Cuba is now completely out of fuel, with intermittent power, uncollected rubbish, and families requiring regular food and water deliveries. “Tommy Robinson”-led far-right protests followed a police incident in Southampton, with Nigel Farage in Parliament calling for “rage” about “two-tier policing” discriminating against white people. Added to events in the Middle East a sense of chaos and economic gloom is hard to dispel, while only violence and conflict seem newsworthy for most of the media.
Coherent public debate in such an atmosphere is hard to maintain. Pope Leo’s call to stress the “common good” (note 1) has to struggle with the instinctive human demand for a strong leader (or “Sovereign Individual”- see note 2) and priority for “my people”. A school system which fails to equip young people with the confidence and ability to engage in coherent and rational debate about our political future cannot meet the needs of this modern world.
Deuteronomy chapter eight holds out the vision of a wealthy, peaceful and just future for a people who had spent forty years aimlessly wandering in the wilderness. But this was won at the price of long years of warfare, ethnic cleansing and frequent genocide commanded by Israel’s god, a picture still in many ways at the core of religious Zionism today. The lack of any archaeological evidence (see note 3) leads most scholars to question if that story was historical fact (for example, Norman Gottwald: “The Tribes of Yahweh”- note 4). The problem, however, is that it is the “history” people are taught and believe that influences political attitudes, rather than what “actually happened”.
The contention of Deuteronomy and the whole “Deuteronomic” history (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings) was that this “cleansing” was necessary to guard against Israel’s “corruption” by the religious “power-worship” of the surrounding empires- but if that was its aim, it failed as often as it succeeded. And the Hebrew Scriptures themselves often question the rigid separation from “foreigners” Deuteronomy seems to demand.
The story of Ruth (stuck in the middle of that history) points out that the great king David himself was the product of a mixed marriage (Ruth his great-grandmother from Moab) in direct contradiction to the repudiation of foreign marriages required at the return from Exile in Babylon (by Ezra and Nehemiah). The prophet Ezekiel imagines land allocated to “resident aliens” in the restored community. Psalm 87 celebrates many peoples, even including former enemies, having their “birthright” in “Zion” (note 5).
So does Palestine “belong” to Israel? Does England “belong” to the English? Or must we say, as so-called “primitive” indigenous communities have said for so long (note 6), that nations do not “own” patches of land. Rather, we all “belong” to the land, and its resources are for all peoples to share?
Notes and Weblinks:
- Pope Leo: The economy must serve the common good – Vatican News
- Sovereign Individual : Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by Davidson, James Dale; Rees-Mogg, William: As New (1999) | GreatBookPricesUK
- The Bible Unearthed by Finkelstein – AbeBooks
- [PDF] Tribes of Yahweh by Norman Gottwald | 9781841270265, 9780567549570 Gottwald argues that “Hebrews” were not a unified nation of “invaders” but the “’Apiru”, the “nomads, outsiders, vagabonds” on the margins of ancient civilisations who rose up in revolt against the oppressive Canaanite City States.
- “We Belong to the Land”- Elias Chacour Belong Land Story Palestinian by Chacour Elias – AbeBooks
- “Time We Started Listening: Theological Questions Put To Us By Recent Indigenous Writing”: Duncan Reid https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1925679802?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_1