Did God choose the best team in the world?
Nationality, treachery and all things football
I tussle still with whether Jesus was the Messiah. I tussle with what is a Messiah. And I tussle with what is God. And I also tussle with my powers of reason, but I always return to one conclusion, which I find inescapable: it cannot have been God’s intention that His children should squabble over the right to possess and exploit a given patch of territory. It simply defies all sense. That intention was man’s alone.
Jana Bennun has produced an interesting and persuasive essay about the chosen people’s claim to the Land of Israel. It is here:
Where I live, we have what’s called “registration of title”: title to property is transferred by formal, notarised deed, to which a plan is appended, which gets registered in a register, securing your title to the land in question. But when I was studying law in Scotland, title registration was only just starting up and we had still to deal with the old system: saisine. Saisine derives from French (saisir = to seize, grasp (in the physical sense as also to understand)), and in times past land would be transferred by a deed which contained simply a description and which was handed over along with a handful of the earth thereby ceded. That meant you needed to hang onto the transfer deed for all time (well, 30 years minimum).
The transfer deed did not just set forth the extent of the property and the right to enjoy it, but also imposed restrictions, and rights that the owner could exercise over other adjacent properties, whether statutory or contractual. But, it’s fairly uncontroversial that: occupancy of the land is subject to the law of the land; to the land law of the land, if you will. If one is to embrace this concept of a conferral of land—even if by a deity—then it is a parallel that must be pursued to its logical conclusions. And one such conclusion is this: it would not be until I constituted a nation state over my land that there would inure to me the rights to create the “law of the land” itself. That final step is a crucial one for establishing legislative prerogative: the right to make laws.
I think it’s important to pursue not only the refutation that Bennun sets forth in her title (the 1948 “prophecy” is a farce) but also to assume the stance of those who contest that refutation, and thereby ask a ream of other questions, some of which she does validly touch upon:
- Who were the “Jews” contemplated in this donation, and who are the “Jews” today? Are they the same?
- Are there any easements attached to this bestowal of occupancy rights? Does not every right portend an (equal and opposite) obligation? Was the land conferred in exclusivity, or was it conferred in the sense that land can be designated as common grazing?
- Do the rights of occupancy thus bestowed extend to a right of ownership and, if so, does that portend a right of disposal and, if so, is that a right exercisable erga omnes or is there reserved a right of first refusal/delectus personae to some identified party?
- Did the bestowal extend to that crucial right of statehood?
- What is a right of statehood in the understanding of a “universal” God?
I approach these and other questions in what follows from the viewpoint of a believer of God. However, you don’t need to believe in God to consider and analyse the contentions put forward by Rabbinic Jewry. One can simply compare the two posits:
the Land of Israel was conferred on the Jews as God’s chosen people;
God, whether in the concept of the Jews or any other religious persuasion, could inconceivably have conferred any land on any people with the intention of thereby constituting a nation state. For, surely, the very notion of any frontier, most of all one circumscribing a nation state, has to be anathema to any god (if not even to patron saints)?1
Not all discrimination is unlawful. In many places, it is unlawful to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, sex, race, membership of a trade union, and so forth. But even then the fields within which such discrimination is outlawed are few: employment is one. But there are fields in which discrimination is the primordial, core value. It is their raison d’être. Without the concept of discrimination, these particular notions would have no use whatsoever. One of them is football.
There is in fact no rule in the laws of football that prohibits a given team’s player from scoring for their opponent. It’s called an own goal. It is perfectly possible for team A to win simply by team B pummelling the ball constantly from one end of the game to the other into its own net. Team A doesn’t even need to touch the ball at any point during the 90 minutes of play. Admittedly, as the reader will no doubt discern, own goals are not exactly the purpose of football. The game’s purpose is to score in the opponent’s goal and for the opponent to attempt to prevent that. A player who deliberately and wilfully contrives to ensure the ball goes into his own team’s net might well be upbraided for failure to appreciate the purpose of the game. He might even be labelled a traitor, and be fired from his position. If the stakes are high, he might even be prosecuted—for match fixing—or in extremis murdered by the team’s irate supporters. So, even though what the player would be doing would be contrary to the spirit of the game, it would not technically be contrary to the laws of the game. Nevertheless, what does and does not get labelled as treachery often skips past the technical definitions of what it means at law.
Team sports aside for the second, for no analogy is ever perfect, there is another sphere within which discrimination is a core value, and where treachery also forms a legal concept. It is the field of nationality. Nationality is like playing football: there is a shirt to be worn, in the form of a flag, a national anthem, and a president or king. There is a following, and there is a purpose. Sometimes that is seen as defence, or prosperity, or glory, or perhaps simply survival. The purpose is one that can vary, but arching over it is the idea of sovereignty: that the people assembled under the panoply of a nationality are free themselves to decide what their purpose is (just like the shareholders of a joint stock corporation). And he is a traitor who would contrive and militate to undermine that purpose. That is treachery. It is a matter on which a fellow Substacker has recently written, from a slightly different angle:
Nationality, therefore, is just like team sports: on the whole, one declares one’s affiliation, and is expected to militate in favour of the team’s purpose. Failing to do that, one is a traitor. And the label traitor stems from that primordial core value of nationality: discrimination. The only aspect that differentiates the scorer of an own goal from the scorer of a goal goal is the end of the ground in which he plops the ball. It has nothing to do with his family background, ethnicity, income, inside leg measurement or hairstyle. It has to do with the colour of the shirt on his back: that allows him to be discriminated against by the other team, and it allows him to be labelled a traitor if he acts in such a way as to favour the other team and disfavour his own.
Understanding what nationality ultimately is, how it functions and what its purpose is (along with other allied concepts, such as passports, borders, customs, rights of entry and exit, wars, aliens, belonging, exclusion, own goals and treachery) is key to comprehending how it comes that Israel:
bundles these aspects together in the concept of a nation state, albeit one that is conferred upon its people by an act of God, who by dint thereof must be seen as condoning such concepts as exclusion, criminal punishment, acts of war and the like; and
seeks to render the inherent quality of discrimination that defines a nation state by expressing its own nationality as a religion, which by most standards and in any other quarter of societal co-existence, is something that ought not to be discriminated against. Israel removes its nationality from the field of nation states, in which discrimination is prescribed, and moves it into the field of religion, in which discrimination is proscribed.
Nationality is the idea that identical people with identical attributes who happen to find themselves on either side of an artificially drawn line on a map (N.B. whose existence is more often than not a result of strife or the threat of strife, if not geographical accident) can be discriminated between. It is hard to conceive that God bestowed any part of His creation on one particular group of His children, to defend and occupy to the exclusion of all others. “Exclusion” is not a concept that rhymes with the message of God—Jesus associated with precisely those who were excluded from society: tax collectors, prostitutes, the poor and the sick. He told moving stories of compassion, like the Samaritan on the road to Jericho. By contrast, exclusion is a concept that rhymes perfectly with the message of nationality, of division, of legislative prerogative and of nation-state borders: it is their very purpose.
Israel’s legislative prerogative stems from the unilaterally declared foundation of a nation state predicated on a divine bestowal of the land over which it was declared. It is justified ex post factum by asserted sovereignty, endorsed by membership of supranational organisations, and justified by acts of antecedent contractual acquisition, conquest of war, and claims of exceptionalism in terms of illegal post-war acquisition.
That basic precept of “seizure” (or “sasine”) founded in divine grace is indeed exceptionalism in the extreme. It defies all and any legal theory and remains in fact inchoate to this day, having never been engrossed in a deed of donation (be it oral or written) that withstands modern juridical scrutiny. The doctrine of positive prescription (the 30-year rule alluded to above) decrees that unchallenged occupancy of land can constitute title to it, provided it extends over said period. But there are two observations that flow from this:
the Jews’ occupancy of Israel has not gone unchallenged for 30 years. There have been many challenges to it, some military and some judicial; and
whatever rights are conferred by a perfected or cured transfer of land, such a transfer does not, for sure, confer any legislative prerogative. Just because I acquire land by positive prescription doesn’t mean I can enact laws over it. The declaration of the Israeli state in 1948 was acquiesced in by the mandatary power, the United Kingdom. But the mandatary power had no business acquiescing in such an act of revolution, for it held Palestine in a fiduciary relationship of trust vis-à-vis its people, the Palestinians; and they most certainly did not acquiesce, but were rather evicted from their own homeland by force.
Geographically, if we are to accept, for argument’s sake, that God did bestow a chosen land upon a chosen people, and if the people themselves are difficult to define, then the land thus bestowed is no less difficult to define—whether in terms of sasine transfer or title registration—unless one construes the gift as having been made, not in favour of a select group but in favour of mankind as a whole; nor unless one construes the land gifted as not comprising some corner of the former Roman empire but rather the world entire.
That is a concept that sits well with me, if with no one else. That God bestowed the Earth upon all of mankind, to husband and to prosper in peace and in harmony, in accordance with His law and subject to His power: the law of love; and the power of love. An occupancy of territory that knows no exclusion, no exclusivity, no defence by means of arms, and no assertion of right, whether that be set down in man’s laws or in man’s title deeds or in man’s arrogance towards his fellow man.
These things I find intuitive. They accord with the test that, for my own faith, I believe we will all face one day: to be judged, not by God. Not by Jesus. And not by our fellow humans. But by ourselves. God lives in us; we are God. We are the actors of God’s will, and we reconcile how we prosecute that responsibility by reference to our consciences, which is the channel of communion with Him and the seat he occupies within us. And not notarised deeds of ownership.
God never meant belief to be a matter of theological argument and extensive, protracted study and debate; He meant it to be a matter of conscience.
A patron saint is quite a different case from the claim of being God’s chosen people. Saint Patrick, for Ireland, is attached to a legend that he drove the snakes from that land. A snake is a very biblical creature, of course, and, truth be told, there are snakes to be found in Ireland today, so some of them must have slithered back (some snakes, I understand, can swim).
Saint Patrick is not God, however: he was a preacher and evangelist who inspired the folk of Ireland. He is an example of holiness, whose ways and beliefs the Irish are called upon to follow and in return for which he will cherish and protect them. Saint Patrick’s day is not a day of Irish nationalism as such, however. It is intended as a day of introspection, when Irishmen and Irishwomen at home and abroad are reminded to look to the example of Saint Patrick and remind themselves of his spiritual leadership. It is not wrong to celebrate Irishness when doing so, as long as one recognises that the blessings Patrick brought upon Ireland do not include the produce of a Dublin brewery.