If you are unfamiliar with something called Christian Zionism, allow me to introduce you to it.
Christian Zionism (CZ) is a kissin’ cousin to the ideology called political Zionism which governs the modern nation-state of Israel. CZ is a similar political ideology that draws from the Bible to defend the Jewish, Zionist conquest of Palestine in 1948 as the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy.
Psalm 122, especially verses 6-9, is commonly cited by CZ folks as setting God’s spiritual goal posts for his future work in the land of Israel. The psalmist says:
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: “May those who love you be secure. May there be peace within your walls and security within your citadels.” For the sake of my family and friends, I will say, “Peace be within you.” For the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your prosperity.
Establishing peace in the literal city of Jerusalem, as the physical capitol ofterritorial Israel, will be the centerpiece of God’s work of ushering in the New Heavens and the New Earth according to my CZ friends.
I just finished reading an article by a CZ scholar who quotes Psalm 122 while concluding with a plea for the end of conflict in Israel/Palestine — notably, while seeming to assume that the Jewish people will maintain their ethnic domination over resident Palestinians.
Perhaps you will be interested in my story. I also talk briefly about life in a Palestinian refugee camp.
The final question my friend asked me was to explain the meaning of Psalm 122. So I did, applying what I will call the New Testament, “apostolic” method for reading the Old Testament (as I explain in my book).
It comes out very differently than the interpretations offered by my CZ brothers and sister.
I have excerpted the interview below by posting my answer to the question, “Scripture tells us to ‘pray for the peace of Jerusalem’ (Ps 122:6). What should that look like?”
I am convinced that this is the proper Christian response to the question:
Psalm 122 is a “psalm of ascent” that was sung by ancient pilgrims as they travelled to Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the center of Jewish worship because the city’s temple was God’s earthly residence. The psalmist’s calls for peace and harmony within the city and among God’s congregation of worshipers (verses 6 – 9), visualize the blessings of God’s presence reflected in harmony among God’s people. Christians today understand that our incarnate Savior, Jesus Christ, was the new temple of God’s presence here on earth (John 2:19 – 22; 4:21 – 24), who is now seated on David’s throne (verse 5) inside the heavenly temple at the right hand of God (Hebrews 1:1 – 4). An earthly temple is no longer needed. We now pray for the expansion of God’s peaceable kingdom on earth: for all of God’s people throughout the world to reflect the peace of Jesus Christ as they worship together and work together to extend God’s peace to the world around them. The New Testament vision of “the peace of Jerusalem” extends far beyond the provincialism, territorialism, and ethnic nationalism embraced by Christian Zionists.
Dina Elmuti retells her grandmother’s story of fleeing the massacre by Israeli troops of well over 100 Palestinians in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin in 1948.
Fatima Radwan on a visit to Deir Yassin in 2015. Photo by Dina Elmuti
Many Israeli historians insist that the massacre never happened.
Elmuti’s grandmother says otherwise. She is living testament to the inhumanity of war, whether it is a Jewish war against Arabs or an Arab war against Israelis.
As Israeli security forces continue to ravage the people of the West Bank, now is a good time to remember what happened at Deir Yassin.
. . . Earlier that same morning, my great-grandmother, Aziza, and her oldest daughter, Rifka who was 13 at the time, went to the village bakery to bake bread. That was something they did each morning as their homes were not equipped with ovens.
My grandmother, nearly 10, and her five younger siblings remained at home.
A tribute to child survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre; Fatima Radwan is pictured in the middle of the top left row. Photo by Dina Elmuti
Inside the bakery, my great-grandmother and great aunt witnessed a horrific scene that continues to haunt me. My grandmother often shared this story with us because she believed it was our responsibility to never forget.
While holding villagers in the bakery hostage, Zionist soldiers ordered the baker, Hussein al-Shareef from the town of Lydd, to throw his son Abdul Rauf into the burning oven. After refusing, the soldiers knocked Hussein to the ground and proceeded to throw Abdul Rauf into the oven while his father watched.
“Follow your son. He needs you there,” said one of the soldiers before throwing Hussein in next.
These are among scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history. Yet, this memory often remains too controversial to share.
Telling it challenges the myths that Israel has manufactured.
Following the gruesome scene, soldiers took the captive villagers and paraded them through the streets of Jerusalem. That is how Zionist forces celebrated their “victory” in Deir Yassin.
Upon returning to the village, the male villagers were lined up against the stone quarry wall and executed. Bodies riddled with bullets were then dumped into a mass grave and set aflame.
Approximately 110 villagers were massacred. Untold hours of human life, gone up in flames. . .
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.
Professor Gary Burge was a New Testament professor at Wheaton College
Professor Gary Burge
for many years. He is also a good friend of mine and is now a dean at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, MI.
Gary has written three excellent books about the errors of Christian Zionism and the real-world fallout that it helps to create.
Thus, I was quite happy when Gary agreed to write the forward to my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Wipf and Stock, 2021).
I recently discovered that a website called ChristianZionism.org, which Gary helped to organize, is promoting my book by reprinting Gary’s very kind forward.
If you haven’t yet purchased your own copy of the book, I encourage you to read Gary’s forward here.
I am sure that the majority of Americans are aware by now of the controversy stirred by Whoopi Goldberg’s comment about the Holocaust on the TV program The View.
Whoopi Goldberg on The View
During this discussion, Ms. Goldberg had the temerity to say, “The Holocaust was not about race. It was about man’s inhumanity to man.” Of course, the feathers began to fly.
In a late-night conversation with Stephen Colbert, Ms. Goldberg clarified what she meant, referring to her experiences as a black woman in America. She made it clear that her reference point for understanding racial discrimination was skin color, whether a person was black or white. This was not surprising. Most people rely on their own personal experiences, their own subjectivity, to lay the initial foundation for how they view the world around them.
Whoopi’s comments could have provided a useful opportunity for a broader, public conversation about the history and meaning of racism. We all could have discussed the fact that skin color is only one of numerous characteristics that have been used to make “racial” distinctions throughout history. Oh, but wait. I forgot. This is America. We don’t do serious thinking in public (or in precious few other spaces) here in this great nation of ours.
In another follow-up interview Ms. Goldberg corrected herself further by adding that she should have said “both” when she spoke out on The View. In other words, the Holocaust was about both Hitler’s extermination of the Jewish race as well as man’s inhumanity to man, implying that the former was an example of the latter.
Unfortunately, Whoopi’s attempts to reframe our conversation about the Holocaust – a very worthy project, in my opinion – has been completely squashed. She knows that she has been silenced. Her most recent statement states that she has now decided simply to never talk about the Holocaust again.
Three cheers for our Holocaust cancel culture!
Yet, this entire affair has been highly unfortunate for a number of reasons.
Quite predictably, Ms. Goldberg’s original statement on prime-time television prompted pro-Israel and pro-Zionist apologists to attack her like sharks after red meat. The leader of this pack has been Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. Fortunately, after discussing the issue personally with Goldberg, Greenblatt came to her rescue, extended a special dispensation by insisting that the now chastised and enlightened TV host not be criticized too harshly for her former ignorance.
Yet, even Greenblatt’s intervention could not save Ms. Goldberg from a two-week suspension from her hosting duties on The View. Luckily for us, her network’s corporate virtue-signaling has saved us all from any more of Whoopi’s “inappropriate” comments about the Holocaust.
Boy, am I relieved!
The supreme irony found at the heart of this ridiculous controversy, however, is the simple fact that Whoopi was not wrong, at least not in the sense that her critics have derided. Let me explain.
I begin with a short bibliography that will allow my reader to make sense of the parenthetical notations included below. I strongly suggest that you read at least one of these important books if you hope to understand what is going on in this contrived controversy:
Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over We Must Rise From Its Ashes.
Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry.
Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped Being a Jew.
Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust.
Beginning with the 1961 trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, pro-Israel/pro-Zionist advocates have worked steadily to conjure a global amnesia about the full diversity of victims in the Holocaust. Frankly, the goal has been to make the world forget that anyone other than Jews were exterminated by the Nazis.
And they have largely succeeded, at least in public discourse. Whoopi Goldberg is only the latest victim of this monolithic Zionist-Israeli Holocaust-management network.
Dr. Norman Finkelstein is an American-Jewish historian whose parents were Holocaust survivors. He has written an important book entitled, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Quoting the Israeli writer Boas Evron, he explains, “Holocaust awareness is actually an official, propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present” (Finkelstein 2000: 41).
Avraham Burg, a former speaker in the Israeli parliament, called the Knesset, traces the beginning of this manipulation process to the Israeli trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. In his book, The Holocaust Is Over We Must Rise From Its Ashes, Burg laments Israel’s decision to make the Eichmann trial a strictly Jewish, Israeli affair rather than opening up the proceedings to an international judiciary.
He describes Eichmann’s trial as “an initiation ritual” in which Israel (and world Jewry) reasserted their unique status as the eternal victims of never-ending gentile antisemitism (Burg 128). “We must always feel like perpetual victims,” he writes. “When we tried [Eichmann] for genocide, we meant only genocide against ourselves (Burg 129) …We took the Shoah to be exclusively our own. Thus, we missed the option of turning it into a much more meaningful, universal event…We nationalized the Shoah, monopolized it and internalized it, and we do not let anyone get closer” (Burg 143).
According to Burg, the Holocaust can best be described as “a crime against creation” (126) – a description that is in the same ball park as Ms. Goldberg’s reference to “man’s inhumanity against man.”
Romanian born author Elie Wiezel (1928 – 2016) appointed himself high-priest of this now all-pervasive Holocaust mysticism, an exclusive realm where non-Jewish victims are erased from historical memory, while exclusive racial curators conjure the Holocaust an utterly unique, incomparable event that only properly trained Jews are capable of discussing appropriately.
It is worth remembering that when the American Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. was in the planning stages, it was Wiesel who “led the offensive to commemorate Jews alone.” Finkelstein explains, “Deferred to as the undisputed expert on the Holocaust period Wiesel tenaciously argued for the preeminence of Jewish victimhood” (2000: 75).
Fortunately, the Jewish historians listed above have all called out this Israeli, Zionist game for what it is: inaccurate, unhistorical twaddle.
It’s malicious imposition on the rest of us, illustrated now by Whoopi Goldberg’s experience, is something that Norman Finkelstein calls “intellectual terrorism” (2000: 47).
He’s right.
We must begin with the simple fact that, despite Israel’s eagerness to obscure this part of the story, Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust. This fact cannot be forgotten, no matter how hard the Zionist lobby tries to make us forget.
The Nazi extermination campaign began with the nation-wide euthanizing of the mentally handicapped and physically deformed. These “unfit” German victims were the first to warm up Hitler’s ovens.
Then they eliminated the communists, socialists, and all other anti-Nazi dissidents, many of whom were Christians.
Then there were the Gypsies, the Roma. As a ratio of total population size, the Nazi extermination of at least half-million Gypsies was roughly equal to the Jewish genocide (Finkelstein 2000: 76; Sand 58). European Gypsies, who remain persecuted to this day, ought not be forgotten.
(Read Finkelstein for the details of how Jewish representatives fought to exclude any mention of the Gypsies from the US Holocaust Museum. Or read Sand for his story about attending a Holocaust conference where Jewish representatives demanded that a Gypsy attendee be excluded).
Then there were the homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, together with two and a half million Poles. The Nazis exterminated five million Poles, half of them were Jews. The other half were Roman Catholics.
So, in this crucial sense then, Whoopi Goldberg is absolutely correct. The Holocaust was not fundamentally about the Jewish race. The outrage unleashed against her is cruel testimony to the effectiveness of fifty years of Zionist-Israeli propaganda with its shaming, cajoling, ridiculing, and guilty-tripping the rest of the western world.
It is, indeed, intellectual terrorism.
However, recalling the great diversity represented among the Nazi’s many victims, we are also reminded that Ms. Goldberg is not entirely correct. We cannot forget that this disparate collection of Nazi victims were all captured in the net of Hitler’s primary racial concern – his obsession with a (fictitious) purified Aryan race.
Only from this perspective can the Holocaust be seen as exclusively about race, although I doubt if Whoopi had this consideration in mind. I am certain that Jonathan Greenblatt and his pro-Israel co-conspirators do not.
The guiding principle directing Hitler’s bloodlust was the protection of Aryan racial purity. His designs to conquer Europe were an attempt to garner an enlarged “homeland” (Lebensraum, living space, it was called) spacious enough to accommodate the perfected Aryan population he intended to produce.
The fact that Hitler hated the Jews was contingent on his own Aryan, racial priorities. He was serving his vision of “the master race.”
The fact that European leaders in the political Zionist movement were also searching for a new homeland large enough to provide for an exclusively Jewish population should not be forgotten. The parallels between National Socialism and political Zionism are no coincidence. Both movements were drinking from the same stream of blood-and-soil, ethnic-nationalism swirling throughout Europe at the time.
So, Ms. Goldberg is both partly right and partly wrong, but not the way that either her detractors or belated defenders imagine.
As far as I am concerned, the important lesson to be learned from this recent tempest is the depressing effectiveness it reveals about Israel’s pro-Zionist propaganda machine. Once again, it has managed to squelch legitimate historical debate by intimidating the hearty few courageous enough to raise a hand and say, “Uh, excuse me, but the Jews were not the only ones who suffered. In this sense, the Holocaust was not about race.”
Perhaps you have heard or read about some recent confrontations between Israeli soldiers and Bedouins living in the Negev in southern Israel.
Below are two video clips of the same incident. The first is from i24 News, an official Israeli news outlet. The second is from Middle East Eye, a London-based news outlet covering news in the Middle East and North Africa.
Notice the differences. How is the same story being relayed in each clip?
First, notice the inflammatory language used in the i24 News clip:
Bedouins are not protesting; they are “rioting.”
Soldiers are only responding to Bedouin “crimes.”
That Bedouins would object to trees being planted (without consultation) on their property is part of “Israel’s crazy reality.”
The only person allowed to speak is a representative of the Jewish-only settlements replacing Bedouin homes and families.
Now notice the language and storyline in the second clip:
Bedouin protesters are allowed to speak for themselves.
The protests are placed within their broader context, which (quite tellingly) is never explained in the i24 clip.
The bigger narrative goes like this.
[a] The Israeli government unilaterally expropriates (i.e., steals) land on which Bedouins have lived for generations; it is now called “disputed land.” The Bedouin village is labeled as “unrecognized,” making it easier to eradicate.
[b] The Zionist process of ethnic cleansing and colonization moves forward.
The Jewish National Fund (the largest land owner in Israel, which prohibits Palestinians from living or working on JNF land) plant trees (probably non-native) on Bedouin grazing land.
The Bedouins are told they must move out.
Bedouin homes are demolished.
The people resist and demonstrate against their expulsion.
The colonizers call the Bedouin resistance “criminal” and “crazy” while their invasion brings “noble” results. (A common technique used by settler-colonizers).
These stark differences in how the story is framed and described illustrates both the construction and the power of propaganda.
It also reminds us of how we should doubt and question every news story presented to us by the media.
Watch the clips again. Who is providing a more accurate version of the actual events?
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.
territorial Israel, will be the centerpiece of God’s work of ushering in the New Heavens and the New Earth according to my CZ friends.
interviewed by the good folks at ChristianZionism.org. We had a friendly conversation about the events in my life that led me to write my book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People.
book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Wipf and Stock, 2021).
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