As Palestinians and Israelis prepare seriously to start their final-status negotiations, the focus will shift from the logistics of issues such as prisoner releases and safe passages to the core issue of this bitter conflict in the land that we call Palestine and the Jewish people call Israel: Whose land is this? Do Israelis and Palestinians have equal right to live here in sovereign states? How did the historical land of Palestine ­ Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza ­ transform from a land with some 95 percent Arab population at the turn of the century to one today where Jewish Israelis comprise a majority?

Two of the key components of this conflict from the Arab perspective are Israel's colonial subjugation of the Palestinians and its claims to the land on the basis of its biblical patrimony. Both these points will be put to their toughest test ever during the final-status negotiations.
These issues are also the subject of a powerful, disturbing and controversial book that challenges us to address the heavy moral consequences of biblical and colonial traditions ­ ones that we must face squarely if we are to resolve this conflict peacefully and with a minimum of fairness and justice to both sides.

The book, "The Bible and Colonialism, A Moral Critique", is by Michael Prior, CM, head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at St. Mary's University College, University of Surrey, UK (published by Sheffield Academic Press, 1997).

He sets out to explore the biblical narrative of the promise of the land of Canaan to Abraham and his posterity, Joshua's conquest of the land, and how the biblical account was used subsequently to justify other colonial and imperial conquests ­ notably the Spanish and Portuguese colonization and settlement of Latin America, the white settlement in southern Africa, and the Zionist conquest and settlement in Palestine.

"The particular perspective of this study," the author says, "is the moral question which arises on consideration of the impact which conquest and settlement have had on the indigenous populations. What are the appropriate criteria by which to evaluate enterprises of conquest and settlement? What is the role of the Bible? The obvious contradiction between what some claim to be God's will and ordinary civilized, decent behavior poses the question as to whether God is a chauvinistic, nationalistic and militaristic xenophobe."

Jews and others around the world will take offense at the use of the words "colonialism" and "imperialism" to describe what Israelis see as their miraculous national liberation and reconstitution in Palestine this century. But then Joshua and his people in the Bible probably felt the same way: they conquered, expelled, killed, or colonized the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan with the constant divine military intervention of their Israelite tribal war god, Yahweh. They were doing God's will to wage Holy War and establish a theocracy, they believed, and not necessarily engaging in ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Prior emphasizes God's morally problematic command to Joshua and the Israelites to utterly destroy and massacre most of the people they encounter on their way to the promised land such as the Amorite kingdoms of Og and Sihon in Transjordan or the indigenous Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perrizites, Hivites and Jebusites in Palestine. He sees the Israelite wars against these indigenous tribes in Palestine as "ethnocentric, racist and xenophobic sentiments that appear to receive the highest possible legitimacy in the form of divine approval."

Furthermore, he says, "the possession of the Promised Land was to be carried out through the genocide of the resident people, and not simply by dispossessing them (e.g. Deut. 20:16-18)."
The book identifies "a uniformity in the mythology of conquest" and the "presumption of a right to conquer and settle a land," in South America, South Africa, and Palestine. Prior says "the myths of Zionism" include the myths of Israel's foundation without expelling Palestinians; self-defense; purity of arms; and, the Jewish right of return and a unique historical claim to the land.
The Arab counter-view, supported by most of the rest of the world and scores of United Nations resolutions, is that these are indeed colonial presumptions that need to be redressed, by ensuring the Palestinians' right to national self-determination and the refugees' right to return or compensation core issues that will be addressed in the final-status talks.

Whether one accepts or rejects this broad political/moral assessment, the Bible elicits conflicting reactions from Arabs and Israelis today. Jews generally see the Bible as containing God's promise of the land to the ancient tribe of Israelites, while Arabs generally see the same narrative as a morally disturbing record of some of humankind's earliest recorded cases of divinely commanded genocide (actually, the poor Amalekites had the worst end of the deal, for God ordered the Israelites to totally wipe them off the face of the earth and blot out their memory forever).

Perhaps the point to keep in mind is that we should separate tribal myths of origin and literary representations of one's deities from the more practical business of coexisting in equality and mutual respect on small pieces of land, whether in antiquity or today. The final-status negotiations that get under way soon will probably remind us of this, making a long overdue transition from arguing the moral and military battles of the past to hammering out the configuration of coexistence and equality for the future.

Rami G. Khouri wrote this commentary in Amman for The Daily Star