President Yasser Arafat,
Shalom.
I write these lines in order to protest against a statement that I cannot ignore. In theweekly Palestinian paper, The Jerusalem Times, there appeared on March 26 a short itemreporting that you have viewed the controversial film of Mel Gibson, “The Passion of theChrist”. Afterwards your advisor and close assistant, Nabil Abu-Rudeina, stated thatyou found the film “moving and historical”. Abu-Rudeina added that ”the Palestinians arestill daily being exposed to the kind of pain Jesus was exposed to during his crucifixion.”
If the statement had not appeared in a Palestinian paper, I would have believed that it wasinvented by Ariel Sharon’s propaganda machine. It is hard to imagine a sentence morecapable of hurting the Palestinian cause.
I hold Abu-Rudeina in very high esteem. I appreciate his loyalty to the Palestinian causeand to you personally. He has remained at your side throughout the siege of your compound,and – like you – he is now risking his life there daily. But this statement should not have beenmade. I have not seen the film, nor do I intend to. I abhor cruelty, also in films, and thisfilm is full of cruel scenes, claiming to depict the New Testament on screen. Obviously,there is a great difference between reading a written text and seeing it all on the screen,with life-like displays of atrocious acts and blood flowing like water.
But this is not the main thing. As an Arab and a Muslim, you are not obliged to be aware of theterrible impact that the description of the crucifixion has had on the life of Jews overalmost two thousand years of persecutions, pogroms and torture by the Spanishinquisition, large-scale expulsions, mass and individual murders, up to the Holocaust inwhich six million Jews perished. All these were, directly or indirectly, caused, or atleast made possible, by this narrative.
The New Testament is sacred to its believers. But like our Bible (the so-called OldTestament), it is not a history text. Religious truth and historical truth are not one andthe same. The descriptions of the crucifixion in the four gospels were written down manydecades after the event, and the writers wrote what they wrote under the influence of thecircumstances of their time.
Let’s take, for instance, the image of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. The Romansdescribed him as an unscrupulous, corrupt and cruel procurator. In the New Testament, he ispictured as a humane person, almost a philosopher, who did not want to execute Jesus butgave in to the Jews. In Gibson’s film, he is an attractive figure, who is compelled by thedisgusting Jews – disgusting even physically – to act against his conscience.
Why this description? Simple: when the text was written, the Christians were alreadytrying to convert the Roman world to their creed. It was convenient for them, therefore, toblame the Jews and exonerate the Romans, reversing the realities of the times.. The Jewsthen, like the Palestinians now, were an occupied people, and the Romans were theoccupiers. Crucifixion was a usual Roman punishment, a kind of “targeted elimination” ofthat time (but after a trial).
The writers of the gospels were bursting with hatred of the Jews. That is not surprising,either. They were Jews themselves, as were Jesus and all the people around him. But theybelonged to a dissident sect, which was considered by the Jewish establishment inJerusalem as heretical. The Christian Jews were cruelly persecuted. As usual in suchfratricidal struggles, this one, too, aroused burning hatred. This hatred found itsexpression in the description of the crucifixion.
The Gospel According to Matthew (Chapter 27) puts it this way: ”Pilate said to them (theJewish crowd assembled in front of his office): ’What then shall I do with Jesus, who iscalled Christ?’ They all said to him: ‘Let him be crucified!’ Then the governor said: ‘Why,what has he done?’ But they cried all the more, saying: ‘Let him be crucified!’ When Pilatesaw that he could not prevail at all, but rather that a tumult was rising, he took water andwashed his hands before the multitude, saying: ‘I am innocent of the blood of this justPerson. You see to it!’ And all the people answered and said: ‘His blood be on us and on ourchildren’.”
Obviously, this is not a historical description. An entire people, or a great multitude,does not talk like one single person. The words “His blood be…on our children” areunreasonable and were put there in order to justify taking revenge on generations to come.And indeed, many generations of rabble-rousers used these words in order to inciteagainst the god-killers.
Adolf Hitler, of course, was no Christian fanatic. Quite the contrary, some of hisfollowers tried to bring back pagan Germanic rites. But Hitler and the perpetrators of theHolocaust learned the New Testament in school, and no one can say how much of the text theyunconsciously absorbed. And many simple fundamentalists accepted the Holocaust ortook part in it because of this.
I do not intend to lay the collective blame on the entire Christian world throughout thecenturies. Far from it. Many of the greatest humanists throughout history wereChristians, some of them very devout. Not only the perpetrators of the Holocaust wereChristians, so were the Righteous Ones, those who saved Jews. Christian monasteries inmany places took in Jews and saved their lives.
Jesus preached love, and the new Testament pictures him as an immensely attractiveperson, righteous, merciful and tolerant. How terrible that so many atrocities in historywere perpetrated by persons and institutions claiming to act in his name.
You, Mr. President, as an Arab and a Muslim, are proud of the fact that for more than athousand years the Muslim world was a model of tolerance, toward both Jews and Christians.The Muslim world has never known mass expulsions and pogroms, that were a regular featurein Christendom, not to mention the terrible Holocaust.
The blood-bond between Muslims and Jews runs through history. One of the darkest chaptersin the history of this country, which we both love, is the story of the crusades. Even beforethe reached the Holy Land, the crusaders committed genocide against the Jews of Germany.When they breached the walls of Jerusalem, they killed the entire population of the city,men and women, old people and babes in arms. One of them proudly described how they waded inblood up to their knees. It was the blood of Muslims and Jews, butchered together, theirlast prayers intertwined on their way to heaven.
After the fall of Jerusalem, Haifa still held out against the crusaders. Most of itsinhabitants were Jews, who fought side by side with the Egyptian garrison. The Muslimsprovided them with arms, and according to a Christian chronicler, the Jews foughtvaliantly. When the town fell, the crusaders butchered the remaining Jews and Muslimstogether.
Four hundred years later, when the Christians finished the re-conquest of Spain from theMuslims, they expelled the Jews and the Muslims together. After the Golden Age, thewonderful cultural symbiosis of Muslims and Jews in medieval Muslim Spain, Muslims andJews suffered a common fate. Almost all the expelled Jews settled in Muslim orMuslim-ruled countries.
Let us not allow the present bitter conflict between our two peoples, with all itscruelty, to overshadow the past, because that is the basis for our common future.
The present sufferings of the Palestinian people – which we, as Israelis and Jews, opposeand fight against – have no connection with what happened – or not – some 1973 years ago.
If there is any connection at all, it is the other way round. Without modern Christiananti-Semitism, the Zionist movement would not have been born at all. As I have mentionedbefore, the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, explicitly stated his beliefthat the founding of a Jewish State was the only way of saving the European Jews.Anti-Semitism was and is the force that drives the Jews to Palestine.
Without anti-Semitism, the Zionist vision would have remained an abstract idea. Fromthe pogrom of Kishinev, through the Holocaust to the anti-Semitism in Russia that hasrecently driven more than a million Jews to Israel – anti-Semitism was and remains the mostdangerous enemy of the Palestinian people. There is much truth in the saying that thePalestinians are “the victims of the victims”.
On top of all the moral reasons, this is an additional argument against a statement aboutthe crucifixion that can be construed by anti-Semites as an encouragement for their cause.
When peace comes, we shall all meet in Jerusalem, Jews, Christians and Muslims.
I know that you dream of it, as do I.
Let us hope that we shall both see it with our own eyes.