faithwashing

Faithwashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to interfaith dialogue in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.

The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.”

While former U.S. President Obama was rightfully pilloried for this ludicrous propagandistic remark given during his last State of the Union address, it was not exactly a unique sentiment. Conflict in the Middle East is consistently treated as routine, even banal, and ultimately rooted in religious disagreement; political actors and their causes are deemed to be hashing out a cultural and religious “clash of civilizations”  with the West, completely obfuscating any economic or political grievances.

Perhaps nowhere else is this as clear as in the discourse surrounding the barely 100 year old Zionist colonization of Palestine, which is depicted as a fight between Muslims and Jews that is as old as time and thus, intractable and hopelessly complicated. Zionism and Judaism are erroneously and dangerously conflated, Christian and other non-Muslim Palestinians are either ignored or their issues cynically exploited, especially by Christian Zionists whose blind dedication to Israel has only deepened its oppressive hold over all Palestinians. Most recently, there has been a growing trend suggesting that Muslims everywhere in the world are deemed to have a stake equal to any Palestinian. Religion was and is used as a pretext for the oppression of Palestinians, and so interfaith dialogue is presented as the long lost “key to the conflict”. All this does is obscure the real issues at hand that this justification helps perpetuate: settler-colonialism, imperialism, land rights, sovereignty over natural resources, and Palestinians’ self-determination; this obscuration is what has become known as faithwashing.

Religion and zionist colonialism

That multiple sites in Palestine, particularly in Jerusalem, have religious significance to Christians, Muslims and Jews is not what is being contested, nor is the idea that a dedication to a political cause or peace and justice cannot stem from one’s personal religious beliefs. Rather, what is being contested is that Palestinians continue to resist Zionism for purely religious reasons or that the roots of the colonization of Palestine are religious.

The founding fathers of political Zionism, including David Ben-Gurion, certainly didn’t view their aspirations for Palestine as religious; they were nearly all atheists or religiously indifferent, and Zionism itself from its onset enjoyed little support from key Jewish figures”. As historian Nur Masalha has explained in detail, political Zionism emerged from the conditions of late-nineteenth century Eastern and Central Europe as a radical break from 2,000 years of rabbinical Judaism and Jewish tradition. The ‘Land of Israel’ was revered by generations of Jews as a place of holy pilgrimage, not as a future secular state, and while generations of Jews expressed their yearning for Zion through prayers and customs, only very recently has this yearning become understood as in any way literal. Instead, early political Zionists most frequently framed their goals in Palestine in the colonial terms popular at the time, such as the idea that Zionists as Westerners were better equipped to cultivate the land than the natives.

No wonder then that 80% of early Zionist settlers did not even settle in Jerusalem, including Ben-Gurion himself, who could not be bothered to visit Jerusalem until three years after arriving. This is due to the fact that Zionist settlers at the time deemed Jerusalem too multi-religious and pluralistic for the founding of the ethnonationalist society of their dreams. Not only was it “full of aliens” (native Arabs) but it was also inhabited by the “old Jewish Yishuv”, whose members were part of the anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox community. As a result, Zionists preferred to build the new exclusively Jewish settlement of Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean coast. The notion that political Zionism and the founding of the Israeli state were predicated on the realization of millennia of religious longing is ex post facto justification. Rather, Zionism, like the European nationalisms before it, is an example of nation-building through the invention of tradition: cherry-picking collective memory and manipulating the religious past for political purposes.

Christian zionism and Israel

The political utility of this manipulation was quite apparent to Ben-Gurion, even telling the British Royal Commission visiting Mandatory Palestine that “the Bible is our mandate”. Like many of the other founding fathers of Zionism, his own lack of religious faith did not prevent him from understanding how vital Western and particularly Western Christian support would be to establishing an Israeli state.

This pandering certainly paid off; Christian Zionists and British imperialists, significantly British prime minister Lloyd George and his foreign secretary Arthur Balfour saw the interests of the Zionist movement and their own interests as so compatible it resulted in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. They believed that a ’Jewish Palestine’ would act as a foothold for British imperialism along the main route to India, and would act as a bulwark against communism following the Bolshevik revolution, which the British elite (correctly) saw as ‘the antithesis for everything which British liberalism stood for’. Furthermore, it would reduce the influx of Jewish refugees into Britain, and, as a bonus, would bring about Armageddon, a belief central to Christian Zionists’ worldview, efficiently combining patronizing attitudes towards Jews with imperialist foreign policies towards the Middle East.

So influential was Christian Zionists’ fixation on Palestine that catering to this fixation played a significant role in why Nazareth would become the only major Palestinian city in what is today Israel to not be ethnically cleansed. Despite Ben-Gurion’s order to “drive them out” as part of his ‘Judaisation of the Galilee’ campaign, Ben Dunkelman, a Canadian Jew who was the commander of the Israeli army’s Seventh Armoured Brigade, disobeyed orders to expel Nazareth’s residents. He believed Christian Palestinians needed protecting, a view he did not extend to Muslim Palestinians. In terms of not upsetting Zionists’ Western benefactors, he was correct to do so, because pressure from the Vatican eventually forced Israel to allow the return of some Christian Palestinians who were forcibly displaced (though as historian Illan Pappe has noted, many refused to do so without their Muslim neighbors).

Since then, Christian Zionists’ obsession with Palestine at the expense of Palestinians has continued to develop with the full support of the Israeli state, especially after the United States took over Britain’s role as Israel’s main benefactor. It is no wonder that Israel continues to encourage this obsession, as it has proven politically useful. As of late 2019, tourism to Israel has been growing by about 10% a year according to the Israeli tourism ministry, with a tourism official sharing how most U.S. tourists are Christians, and a growing share of them are evangelicals. These tourists can freely visit the Christian religious sites which many Palestinian Christians cannot, and are gleefully shuffled into museums which highlight Byzantine archaeological remains while ignoring Islamic remains as politically expedient “highlights of history” regarding the various cultural, religious, and political empires that have marked Jerusalem’s past.

Perhaps more importantly, as support for Israel continues to wane among American youth, liberals, minorities and women (it is strongest among older, well-to-do, conservative white men), Israel has found a winning strategy in courting its American Evangelical supporters. It’s a numbers game really; while Israel fashions itself as representing the Jewish people, it need not worry about surveys finding that U.S. Jews are more likely than Christians to say Trump favors the Israelis too much, how younger Jews are less likely to be emotionally attached to Israel, or how 82 percent of American Jews are more apt to stand with human rights and international law and freely criticize Israeli. Why bother when as of 2020, Christians United for Israel, only one of the many pro-Israel lobbying group in the U.S, boasts of 10 million members, more than the entire Jewish population in either the United States or Israel.

Overall, the Christian Right has been found to constitute the largest social movement in the U.S and the largest voting bloc within the Republican Party, and its support for U.S. imperialist policy vis-a-vis Israel for years has culminated in billions of dollars of aid. This is in addition to the millions evangelicals have poured into West Bank settlement projects over the past 10 years, estimated at somewhere between $50 million and $65 million.

What this love affair between Israel and its Christian Zionist supporters is really helping accomplish is the faithwashing of Israel’s oppression of all Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians, who are not exactly feeling liberated by these Western Christians’ violent and colonial interpretation of the Bible.

Rather, as an early 2020 opinion poll among Palestinian Christians revealed, 62% believe that Israel’s end goal is to expel them from their homeland, 83% of Palestinian Christians are worried about violence by Israeli settlers, and 73% are worried about the continued occupation of their lands. The result of these oppressive conditions contradicts Zionists’ claims that Palestinian Christians are emigrating because of “extremist” Muslim Palestinians; instead 32.6% opted to emigrate due to the loss of freedom and absence of safety amidst the occupation, 26.4% left because of the deteriorating economic conditions, and another 19.7% emigrated due to political unrest, especially during the second Intifada [You can read more about this here].

This is within a context of repeated attacks against churches by Israeli settlers with incidents far exceeding indictments, lending credibility to Palestinians’ claims that the Israeli government allows settlers to commit these acts with impunity. Christian and Jewish Zionists trying their best to blame Palestinian Muslims for the mess they’ve created is in part a pathetic attempt at a divide-and-conquer strategy to turn Palestinian Muslims and Christians against each other, the failure of which has thus far been quite infuriating to Israel. Instead, Palestinian Christians continue to take on leading roles in defining Palestinian nationalism and resistance to Israel’s occupation, despite Israel’s marketing as the Middle East’s only outpost of ‘civilization’. This blame game is also part of the instrumentalization of Islamophobia and anti-Arab (specifically anti-Palestinian) racism to garner support for their colonial project.

Interfaith dialogue to solve colonialism

Frequently, when any Christian -Palestinian or otherwise- speaks out against Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, their criticism is equated with antisemitism, with the prescribed solution being Christian-Jewish “interfaith dialogue,” an activity that is closely linked to the long-term Christian program to reconcile with Jews for millennia of church persecution. In this way, Christians are permitted to consider the urgent issue of Palestinian human rights only within the context of European Christian penitence for Jewish persecution. This is evident in Christian Zionist groups like Bridges For Peace and the International Christian Embassy for Jerusalem, who describe their missions as “hope and reconciliation” and “teaching the history of Christian antisemitism” as part of a broader mission to mobilize Christian support for Israel. Unfortunately, this tactic is not completely unsuccessful; for many Christians, at leadership levels as well as in the general ranks, preserving hard-won connections with the Jewish community supersedes considerations of human rights issues.

These cynical accusations of antisemitism also lead us to how Islamophobia is used to faithwash Israel’s settler-colonial interests, specifically the dehumanizing and ahistorical claim that Palestinians, especially Muslim Palestinians are uniquely antisemitic compared to enlightened Westerners. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was quite confident that he could rely on this ahistorical framing when repeatedly claiming that it was a Palestinian Mufti who was responsible for Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jewish people (seriously).

The idea that Palestinians and Muslims more broadly are inculcated to be irrationally violent and hateful towards the “Jewish State” and thus need to be rehabilitated into “civilized’ and “balanced” views of Israel abounds in op-ed pages and news broadcasts. Mark Schneier, ‘rabbi to the stars’ and one of the founders of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding seeking to “improve Muslim-Jewish relations” put it this way:

“First, this is not a war between Israel and Arabs. This is not a war between Muslims and Jews. Rather, it is a war between moderation and extremism; modernity and medievalism; civilization and barbarism.” 

Schneier and those heading similar organizations have appointed themselves, in all their magnanimous wisdom, to figuring out who the Good Muslims are. This talking point can be boiled down to the outrageous idea that Palestinians who object to being ethnically cleansed, murdered en masse, and to the theft of their land really are only doing so because the perpetrators of these acts are doing so in the name of a Jewish State. It has also opened up nice little career paths for these Good Muslims: so-called leaders and representatives positioning themselves as Reformers from within. Surely these workshops and itineraries focused on “interfaith dialogue” will get these annoying Palestinians to pipe down about their oppression.

The good muslims

Abdullah Antpeli is one of the Good Muslims who has so bravely stepped forward to reign in the backwards hordes. At the time of writing he is Duke University’s Muslim Chaplain, who organized an ‘interfaith’ all-expenses paid program called the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI) which has notoriously been attended by members such as Rabia Chaudry and Wajahat Ali. The program has included primarily non-Palestinian Muslim Americans, ultimately disconnected from Israeli colonialism yet made the representatives of those suffering under it.

The program has also come under fire for its cooperation with Zionist institutions, namely the Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI), which is a liberal Zionist educational institute partnered with the AIPAC lobby in its mission to demonize and otherwise block attempts to boycott Israel due to its human rights violations. SHI also maintains close ties with the Israeli military. The individuals at its helm are actively engaged in the intimidation of American citizens critical of Israel’s policies as part of efforts to drive a wedge between “soft critics and hard deligitimisers”, and as was made clear on its website regarding the MLI program, equates Israel’s actions and Zionism in general with all Jews everywhere.

As such, MLI’s coordinated trips to Israel are in violation of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC)’s call for a boycott of projects that bring international delegations, faith-based or otherwise, for visits to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) in a manner that is complicit with Israel’s regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid. This is because overall, SHI is demonstrably not interested in merely teaching Muslim leaders more about Judaism than it is justifying Zionism; in fact, the curriculum designed for these Muslim leaders was titledEncountering Israel: Independence, Peoplehood, and Power.

Finally, seeing as SHI is not only partially funded by Islamophobic foundations but is chaired by the president of a family foundation that has provided significant funding to Islamophobic projects, it seems counterintuitive that they should claim to be “bridging the divide” between Muslim and Jewish communities.

Faithwashing as cover for normalization

Despite these apparent contradictions, we can expect more discourse and more of these initiatives which present the magical solution to a century or so of settler-colonialism as interfaith hand-holding sessions. This will continue even as Israeli settlers attack Muslim places of worship and as the Temple Mount movement gains in strength in its goal to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque and replace it with the Third Temple. Far more important to the Gulf and other Muslim states is the political usefulness of formally announcing diplomatic ties with Israel.

While ‘interfaith’ delegations such as government-backed “This is Bahrain” are aiming to provide a cover for these diplomatic ties as moves towards interfaith harmony, a scratch below the surface reveals motives for these diplomatic ties far more plausible than that states like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain have become interested overnight in religious tolerance. Bahrain is home to the US Navy’s regional headquarters, and an acceptance of relations with Israel on the part of these Gulf monarchies comes with promises of arms acquisitions, U.S. diplomatic support in geopolitical matters, as well as preserving the status quo of absolutist rule at home.

Directly after Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed a deal normalizing ties, prominent Emirati social media accounts, some with government links, warned that anyone in the UAE criticizing the deal should be reported to the authorities. One post linked to an app released by the Attorney General’s Office which allows users to easily report tweets that threaten “the basic principles of social security.” According to experts and activists, in the past critical social media posts have resulted in detention, forced disappearances and torture.

A prominent example of this is the case of Ahmed Mansoor, a well-known Emirati rights activist targeted by the Israel-based NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in 2016. Israeli spyware has allowed Emirati authorities to “control any activity in the public and private space,” says Andreas Krieg, a risk consultant and professor at the Defense Studies Department of King’s College London. “It has contributed to a constraint of the freedom of speech over the past decade that is unprecedented in its rigidity, even in the Gulf. This is simply a continuation of the proud Israeli tradition of providing arms and dangerous technology to the most repressive regimes in the world at pretty much any given point in time, including to Apartheid South Africa.

Ultimately, faithwashing through these normalization efforts come at a time where multi-faith alliances under the premise of shared values of equality, justice and human rights are being formed. The Presbyterian Church recently moved to divest its holdings from US corporations complicit in the oppression of Palestinians, non-Zionist Jewish religious communal spaces are being carved out, and the US Council of Muslim Organizations dropped Emgage, an American Muslim political advocacy organization over its ties to pro-Israel lobby groups.

All the aforementioned present an alternative to the deeply sectarian and racist establishment discourse on Israel which erases Christian Palestinians in favor of Western evangelicals and which projects Muslims and Jews as inherently antagonistic to each other. This framing is complicit in the stoking of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Arab racism in service of Israel’s positioning as a garrison state for America’s interests and is in contradiction to the much more nuanced history of Muslim-Jewish relations.

Principled human rights defenders, activists, and organizers will and must reject the hegemonic efforts to demand Palestinians accept that Israel has a ‘right to exist’ as a an (inherently undemocratic) Jewish state on the ruins of their villages and the bones of their loved ones. Justice in Palestine means that the religiosity of anyone living from the river to the sea does not supersede the rights of anyone else, and that above all else, Palestinians’ rights to self-determination and to living in freedom and justice is no longer denied by settler-colonial structures and ideas under the guise of interfaith heart-to-hearts.

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Further reading
  • Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the roots of terror. Harmony, 2005.
  • Masalha, Nur. The Bible and Zionism: invented traditions, archaeology and post-colonialism in Palestine-Israel. Vol. 1. Zed Books, 2007.
  • El-Haj, Nadia Abu. Facts on the ground: Archaeological practice and territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
  • Haija, Rammy M. “The Armageddon lobby: Dispensationalist Christian Zionism and the shaping of US policy towards Israel-Palestine.” Holy Land Studies 5.1, 2006: 75-95.
  • Bennett, Stephen. “Jerusalem as a City ‘Reclaimed’: Orientalism and Biblical Discourse in US Media 1948 and 1967.” Jerusalem Quarterly 44, 2010: 75-91.
  • Braverman, Mark, ed. Zionism Unsettled: A Congregational Study Guide. Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA), 2014.
  • American Muslims for Palestine, Creeping Normalcy a.k.a. Faithwashing, 2016. [Link]
  • Clark, Victoria. Allies for Armageddon: the rise of Christian Zionism. Yale University Press, 2007.
  • Damen, Ahmad. Forbidden Pilgrimage, Al Jazeera. 2013. [Link]
  • Bazian, Hatem. Palestine: Toward a social justice based interfaith horizon. HatemBazian.com. September 12th, 2014. [Link]
  • Ahmad, Halah. Tourism in Service of Occupation and Annexation. Al Shabaka. October 13th, 2020. [Link]