Strictly Personal

Farewell to the “Judaic-Christian ethic”

Is it possible to criticize Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank without being anti-Semitic? The question seems worth asking, even if it almost certainly means being called anti-Semitic by some.  Surely it is possible to deplore Hamas without being called anti-Palestinian.

I don’t know what to do with this except to be personal about it.

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago in which racism was pervasive, though mostly polite, because no people of color lived there: in which unspoken replacement theology held sway – that is, the premise that Jews, followers of the Old Testament – the Hebrew Bible – eventually would be converted to the principles of the New Testament, the Christian Bible.  

Folkways of the village in the Fifties exhibited some pretty strange ideas about gender, too.  The use of atomic bombs and carpet bombing against civilian populations during World War II raised few objections. And as for the indigenous populations we had displaced? The hockey team was named for them.

A large part of my education since has involved escaping those prejudices, by degrees, via participation in “movements” of various sorts: college, civil rights, anti-war, pro-women, and now, opposition to Israel’s “Second War of Independence;” that is, its special military operation in Gaza. 

Revolted as I was by the Hamas raid, my first reaction to the news of the massacre of some twelve hundred innocents was to ask myself what Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu should have done?  I had grown up to become a member of a Congregational church; I could use my confirmation instead of a birth certificate to obtain a passport, or so I was told.  For a time, I had been a Zionist:  I knew a good deal about the Holocaust; I had thrilled to the film Exodus in high school.  

Netanyahu should have turned the other cheek, I thought, called out Hamas to worldwide disgust and scorn, and resigned.  It took only a day to realize that recommending the Sermon on the Mount to the Israeli Defense Force was no solution. That set in motion this skein of thought.   

I had never seen, until I came across it yesterday, in an article in The Atlantic,  US president Dwight Eisenhower’s advice in a letter to one of his brothers, in 1954, in the early stages of the Cold War:

You speak of the “Judaic-Christian heritage.” I would suggest that you use a term on the order of “religious heritage” – this is for the reason that we should find some way of including the vast numbers of people who hold to the Islamic and Buddhist religions when we compare the religious world against the Communist world. I think you could still point out the debt we all owe to the ancients of Judea and Greece for the introduction of new ideas.

Advice as sage today as it was then. Even much-loathed former Commies might be included in the heritage of humanity today. I’ll leave it to historians, Biblical scholars, ethnologists, anthropologists, and sociologists to pick apart the differences. But theologian Paul Tillich’s phrase “Judaic-Christian heritage,” which offered such comfort during the years after World War II, is no longer part of my vocabulary.

Having said this much, I must come to the point.  I am aghast at the Israeli government’s invasion and occupation of Gaza; appalled by its plan to occupy the territory after the slaughter stops; embarrassed by the United States’ veto of the 13-1 United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire.

I object to the US Congressional and donor bullying of university presidents. The American newspapers I follow seem to have been somewhat intimidated as well. (Here is a long view of the situation in The Guardian that makes sense to me.) The stain on the reputations of the leaders and policymakers involved, including those in the United States and Iran, can never be erased.

I have had this privilege of writing Economic Principals for forty years.  I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t say this much about current events in the Middle East. It is, however, as much as I have to say. I’m against the war in Ukraine, too, but after twenty years of following its genesis, it is a problem I know something about. 

The relevance to these matters of economics should be clear, at least intuitively. I pledge to work harder to spell it out.

                                                  xxx

Swedish Television does an excellent job on its short profiles of each year’s well Nobel laureates.  The link offered here last week to their visit with Harvard economist Claudia Goldin didn’t work. Here is one that does. At fourteen minutes, it is well worth watching.