Category: Christian Zionism

A Christian Look at the War in Gaza: Episode Two, Dr. Mae Cannon

The Rev. Dr. Mae Elise Cannon is the Executive Director of the organization, Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP), an organization with which I am involved.

She is also a friend of mine. (By the way, Mae has two doctorates.)

In fact, we were both recently in Phoenix, AZ attending the same conference sponsored by the Netword of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME). I am a member of the NEME leadership committee.

Today, Rob and Mae discuss the political dimensions of the current war against Gaza. Mae’s work keeps her heavily involved in a great deal of lobbying and activism in Washington, D.C.

There is a lot of vital information here about what is happening right now in Israel, Palestine, and the USA. Check it out.

A Christian Look at the Conflict in Gaza, Episode One with Rob Dalrymple

My good friend, Dr. Rob Dalrymple, is hosting a series of podcasts discussing the current Israeli war against Gaza.

Rob will host a number of informative guests over the next several weeks (including yours truly) discussing different dimensions of this ongoing conflict.

Today, Rob introduces the issues himself. He is a former pastor, the author of several books, has visited Israel/Palestine numerous times, and is deeply involved in Christian activism for peace in the Holy Land.

I encourage you to  watch, listen, take notes, pray, respond and come back tomorrow for another installment.

Israel’s Intelligence Ministry Leaks Plan for Gaza’s Ethnic Cleansing

The online magazine +972 has published a 10-page policy paper produced by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry which argues that the only solution to the current war with Gaza is wholesale Palestinian population transfer.

According to the report, all the people of Gaza must be removed from their homes, relocated to the Sinai desert, and then redistributed as refugees throughout hospitable nations.

The document (which is included within the +972 article; you can read it for yourself) is remarkable for its colonial hubris and moral blindness.

Members of the Israeli establishment are conducting serious conversations about the best ways to stage manage, i.e., manipulate and control, the lives of 2.3 million native people.

The goal is to eliminate the inconvenience these uncooperative Palestinians pose to Israel’s settler-colonial status quo.

Since Palestinians continue to resist their colonization, the colonizing power — blinded by its imperial privilege and nationalistic arrogance — can only think to intensify its historic criminality.

Folks, population transfer is a war crime. It was a war crime in 1948. It remains a war crime today.

Here are some select excerpts from the +972 article. It is titled “Expell all Palestinians from Gaza, recommends Israeli gov’t ministry.” The author is Yuval Abraham. (All emphasis is mine):

The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, according to an official document revealed in full for the first time by +972’s partner site Local Call yesterday.

The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry — a small governmental body that produces policy research and shares its proposals with intelligence agencies, the army, and other ministries. It assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the framework of the current war, and recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. It also calls on Israel to enlist the international community in support of this endeavor. The document, whose authenticity was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972 . . . 

The document recommends that Israel act to “evacuate the civilian population to Sinai” during the war; establish tent cities and later more permanent cities in the northern Sinai that will absorb the expelled population; and then create “a sterile zone of several kilometers … within Egypt, and [prevent] the return of the population to activities/residences near the border with Israel.” At the same time, governments around the world, led by the United States, must be mobilized to implement the move. . . 

The transfer plan is divided into several stages. In the first stage, action must be taken so that the population of Gaza “evacuates south,” while the air strikes focus on the northern Gaza Strip. In the second stage, a ground incursion into Gaza will begin, leading to the occupation of the entire Strip from north to south, and the “cleansing of the underground bunkers of Hamas fighters.”

Concurrently with the re-occupation of Gaza, Palestinian civilians will be moved into Egyptian territory, and not be allowed to return. “It is important to leave the travel routes to the south open to enable the evacuation of the civilian population toward Rafah,” the document states. . . 

Last week, the Misgav Institute, a right-wing think tank headed by Meir Ben-Shabbat, a close associate of Prime Minister Netanyahu and a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, published a position paper that similarly called for the forced transfer of Gaza’s population to the Sinai. The institute recently deleted the post from Twitter and from its website after drawing strong international censure. . . 

You can read the entire piece here.

John Mearsheimer: What Israel is Doing is Sickening.

I am convinced that extensive Israeli settlement throughout the West Bank has made the fabled two-state solution an impossibility.

New solutions must be sought. But the ethnic cleansing of Gaza cannot be one of them.

Aside from that caveat, Prof. Mearsheimer offers a good summary of the present situation in Gaza:

Bad Theology is Helping to Drive America’s Support for Israel’s Massacre in Gaza

All Christian theology has practical results in the way believers live their lives. Unsurprisingly, bad theology will have bad results.

The immoral legacy of Christian Zionism is helping to drive US congressional support for Israel’s slaughter in Gaza today.

How Can Christians Support Genocide?

Israel is inflicting genocide upon the people of Gaza.

Since the horrific Hamas assault against southern Israel on October 7, which killed approximately 1,400 people, the death toll in Gaza has risen to over 7,000, more than 3,000 of them children.

This grossly disproportionate death toll is deliberate.

The Israeli military doctrine of Dahiya dictates that Israel will always respond with overwhelming force, deliberately killing many more of their opponents than the opponents have killed Israelis. The Dahiya doctrine is supposedly intended to serve as a deterrent in limiting hostilities. It has been consistently applied throughout the West Bank as well as in the five wars inflicted on Gaza over the past fifteen years.

Which raises the question: does the Dahiya doctrine work? Has it deterred Palestinian resistance to Israel’s military occupation?

The answer is two-fold: As a deterrent to Palestinian resistance, the answer is No. Dahiya is a failure. And Israeli leaders are insane for believing that another round of carpet bombing in Gaza will eliminate the Palestinian urge to resist their seventy-five-year military occupation. It hasn’t worked yet. Why should anyone except Israeli and American arms manufacturers imagine that it will work now? This is the classic definition of insanity.

The second answer gets to the heart of the issue. Dahiya does not deter Palestinian resistance against Israeli oppression, but it does kill a massive number of Palestinians. This is the crux of the issue in Gaza today.

If you cannot kill a person’s dream of freedom, you can always kill the dreamer. Killing the dreamer kills the dream, unless of course there are many, many more dreamers waiting in line. In which case, all the dreamers must be killed by those who oppose the dream.

This is what Israel is trying to do right now. A number of Israeli leaders have explicitly addressed the “need” (in their view) to eradicate every Palestinian from Gaza, to “wipe them out,” to send them all to the grave or to Egypt; anywhere but in Israel.

Similar plans are being implemented in the West Bank. More than 100 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli soldiers, 30 of them children, in the past few days. For, you see, they share the same dream as the people of Gaza – freedom from Israeli military occupation; equal rights and equal citizenship in a sovereign state where they can live their lives out from under an occupier’s bootheel.

Yes, the Hamas attack on October 7th was a war crime. If possible, all the perpetrators should be arrested, brought to trial and punished.

But October 7th was not the beginning of this tragic story. That sad and bloody day unfolded within the context of another crime against humanity, a prior crime that created the conditions for the Hamas attack against Israel.

Israel has occupied Gaza for 75 years; 17 years ago, Israel imposed a strict military blockade that has killed its economy and starved its people. Now Israel imposes a siege, cutting off all water, food, fuel, and power to 2.3 million people. This also is a war crime.

As I wrote in a post yesterday, Israel’s objective is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of all Palestinians — men, women, children, the elderly and disabled, everybody.

I personally know a number of Christian Zionists (Christians who believe that Israel is God’s chosen nation with a right to own all the land of Israel) who remain in lock-step with Israel’s Dahiya strategy. When challenged on this question of genocide, their responses fall into two categories.

First, they say that Israel has the right to defend itself, especially against an antisemitic aggressor like Hamas. Hamas poses an existential threat to Israel, they insist, which gives Israel the right to use whatever means are necessary to eliminate that threat.

Second, they say that the Palestinians have brought these troubles onto themselves. The people of Gaza elected Hamas as their government, voting them into power. You reap what you sow, I am told. Terrorist leaders can only bring catastrophe onto their people.

I have several responses to these popular excuses for why someone claiming to be a Christian could possibly sanction Israel’s current bloodlust.

First, Palestinians are human beings loved by God. They are created as the Image of God, as are all Israelis, Americans, and every person on this planet. However, the racism of western news coverage is blatant, if unrecognized, in the subtle ways that Palestinian humanity is minimized or even denied. For whatever reason, their humanity is not equal to the humanity of Israelis and other westerners.

The Israeli defense minister has called Palestinians “human animals.” Others have called for the army to “wipe out” all Palestinians. US Defense Department spokesmen lament the loss of Israeli lives in the tragic terms of family loss and personal grief. Whereas, Palestinians deaths are dismissed as mere collateral damage, the unavoidable consequence of war. Palestinians are dehumanized as the inconvenient byproduct of a necessary (and glorified) war machine now grinding its way towards victory.

Second, Christians are called to live as citizens of God’s kingdom, a divine, heavenly kingdom that has no allegiance, much less an alliance, with any earthly nation-state. No nation on this earth can ever claim to be carrying out God’s plan for the salvation of humanity. No nation can ever claim my allegiance since I (as a Christian) have already sworn my loyalty to God’s peaceable kingdom, where I am commanded to be a peacemaker – never a warmonger.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, supporting Israel does not please our Lord. In fact, supporting war and slaughter grieves our God, for it is the antithesis of all that Jesus came to accomplish for humanity.

Third, yes Israel may have a right to defend itself, but no one has the right to commit genocide, nor to execute their Dahiya doctrine in response to an attack. Just war theory has always maintained that Christians insist on a proportional response to an attack. There is nothing proportional about Israel’s reactions to Hamas. This is anything but a just war.

Fourth, when do the Palestinians gain the right to defend themselves? The Hamas attack did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it is the symptom of a deeply rooted, deadly disease called Israeli military occupation. As long as Israel’s occupation continues, Palestinians will continue to resist. You can count on it. It is human nature.

God did not create the Image of God to suffer interminable abuse. There is something innate to every human being that leads us to stand up against such abuse, to rise up, to raise our hands, and to say, “No more. You cannot beat me any longer. This is wrong. I will resist your efforts to dehumanize me.”

Furthermore, it is more reasonable to ask what the state of Israel expected would happen after 75 years of oppression? You can only persecute people for so long before they resist their persecutors. Why should anyone be surprised that a group like Hamas now exists in Gaza? It is the obvious and easily anticipated outcome of Israeli policies.

What we are witnessing now in Palestine is comparable to any number of anti-colonial uprisings that occurred throughout the “third world” in the 1960s and ‘70s. Israel has always been a settler-colonial state where European settlers have taken away the land of indigenous Palestinians.

Or think of the American slave revolts, like Nate Turner’s revolt in the 1830s. History has taken sides with the slaves (and the colonized) who revolted, throwing off the heavy shackles of their onerous oppression. Does anyone now applaud the slave owners who murdered black men, women and children as if they were animals in order to put down the slaves’ struggle for liberation and maintain their own brutal domination?

History will judge Israel’s current oppression of the Palestinian people in the very same light. Israel is the abusive master brutalizing the brown skinned people now resisting their enslavement.

Finally, on a thoroughly pragmatic note: Gaza has not held any elections since 2006. This means that the vast majority of the Palestinian population were either not yet born or were too young to vote in Gaza’s last election. So, how can  all Gazans be held responsible for voting Hamas into office 17 years ago? Half the Gazan population are minors. The median age is 16.

Most Gazans have never had any say in who does or does not govern them. By blaming the people of Gaza for causing their own genocide, Israel’s defenders are actually promoting grotesque acts of collective punishment (illegal under international law) that have nothing to do with “who voted Hamas into office.”

I am sorry, but my fellow Christians who are now defending Israel’s actions in Gaza have lost touch with the mind of Christ, if in fact, they ever possessed it.

On this matter, they have lost connection to the Head, the Lord of the Church.

Their failure to speak out, to protest against Israeli war crimes, makes them complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

May God have mercy on us all.

Zionist Think Tank Publishes Plans for Gaza’s Ethnic Cleansing

Below is a lengthy excerpt from a recent article at the Grayzone. titled “Zionist Think Tank Publishes Blueprint for Palestinian Genocide.” It is written by Kit Klarenburg.

The article is both shocking and entirely believable.

What we are watching today in Gaza is a modern instance of genocide. The goal is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, and eventually from the West Bank, as well.

The excerpt begins here:

As Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza entered its third week, leaving over 5000 dead and at least one million residents displaced, a Tel Aviv-based think tank published a blueprint for self-proclaimed Jewish state’s final solution.

In a white paper released over a week after the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israeli military bases and kibbutzes, The Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy outlined “a plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza,” based on the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” that Israel’s latest assault on the besieged costal enclave provided.

Published in Hebrew on the organization’s website, the paper was authored by

Smoke and flames billow after Israeli forces struck a high-rise tower in Gaza City, October 7, 2023. Palestinian militants have begun a “war” against Israel which they infiltrated by air, sea and land from the blockaded Gaza Strip, Israeli officials said, a major escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Photo by Ali Hamad apaimages

Amir Weitman, “an investment manager and visiting researcher” at the Institute who also leads the libertarian caucus of Israel’s ruling Likud Party. The document began by noting that there are 10 million vacant housing units in neighboring Egypt that could be “immediately” filled with Palestinians. Weitman then assured readers that the “sustainable plan…aligns well with the economic and geopolitical interests of the State of Israel, Egypt, the USA and Saudi Arabia.”

Weitman’s ethnic cleansing proposal echoes forced transfer plans advanced in recent days by former Israeli officials while capitalizing on evacuation orders delivered to the entire civilian population of northern Gaza by the Israeli military.

Weitman’s sinister blueprint imagined Israel purchasing these properties at a cost of $5 – 8 billion dollars, a whopping price-tag that reflects just 1 – 1.5 percent of Israel’s GDP.

“These sums of money [required to cleanse Gaza] in relation to the Israeli economy, are minimal,” Weitman posits. “Investing individual billions of dollars to solve this difficult issue is an innovative, cheap and sustainable solution.”

Weitman acknowledged that his plan virtually amounts to Israel “buying the Gaza Strip,” arguing the move would be “a very worthwhile investment” for Zionists because it would “add a lot of value over time.” He asserted local “land conditions” in the area would provide “many” Israeli settlers a high standard of living, therefore allowing for an expansion of settlements in Gush Dan near the Egyptian border, giving “a tremendous impetus to settlement in the Negev.”

In December 2021, Tel Aviv approved plans to establish four settlements in the Negev to house 3,000 settler families.

Though Egypt has so far rejected Israeli pressure for a mass exodus of Gaza

A section of the Gaza border-fence

residents through the southern Rafah crossing, Weitman argued Cairo will welcome the mass exodus of Palestinian refugees  as “an immediate stimulus” that will “provide a tremendous and immediate benefit to al-Sisi’s regime.” 

Weitman claimed that Cairo’s major creditors — including France, Germany and Saudi Arabia — are likely to welcome a revitalized Egyptian economy, courtesy of “Israeli investment” in the Palestinians’ permanent removal. He surmizes that Western Europe will welcome “the transfer of the entire Gaza population to Egypt,” because it will significantly “reduce the risk of illegal immigration…a tremendous advantage.” Meanwhile, he expects Riyadh to embrace the move because the “evacuation of the Gaza Strip means the elimination of a significant ally of Iran.”

The ethnic cleansing of Gaza would mean an end to “ceaseless, repeated rounds of fighting, which inflame the fires of hatred against Israel.” Moreover, “closing the Gaza issue will ensure a stable and increased supply of Israeli gas to Egypt and its liquefaction,” from the vast reserves seized by Israel near Gaza’s shores.

Palestinians in turn are expected to jump at the chance to be forcibly transferred from their homes rather than “living in poverty under the rule of Hamas.” It is therefore necessary for Israel to “create the right conditions” for them to “immigrate” from Gaza to Cairo. Weitman noted that Gaza’s two million inhabitants “constitute less than 2% of the total Egyptian population, which today already includes 9 million refugees. A drop in the ocean.”

The paper ominously concluded: “There is no doubt that in order for this plan to come to fruition, many conditions must exist at the same time. Currently, these conditions are met and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if ever. This is the time to act. Now.” . . . 

. . . In 2004, Zionist demographer Arnon Sofer of Haifa University laid out detailed plans for the isolation of Gaza directly to Ariel Sharon’s government. This entailed withdrawing Israeli forces from the area entirely and constructing a stringent system of surveillance and security to ensure nothing and no one went in or out without Zionist proviso. He predicted a perpetual bloodbath:

“When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today…The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…the only thing that concerns me is how to ensure the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”

The Institute has put forward a clean and easy fantasy of achieving the same goal put forward by Sofer. For it to succeed, all Palestinians have to do is put down their weapons and head toward the desert of permanent exile. . . 

Read the entire article here.

Another Response to Russell Moore and His Complaint Against “Bothsidesism”

This is my second post made in response to an article by Dr. Russell Moore, of Christianity Today magazine. My first response, issued quickly late last Wednesday night, was a reply to Moore’s previous editorial, “American Christians Should Stand with Israel Under Attack.”

Now I am at it again.

Several days ago, I received a request from my friend Steve, who pastors a church in Northwest Washington. He sent me a new article from Russell Moore’s Newsletter and asked if I might write a response. Dr. Moore’s  second article is titled “’Bothsidesism’ About Hamas Is a Moral Failure.”

Although Dr. Moore does not clearly define what he means by “bothsidesism,” he does clearly insist that there is only one moral position to take when viewing the current war between Israel and Hamas: Hamas is a terrorist organization that launched “a vicious and unprecedented attack” against Israel. Any attempt to explain Hamas’ motivations, anything that sounds like excuse-making or a justification for terrorism, has entered “a morally dangerous place” leading to “hackery,” according to Moore.

So, please excuse me while I put on my hackery hat for a moment.

One of the first lessons I learned in graduate school is that I cannot pretend to understand an issue until I have first examined all of the evidence available for all sides of a question. Knowing only how to defend one side – my side – of an argument demonstrates that I do not understand the argument well enough to talk about it. What are the strengths of the opposing views? Why are others convinced of things that I am not? Why do I think that my arguments are sufficiently convincing that I can, in good conscience, persuade others to share my opinion rather than anyone else’s?

It’s called being educated. Others may call it bothsidesism. I call it the essential foundation of a well-considered opinion.

Only after I am sufficiently educated on a subject (whether a question of war or a doctrinal controversy) am I in a position to then form a moral judgment about the matter at hand. Ill-informed, knee-jerk judgments are cheap and easy, especially when they keep us singing the same moralistic tune as all the other folks in our favorite community choir.

Condemning a well-considered educational process as bothsidesism is only a high-falutin, moralistic sounding way of dismissing the importance of knowing what one is talking about.

Explanation is not the same as making excuses. To excuse Hamas is one thing – a completely unacceptable thing. But explaining the motives behind Hamas terrorism is another thing altogether; something that can easily coexist with moral outrage over Hamas’ actions.

So, on the one hand, Dr. Moore is right. Our first response to Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians can only be condemnation. All the innocent victims, their families and friends deserve our deepest sympathies and whatever humanitarian assistance we can provide in their hour of need.

On the other hand, I am able to walk and chew gum at the same time. My second response is to insist that we apply the terrorism label even-handedly.

Terrorism is commonly defined as the use of violence against civilians to achieve a political or military aim. By that measure, the Hamas attack on October 7th was a massive act of terrorism. Firing Hamas rockets (which typically lack a guidance system) into Israeli territory is terrorism.

But it is pure, unadulterated, blind prejudice not to recognize that the Israeli government practices terrorism against the Palestinian people on a daily basis, and has done so for decades. Israeli leaders boasted about their deliberate terrorism when their defense minister promised to “wipe out” the “human animals” living in Gaza.

Israel commits terrorism when they slaughter over 3,000 human beings, including more than 1,000 children, while bombing the residential neighborhoods of Gaza.

Israel has committed crimes against humanity for over 16 years by imposing a strict military blockade around Gaza, reducing the population to extreme, dehumanizing living conditions as an act of collective punishment.

The Israeli sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling, once described Gaza as “the largest concentration camp” in the world. Can you blame the inmates of a concentration camp for eventually attacking the prison guards who starve them, bomb them, and dehumanize them daily?

Israel is a settler-colonial, apartheid state that continues the state-sponsored land theft begun in 1948. The official government term is “Judaization.” All throughout Israel and the West Bank “legal” mechanisms are applied to dispossess Palestinian land-owners and replace them with Jewish settlers, settlers who frequently attack and kill innocent Palestinian civilians. (For more on the role of the Israeli military in Israel’s Judaization process, see my book Like Birds in a Cage.)

I can’t help but wonder if Dr. Moore has ever expressed the same moral clarity in writing an editorial condemning Israeli war crimes as he now possesses in condemning the recent Hamas attacks. At several points in his essay, he offers the bland bromide that we cannot grant “unthinking acceptance of anything the modern state of Israel does,” but when and where has Dr. Moore ever publicly criticized Israeli actions in the way he now justifiably criticizes Hamas?

I am happy to be corrected, but I suspect that he never has. In general, Israeli crimes are quietly accepted. Only Palestinian crimes are condemned.

So, excuse me while I find Dr. Moore’s warnings about bothsidesism to be a one-sided excuse for poo-pooing those who are working to describe an educated appraisal of the way war crimes beget war crimes.

It’s long past time to extend our criticisms even-handedly to both sides. For Hamas and Israel are both guilty. While Israelis and Palestinians are all suffering.

Watch My Interview with Stephen Sizer

The Rev. Stephen Sizer is a vicar with the Church of England who has been a strong advocate for Palestinian human rights for many years.

He is also a staunch disciple of Jesus Christ who vividly examplifies what it means to love one’s enemies.

As a result of Stephen’s witness to loving his neighbors in Palestine, he has also suffered a great deal of persecution and unjust suffering at the hands of the pro-Israel lobby in England.

I was pleased as punch when he asked me to do an interview about my new book with him on his podcast. Take a look:

 

 

Jonathan Cook Talks About the Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Jonathan Cook is a British journalist living in Israel. Today he has an excellent post at Consortium News about the long-term, ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The current war is only the latest chapter in a heartbreaking, 75-year story.

Yes, the Hamas attack against Israel was a horrible war crime and deserves

The results of Israeli bombing in Gaza

to be condemned. Yet, it was a crime committed in response to 75 years of war crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinian people.

Here is an excerpt:

The missing context for what’s happening in Gaza is that Israel has been working night-and-day to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their homeland since even before Israel become a state — when it was known as the Zionist movement.

Israel didn’t just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettos inside those borders — as a holding measure until they could be expelled outside the borders.

The “settler” project, as we call it, is a misnomer. It’s really Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme. Israel even has a special word for it in Hebrew: “Judaisation,” or making the land Jewish. It is official government policy.

Gaza was the largest of the Palestinian reservations created by Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme and the most overcrowded. To stop the inhabitants spilling out, Israel built a fence-barrier in the early 1990s to pen them in. Then when policing became too hard from within the prison, Israel pulled back in 2005 to the outer perimeter barrier.

Read the rest of the article here.