Not long ago I wrote about my young Palestinian friend, Anas, who had been arrested by the Israeli army.
A few days ago, Anas’ wife and family received news from the local, West Bank military authority telling them about his situation.
Anas was being held in an Israeli prison under the conditions called “administrative detention.” That is, he was not charged with any crime. There are no plans for a trial date. He was simply being held for six months in a military prison.
(There is no “civil jurisdiction” for Palestinians in the West Bank because they live under military occupation. Military rule is all they know.)
At the end of that six month period, Anas may be imprisoned for another six months — again without any criminal charges, trial, or recourse to a defense attorney.
But then, as a friend of mine who is a Palestinian defense attorney once said, “Without charges, evidence, or a trial date, there is nothing for a defense attorney to do within the military prison system.”
This unjust process of administrative detention may be repeated indefinitely.
During its recent ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, Israel released a number of Palestinian prisoners, mainly women and children, in exchange for Israeli hostages.
These were the visible prisoner swaps shown to us in public.
Anas is now a part of the other invisible prisoner swap taking place in the West Bank, often under the cover of darkness.
For every Palestinian prisoner released in a publicized, photographed hostage exchange, Israel is busy kidnapping and detaining many more Palestinian hostages whose stories will never be told on CNN or MSNBC.
Israel is busy ensuring that none of its dark, cold prison cells will remain empty.
This new generation of prisoners, like Anas, are also hostages; additional bargaining chips held indefinitely in brutal military prison conditions for whatever inhumane games Israel decides to play with their lives in the months to come.
If you are a praying person, please pray for my friend Anas, as well as the many other Palestinian hostages now held in Israeli prisons whose only crime is being Palestinian.
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
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 brieflyexplain 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.
The online magazine +972 has published a 10-page policy paper produced by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry which argues that the only solution to the current war with Gaza is wholesale Palestinian population transfer.
According to the report, all the people of Gaza must be removed from their homes, relocated to the Sinai desert, and then redistributed as refugees throughout hospitable nations.
The document (which is included within the +972 article; you can read it for yourself) is remarkable for its colonial hubris and moral blindness.
Members of the Israeli establishment are conducting serious conversations about the best ways to stage manage, i.e., manipulate and control, the lives of 2.3 million native people.
The goal is to eliminate the inconvenience these uncooperative Palestinians pose to Israel’s settler-colonial status quo.
Since Palestinians continue to resist their colonization, the colonizing power — blinded by its imperial privilege and nationalistic arrogance — can only think to intensify its historic criminality.
Folks, population transfer is a war crime. It was a war crime in 1948. It remains a war crime today.
Here are some select excerpts from the +972 article. It is titled “Expell all Palestinians from Gaza, recommends Israeli gov’t ministry.” The author is Yuval Abraham. (All emphasis is mine):
The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, according to an official document revealed in full for the first time by +972’s partner site Local Call yesterday.
The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry — a small governmental body that produces policy research and shares its proposals with intelligence agencies, the army, and other ministries. It assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the framework of the current war, and recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. It also calls on Israel to enlist the international community in support of this endeavor. The document, whose authenticity was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972 . . .
The document recommends that Israel act to “evacuate the civilian population to Sinai” during the war; establish tent cities and later more permanent cities in the northern Sinai that will absorb the expelled population; and then create “a sterile zone of several kilometers … within Egypt, and [prevent] the return of the population to activities/residences near the border with Israel.” At the same time, governments around the world, led by the United States, must be mobilized to implement the move. . .
The transfer plan is divided into several stages. In the first stage, action must be taken so that the population of Gaza “evacuates south,” while the air strikes focus on the northern Gaza Strip. In the second stage, a ground incursion into Gaza will begin, leading to the occupation of the entire Strip from north to south, and the “cleansing of the underground bunkers of Hamas fighters.”
Concurrently with the re-occupation of Gaza, Palestinian civilians will be moved into Egyptian territory, and not be allowed to return. “It is important to leave the travel routes to the south open to enable the evacuation of the civilian population toward Rafah,” the document states. . .
Last week, the Misgav Institute, a right-wing think tank headed by Meir Ben-Shabbat, a close associate of Prime Minister Netanyahu and a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, published a position paper that similarly called for the forced transfer of Gaza’s population to the Sinai. The institute recently deleted the post from Twitter and from its website after drawing strong international censure. . .
“If Americans Knew” is an independent newsite that provides the news coverage on Palestine/Israel that you will never see on mainstream, corporate media. I read it regularly.
For example, here is a recent story with an accompanying video posted on X.
It reminds us of the long-running peaceful, non-violent marches that occurred in Gaza for several years prior to the attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
The message reads:
Before the Hamas attack, media didn’t tell you about the thousands in #Gaza protesting non-violently every week from March 2018 through December 2019, Israeli snipers picking them off one by one…
Israeli journalist Gideon Levy critiques the work of Israel’s spy agency, Shin Bet in the most recent edition of the Jerusalem daily, Haaretz. The article is
Below is an excerpt explaining why Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza will forever resist Israeli oppression:
. . . It is difficult to assess the real balance – how many terror attacks the Shin Bet thwarts and how many attacks it motivates with its unchecked activities. But when Bar boasts of 2,000 recent arrests, it’s clear there are more than a few innocent people among them, and people who will be radicalized by their very detention.
In a reality in which every night, soldiers accompanied by dogs terrorize people sleeping in their homes and snatch citizens from their beds at the behest of the Shin Bet, without any legal supervision of course, and in a reality where hundreds of people are detained without trial for months and years, also by order of the Shin Bet, it is clear that the damage is enormous. The most serious consequence is turning Israeli democracy into one of the most brutal military tyrannies in the world, even if only in its own backyard.
The Shin Bet barely operates in sovereign Israel. But what it is doing in the occupied territories, which are an inseparable part of Israel, apparently forever, makes it impossible to define Israel as a democracy anymore, certainly not when it is clear that this is not a temporary situation. There is no evil with which the Israeli Stasi – in the territories the Shin Bet is the Stasi in every way, with more advanced technology than the infamous East German organization had – is unfamiliar.
Just this week I met, at the Al-Arroub refugee camp, an 11-year-old boy who lost an eye to an IDF bullet. Now he has also been defined as a security risk, who is barred from entering Israel for treatment at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center on the order of the Shin Bet. Last week, two cancer patients in the Gaza Strip died; they were unable to receive treatments in Israel in time because the Shin Bet denied them entry for two months.
It is mind-numbingly absurd to hear the president of the United States seriously referring to “the two state solution” as the best hope for the Palestinian people.
The supposed “two state solution” died years ago, asphyxiated beneath the weight of 700,000 illegal Jewish settlers occupying hundreds of illegal, Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank; buried beneath the unending
U.S. President Joe Biden signs the visitors book as Israeli President Isaac Herzog looks on at his residence in Jerusalem, July 14, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli land grabs, government annexations of “military zones,” illegal home demolitions, unremitting crop destruction, orchards butchered, olive trees and vineyards uprooted, not to mention the brutal, suffocating military occupation now entering its 75th year.
As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy explains, Biden’s appeal to the future prospects of a two-state solution, one for Israel and one for Palestinians, expresses America’s surrender to Israel’s stone-cold hard-heartedness, inflexibility, and Zionism’s blinding belief in Jewish, ethnic entitlement.
Posing as a neutral mediator, while never — no never — acting as anything of the sort, the US has encouraged decades of false hope and wasted effort in supposed “Peace Talks” between Israel and the Palestinian leadership.
Granted, Yasser Arafat was a foolish negotiator — but never the intransigent deceiver that Israel and the USA always made him out to be — and the PLO made plenty of irresponsible mistakes while betraying their own people.
But as Israel’s greatest political supporter, financier, and supplier of military hardware and technology, the US never intended to assist the Palestinians in their efforts to escape Israeli’s colonial domination.
For instance, when dealing with the Likud negotiators under Begin and Netanyahu, the US never — never — challenged the Likud party platform proclaiming that Israel would never permit the creation of a Palestinian state.
If that’s not reprehensible collusion, I don’t know what is.
After all, what are 4.5 million Palestinian refugees when compared to two colonial, nuclear armed super-powers pledged to watch each other’s backs? The strategic interests of neither America nor Israel has ever included the moral imperative of justice for oppressed, brown-skinned, Arab human beings.
Why has anyone ever been foolish enough to imagine otherwise?
At Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, of all places, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a death certificate. The two-state solution died a long time ago, and now so has the Palestinians’ strategic choice of relying on the West in their struggle for their national rights.
This hope drew its last breath at Augusta Victoria. In his speech Biden mused at great length about his and his family’s time in the hospital; he remembered the intensive care ward. A flat line on the monitor meant death, he learned there. About an hour later, in Bethlehem, the monitor flatlined. The path the Palestinians embarked on 50 years ago has come to an end. They have reached a dead end.
At the beginning of the ‘70s, a new star appeared in the political skies: the cardiologist Issam Sartawi, a refugee from Acre, a student in Iraq, an exile in Paris and an architect of the plane hijackings. He underwent a complete change. He became the Palestinians’ trailblazer to the West’s heart; until then they had relied on nonaligned countries. Sartawi led the Palestinians to Bonn, Vienna, Paris and Stockholm instead of Moscow, Jakarta, Delhi and Kuala Lumpur.
This was depicted as an excellent choice. The protégé and even the darling of Western Europe’s social democratic stars of those days – Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, Olof Palme and François Mitterrand – continued on to the Israelis’ hearts. Sartawi began with meetings with representatives of the Israeli left. Yasser Arafat enthusiastically joined the path his adviser had blazed. It seemed much more promising than winning support from Karachi.
Fifty years later this road has reached its end, with the Palestinians bleeding on the ground. An American president only gives them a few hours – on a visit that gives new meaning to the terms doing the minimum and lip service. So the time has come to awaken from the dream that Europe and America will ever do something for the Palestinians that won’t be to the satisfaction of their unassailable cherished one, Israel.
It’s a president who doesn’t bother to correctly pronounce the name of Shireen Abu Akleh, [Biden mispronounced her name as Abu Al-Qaeda!] the journalist killed almost certainly by Israel, becoming a national and international symbol. Jamal Khashoggi he knows how to pronounce. The Palestinians no longer have anything to look for in this arena. When Biden quoted from a poem that says how “hope and history rhyme” and threw them $100 million for Augusta Victoria, it was clear that it’s lost with the United States.
With an American president who promises them a two-state solution, but “not in the near term,” you get to the end of the story. You feel like asking Biden: “What will happen ‘not in the long term’ that will achieve this solution? Will the Israelis decide on their own? Will the settlers return on their own? When there are a million of them instead of 700,000, will that satisfy them?
Will America ever think differently? Why should this happen? With the laws against BDS and the new and distorted definitions of antisemitism, the United States and Europe are lost as far as the Palestinians are concerned. The battle has been decided, Israel has all but beaten them, and their fate might be the same as that of the indigenous peoples in the United States.
It’s enough to look at the picture of the meeting in Bethlehem: Twelve grim Palestinian men in ties around the two leaders in a group photo of despair. It’s enough to recall Biden’s words in 1986 to the secretary of state at the time, George Shultz: “I hate to hear an administration … refusing to act on a morally important point. … I’m ashamed that this country puts out a policy like this, that says nothing, nothing.”
Biden was referring to U.S. policy on the previous apartheid country, South Africa. Amazingly similar remarks can be hurled now at Biden because of his approach to the second apartheid country. But there’s no Biden to hurl them.
A few days ago, Anas’ wife and family received news from the local, West Bank military authority telling them about his situation.
final contribution to that debate. (For a fuller picture of why I think the way I do, please read my book, 
