Hebrews of the Cross

An article in National Geographic details the plight of Middle Eastern Christians:
But the 196,500 Palestinian and Israeli Arab Christians, who dropped from 13 percent of the population in 1894 to less than 2 percent today, occupy a uniquely oxygen-starved space between traumatized Israeli Jews and traumatized Palestinian Muslims, whose rising militancy is tied to regional Islamist movements that sometimes target Arab Christians. In the past decade, "the situation for Arab Christians has gone rapidly downhill," says Razek Siriani, a frank and lively man in his 40s who works for the Middle East Council of Churches in Aleppo, Syria. "We're completely outnumbered and surrounded by angry voices," he says.

Christianity is a religion born of Judaism. Both Jesus and Paul the Apostle considered themselves Jews. Why then should Israel not open its doors to the Christians of not just the Palestinian territories, but all of the Middle East? Over the generations the present "Arab Christians" will gradually transform into Hebrew Christians - which is exactly what the early Christians were. No doubt many of today's Arab Christians are partially descended from some of those original converts.

I am not proposing that Israel stop defining itself as a "Jewish state," but that it stop defining itself as a religiously Jewish state (which was never what its founders intended it to be). By embracing Arab Christians as long-lost brothers, as Hebrews who practice Christianity, Israel would only be returning to the situation of the first century A.D, when Judeans ranged from Pharisees to Sadducees, Hellenizers to Christ-believers. Yeshua ben Yosef deserves a place at the Sabbath table. Let the right of return extend to the Semites of the cross.

Comments

  1. latté islandJuly 6, 2009 at 2:09 AM

    But some Arab Christians are anti-zionist and anti-semitic. For instance Edward Said was descended from Arab Christians, and the local Christian patriarch Michel Sabbah seems to be on the other side too. So even though your position makes sense to me, the people who live there may not see it your way.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Manifesto

The establishment of the state of Israel is the most profound modification of the galut which has occurred, but it is not the end of the galut : in the religious sense, and perhaps not only in the religious sense, the state of Israel is a part of the galut . Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved. In other words, human beings will never create a society which is free of contradictions. From every point of view it looks as if the Jewish people were the chosen people, at least in the sense that the Jewish problem is the most manifest symbol of the human problem . . . - Leo Strauss I am a Jew living in the galut . I would remain a Jew living in the galut if I lived on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Zionism responds to the geopolitical dimension of Jewish exile, but exile is not simply or primarily a geopolitical problem. Exile is an infinite, absolute problem that crosses all borders. The state of exile encompasses displacement from God, di
Read more

The Anti-Semite as High School Girl

The Germans hate the Jewish religion less than their race, less their peculiar faith than their peculiar noses. - Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem The most assimilated and preeminent Westerners of Jewish lineage still preserved in their physical physiognomy, if in nothing else, the unmistakable and eternal stamp of Israel. And this inevitable fact has again and again infuriated the pagan peoples of the world. - Ludwig Lewisohn I found the reductio ad absurdum proof of the above sentiment in a blog comment posted by an Internet beauty queen: Plenty of people object to Jewish looks/appearance, not just WNs…Jews tend to be very physically ugly. Actually, the vast majority of Jews aren’t just ugly, many are FRIGHTENINGLY UGLY, so much so that most normal and healthy people of all racial/ethnic backgrounds are immediately repulsed or even instinctively scared (women and children, mostly) of them and as such avoid contact with them. Full-blooded Jews, especially unmixed Ashkenazim, are quite
Read more

Anti-Semites, The Nation of Priests

Anti-Semites cite the following passage from Genealogy of Morals to enlist Nietzsche into their cause: All the world’s efforts against the “aristocrats,” the “mighty,” the “masters,” the “holders of power” are negligible by comparison with what has been accomplished against those classes by the Jews—the Jews, that priestly nation which eventually realized that the one method of effecting satisfaction on its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of values, which was at the same time an act of the cleverest revenge. Yet the method was only appropriate to a nation of priests, to a nation of the most jealously nursed priestly revengefulness. It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with terrifying logic to suggest the contrary equation, and indeed to maintain with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of weakness) this contrary equation, namely, “the wretched are
Read more