Trump, the Nobel Prize and the Ivory Tower

Academics, like political pundits, often feel invisibly compelled to become classic killjoys. Such is the case with regard to the recent Middle East peace deals, orchestrated by the Trump administration, between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain. What should be a cause for universal celebration has predictably been downplayed, not only in the international press but among those ensconced in scholarly ivory towers. Jonathan Cristol, Research Fellow at Adelphi University, cynically observed, “…these deals do not usher in some sort of new era of peace and harmony.” Middle East professor at Lehigh University, Henry Barkey, declared, “The Trump administration should be in these countries’ debt because they gave it an excuse to gloat about the diplomatic achievement.” He went on to assert that a Biden administration would have been careful to consider all the “ramifications” of the deals before promoting and entering into them. By “ramifications” he is echoing the criticism of Notre Dame professor of religion and peace studies, Atalia Omer: “The main problem behind this ‘peace deal’ is it ignores the Palestinian struggles and demands.”

Leave it to academics to confuse serious progress toward a more peaceful region, and by extension a more harmonious world, with the rejectionist rantings of the corrupt Palestinian Authority, intent on establishing what would effectively amount to a terrorist state on the order of Gaza, situated on the very outskirts of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It takes no scholarly pedigree or Ph.D. to recognize that what has for decades been referred to as a “peace process” with the Palestinians is in fact nothing short of a “war process.” It is hardly practical to imagine that the tiny state of Israel, no larger in area than New Jersey, could realistically be subdivided into two sovereign nations, that of the Palestinian Arabs inexorably committed to the destruction of their Israeli neighbors. It is precisely in the ivory tower that the world of theory expresses itself in sharp disconnect with the practical realities of this war-torn region. However the academics might fantasize to the contrary, the Middle East is not Switzerland, where men in lederhosen come yodeling over the hillsides. 

Having lived in Northern Galilee and worked for a television news gathering operation in southern Lebanon, I have, unfortunately, seen the face of terrorism “up-close and personal.” When my friend and colleague, a Christian man from Ohio, was murdered in his own living room by radicalized Lebanese Shiites, just a few kilometers from Israel’s northernmost villages, it became obvious to this observer that genuine hope for this troubled region must be found, not by catering to the demands of the Palestinians and their professorial acolytes in other countries, but by building bridges with the moderate Arab states in the region, who recognize, as Israel does, the need to form a bulwark against Islamic radicalism and forge a future built on shared values of peace and security. For the agreement with both the UAE and Bahrain, President Trump has surely earned not one but indeed two Nobel peace prizes. For this he deserves the gratitude of the region and the world.  

Bahrain, Biden and Bombast

For Jews around the world, and of course in the land of Israel, it is the season of the High Holy Days: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. There is an ancient tradition that “on Rosh Hashanah, all the world passes before God like sheep.” But beyond the expectation of the divine verdict, it is also a season of renewal and a time of hope. Nothing more epitomizes the longing for a better day than the “impossible dream” of peace between Israel and the Arab world. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his people on Israel T.V., declaring: “It took us twenty-six years from the second peace agreement with an Arab state (Jordan) to the third peace agreement (with the UAE). And it took us not twenty-six years but twenty-nine days between a peace agreement with the third Arab state and the fourth Arab state (Bahrain). And there will be more…”

Some would call these developments nothing short of miraculous. Yet it is clear that their catalyst was none other than the great dealmaker, President Donald Trump, and his skillful Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner. For Joe Biden, by contrast, such peace deals are not miracles; they are “accidents.” He remarked: “I think Trump is going to accidentally do something positive here, in terms of this issue of … other Arab states.” It goes without saying, however, that for the people of Israel, who have lived in a state of cold war if not hot war with their Arab neighbors since the birth of their nation in 1948, these developments are infinitely more providential than accidental. 

The latest peace agreement, with Bahrain, was announced on the nineteenth anniversary of 9/11. Leading Israel's newscast that Sabbath Eve was a melody by the celebrated songstress of the Jewish state, the late Naomi Shemer. Its hauntingly beautiful refrain went out over the airwaves and the internet: “After the Holidays all will be renewed; Our daily life will return and be refreshed; The air, the dust, the rain, the fire; You too, you too will be renewed.” 

In today's cynical culture and vulgar political climate, it's easy to become jaded, to miss the “miracle on the Mediterranean” that today’s Israel represents. For Joe Biden and the Democrat Party operatives who feed him his lines, it’s much easier to frame not only American culture but the world at large in terms of identity politics, to harp on the essentially Marxist narrative of the “oppressors” and the “oppressed.” Biden’s party views the Palestinians as the oppressed ones, though the terrorist cadre among them have perpetrated untold acts of murderous aggression against innocent Israeli civilians. 

Their Jewish neighbors, by contrast, are without question members of the most persecuted ethnic group in all of human history. They have suffered exile, dispersion, and near annihilation at the hands of genocidal Nazis. Now that a new diplomatic horizon is presenting itself for this truly persecuted people, it suits America’s minions of the radical left to frame it as happenstance. But in the Jewish state, suffering like so many countries from the China Virus, the coming Days of Awe are indeed days of hope. And for the UAE and Bahrain, Israel at last “is real.”

Famous Amos

Famous Amos

True prophets are often the ones we least suspect of greatness. In the case of ancient Israel they often lacked social standing and possessed no special pedigree. Their authority derived solely from the power of their message. So it was with a remarkable man of righteous indignation, who arrived on the scene in the middle of the eighth century before the Common Era. His name was Amos, from a small city in Judah called Tekoa about 6 miles south of Bethlehem and eleven from Jerusalem. By this time in the history of Israel the once united kingdom of David and Solomon had irrevocably split in two. Ten northern tribes had created their own kingdom, while only Benjamin and Judah, from which Amos hailed, remained in the south. Little did anyone realize that this man Amos would be at the vanguard of Israel‘s ancient social justice movement. Oddly, we don’t know a lot about him.

Who or What Is a Prophet?

The immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. still echo in our ears: “I have a dream today.” They were a clarion call for what became one of the great movements of the modern world. Of course I’m talking about the social justice movement. The idea that all should be treated, not according to wealth or social class, but according to the content of their character. Of course Dr. king didn’t invent the idea of social justice. A century and a half ago Abraham Lincoln thunderously declared that all people are created equal. But he didn’t invent such ideas either. Nor did the framers of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. Don’t you suppose it would be helpful to figure out how and when this curious notion of human rights originated?

Digging Up Abraham

They called him "the father of pots.” It takes a certain kind of temperament to spend one's life digging around in the dirt. But eccentric Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie understood how archaeology would henceforth and forever be defined: the study of pots. It was he who declared that the construction of the ancient past is best accomplished not by considering gigantic monuments left behind, but by piecing together the tiny remnants of broken earthenware, the "unconsidered trifles.”

However, in the last decade of the 19th century Petrie was destined to stumble upon something that, while previously unconsidered, was hardly a trifle. It would in fact write a new chapter in the contentious field of biblical archaeology. Who was this William Flinders Petrie? The grandson of the first person to map Australia, here was a fellow with exploration in his blood. A sickly child, his mother, a scholar in her own right, taught him Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Though he lacked formal education, his father taught him surveying, which contributed to his later career as an archaeologist. As an eight year old boy he overheard a family discussion of an archaeological dig of an ancient Roman villa on the Isle of Wight, and protested that the earth ought to be cleared away with care rather than roughly shoveled out. As an elderly man, he later wrote: “All that I have done since was there to begin with, so true it is that we can only develop what is born in the mind. I was already in archaeology by nature.”

Whose Holy Land?: Archaeology Meets Geopolitics in Today’s Middle East

Biblical Archaeology today is more than just an obscure field for academic eggheads. It’s a mine field, with implications that may well determine the course of events, geopolitically, for the Middle East and the entire world. It’s exciting enough that there are always “Indiana Jones” adventures lurking in the background, including fantastic new discoveries, as well as age-old discussions about the fate of the Ark of the Covenant, among other things. But more than that, there’s the modern struggle to flesh out a “narrative” – a story about the origins of the “Holy Land” and to whom it belongs. The artifacts of archaeology are more than just museum pieces; they’re the storytellers, witnesses in stone, relating, in unbiased fashion, what the unvarnished truth is behind who lived in this land and when. It’s not surprising then, that modern parties to the Middle East conflict would be locked in dispute about the ownership of the artifacts as well as the land. The bottom line is: Whoever controls the artifacts controls the narrative. And the narrative is what it’s all about.

Passover, Easter and the “Apocalypse”

 

Springtime is a season that's all about rebirth and renewal, and it also has as its spiritual centerpiece two religious holidays, Easter for Christians and Passover for Jews. But hardly anyone recognizes that each of these holiday has much in common with the other, though not as one might think. What I mean by that is that both Passover and Easter share an undercurrent of apocalypticism, the origin which is in Judaism itself. Indeed, the whole concept of eschatology, that is the “end of days,” normally associated with Christianity, is at its core Jewish, and intimately connected with the springtime feasts celebrated by both Jews and Christians.