A 25th Anniversary Trip to Israel/Palestine Turned Into a Quest for Origins and Solutions of the Conflict There

By James R. McCormick

How did I, an American who grew up with newsreel images of the Nazi death camps and the movie “Exodus,” come to be a passionate sympathizer with the Palestinian victims of Zionism? How did I, a post-Vatican II Catholic, encouraged to embrace our Jewish elder brothers in the common faith of Abraham, come to a grudging realization that in Israel the scapegoat of history has become the oppressor?

As of early 1993 I had never met a Palestinian, but I had worked with many Jews while a lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board and the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. I counted quite a few among my friends. These were good people, committed to a better world, always on the side of the underdog. Exactly my kind of people. In 1976 I was elected to a judgeship, and have been a judge in Michigan for 22 years.

Although I now live in a community with relatively few Jews, I have had the privilege of acting on my religiously-based affinity for Jews on two occasions. The first was a successful effort to bring a Jewish congregation, Temple Beth El, within the fold of our local ecumenical Christian organization. The rabbi and I hammered out language which satisfied all sides. The temple became an active participant in interfaith activities, a development that gave me great pleasure. Then, in 1985, I chaired a civic committee for a Holocaust Memorial Program on the 40th anniversary of the end of the Nazi plan to destroy European Jewry. It remains one of my proudest moments.

In 1993 my wife, Marilyn, and I traveled to Israel/Palestine to celebrate our 25th anniversary. I remember well the Jews on board our jet clapping as we landed at Ben-Gurion Airport. I joined in the spontaneous celebration, and kissed the tarmac upon exiting the plane. But the euphoria was dampened by my observation of the harsh treatment of Palestinians going through customs, my introduction to the apartheid system of the Israeli government.

We stayed at a run-down Palestinian hotel in East Jerusalem, and soon were exposed to the separate worlds of the Israeli and Palestinian sides of the Holy City. We saw Israeli soldiers jump out of jeeps in East Jerusalem and frisk and humiliate Arab men without provocation. We couldn’t help seeing the lack of city services in the Arab areas. Soon we were to witness the checkpoints, the closures of roads to Arabs, the menacing soldiers with their semi-automatics ready to go. We were surprised to discover that the Palestinian Christians and their leaders were entirely sympathetic with the grievances of the Muslim majority.

Yet we had little understanding of the origins of the disturbing situation in which we found ourselves. Israelis and Palestinians all had their pat little stories. Some said the Arabs had always hated Jews, and that the Palestinians in the refugee camps should be absorbed by the 20 surrounding Arab states.

Then there was the biblical covenant whereby God promised the land to His people, Israel, forever. Was this not a trump card which overrides all other justice claims to the contrary? And hadn’t Israel taken a virtually empty land and made the desert bloom?

Faint Stirrings of an Idea

Upon returning home to Michigan I began to read everything I could get my hands on concerning the holy places associated with the life of Jesus. The faint stirrings of an idea—to write a guidebook for Christians of all denominations, but containing sympathetic presentations of Jewish and Muslim history, holy places, and contemporary life as well—were brought to life when a group from my own parish planned a “Holy Land Pilgrimage” in 1995. I felt inspired to travel on my own to Israel/Palestine and after a period of time exploring the Old City of Jerusalem, to meet up with the Michigan group.

Just before leaving home I was surprised by the sharp response I received from a rabbi with whom I was talking in a coffee shop when I innocently remarked that I was traveling to Israel and Palestine. He made it clear that the latter term was off limits.

On this second trip I looked a lot more closely at my surroundings. I came to see the parallels between this land and South Africa and the old Jim Crow South, and the 19th century Indian reservation policy of our government. The Palestinians were a permanent underclass, despised by a substantial percentage of Israelis. They were progressively being driven out of Jerusalem by insidious laws and regulations governing work, travel and residency.

The hills in the West Bank, the part set aside in 1947 by the United Nations for a State of Palestine, were filling up with modern Jewish apartment complexes, cleverly denominated as “settlements,” suggesting brave frontiersmen. In fact, they were systematically seizing (stealing) the best land, leaving only crowded, isolated Bantustan towns to be occupied by the Palestinians, the remnant of the people who had for many centuries lived everywhere in this land.

I went home and read, this time turning more of my attention to the origins of the modern tragedy, but still mainly focused on Christian pilgrimage. Late in 1995 I wrote the first draft of my book, Jerusalem and the Holy Land: The First Ecumenical Pilgrim’s Guide. I sent it to a number of well-informed people for critiques: scholars, pilgrimage leaders, Palestinian Christian leaders, and one Zionist Jewish friend.

In response I received a mass of suggestions, many criticizing my naive attempt to be impartial as between Zionism and the Palestinian cause. It was apparent that most of these people whose opinions I respected, people with years of experience on the ground, found the moral high ground to be with the Palestinians and felt it was wrong to sugarcoat the truth.

Determined to dig deeper, I sojourned to this land again in early 1997, before the publication of the book. This time I was traveling strictly on my own. My powers of observation were improving.

Everyone I really respected supported the Palestinians. Yet I detected no anti-Semitism in these people. I talked to representatives of the Latin and Greek Catholic churches, the Lutheran and Anglican churches, all Palestinians. I discovered that the local Christian Palestinians, who endured second-class citizenship for centuries under the Turks, support a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem (or else a shared Jerusalem) as its capital.

They are not naive. They are concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, but they believe Israel is fueling that movement by creating desperation in the people.

I also spoke to representatives of the Christian Peacemakers Teams and the Mennonite Central Committee who filled me in on the house demolitions and other harassment of innocent Palestinians in the Israeli government’s single-minded effort to ethnically cleanse what little remains of Palestine. And, finally, I had an audience with Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek, an Anglican Palestinian priest and theologian who founded Sabeel, the Center for Palestinian Liberation Theology.

He and his staff critiqued my book draft, educated me on the sources of the conflict in the misguided Zionist movement, and pointed me in the direction of further reading. It was a stimulating encounter, one which answered my remaining reservations about the justice of the Palestinian cause.

In 1998 I returned again, this time as co-leader of 40 pilgrims. We met with the Greek Catholic Archbishop, Lutfi Laham, in the Old City, and with Palestinian Lutheran pastor Mitri Raheb and his congregation in Bethlehem. Both spoke eloquently of the injustices, hardships and indignities suffered by their people over the 50 years since Israeli “Independence” and the Palestinian “Catastrophe.”

We learned that the $16,000 Jewish per capita income is 10 times that of Palestinians in the same country, and that Palestinian Christians, who have held on through centuries of harsh Turkish rule and minority religious status, are giving up under Israel’s stranglehold. Sad to say, they are emigrating, leaving the land where Jesus walked the earth. Soon there may be no remnant of the mother church of Christianity in the Holy Land, except for foreign pilgrims and the lonely guardians of the holy places.

I continue to read widely on the origins of Zionism and the colonial attitude toward the Palestinian society which Zionists seek to replace altogether with a Jewish “homeland.” I now see how and why many Christians in England and America bought into the notion of Jewish sovereignty over the “Promised Land,” regardless of the rights of the inhabitants.

I now know how few Jews lived among the nearly one million Palestinians a century ago when the first Zionist congress laid claim to the entire country. I have read the works of the brave Israeli and American Jewish revisionist historians, including Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe and Simha Flapan, whose The Birth of Israel I found in a West Jerusalem bookstore, first opening my eyes to the truth about the events of 1947-1948.

In addition to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and The Link, both strong advocates of Palestinian rights, I also regularly read Forward and The JUF News, two militantly Zionist periodicals, in order to hear the other side.

Which leads me to note that some of the most powerful arguments for the justice of the Palestinian cause have been written by Israeli Jewish scholars—true to the Jewish tradition of coming to the rescue of the downtrodden! I also take heart in the proliferation of small but determined peace-minded groups in Israeli society. These include Peace Now, Rabbis for Human Rights, and B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, among many others.

An outstanding 32-page pamphlet, The Origin of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, is available from Jews for Justice in the Middle East, P.O. Box 14561, Berkeley, CA 94712. Read it and you will be armed with unassailable documentary evidence, in the words of Israel’s own government leaders and historians. So righteous Jews are playing a key role in the ongoing movement to right the wrongs of a half-century ago.

Israel seized Palestine unjustly 50 years ago, with monumental Western help. Yet it is here to stay, or at least I pray this is so. This generation of young Israeli Jews, grandchildren of the “exodus,” can no more justly be told to go back where they came from than can we Euro-Americans be told to go home to Europe. What is more, Israel has indeed given Jews a haven, if not yet a safe one. Safety will come when Israel accepts the truth about its origins and makes amends and a just peace with its own victims, the people of Palestine.

James R. McCormick is a Michigan District Court judge.