Review of Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner

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Review of Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner
Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner. Lela Gilbert. Published by Encounter Books, 2012. $25.99 pp.312

Lela Gilbert is a free-lance writer, journalist, and editor who has authored or co-authored more than sixty published books and many more articles. An evangelical Christian from southern California, Gilbert has a special interest in the persecution of Christians world-wide, especially in Muslim countries.

The title of Gilbert’s book alludes to an oft-repeated slogan of radical Muslims: “On Saturday we kill the Jews, on Sunday we kill the Christians.” The unifying theme of Gilbert’s book is that both Christians and Jews in the Middle East are being targeted by radical Muslims who share the deeply held belief of all Muslims that Muhammad was the final and most perfect prophet and that Islam has abrogated all previous religions. This Islamic supercessionisn has traditionally manifested itself both in the doctrine of jihad and in the traditional discrimination against dhimmis (subjugated Jews and Christians) that is mandated by Islamic law.

Gilbert’s text and the bibliography at the end of her book make it clear that she is well-read in Islamic and Middle-Eastern history. She is acquainted with the writings of Bat Ye’or, Norman Stillman, Martin Gilbert, Efraim Karsh, David Cook, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Michael Cüppers, and many others. She has read many memoirs by twentieth-century Jewish refugees from Islamic countries and also quotes extensively from interviews with such refugees, who today comprise about half of the Jewish population of Israel. The general sense of this reviewer is that Gilbert is far better informed about Islamic and Middle-Eastern history than the average Western journalist reporting from the region.

Gilbert’s prose is engaging and accessible, and her book is meant for a general audience, yet even academics specializing in the Middle East would find much of interest in her book. What makes this book original and valuable even to scholars is the large number of interviews she has conducted with eye-witnesses to history who are all too often ignored by the mainstream media and Western academics. Her interviewees include Jewish refugees from Muslim countries, Israeli Arabs, Arab Christians from the West Bank and Gaza, West-Bank “settlers,” Christian refugees from Muslim countries, Israeli archaeologists and defense experts, and countless Israeli friends and neighbors, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, of all political stripes and from all walks of life. As a well-connected writer and six-year resident of Jerusalem, Gilbert has insights into Israeli and Palestinian society that should not be dismissed lightly.

Yet many will, alas, be inclined to dismiss them, since she is unabashedly pro-Israeli. While she writes with a gentle charity befitting a Christian, she nonetheless displays a steely refusal to countenance the politically correct double-standards that distort so much Western reporting on the Islamic world and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Having read David Cook on jihad and Bat Ye’or and Norman Stillman on the treatment of Jews under Islam, and having met so many Christians and Jews who have suffered at the hands of Muslim majorities in the Middle East, Gilbert knows that the myth of “Islamic tolerance” is just that, —  a myth. Unlike the utopian proponents of the so-called one-state “solution” with a “right of return” for registered Palestinian refugees, Gilbert understands why Israeli Jews cannot allow themselves to be made once again into a minority living under a Muslim majority in their ancestral homeland of Eretz Israel. Unlike the critics of the West-Bank security barrier, Gilbert has not forgotten the fearsome suicide bombings that led to that barrier’s construction in the first place. Unlike the reporters who routinely refer to the 2010 “attack” on the Mavi Marmara by Israeli commandoes, Gilbert knows that those commandoes were themselves attacked first by Turkish militants wielding clubs, knives, and chains. Unlike the naïve Westerners like Jimmy Carter who insist that Hamas leaders are interested in a peace agreement, Gilbert is aware of the religious fanaticism and deadly Jew-hatred that is integral to the world-view of Hamas and other Islamist groups. Unlike trendy leftists who accuse Israel of “apartheid,” Gilbert has taken the trouble to interview refugees from South African apartheid who live in Israel and offer informed rebuttals of this baseless comparison.  Unlike the left-wing Western academics who have read Edward Said and thus “know” that Palestinians have always been committed to a secular democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Christians, Gilbert knows that Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the founding father of Palestinian nationalism, was in fact a Nazi collaborator committed to exterminating the Jews. She also knows of the discrimination faced every day by Christians living in the West Bank and Gaza and the savage persecution meted out in those territories to Muslim converts to Christianity, with the collusion of the police. (A relevant bit of context here that Gilbert does not mention is that the Palestinian Authority draft constitution, Article 4, stipulates that Islam is the official religion of the P.A. and the principles of Islamic sharia are the primary source of legislation in the P.A., — so much for Edward Said’s “secular, democratic state.”)

Lela Gilbert’s is a voice that deserves to be heard. If “progressive” Westerners could set aside their anti-Israeli and anti-evangelical biases long enough to read her book, they would learn (and, more importantly, unlearn) a great deal about an important yet chronically misunderstood part of our world.

JOSEPH S. SPOERL is professor of philosophy at Saint Anselm College, Manchester, N. H. 

This book review has been made available to the Faculty Forum courtesy of the Jewish Political Studies Review.

 

Review of Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner

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