Dr. Rob Dalrymple and Vinnie Angelo both host the DetermineTruth podcast available at Patheos, an evangelical platform for a variety of religious blogs and websites.
Rob and Vinnie recently contacted me in order to interview me about my forthcoming book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionist Collaboration in the Suffering of the Palestinian People.
Dr. Rob Dalrymple
My interview is about 1 hour long. You can watch the video version of my discussion with Rob and Vinnie about Christian Zionism and my forthcoming book on YouTube here or you can listen to the audio-only version at the DetermineTruth website here.
Pastor Vinnie Angelo
Rob and Vinnie also discuss their own eye-opening awakenings to the problems of Christian Zionism and the oppression of the Palestinian people in an introductory discussion here.
US media regularly repeats Israeli talking points about “terrorist attacks” (the common description of unarmed civilians protesting in the streets) against Israel. Yet, these same outlets remain mute about Israel’s daily terrorist attacks against Palestinians.
It’s as if US corporate media is joined at the hip to the Israeli government propaganda department.
Israel may not be carpet-bombing Gaza at the moment — though bombing
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy
has continued fairly consistently throughout the summer — but killing Palestinians in the West Bank continues apace without interruption.
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy aptly labels the Israeli shooters as “death squads.”
Mr. Levy’s latest article in Haaretz newspaper describing the recent murders of 4 innocent, young men — stories you will never see covered by US corporate media — is entitled “The Media Yawns at the Israeli Army’s Death Squads.”
Israeli terror is at it again. The Israel Defense Forces’ death squads chalked up another successful week: four bodies of innocent Palestinians piled up between the two Fridays. There doesn’t seem to be a connection between the four incidents in which four sons were killed, but the link cannot be broken.
In all these cases, soldiers chose shooting to kill as the preferred option. In all four cases another way could have been chosen: Arrest them, aim for the legs, don’t do anything or simply don’t be there at all. But the soldiers chose to kill. It’s probably easier for them that way.
They come from different branches of the army with different backgrounds, but they share the incredible ease with which they kill, whether they have to or not.
They kill because they can. They kill because they’re convinced that this is how they’re expected to act. They kill because they know that nothing is cheaper than the life of a Palestinian. They kill because they know that the Israeli media will yawn and not report a thing. They kill because they know that no harm will come to them, so why not? Why not kill a Palestinian when possible?
They killed a 12-year-old boy and a 41-year-old plumber. They killed a 17-year-old youth and a 20-year-old young man attending a funeral, all in one week. An Israeli slogan during the 1948 war went “To arms, every good man,”
Israeli soldiers at the funeral of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Alami in the West Bank town of Beit Ummar Thursday. Credit Emil Salman
leading later to the concept of the IDF’s “purity of arms.” Four in one week, for no reason, with no hesitation, with no terrorist facing them. Four executions of young men with dreams, families, plans and loves.
None of the four endangered the soldiers, certainly not in a way that justified lethal fire. Thirteen bullets at a car driving by innocently, carrying a father and his three small children. Shooting a plumber holding a wrench and claiming that he was “moving rapidly toward the soldiers.” Three bullets at the stomach of a 17-year-old who was on his way to take his brother home.
All this can be called terror; there is no other definition. All this can be called the actions of death squads; there is no other description. It sounds horrible, but it really is horrific.
It could be less horrific if the Israeli media bothered to report on it, possibly shocking Israelis. It could be much less horrific if IDF commanders took the necessary steps given their army’s murderous recklessness. But most of the media believed that the killing of a child interests no one or is unimportant, or both, so this shocking incident wasn’t reported on.
If the soldiers had shot a dog – also a shocking act, of course – it would have attracted more attention. But a dead Palestinian child? What happened? Why should it interest anyone, why is it important?
“Are you working for the Arabs?” journalist Yinon Magal maliciously tweeted, addressing Haaretz’s Hagar Shezaf, virtually the only journalist who covered the boy’s funeral. This is the new journalistic ethos: Reporting the truth is tantamount to working for the Arabs.
Let’s leave aside the media of trivia and nonsense that was busy to the hilt with the modeling agent suspected of sexual misconduct and with lists of pedophiles – what does the media have to do with the killing of children? The question is: Where are the military commanders and the political leaders?
Their disgraceful silence leads to only one conclusion: They believe that this killing is acceptable. It’s exactly what they expect of soldiers: the killing of innocents. There is no other way to explain everyone’s silence without even a semblance of condemnation.
If the killers of the boy Mohammed al-Alami are still not in custody, then the IDF under Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi – a person known to speak in lofty terms about values – is saying that the soldiers acted correctly. If the paratroopers who killed Mohammed Tamimi by firing three bullets into his body from their armored jeep are still walking around freely in the West Bank, this means the army salutes them.
And if the IDF salutes them, we really are talking about death squads, just like in the most dreadful regimes.
I am sure you have heard about the Israeli ruckus occurring in the wake of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream company deciding to join the international BDS
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy
movement by no longer supplying ice cream to the illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank.
Certain US news outlets have gotten this wrong. Ben & Jerry’s is not boycotting the entire West Bank, only the Jewish settlements now housing some 700,000 Jewish colonizers occupying stolen Palestinian land.
Israeli politicians, as well as the citizens they represent, are up in arms over this latest “antisemitic” attack against the Jewish state.
There is so much propagandistic malarkey at play in this recent Israeli temper tantrum, it would be funny were it no so tragic.
Gideon Levy, columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, gives us the necessary perspective on this latest display of Zionist insanity. His article is titled “A Tempest in an Ice Cream Tub Revealed Some Truths to Israelis.” (All emphasis is mine):
If Ben & Jerry’s keeps to its word and pulls its product from the settlements in a year and a half (and there’s good reason to doubt it will, given the pressure expected from American Jews), I will start eating its ice cream. I will be able to enjoy a product that shows a little more caring, more involvement, more conscience and, above all, more decency.
Until then, one can only laugh at the summer frenzy that has broken out and will disappear when the next storm of vanity emerges. Do Israelis now need to boycott the ice cream to protest the company’s decision? Or should we buy more in a show of support for the patriotic local franchisee, who will continue selling in the settlements until its contract is up? Meanwhile, what we have is a tempest in a tub of ice cream that teaches us more about Israel than a thousand scholarly papers.
The Ben & Jerry’s affair has made Israelis happy. There aren’t a lot of things they love more than the appearance of an external threat. It brings us together, to wallow in the bitter fate that we of all peoples must face, to create a repulsive unity and groupthink, and to launch a bombastic counterattack, with the knee-jerk accusation of antisemitism for dessert.
When the franchisee of our beloved McDonald’s, Omri Padan, decided to boycott the territories, collective Israel shrieked a lot less. Why? Because Padan is a patriot who in no conceivable way can be tarred as an antisemite. He is untouchable. With an American company, it’s a lot easier.
Ice cream succeeded where the deaths of 67 children in Gaza failed – to remind Israelis of the occupation. Still, the madness remains: The occupation is a victim, the only victim. It boggles the mind that whenever someone dares remind Israelis that something is still wrong, the issue immediately becomes how Israel is the victim. Headlines, endless talk, and the only thing no one asks is – why?
Why would any reasonable person want to boycott Israel? Well, maybe because of the pressure exerted by BDS. Only because of such pressure. Otherwise, there’s no way an ice cream company might come to the conclusion on its own that it no longer wants to sweeten the lives of the settlers. There’s no chance of there being business people with values. It’s just the consequence of pressure. The mechanisms of repression and denial that Israeli society has developed won’t drink from the cup of Chubby Hubby. It’s society’s Iron Dome – it can’t be abandoned.
Therefore, the situation demands nothing less than a real boycott of Israel, of all Israelis, everywhere – a painful, costly, destructive one. Not a boycott-lite on the ice cream sold at the Rami Levy supermarket at the Etzion Junction, but one that all of Israel will feel in its pocket. Only one that can relieve Israel of its blindness and expose the lie it has been feeding itself for so many years.
Equally amazing is all the unity and groupthink that the affair has created. Suddenly, it has become clear that we’re all settlers. The Green Line has long ceased to exist. The Ben & Jerry’s affair has revealed that there’s no difference between the radical right and the left. Everyone is for the settlements. Everyone opposes their being harmed, even if it’s minor harm to the contents of their freezers.
But is it really so sudden? Yair Lapid talks about antisemitism and Economy and Industry Minister Orna Barbivai acts if she dreams of being Miri Regev when she grows up. Meanwhile, we can ask ourselves why we deserve ridiculous politicians like these and why no one has mustered the courage to thank Ben & Jerry’s for acting in their small way.
In any case, the step the company took is artificial: It’s no longer possible to separate the settlers and the rest of Israel. The tempest in the tub proves that.
We should praise the ice cream makers from Vermont: They won’t end the occupation – that’s not their job – but on a hot summer day they revealed a few truths to Israelis. Only one question remains for all reasonable Israelis to ask themselves: What would they think of an ice cream company that boycotted South Africa?
During the recent violence in Israel/Palestine, mob rule seemed to be the norm in many Israeli neighborhoods, especially after dark. Both Jews and Palestinians fell victim to racist attacks.
Israeli Jewish extremists wave Israeli flags amid a night time curfew in the central city of Lydd Oren ZivPicture AllianceDPA [Notice that the Jewish demonstrators are violating the curfew. Yet police are standing with them making no attempt to enforce the order.]Two days ago, the Electronic Intifada printed an extensively documented story about the Jewish mobs that were roaming the streets of Palestinian communities and assaulting residents.
The article, “‘Today we are Nazis,’ says member of Israeli Jewish extremist group,” was written by Ali Abunimah and Tamara Nassar. It includes extensive video evidence and other documentation verifying their claims.
Here is an excerpt:
Israeli Jewish extremists used instant messaging services to organize armed militias to attack Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Voice messages, texts and other communications indicate they coordinated attacks in cities where Palestinians live in close proximity to Jews – including Haifa, Bat Yam and Tiberias in the north, and Ramla and Lydd – Lod in Hebrew – in the center, to Beersheba in southern Israel.
Settlers from Jewish-only colonies in the occupied West Bank also joined the coordinated attacks, with the apparent knowledge and collusion of Israeli officials.
They communicated via WhatsApp and Telegram, as well as Facebook groups.
In many cases, extremist organizers said they relied on either the active or passive support of Israeli authorities.
Israeli research organizations Fake Reporter and HaBloc intercepted messages from some of those groups and reported what they found to Israeli police as a “ticking time-bomb.”
“It’s painful to know that despite our attempts, very little was actually done,” Fake Reporter said.
“No one in the authorities could claim that they did not know,” HaBloc said.
In screenshots from the groups posted by Fake Reporter, members talked about types of weapons and made plans for where to meet up in order to attack Palestinians and burn mosques. They engaged in virulent racism and incitement against Palestinians.
The messages were released in the context of recent attacks by extremist Jewish Israelis on Palestinians, their homes and businesses as Israel escalated its attacks on the occupied West Bank and Gaza over the last week.
“We are no longer Jews today,” one user wrote in a Telegram group titled “People from Holon, Bat Yam and Rishon Lezion go out to bring war.”
Chris Hedges has written an extensive article detailing Israel’s flagrant continuation of war crimes against the Palestinian people.
You can find the entire piece at SheerPost. I heartily recommend reading it in its entirety. Below is an excerpt. All emphases are mine:
Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising the right to defend itself. It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. . .
. . . The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises
Bombing in Gaza
including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.
I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.
I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas. . .
. . . Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.
This is the truth. Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie. . .
Let’s begin by watching a recent CBN (Christian Broadcast Network) report on the violence unfolding in Israel/Palestine. The reporter is Chris Mitchell who lives in Israel.
As far as I can tell, all the on-screen personnel at CBN are avid Christian Zionists, meaning that they believe Israel is God’s chosen nation now preparing the way for the second coming of Christ.
Let’s start by observing the major points in this report:
The current violence in Jerusalem begins with Hamas rockets launched at Israel from Gaza. Thus, Palestinians are the aggressors. Jews are only defending themselves.
Netanyahu warns the Palestinian “terrorists” that Israel will respond firmly and decisively in self-defense.
Mahmud Abbas (the West Bank leader of Fatah) is the instigator behind all the Palestinian “riots” in Jerusalem
Palestinian residents in Sheikh Jarrah are protesting their home evictions unreasonably because the original Jewish property owners had reached a generous compromise that was then rejected by Mr. Abbas.
Let’s take these points one at a time:
First, CBN adopts the standard storyline of explaining the issues according to something I call APR time. APR time means After Palestinians Respond. It’s as if the Palestinians simply woke up one morning and decided to riot and fire rockets in Israel, just for the fun of it.
Actually, the current violence has its roots in Israel’s unilateral decision, made several weeks ago, to close off the Damascus Gate entrance to the Old City during the Muslim period of Ramadan. The Damascus Gate is the main thoroughfare used by Palestinians going to pray at al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock during Ramadan.
Palestinians naturally took offense at this closure and challenged the decision in the streets. Events have escalated from there.
Second, Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been unable to form a new government since the recent national elections. As a right-wing politician, he knows that the easiest way to gather support is to rally people by fear-mongering over an alleged, national threat. American politicians do it all the time. In Israel, Palestinians serve as the standard, cardboard cutout for the state’s ever-present boogeyman.
Third, Mahmud Abbas is the leader of the Palestinian political party known as Fatah and the head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. Since the Oslo Accords, the PA has served as the West Bank wing of the Israeli security forces.
Abbas has no connection to the Hamas party in Gaza. In fact, Hamas considers the PA to be a traitorous organization given its cooperation with the Israeli military.
Mitchell’s claim that Abbas has somehow orchestrated the Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza is ludicrous. Here he reveals that he is not a journalist but a faithful propagandist for the Israeli government.
It is true that Abbas is a corrupt scoundrel who has postponed the West Bank elections. But there is no evidence that he can influence the Palestinians citizens of Israel to take up mass demonstrations to distract from his shenanigans in the West Bank.
That claim makes no sense. Palestinian Israelis cannot vote in the West Bank elections. They don’t have a dog in Abbas’s election fight. He has no influence over them and they have little to no regard for him.
Fourth, Mitchell’s attempt to explain the tensions raised by Palestinian evictions in Sheikh Jarrah is a complete fabrication. Once again, he shows that he works as a tool for the Israeli government. He is not a journalist.
Mr. Mitchell is merely repeating the public relations bulletin handed to him by the Israeli Ministry of Public Affairs.
I shared a document yesterday that explains the actual history of the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, and it has nothing to do with the foolishness repeated by Mr. Mitchell. You can read it here.
The CBN anchorman asks the question, “Why are we not hearing that story in the western media?” The implication is that this is “omission” yet another instance of the western, antisemitic conspiracy against Israel.
In fact, the reason this supposed story has not been mentioned by other western, news outlets is because it is complete balderdash; another Zionist myth fed to gullible, ignorant devotees of Israeli apartheid who will foolishly repeat it for American, Christian Zionist consumption.
Sadly, this fallacious, inaccurate reporting on Israel/Palestine is typical of the “news” made available on Christian broadcasting.
I strongly suggest that my readers not take it seriously. It is NOT a reliable source of accurate information about the world we live in.
Israel was the last successful colonial project taken on by the British Empire — THE western, colonial power par excellence. We cannot accurately understand what is happening in Israel/Palestine today until we grasp that point.
As in every project of settler colonialism throughout history, the native people must be replaced, eliminated, expelled, made to disappear.
When the natives resist, the colonizers justify their rampant land theft and brutalization of the indigenous people by labeling them as sub-human savages, blood thirsty brutes, terrorists who live only for violence.
This dehumanization of the native people frames the settlers’ ongoing attacks against the stubborn natives as justifiable acts of “self-defense.” Even ethnic cleansing is excusable as the noble act of brave pioneers paving the way for civilization.
Colonialism always creates conflict. But colonial conflicts are always asymmetrical. That is, one side is the conquering aggressor who comes with superior weapons and technology.
For my money, the colonial aggressor is always in the wrong.
The other side, the native side, is always the victim forced to act defensively, whose resistance against colonial aggression is turned against them as justification for another wave of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Remember Geronimo.
What is happening right now is Israel/Palestine is NOT another round in a long-standing “conflict” between Jews and Arabs.
That is the dominant framing chosen by Israel’s Jewish colonizers. It is the framing that gets all the air-time and publicity because Israel is the overpowering aggressor who holds all the power in a very, very asymmetrical relationship with the suppressed and occupied Palestinians.
The only accurate, historical framing for the violence occurring today in Jerusalem is to see that Israeli colonialism continues by force of arms.
Israel is still colonizing the West Bank; still working to eradicate “the natives.” Oh, how troublesome those pesky natives can be.
Palestinians, for their part, are still resisting their colonizers; still standing up against the most powerful military in the Middle East.
No, this is not a conflict. It is a bloody, grotesque anachronism.
An outpost of western colonialism in the Middle East, originally underwritten by a now defunct imperial empire, is still trying to use 19th century tactics in a 21st century world.
So far, the world has turned a blind eye to Israel’s colonial, ethnic cleansing industry. I hope and pray that that time is coming to an end.
Below is a good clip from Al Jazeera News giving a fairly balanced perspective on the recent attacks against Palestinian worshippers at the al-Aqsa mosque.
At the 6:47 mark, an interview begins with Ines Abdel Razek, the Advocacy Director for the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD). She does an excellent job of explaining what is happening today in Jerusalem and placing it in its proper context.
Today I am writing a series of posts about the tragic stream of events unfolding in Israel.
The Israeli government is in the process of evicting numerous Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem area called Sheikh Jarrah. East Jerusalem, including the Old City of Jerusalem, is part of the occupied West Bank.
The entire West Bank was captured and occupied by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967 — a war begun by Israel’s offensive attacks against Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
Ever since, Israel has persisted in violating International Law and the
A Palestinian woman reacts as she carries a toddler, while Jewish settlers move out the belongings of a Palestinian family from a house in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2009. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty)
Geneva Convention by a) forcing Palestinian residents from their homes, and b) encouraging Jewish settlers to move into Palestinian Occupied Territory.
These types of evictions have been happening for a long time all throughout Israel/Palestine. The Israeli government refers to the process as “Judaization.” That’s Israel’s term, not mine.
The Israeli government is justifying the Sheikh Jarrah evictions by claiming that these properties were originally owned by Jews prior to the war in 1948. So, they are only “reclaiming” Jewish property.
Imagine an Irish-American organization sending its “settlers” into what are now Jewish neighborhoods in New York City. They pass through the streets knocking on doors announcing, “This property used to be owned by Irish people. Get out.”
I would call that kind of behavior racist. The Jewish Defense League would call it antisemitic.
Can these displaced Palestinians return to their original homes and properties taken from them (or more likely demolished) by Jewish militias in 1948?
Of course not. They are Palestinians. They have no right of return. Only Jews can claim that “right” in Israel.
That’s what makes Israel an apartheid Jewish Supremacist State.
Several Palestinian rights organizations have submitted a “Joint Urgent
Israeli settlers in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah mock anti-settler demonstrators from the Palestinian home they have taken over. April 16, 2021. (Photo by Emmanuel DUNAND / AFP)
Appeal to the United Nations Special Procedures on Forced Evictions in East Jerusalem” to the UN. This proposal carefully documents the legal circumstances at play in right now in East Jerusalem.
It is important to understand this history because most US media outlets will never fill-in these blanks. I have posted an excerpt below.
I encourage you to read the entire document, complete with its abundant citations and corroborating documentation:
Since the forcible displacement of 85 per cent of the Palestinian population during the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 by Zionist settler-colonial forces, Israel designed and issued a series of discriminatory laws, policies, and practices, forming the foundation of its institutionalised regime of racial domination and oppression over the Palestinian people as a whole, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory, and Palestinian refugees and exiles abroad.
Israel has ensured the maintenance of its apartheid regime over the Palestinian people through its policies and practices, such as the strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people, including by denying Palestinian refugees and other persons displaced from their homes their inalienable right to return, and the appropriation of their homes, lands and property, coupled with the creation of a coercive environment designed to drive the ongoing transfer of Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. In occupied and illegally-annexed East Jerusalem, 15 Jerusalemite families totalling 37 households of around 195 Palestinians, residing in Karm Al-Ja’ouni area in Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood and Batn Al-Hawa neighbourhood in Silwan, are currently at imminent risk of forced eviction. Unlawfully applying Israeli domestic law to occupied territory, Israeli courts have ruled in favour of lawsuits undertaken by settler organisations to evict the 15 Palestinian families. Most of the families living in Karm Al-Ja’ouni area and Batn Al-Hawa neighbourhood, who are facing the threat of forced eviction, are refugees. . .
. . . To cement Palestinian dispossession and displacement in East Jerusalem, Israel enacted the Legal and Administrative Matters Law in 1970, which exclusively allows Israeli Jews to pursue claims to land and property ownership allegedly owned by Jews in East Jerusalem before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. In accordance with the 1970 Law, “assets of Jews” in East Jerusalem, which were managed by the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property until 1967, were transferred to the Israeli Custodian General within the Ministry of Justice. The Custodian General has the authority to release the properties to Israeli Jews who claim ownership, or claim that they inherited properties from before the establishment of the State of Israel, upon their request. Utilising the discriminatory aforementioned law, Jewish Trusts and Jewish entities with unclear legal status have secured land ownership in Batn Al-Hawa neighbourhood in Silwan and Karm AlJa’ouni area in Sheikh Jarrah by the Custodian General. Later, these Jewish Trusts and entities sold their ownership rights or transferred their management to settler organisations, which do not have ties to the original alleged Jewish owners. In turn, the settler organisations, which envision further settlement expansion in occupied and illegally-annexed East Jerusalem, have been filing eviction lawsuits against Palestinians in Israeli courts.
You can read the entire document now before the United Nations here.
Not long ago I was invited to participate in an online webinar happening May 18th, 12:00 pm (Eastern Time) sponsored by the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME).
The discussion will focus on the different ways Americans and Israelis view themselves as “exceptional nations,” both fulfilling a unique, divinely ordained mission to world history.
The presidency of Donald Trump gave voice to evangelicalism’s (i.e., conservative Christianity’s) bellicose commitment to both Christian Nationalism (the belief that America is a Christian nation) and Christian Zionism (the belief that Christians must support the state of Israel).
Israel puts itself at the center of Jewish Nationalism.
How do these political beliefs relate to each other?
What does the Bible say about such things?
How should the Christian church relate to Israel and its continuing conflict with the Palestinian people?
I will share this conversation with Lisa Sharon Harper (founder and president of Freedom Road) and L. Daniel Hawk (Ashland Theological Seminary).
I hope you will join us for what, I am convinced, will be a fascinating conversation. For those who can’t make it, the webinar will be recorded and made available at the NEME website.
Dr. Rob Dalrymple and Vinnie Angelo both host the DetermineTruth podcast available at Patheos, an evangelical platform for a variety of religious blogs and websites.
families from their homes in the East Jerusalem area called Sheikh Jarrah. East Jerusalem, including the Old City of Jerusalem, is part of the occupied West Bank.
Imagine an Irish-American organization sending its “settlers” into what are now Jewish neighborhoods in New York City. They pass through the streets knocking on doors announcing, “This property used to be owned by Irish people. Get out.”
with the Palestinian people?