Barack Obama said in Belfast on October 13 that Jews who sought refuge “took land off people”. On October 23, Charisma News answered with Genesis, as a rights group reported 672 settler violence incidents in the West Bank olive harvest. The headline’s subject is a claim, and the claim arrives convicted twice: “Controversial” before anyone reads it, and quotation marks around ‘Took Land’ that doubt the words without saying they are wrong. That is the sneer in quotes. The record does not dispute the core. Amnesty counts more than 700,000 Palestinians expelled or displaced in 1948; the Aristotle Foundation, which rejects the Palestinian reading, gives the same 700,000 and adds 800,000 Jews forced from North Africa and the Middle East. Charisma’s rebuttal is Genesis 12:7, 13:15, 15:18 and 17:8. Writer Abby Trivett cites no historian and no document from 1948, and calls the verses “the biblical record”. The tell: a question about what happened in one year is answered with a verse, so the faith does the work a record would do. For a reader who already holds the promise, the line hands back the proof they came for. The move is the use of scripture as a land deed, never the scripture. The same day carries another record. Yesh Din counted 672 incidents of settler violence in 194 Palestinian communities from September 27 to October 22, 135 of them physical, with the IDF present or involved in more than 23%. In RTÉ’s report, Obama named “the settler movement” as a reason he is not hopeful. A promise read as a deed has no date on it, so it covers this October’s olive grove as readily as 1948.
