The escalating violence instigated by the Israeli military in the West Bank continues unabated.
The numbers of dead, wounded, and arrested Palestinians far exceeds the number of Israeli civilians killed last week in Israel. But this is par for the course.
Israel’s vengeance against the undifferentiated “mass” of neighboring Palestinians always far exceeds the damage done by isolated acts of Palestinian violence.
God intended to curb the ancient urges for Israelite vengeance with his rule of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Modern Israel, however, has kicked that rule to the curb.
Israel now insists on a dead body for an eye, or five of their dead or injured for one of ours.
The two videos below are only a tiny portion of the many available reports that western, corporate media deliberately ignore.
I challenge you to ask yourself, How would you respond to such treatment?
The recent flurry of seemingly random shootings committed by Palestinian men in Israel has spurred a new wave of demands that Palestinian leaders “condemn these acts of terrorism” against innocent Israeli civilians.
Naturally, every Christian should certainly condemn these acts of violence and grieve with the victims’ families.
However, as I mention in my book, Like Birdsin a Cage, such attacks are extremely rare. Their rarity is especially noteworthy when we recall that millions of Palestinians are subjected to Israel’s state-sponsored terrorism on a daily basis throughout Gaza and the West Bank.
For those of us who follow this story, it is not unusual to read weekly accounts about Israeli soldiers demolishing Palestinian homes and property, cutting down family olive groves, or attacking, beating, arresting, and shooting Palestinian civilians, including children, women, and old men.
What amazes me about Palestinians in Israel/Palestine is how docile they remain in the face of Israel’s unrelieved terrorist campaign against them.
Below are excerpts from two recent pieces in Haaretz newspaper written by the Israeli journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy. Click on the titles to read the entire articles.
Hass and Levy speak for the small minority of Israeli Jews who faithfully cultivate a humanitarian conscience, seeing Palestinians as fellow human beings equal to themselves.
While the Palestinian public understands the attackers’ motives, the vast majority does not choose this path, which does not advance their cause, and has reservations about targeting civilians. But condemnation? Let Israelis first condemn the violence they exercise against Palestinians.
The three acts of murder-suicide perpetrated by four Palestinians — from both sides of the Green Line — in less than two weeks only highlight the absence of a leading political Palestinian body, employing a single, clear and unifying strategy. The attacks reflect internal divisions and the painful awareness of Palestinian weakness and inability to act in the face of Israel’s might. On the other hand, the fact that so few choose this route, despite its availability, indicates a broader political understanding that such attacks do not further the Palestinian cause.
The vast majority is voting with its feet: it knows that individual wolf attacks driven by despair or revenge have not, are not and will not achieve a thing. They won’t change the balance of power. The Palestinian public in the West Bank understands this without being thus directed from above, without open public discourse on the topic and while its political organizations, mainly those of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, are at their lowest point in terms of power and public confidence — and are in conflict and competition with one another more than ever before.
Every Palestinian, on both sides of the Green Line, has many reasons to wish that Israelis feel pain, because it’s they and not only their government that are responsible for the Palestinians’ predicament. It’s likely that this was the desire of the four suicide-murderers — regardless of their background, family circumstances or individual character. Israelis immediately know, since there is an entire apparatus disseminating such information, which attacker had been arrested previously, after which attack candy were handed out and next to which assailant’s house young people celebrated (with total disrespect for the family’s pain). But Israelis, on the whole, are not interested in the extent to which Israel, and they themselves, as its citizens, constantly and for many decades have been harming Palestinians, as individuals and as a people.
This huge gap between specific knowledge and willful lack of knowledge is sufficient to explain why the Palestinian public in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is indifferent to the recent attacks by individuals, whether committed by Israeli citizens or West Bank residents, and is not obeying Israeli demands to condemn the murders. What is noteworthy is not that the attackers have escaped the Shin Bet’s attention, but that despite their understanding for the assailants’ motives, the vast majority of Palestinians do not choose to take this route.
Thousands of Palestinians without a work permit openly enter Israel every day through the multiple gaps in the separation fence. This has been going on for years, with the full knowledge of the army and police. As everyone knows, there are ample weapons and ammunition among the Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank. These two facts could have engendered many more revenge attacks by individuals that could not be discovered in advance, both by Palestinian citizens of Israel and by West Bank residents. Even if copycats crop up in the coming weeks, like the screwdriver attack on Thursday, for Palestinians, the number of these attacks pales in comparison to the extent of the injustice Israel inflicts on them, and its systematic nature.
Every Palestinian has good reason to desire cracking the false normalcy enjoyed by Jewish citizens, who by and large ignore the fact that their state is acting tirelessly, day and night, to dispossess more Palestinians from their lands and their collective, historical rights as a people and society. In order to achieve this goal, Israel maintains a continuous regime of oppression.
Raad Hazem was born on Kaf Tet B’November, 1993 – November 29, the date of the 1947 United Nations vote to partition Mandatory Palestine. He was born into the hope of the Oslo Accords and grew up in the catastrophe of Operation Defensive Shield. He was nine when the Israeli tanks invaded his refugee camp, destroyed its center and killed 56 of its inhabitants. This boy saw in the streets bodies that could not be buried until the army left, tanks that crushed the homes and cars of residents whose lives were wretched and a bulldozer that flattened the camp and “turned it into Teddy Stadium” – the home field of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team, whose most vocal supporters are the notoriously anti-Arab La Familia group – as the digger’s driver bragged.
“Raad” means thunder in Arabic. On Thursday evening he sat on a bench on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street for 20 minutes before he stood up and began shooting at people around his age who were enjoying happy hour at Ilka Bar. In the picture that was posted later he looks handsome; in a different picture, in which he clutches two rifles, he appears enraged and frightening. Hazem killed Tomer Morad, a mechanical engineering student; Eytam Magini, a computer science, psychology and neuroscience student; and Barak Lufan, a former Olympic athlete and the head coach of Israel’s national kayak team. All of them, like him, were young men.
It’s hard to imagine better casting for this story. No one can know for sure what went through his head, but we can assume that Hazem wanted to live the lives of his victims. He didn’t have even the smallest chance. He, too, would have wanted to study neuroscience or mechanical engineering, or to coach kayaking. He too would have wanted a happy hour. He would have wanted to serve in the military, like them, maybe even in an elite unit whose members boast about it. But he was born into a reality from which it’s impossible to escape into the worlds of his victims on Dizengoff. He couldn’t even get to Dizengoff the direct way, imprisoned as he was in his refugee camp, prohibited from entering Israel. He probably never saw the sea, and certainly not a kayak. Instead, he saw soldiers invading his camp almost nightly, mistreating and humiliating its residents, and members of his parents’ generation fighting and dying with courage and determination that have become iconic. There is no place as militant, armed and brave as the Jenin refugee camp.
The bench on Dizengoff was removed by security forces after the attack, in order to collect physical evidence of the man who had sat on it, when he was still unknown. But no DNA analysis can tell his story, just as a thousand police officers couldn’t find him when he was on the adjoining street. Police, Border Police, Shin Bet security service, Sayeret Matkal, Shaldag, Yamam, Yasam, Lotar and all the other military forces will never extinguish the fire of this struggle. All of these organizations, which train for years for exactly this moment, whose budgets exceed those of the health and education systems together, are no match for one resolute descendant of refugees in the moment of truth.
It was a mirror image that could have been from a movie. Young people from the same country, sitting across from each other: the so-called stranger on the public bench, tense and agitated, facing locals in a bar on Thursday evening. In the days preceding the terrible night friends of the guys in the bar, soldiers and Border Policemen, killed five young people in his refugee camp, and now he sets out to kill them indiscriminately.
The people facing him are the characters he would like to be, with the life he would like to live, the freedom and the opportunities he too would like to have. He wants to make his existence known and say: If I don’t have that life, those rights, you who sit in the bar facing me will also never have them. That’s the whole story. On top of it one can build piles of intelligence and weapons, punishment and deterrence, theories about bloodthirstiness and moral judgment, about murder and killing, war plans, operations and fences. In the end, that’s the story. This and no other. Nothing can beat it.
The massacre of Palestinian villagers at Tantura in 1948 was one of many similar horrific, criminal acts committed by the Israeli military during the founding of modern Israel.
Professor Ilan Pappe
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has documented an additional thirty-one confirmed massacres of unarmed Palestinian civilians, including women and children, with the possibility of another six needing further investigation.
This video from the Middle East Eye focuses on the Tantura massacre. Pappe describes the Israeli killing spree in some detail in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, pages 133-137. As many as 230 villagers were executed at Tantura, lined up and shot in the back of the head.
Future Israeli Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, recently announced, “When I am prime minister, we still won’t hold negotiations with the Palestinians.”
In one sentence, Lapid brazenly let the proverbial cat out of the bag. For the truth is that Israel has never been an honest negotiating partner in the Palestinian/Israel peace process.
Israel’s Likud party, which has been the nation’s dominant political party since the time of Menachem Begin (Israel’s sixth Prime Minister, 1977 – 1983), has it written into its party platform that Israel’s eastern border must extend to the Jordan River denying any possibility of a Palestinian state.
You can read the Likud party platform here in an article by Jonathan Weiler. Items one and three in the platform declare:
a. “The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel.”
c. “The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.”
So much for all the gibberish we have heard over the decades about Israel’s willingness to “exchange land for peace.”
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy’s new article in Haaretz discusses the real world consequences of Israel’s historic hostility towards peace with the Palestinians. His piece is entitled “The Truth Will Set You Free.”
Below is an excerpt (all emphases are mine):
. . . This item [Lapid’s statement] didn’t make big headlines, which isn’t surprising, since there is nothing new here – aside from the spectacle of a minister telling the truth, if
Yair Lapid said he will not negotiate with the Palestinians when he is Prime Minister. Credit. Gil Eliyahu
only for a moment. Lapid deserves credit for revealing something that has long been known: There is no Israeli partner. No Israeli partner for ending the occupation, no Israeli partner for any solution, nor even an Israeli partner for negotiations. In truth, there never was, but now official Israel, for the first time in its history, is acknowledging as much. The explanation, as usual, comes from internal politics. “The coalition agreements prevent progress in this channel,” the prime-minister-in-waiting explained. . .
If an Israeli foreign minister had said something like this years ago, the sky would have fallen. No negotiations? None? The Americans would have issued condemnations, the Europeans would have been furious, the UN would have passed a resolution, Labor and Meretz would have threatened to quit the government. But now – no one bats an eyelid.
Lapid spared us all of that. He announced the end to the peace process ritual that has facilitated the many years of occupation. No one really thinks that Israel will get a more moderate government than this one in the coming years, and anyway the 50 years of moderate peace governments should have been enough to make us see that there is no one to talk to in Israel, no matter who is in power. Lapid is advancing one small but important step towards recognition of this fact. Now it needs to really sink in: There will be no solution, definitely not a two-state solution.
The possibility that the Palestinians will be doomed to another hundred years of apartheid cannot be dismissed. In fact, it is the most likely possibility. For who is going to extricate them from this apartheid, and how exactly can they extricate themselves from it? They’ve tried everything already. Now they at least understand, and the world too, that there is no chance of them having a partner, because Israel has coalition agreements.
The Americans won’t keep bugging us with their special envoys, the Europeans won’t keep issuing hollow statements of condemnation, nor will the UN, and the Quartet will die too. World leaders will no longer have to waste their time and honor on pointless talks about the Palestinian issue; for there’s no one to talk to about that in Israel. . .
For anyone is interested in learning more about the reality of past “peace negotiations” and the dishonest coverage they receive in western media, here are a few good books to read:
Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo.
Naseer H. Aruri, Dishonest Broker: The U.S. Role in Israel and Palestine.
Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East.
Clayton E. Swisher, The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process.
Zalman Amit and Daphna Levit, Israeli Rejectionism: A Hidden Agenda in the Middle East Peace Process.
Perhaps you are aware that the Israeli government recently accused six Palestinian humanitarian organizations in Israel of providing money-laundering services for terrorist organizations.
Naturally, the official announcement offered no substantiating evidence but promised to produce it later.
Well, now we have it.
As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, the “evidence” presented to the US Congress has nothing to do with the six organizations in question but a seventh, entirely different group all together!
The Shin Bet representative tasked with briefing U.S. Congress on Israel’s designation of six Palestinian civil society NGOs as terrorist groups presented evidence on an unrelated organization.
The document had previously been presented to European diplomats in May in an attempt to convince them to stop funding the organizations. Sources who were shown it at the time said it did not convince them. According to sources, additional evidence was presented to the U.S. State Department and other officials with higher security clearances.
The document discusses a total of seven organizations: Six are the civil society organizations that Defense Minister Benny Gantz designated as terrorist organizations last week. The seventh, the Health Workers Committee, was designated as an unauthorized organization affiliated with the PFLP in January 2020.
The Health Workers Committee is at the center of a trial in an Israeli military court that will begin in a few days. Israel is charging four of their employees with membership in the PFLP and inflating receipts to divert donor money for the organization’s benefit.
Israel acted against the groups because they have been giving information to the International Criminal Court– whose prosecutor began a criminal investigation of Israel this year under a complaint filed by Palestine five years ago.
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 asJesus 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.
Ido Efrati has an important article about “long haul covid” in young children in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Please, don’t listen to the anti-vaxers and anti-mask folks who continue to spread dangerous misinformation about young children being immune, or only susceptible to a very mild form of covid-19.
At the “long COVID” clinic at Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikva, about 150 children are being treated, but several hundred more are on a waiting list. “Demand is high and the wait is more than half a year, because we monitor and test everything for each patient,” says Dr. Liat Ashkenazi-Hoffnung, an infectious-disease specialist.
The clinic began operating in November, several months after similar clinics were opened for adults. The symptoms the doctors see are varied, from shortness of breath (the most common complaint), muscle pain, headaches, fatigue, disordered sleep, chest pain, hair loss, and digestive disorders, to the loss of taste and smell, weight loss, difficulty concentrating, memory loss and the exacerbation of tics in children who suffered from them previously. About 60 percent report reduced daily functioning because of the symptoms.
“What’s interesting, is that in some of the children, it really appears as a direct continuation of severe illness but in very many of the children, there is a severe illness, followed by a lull of several months and only then do the symptoms of long COVID begin,” says Ashkenazi-Hoffnung.
According to her, the persistence of the symptoms varies. “There are children for whom it takes half a year or more. For example, we had a boy here who was a competitive swimmer and came down with long COVID and was very anxious and in pain. After half a year he went back to swimming and even broke a personal record.”
However, she also says that there are “a few children here who, a year after the illness, haven’t recovered, and they have symptoms that are affecting their day-to-day functioning. There are cases in which it lasts for more than a year.”
. . . Another phenomenon, which was first reported in April of 2020 is multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, of which about 100 cases have been reported in Israel. The syndrome usually appears eight to ten weeks after the illness, even among children who had light cases. It starts out as stomach aches, a rash and a fever and can develop into life-threatening damage to the heart. It requires hospitalization, and in most cases cardiac damage remains after recovery. . .
A prepublication ordering page is now available at the Wipf & Stock website for my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People.
I hope that you will check it out and seriously consider buying a copy so that you can inform your Christian friends, and others, about the serious mistake the American church makes by endorsing Israel’s behavior in the Middle East.
You can place your orders (because I understand that everyone will want to place multiple orders for friends and relatives. Ha!) by clicking HERE.
Unfortunately, the fellow in charge of cover design has been very ill for some time, but whatever he eventually comes up with will be inserted into the order page.
Below is the description I wrote for the publisher’s advertising purposes:
When Christians collude in crimes against humanity, they betray their citizenship in the kingdom of God, demonstrating that Christ’s Lordship does not rule over every area of their lives. The popular ideology known as Christian Zionism is a prime enabler of such widespread discipleship–failure in western Christianity. As the state of Israel continues to violate international law with colonial settlement in lands captured by warfare, legalized racial discrimination, and the creation of what many have called “the world’s largest open-air prison” in Gaza, Christian Zionists continue their unqualified support for Zionist Israel. Though Israel advertises itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” it is actually a rigid ethnocracy–its entire society built on the foundations of Jewish supremacy over a Palestinian underclass. History will eventually judge Christian Zionist support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians in the same way people of conscience now condemn the Christian church in the American South for its defense of slavery and hostility towards the civil rights movement. Just as the Southern Baptist church finally repudiated its pro-slavery past, so everyone genuinely devoted to Jesus Christ must repudiate both the ideology and the legacy of Christian Zionism.
The modern state of Israel was founded upon ethnic cleansing.
750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by a Jewish military that freely committed war crimes just as every invading army has violated civilian populations throughout history.
Below is a video telling the story of only one Palestinian family whose home was recently demolished in order to make way for Jewish settlers.
Zionist ethnic cleansing has never ceased, not since it began in 1947.
The Israeli government refers to the process as “Judaization,” that is the replacement of native Palestinians with Jewish settlers.
It is also referred to as “redeeming the land.” For political Zionism, redemption is not God’s business. It is Jewish Zionist business. And it is accomplished by ridding the land of the pollution created by Palestinians.
I could post several such videos and articles every dayand never run out of new material exposing the ongoing injustices of Israeli political Zionism.
So, here again is a new, representative story I have selected out of many, many possibilities this week alone.
Watch it and ask yourself, as well as your elected representatives, is this why the US subsidizes Israel to the tune of nearly $4 billion each year????
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.
However, as I mention in my book, 
So place your orders now (please!) and share what you learn with your family and friends. 
Dr. Rob Dalrymple and Vinnie Angelo both host the 
