A Blog from David Crump
Regular subscribers will recognize Jonathan Kuttab. I have recently posted several interviews featuring my friend.
Here is another where Mr. Kuttab, who was educated partly in America, discusses the errors of evangelical, Christian Zionism and its contributions to the violence in Gaza and the West Bank.
Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac is a professor at Bethlehem Bible College as well as the pastor at the bethlehem Lutheran Christmas church. Terry and I often worship at this church whenever we are in the West Bank.
Pastor Isaac understands that now is the time for a prophetic word addressed to the western church. He declares hard truths powerfully.
He is a Christian leader speaking to his fellow believers in the western Church — a Church that largely approves of Israel’s current campaign of destruction against his people. How can this be?
Our only proper response is repentance.
President Biden recently condemned Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza. Israel’s defenders reply by insisting that Israel’s bombs are carefully calculated to hit only designated targets; there is nothing indiscriminate about them.
A recent investigation by journalists at +972 magazine now explains how to resolve this seeming contradition. The massive bombing campaign is not indiscriminate. It only looks that way because of a new Israeli computer program linked to artifcial intelligence.
The new AI program can isolate a vast array of possible targets within seconds and send misssles to each of them. As a result, the massive levels of damage caused by Israel’s bombing campaign is not only deliberate but well calculated.
It is precision bombing on a massive scale.
The Israeli military has so much confidence in this new AI killing program that it has been labeled “The Gospel” — a most repulsive, ghoulism blasphemy, in my view.
Below are selected excerpts from the article written by Yuval Abraham. It is titled “‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombmg of Gaza.” (All emphasis is mine):
The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.
. . . has seen the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (“matarot otzem”).
The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it.
Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.
In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.
“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
Give special attention to Israel’s bizarre rationale for excusing this murderous behavior. Israel is “not like Hamas,” we are told, because Israel deliberately targets civilians; knows exactly how many civilians will end up as ‘collateral damage’; and so is killing massive numbers of innocent men, women and children knowingly, intentionally.
And this makes Israel superior to Hamas?
Really?
Here we have a good illustration of how the arrogance of privileged power-brokers can scorch the conscience, twist our sense of right and wrong, and rationalize even the most ludicrously cruel, murderous calculations.
Read the entire article here.
What would I have done?
That’s the common question we usually ask ourselves when watching a movie like “Schindler’s List,” the academy award winning film about one man’s efforts to rescue Jews from Hilter’s gas chambers.
Schindler risked his life to save others. And he was not the only one.
Others such as the Dutch woman, Corrie Ten Boom, broke the law by hiding Jews inside their homes, risking their freedom while trying to rescue people like Anne Frank, who hid in her neighbor’s attic.
Even though the majority of German church pastors supported the Nazi regime, there was a small minority of faithful ministers of the gospel who eventually lost their freedom because they would not remain silent in the face of Nazi criminality.
Books like Defying Hitler tell the stories of the many ways in which ordinary people in Nazi Germany said No, refusing to march with the majority who refused to speak up or to act out against the wanton atrocities unfolding around them.
Which, again, raises the question, What would I have done?
Would I have remained inactive and silent? Or would I have spoken up, protested, or used whatever means I had at my disposal to work against the genocide and save whomever I could?
Now we all know the answers to those questions. We don’t have to wait any longer.
We are living in a unique moment of history. For a real genocide, a horrendous program of ethnic cleansing is now occuring before our eyes.
Though the American/Western mainstream media gives it all scant attention, anyone with a wider bandwidth of human interest can watch the scandalous, ugly images of daily attrocities as they unfold in real time.
Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, The Electronic Intifada, The Gray Zone, and the Katie Halper Show (among others) are thankfully offering the news coverage that corporate America does not want us to see.
And that news is shockingly repetitious. For what Israel is now doing in Gaza and the West Bank “is a textbook case of genocide.” Those are not my words but the words of Craig Mokhiber, formerly the Director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights.
Mr. Mokhiber is the former director because he recently resigned from his position at the United Nations over its efforts to censor his reports on Israel’s attrocities in Gaza.
As a result, Mokhiber ranks among the heroes with Mr. Schindler and Corrie Ten Boom for doing what he could to speak out, protest, and even to hinder the genocide unfolding before our eyes.
He has shown us how he answers the question, “What would I have done?”
It is all too easy to cast ourselves as heroes in our own imaginations, especially when we have no contemporary circumstances to offer us an immediate heroic option.
So, I always imagine myself the hero. But today I do not need to imagine anything. I can face the evidence squarely by looking at my actions today.
What am I doing today to protest, to act, to work against the textbook case of genocide now being written in the pages of modern history with Palestinian blood?
This is the answer for both you and me.
If I am doing nothing to defend Palestinian life today, then that’s what I would have done to defend Anne Frank — nothing.
If I am doing nothing to protest the genocide now occurring in Gaza, then I would have remained silent as I inhaled the stench of Auschwitz.
We can all go to bed tonight knowing that we have answered the perpetually troubling moral question: What would I have done?
Can you still sleep well?
Khan Younis is a city in Southern Gaza. This former member of the Israeli Knesset is openly calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza on Israeli national news.
Independent journalist Ben Norton has compiled a litany of statements made by Israeli leaders, both political and military, loudly proclaiming their goals for ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
They make no bones about it. Israel’s final objective is to eradicate all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Carpet bombing the people is a piece of their strategy.
And they are accomplishing their goals. Thus far, 1.5 million people have been displaced. Over 11,000 have been killed; 4,500 of them children; over 20,000 are missing.
The USA and other western powers remain silent.
Mr. Beinart was once a staunch Jewish Zionist — read his book The Crisis of Zionism.
More recently, he has changed his mind. Now he strongly advocates for Palestinian human rights and an end to the Occupation.
Today he was interviewed by Amy Goodman at Democracy Now where he criticizes Israel’s slaughter of innocent Palestinians. Take a listen:
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
Last October 19th Jewish-Israeli historian Ilan Pappe gave a lecture at the Berkley Law School explaining the historical background to the October 7 attack by Hamas as well as the ongoing bombing of Gaza.
Professor Pappe has devoted his entire career to studying the history of his country and the effects of Zionism. He is a world-renowned authority on these subjects. He is also as much a prophet as he is an academic.
An historian with a heart and a conscience is the best sort to learn from in my view.
The video is one hour and a half long. If you don’t have time or inclination to listen to it all, I suggest beginning at the 20 minute mark where he begins to speak specifically about the current cirumstances.
Please, enjoy, listen and learn.
