Category: Human Rights

“Why Young American Jews are Turning on Israel”

One important fact that the mainstream media will not tell you about the current anti-war protests condemning Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza is that many of the leaders and participants are Jewish Americans.

Two important Jewish organizations — If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace — are leading the way in these student protests.

Remember this the next time you hear someone accuse these protests of being “antisemitic.”

They are not anti-semitic. That is a standard Zionist lie used to distract from the real issues.

Rather, they are anti-war, anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian, pro-humanity.

Simone Zimmermann is a young Jewish woman, and cofounder of the Jewish organization IfNotNow, who is also one of the creators of the important, recent film Israelism. I encourage everyone to watch this story of how an increasing number of young Jewish Americans are turning away from Zionism and embracing the just cause of Palestinian liberation.

Palestinian Ethnic Nationalism is Not the Answer to Zionism

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.

“Israelis Against Apartheid” Accuse Israel’s Leaders of War Crimes, Calling for Prosecution before the International Criminal Court

Over 1,500 Israeli anti-apartheid activists have signed a petition accusing Israel’s political and military leadership of committing war crimes in Gaza.

Jessica Corbett’s article appears in Common Dreams. Below is an excerpt:

Israelis Against Apartheid, a group representing more than 1,500 citizens, this week urged the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor “to take accelerated action against the escalating Israeli war crimes and genocide of the Palestinian people” in Gaza.

“For the safety and future in the region, all elements of international law must be enforced and war crimes should be investigated,” declares the letter to the ICC’s Karim A. A. Khan, noting his ongoing Palestine investigation and recent remarks on the war.

The letter, dated Thursday, explains that “as Israeli anti-colonial activists, we have joined our voices to the voices of Palestinians for decades warning on the dangerous course of action pursued by the Israeli state and repeatedly called for international intervention.”

“Persistent impunity has created the conditions for the consolidation of the Israeli apartheid regime, which is intent on committing ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Indigenous Palestinian population,” the letter continues. “The acute deterioration in basic conditions of life that we are now witnessing could have been avoided if Israel had not been continuously granted impunity for its ongoing crimes.”

You can read the entire article here.

Yasmine Ahmed of Human Rights Watch on the ‘hypocrisy of the international community’ regarding Palestinians

Ms. Ahmed, of Human Rights Watch, provides essential context and shocking details that should illuminate our view of the current war against Gaza.

Current Affairs Magazine: “Biden Couldn’t Care Less About Human Rights”

Nathan J. Robinson has an excellent piece in the online magazine Current Affairs detailing the utter disregard, indeed distain, with which President Joe Biden treats matters of human rights in international affairs.

Biden has filled his administration with neo-conservatives who push American imperialism above every other consideration. How foreign governments treat their own people, including their dissidents — most especially their dissidents — matters not one whit to this Biden administration.

He has proven his gross disinterest time and again.

Check out Robinson’s article filled with more than enough evidence to indict Biden as one of the most hard-hearted, inhumane presidents of all time.

Below is an excerpt:

. . . The pattern is consistent. Biden believes that U.S. global power matters far more than freedom and democracy (emphasis mine). As a result, he has totally ignored the pleas of human rights activists to exert even mild pressure on authoritarian regimes. 

Consider the case of Egypt. Earlier this month, the U.S. “approved $235 million in military aid for Egypt that it had withheld for the past two years because of the country’s repressive policies.” The details of the policy are ugly. That money was legally only supposed to be provided to Egypt if it met basic conditions of human rights. Eleven members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee sent a letter to Biden imploring him to withhold the aid, citing Egypt’s jailing of  “journalists, peaceful civil society activists, human rights defenders and political figures.” Biden ignored the plea and waived the legal requirement that Egypt respect basic human rights in order to receive this aid. The New York Times says the administration concluded that “national security interests outweigh congressionally mandated benchmarks for Egyptian progress on human rights.” Of course, nobody ever says how our “national security” is served by giving Egypt hundreds of millions of dollars without imposing any of the human rights requirements that Congress had demanded. Egypt has certainly learned the lesson that it need not make any human rights concessions to the U.S., because the money will keep flowing regardless. . . 

Read the entire article here.

Time to Support the One Democratic State Solution for Israel

Even though western pundits continue to promote the old idea of a “Two State Solution” for Israel-Palestine, the facts on the ground (as Israeli politicians like to say) buried this possibility long ago.

In the wake of the disastrous Oslo Accords, with 700,000 or more Jewish settlers entreanched in the many illegal settlements scattered throughout the West Bank (what Israel calls Judea and Samaria), the old idea of a two state solution has become a blind man’s fantasy.

That’s why men (and women) like Jeff Halper are promoting a new vision called the One Democratic State Campaign. A program for Israel’s truly democratic future where all citizens, Jews and Palestinians, throughout the whole of the land — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — would have the same citizenship status with equal rights.

It’s the only “solution” that can bring real justice to Israel-Palestine. And justice is the necessary precursor to lasting, genuine peace.

Take some time to listen to Jeff Halper explain how this could work:

Enough Already with the Royal Family

The Harvard history professor, Maya Jasanoff, has written three books about the British Empire. Over at the Washington Post, she has published an

Professor Maya Jasanoff

article discussing the recent coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. It is titled, “Mourn the Queen, Not the Empire.”

Similar articles can be written — actually, many have been written already — about the long history of the American Empire.

Below is an excerpt (all emphasis is mine):

“The end of an era” will become a refrain as commentators assess the record-setting reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Like all monarchs, she was both an individual and an institution. She had a different birthday for each role — the actual anniversary of her birth in April and an official one in June — and, though she retained her personal name as monarch, held different titles depending on where in her domains she stood. She was as devoid of opinions and emotions in public as her ubiquitous handbags were said to be of everyday items like a wallet, keys and phone. Of her inner life we learned little beyond her love of horses and dogs — which gave Helen Mirren, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy rapt audiences for the insights they enacted. . .

. . . What you would never know from the pictures — which is partly their point — is the violence that lies behind them. In 1948, the colonial governor of Malaya declared a state of emergency to fight communist guerrillas, and British troops used counterinsurgency tactics the Americans would emulate in Vietnam. In 1952 the governor of Kenya imposed a state of emergency to suppress an anticolonial movement known as Mau Mau, under which the British rounded up tens of thousands of Kenyans into detention camps and subjected them to brutal, systematized torture. In Cyprus in 1955 and Aden, Yemen, in 1963, British governors again declared states of emergency to contend with anticolonial attacks; again they tortured civilians. Meanwhile, in Ireland, the Troubles brought the dynamics of emergency to the United Kingdom. In a karmic turn, the Irish Republican Army assassinated the queen’s relative Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India (and the architect of Elizabeth’s marriage to his nephew, Prince Philip), in 1979.

We may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her name. (What transpires in the sovereign’s weekly meetings with the prime minister remains a black box at the center of the British state.) Her subjects haven’t necessarily gotten the full story, either. Colonial officials destroyed many records that, according to a dispatch from the secretary of state for the colonies, “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government” and deliberately concealed others in a secret archive whose existence was revealed only in 2011. Though some activists such as the Labour M.P. Barbara Castle publicized and denounced British atrocities, they failed to gain wide public traction.

Click here to read the entire article.

Lessons from “One of the Most Brutal Military Tyrannies in the World” — Israel

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy critiques the work of Israel’s spy agency, Shin Bet in the most recent edition of the Jerusalem daily, Haaretz. The article is

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

titled “Israel’s Stasi Preaches Morality.”

Below is an excerpt explaining why Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza will forever resist Israeli oppression:

. . . It is difficult to assess the real balance – how many terror attacks the Shin Bet thwarts and how many attacks it motivates with its unchecked activities. But when Bar boasts of 2,000 recent arrests, it’s clear there are more than a few innocent people among them, and people who will be radicalized by their very detention.

In a reality in which every night, soldiers accompanied by dogs terrorize people sleeping in their homes and snatch citizens from their beds at the behest of the Shin Bet, without any legal supervision of course, and in a reality where hundreds of people are detained without trial for months and years, also by order of the Shin Bet, it is clear that the damage is enormous. The most serious consequence is turning Israeli democracy into one of the most brutal military tyrannies in the world, even if only in its own backyard.

The Shin Bet barely operates in sovereign Israel. But what it is doing in the occupied territories, which are an inseparable part of Israel, apparently forever, makes it impossible to define Israel as a democracy anymore, certainly not when it is clear that this is not a temporary situation. There is no evil with which the Israeli Stasi – in the territories the Shin Bet is the Stasi in every way, with more advanced technology than the infamous East German organization had – is unfamiliar.

Just this week I met, at the Al-Arroub refugee camp, an 11-year-old boy who lost an eye to an IDF bullet. Now he has also been defined as a security risk, who is barred from entering Israel for treatment at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center on the order of the Shin Bet. Last week, two cancer patients in the Gaza Strip died; they were unable to receive treatments in Israel in time because the Shin Bet denied them entry for two months.

Click here to read the entire article.

Inventing the Novel and Human Rights: What Happens When the Image of God Reads Compelling Fiction

Where did the belief in universal human rights come from?

Why did western societies ever begin to write documents proclaiming that “all men (and women) are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”?

What was the original spark of humanitarian instinct that eventually gave rise to a document like The Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

The Judeao-Christian belief that all people are created as the Image of God certainly had an important role to play. But many “Christian” societies have embraced this biblical doctrine without any practical implementation towards eliminating torture, injustice, or discrimination.

So how did the broad-based, societal belief in establishing “human rights” for everyone equally as a matter of law spring into life?

Professor Lynn Hunt teaches modern European history, specializing in the French Revolution, at UCLA. She has written a fascinating book called Inventing Human Rights: A History (W. W. Norton, 2007) where she argues that the impetus towards universal human rights arose with the creation of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century.

It is difficult today for us to imagine a time when the fictional novel was a new invention, a new form of literature. It is also difficult to understand the novel’s wild popularity among the masses.

Almost everyone who could read consumed them whole. And many who could not read had someone read the latest novel to them.

One of the major social benefits of this craze was the rise in empathy for others, especially others who were not like you, others whom the reader did not know personally, first hand.

An important question this book raises for me concerns the possible connection between American xenophobia, and our hard-heartedness towards warfare and the suffering of “foreigners” and the decline in American literacy.

Nearly 1/3 of American’s did not read a single book last year. Only 20% read

for pleasure on a daily basis. When we do read, it is on average for 17 minutes per day.

Below is an excerpt from Inventing Human Rights (emphasis mine):

(Novels) drew their readers into identifying with ordinary characters, who were by definition unknown to the reader personally. Readers empathized with the characters, especially their heroine or hero, thanks to the workings of the narrative form itself. Through the fictional exchange of letters [the epistolary form of novel was especially popular] taught their readers nothing less than a new psychology and in the process laid the foundations for a new social and political order. . . Novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings, and many novels showcased in particular the desire for autonomy. In this way, reading novels created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative. Can it be coincidental that the three greatest novels of psychological identification of the eighteenth century – Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761) – were all published in the period that immediately preceded the appearance of the concept of “the rights of man”?

. . . Empathy only develops through social interaction; therefore, the forms of that interaction configure empathy in important ways. In the eighteenth century, readers of novels learned to extend their purview of empathy. In reading, they empathized across traditional social boundaries between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women. As a consequence, they came to see others – people they did not know personally – as like them, as having the same kinds of inner emotions. Without this learning process, “equality” could have no deep meaning and in particular no political consequence. The equality of souls in heaven is not the same thing as equal rights here on earth. Before the eighteenth century, Christians readily accepted the former without granting the latter.

 

Professor Hunt’s observations raise troubling questions about the demise of literacy and the liberal arts in American education.

I fear that the increasing turn towards “professionalization” as opposed to cultural literacy in education will pave the way for a harsher, more xenophobic, aggressive, inhumane vision of the world for American society.

But, then, maybe we are already there…