Catholic Legal Theory and the Middle East

This past Tuesday evening I had the great pleasure of taking part in a dinner celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Arab American Bar Association of Illinois.  I am a founding member of this organization and currently serve as its vice-president.  The reason for this is that, notwithstanding my pale white skin, dull blue eyes, and Irish last name (inherited from my Belfast born father), I am, in fact, part Arab.  My maternal great-grandparents, Joseph George and Helena Mansour, immigrated to the U.S. from Bsharri, a Maronite village in the north of Lebanon, close to the cedar forests for which the country is so famous, and proudly so.

The Arab Bar Association is a wonderful group of men and women who trace their roots to countries throughout the Arab world, from the Levant, to the Gulf, to North Africa.  Like similar organizations, the bar provides its members with opportunities to engage in networking, continuing education, and judicial evaluation.  The constituency of our bar is about half Muslim and half Christian, and so, although the organization is not religious, it has a distinctively interreligious quality about it.  The legal profession and the practice of law serve as a common meeting place where we can come together as members of one community, even as we recognize and respect our differences.

One of the most uplifting things about the Arab Bar is that it serves as a counterpoint to the hateful caricature of Arabs present in our culture – a caricature that existed long before 9/11.  The bar provides a positive image of Arab Americans as members of a learned profession dedicated to public service and the rule of law.  Thus, we were honored to have Ray LaHood, longtime Congressman from Peoria and now Secretary of Transportation in the Obama Administration as our keynote speaker on Tuesday night.  The Arab Bar is also in dialogue and collaboration with other ethnic bar associations, and I was honored to have the president of the local Decalogue Society seated at my table.

Sadly, Christian communities throughout the Middle East have been under increasing pressure to abandon their homelands and relocate to the West for a number of years.  We witnessed an especially bloody example of this pressure recently with the massacre of over fifty people including two priests at a Syrian Catholic Church in Bagdad last week and the murder of more Iraqi Christians this week (see here and here).

The recent Special Synod of the Bishops of the Middle East produced a document that addresses the complex situation in which Catholics (Maronite, Melkite, Syrian, Chaldean, Coptic, Armenian, and Latin Rite) find themselves in that part of the world.  (The Synod’s preparatory document is here and its closing statement is here).  The closing document forthrightly demands the right to religious freedom for Christians and others in these predominantly Muslim countries.  It also calls for a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a point that has aroused no small amount of criticism (see here, here, and here).

The views expressed by the bishops do not reflect, as some critics have suggested (here), a kind of naïve optimism for a utopian future in the region once a Palestinian state is established.  The bishops are well acquainted with the mortal threat posed by Islamic extremism in the Holy Land and other countries in the region.  They witness it everyday.  Instead, the document reflects the reasonable parameters of compromise necessary to achieve a just peace – the only kind of peace that will be lasting.  These are in keeping with what both John Paul II and Benedict XVI have said with respect to the conflict and how it should be resolved.

The people of Israel are our brothers and sisters, and when they are the victims of terrorism, whether from Katyusha rockets or suicide bombers, their blood cries out to heaven for justice.  The same is no less true when Arab blood is spilled by fellow Arabs (whether Muslim or Christian), or by Israelis.  This is not to suggest some kind of moral equivalence between acts of terrorism and acts of self-defense.  It is to suggest that not every Israeli action can be rightfully described as an act of self-defense.  To say as much is not to wallow in the gutter of anti-Semitism.  It is to say that the actions of every nation may be subject to scrutiny and criticism, and where appropriate, condemnation.  No one is above reproach. 

Israel is a member of the family of nations.  She has a right to exist in peace and security within internationally recognized borders, but she does not have the right to dictate what those borders should be in a unilateral fashion.

I am no apologist for Palestinian and other Arab violence against Israelis and Jews, but neither do I wish to indulge in the Israeli exceptionalism that typifies discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute in the United States.

The Catholic bishops of the Middle East have provided a fresh starting place from which to begin the conversation—one that will be new to many Americans, one that is consistent with the principles of Catholic social teaching.  For those interested in the real world implications of this teaching, the document is well worth considering.