Tag: Christian Zionism

Palestinians Suffer Every Single Day Under Israeli Occupation

  • As often as we can afford it, Terry and I travel to Israel/Palestine in order to live with friends in the Aida refugee camp, located on the outskirts of Bethlehem.  Our main focus involves volunteer work in a local, Palestinian community center.  I have also done educational research when I was teaching at Calvin College.  We always try to document and participate in some of the local protests against the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian communities.

In the summer of 2014, our stay coincided with the tragic kidnapping and murder of three Israel, Jewish teenagers.  We witnessed some of the effects of Operation Brother’s Keeper, the Israeli military response to the kidnappings, an exercise in massive, indiscriminate collective punishment throughout the West Bank.

I gave this talk, complete with illustrative Power Point slides and video, at Calvin College in February, 2015.  The MC introduces me at the 5:48 minute mark. I begin to speak at 9:15.

I hope that, if you haven’t already, you will take the time to listen and then, perhaps, pray for the plight of the Palestinian people.

Israeli Sniper Films Target Practice on Young Palestinian

The short video speaks for itself.

Military training typically indoctrinates soldiers into dehumanizing the “enemy.”  Yet, even if that could be justified (which a Christian conscience forbids), what is happening now in Gaza is not a military conflict.

The target is an unarmed young man posing no threat whatsoever to the soldiers.  He carries no weapon, not even a raised fist.  This is not a battle; it is an execution.

The victim’s only crime was being Palestinian.  For that infraction, he had been tried, convicted and sentenced long ago.

His only provocation was objecting to an insufferable occupation that has denied him of every human right.  Yet, his presence at the Gazan protests demonstrates that he had not surrendered himself to Israel’s dehumanizing demands.

So Israel terminated  him for insubordination.  Holding one’s head up is an act of terrorism in Israel, if you are a Palestinian.

Israel’s Zionist policies had worked at dehumanizing this young man all of his life.  He was defined as Israel’s enemy the day he was born, not by his parents, mind you, but by Israel itself.

The sniper’s outburst of joy and laughter demonstrates who has truly been dehumanized by a lifetime of Zionist indoctrination.

What further proof is necessary to show that the American, evangelical love affair with modern Israel is a twisted relationship that must end?  If pious Bible-believers do not see this execution and recoil with shame, then how hard have out hearts become?

Persistently saying, No, to the Holy Spirit leads us into an ever-darker place where conscience eventually dies, “as if it were seared with a hot iron” (1 Timothy 4:2).

Gaza Is the Latest Evidence of Christian Zionism’s Inhumanity #christianzionism

The killing of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza continues unabated.

As of today, the death toll has risen to 31, including at least 1 journalist wearing a vest emblazoned with the word “PRESS.”  6 journalists in all have been shot. The numbers of people wounded by live ammunition is now in the thousands.

Children are counted among the dead.

Reporting on the journalist’s death, today’s AP says:

 “Witnesses said Murtaja was over 100 meters (yards) from the border, wearing a flak jacket marked “press” and holding his camera when he was shot in an exposed area just below the armpit.

 “The Israeli military has said it fired only at ‘instigators’ involved in attacks on soldiers and was investigating Murtaja’s death amid a very hectic environment.”

A reporter armed only with a video camera “instigating attacks” on soldiers safely sequestered behind barriers and a fence 100 yards away?

The journalist Glenn Greenwald puts it best (watch the interview here):

“I think it’s just time to acknowledge and accept the reality of what Israel is…And even people who once believed that [Israel was a democracy] are now starting to come and see that Israel is an apartheid, rogue, terrorist state.”

Israel long ago slipped down the rabbit hole with Alice and the Mad Hatter.  Now Israel wants the rest of the watching world to follow suit.  Eat Israel’s magic mushroom, listen only to the official press releases and repeat Israeli propaganda.

All Palestinians are, by definition, terrorists.  As Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said:

“There are no innocent people in the Gaza strip.”

“From the standpoint of the Israeli soldiers, they did what had to be done. I think that all of our troops deserve a commendation…”

American politicians and the mainstream media all remain silent, or nonchalantly mimic Israeli press releases.  Bernie Sanders is still the only member of Congress to speak out and condemn the mass slaughter now occurring (here, here and elsewhere).

US news outlets are obsessed with Stormy Daniels but have nothing to say about Gaza.

Our government has expelled 60+ Russian diplomats, on the flimsiest of evidence, but refuses to criticize Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza.

And where is the Christian church in this mix?  Where is the so-called pro-life movement?  Where is the voice of Christian conscience?

The church is nowhere to be found.  We have eaten too many of Israel’s magic mushrooms.

Evangelicalism remains silent, too busy groveling at the feet of its Republican idols to look up and notice the criminality of America’s tacit complicity in Israel’s crimes.

But the most powerful force behind this evangelical silence is not politics, not even politics veiled beneath religious conviction.  No.  The grotesque force holding its hand over the mouth of most evangelicals is the depraved theology of Christian Zionism.

A theology of Israeli privilege that overshadows and negates all competing ethical concerns.  A theology that baptizes genocide as the approved work of God.  A theology – that is really an IDEOLOGY – as effectively racist towards Palestinians as the political Zionism animating the monstrously perverse Middle Eastern beast once known as Israel.

American evangelicalism will one day be held to account.

Just as the largest part of the American church will be held to account for approving slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, Jim Crow and its indifference to the poor, so too will our Eternal Judge ask us all, “Why did you not lament, and work to change, the fate of your Palestinian brothers and sisters?”

I encourage everyone to call one of Bernie Sanders’ office numbers.  Thank him for protesting the killings in Gaza.  Ask him to remain vigilant, not to give up, to enlist others to his cause, and to continue to speak up for Palestinian lives.

Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Dead or in Prison.

Thomas Friedman, among others, once suggested that the long-awaited solution to Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian people could be found in a Gandhi-esque mass movement of Palestinian non-violent resistance.

In a 2002 New York Times editorial entitled “Waiting for Gandhi on the West Bank,” penned during the First Intifada, Friedman opined:

“…the Palestinians have long had a tactical alternative to suicide: non-violent resistance à la Gandhi. A non-violent Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian state 30 years ago”

In July 2010, the New York Times editorialist Nicholas Kristof offered similar advice:

“…imagine if Palestinians stopped the rock-throwing and put female pacifists in the lead.  What if 1,000 women sat down peacefully on a road to block access to an illegal Jewish settlement built on Palestinian farmland? What if the women allowed themselves to be tear-gassed, beaten and arrested without a single rock being thrown? Those images would be on televisions around the world – particularly if hundreds more women marched in to replace those hauled away.”

I can’t help but notice how easy it is for Kristof to volunteer someone else’s grandmother – in the case of Palestine, thousands of mothers and grandmothers – for a good gassing, beating, arrest and sentencing to a brutal, Israeli military prison.

I find it especially curious that, since both Friedman and Kristof clearly imply that the Palestinians deserve a peaceable resolution to The Occupation, neither of them has the guts to criticize (much less condemn) Israel’s draconian policies towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

A Palestinian stands on his property overlooking the Israeli settlement Har Homa, West Bank, February 18, 2011. U.S. President Barack Obama called Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas…in an attempt to prevent the upcoming vote on an United Nations resolution condemning Israeli settlements. UPI/Debbie Hill

Kristof even acknowledges, whether accidentally or not, that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law.  Yet, he does not propose the obvious solution of dismantling these illegal settlements which steal Palestinian resources on a daily basis.

Mr. Kristof thinks it better to imagine thousands of pacifist, Palestinian grandmothers battered by tear-gas canisters and hauled off to a military prison.  My apologies, I cannot help but wonder if Mr. Kristof’s Freudian slip is showing?  Was he secretly grinning when he wrote that sentence?

Furthermore, both writers seem to agree that continued rock-throwing – yes, that most horrid of all destructive terrorist tactics, rock-throwing…by women and children, no less! – poses an insuperable obstacle to Israel’s acceptance of Palestinian demands for peace in their own territory.

Imagine what peace might be had in the Promised Land already if only those Palestinian protesters had shown the bravery needed to surrender their rocks!  One can only wonder.

However, if the current blood-letting in Gaza teaches us anything, it is that the majority of Israeli citizens today have no conscience.  At least, not when it concerns the Palestinians.  There is no moral “silent majority” waiting to “deliver a Palestinian state” if only rabid Palestinian miscreants would get their non-violent house in order.

As the journalist Gideon Levy writes in today’s edition of Haaretz (4/5/18):

“In Gaza, Israeli army snipers shot unarmed demonstrators as if they were on a shooting range, to a chorus of rejoicing by the media and the masses…This is what the nation wants and this is what it will get. Even if soldiers kill hundreds of demonstrators in Gaza, Israel will not bat an eyelid. The reason: evil and hatred of Arabs. Gaza is never perceived as it really is, a place inhabited by people, an enormous and terrible prison, a huge site of human experimentation. Most Israelis, who — just like their prime minister — have never spoken to a single Gazan, only know that the Gaza Strip is a nest of terrorists. That’s why it’s OK to shoot them. Shocking? Yes, but true.”

Will the likes of Friedman and Kristof now recant?

Will they and their pro-Zionist brethren finally admit that, as long as Israel retains the unquestioning support of the world’s only super-power, no Palestinian strategy for gaining their human rights, liberty and civic freedoms will every prove effective? No sort of resistance will ever be tolerated?

Will they recognize that political Zionism finally has drowned the last vestiges of Israeli conscience and humanitarian spirit in the brackish waters of Jewish nationalism, synonymous with systematic, unapologetic racism?

The entire world is now witnessing what happens when massive, non-violent protests confront the military force of an ethnocracy, rooted in a commitment to purity-of-blood, defending its founding ideology of racial privilege.

Historical discussions on the effectiveness of non-violent movements, of course, usually focus on Gandhi’s confrontation of British rule in India. Gandhi has become the icon of pacifistic civil disobedience, especially as he led the people’s Salt March in 1930.

Cynics, however, have typically responded to pro-Gandhi idealists by pointing out the humanitarian bent of the British Empire (grossly exaggerated, by the way).  They then pose an alternative scenario:

What if Gandhi and his followers had confronted Nazi Germany rather than Great Britain?  How effective would Gandhi’s mass-pacifism have been once the Indian people were staring down the barrels of German machine guns enforcing Nazi racial doctrine?

Well, the world no longer needs to wonder about history’s answer to that cynical, hypothetical question.  The answer is no longer hypothetical.  The answer is real and obvious for all to see in the blood-stained no-man’s land surrounding a place called Gaza.

Israeli soldiers are shooting down innocent, unarmed, non-violent – oh yes, I forgot, a very, very few do threaten Israeli peace of mind with their occasional stone-throwing – men and women for no other reason than that they are Palestinians marching for their freedom.

Have you yet seen the video footage of the elderly Palestinian grandmother who decides to enact Kristof’s dream scenario?

Holding a Palestinian flag in her wrinkled hand, she ambles slowly toward the separation fence.  Israeli soldiers, undoubtedly terrorized by this slow-motion charge of an elderly woman, seemingly intent on climbing over the 10-foot fence and beating them to death with her small flag stick, shot her dead while she was still dozens of yards away.

Her knees buckle as a crowd of young people run to help her (watch the first 17 seconds). She falls to the ground and disappears, flag and all, into the green grass.

I wonder what Mr. Kristof has to say now?

Under Israel’s vigilant gaze, every Palestinian commits an unforgivable sin when she will not lay down and play dead.  If you don’t play dead, an Israeli soldier will make you dead.

Palestinians with enough hubris to stand up and insist that they, too, are human beings will quickly be cut down to size.  Including the old women.

The world is now witnessing a demonstration of how those who have been abused assimilate themselves to their abuser.  The victims of the Holocaust have perfected their own brand of genocide rooted in their own doctrine of racial superiority.

Where Palestinian Lives Don’t Matter

17 dead.  773 wounded, or is it 1,400?  How many more victims will there be this week, or in the weeks ahead as Palestinians continue their Land Day protests?

Every victim shot with live ammunition.  Bullets fired at unarmed people standing dozens, if not hundreds, of yards away from the soldiers.  Unarmed marchers and high-powered rifles separated by a steel fence and a wide no-man’s land imposed from on high.

Over 100 snipers staring through high powered scopes.

Deadly shots fired into crowds kneeling in prayer, marching in protest.  Smoke and tear gas wafting through the air, encircling their heads, burning eyes, nose and throat like Hades’ own sulpherous fumes reminding them of hell on earth.

The army is proud, boasting that they know precisely where every bullet landed (a tweet since removed from Twitter). Each death a deliberate murder.  Every injury an intentional maiming.  Every wound a purposeful assault on the image of God.

The largest, most technically advanced military in the Middle East tries to convince us that young men with rocks, slingshots and burning tires pose an “existential threat” (as they say) to nuclear armed Israel.

Perhaps Israeli soldiers now fear deadly smoke inhalation from 100 yards away, as Palestinians cover their faces, sputter and gag against the hundreds of tear gas canisters raining down on their heads.

We are reminded that Palestinian lives don’t matter, not to Israel.

Nor do Palestinian lives matter to America, which once again seeks to block the U.N. resolution condemning the slaughter.  America, the lumbering moral Frankenstein, mesmerized by Israeli propaganda, suffers from a cauterized, national conscience seared like a piece of raw meat by a red-hot iron.

No.  Palestinian lives don’t matter to the United States, where Israeli lobbyists write US foreign policy in the Middle East.  Palestinians are inconvenient human fodder in need of bulldozing by Zionist racism and international neglect.

It is impossible for these Palestinian to make contact with the Israeli soldiers aiming at them from the opposite side of the fence.  Yet, these soldiers posture heroically while discussing the Palestinian “threat” they now mow down by bravely firing remote-controlled machine guns into the Gazan killing fields – the guns’ operators safely sitting many miles away in the Sinai desert.

It is like shooting fish in a barrel, except that these fish are human beings and the barrel is the Gaza Strip, a place that many observers have described as “the world’s largest open-air prison.”

Glenn Greenwald (one of the most important investigative journalists working today) asks a most revealing question, “Imagine if an Arab-majority country were imprisoning 1.8 million Jews in an open-air cage, preventing them from leaving, controlling all aspects of their deprived civic lives, then picking them off with snipers in the back when they protested. Might the reaction be different?”

What would the United States be saying to the United Nations then?

No, Palestinian lives don’t seem to matter, except to their Creator.

The Christian church knows that the Lord God Almighty cares deeply for the Palestinian people, as he does every human being.  And the Lord keeps score. He will not forget their suffering, come judgment day.

  • Please take a few minutes to watch Max Blumenthal – an investigative journalist who has spent a considerable amount of time in Gaza – describe what is happening now.
  • Also, read Gideon Levy’s article containing this lead: “The shooting on the Gaza border shows once again that the killing of Palestinian’s is accepted in Israel more lightly than the killing of mosquitoes.”

Zionist Settlers Attack Palestinian Farmers…Again

Gideon Levy is a brave and principled Israeli journalist.  For years his column in the daily newspaper Haaretz has been a near solitary voice documenting Zionist crimes and abuses against the Palestinian people.

Here is an excerpt from today’s column, “When Settlers Beat Palestinian Fathers in Front of Their Sons.”

“Raafat heard his father screaming in pain. He saw the Israeli draw close and hit his father in the head with his rifle butt, as he lay helpless at the foot of the hill. Raafat recognized the man from an attack the previous week, when he had also acted brutally. Jumaa urged his son to escape, so the thugs wouldn’t hurt him, too.”

I encourage you to read the entire piece and to check in on Mr. Levy’s work in Haaretz regularly, if possible.

Gideon Levy lives with personal bodyguards. He continues to write, travel and speak despite the regular death threats he receives from his fellow citizens.  While similar threats have driven other critics of Zionism from the country, Mr. Levy chooses to remain in Israel.

Gideon Levy is one of my heroes.

His is a prophetic, humane voice crying out for justice and love of neighbor in the midst of a racist Zionist nation, responsible for profligate state-sponsored violence, discrimination and bloodshed.

 

Israel Criminalizes Free Speech and Abuses Children

My friend, Munther Amira, is sitting in an Israeli prison cell.  His only crime: protesting to defend the rights of Palestinian children held in Israel’s military prisons.

Military courts, judges and prisons are the only options available to Palestinians in the West Bank because they live under military law and have no civil rights.

Modern Israel is a racist state, imposing a form of apartheid over the Palestinian people. The vast majority of Israelis do not care about the Palestinian children who are ripped from their families for the crime of throwing rocks at armored vehicles. Nor do they care when these children are crammed into over-crowded prison cells, having no idea when they might be allowed to return home.

But Munther cares.  So do I. And so should the church of Jesus Christ throughout the world.

Take a moment to watch this youtube video  from the independent journalist, Abby Martin, as Munther gives her a tour of his neighborhood in the Aida refugee camp.

Munther was arrested by Israeli soldiers on December 27th for the “crime” of walking down a Bethlehem street with a sign in his hands. He was marching peacefully with others who were protesting Israel’s habit of jailing Palestinian children such as Ahed Tamimi.

Hear Ahed describe her life under military occupation.  As a 16 year old advocate for Palestinian rights, Ahed had the audacity to slap the Israeli soldier who, just the day before, shot her cousin in the head.  She is now in prison, facing years of imprisonment.

Israel’s Minister of Education believes that the teenager  should receive a life-sentence.  A prominent Israeli journalist has advocated vigilante justice, saying, “In the case of girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark without witnesses or cameras.”

That’s the state of Israel for you.

My friend, Munther was sentenced to 6 months in prison and 5 years probation, for the “crime” of peacefully defending the rights of Palestinian children such as Ahed – while holding a sign with her picture on it, no less! – to be treated humanely and, most of all, justly.

I cannot think of a more noble cause. Yet, it is a cause that the United States and American evangelicalism/fundamentalism largely ignores.

At his sentencing hearing, Munther told the judge:

“[It] is my right to express and defend my people; I exercise this right in the territories of the Palestinian National Authority, and you are not responsible for me; I will not ask you to authorize me to express my point of view … I will not ask you for a permit.”

You can see why I like this man so much.  I am proud to call Munther my friend.

Munther’s cause is being supported by Amnesty International (USA), Amnesty International (UK), the International Federation of Social Workers – Human Rights Commission, the British Association of Social Workers and a number of other human rights organizations as well.

Munther’s daughter, a recent law school graduate, has written an article describing her father’s commitment to both non-violence and the continuing struggle for Palestinian equality.

Please sign the several petitions available through the links in this post demanding Munther’s immediate release.

Call your elected officials, telling them that American’s blind support for Israel’s human rights abuses must end.

Explain to anyone who will listen that Israel is a racist state that does not deserve American support, especially not the support of American Christians.