Resurrection

We are told that “Jordan is Palestine”. Indeed she is. Jordan as created at the end of the British Mandate. That is to say, including the West Bank. There has never been a state with its border at the Jordan, and the populations of the two Banks are one people. The answer to the question of why anyone ever designed a country so short of water as Jordan is, is that no one ever did.

The Declaration of a Palestinian State on the West Bank would be the end of the Hashemite Kingdom, which is just as much a foreign imposition as the Zionist project, and which was imposed by the same colonial power, which therefore bears the same historic responsibility. The pressure for incorporation into a Palestinian State would be irresistible. That, rather than the destruction of Israel, would be the great national aspiration. And then, following its rapid and its largely, if not entirely, bloodless achievement, that would be the great national triumph.

The proposed revocation of citizenship from 1.8 million Jordanians with especially strong family ties across the River, in a country of only 6.5 million, indicates that the Hashemites and their entourage are fully aware of this. Let their fear be proved well-founded. It is time to be radical, to go back to the roots.

In its day, American Protestant missionary activity has had an important impact in the region. Its universities, untainted by association with British or French colonialism, nurtured generations of Arab nationalist leaders, Muslim as well as Christian. As did those with the most interest in defining the local and putatively national identity as Arab rather than Islamic, namely the ancient indigenous Christians. That was, and very largely still is, Arab nationalism: the fruitful encounter between indigenous Catholicism and Orthodoxy on the one hand, and the educational opportunities opened up by American “mainline” Protestants on the other.

Alas, the numerical decline of Episcopalianism and of “mainline” Presbyterianism, Lutheranism and Methodism in American society has had an impact on, especially, the Republican Party, while the not coincidental decline of those bodies from the doctrinal and moral orthodoxy that, among other things, sends missionaries has cut them off from the wider Anglican, “Calvinist”, Lutheran and Methodist worlds.

However, the wonderful Melkite Catholic Archbishop of Galilee, Elias Chacour, one of the greatest men of the present age and whose Nobel Peace Prize is long overdue, has founded and heads the first Arab university within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. It is a branch of the University of Indianapolis, an institution of the United Methodist Church, the largest “mainline” denomination. He also holds honorary doctorates from Duke and Emory, both of which are United Methodist foundations, and he has been honoured with the World Methodist Peace Award.

The politically electrifying union of popular Catholicism and Orthodoxy with an academic leadership defined by traditional, not fundamentalist, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism and Methodism in their American expressions has happened before. It was specifically and successfully a bulwark against political Islam, as well as against Marxism. It was called the Arab nationalism of the Near East. And it is still there. Including – indeed, now primarily – in Israel. All is far from lost.

The perfect note on which to conclude on this Easter Sunday for Abuna Elias and for all the many Catholics and others of the Eastern Churches. Stalwart defenders of the full Canon of the Old Testament, the only reason why anyone has ever heard of the two Books of Maccabees that were lately in or around the showbusiness news. It is only proper that their dramatisation should be a practising Catholic rather than a secular Jewish project, if that is the choice to be made. Ruling out, therefore, the handing over of that project to Mel Gibson.