Book Review by David W. Virtue, DD, davidvirtue2.substack
A slim Grove Ethics booklet, by Colin Chapman and James E. Patrick, has done something rare in the poisoned debate over Israel: it has put two opposing Christian histories of the conflict between the same covers and let each man make his case. Colin Chapman, a former lecturer in Islamic studies at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut and author of Whose Promised Land? writes the history as most Palestinians and Israeli Arabs would tell it. James E. Patrick, an Old Testament scholar who chairs an alliance of pro-Jewish Christian organizations, writes it as most Israeli and Diaspora Jews would.
Both men frame the task ethically: establish accurate history first, then make moral judgments. Both lament Britain’s role in inflaming the conflict, though they locate the guilt in different places. But the deepest fault line between them is not historical. It is theological.
The Fault Line Beneath the History
Chapman insists on keeping his reading of history separate from his interpretation of Scripture. He has concluded that the coming of God’s kingdom in Jesus transformed the Old Testament promises of nation and land, leaving the Jewish people no present or future territorial claim. Patrick openly does the opposite. He believes God’s promises to Israel remain physical as well as spiritual, and he allows the Bible to shape his understanding of modern events.
Everything that follows flows from that divide.
A Shared Spine, Two Readings
On the ancient background the two agree on the facts: Abraham, the Exodus, the kingdoms, the exiles, Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem, and the long procession of Byzantine, Arab-Muslim (from 634), Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman (from 1516) rule. Both accept that by 1880 Jews made up roughly 5 percent of the population and Arabs about 95 percent.
Chapman presents this as ordinary political history. Patrick reads it theologically. Jewish identity, he argues, has always been bound to the land and to Jerusalem. “Return to Zion” is the literal meaning of Zionism, woven into daily Jewish prayer. A continuous Jewish presence and longing survived centuries of subjugation, a longing Christians rediscovered when the Reformation restored Romans 11 to their Bibles.
Settler Colony or Homecoming?
From the 1880s, European antisemitism and pogroms drove Jewish immigration, and Theodor Herzl gave the movement political form in 1896–97. For Chapman, because Jews were then a tiny minority, Zionism functioned as a settler-colonial project, with some leaders speaking early of “transfer.” Palestinian nationalism arose alongside it, and the tidy “clash of nationalisms” framing misleads, he says, by implying two equal parties.
Patrick sees a different land. Under Ottoman misrule it had been neglected and depopulated. Absentee landlords sold wasteland to Jews at inflated prices. Jewish farming, swamp drainage and higher wages benefited Arabs and even drew Arab immigration. And Arab leaders such as Emir Faisal and Sherif Hussein initially welcomed the Jewish return.
Britain’s Contested Promises
The First World War produced Britain’s tangled pledges. Chapman treats the McMahon–Hussein correspondence (promising Arab independence, plausibly including Palestine), the secret Sykes–Picot agreement and the 1917 Balfour Declaration as contradictory commitments. Most Arabs regard Balfour as a betrayal; even a British official privately doubted both sets of promises could be honored.
Patrick answers that the pledges to the Arabs were conditional and, read closely, excluded western Palestine. Churchill’s 1921 settlement gave the Arabs 78 percent of the Mandate territory in Transjordan, and the 1922 Mandate recognized the Jews as indigenous too, entitled under international law to “reconstitute” their national home.
The Mandate Years, 1922–48
Chapman stresses that Britain could never reconcile its obligations. Arab opposition erupted in violence in 1929 and in the 1936–39 revolt, which Britain crushed. The Peel Commission recommended partition in 1937, and the 1939 White Paper capped Jewish immigration just as the Holocaust loomed.
Patrick counters that the Mandate’s very purpose was to build toward a Jewish majority and state; that land purchases did not create a large dispossessed class; that Jewish immigration and taxes materially improved Arab life; and that the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, incited violence and later allied himself with Hitler, while Britain shut the door on Jews at the moment of their greatest need.
1948: Independence or Nakba
Chapman notes that the 1947 UN partition plan gave a Jewish population of one-third some 56 percent of the land. Jews accepted; Arabs rejected it as imposed and unjust. Israel declared independence in 1948, and the invading Arab armies were defeated. What Jews call the War of Independence, Arabs call al-Nakba, “the catastrophe,” in which some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled and around 500 villages were destroyed.
Patrick emphasizes the repeated Arab refusal of any Jewish sovereignty at all; the non-binding character of UN Resolution 181; Israel’s founding declaration promising equal citizenship; the assault by seven Arab armies; and Transjordan’s expulsion of every Jew from the West Bank and the Old City. Many Arabs, he argues, left at their own leaders’ urging, and Israel later readmitted some.
The Refugees, 1948–67
Chapman records Israel’s refusal, despite Resolution 194, to permit return for fear of a fifth column, and the founding of Fatah (1959) and the PFLP (1967). Patrick sets the Palestinian exodus against the vast population exchanges of the era. Roughly 650,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands were absorbed by Israel, he notes, while Arab states other than Jordan refused to integrate Palestinians. He faults UNRWA for uniquely passing refugee status down the generations, with return as its only goal.
1967 and the “Occupation”
Chapman describes Israel’s preemptive strike and its capture of Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan; its slowness to implement Resolution 242; its annexation of East Jerusalem; and a settlement program widely judged illegal. He traces the First Intifada (1987), the birth of Hamas, and the PLO’s 1988 move toward recognizing Israel.
Patrick argues that Nasser’s blockade and military buildup justified Israeli self-defense; that Israel holds valid title, so “occupation” is itself contested; that Resolution 242 pointedly avoided demanding withdrawal from “all” the territories; and that the PLO never revised a charter denying Jewish nationhood and demanding armed struggle.
Why Peace Failed, 1991–2005
Here they divide most sharply. Chapman gives five reasons Oslo failed: the core issues were deferred; nothing restrained settlement growth; the United States was no honest broker; Yitzhak Rabin was murdered; and successive right-wing Israeli governments rejected a Palestinian state. He reads the 2005 Gaza withdrawal as a device to freeze negotiations.
Patrick argues that Yasser Arafat entered talks pragmatically but never curbed terror or revised the charter. Israel conceded much. When Ehud Barak put a far-reaching offer on the table at Camp David in 2000, Arafat walked away, and the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada followed. The security barrier, Patrick says, sharply reduced attacks.
From Gaza to October 7, 2005–23
Chapman highlights Iran’s adoption of the Palestinian cause and its “Axis of Resistance”; Hamas’s 2006 election victory; the blockade and repeated Israeli incursions that followed (“mowing the grass”); and the Abraham Accords’ sidelining of the Palestinians, with imminent Saudi normalization a trigger for October 7.
Patrick emphasizes Mahmoud Abbas’s rejection of Ehud Olmert’s sweeping 2008 offer; Palestinian Authority incitement and “pay-for-slay”; and Hamas’s violent seizure of Gaza in 2007, followed by years of rocket fire under a charter steeped in Muslim Brotherhood antisemitism.
October 7 and the War Since
Chapman records roughly 1,139 Israelis killed and 251 hostages taken; notes that most Palestinians saw the attack as a breakout from “the largest open-air prison”; and cites more than 75,000 Palestinian dead, a figure drawn from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, along with 90 percent of Gaza’s buildings destroyed and widespread charges of genocide and a renewed Nakba.
Patrick puts the Israeli toll at about 1,183, calls the prospect of a Palestinian state the war’s greatest casualty, disputes the Gaza figures and the genocide charge, and describes Israel’s subsequent multi-front war against Iran’s proxies: the degrading of Hezbollah and the fall of Assad.
Two Letters
The booklet closes with two candid letters. Chapman charges Patrick with minimizing Jewish violence, denying the Nakba and the occupation, and letting biblical interpretation govern his history so that a divine land promise overrides the rights of the Arab majority.
Patrick charges Chapman with excusing repeated Arab rejection of statehood, with overlooking that self-determination need not mean statehood, and with failing to let God’s covenant love for the Jews coexist with love for Palestinians. Both insist the conversation must continue.
The Verdict
Chapman deserves his due. He has lived and worked in the Middle East on and off since 1968, Whose Promised Land? has become the standard text for Christians sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and he writes with genuine compassion for a people who have suffered much.
But this writer is persuaded that Patrick offers the truer reading: of Israel’s history, of its roots in biblical history, and of the political realities of this present hour.
Chapman’s claim to read history free of theology is itself a theological choice. To decide in advance that the promise of land has been fulfilled and folded into the kingdom is to decide in advance what the facts may mean. Patrick at least declares his hand.
More telling is what Chapman’s history cannot explain: the rejections. The Peel plan in 1937. Partition in 1947. Camp David in 2000. Olmert in 2008. Offer after offer refused, not because the terms were too small but because the premise, a Jewish state of any size, was never acceptable. Bill Clinton, who brokered the Camp David talks, has long laid their failure at Arafat’s feet and acknowledged the long shadow it has cast over the Middle East.
And Chapman fails to reckon with the depth of Jew-hatred across the Arab world and far beyond it: at the United Nations, in countries such as South Africa, and increasingly in Britain, where both men live.
Nor does his framework, which treats the conflict as a dispute over land and rights, have any category for an enemy whose goals are eschatological. The storm gathering over the Middle East is not passing anytime soon. A war now in its seventh month is sending shocks through the global economy. But a larger war lies beneath it, and it is theological. Iran’s clerical rulers are shaped by an apocalyptic reading of history centered on the return of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi of Twelver Shi’ism. That end-times vision trumps deal-making. Borders can be negotiated. The apocalypse cannot.
Chapman and Patrick agree the conversation should go on. It should. But Tehran is not waiting for it to end.
From here.
See Two Histories on the Grove Ethics website here