particularly evangelical fervor with which we engage over some topics — not least of which is Palestine and Israel.

In a complex world, lacking the certitudes of the past, we have had to create a metaphor to try to make some sense. Is it a surprise that we went straight back to the very birthplace of metaphor to redefine g(o)od and (d)evil for a post-theological age?

Even when there is not a cataclysmic war there, Israel and Palestine receive exponentially more attention from the United Nations, from churches, trade unionists, campus and academic associations, media, diplomats and every variety of activist movements than conflicts that are exponentially more serious and life-destroying. Why?

There are a few reasons, some of them plausible. You can get an earful of these justifications whenever you challenge a follower of the Palestinian movement on their seemingly obsessive focus on this conflict. Yet the sheer irrationality of this almost unanimous fixation must tell us something beyond reason is at play.

Here’s a theory: Baked into the progressive worldview is a sense of guilt that we feel as privileged citizens of the West. Is it fair to say that progressives hate ourselves, or at least carry substantial burdens of guilt — for our privilege, our comparative wealth, our good fortune at being born into the comfortable society we inhabit? (No matter where a North American falls in the comparative economy of our own countries, by dint of birth most of us are among the wealthiest people in the world.) Let’s consider the things that privileged North Americans (rightly) harbor guilt around. Then consider the way we approach Israel and Palestine, and compare.

The treatment of Indigenous peoples in North America, the consequences of which are being felt through intergenerational trauma and the results of systemic discrimination and continued racism, is one of the most serious issues we face. Canadians have been engaged in an admirable process of reconciliation, though we have a great distance to go and, even then, we cannot change the terrible past.

Yet when we look at Israel and Palestine, we see — or, because of the distorted and simplistic narrative we have accepted, we imagine we see — a similar process taking place against an Indigenous people, the Palestinians. The reconciliation process we are engaged in at home can be difficult and it is necessarily insufficient. Are we, who live on unceded ancestral lands going to give up the rights to the property we dwell on, that we paid for, and for which we are probably still paying a mortgage? No. But we can feel better about our hypocrisy at home by railing against a perceived parallel situation halfway around the world. It is reconciliation on the cheap. We can feel better about ourselves — we can atone for our sins as descendants of colonists — at absolutely no cost to ourselves. So we construct Palestinians as the Indigenous peoples and Zionists as the colonial-settlers. And if that construction bears very little resemblance to reality, well, we’ll just shout our slogans a little louder until even we believe they’re true.

Likewise, the cycle of economic exploitation of which each of us is a part through cheap foreign-made clothing or the gamut of exploitive benefits we reap as middle-class Developed World people is hard to deny or extricate ourselves from. We celebrate symbolic gestures like Buy Nothing Day or we modestly reduce our consumption of consumer goods, but only the most dedicated fraction of 1% among us (and those are probably accused of fanaticism) have a carbon footprint or annual waste accumulation equal to an average Developing World citizen.

This inconvenient reality can be balanced (again, at no cost to ourselves) through our activism on behalf of Palestinians who we accept as being economically disadvantaged (despite that they receive more humanitarian aid per capita than any other people on earth). The narrative around Israel and Palestine likes to paint the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean as one of opulent Israeli affluence and universal Palestinian destitution. (This construction also illustrates another area where Western progressives are Palestinians’ worst enemies: Part of the reason that Palestinians are economically disadvantaged compared with Israelis is because of the refusal to engage with the “Zionist entity,” the economic engine of the region, a self-defeating approach encouraged and rewarded by the BDS movement.)

Regardless, we can sit in comfortable North America and declaim Israelis as economically exploitive interlopers and Palestinians as hopeless economically disadvantaged people lacking all agency and we can feel a little better about our own unfair advantages and ongoing excesses. Our grotesque overconsumption — the volume of food we eat, the resources we use, the pollution we create, the waste that typifies our existence — all these sins can be atoned for in a small way if we condemn Israel for its conspicuous material success in a region typified by destitution. And just as it makes no rational sense, and just as we might ridicule the wine and the wafer and the confessional and the range of religious infrastructure created to alleviate the pain of human sin and guilt, we practice something equally irrational and definitely more destructive: An illogical but fanatical adherence to an imaginary narrative.

As we’ve come to terms with the impacts of our ancestors’ marauding, whether British, Dutch, Spanish, French or other colonial societies — even as we continue to benefit materially from the profits of that marauding — we try to absolve ourselves by railing against Israeli “imperialism,” which is a surprisingly common motif, but which by even the broadest definition of the term cannot be made to rationally fit. To be an imperial entity, Israel would have to be an outpost of some imperial power, serving as a source of resources or other wealth for the “mother” country, rather than the incarnation of an indigenous national self-determination that it is. But facts are extraneous if the narrative fits our needs.

The examples go on. Israel is depicted as the very embodiment of global evil. Anti-Zionists relish depicting Israeli leaders as demons, a familiar motif to anyone with the scantest acquaintance with medieval religious antisemitism. In a world where black and white are widely dismissed as incapable of incorporating the nuance of human experience, Israel is the one exception, depicted by its enemies as intrinsically and irredeemably wicked. The creation of a secular version of an underworld is particularly on the nose when anti-Zionists employ, as they habitually do, the infantile term “IsraHELL.”

Now, of course, there are rejoinders to every one of these examples. No, no, no, say the anti-Zionists, Israel actually is just that terrible. Yet in a world where genuine atrocities are affecting millions of people every day of the year, our groundless obsession over this one conflict to the detriment of all others points to one conclusion: Despite all of our sophistication and cleverness, we still go back to that most enduring empty vessel onto which our grandparents and their grandparents unloaded their fears, prejudices and hatred — the Jew. Whether in the form of antisemitic prejudice and violence, which was the go-to for millennia of Europeans who could not explain why a plague was killing their children and so blamed the “other,” the Jews, or whether in the form of unburdening our sins on the crucified body of a Jew, Jesus, the empty vessel was, is and seems destined to continue to be a Jewish one, now in the form of the Jewish state.

The idea that rational, intellectual atheists, agnostics or liberal Christians are exhibiting some misshapen variant of our ancestors’ rituals should not be shocking. What should be shocking is that nobody seems to recognize the ancient ritual we are so transparently re-enacting.

In progressive movements today — the Women’s March is one of the most documented examples but really almost anywhere on the left — Zionism is viewed like Satan-worshipping is regarded among churchgoing folk. Zionism is secular blasphemy: It will not be tolerated. Unquestioning absolutism defines Palestinianism and anyone who whispers the slightest dissent is an apostate, a heretic. The “progressive” treatment of Zionists is the literal definition of shunning. I have been told (by a schoolteacher, among others) “I don’t engage with Zionists.”

We’ll don our welcoming, inclusive masks when Jewish activists ask to join our marches, so long as they sign on to some statement disavowing Israel, as if the Spanish Inquisition were the model for our movements. By segregating “good Jews” (anti-Zionists) from “bad Jews” (the vast majority who support their people’s national self-determination) we are confident that we have struck just the right balance, even as we advance an ideology that would leave the Jewish people stateless in an increasingly hostile world we ourselves are helping to create.

Like fundamentalist religions, our testament of Palestinianism cannot acknowledge any of its own failures, inconsistencies or shortcomings. No matter how irrational or contradictory our narrative about Palestine is, we hold to it like gospel. We manipulate history as it suits our narrative, accentuating or ignoring chapter and verse just as we condemn hypocrites of faith for doing.

Like some Christians speak of forgiveness and love while demonstrating hatred and judgment, the Palestinian movement speaks of freedom and peace, while making common cause with the most oppressive and violent forces on earth. No matter how violent the Palestinian movement, we find a way to blame Israel while insisting that Palestinianism is a movement for peace. No matter how contrary Palestinianism is to our values of feminism, pluralism, free expression, nonviolence and equal rights, somehow we overcome these contradictions and defend our certitudes. The saintly must be beatified and the antagonists demonized.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that Palestine, like Israel, is forced to fit into a mold that bears little resemblance to reality, there is a Messianic Palestinianism that behaves as though the redemption of Palestine will bring heaven on earth. There is an inescapable stream running through not only the left, but also much of the world’s foreign policy, including that of the United Nations that, if only this one issue were settled, swords worldwide would become ploughshares and unicorns would return from the void. If only Palestine were “free,” everything else would fall into place, from the conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan to the panoramic human rights abuses almost everywhere in the world, to civil wars and genocides in Africa and Asia. It is a messianic idea that has no place in rational discourse. And it is a flip side of the familiar coin: What is standing in the way of the great new global age of peace and happiness? The Jews, again.

(The only kernel of potential truth in this is the fact that, yes, if the conflict were to end and, with it, the obsession about Palestine, some of these other serious global issues might receive the attention they deserve and perhaps move toward resolution. Instead we will continue to see millions of imperiled people ignored because Palestine! Palestine! Palestine!)

Is this Messianic Palestinianism a psychological phenomenon or a theological transference? Does it matter? The point, I guess, is that the very characteristics of traditional religion these people ostentatiously reject they nevertheless unconsciously exhibit when dealing with a geopolitical issue that is inextricably wrapped up in religion, history, the Holy Land and our approach to Jews. And the positions we take on Israel and Palestine, which we assure others and ourselves are founded on fact-based reason and empiricism may instead be deeply distorted by our own suppressed religiosity, even if — perhaps especially if — we deny we even carry any vestiges of religiosity.

In short: What are the chances all of this could be untainted by generations of received ideas and prejudices we don’t even consciously acknowledge carrying? There is no way that the Sunday school stories of our childhood do not influence our vision on this. Even the most atheistic were raised with Bible stories. Noah’s Ark, Adam and Eve, Joseph and his brothers, the Easter bunny. (No wait — but see how these get entwined?) These Jewish texts are so interwoven with our popular culture that many of us may not be able to distinguish the source, Deuteronomy or Disney, but the lessons they impart are there. Liberal Christians and plenty of non-believers know the narratives even if we reject them literally. Crucifixion, resurrection, sin and redemption, even Old Testament ideas of Armageddon (bad) and Eden (good) play in to this, even as we pretend that our positions are founded in facts, rendered with reason and untainted by irrationality.

After all these years, so much human evolution and the rejection of our ancestors’ superstitions, still when we need a scapegoat, our first reflex is to look for the Jew. Our great-grandparents may have bludgeoned their Jewish neighbors on Good Friday or, more harmlessly, relieved themselves of sin by unburdening it on the figure of a sacrificed Jew at the front of the church.

For 2,000 years of Christian tradition, our ancestors piled their sins on a Jewish vessel and destroyed the vessel, drinking his blood and eating his body.

It is still happening — every Sunday in your neighbourhood, during morning and evening services, in every car with a cross appended to its mirror and on every neck with a crucifix hanging from it. Now, every chant of “free Palestine” has undertones of a similar reenactment.

Israel has borne this cross for a long time. But in the past decade the world community has moved into place along the road chanting and howling as Israel bears its burden toward its final destination. And anyone having the slightest familiarity with Christian tradition knows where that road leads.

And as smart and sophisticated and post-theological as we think we are, we still can’t keep ourselves from joining the procession, lining up along the Way of Suffering, piling the worst imaginable sins of humankind on a Jew(ish state) and then seeking its destruction.