Why Palestinian Arabs don't like the "Exodus" movie

Giles Fraser is quite anti-Israel. ,  But his latest column in The Guardian unwittingly reveals something interesting about his Arab (Christian) friends in the West Bank:

Liberation theology is back in business. After decades of official censure (including from the present pope, in earlier guise), the big narrative of Christian theology is once again one of liberation for the poor and the oppressed. Salvation is not some private transaction between the individual and God, it is a public story in which the oppressed find freedom in the here and now.

Theology, so liberation theologians insist, is a practical business and not an intellectual exercise. This is Jesus as half Marx and half Moses. Forget academic theory, angels dancing on pins, sterile arguments about God’s existence, the church’s obsession with clothes and buildings. Instead, think praxis: good news to the poor, freedom to the captive, sight to the blind. Doing is believing. And from the favelas of São Paulo to the shantytowns of Johannesburg, it rejuvenated Christianity by returning to its revolutionary roots.

So why was it that these Palestinian Christians were having none of it? We were sitting in a cafe in Ramallah, close by the Kalandia checkpoint. Despite the fact that my Palestinian friends were constantly on the lookout for hermeneutic resources that might aid in the struggle against Israeli occupation, they seemed extremely reluctant to align themselves with liberation theology.

It was only when we started talking about Moses that the scales fell from my eyes. From a western perspective, the Exodus story is the primary text of the biblical cry of freedom. The African slaves who sang spirituals in the cotton fields of America would link their suffering to that of the Jews under Ramses II. Thus, for instance, they sang: “Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt’s land, Tell ole Pharaoh To let my people go.”

But from a Palestinian perspective, one person’s liberation is another’s slavery. The very story African slaves told each other as the story of their anticipated liberation is, according to Palestinians, at the root of their current occupation. The slaves come out of Egypt and into a land promised them by God. And, for Palestinians, this promise is responsible for their military subjugation, for walls and settlements.

Fraser almost gets it right. It isn't that Palestinians associate God's promise to the Jews with "settlements." It is that they cannot admit even to themselves that Jews ever lived in the Land of Israel because that means that they are the ones who are on someone else's land.

Don't take my word for it. Read this article that I quoted from in 2011 from by former PLO negotiator Ahmad Samih Khalidi, describing why believing in the Biblical story is antithetical to the core beliefs of Palestinian arabs, and therefore must be rejected:

[I]f Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, then the lands that it occupies today (and perhaps more, for there are as yet no borders to this “homeland”) belong to this people by way of right. And if these lands rightfully comprise the Jewish homeland, then the Arab presence there becomes historically aberrant and contingent; the Palestinians effectively become historic interlopers and trespassers—a transient presence on someone else’s national soil.

This is not a moot or exaggerated point. It touches on the very core of the conflict and its genesis. Indeed, it is the heart of the Zionist claim to Palestine: Palestine belongs to the Jews and their right to the land is antecedent and superior to that of the Arabs. This is what Zionism is all about, and what justifies both the Jewish return to the land and the dispossession of its Arab inhabitants.

Clearly, this is not the Palestinian Arab narrative, nor can it be. Palestinians do not believe that the historical Jewish presence in and connection to the land entail a superior claim to it. Palestine as our homeland was established in the course of over fifteen hundred years of continuous Arab-Muslim presence; it was only by superior force and colonial machination that we were eventually dispossessed of it. For us to adopt the Zionist narrative would mean that the homes that our forefathers built, the land that they tilled for centuries, and the sanctuaries they built and prayed at were not really ours at all, and that our defense of them was morally flawed and wrongful: we had no right to any of these to begin with.

The Biblical story from the Exodus through Joshua, David and Solomon - a story that the Quran largely accepts - undercuts the very foundation of Palestinianism. They know that, and this discomfort (and in the case of Arab Christians, cognitive dissonance) must be buried and pushed aside and forgotten.

A film like the Ridley Scott epic, as bad as it sounds like it is, still includes the basic storyline of a Jewish people chosen by God to be brought out of slavery and into the Promised Land - promised by none other than God Himself. And that is unacceptable.

So of course that cannot relate to the story of the Jews - because it undercuts and annuls their entire narrative.

This also explains why the discredited Khazare theory is so popular among Arabs - it is a very loose peg to hang their narrative on by claiming that ancient Jews have nothing to do with modern Jews. Similarly, it explains why Palestinian Christians embrace replacement theology, because that means that God's promise to the Jews is no longer relevant.

Defending their narrative is the driving force behind their beliefs, and truth is their enemy.