Aida Refugee Camp is where Terry and I live when visiting the West Bank and Israel. It is filled with children.
Yesterday we received the following email informing us that one of these children had been murdered by Israeli soldiers.
As shocking as this story may be — and I hope it does shock you — I am sorry to say that its details are not unusual. We live in a cruel world where average, ordinary people commit horrible acts of cruelty every day.
Below is the email. (Emphasis is mine):
Dear friends,
This morning, just after fajr prayers, the seventeen-year-old Mohammed Ali Aziah from Aida camp was killed by an Israeli sniper. Mohammed, who was in his last year of high school, was shot when he was on the roof of his house to study. The occupation soldiers raided the camp, and placed snipers of rooftops and the watchtower next to the UNRWA school and clinic.
After Mohammed was shot in the chest, the occupation army prevented the Red Crescent ambulance from entering the camp, and instead moved Mohammed’s critically injured body near the great key of return. He had to wait there until the occupation authorities arrested him and took him away. Mohammed died from his injuries shortly after.
We are devastated by the senseless death of Mohammed, who was still a child and had a bright future ahead of him.
During the raid that killed Mohammed, five people from Aida camp were arrested, bringing the total of arrests from Aida and Al-Azza camp to 65. One of them is 32-year-old Hanin Al-Massaeed. She is the first woman who was arrested from our community, and we are worried about her well-being after worrying reports of physical violence against women in Israeli prisons.
Please keep calling out to politicians and institutions in your country to release Palestinian political prisoners, and end this injustice and suffering.
Best wishes, Anas Abu Srour Director of Aida Youth Center
Last October 19th Jewish-Israeli historian Ilan Pappe gave a lecture at the Berkley Law School explaining the historical background to the October 7 attack by Hamas as well as the ongoing bombing of Gaza.
Professor Pappe has devoted his entire career to studying the history of his country and the effects of Zionism. He is a world-renowned authority on these subjects. He is also as much a prophet as he is an academic.
An historian with a heart and a conscience is the best sort to learn from in my view.
The video is one hour and a half long. If you don’t have time or inclination to listen to it all, I suggest beginning at the 20 minute mark where he begins to speak specifically about the current cirumstances.
Greg Khalil is a Palestinian American who is also a graduate of Yale Law School. In the early 2000s he was a negotiator with the Palestinian team talking with Israeli negotiators about peace in Israeli-Palestine.
Drawing from his family background and his own first-hand experience, Greg discusses the history of Gaza, Hamas, the American church, and possible pathways forward towards an end to the current bloodshed.
I have recently attended and participated in several online seminars that thankfully included Palestinian Christians from the West Bank.
These brothers and sisters in Christ were offering their observations and feelings about the ongoing war against their people in Gaza (and the West Bank; yes the war has expanded beyond Gaza).
I am grateful for such opportunities because, when witnessing such horrendous tragedy, it is vital that we hear the voices of those who are actually enduring the suffering. We must listen to the words of the persecuted, the victims, those who are experiencing abuse, those who weep and mourn, those for whom imminent death is a real possibility.
Their voices are essential to understanding any conflict.
At the same time, I feel the need to humbly express a note of reservation about one theme that I see threading its way throughout the several webinars I have seen. Several Palestinian speakers have referred to the special spiritual connection that Palestinians typically feel toward their land.
I have noted two written instances hinting at such “blood and soil” sentiments below. (The second example was written on a PowerPoint slide without a reference):
We affirm that every citizen must be ready to defend his or her life, liberty and land (Kairos Palestine Document, para. 4.2.5)
Our land is meant to be a witness to God’s love manifested on the cross for all the people of the earth…
If I am misunderstanding the meaning of these oral and written references, then I invite correction. If a Palestinian believer can address my misunderstanding, please do.
Otherwise, I must voice my concerns.
For I fear that two errors are waiting to pounce on those believers who hold such convictions about their spiritual connection to the land of Palestine:
First, political Zionism (which is the basis of the Israeli state) is founded upon just such a purportedly psychic, spiritual, even ontological connection between the Jewish people, on the one hand, and the land of Israel, on the other.
This imagined, age-old people/land connection lays the cornerstone to their conviction that the land belongs exclusively to the Jews. For the land and the people are eternally bound together, according to political Zionism.
In this way, political Zionism reveals its roots in European blood and soil ethnic nationalism, the 19th century, Romantic philosophical belief that “the soul” of a national people-group was intertwined with the geography and landscape from which they trace their origin. So the Scots are bound to the land of Scotland; the Welsh are bound to Wales; etc.
This blood and soil ideology was the basis for Adolf Hitler’s Aryan doctrine and his horrific efforts to purify German territory of all non-Aryans/Germans. The parallels with Israel’s current work to “Judaize” the West Bank (and Gaza?), replacing Palestinians with Jewish settlers, are crystal clear to anyone who knows this history.
Nazism and political Zionism are kissin’ cousins.
Therefore, I cannot see the usefulness of the church of Jesus Christ adopting the language of blood and soil ethnic nationalism as its own.
Second, the New Testament clearly teaches God’s people that this world is not our home. No matter the warm memories created by lovely times of togetherness at hearth and home in our native vale, followers of Jesus Christ have no homeland in this fallen world. Rather, we are “aliens and strangers in this world” (Heb. 11:13, 16; 1 Pet. 1:1; 2:11).
Therefore, there is no spiritual obligation for Christians to defend their land. Nor did Jesus ever appoint the “holy land” to be a witness to God’s grace. This is a secularization of both the gospel and the meaning of our citizenship in the kingdom of God.
Yes, we must resist and condemn injustice.
When people are beaten and murdered, their homes demolished, families displaced and land stolen, then the prophets call us to protest, to cry out for justice, even to non-violently resist the oppressor. But this happens because injustice is sin. Oppression is wickedness.
Imputing imaginary spiritual qualities to one’s homeland is neither the answer nor a proper motivation to resist oppression because it is not biblical. And the history of its application shows damning results.
Zionist ethnic nationalism cannot be defeated by Palestinian ethnic nationalism. Nor do Christians have any business allying themselves with the toxic ideology of blood and soil, ethnic nationalism.
That is the error of Jewish-Christian Zionism, where Jews who say they follow Jesus compromise their allegiance to God’s kingdom – a global, multi-ethnic, international kingdom – by taking up the secular, ungodly standards and constraints of Zionist blood and soil nationalism.
Therefore, I ask my Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ to reconsider their current flirtations with blood and soil, ethnic nationalism as they justly resist Zionist efforts to rob them of what is theirs.
In his latest article for Consortium News, veteran journalist Chris Hedges gets the story exactly right when describing Israel’s genocidal plans for
Chris Hedges
both Gaza and the West Bank.
When a sociopath like Bibi Netanyahu (and members of his coalition government) repeatedly tell you that he/they plan to murder you and steal your home, it’s best to take them at their word.
Below is an excerpt of the article titled “Israel’s Final Solution.”
I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States.
I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.
His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, whom Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine.
Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”
There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state.
“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”
The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israel’s crypto-fascists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. These Jewish extremists, which make up the ruling coaltion government, are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians are dying daily. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil.
Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged.
A leaked 10-page document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence dated Oct. 13 recommends the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
It is a grave mistake not to take the blood curdling calls for the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription. Netanyahu in a tweet, later removed, described the battle with Hamas as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”
These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem. They dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first two weeks of the assault to obliterate at least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units, according to the U.N. ‘s humanitarian office. They have no intention of being detoured, even by Washington.
“It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported.
“In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries,” the paper continued.
The goal is a “pure” Israel, cleansed of Palestinian contaminants. Gaza is to become a wasteland. The Palestinians in Gaza will be killed or forced into refugee camps over the border in Egypt.
Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque — the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army — to be demolished.
The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will be a Jewish version of Iran.
My friends Lisa Loden and Richard Harvey are both Jewish Christians. Lisa lives in Israel. Richard resides in England.
Today Rob talks with them about their Jewish, Christian perspectives on the current war. Their commitment to following Jesus as the Prince of Peace during a time of war provides a powerful testimony to the presence of God’s kingdom in this world.
I will make only a few brief comments of my own to follow up on some of the issues raised in the interview:
First, I believe it is long past time to stop using the history of Jewish suffering, as horrific as it is, to excuse Israel’s current oppression of the Palestinian people.
Second, by Richard’s own definition of terrorism, Israel is now committing acts of terrorism against the people of Gaza.
Finally, I completely agree with Lisa when she says that this war is not about Israel’s self-defense.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Jonathan Kuttab is a Palestinian Christian from East Jerusalem. He is a human rights lawyer who has practiced law in the USA, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Today Rob talks with Jonathan about the war against Gaza, the death of the two-state solution, as well as his Christian commitment to non-violent living in the kingdom of God.
Dr. Gary Burge was recently interviewed on the podcast Theology in the Raw.
My friend Gary provides an extensive argument for answering NO to this question. No, Christians do not have a theological obligation to support Israel’s right to the land.
If you have any questions about these matters, then please give Gary an hour of you time. You will be glad you did:
British journalist Jonathan Cook addresses the elephant in the room whenever we talk about the Hamas attack of Oct. 7:
Jonathan Cook
How did Hamas guerillas, carrying light armaments, manage to demolish and burn down sizeable concrete buildings in numerous kibbutzim throughout southern Israel?
Numerous Israeli eyewitnesses point their fingers at the Israeli military.
Yep, Israel makes a practice of killing their own. Below is an excerpt of Cook’s article:
Did the Israeli military fire into the Hamas-controlled civilian homes in the same fashion as it had fired into its own military bases, and with the same disregard for the safety of Israelis inside? Was the goal in each case to prevent at all costs Hamas taking hostages whose release would require a very high price from Israel?
Kibbutz Be’eri has been a favoured destination for BBC reporters keen to illustrate Hamas’ barbarity. It is where Lucy Williamson headed again this week. And yet none of her reporting highlighted comments made to the Israeli Haaretz newspaper by Tuval Escapa, the kibbutz’s security coordinator. He said [link is in Hebrew] Israeli military commanders had ordered the “shelling [of] houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
That echoed the testimony of Yasmin Porat, who sought shelter in Be’eri from the nearby Nova music festival. She told Israeli Radio that once Israeli special forces arrived: “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages because there was very, very heavy crossfire.”
Are the images of charred bodies presented by Williamson, accompanied by a warning of their graphic, upsetting nature, incontrovertible proof that Hamas behaved like monsters, bent on the most twisted kind of vengeance? Or might those blackened remains be evidence that Israeli civilians and Hamas fighters burned alongside each other, after they were engulfed in flames caused by Israeli shelling of the houses?
Israel will not agree to an independent investigation so a definitive answer will never be forthcoming. But that does not absolve the media of their professional and moral duty to be cautious.
Bruce and Alessandra are both friends of mine. Bruce is a retired New Testament professor. His wife, Alessandra is a Palestinian. Together they make a formidable team explaining the ins and outs of the dire situation in Gaza and Israel.
They recently gave a seminar to an East coast church. It’s 90 minutes long but well worth every minute:
