A Blog from David Crump
Bruce and Alessandra are both friends of mine. Bruce is a retired New Testament professor. His wife, Alessandra is a Palestinian. Together they make a formidable team explaining the ins and outs of the dire situation in Gaza and Israel.
They recently gave a seminar to an East coast church. It’s 90 minutes long but well worth every minute:
Over 1,500 Israeli anti-apartheid activists have signed a petition accusing Israel’s political and military leadership of committing war crimes in Gaza.
Jessica Corbett’s article appears in Common Dreams. Below is an excerpt:
Israelis Against Apartheid, a group representing more than 1,500 citizens, this week urged the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor “to take accelerated action against the escalating Israeli war crimes and genocide of the Palestinian people” in Gaza.
“For the safety and future in the region, all elements of international law must be enforced and war crimes should be investigated,” declares the letter to the ICC’s Karim A. A. Khan, noting his ongoing Palestine investigation and recent remarks on the war.
The letter, dated Thursday, explains that “as Israeli anti-colonial activists, we have joined our voices to the voices of Palestinians for decades warning on the dangerous course of action pursued by the Israeli state and repeatedly called for international intervention.”
“Persistent impunity has created the conditions for the consolidation of the Israeli apartheid regime, which is intent on committing ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Indigenous Palestinian population,” the letter continues. “The acute deterioration in basic conditions of life that we are now witnessing could have been avoided if Israel had not been continuously granted impunity for its ongoing crimes.”
You can read the entire article here.
Daniel Levy worked as a peace negotiator for Israel in the days when such negotiations were taking place.
Here are two short clips where Mr. Levy expresses a few hard truths about Israel/Palestine.
Ms. Iversen not only describes what she saw in the Occupied Territory, she also reads the moving descriptions of Palestinian suffering posted by others.
Palestinians are human beings too.
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.
Dr. Gary Burge is another good friend of mine. He is a well-known New Testament scholar and author of numerous books and commentaries. Gary has worked and traveled widely throughout the Middle East, including Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
In this interview, Gary discusses the circumstances leading up the Hamas’ October 7 attack.
He also answers various biblical and theological questions about “Israel’s right to control the land.”
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.
Check it out. It will be well worth your time.
For some time now I have particiated in an informal discussion group consisting of a mix of Christian Zionists and non-Zionists, such as myself.
The group is largely composed of academics from around the world. We meet by Zoom calls one per month to talk across the theological chasm that separates us on the question of modern Israel and Palestine.
Christian Zionists believe that Israel remains God’s chosen nation; that occupation of the land is an essential precondition to the return of Christ; and that political loyalty to Israel is a necessary value for faithful Christians to uphold.
I, and my fellow non-Zionists, do not believe these things. Jesus is free to return at any time, and Israel has nothing to do with when or how that can happen.
As you can imagine, we have strong disagreements. But the group’s reason for being is to exercise and to model civil, loving discourse among brothers and sisters in Christ who have strong theological disagreements with each other.
As you can imagine, the outbreak of Israel’s war against Gaza has turned up the heat considerably within the group. We recently had a lengthy email exchange debating the horrific events that have erupted, beginning with the dastardly Hamas attack on October 7.
To briefly explain my own position on this war, I have reproduced below my
final contribution to that debate. (For a fuller picture of why I think the way I do, please read my book, Like Birds in a Cage.)
I share this email with you, my subscribers, in order to illustrate and to explain what I believe is the proper Christian response to the events unfolding in Israel and Gaza today:
In the course of our conversation, several folks have asked the (rhetorical?) question, “What else is Israel supposed to do to root out Hamas?” The implication being that Israel’s current actions in Gaza are necessary and unavoidable – what else could Israel do?
Allow me to suggest that the question reveals a lack of imagination. At the risk of offending some, I will go further and suggest that the question reveals a deficiency of Christian discipleship. The calculations of Realpolitik are tangential, if not irrelevant, to the moral requirements of citizenship in God’s kingdom. The basic problem, I believe, is that the pro-Zionist conscience is truncated and distorted by its loyalty to a secular nation-state. Thus, the demands of loyalty to Zionist, nationalistic ideology is allowed to stifle both imagination and discipleship. This is a failure to fully inhabit our intended citizenship in God’s peaceable kingdom.
The two factions of our group are separated by seemingly irreconcilable differences, differences that we cannot, or at least, do not, talk about. These differences lead us to vastly different opinions and commitments concerning the current bloodshed, among both Israeli Jews and Palestinians.
My theological commitments lead me to believe that the history of American imperialism makes us very comfortable taking the colonizer’s side in anti-colonial conflicts. I believe that implied belief in Israeli exceptionalism and Palestinian/Hamas barbarism subtly runs throughout our conversation.
As many others have said, there is no military solution to this so-called conflict. Zionist dreams of “replacing Hamas” with something or someone else continue to ignore the root causes of this violence. The only lasting solution will be political, that is a just, humane ending of Israel’s military occupation and all that goes with it. Currently, Israel is an apartheid state. Those who are discriminated against will always resist their oppressors. It’s human nature. No amount of carpet bombing will beat the impulse for freedom and equality out of Palestinian hearts and minds.
I hope that sharing this statement with you may be of some interest and/or help to those wrestling with the moral questions raised by both Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza and the Hamas attack against Israel.
If you have questions or comments, please send them to me. I will respond to everything.