A Most Miraculous Anniversary.
BY Paul Merkley.
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The Lord shall set His hand for the second time to recover the remnants of His people and He shall set up an ensign for the nations and shall assemble the outcast of Israel and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. (Isaiah 11:11.)
On May 14, 2018, Israel will be observing its seventieth anniversary. Then, as now, Israel’s enemies will be asserting that the circumstances attending its birth are dubious and/or discreditable and will be insisting on a recount.
In reality, no nation on earth can present a birth certificate more securely witnessed or more soundly accredited. The legal basis for the creation of “a Jewish State and an Arab state” to replace the Mandate for Palestine that Britain held on behalf of the League of Nations is to be found in a decision made by the General Assembly of the newly-founded United Nations on November 29, 1947. From several points of view the decision was exceptional – not least because on virtually every other matter of substance during those years the United States and the U.S.S.R. took up antagonistic and irreconcilable positions. Historians are still arguing about why Stalin agreed to join the U.S. in supporting this decision, but for our purposes it is sufficient to note that he did and that the world stood back in astonishment at the sight. Passage of the Resolution for Partition of the British Mandate of Palestine required a two-thirds majority of the votes of the UN’s then 56 member states. After much backstage lobbying the result came: 33 for, 13 against, 10 abstaining.
Any serious person who claims that he belongs to Christ cannot escape the word “miraculous” or at least “providential” when contemplating the circumstances surrounding this moment.
First of all there is the fact that the moment of Israel’s creation belongs to the hour when Western intellectuals were reviewing the strengths of our Christian civilization in the light of the recent escape from Nazism and the prospect of a long struggle against the Soviet Communist Empire; scholars, public commentators and most politicians were still generally convinced that the choice was one between light and darkness, freedom and slavery.
This moment is now long gone – without trace. Before another generation had gone by, academics and opinion elites had got themselves persuaded that the first duty of the inquiring mind is to despise what one belongs to. Soon it would be impossible in academic circles to say a kind word for “civilization” and downright heresy to say a kind word for the Christian legacy. At the end of this process, the intellectual consensus was that the democratic State of Israel was an engine of imperialism, the oppressor of Third World peoples, the proxy of the bloody Crusaders.
Secondly, the mainline churches as well as secular intellectuals and the generality of citizens of most Western nations were, in this moment of time, confronting the previously unthinkable realty of the Holocaust. The experience of the Jews of Europe, coming to light at the very moment of the declaration of victory by the Allies over the Axis powers, secured for the Jews of the world the sympathy of most decent people, and disposed most decent people to accept the argument that Jews would always remain vulnerable to irrational hatred until they had a nation of their own —the Homeland that had been promised to them by the League of Nations after the First World War.
But before many years had passed, memory of the Holocaust began to fade, Jews lost the compassionate advantage as the world’s attention shifted to the herculean task of dismantling the British and French empires in Africa and Asia. At the UN, the introduction of many new nations following the dismantling of the British and French Empires arithmetic turned the political arithmetic against Israel forever. A majority of members could henceforth be always counted in favour of any and all declarations denouncing Israel as an oppressor, a tool of the imperialists, or the enemy of mankind.
Israel’s coming into the world belongs to a peculiar moment in time when the governments of the West were still largely managing the direction of affairs in the United Nations General Assembly. Most of the governments of the Americas and most of the newly-emerging national states in Africa and in Asia looked to the United States for the financial support to keep them alive and to give them confidence for the future. But over the next decade or so, most of the new nations applying for membership in the United Nations had given up on the thought that the United States was their friend; anti-colonialism and vocabulary borrowed heavily from Marxism-Leninism dominated the public rhetoric of these nations The prestige of the Soviet Union and of Communism was on the way up. Respect for Western culture was on the way down
In short, by about 1960, the vote of November 29 1947 that secured for the Jews the right to declare their own State within the bounds of the Mandate of Palestine would be out of the question within a couple of years and Israel’s declaration of its independence could not have happened.
The pro-Zionists among the statesmen and intellectuals who favored the Partition of the Mandate showed no willingness to open before the world’s statesmen the question of the validity of biblical prophecy, but they did seem bound to make a case for a Jewish State as a bridgehead for the values of European civilization – beginning a process of rolling back what Reinhold Niebuhr described as the “feudal realities” left by centuries of Islam. This second argument – the one that turns on enthusiasm for civilization — does not resonate favorably in liberal circles today. We need to reflect on the fact that the moment of Israel’s creation belongs to the hour when Western intellectuals were reviewing the strengths of our Christian civilization in the light of the recent escape from Nazism and the prospect of a long struggle against the Soviet Communist Empire; scholars, public commentators and most politicians were still generally convinced that the choice was one between light and darkness, freedom and slavery. This positive evaluation of our legacy was entirely gone from the repertoire of intellectuals by about 1960.
The Zionists’ opportunity to win the hearts of mainline Protestants was therefore brief, created by extraordinary and unrepeatable circumstances: the uncovering of the Holocaust; the intolerable situation of Europe’s surviving “displaced” Jews; and the sobering consideration that Jews not admitted to Palestine would have to be admitted in vast numbers to the Western democracies.
Thus, at the time of the creation of the World Council of Churches (a few weeks following the creation of the State of Israel) the attitude within mainline and ecumenical Protestantism was generally friendly to the Jewish State. For the moment, the word “Zionism” rang positively for most Christians. But much has happened since then in the life of the Church and in the life of the State of Israel.
Today the churches participating in the World council of Churches are uniformly unfriendly to Israel and contemptuous of the argument that Israel has anything to do with biblical prophecy. For that matter, they are contemptuous of the notion that anything has anything to do with biblical prophecy.
At the same time, Christian Zionism is much more securely established in the hearts and minds of that great body of Christians who, regardless of denominational belonging, believe in the eternal validity of the Promises of God. And it is a force that serves powerfully in the cause of Zion.
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The Bayview Review 