A Blog from David Crump
These videos speak for themselves.
These are only two little girls who are, fortunately, rescued. The United Nations estimates that some 10,000 Palestinian bodies have never been rescued. They remain in the rubble.
To watch the above video use the URL address inbetween the brackets: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6pfJ3gCrcxs]
I am happy to announce the next episode of the Christian Forum on Israel-Palestine. It will be broadcast on June 8th, 4 pm Eastern, 1 pm Pacific.
We will be speaking with Ilan Pappe, one of the world’s premier historians of modern Israel, but especially of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
When the time comes you can watch this conversation by clicking on the following link or paste it in your computer’s URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Azgev9Rc8
Professor Pappe has written many important books. Perhaps his best known
publication is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. His most recent work, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (available in September), deals with the power and influence of Israeli/pro-Zionist lobbying efforts around the world.
Please join us for what I know will be a fascinating conversation with one of Israel’s foremost historians.
I am deeply disappointed to say that I will not be participating in this particular conversation. I will be flying home from Israel on June 8. But trust me, I will NOT miss any more of our upcoming conversations.
Mark you calendars now, not only for Ilan Pappe, but for what I know will be another fascinating conversation with Ali Abunimah, the founder and chief editor of The Electronic Intifada, on June 18.
I will provide more information once I return from my trip to Israel-Palestine.
This is the 7th mass grave discovered on the grounds of two different hospitals in Gaza. The bodies include those of men, women and children. Many of them were apparently patients.
A central plank of Israeli/Zionist mythology is the claim that Israel is always desperate for peace but can never find a Palestinian peace partner willing to sign a ceasefire agreement.
That has never been the case, but that doesn’t stop the Israeli propaganda mill — faithfully reported on the Christian Broadcast Network as gospel truth — from repeating these claims.
The following video report rehearses all of the ceasefire proposals that have been agreed to by Hamas but have been rejected by Israel.
Of course, Israel has the right to negotiate as it pleases and reject the proposals it does not like. But it does not have the right to lie about the nature of the negotiations, insisting on Hamas’ intransigence when in fact Israel has always wanted to continue the current attack on Gaza regardless of the peace plan being offered.
The Jewish magazine Forward has published two different letters written by Jewish university students insisting that the anti-genocide demonstrations on their campuses have NOT been antisemitic, but that all impulses towards
violence and antisemitism have been imported by outside instigators.
Here is a brief excerpt of the Foward article titled “Jewish students reject claims that campus protests for Palestine have been antisemitic“. All emphasis is mine:
Editor’s note: Today we published two open letters from college students regarding the protests that have been roiling campuses nationwide for weeks. Below, 750+ Jewish students from 140+ campuses say they “reject the claim that these encampments are antisemitic and that they are an inherent threat to Jewish student safety.” In the other letter, 280+ Jewish students at Columbia University argue that their “concerns have been brushed off and invalidated” when calling out antisemitism on campus. The original letters can be found here and here.
We the undersigned are Jewish students on college campuses in solidarity with student encampments for Gaza. We reject the ways that these encampments have been smeared as antisemitic and we call on our institutions to take action to stop Israel’s assault on Gaza.
In the last week, we have watched the movement of student encampments for Gaza spread across the country. We have also watched as these protesters have been met with repression, arrests, violence, and false claims of antisemitism. As Jewish students, we wholeheartedly reject the claim that these encampments are antisemitic and that they are an inherent threat to Jewish student safety. We believe that safety for Jewish students can only come when all students are safe, including Palestinian students, BIPOC students, and queer and trans students.
While journalists, students, and even police have consistently reported encampments to be peaceful, school administrations and city officials have intentionally and consistently escalated through state violence. Their tactics have included arresting and brutalizing students, and denying students access to housing, medical care, and religious spaces. The majority of these acts have targeted Arab, Muslim, Black, and brown students. This violence we’ve seen this week does not make any of us safer. We wholeheartedly condemn the brutal repression of the encampments.
You can read the entire article here.
“The narrative of protesters endangering Jewish students has been used to justify police repression. But at the Columbia encampment, I saw a commitment to confronting antisemitism.”
Journalist Hadas Thier has written a good article for The Nation magazine giving an insider’s look at the anti-genocide demonstrations happening on American campuses.
The article is titled “Student Encampments Aren’t a Danger to Jews. But the Crackdown Is.”
Here is a brief excerpt:
. . . Since then, the story of protesters endangering and threatening Jewish
students has been used to justify the brutal repression that they’ve been met with. But I spent the last week speaking to students across many campus encampments, and last Wednesday I made my way to Columbia’s encampment to get a picture of it for myself. My experience was decidedly different from the story we’ve been fed.
In the middle of the lawn, surrounded by a low buzz of students sitting in study circles, making art, pointing out a hawk that flew nearby, working on laptops, I met Atesh, a Columbia student who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of reprisal. He told me how meaningful it was for him to participate in his first Passover seder with about 100 other students and professors on the lawn. There, Jewish students had led their peers in songs and rituals. The Passover seder is a Jewish tradition that celebrates liberation and is rooted in community, inquiry, and questioning. It was a fitting celebration for the encampment.
As Atesh was talking to me, another student approached us, looking for a Jewish member of the encampment to connect with. Atesh shrugged and said, “We’re all Jewish. We’re all Palestinian.”
Later that day, I sat on the lawn with nearly 200 students to listen to Jewish students lead a teach-in about antisemitism. Some discussed their experiences growing up in predominantly Christian towns where pennies were thrown at them and conspiracy theories about Jews were ubiquitous. Others shared their impressions of why so many American Jewish communities feel connected to their Israeli counterparts and why conversations about Palestine are difficult to have. A few recounted why their opposition to the current war is rooted in their traditions and observance of Judaism. All of them expressed discomfort at having to take center stage. But they felt an obligation to do so because of the ways in which the “safety of Jewish students” has become a disingenuous rallying cry of everyone from liberal college presidents to MAGA-aligned politicians.
I am an Israeli-born Jew who has been involved in Palestine activism for over 20 years, and I have never experienced the level of solidarity and the depth of understanding about antisemitism that I am seeing across college campuses right now. In the past, I had seen antisemitism only on the fringe of the movement, turning up through an occasional odd and unsettling poster at a protest, summarily dismissed and removed by organizers. At the center of the movement, I always felt welcome and comfortable as an Israeli-born Jew. But, still, until the recent phase of the new movement for Palestine emerged on American campuses last fall, I had never before witnessed such a deliberate commitment to learning about and confronting antisemitism head on. . .
. . . “It is not that they care about Jewish students,” JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] member Maya, told me. “They actually care about Zionist students.” Among those arrested and suspended were many Jewish students, she said. “They do not care about the safety of the Jewish students that are in the camp or that are part of this movement. And they’ve shown that by arresting and by attempting to erase the fact that we even exist.” Anti-Zionist Jews, she explained, “are not part of [the administration’s] fight against antisemitism.” . . .
You can read the entire article here.
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…
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:
One mass gravesite is near Al Shifa hospital. The other is near Nasser hospital. Both hospitals have been demolished by Israeli forces.
Many of the corpses have their hands tied together.
Many are women. Some are children.
Others are wearing hospital gowns. Some even have the IV drip tubes still attached to their arms.
I have posted a selection of video reports below. Since most are age restricted I have enclosed the URL in quotation marks. Simply copy the URL to your web browser in order to watch:
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhsRRGvl1dc”
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clg-x1dchv8”
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcZ4_dZ8WZU”
