A Cultural Nakba

The vision of God as Cosmic Realtor.

As I continue to cover the situation in Israel and Palestine, one song keeps going through my mind.

When I was a small child, maybe 6 or so, perhaps the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater was called “Exodus.” My parents took me to see it in the Uptown Theater on Genesee Street in Utica.

Exodus was a Hollywood epic about the founding of Israel, directed by a famous man named Otto Preminger. At that point, Jews were very much seen as the “other” in American society, which meant the movie needed a protagonist that white Christian audiences could identify with. The movie served up an idealistic white English woman who means a manly Jewish warrior and falls in love with him. That role was filled by Paul Newman – someone who, like me, had a Jewish father and a mother with a Christian background, but who, unlike me, had brilliant blue eyes that produced swooning as well as sympathy in those mainstream audiences.

That’s the Hollywood formula: a white Christian for identification, and an attractive outsider protagonist who overcomes their prejudices by instilling desire, identification, or sympathy. If he looks like an idealized member of the ruling class – sandy hair, blue eyes – so much the better.

The song that keeps running through my mind is the theme song to that movie. I looked it up. It was sung by Andy Williams who was a very popular singer of the time. He was a big favorite with my mom, if I remember correctly. The song begins – and this is the part that keeps running through my mind – “this land is mine, God gave this land to me.”

Now, that's hardly the foundation for a productive dialogue between two groups contending over the same territory, is it? Nor is the realm of the spiritual well-served this vision of the Deity as Cosmic Realtor. And yet … many of the people who run this country are my contemporaries or older. The beliefs and prejudices behind that song and that movie shaped their understanding of the Middle East.

It was around that time that I heard the phrase, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Maybe it came from the movie, maybe from somewhere else. That phrase, like the Andy Williams song, was a form of cultural nakba. It erased an entire people.

No wonder this erasure was so successful in the United States. This country was built on “manifest destiny” – the literal belief that God gave this land to us. It was built on the erasure of American Indians. And it was built on the attempt to turn human beings into chattel.

This was never a land without a people. But at the rate we’re destroying our planet, we may soon be a people without a land.