By Abuchi Obiora
The first part of this thesis explored the genesis of the political problem between Israel and Palestine in the Middle Eastern region of the world within the original context of the Last Testament (WILL) of Patriarch Abraham.
This second and concluding part highlights some other obvious but craftily concealed facts hitherto neglected, which will, no doubt, throw some light on the direction of a possible permanent solution to the long-drawn, centuries-old imbroglio in the Middle East.
But the most important reason for this second part in the two-part series is to proffer what may come out to be the only workable perspective for a permanent solution to the problem in the Middle East when all political and military solutions have failed. It is expected that the recommendation here will forever unite the Jews with their Arab brothers. The novel thing about what will be said here, too, is that the rest of the world will be positively affected, because all the sinister power blocs and hawkish economic interest groups who profit by the misfortune in the Middle East will have no further business there.
Since history repeat itself and in so far as we are all mortal human beings presently habiting the earth and are bound to depart as our various tenors expire, I felt it worthy enough to put my views on record, believing that somebody listens, so that future generations of mankind will derive wisdom from the early blunders of both manipulation and misrepresentation of the Last Testament of Abraham, which has generated an unending feud in the Middle East, and hatred for the Jewish race.
An Igbo proverb says that you do not add pepper when preparing a solution to cure madness. This means that no suspicion must be concealed or harbored to get rid of a nagging problem.
The solution must be plain enough and seen to be so to penetrate in a no-holds-barred manner. You must open a wound, no matter how deep and ugly the inside might be, in order to apply a curative paste to it. This explains my reason for unearthing the secret suspicious and sentiments of Arabs.
In a beautiful musical rendition typical of the sonorous lyrics of young African artistes, an African songstress advises that “no matter where you go……remember the road that will lead you home…”
The descendants of Abraham must begin to look critically into their past so that they can navigate the present well and chart a clear future. There should be enough of buck-passing and shifting blames.
The present leaders of the descendants of Abraham must courageously, without prides, address their family problem.
The Holy Bible records that the quarrel in Abraham’s house started between Sarah and Hagar over Ishmael and Isaac. We can re-create this scene to understand how difficult it would be for a woman to be comfortable in a house where the child of her house help will inherit. Sarah must have been vexed by the good fortunes of her handmaid, Hagar.
The Holy Bible further gives some details about the burial of Abraham. Ishmael came back home and participated effectively, actually playing the ‘di-okpa’(first born in Igbo) or ‘Akobi’ (first born in Yoruba) role during the burial.
This would have been an auspicious time for the unification of the two brothers, but because this did not happen, I would be inclined to believe that the Jewish caste system may have made it impossible for Ishmael to stay back with his brother Isaac after the burial. Now, the world must do something to unite the descendants of these brothers.
A man who openly anoints a child over and above a natural first-born brings confusion and anarchy upon his household after he has departed the earth.
There could be subtle ways by which a special and beloved son may be blessed by a father, and the world at large will be witnesses to the practical manifestation of the blessings of a favorite child as the father’s anointing unfolds.
Unless some people want us to believe that God in his omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence made mistakes in making Ishmael come before Isaac thereby causing the present unease and bloodshed in the Middle East, somebody/some people with vested interest (caste system?) in the distant past had cooked up the story presenting Ishmael as unworthy to ascend the ‘throne’ of his father.
It is not in the nature of God to drive man to sin in order to prove His point or even attain His purposes. As a matter of fact, being omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient, He does not have to.
Having given man the ‘will’ to navigate his coast, what God does in His mercy is to offer man the ladder to climb away from the consequences of sin when man is penitent and remorseful.
It is both wrong and absurd to justify the actions of man with the wisdom of God. When we fall, we fall and we should accept the fact that we have fallen. This is the only honest way to view the mistakes of Abraham.
I would prefer to think in the direction that by making Ishmael come before Isaac and endowing Isaac with the so-called blessings of Abraham, the descendants of Isaac have for centuries failed the test of love and missed the rare privilege of God for Isaac to grab a special honor for taking care of his less advantaged (as a result of his material links to Egypt) elder brother. It surprises me that rather than correct the mistakes of their forefathers, the present descendants of Isaac are still treating the present descendants of Ishmael with the ignominy which the forefathers of the later received. To say the least, it is both provocative and annoying and there could be no better reasons for human beings to willingly lay down their lives than in defense of their father’s beliefs, especially when those beliefs are meant to redress perceived injustices long suffered.
I say this with my knowledge that the truest test of synchronicity and correspondence of human justice with divine justice (as some people would want me to believe as what took place between Ishmael and his younger brother, Isaac) is love. Love is the foundation upon which the world was built and is being sustained. There was lack of both human and divine love in the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael by the Patriarch Abraham.
To use a personal experience, my father effectively prepared me to usurp the roles of my elder brother from a very tender age. I was wiser. After my father’s death, I backed out, allowing my elder brother to play his role. Twenty five years later, I called a family meeting and surrendered the documents of four houses in choice areas of Nigeria, and several empty lands which my father kept in my custody.
It was not a difficult decision for me to take because I had called my wife when my father died and convinced her that if God actually wanted to make me the first son of my father, nothing would have prevented HIM to do so.
I also knew that to confiscate my father’s estate in a polygamous home was to have a dangerous courtship with danger and bring ridicule to the family. In spite of provocations from sundry quarters, I withdrew a pending court case before the first appearance and allowed the primary decision of God before we were all born, to reign. Thirty years later, I enjoy the family love more than I would have enjoyed my father’s wealth, and my children with my grandchildren move freely within family circles.
My understanding, therefore, is that it takes a greedy son to accept undue and lop-sided favor from a father who was either excited, biased, or influenced. The consideration of the peace and continued existence of a family unit must precede all personal interests.
Israel must re-examine its position in order to allow peace to reign in the Middle East.
History reveals that the fact that Jews prefer to live and work together within and amongst themselves in comparison to the nomadic way of life imposed by Abraham on Ishmael to wander in search of food before Angel Gabriel came to rescue him and his mother may have been responsible for the Jews (pampered children) not to have aspired to expand beyond Jerusalem and the immediate environs.
Psalm 126 verse 5 says ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy’. The wanderings of yesteryears by Ishmael has paid off handsomely today in extensive land mass for the Arabs.
It is one of the ironies of life and human mischief that certain conducts of man which I have already identified as defects of conditioned souls in Part One of this thesis are clearly and cleverly concealed and justified in some religious doctrines and belief systems. For this reason, the religions, after all, may not be as sacrosanct as we believe they are. The possibility may not be overruled that some of the stories we read as historical religious facts may have been invented and made up by people with vested interests.
Though Abraham retains the position of the Patriarch of all Patriarchs, by being unable to play the neutral role in the management of his polygamous family, Abraham also set the unenviable record of presiding over the world’s first recorded broken home – a record which no religious dogma can dispute, irrespective of in whatever form the dogma is cleverly crafted.
In a manner reminiscent of the judgment passed by Jesus Christ on the crowd that arrested the adulterous woman when Jesus Christ asked, ‘who will throw the first stone’ no religious doctrine, however crafted, should overwhelm our sense of justice. Justice should have no religious, linguistic or racial coloring. Justice for one person should be justice for the next person.
Peace in the family unit is essential for peace in the world. The world must learn a lesson from the mistakes of Abraham and aim at peace within the family units so that our common dreams of peace amongst the nation of the world will be achieved in our time.
Islam should also learn from the mistakes of Christianity and stop the trend now prevalent within some Islamic sects where countries deviously sponsor organized terror to unleash mayhem on the world.
Because Islam is a more difficult religion to practice, many Muslims that we come across on daily basis are not true Muslims. True Muslims are meek and humble. They are not killers. True Muslims are far, far in the minority…. a fact which puts the core values of the religion of Islam and the spiritual efforts of Prophet Mohammed (S.A.W.), in visible danger of submersion.
Since the Jews failed to co-opt the descendants of their fathers elder brother to Judaism because of their exclusive claim to the ownership of God, a vacuum was created and fetishism and paganism of the Quaresh Arabs became the natural consequence of that vacuum. The resilience of these dangerous marauders may have been responsible for the brutal wars which Prophet Mohammed (S.A.W) waged to force the religion of Islam on them.
Secondly, the world may have been in more danger today if those deadly pagans who were cannibals and performed human sacrifices were not converted to Islam, because the Jews had already foreclosed the spread of Judaism, preventing it to reach the gentiles. This foreclosure was the most important factor which aided the spread of Christianity in the early centuries A.D.
As a matter of fact, the emergence of Islam put a stop to the wanton destruction that took place in that region. The carnages of the Jewish exilic periods were, by the way, perpetrated by the descendants of their father’s elder brother who they refused to show the light of the Judaist family under the custody of YWHA. If you do not quench the fire in your brother’s or neighbor’s house today, who knows if you will be the next victim tomorrow. This was the premeditating condition which brought about the serial but historical genocide to annihilate the Jews.
The world should put these things in correct perspective so that it can find a solution to the problem in the Middle East.
Though a good and practicing Christian who loves Jesus Christ deeply because of absolute righteousness which he excluded on earth, I am close to my Moslem brothers and sisters, to perceive the injustice that they feel has been sustainably perpetrated against them by past generations of empires inflamed with the sentiment of the so-called promise of God to Isaac.
I am sure that Jesus Christ will not approve of the treatment being meted to his ancestral descendant brothers if he was to be physically alive today. The clothe demarcating the Jews from the Gentiles in the synagogue was thorn mysteriously to signify a re-unification of the two brothers when Jesus Christ gave up the ghost. Two thousand and twenty years later, the word has not been able to achieve this unification which the death of Jesus Christ symbolized.
The truth is that consecutive political empires on earth hijacked Christianity to fight the wrong enemy. I must warn fellow Christians to separate our religion from politics or kill the region established on the tenets and teachings of Master Jesus Christ.
The destruction of many dynasties and civilizations in history including the much developed and organized dynasty of Pharaoh in Egypt was as a result of the fact that consecutive Pharaohs used their vast influences to conquer and enslave their neighbors rather than build them. My father used to say that he that slaps more than one person at the same time uncannily brings a mob action on himself. Some rash, inconsiderate actions that we take may expose us to mob attack when the people that we have offended gather against us at the same time.
What actually is the difference in the three religions of the Middle East? The difference between the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the perspectives from which they see Jesus Christ apart from other cultural differences which pertains to their modes of worship.
The first religion, Judaism, believes that Yeshua, one of their own, was the promised prophet of God whose spiritual powers challenged the authority of their slave masters and freed them from servitude, while the second religion, Christianity, believes that Jesus Christ is the savior and the redeemer. Sharing aspects of the belief systems of the two earlier religions, the third religion, Islam, believes that Isah was a prophet of God as Mohammed (S.A.W) was.
As a matter of fact, the name Isah was mentioned many times in the glorious Qu-ran, with the word, Al-Masi, The Messiah, mentioned thirteen times. Most importantly, Islam does not regard anybody to be a true Muslim if he does not believe in all the prophets, including Jesus Christ.
Above all, the coming of Al-Masi, The Messiah, is regarded in Islam as one of the signs of end time.
The three religions share the same values. I found out that the differences which some leaders of these three religions are exaggerating as a result of self-interests are actually semantics based on the respective diverse cultures of the religions as well as their localizations and not on the core value of absolute belief in one omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and monotheistic God.
THE SOLUTION
- Firstly, the peace effort recommended must be preceded by mass and sustained public enlightenment in Israel and Arab nations as to the need to sit down together and dialogue.
- There should be separate resolutions from the governments of the countries that fall into the ancestral heritage of Abraham to empower the heads of the extant religions which emanated from Judaism to negotiate on their behalf.
- The governments of these sovereign nations that fall within the descendants of Abraham to give their political support to the heads of these extant religions to seek peace.
- A Meeting in Jerusalem of the spiritual heads of the extant religions of the descendants of Abraham to firm up modalities for peace. The Pontiff or his representatives should be part of this meeting.
- An international N.G.O (Non-Governmental Organization) to moderate the meetings with observers nominated across the world to be part of the meeting.
- Funding may be raised through individuals or organizations who desire peace to reign in the world.
- The Meeting of the Shepherds to nominate from their respective countries professionals who will sit in different committees to sort out the details of the peace accord.
- A Grand Memorandum of Understanding to be issued for implementation by the committees, approved by the Shepherds and ratified by their governments for implementation.
Like his brother Jonathan Yoni Netanyahu who attained heroism while shielding his colleagues from gunfire during the Entebbe raid organized by MOSSAD, the Israeli Intelligence Agency (Yoni was downed by a sniper’s bullet, ) to release hostages held in Uganda by President Idi Amin Dada, the present Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu shall hit the books of records when he engages the Israeli Knesset to this type of dialogue. The Sanhedrin which is the supreme order of eminent Rabbis in Israel shall also do well to support a peace dialogue directly involving them.
Abuchi Obiora can be reached through abuchiobiora@gmail.com