http://www.benwhite.org.uk/blog/?p=1281

For those interested, this article from the Anglican Third Way journal, while ostensibly merely about universal human rights, is surely also background to how Ben White explains his pro-Palestinian Christian and Muslim nationalism as qualitatively different from pro-Israeli Jewish nationalism.

I’d just like to pick out some things first:

“as Christians we believe that every person, made in God’s image, is inherently worthy of dignity and justice – a profound truth reinforced by the mystery of the Incarnation, when God and humankind became one. Furthermore, ‘loving our neighbour’ means solidarity with those who are not ‘one of us’, offering the same risk-taking love as we would to a brother or sister in faith.”

“the biblical story out of which we act, leading from Eden to the New Jerusalem, is a unique, action-shaping narrative. Moreover, the way in which we, as a community, embody an alternative to the world around us, means that our Kingdom-shaped commitment to costly, indiscriminate justice will be a breath of fresh air.

These are tricky waters to navigate, avoiding the unhealthy extremes of Christian ‘tribalism’ while ensuring that the suffering members of the faith family feel our support.”

Ben is an evangelical Christian, curiously blind to the aspect of the Christian narrative which condemns ancient Jewish resistance to Roman imperialism and colonialism, holds Jews as justifiably ethnically cleansed and dispossessed as a result, and wholly fails to identify with the Jewish other in his dispossession, from the land of Israel and just about everywhere else since, as well as hopes for return and restoration, yet has a uniquely preciously diametrically opposite view of Palestinian Christian and Muslim dispossession and hopes for return and restoration.

This spectacular double standard is not, apparently, an expression of, as BW calls it, “Christian tribalism”, rather a subscription to universal human rights.

Unfortunately, being a cripple and largely housebound, I will not be able to attend his book launch.

Anyway, here is the rest of his article:

http://www.thirdway.org.uk/editions/no-edition/features/why-god-believes-in-human-rights.aspx

I might add that this article of Ben’s carries more than a hint of a threat: non-violent resistance is a means, not an end, he writes, the end being the “de-colonizing” of “Palestine”. He skirts round the the natural corollary of “non-violent resistance is a means, not an end” i.e. “if non-violence fails, violence is necessary” with “It is the end goal, decolonization and liberation from occupation and Zionist apartheid, that is ferociously opposed by the self-declared international guardians of the “peace process” and their friends in the Palestinian elite. The rest is just smoke and mirrors.”

But the threat is there, nonetheless. And note the end for Ben is an end to “Zionist apartheid” i.e. a Jewish state.

It’s extraordinary how he both elides non-violence with violence and then manages to ameliorate the latter to irrelevance. As though Palestinian Christian and Muslims nationalism were anything other than almost wholly exclusory (to put it nicely) towards Palestinian and Jews in general.

“The first problem is that the article does not do justice to the rich tradition and contemporary practice of nonviolent resistance, or popular struggle, in Palestine. The first intifada and the protests in Bil’in are cited, but the Palestinians draw on a far deeper reservoir of experience, dating at least as far back as the 1936 Revolt against British occupation and creeping Zionist colonization. As writer Mazin Qumsiyeh has noted, part of the Revolt included “a conference of 150 delegates representing all sectors of the population calls for a general strike and refusal to pay taxes to the British occupation authorities.”

He’s re-writing the history of modern Palestinian Christian and Muslim nationalism as one of essential reasonableness and non-violence (and, where violent, essentially provoked by the “Zionists”).

Anyway:

“The problem has never been a Palestinian failure to meet the demands set by the US or international community, a display of colonial arrogance that repeats itself in every successive “negotiation.” Popular struggle, like violent resistance, is not an end in and of itself; it is a method, a strategy. It is the end goal, decolonization and liberation from occupation and Zionist apartheid, that is ferociously opposed by the self-declared international guardians of the “peace process” and their friends in the Palestinian elite. The rest is just smoke and mirrors.”

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9036.shtml

Suddenly those pro-PA are “middle class” bourgeoisie, the non- violent (and violent) anti-two staters the authentic Palestinian Christian and Muslim proletariat.

Ben White: evangelical Anglican Christian non- (and not so non-) violent quasi Marxist (jihadi?).

War on Want? War on something. War, it seems, of the non- (and if that fails non-non-) violent sort, until the dissolution of the Jewish state.

He cites the general strike of 1936 as an example of non-violent Palestinian resistance, but doesn’t seem to know it was instigated by the Mufti who, arguably, even in the 30s, had an eliminationist if not genocidalist view towards the Jews of Palestine (”The English to the sea, the Jews to the grave!”).

Ben thinks he can write a history of Israel or Zionism of academic quality. He’s a bit deficient in his Palestinian Christian and Muslim national history.

But, then, he (is the son of an Anglican minister and?) went to Cambridge. He’s too good to debate with the likes of us.