A Blog from David Crump
My friends at the Christian Forum on Israel-Palestine recently interviewed the influential, internationally known Palestinian pastor-theologian, the Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb.
We had a wide-ranging discussion about the war against Gaza and the West Bank and its effects upon the Palestinian Christian community.
Please check it out:
Next Tuesday, August 13 you are invited to join a conversation Dr. Mae Elise Cannon, Executive Director of Churches for Middle East Peace.
Dr. Cannon wrote one of her two(!) doctoral dissertations on the history of the American evangelical church’s engagement with Israel. Which is more than a coincidence, since will be the topic of our conversation next Tuesday.
Why do western evangelicals generally side with Israel in its war against Gaza? Why don’t we respond to Palestinian suffering — some call it a genocide — as empathetically as we do the Israeli pain of October 7?
Tune in and share your own thoughts next Tuesday! Join us at 11 am Eastern, 8:00 Pacific at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHIs8HnRiMA
Some people’s experiences in an Israeli prison are even worse than Munther’s.
Sometimes you don’t need to hear the story. You only need to see the released prisoner’s face. And then imagine the inhumanity that produced such heart-breaking expressions.
This coming Friday, July 12 at 1 pm Eastern time, 10 am Pacific, I will lead the next episode of the Christian Forum on Israel-Palestine.
The following link will allow you to watch the conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYXuwuUNJ-k
Our guest will be my friend Munther Amira. Munther is a Palestinian, non-violent, peace activist who lives in the Aida refugee camp where Terry and I stay during our visits to the West Bank.
Munther was arrested by Israeli soldiers in September 2023 and released in February 2024. He will talk with us about the dire conditions for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
But he will especially describe the brutal changes implemented after the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Trust me. You won’t want to miss Munther’s first-hand account of Palestinian Life in an Israeli Prison.
Again, use the following link to watch this important conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYXuwuUNJ-k
The objectives of the Israeli nation-state have always been clear: acquire as much Palestinian land as possible with as few Palestinians remaining as possible.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians may have begun in 1947 but it has never stopped. It continues viciously in the present day through home demolitions and blatant land theft, all salaciously “legalized” by Israeli politicians and bureaucrats.
Journalist, editorialist and former lawyer, Briahna Joy Gray, explains the motivations and concerns of the campus protests now sweeping the world.
Guess what. The truth about student protesters has nothing to do with the anti-demonstration messaging coming from the corporate media and the political class.
“Words are not violence; Zionism is.”
Today the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies published my article titled “Echoes of Slavery, Racial Segregation and Jim Crow: American Dispensationalism and Christian Zionist Bible-Reading.”
Below is the abstract, that is a brief summary of the article:
The apologetics of pro-slavery, pro-segregation Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were identical to the methods of biblical interpretation used by Dispensationalist Christian Zionists today. The ideology’s specific rules of ‘literal interpretation’ and ‘antecedent theology’ led both groups to similar conclusions about slavery and racial segregation, on the one hand, and Jewish privilege and Palestinian displacement, on the other. Abolitionist efforts to promote a Christ–like hermeneutic rooted in Christian morality points the way forward to correcting modern theologies, such as Dispensationalist Christian Zionism, that continue to sanction human oppression.
I believe that clicking the highlighted title above will allow access to the article online. However, if this does not work for you, let me know and I can send you a copy.
Yes, I too am disappointed by the numerous formating and editorial errors in my article. Yuck! Unfortunately, it is too late for me to do anything about it now…sigh…
Jewish students have been in the lead of the current anti-genocide campus protests. Here a Jewish student at Columbia clearly explains the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, a distinction that our corporate media, as well as Congress, is working hard to erase.
Breaking the Silence is an Israeli organization made up of former soldiers. They share similar stories. The majority did their tour of duty in the Occupied Territory (the West Bank). Upon reflecting on their behavior when they wore the uniform; after thinking about the ways they treated Palestinians, all develop a guilty conscience. In order to ‘atone’ for their sins, and to educate the Israeli public about the evils of occupation, they tell their stories
Below is one recent example dealing with Gaza:
Professor Omer Bartov is a long-time Israeli scholar of genocide and
Holocaust studies. One of his recent books is titled Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis, where he compares the Nazi holocaust with the Palestinian Nakba (the violent Israeli displacement of750,000 Palestinians in 1948).
Today he was interviewed by Amy Goodwin on Democracy Now. They talked about Gaza, student protests and antisemitism:
