"It is the darkest accusation the Jewish People has ever faced. And it is coming to a theater near you."
Background / Jesus of Palestine & the 'Passion' of Israel

By Bradley Burston, bburston@haaretz.co.il Thu., February 26, 2004 Adar 4, 5764
Haaretz Correspondent

It is the darkest accusation the Jewish People has ever faced. And it is coming to a theater near you.

Left for dead in the post-Vatican II era of secularism and political correctness, the deicide debate has roared back to life with the scheduled release Wednesday of Mel Gibson's new feature film "The Passion of the Christ."

Twenty centuries in the making, it boils down to a single charge: it was the Jews who had Christ killed.

As an issue that cannot be resolved, it is doomed to be resurrected, century after century, exhumed, reimagined, transubstantiated into new forms: inquisition, wholesale expulsion, burnings at the stake, mass murder.

Or movies.

Jewish sensitivity over the film in the United States has been cast in bold relief, both by Christian raves for the emotional force and the bonecrushing physicality of its portrayal of the Passion, and by the vocal fears of Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman that the film, while not anti-Semitic in itself, could exacerbate what is already the most dramatic rise in Jew-hatred worldwide since the close of the Nazi Holocaust.

American media buzz over the "Passion" has reached oversaturation levels, with close attention paid to such sidebars as Gibson's octogenarian father's view of the Holocaust. "It's all - maybe not all fiction - but most of it is," Hutton Gibson, 85, told New York talk show host Steve Feuerstein last week.

In a New York Times Magazine article last year, Hutton Gibson was quoted as saying that the Holocaust was manufactured as part of an arrangement between Hitler and "financiers" to move Jews out of Germany and into Palestine.

Hitler "had this deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs," Hutton Gibson told the Times.

In the land of Jesus, the controversy has been treated somewhat at a remove, as a curiosity that has not yet made its way to its gore-drenched traditional source.

For the moment, more immediate expressions of brutality, horror, inhumanity and suffering in Jerusalem and its environs have held sway over the attention of Israelis and Palestinians.

Here and there, however, the buzz is taking root. Clips of the "Passion" have been broadcast on news programs, along with an excerpt of an interview with the film's creator, an expression of acknowleged master storyteller Mel Gibson's unerring gift for raising new suspicions even as he allays old ones.

Israel's Channel 10 television station screened a recent ABC interview in which ABC's Diane Sawyer asks Gibson - who has strongly condemned anti-Semitism as a "sin" - to comment on those who fear that "in a world in which horrible things have been done to the Jewish populations, simply looking at these events will once again incite people toward if not violent animosity, [then] prejudice, vindictiveness."

Gibson, nodding in agreement to the first part of the sentence, then replied, in a parallel that grated on Israeli ears: "I don't think you can say that. I watched Schindler's List, and what the Germans do in that is horrible, you know. But I don't hate Germans, or want to hurt them or anything. I mean, if you go by that rationale, any story where one group of persons does something to another group of persons - you shouldn't put any of it on film."

In recent years it has become axiomatic, if in many cases less than accurate, that Israel's policies have inflamed anti-Semitism in Europe, the United States and throughout the Muslim world.

But when Gibson's Jesus of Palestine finally makes his way home, could the world's oldest form of anti-Semitism, the charge of Christ-killing, take the opposite route, helping to fan the flames of Palestinian anger against Israelis?

When it finally reaches the Holy Land, could "The Passion of Christ" add new fuel to an already intensely volatile conflict?

'Jesus was a Palestinian'

Certainly many Palestinians, even among the strongly Muslim majority, identify with Jesus. The concept of the holy rebel waging a hopeless, ultimately victorious fight to the death against authorities of overwhelming power, has been long used by Arab cartoonists and editorial writers to represent the Palestinian struggle.

Gibson's "Passion" may ultimately be used by some Palestinians in marshalling anger against Israel, says Haaretz commentator Danny Rubinstein.

In some respects, Palestinian identification with Jesus renders irrelevant the Gospels-driven debate over whether the Jewish establishment or the Romans bore ultimate responsibility for the death of Jesus.

In the Palestinian national metaphor, with an American empire believed to be under the influence of Jewry, Jewish Israel can easily play a simultaneous dual role: that of the armor-clad iron-fisted Roman occupier, and that of the hard-line Tz'doki [Sadducee] Jewish leadership of Roman-ruled first century Judea, a territory which imperial authorities would only after Jesus's death begin to call Palestine.

The point has been driven home repeatedly by Yasser Arafat, who on Christmas Eve 1995, soon after Israeli troops withdrew from Bethlehem, attended his first mass at the traditional site of the manger of Jesus's birth.

"Jesus was a Palestinian," Arafat declared to assembled thousands of Palestinians and Christian pilgrims around the world. He also once wrote the sentence in a message to the Pope.

Christian Palestinian clergymen, taking radical Latin American churches as a rough model, created a Palestinian Liberation Theology based in part on the figure of Jesus.

"Jesus was a refugee and lived under occupation," the movement's founder Dr. Naim Ateek, a canon at St. George's Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem, told Reuters in 1999, as the Holy Land prepared to celebrate the millenium of Jesus's birth.

"If he's interpreted in this way he becomes a model for faith. So I can learn from him and how he coped with a life under occupation like me," said the U.S.-educated Ateek, who said that when he was 11 in 1948, Jewish soldiers forced his family to flee their home near Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee.

The figure of Jesus, known in Arabic as Issa, also resonates for Muslims as a prophet and saint in Islamic tradition.

Arafat, a devout Muslim, has always been careful to include Christians as integral to the ranks of the Palestinian movement, notes Haaretz commentator Danny Rubinstein.

"Politically, the Palestinians as a national movement, and Arabism as a whole, exists without reference to religious affiliation, it relates rather to language, culture, lifestyle, music, food, dress, but not religion."

When Arafat speaks publicly of going to Jerusalem and flying the Palestinian flag, he often states that he will fly it "from the churches and from the mosques," placing the churches first, Rubinstein says.

Arafat, himself married to a Christian-born convert to Islam, has also been careful to include Christians in his cabinets.

Exodus of Christians

At the same time, many Palestinian Christians, like Christian Arabs in Syria and Lebanon, have left the area, continuing an exodus that has been taking place for more than a century.

"This is in part due to increased access to the West in recent years," Rubinstein continues, citing Latin America and the United States as primary destinations. "In Chile, for example, there are some 30,000 people descended from families from [the Bethelem-area West Bank village of] Beit Jala, with cousins bringing cousins, and so forth. At this point, there are only 6,000 Christians in Beit Jala itself."

Violence in the territories has also been a primary spur of migration, with some Christians moving out of the West Bank into Israeli Arab centers like Ramle.

There has also been increased, if quietly expressed, concern among Christians over the increasingly Islamic nature of Palestinian activism, as symbolized by the use of the expression "Al-Aqsa intifada," focusing on the Muslim holy site.

An expression that has made the rounds in the Palestinian street is "After Shabbat comes Sunday," meaning, Rubinstein says "'After we finish with the people of the Sabbath [the Jews], those who revere the seventh day, we'll begin with the people of Sunday.' I have heard this from Christians, who said this saying was hurled at them in anger during a row."

Christian concerns over intra-Palestinian strife have deepened since September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of American military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, some Muslims have come to view the Bush White House as reincarnating the Christian-led Crusades.

"As long as the war here is one of nationalism, there's no problem, there are Arabs on one side and there are Jews on the other. But if the war begins to acquire a religious dimension, then the Christians find themselves on the other side," says Rubinstein.

Rubinstein quotes an aide to the Pope as having said that if the process of emigration continues, "In one generation, there will be no Christians in Christ's land."

Giving racism a bad name

In the end, the Middle East may serve to exemplify one of the signal lessons of "The Passion of the Christ": that the potential for deep-seated, extra-rational hatred is universal, that no side is exempt from the failing of human cruelty.

In any event, the Israeli-Arab conflict hardly requires wide-screen cinematic fuel to keep its conflagrations white hot.

This was arrestingly illustrated Tuesday by Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev Boim, when he addressed the issue of why much of local, regional and world terrorism is directed by extremist Muslims.

"What is it about Islam as a whole and the Palestinians in particular?" Boim asked rhetorically, speaking at a memorial for the victims of a Palestinian terror attack that took place 26 years ago.

"Is it some form of cultural deprivation? Is it some genetic defect? There is something that defies explanation in this continued murderousness."

Fellow Likud legislator Yehiel Hazan rushed to defend Boim against charges that the deputy minister had practiced anti-Semitism against the Arab branch of the Semitic peoples.

"He's right," Hazan said, "It's been a known fact for many years that the Arabs slaughter and murder Jews, without any connection to land. It's imprinted in their blood. It's something genetic. I haven't done research, but there's no possibility of explaining it differently.

"You can't believe an Arab, even one who's 40 years in his grave," Hazan said.

Leftist Meretz legislator Avshalom Vilan then condemned both Boim and Hazan for racism of the type practiced by old-fashioned anti-Semites.

"What is this? 'Genetic defect'... 'You can't believe a single Arab.' These are the gravest of generalizations, disgusting, having nothing in common with the truth," said Vilan.

"There is something called terrorism. It must be fought. We need to understand its sources, and to seek to dry them up. But to go into genetics, is like trying to cite the inexplicable for why and how the Jewish people have lasted this long, then to apply all sorts of labels on us such as those in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, then to make accusations of blood libels, and then finish with the terrible massacre of the Holocaust."

Israeli Arab legislator Jamal Zahalka (Balad), then traded muck for muck, responding that "whoever says that Palestinian behavior is caused by a genetic defect, has a brain defect himself and the values of a racist fascist."

Zahalka, accusing Boim of having violated an Israeli law prohibiting racism said Boim was "returning to the same kind of primitive, sickening and dangerous racism from which the Jews have suffered for many generations."

The Arab lawmaker declared, "Boim is giving racism a bad name."
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