by Archives MCNZ.

Dreams and Reality in 2024

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Eighty years ago, the Rev Bill Blight published a brief, 14-page booklet entitled What is British Israel: the chief points of British Israel teaching examined … It was a critique of a movement and a way of thinking that had been present in the English-speaking world for more than a century. It particularly attracted members of the Established Church but it was to be found among Christians of all varieties who owed their forms of religion to their ‘homeland.’

It was originally based on the simplistic belief that the people of England had their origins in the so-called ‘lost tribes of Israel.’ A romantic notion, unsupported by hard evidence, and as the decades have passed nothing has emerged to endorse this special genetic link with Israel. But it found its way to Aotearoa and I recall my parents referring to people they knew as being committed supporters of the movement.

I include the first line of William Blake’s poem Jerusalem in the title simply because the mythical connection lives on. One king of England even referred to it as the National Anthem. Blake’s words were, of course, an appeal to the past – but it was a past without smoke-belching factories – when people lived in a ‘green and pleasant land.’ That sort of idealism can live on despite the logic of scientific progress and in a changing world, where the balance of power teeters from one extreme to another. If English-born Methodists continued to speak of their distant place of birth as ‘home’ there was little likelihood of change. However, Bill Blight knew he was living in a new world where such romantic idealism had no place. He had seen the disaster of war at first hand and did not imagine that the end of the conflict would lead to a return to a lost way of living.

It could be said that a factor in the decision to create a homeland for the dispersed Jewish people was, partly, a reflection of that idealism. Jerusalem was the heart of the Holy Land, and nothing should prevent that from being made a fact in the settlements that must take place at the conclusion of WW II. The British parliamentary leader Arthur Balfour had made a declaration to that effect in 1917.

And so it happened, in 1947, and the history of that part of the world since that time has been continuously riven by the almost irreconcilable problems of the relocation and dislocation of displaced peoples. Palestine, as that whole area was called at the time, then became Palestine and Israel, and the boundaries of these two nations - with a shared history going back at least 3000 years - have never been equitably settled.

What we are currently witnessing is the appalling outcome of both international indecision and of age-old rivalries and distrust. And, as is mostly the case in such situations, it is ordinary people who suffer. A strip of land is being fought over, 365 sq. kms in area - significantly less than the area of greater Wellington, for example.

How many have died so far? The reports vary, but the truth is chilling. Of one thing we may be sure – helpless citizens are being killed in their thousands. And that will go on, even if a truce is temporarily arranged. We want peace for Gaza especially, and peace in that whole area of necessity. That peace will not come simply because of our special feeling for the Holy Land or Jerusalem, but because justice and compassion demand it.

Is there a place for such a philosophy as British Israelitism nowadays? Certainly not at this moment. A cease-fire is only a step on the way. Peace will come when the exercise of power is replaced by an awareness of our common humanity.