Going global while standing with Arab refugees: Left Christians dissenting with their local Church. Missed or "un"-legacies, misconnections & ambiguities of French contributions to the early stages of liberation theologies in the Middle-East (1960s-80s)

After the Six Day War, French Left Christians were many to side with “Arab refugees” or Palestinians, by contrast with the common sympathy of Western Churches with Israel. In May 1970, these politically left-leaning, theologically Christian progressives, either lay or clergy, mixing Western Catholics and Protestants with Eastern diasporas in France, represented a third of the 400 attendees to the First World Conference of Christians for Palestine, held in Beirut. The organization committee was even divided in two locations, Paris and Beirut; its general secretary was (Roman Catholic) George Montaron, editor-in-chief of Témoignage Chrétien, at odds with the Catholic hierarchy in France.

As lay activists, they were mostly intellectuals, writers (Orthodox Gabriel Mazneff), journalists (delegations set up by Témoignage chrétien and Lettre), social scientists. While Protestant Jean Baubérot was based in Paris (b. 1941), others, belonging to an older generation, had been trained in the decades-old Orientalist fashion, and were members of the Lebanese Cenacle. Secular and regular clergy were highly represented: the Dominican order was at the forefront with François Biot, together with diocesan priests and pastors that had fought for the Algerian independence (Roman Catholic Robert Davezies, Protestant Pastor Casalis). Catholic missionaries in the Middle-East (Jean Corbon, ordained as Roman Catholic, who transferred to the Melchite Church and was based in Beiruth) worked hand in hand with Middle-Eastern born theologians, such as Youakim Moubarac, who as a diocesan priest incardinated in Paris, was travelling back and forth from Paris (the priest community of Saint-Séverin, living by the ideals of Vatican II) to Beirut.

Often keen to examine the relation between Christian theology and Marxism, they were at at odds with their hierarchy and fellow-believers in France. Vocal, they represented the dissenting minority; facing recriminations from Church authorities in France, they look out for support among fellow believers in the West and the Middle-East. They rooted their political stance in a strong theological argumentation for refugees and in a decade-long activism, seeing in Arab refugees and Palestinians the face of the “suffering Christ”. Some of them, as Paul Gauthier, a former worker priest, missionary in Nazareth, then laicized priest and married, had lobbied at Vatican II in the group of “Jesus, the poor and the Church”, to have the Church take action on poverty. As peace-activists, they didn't condamn violenceandterrorism in Munich (1972), given the poltiical disbalance in power relations.

However, their views entailed the many ambiguities of European Christian progressivism towards the “Third-World”, as this paper proposes to investigate.

By showcasing French Christian support to the Palestinian cause from the 1960s to the late 1980s, a time when the hierarchy identified this pro-Palestinian movements as “theological anti-Zionism”, this presentation inserts itself in four different approaches. First, it intends to contribute to a global history of liberation theologies as it outlines the connections between Europe and the Middle East -- from circulation of ideas as a theological and ecclesiological matter, to the structuration of an international cause, that drew on faith-based activism and tapped on social and humanitarian action. As we investigate a group of people that is usually left aside in the non-European history of liberation theologies, we intend not only to question anew  the center-periphery paradigm, but also to outline misconnections and "missed" legacies in a multi-polar history of liberation theologies. Decentering and globalizing the history of these activists outlines their paradoxical, failed legacy.

Indeed, beyond the ideals of “Third-Worldism”, the Euro-centered forms of support kept perpetuating the structures of power and power relations inherited from the past decades of European domination, despite their calls to precisely break from it. Tapping on methods borrowed to subaltern studies and postmodern discourse analysis, this paper outlines such tensions between “standing with” Arab refugees and fellow Christians in the Middle East and the theological experimental and tentative discourses on “theology of development”, “theology of people” and the wider catching word of “liberation”, framed nonetheless in their own European terms and minds. Hence continuity of intellectual domination? These intellectuals intended to take the opposite stance against the Western theological developments of a theology of the Jewish people, seen as specifically Western. Developing another "counter"-theology of land and people, they claimed for themselves a theological form of “anti-Zionism”, rather than rebuking a term used by their hierarchies as a way of discredit.

Indeed part of these dynamics were specifically European and Euro-centered, which offers an explanation on why their legacy, seen as too European, didn’t pass on the next generations, after the 1980s, either in France – where pro-Palestinian support took a less theological and a more social form of support in continuation with Christian humanitarianism – or in the Middle-East: Biot, Montaron, Casalis, are hardly quoted in the seminal works of Palestinian theology, such as that of Naim Ateek, in the late 1980s. Sabeel was only able to create a center in France in 2010, long after other European countries. Hence, the French contribution quickly waned and vanished. This paper explores such misconnections and un-legacies. As it historicizes this failed attempt to decenter and universalize Church politics, it leads us to look anew at our first question: to what extent can these forgotten French Left Christians really be considered as temporary links in the global, decades-long history of Palestinian Liberation? Or were they just a expression of dissent,, locally contextualized, displaying support for Palestine while addressing mostly national, European-based issues?

At the crossroads of history of theology, emotion and politics, we finally arguethat such activism wasn’t just about international politics or humanitarianism. It claimed its advocacy not to be just faith-based but also intrinsically theological. It had a theological systematic ambition, working anew, in the case of Roman Catholics on the global and local receptions of Vatican II, reclaiming both Gaudium et Spes and Nostra Aetate 3. In order to account for this faith-based activism and its multi-dimensions, this paper is based on a large range of archival (private) materials and oral testimonies, collected from the protagonists themselves. We confront them with archives of the Church institutions, categorizing their activism as “dissent”.