Thursday, February 6, 2025

Part I

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To Whom Does the Gaza Strip Belong? The Contentious History of the Conflict in Gaza

Well, on Tuesday night, President Trump made history once again, this time by suggesting that the United States might purchase or at least gain the use of and then develop what is known as the Gaza Strip. The president was speaking at a joint press conference with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and immediately the chattering class, the intellectual elites, and the mainstream media went crazy.

The suggestion was that this was an entirely crazy suggestion coming from an entirely unpredictable president of the United States. Now, in one sense, it is unpredictable. This is something unexpected. When it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to this kind of media event, President Donald Trump is different than virtually every other president. I have mentioned before that at least a part of what he does is to think out loud in a way virtually no president before him has ever done. He thinks out loud, he suggests things, and then he intentionally provokes some controversy. He intentionally provokes a conversation.

And no doubt over the course of the last, say, 36 hours, there’s been a lot of conversation. Most of it has been entirely dismissive of what the president had to say, and there also have been some predictable patterns in terms of the response. But before we think about that any further, let’s just try to gain a bit of historical perspective because most Americans watching, most people around the world watching, really don’t have any idea what we are talking about or how the dynamic has come about. And so let’s consider that history for a moment.

When you’re talking about Gaza, you’re talking about a land that is often referred to by the people known as the Palestinians as Palestine. And it is now known as the Gaza Strip because it is one of two territories in which have a very high Palestinian population, but both of them on the border with Israel are contested territories.

The West Bank is the larger, the Gaza Strip is the smaller, the territories. It’s about 25 miles long. It only includes 141 square miles. Now, if you think about 141 square miles, that sounds like a pretty big tract of land. But when you consider you’re putting 2 million people on it, well, things begin to look very different.

The emergence of the nation Israel in 1948 was the big game changer. Before that, the area now often referred to by the Palestinians as Palestine, it was under a British Mandate for the years 1920 to 1948. Footnote there, even during this British Mandate, the British tried to pass at least some of the supervision or the administration of the area over to the Egyptians as fellow Muslims. But the Egyptians didn’t want to touch it then. And by the way, as we’re going to see, they really don’t want a part of the situation right now. They don’t want the Palestinian population moving into Egypt.

But let’s go back. We were talking about the British Mandate. From the end of the First World War, about 1920 until 1948, Israel was born in 1948. And let’s just remind ourselves, Israel was born after long years of struggle by the Jewish people to claim a homeland, a Jewish homeland there. And of course, it also came after action undertaken by the United Nations. So it was an authorized emergence of a recognized nation in 1948.

But there were people who were there, and the majority of them, at least as you go back to the early 20th century, were Palestinian Muslims. But there’s a big question, a big historical contest about the actual political reality of what they will call Palestine and of the ethnic identity known as the Palestinians. If you go back, you understand that even before the British Mandate, the most important period was the Ottoman Empire. That was the Muslim Empire referred to as the Ottomans, because of the Ottoman Dynasty, it was headquartered in Istanbul. And it was a very powerful medieval Empire threatening even Christian Europe and turned back only by very important and strategic battles that were won by the Europeans and turned back the Ottomans.

But when it comes to North Africa, when it comes to the area now known as the Holy Land, that was almost entirely under the control of the Ottoman Empire. So long as the Ottoman Empire was in control of that area, it was referred to as Syria or as a part of Syria, as Ottoman, Syria.

The first reference to this particular region, this part of the land as Palestine goes back to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, but it has never been particularly clear exactly to what or to whom it refers. So if you go back, for example, to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the emergence of Israel did displace a large number of persons identified as Palestinians. Most of them were persons who lived on the land, they were Muslims. And so many of them went into Jordan. There was an infusion of the Palestinian refugees into Jordan, the Hashemite Kingdom. And Jordan absorbed a large number of them, but politically, the greatest threat to the Jordanian throne, to the Jordanian government’s been the presence of so many Palestinians who might have a different agenda than the dynasty or the government there in Jordan.

The same thing’s true of Egypt. Egypt, like Jordan, presents itself as a friend of the Palestinian people, but it really doesn’t want to define them, nor does it want them moving to Egypt. So as you’re looking at this, that’s not new. That’s at least as old as the middle of the 20th century. And the roots of this conflict go back long before that. And of course you have a battle over history, because many of the Palestinians, in terms of their own ideology and their own construction of history, they claim that there is actually no continuity between modern Israel and biblical Israel between the Jewish people now and the Jewish kingdoms in Judea and in Israel.

But of course, Israel makes the counterclaim and claims absolute continuity and a right to the land. And that was recognized by the United Nations back in the late 1940s. That produced the land of Israel, the nation of Israel.

And the relationship between Israel and its Arab neighbors has been contentious from the start. No sooner had Israel’s existence been declared than Arab nations sought to exterminate it, literally to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and to bring the new Jewish nation to an absolute end. But against all odds, Israel fought back and won its war of independence. That then led to decades of displacement for many of the Palestinian people who moved out of Israel into territories that had never been a part of a formal nation as in a nation-state. Much of the world, much of the globe was of course defined by recognizable nation-states. By the time you get to the end, just for an example of World War I, that was not the case when it comes to Palestine. This is a part of the controverted very controversial history.

When you look at the land, it was once inhabited by those described in the Bible as Canaanites. And then you look at the existence of Israel and you look at the kingdom, you look at the divided kingdom between the north and the south, as is referenced in the Old Testament, and then you look at Israel in Roman times and you come to understand that even then the Romans were using something like the word Palestine in order to try to speak of the land rather than of the Jewish inhabitants. You understand that anti-Semitism is very much a part of this in terms of antipathy to the people of Israel, antipathy to the Jewish people. But you also have displaced people who identify as Palestinian, they very clearly feel that they have been displaced and have been wronged. They feel like they lost their land and they lost their nation even though it was not an organized nation as in a nation-state.

This is at the crux of the controversy in the Middle East most importantly over the existence of Israel. And over the course of Israel’s existence, it really gained control of this territory in the 1967 Six-Day war. And Israel has understood from the beginning that if it lost control of this territory, it would have an enemy surrounding it close at hand. It would be very difficult for Israel to protect itself in terms of its own security if there were powerful Palestinian nations on the West Bank and in what is now known as the Gaza Strip.

By the way, it’s referred to as a strip because it is a narrow passage of land there largely on the coast of the Mediterranean. Interestingly, the geographers would say it is a part of West Asia. That’s an interesting designation, but it reminds us that it’s on the Asian side of the Mediterranean, not on the European side of the Mediterranean.

So the Ottoman Empire, Muslim Empire, had control of the area from about 15, 16, well into the 20th century. Then you had some years of upheaval, and then you had the British Mandate, and then you had the establishment of Israel. And there never has been a recognizable Palestinian state alongside Israel, and that is for two reasons. Israel does not really want a Palestinian state. The two state solution, however, is a formula to which the United States and many of our allies have been committed for a long time. But the reality is that’s been a commitment that has never really led to a commitment, and you also have the reality that those lands have been largely ungovernable.

One of the main obstacles to the emergence of something like a Palestinian state, it is not just Israel’s opposition, it is also the internal problems of the Palestinians. And remember that Hamas, the Islamic terrorist organization, the enemy of Israel, committed to the extermination of Israel as a nation, Hamas was elected to lead the government there in Gaza by the local people.

And thus, you’re looking at a deep-seated problem. You’re looking at a massive historical argument. You’re looking at a clash of worldviews. You’re looking at what ethics is referred to as a problem that is incommensurate, which is to say you’re not really looking at one thing that is like another thing. If you’re going to talk about a two-state solution, you would think that it requires one thing to be alike the other thing. It’s very difficult to imagine how a legitimate Palestinian state could be constructed in that area in a way that would be acceptable to Israel. Although some Israeli governments have, at least in principle, been in favor.

But the current government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s a coalition government, some of the parties are actually even more conservative than the prime minister himself and his own party. But the fact is it has become untenable in Israel that there could be a legitimate Palestinian state that would not pose a direct threat to the existence of Israel. And thus Israel has been trying to control the territory, trying to defeat Hamas, and let’s be honest, trying to wait out history.

And here’s where there’s just an awful lot of dishonesty out there. It is absolutely required of us in honesty that we say the Palestinian people have suffered much. They have suffered much for a very, very long time. Sometimes it’s true that they have suffered much at the hands of others. The creation of Israel did not come without a cost. It did not come without the declaration of territory now belonging to Israel that at least some claim had belonged to them, and sometimes they say for a very long time. That’s why they’re referred to as displaced, sometimes even dispossessed.

But it is also true that even as the Palestinian people have suffered much, the reality is they have suffered not only, they would argue, by the existence of Israel. They have also suffered a very great deal, by Arab nations, Arab governments in the region because the last thing either Jordan or Egypt wants is a vast infusion of Palestinian. And that’s probably particularly true now since so much of the Palestinian nationalist movement has become so militant. And that’s an understatement in some cases. And neither Jordan nor Egypt wants those militants inside its own territory. So they’ll talk a good game here, but they are unlikely to want to do anything that would mean a vast resettlement of Palestinian refugees into either Jordan or Egypt.

Part II

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What About President Trump’s Comments on Gaza? The President’s Comments May Have Sent a Subtle Message to Nations in the Entire Region

That takes us to President Trump’s statements on Tuesday night. What in the world was he doing? Was he just risking sounding like a madman on the world scene? Was he trying to just turn himself into a real estate developer to take the West Bank and turn it into some kind of capitalist enterprise and vacation destination? Was he trying to do something unpredictable? He certainly did the unpredictable.

But President Trump said two things that are very important and very true. The first of them is, he pointed to the suffering of the people there in Gaza. And then he went on to say, “Gaza, as it stands now is uninhabitable. It is an uninhabitable ruin.” That’s a correct statement. It is very difficult to imagine how Gaza can be rebuilt in that region in a way that is safe for Israel and includes an actual rebuilding of a society that can sustain something like 2 million people. That is something that President Trump said with honesty. And even though there are a lot of people will say they disagree with him, the fact is, at least silently, there is widespread agreement that those statements are true.

The second thing that President said that is also true is that this is very valuable property or should be, and that it could be developed into something that might be very fruitful, but it is unlikely it will be. And I’ll simply say that’s an understatement. It’s unlikely that it will be. Just recall the fact that if you were to go back to, say, the early decades of the 20th century, even into some of the middle times in the 20th century, you would look at a nation like Lebanon and understand that at one point it had been a vacation destination for Americans and, in particular, for wealthy Europeans. It was described as something akin to the French Riviera as it was referred to then.

And when you look at the beachfront property and President Trump, if anything, he knows real estate, that beachfront property could be turned into an enormous asset, but it is unlikely that’s going to have anything to do with the future development of Gaza under current political circumstances.

So what was President Trump really trying to do? I’m going to suggest you need to look behind the headlines. You need to watch and listen to the president as he speaks. And one of the things he said, and he had made some of these remarks even before that press conference, he said that many of the people who have been displaced there on the Gaza Strip. Their homes destroyed their villages and their neighborhoods simply obliterated. They should move to neighboring Arab nations, which should receive them and give them homes. That’s what Jordan, at least to some extent, did during the period after Israel’s War of Independence and after the Six-Day war in 1967. Egypt has done that to a lesser extent, but the point is neither one of those nations wants to do anything like that now. For their own internal security, they do not want that. Neither Jordan nor Egypt, right? They’re very close to the area. Neither one of them wants a vast infusion of those identified as the Palestinian people into their nations.

Back during the early 1990s, I had the opportunity to be a part of a delegation meeting with so many people representing these different nations. And the one thing that was clear then, so we’re talking now more than 30 years ago, one of the things that was true then, clear then, is that neither Jordan nor Egypt wanted an infusion of people from the occupied territories as they were called then. They didn’t want that. And the same thing is true now. What they didn’t want then, they don’t want now.

So what was President Trump doing? Well, at least one reading of what the president was doing was basically offering a form of a threat, something of a carrot and something of a stick. If the Arab nations are unwilling to receive these people who are now under the situation of such devastation there in Gaza, then maybe those nations need to cooperate at the deepest level with the United States of America in some kind of effort to try to rebuild that area. And so a lot of leverage there. And let’s just say that President Trump and those who work with him knew exactly how those words were going to be heard. That was not something that happened accidentally.

To put the matter just bluntly once again, neither Jordan nor Egypt wants a vast infusion of the people now in Gaza. And so it is likely that the president got their attention. They’re likely to be even more cooperative with the United States and potentially even with Israel in terms of dealing with the situation as it now stands.

So I have to speak honestly, I do not see a scenario in which the United States will, or for that matter, should, take control of the area. I don’t see a scenario in which the title deed to that property is going to go to the United States or come under the control of the United States for real estate development. That’s not an insane idea just given the topography, given the coastline. But given the politics and the reality, I don’t think the president of the United States really wants to put American lives and America’s prestige, America’s reputation on the line in governing the area now known as the Gaza Strip. I do not think that was a serious proposal. I do think the president had a very serious point. And I also think a lot of people in the region almost assuredly got the point.

But before leaving this issue, I want to go back to the issue of language. Language is never neutral. Christians understand from a biblical worldview that language is never neutral. All the language in that area referring to peoples and to locations, it’s often very controversial. And deep worldview, deep historical, even deep theological issues are sometimes at stake in the language that is used.

Now for example, you have language such as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But when you’re talking to someone like the current ambassador designee from the United States to Israel, and that would be former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, he’s made very clear he doesn’t use the term West Bank. He refers to Judea and Samaria, the biblical terms. That’s exactly what Israel wants, but it is also laden with all kinds of significance. And Governor Huckabee, soon to be Ambassador Huckabee, knows exactly what he’s saying and he knows what he means to say.

And then you also look at the use of terms such as “the occupied territories,” that’s United Nations language. Sometimes the United States’s referred to “the occupied territories.” It’s still not exactly clear what kind of language President Trump is going to use for those very same territories. The safer thing is to refer to the geography such as Gaza rather than to speak of the political condition there, because that again, is controversial. It depends on which side of the argument you are on.

When it comes to “settlements,” the word is often used for Israeli communities on what are referred to by some as the occupied territories, they’re referred to as settlements. And that’s a way of saying basically, “This is a form of imperialism.” That’s making an accusation. That’s making a judgment. The Jewish state would refer to those as communities, Jewish communities, even though the mainstream media, and you have the United Nations and others that refer to the very same communities as “settlements.” A huge issue of controversy, by the way, not only in the international arena, but in Israel itself. That’s one of the dynamics in the political coalition that is led by the current prime minister–now, the longest-serving Prime Minister in Israel’s history–Benjamin Netanyahu, there are some in his government who argue that the only way Israel can be secure is to officially, in terms of its borders and its administration, be in control of that entire region. They also see it as a part of Israel’s self-identity and destiny.

Part III

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These Two Things are True of the Conflict in the Middle East: Israel Has Every Right to Defend Itself, and Christians Need to Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem

Now, as Christians, we need to be very, very concerned about the people there in Gaza and their suffering. That’s a very legitimate, indeed it’s a necessary concern. They’re human beings made in God’s image. And regardless of their politics, they are now suffering shortages of food, shortages of medical care, and the absolute obliteration of their homes, at least for millions.

How they can rebuild? That’s a very hard question, how they will relate to Israel? A very hard question. But at the Christian level, we understand we are concerned for the welfare of the people there, and we must be. But I’m going to speak as a Christian also as one who defends the existence of Israel and the rightness of the statements and actions by Israel that it has a right to defend itself and to seek to establish peaceful conditions for not only the existence, but the flourishing for Israel among the community of nations.

Now, finally, on this issue, I would not dare to say I can read the president of the United States mind on this issue. I think we can read his words. And behind that we can understand history, we can understand the dynamic, and we can come to a clearer understanding of what he well might be up to.

As for the next steps, it’s going to be very interesting to see how the Arab nations in the region respond. It’s going to be very interesting after that to see how President Trump and his administration respond in return. This is an ongoing negotiation. And anyone familiar with that part of the world will well understand it is seemingly always, until Jesus comes, a part of ongoing negotiation.

But we also need to say in relation to the developments in recent days, Israel has an absolute right to defend itself. It has an absolute right to defend its borders. It has an absolute right to establish the conditions that will allow for peace in Israel. And that means that there will never be peace in that region so long as there are many, including those who often are elected by and put up to represent the Palestinian people, if they are demanding the non-existence of Israel, that conversation is a non-starter.

And in conclusion, it is always right from a Christian biblical understanding to pray for peace. But what we have to pray for is a genuine peace, a lasting peace, a just peace. Lord, may it be so.