Replacement theology is at the heart of Middle East conflict and risks changing our history
SOUTH Africa, to its credit has enacted legislation to suppress both apartheid and racism. Proposals by the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) for introduction of a bill which will ‘domesticate’ the 1973 United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, alongside the creation of ‘apartheid-free zones’ and the criminalization of Zionism, confront us with an absurdity: it is as if apartheid never happened within South Africa, since it appears no laws were adopted referencing the UN convention?
If our 1994 dispensation appears in danger of being replaced by a formidable global campaign connected to a maximalist view of Palestinian territory, associated with the former British Colony, then you may be correct.
“From the River to the Sea” is the oft heard rallying cry alongside “Death to Israel and America”, as anyone with a different viewpoint is shouted down. Yet the ‘rainbow-coloured’ demonstrators have not translated into ‘rainbow ideas’ in the Middle East?
This is because replacement theology is at the heart of the conflict.
A 2020 academic paper by Philip du Toit, Is Replacement Theology Antisemitic?’ begins by defining anti-semitism as “normally understood as prejudice or hatred against Jewish people as a race” before concluding that since Christianity doesn’t perceive the Jews as a race, Christian theology cannot, by definition be anti-semitic.
In Revisiting the Charge of Tarrīf: The Question of Supersessionism in Early Islam and the Qur’an, Sandra Keiting argues that Islam was supersessionist from its inception, advocating the view that the ‘Quranic revelations’ would “replace the corrupted scriptures possessed by other communities”.
Jonathon Feldstein observes the popular “Dome of the Rock” in East Jerusalem has perhaps become “the cornerstone of Islamic replacement theology” alongside a new tradition that undermines both Judaism and Christianity.
“Today, it’s commonplace to hear Palestinians and other Muslims deny any Jewish – and therefore Christian – history to the Temple Mount, Jerusalem and the Land of Israel.”
Feldstein’s views are supported by a videographer who prompted Arab Palestinians to explain the plethora of Jewish archaeological sites in the region – their answers invariably involve a denial of history, for them, the scientific evidence is a religious “falsehood” to be discarded and ignored, replaced by another narrative, one which seeks to overcome and replace proven historical facts.
Even the Qu’ran references the land of Israel. Al Baqara 2.47 ; Al Maida 5.21; Al Aaraf 7.137; Yunus 10.93; Al Israa 17.2-104;Ta Ha 20.80; Al Mumim 40.53; Al Dukhan 44.32; Al Jathiya 45.16, all refer to Israel as the land of the Jews.
The latest PSC dogma and its imported weltanshauung not only seeks to make Jews responsible for apartheid, it criminalises those who profess their religion on the basis of the biblical idea of Zion, in the process relocating South African history to the Middle East.
Furthermore, it provides a canon that replaces the narrative of the Hebrews with that of Arab Palestinians, many of whom were migrants from across the former British and Ottoman Empires.
One has merely to examine the history of the Ottoman Railway Company to see why this statement is true.
Beginning in 1900, the main line from Damascus to Haifa, allowed mass migration to the new economy surrounding the Zionist endeavour, and the claim is supported by the census data.
A 1936 economic review in the Damascus newspaper Al Ayam corroborates by complaining, “Whole villages in the Hauran have been emptied of their people, who are drifting into [Mandate] Palestine”.
Count de Martel, the French High Commissioner for Syria, asserted in the summer of 1934 that even Arab merchants were moving from Damascus to [Mandate] Palestine because of the prosperity there.
Replacement theology as it is constructed in recent times, may be understood as the basis for the apartheid analogy, a process whereby the history of our own country, is similarly replaced and discarded in the furtherance of a strategy which has been termed supersessionism.
It is therefore significant that the UN apartheid convention targets crimes against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
Perversely, the phrase “one racial group over any other” is routinely omitted by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and PSC, in order to redact the convention to instances of state oppression of minorities, a lamentable situation not uncommon in our world today and certainly not unique to the state of Israel and its neighbours, all of whom should take the blame for the current escalation.
The apartheid convention was enacted in the 1970s primarily to deal with apartheid as it was then constructed within South Africa’s borders – a racist segregationist policy associated with a white Christian minority regime of PW Botha et al.
It had nothing to do with Jews, who under apartheid were disproportionately jailed compared to their white Christian compatriots, with outspoken Rabbis deported.
The only genuine question raised by the PSC proposal, (whatever the merits), is whether or not our foreign policy should reflect our constitutional values? At the face of it, foreign policy is best served by an outlook which boldly supports our Constitution – its democratic values – it cannot be that we, as a nation, are compelled to support those like Hamas or Hezbollah, who are avowedly opposed to secularism, democratic centralism, women’s rights, LGBT rights, independent trade unions, and other rights.
In doing so, we risk rewriting and fabricating our own history.