A Blog from David Crump
Though I can’t agree with his theology, I can’t help but have the deepest admiration for Dr. Cornel West. He was denied tenure at Harvard because of his outspoken defense of the Palestinian people suffering under Israeli apartheid.
In this clip from Middle East Eye, he explain the complicity of US media in covering up Israeli war crimes.
Here is an exercise in seeing the difference that “framing” makes in the way different “authorities” can tell the same story to very different effects.
The first clip below is from an Israeli national news program. You will hear a conversation about yesterday’s fatal shooting of the Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh. Listen and make a few mental notes on what you hear.
What is emphasized? What are the guest’s primary concerns? What do you think is omitted from this discussion?
The next clip is from the alternative news site Democracy Now. Amy Goodman talks with Dr. Rashid Khalidi, the Edward W. Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University.
You will notice that professor Khalidi’s way of framing of the shooting is very different from Dan Perry’s framing in the Israeli clip.
Make some mental notes. What is Khalidi’s emphasis? What does he discuss that you did not hear in the previous interview? What did Mr. Perry discuss that you do not hear about from Khalidi?
How can you account for these differences?
A number of issues strike me as very important.
First, notice how Mr. Perry frames the issues in terms of competing media narratives, or battling storylines. He laments that fact that, in his opinion, Israel is currently “losing” the media battle to the Palestinian version of the story.
Personally, I do not believe that he has a basis for his lament, although his focus of the public’s perception of Israel — quite apart from what actually happened — is typical of what you will hear from Israeli representatives.
Second, I also hear Perry repeat the characteristic lament over “Israeli victimhood”; my words, not his. For the Israeli propaganda machine (yes, I know, I am letting my own framing show itself at this point), Israel is always under attack; Israel is always the innocent victim; any and all accusations made against Israeli behavior are inevitable examples of the world’s eternal hatred of the Jews.
This victim mentality is an essential component of political Zionism.
Third, I do agree with Perry, however, when he criticizes the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for refusing to cooperate in a joint enquiry into the shooting. This is a foolish move on his part, which will hopefully be overturned quickly.
Fourth, notice the alternative framing offered by professor Khalidi. He describes this shooting as another in a long line of murderous incidents illustrating the brutality of Israeli settler-colonialism — a perspective with which I happen to agree.
Naturally, Mr. Perry never raises this settler-colonial perspective because the majority of Israelis refuse to see themselves in this light. This is not surprising, however.
All throughout history, colonizers have always tried to whitewash their
crimes, in one way or another. Guilt is always laid at the feet of those who have been colonized. The settlers were bringing civilization to eradicate the barren wilderness and to bring enlightenment to primitive people.
Both the bloodshed, the shirking of responsibility, and the political rhetoric in Israel-Palestine are no different. This is why the two video clips above offer such divergent analyses.
Think of the 17th to the 19th century settlement history of the United States. The white, European settlers commonly, almost universally, framed themselves as the innocent victims of Native savagery.
To the white mind, the Indians were always the senseless aggressors. Every
settler storyline began at the moment the Indians appeared threatening or attacked,
unjustly, inexplicably. Rarely did anyone discuss what the settlers had been doing to the Natives beforehand.
White settlers also never lacked a noble justification for their latest betrayal.
Modern Israel is the last settler-colonial state in this world of ours, and we are seeing the same colonial distortions of history working themselves out in Israel-Palestine today.
Israel’s airwaves provide the final frontier of media battles over “competing narratives.” Israel, and its many Zionist sympathizers, tell their stories from the settlers’ perspective.
Palestinians, on the other hand, tell their stories from the Native perspective. The Palestinian narrative, whether or not it “wins” the nonstop media battle, explains how a powerless, conquered people continue to be abused by their conquerors, conquerors who hold the power and always carry the biggest weapons.
I am happy to announce that my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021), is now available.
So place your orders now (please!) and share what you learn with your family and friends. Just click this link.
Rather than talk about my own book, allow me to share a few of the recommendations the book has received from other scholars in this field:
A keenly reasoned, comprehensive, full-frontal critique of Christian Zionism. Equally at ease interpreting St. Paul, critiquing ideologies of privilege, deconstructing Israel’s discriminatory legal regime, and narrating scenes of unarmed, tear-gassed villagers, David Crump mounts a formidable case against the troubling logic, and deadly deployment, of ethnocracy and territorial exceptionalism. This prophetic call to walk not where Jesus walked, but as Jesus walked, is more urgent now than ever.
Bruce N. Fisk, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow, Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East
This new volume by David Crump may be the most comprehensive critique of Christian Zionism by an evangelical author to date. As a former ‘insider,’ his unique perspective has delivered a tour de force by combining scholarly biblical exegesis of key texts the incisive theological analysis. His solid grasp of the relevant political and historical context of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle adds context and texture to this wonderfully written book. I hope this volume will be widely read and reviewed across the evangelical spectrum by pastors, biblical scholars, students, and perhaps most urgently, evangelical politicians.
Don Wagner, author of Anxious for Armageddon
Like Birds in a Cage is destined to become a standard text on Christian Zionism in the USA. With devastating precision, Dave Crump exposes the cancerous nature of this deviant theology. For Evangelicalism to survive with any credibility, it must repudiate the justification of apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Crump’s book provides not only the diagnosis but also the cure.
Steven Sizer, Founder and Director, Peacemaker Trust
This book is quite unique in the way that it combines a sound grasp of the history of Zionism, careful interpretation of the Bible, and first hand, recent experience of everyday life for Palestinians living under occupation on the West Bank . . . My hope and prayer is that this book will help American Christians of all kinds to wake up to the very significant ways in which Christian Zionism has contributed — and continues to contribute — to this tragic conflict. They might then be more able to challenge their government’s policies.
Colin Chapman, author of Whose Promised Land?
The neighbor kids threw some firecrackers over the fence yesterday into my backyard. My dog was freaked out.
I had to teach them a lesson.
So, I fired up my oversized Hummer, with the extra-wide, off road, knobby
tires. I put it into overdrive and crashed through the side of their house at high speed. In the process I ran over their cat, clipped the mother making coffee, and popped out the sliding glass doors into their backyard.
That’ll learn ’em.
——————
It only took Israel’s new government two days to rain more terror down on the people of Gaza.
Jake Johnson has an article at CommonDreams updating us on Israel’s latest aggression against the people of Gaza. His piece in entitled, “After Far-Right Marchers Chant ‘Death to Arabs,’ New Israeli Government Bombs Gaza“:
“The problem is bigger than Netanyahu—it’s apartheid.”
Just hours after far-right marchers chanted “Death to Arabs!” during a demonstration in the streets of Jerusalem, Israeli war planes bombarded the occupied Gaza Strip early Wednesday morning in the first series of airstrikes launched by the new government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a former IDF officer who once boasted that he has “killed a lot of Arabs.”
While initial reports indicated that no Palestinians were killed in the new
bombing campaign, the air raid intensified fears of a fresh wave of violence by the Israeli government just weeks after a tenuous cease-fire agreement paused Israel’s deadly 11-day assault on Gaza last month, which killed more than 240 people.
The Israeli military characterized the latest airstrikes as retaliation for “incendiary balloons” released into Israel from the Gaza Strip. The balloons reportedly caused at least ten fires in Israel.
“Homemade fire balloons versus U.S. bombs. Is there a better example of the disproportionate use of force?” asked Ariel Gold, national co-director of the anti-war organization CodePink.
Abu Malek, whom the Associated Press identified as “one of the young men launching the balloons,” said the incendiary objects were released into Israel in response to a far-right, government-sanctioned march through Jerusalem, where demonstrators rallied alongside several members of the Israeli Knesset and chanted “Death to Arabs!”
Israeli police fired rubber bullets at Palestinians who tried to disrupt the march, which reached the main entrance to the Old City’s Muslim quarter.
“This is a genocidal chant. Let’s call it what it is,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.). “I represent many within the Jewish community who disavow and condemn this hateful language. So why does only a small portion of our Congress?”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the first Palestinian-American woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress, said that “after racist and violent ‘death to Arabs’ marches earlier today in Jerusalem, children in Gaza are being woken by bombs in the middle of the night.”
“Israel’s government doesn’t value Palestinian lives,” Tlaib added. “It has managed a decades-long ethnic cleansing project, funded by the U.S.”
The Israeli airstrikes came just over 48 hours after the country’s parliament narrowly voted to replace former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Bennett, a change that defenders of Palestinian rights did not applaud given the latter’s record and policy stances, which include support for annexing the occupied West Bank in violation of international law.
“While being hailed by many as the opportunity for a fresh start, Naftali Bennett is at best a continuation of Netanyahu’s policies and at worst an ideologue whose positions are to the right of Netanyahu’s,” Gold of CodePink wrote for Common Dreams on Monday.