Rob Dalrymple has become a good friend of mine, so it was fun to do this interview with him. We began with a few technical difficulties, but it smooths out quickly.
We discuss several different but related topics: Palestinian life in the Occupied Territory of the West Bank; Christian Zionism and its relation to the modern state of Israel; the current war against Gaza; and the ethical demands for citizenship in the kingdom of God today.
I hope you find this conversation interesting, challenging and educational. I pray that it will move you to action in protesting the current war, calling for a ceasefire and negotiations.
Call you elected representatives and ask them to please demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Aida Refugee Camp is where Terry and I live when visiting the West Bank and Israel. It is filled with children.
Yesterday we received the following email informing us that one of these children had been murdered by Israeli soldiers.
As shocking as this story may be — and I hope it does shock you — I am sorry to say that its details are not unusual. We live in a cruel world where average, ordinary people commit horrible acts of cruelty every day.
Below is the email. (Emphasis is mine):
Dear friends,
This morning, just after fajr prayers, the seventeen-year-old Mohammed Ali Aziah from Aida camp was killed by an Israeli sniper. Mohammed, who was in his last year of high school, was shot when he was on the roof of his house to study. The occupation soldiers raided the camp, and placed snipers of rooftops and the watchtower next to the UNRWA school and clinic.
After Mohammed was shot in the chest, the occupation army prevented the Red Crescent ambulance from entering the camp, and instead moved Mohammed’s critically injured body near the great key of return. He had to wait there until the occupation authorities arrested him and took him away. Mohammed died from his injuries shortly after.
We are devastated by the senseless death of Mohammed, who was still a child and had a bright future ahead of him.
During the raid that killed Mohammed, five people from Aida camp were arrested, bringing the total of arrests from Aida and Al-Azza camp to 65. One of them is 32-year-old Hanin Al-Massaeed. She is the first woman who was arrested from our community, and we are worried about her well-being after worrying reports of physical violence against women in Israeli prisons.
Please keep calling out to politicians and institutions in your country to release Palestinian political prisoners, and end this injustice and suffering.
Best wishes, Anas Abu Srour Director of Aida Youth Center
In his latest article for Consortium News, veteran journalist Chris Hedges gets the story exactly right when describing Israel’s genocidal plans for
Chris Hedges
both Gaza and the West Bank.
When a sociopath like Bibi Netanyahu (and members of his coalition government) repeatedly tell you that he/they plan to murder you and steal your home, it’s best to take them at their word.
Below is an excerpt of the article titled “Israel’s Final Solution.”
I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States.
I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.
His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, whom Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine.
Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”
There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state.
“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”
The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israel’s crypto-fascists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. These Jewish extremists, which make up the ruling coaltion government, are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians are dying daily. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil.
Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged.
A leaked 10-page document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence dated Oct. 13 recommends the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
It is a grave mistake not to take the blood curdling calls for the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription. Netanyahu in a tweet, later removed, described the battle with Hamas as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”
These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem. They dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first two weeks of the assault to obliterate at least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units, according to the U.N. ‘s humanitarian office. They have no intention of being detoured, even by Washington.
“It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported.
“In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries,” the paper continued.
The goal is a “pure” Israel, cleansed of Palestinian contaminants. Gaza is to become a wasteland. The Palestinians in Gaza will be killed or forced into refugee camps over the border in Egypt.
Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque — the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army — to be demolished.
The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will be a Jewish version of Iran.
Journalist Nida Ibrahim describes and illustrates the escalating violence against Palestinians that is spreading throughout the West Bank, one of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
I understand that this video is being blocked when folks try to access it through this post.
Try this instead: Open your computer and place the following url address into your web brouser. Do not include the quotation marks at the beginning and end of the url address. I’ve only added those to prevent the video’s transfer into this post. Capich? The video should come up.
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efgSONavf90”
This video is grotesque. Here is my advisory warning.
To watch the video, click the link. It will take you to the YouTube page for viewing.
It shows severe violence, both in actions and language, directed against Palestinians by both Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
This is not unusual.
I apologize for the severe nature of the video. But I think it is important to see that this is real life for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
Today in episode four Rob Dalrymple interviews Saleem Anfous. Saleem is a Palestinian Christian who lives near Bethlehem in the West Bank. He works as a tourguide and describes what it is like to live under Israeli military occupation.
Notice how Saleem is not filled with hopelessness or despair. He is realistic. But his hope is in Jesus Christ.
Tonight Dr. Rob Dalrymple interviews another good friend of mine, Dr. Bruce Fisk. They discuss a wide range of issues, including the founding of modern Israel, the history of Hamas, and Christian Zionist beliefs in Israel’s “favored nation” status with God.
My good friend, Dr. Rob Dalrymple, is hosting a series of podcasts discussing the current Israeli war against Gaza.
Rob will host a number of informative guests over the next several weeks (including yours truly) discussing different dimensions of this ongoing conflict.
Today, Rob introduces the issues himself. He is a former pastor, the author of several books, has visited Israel/Palestine numerous times, and is deeply involved in Christian activism for peace in the Holy Land.
I encourage you to watch, listen, take notes, pray, respond and come back tomorrow for another installment.