Convivencia
The Jewish Network for Palestine has something interesting to say about the “Judea — Christian heritage/tradition”, namely it’s an invention that obscures a large element of our history. It also has something interesting to say about the atrocities taking place in Palestine and elsewhere.
“Convivencia is a cross-faith, international initiative for a just peace in the Middle East. This is a better way forward than the current militarised ‘solutions’ based on racist oppression, brute force, denial of rights and colonial dispossession. The proposal is based on a history of shared values of the monotheistic faiths. It is also based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially its placing of responsibility on everyone ‘to promote respect for these rights and freedoms’. The call extends to people of all faiths and none who are committed to these values. Instead of dividing people, this approach unites them in a search for a just peace based on equality for all in Palestine/Israel. The intention follows the original PLO programme, towards building a shared political community through a process of decolonisation, beginning with Palestine. This requires an end to Zionism, apartheid and occupation, and building a just and democratic civic society in the whole of Palestine.
At different times and places, all faiths have been afflicted by various aspects of racist behaviour. Racism and Supremacist positions should be totally and clearly rejected by all religious and civic communities. All forms of racism must be treated in the same manner, being equally reprehensible. Two important historical examples of people of different faiths living in mutual respect were Andalucia during the Golden Age and Palestine throughout most of its history, with the exception of the time of the Crusades. The Ottoman Empire was, like other empires of the period, based on multifaith and multinational coexistence. We wish to use such concrete examples as models for future coexistence in Palestine and beyond, especially in the Middle East.
Unfortunately, racist agendas have been treated differentially in Britain. Allegations of antisemitism have been weaponised by conflating it with anti-Zionism to suppress popular campaigns for a just peace in Palestine/Israel. Thus, Israeli settler-colonial privileges as well as Israeli actions against Palestinians, combine to deny Palestinians universal human rights and constitutes the international crime of Apartheid. ….
The concept of justice is central to all three monotheistic faiths. It follows that any political system that gains their support must combine equality, justice and universal human rights in order to deliver peace, democracy and the rule of law. In this way, the process of decolonisation will create the shared political community crucial for a real Convivencia. Of course, at various historical junctures practitioners of the three faiths have denied or contradicted such principles. Despite these aberrations, they are the basis for modern democratic systems supported, of course, by other faiths and humanists who honour the same principles…
Today’s racist state agendas (especially Zionism) have been sanitised by obscuring or rewriting history in several ways. Around the mid-20th century, a Western narrative invented ‘the Judeo-Christian heritage’ (or tradition) for various political agendas, even contradictory ones. Spanning those differences was a basic assumption about shared values between the two religious’ traditions. The narrative has cited the Old Testament yet excludes Muslims, and does not recognise the roots of antisemitism in European Christianity.
A common ‘Judeo-Christian heritage’ plays several racist and historically amnesiac roles, in particular:
— Portraying European and Zionist colonisation as normative societal progress, while sanitising its violent racism
— Denying or disregarding Israeli Apartheid
— Obscuring western exploitation in the Middle East whilst idealising Israel as the West’s front-line thus scapegoating Muslims for Europe’s internal failures
— Portraying Muslims and Arabs as the main threats to Jews, while obscuring Western Right-wing antisemitism and the long history of Christian antisemitism which continues today;
— Ignoring the common Judeo-Muslim history and heritage
— Obscuring various cross-faith (and secular) anti-racist agendas opposing antisemitism over the past couple centuries.
As many Jews have become integrated into Western countries, the past half-century’s oppressive convergence has been projected back into distant times as a fictitious basis for ‘the Judeo-Christian tradition’.
In the past decade, allegations of antisemitism have been increasingly weaponised by conflating it with anti-Zionism in order to suppress the popular campaign for just peace in Palestine/Israel. In this racist agenda, Israeli settler-colonial privileges depend on denying human and political rights to the indigenous population of Palestine, and on continuing an illegal and repressive militarised occupation. As a key weapon of this agenda, pro-Israel forces have aggressively promoted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Definition of Antisemitism, whose examples include ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’. This contentious example has been deployed to make false accusations of antisemitism and to deny venues for public events or to restrict speakers…
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We wish for the peaceful resolution of the conflict in Palestine to become a positive beacon of life together elsewhere, as Al Andalus did in its historical period. We call upon relevant religious and secular organisations to come together under the banner of Convivencia and lay a new foundation to future life in Europe, as well as in Palestine. Let us work together for peace and coexistence!
Bibliography:
https://jewishnetworkforpalestine.uk/
https://medium.com/@qekhan/judea-christianity-the-foundation-of-the-west-907ee5d46a9b
