From Cairo to Christ by Abu Atallah

Author:Abu Atallah [Atallah, Abu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2017-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ISRAEL

and the

MUSLIMS

Alongside the Christian and Muslim history of Egypt runs that of Israel, both ancient and modern. To say that Israel and Egypt have a long and complicated past is to put it mildly. According to the book of Exodus, the story of Israel itself begins in Egypt. It is clear from the biblical history of Israel that there are many parallels between it and Egyptian religion and society. For example, ancient Egyptian religion had long acknowledged the death and resurrection of a god—the sun god—as well as a day of judgment and a paradise for believers. Moses was raised as a prince in Egypt, and the two sons of Joseph (Ephraim and Manasseh) had an Egyptian mother. Ancient Israel was born out of Egypt, and you might say that modern-day Israel was born out of Egypt as well.

This is because Egypt, Syria, and other nations of the Middle East created the conditions that led to the establishment of the modern state of Israel. At the time of Christ, Philo of Alexandria reports that there were approximately one million Jews in Egypt, or nearly one-eighth of the Egyptian population.1 Many Jews migrated to Egypt at the time of the Babylonian exile, and developed a thriving economic and intellectual society in Egypt (see Jeremiah 41:16–42:22). Their history under the Muslim Arabs was up and down: sometimes they enjoyed relative peace and prosperity, and other times they endured exorbitant taxation and persecution. By 1917, the number of Jews in Egypt was down to about sixty thousand.2 And in 1956, to promote his pan-Arab program, Nasser expelled most of the Jews from Egypt, where they had lived for hundreds of years. They had nowhere to go. They were refugees in need of a homeland. This need, combined with the horrors of the Holocaust, created the political conditions that brought about the modern state of Israel.

To create the state of Israel, the Israelis had to forcibly take the land from the Palestinians. Under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, the Israelis killed some and removed many of the men, women, and children from the land they had lived and toiled on for centuries. The Israeli government set up a working group called “The Committee on Population Transfer,” dedicated to the removal of the Palestinians.3 After taking power in 1948, the Israeli government emptied and destroyed 400 Palestinian villages and evicted over 100,000 Palestinians.4 A considerable number of these Palestinians were Christian. In fact, one of the most ancient Christian traditions, the Maronites (named after St. Maron), is Palestinian.

The history of this animosity among the “People of the Book” is lengthy. The principal source of this conflict is the long-standing dispute over Jerusalem. By the time of Muhammad, the temple of Jerusalem had been built and destroyed two times. Solomon’s temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BCE, and Herod’s temple by the Romans in 70 CE. The site of the temple remained well known. Near that same site, in about 530 CE, the Christian emperor in Constantinople, Justinian, built the Church of Our Lady.

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