The Middle East Quagmire
How did it start? How will end?
By many estimates, the current crisis in the Middle East began 4000 years ago. The Jewish patriarch Abraham and Sarah were childless. Fortunately, God promised Abraham that they would have a son whose descendants would become a great nation. God also promised that this nation would inhabit the land under Abraham’s feet.1 Back then it was called Canaan.
We call it Palestine today, and it is very much the centre of the ongoing conflict between the Muslim Arab nation, Zionist Jews and Christians.
Unfortunately, the years went by and Sarah failed to fall pregnant. In that Eastern culture, it’s important to understand, that it is always the woman’s fault if she can’t produce a child, preferably a son. Sarah’s inability was horribly humiliating to her, so she proposed to Abraham that in order for God’s promise to be fulfilled, and that Abraham have an heir, that he have a child by her Egyptian servant, Hagar. While we might recoil at such a blatant suggestion, back then this was an acceptable form of surrogacy—a way for an infertile couple to have a child. (Surrogate motherhood has a long history!)
competing claims
“A son coming from your own body will be your heir” (Genesis 15:4), God had promised Abraham. But Abraham probably reasoned that God hadn’t said the son had to come from Sarah’s body, so he followed through on her proposal.
What followed is not surprising. The two had a falling out, for when Hagar discovered she was pregnant, “she began to despise her mistress” (Genesis 16:4). Sarah complained to Abraham, who, lacking in courage, protested that it was all Sarah’s fault and told her to deal with it, and over the months of her pregnancy, Sarah so “ill-treated Hagar; so that she fled” (verses 5, 6) into the desert, where she almost perished, but returned to the camp nevertheless. When Ishmael was born, he was Abraham’s son, nevertheless, and it was Abraham who named him (verse 15).
Abraham was a wealthy man, and he had an impressive retinue of servants and herdsmen in his camp—well over 300.2 Now stop and think of this: For the next 15 or so years, Ishmael was the prince. He was the heir apparent. Everyone in the camp knew it. Everyone talked about it. And Ishmael himself surely revelled in the knowledge.
Then one day, when Ishmael was about 17 years old, God told Abraham that Sarah would have a son, and that son was to be the inheritor not only of Abraham’s wealth but also of His promise to become a great nation in the land of Canaan. Sure enough, a year later Sarah gave birth to Isaac.3
Now think about how Ishmael must have felt. After 17 years of seeing himself as the heir to Abraham’s fortune and flocks, as well as the entire land of Canaan, he is suddenly reduced to the status of a mere servant. What a crushing blow!
Once again Hagar and Sarah fell out, and Sarah had Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away, something Abraham was loath to do. In the desert, the two soon ran out of water, and were on the verge of dying when God “heard the boy crying” and came to their rescue. “Lift the boy up and take him by the hand,” He told Hagar, “for I will make him into a great nation” (Genesis 21:17, 18; cf 16:10). God promised that he would be the father of 12 rulers or princes (see Genesis 17:20; 25:12-16).
Isaac, Sarah’s son, went on to become the father of the Israelites, but Ishmael, Hagar the Egyptian’s son, went on to become the father of the Arab nation. That’s how the current Arab–Israeli conflict got started: a family feud, fuelled by jealousy—a situation borne of a lack of faith in the promises of God. The Bible says of Ishmael’s descendants that they “lived in hostility towards all their brothers” (Genesis 25:18), and, just as the Bible predicted at Ishmael’s birth (Genesis 16:12), they still do today.
The Jewish nation claimed Isaac was the legitimate inheritor of God’s promises to Abraham. Arabs claimed, and with some justification, that Ishmael, the older son, was the rightful heir. And so each claims ownership to the same piece of real estate—Palestine.
And there’s more. Enter the Christians and the Muslims.
Christian–Islam conflict
Christianity grew out of the Jewish nation of Roman times. It began in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, the progeny of Judaism. Non-Christians, both Jews and pagans, fought Christianity with a vengeance, but Christianity eventually became the dominant religion of the Empire.
By 500 AD, with the Roman Empire in decline, the religion of Jesus flourished, dominating the Mediterranean from the Levant to Southern and Central Europe, the Mediterranean coast of North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal). Mesopotamia and Asia Minor were also predominantly Christian.
Mohammed grew up in Mecca, today a city in Saudi Arabia, outside the area dominated by Christianity. At the age of 40 he felt that God was calling him to preach and to be a prophet to his fellow Arabs. Most people in Mecca rejected him, though, and in 622 AD—the year that Muslims consider their religion to have begun—he fled to Medina, where he established a theocratic government.
By the time of his death in 632 AD, Mohammad’s religion had spread throughout most of the Arabian Peninsla, partly through conversion and partly through force of arms. And within less than 100 years it had spread—again by conversion and military conquest—across the Middle East as far as India, throughout all North Africa and crossed the Pillars of Hercules to the Iberian Peninsula.
Thousands of Christians abandoned their faith to become Muslims, some through persuasion, some from persecution, and still others because of the privileges afforded to adherents of the new faith. The Christian religion, which had flourished throughout the Middle East and North Africa, was reduced to servitude.
Christians felt particularly incensed over the Muslim domination of the land of Jesus, Palestine. In 1095, Pope Urban II preached fiery sermons urging a crusade to deliver the holy sepulchre from the hands of infidels. Thousands of European Christians rallied to the pope’s call to arms, and the First Crusade ended in July 1099 with the taking of Jerusalem by Christian forces. Both Muslims and Jews were massacred in the thousands.
Over the next 200 years, Christians mobilised seven more major crusades and a number of smaller ones against the Muslims. However, these were less and less effective. By the year 1300 the Muslims had expelled the invaders and regained control of the Holy Land, including Jerusalem, which they held until 1948.
Despite their own efforts in invading Christian Europe (they got as far as the Danube, in Hungary) and Spain, the Arab Muslims have never forgotten the Crusades, and most haven’t forgiven them either.
the modern conflict
The UN established the modern state of Israel in 1948, following the withdrawal of the British, who had occupied it since World War I. Following the unsuccessful attack on the new nation by an Arab coalition, thousands of Palestinian Arabs within the state of Israel were evicted and forced into refugee camps, where they have lived without a country and with virtually no political rights ever since.
And not without cause; many remain resentful of both the nation of Israel and the Western powers that established and nurtured it. Their resentment is compounded by Israeli control of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, claimed as an extremely holy site by both Abrahamic lines.
A large and growing number of Christians view the establishment of the nation of Israel in 1948 as the fulfilment of a key part of the Bible’s end-time scenario, and preach this openly. This also inflames the resentment of the Palestinians and other Muslims toward the West and Christians in general. And while tensions might exist between various Muslim groupings and states around the world, all are united in their opposition to the state of Israel.
The basic issue is this: Which son of Abraham will control Jerusalem and the land of Canaan that Abraham was promised?
So, we today are faced with a crisis of global proportions as Arab nationalism and Muslim extremism merge into terrorism and war. Is there a way out?
The world’s leaders seek a military solution to the imbroglio. Unfortunately, and it’s obvious to any student of history, armies haven’t brought a permanent peace in the past, and, as we are seeing daily on our television screens, they aren’t doing very well at bringing about peace now. Nor will they in the future.
The only lasting solution is of a spiritual nature. As a Christian, I know God can bring about profound changes in the human heart. People who surrender to His power can love their enemies and forgive them.
In the ultimate, I see the only permanent solution as the establishment of God’s eternal kingdom that was predicted 2500 years ago by the prophet Daniel, who said, “The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed. . . . It will endure for ever” (Daniel 2:44).
It is in this kingdom that swords are turned into ploughshares; it’s in this kingdom that wolves, both metaphoric and literal, will lie in peace with lambs.4
Footnotes
1 Genesis 13:14-17. 2 Genesis 14:14.
3 Genesis 17:21. 4 Isaiah 2:4; 11:6-9; 65:25.
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This is an extract from August 2004
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