A Blog from David Crump
My friends at the Christian Forum on Israel-Palestine recently interviewed the influential, internationally known Palestinian pastor-theologian, the Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb.
We had a wide-ranging discussion about the war against Gaza and the West Bank and its effects upon the Palestinian Christian community.
Please check it out:
This coming Friday, July 12 at 1 pm Eastern time, 10 am Pacific, I will lead the next episode of the Christian Forum on Israel-Palestine.
The following link will allow you to watch the conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYXuwuUNJ-k
Our guest will be my friend Munther Amira. Munther is a Palestinian, non-violent, peace activist who lives in the Aida refugee camp where Terry and I stay during our visits to the West Bank.
Munther was arrested by Israeli soldiers in September 2023 and released in February 2024. He will talk with us about the dire conditions for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
But he will especially describe the brutal changes implemented after the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Trust me. You won’t want to miss Munther’s first-hand account of Palestinian Life in an Israeli Prison.
Again, use the following link to watch this important conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYXuwuUNJ-k
You are invited to join the Christian Forum on Israel-Palestine this coming Tuesday (tomorrow, June 18) for our second conversation. This time we will be talking with Palestinian-American author and journalist Ali Abunimah, founder and senior editor of the Electronic Intifada.
You won’t want to miss it!
Use this link for the livestream and to view the recording after the fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYLhwY_yThU
These videos speak for themselves.
These are only two little girls who are, fortunately, rescued. The United Nations estimates that some 10,000 Palestinian bodies have never been rescued. They remain in the rubble.
To watch the above video use the URL address inbetween the brackets: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6pfJ3gCrcxs]
I am happy to announce the next episode of the Christian Forum on Israel-Palestine. It will be broadcast on June 8th, 4 pm Eastern, 1 pm Pacific.
We will be speaking with Ilan Pappe, one of the world’s premier historians of modern Israel, but especially of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
When the time comes you can watch this conversation by clicking on the following link or paste it in your computer’s URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Azgev9Rc8
Professor Pappe has written many important books. Perhaps his best known
publication is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. His most recent work, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (available in September), deals with the power and influence of Israeli/pro-Zionist lobbying efforts around the world.
Please join us for what I know will be a fascinating conversation with one of Israel’s foremost historians.
I am deeply disappointed to say that I will not be participating in this particular conversation. I will be flying home from Israel on June 8. But trust me, I will NOT miss any more of our upcoming conversations.
Mark you calendars now, not only for Ilan Pappe, but for what I know will be another fascinating conversation with Ali Abunimah, the founder and chief editor of The Electronic Intifada, on June 18.
I will provide more information once I return from my trip to Israel-Palestine.
The Jewish magazine Forward has published two different letters written by Jewish university students insisting that the anti-genocide demonstrations on their campuses have NOT been antisemitic, but that all impulses towards
violence and antisemitism have been imported by outside instigators.
Here is a brief excerpt of the Foward article titled “Jewish students reject claims that campus protests for Palestine have been antisemitic“. All emphasis is mine:
Editor’s note: Today we published two open letters from college students regarding the protests that have been roiling campuses nationwide for weeks. Below, 750+ Jewish students from 140+ campuses say they “reject the claim that these encampments are antisemitic and that they are an inherent threat to Jewish student safety.” In the other letter, 280+ Jewish students at Columbia University argue that their “concerns have been brushed off and invalidated” when calling out antisemitism on campus. The original letters can be found here and here.
We the undersigned are Jewish students on college campuses in solidarity with student encampments for Gaza. We reject the ways that these encampments have been smeared as antisemitic and we call on our institutions to take action to stop Israel’s assault on Gaza.
In the last week, we have watched the movement of student encampments for Gaza spread across the country. We have also watched as these protesters have been met with repression, arrests, violence, and false claims of antisemitism. As Jewish students, we wholeheartedly reject the claim that these encampments are antisemitic and that they are an inherent threat to Jewish student safety. We believe that safety for Jewish students can only come when all students are safe, including Palestinian students, BIPOC students, and queer and trans students.
While journalists, students, and even police have consistently reported encampments to be peaceful, school administrations and city officials have intentionally and consistently escalated through state violence. Their tactics have included arresting and brutalizing students, and denying students access to housing, medical care, and religious spaces. The majority of these acts have targeted Arab, Muslim, Black, and brown students. This violence we’ve seen this week does not make any of us safer. We wholeheartedly condemn the brutal repression of the encampments.
You can read the entire article here.
“The narrative of protesters endangering Jewish students has been used to justify police repression. But at the Columbia encampment, I saw a commitment to confronting antisemitism.”
Journalist Hadas Thier has written a good article for The Nation magazine giving an insider’s look at the anti-genocide demonstrations happening on American campuses.
The article is titled “Student Encampments Aren’t a Danger to Jews. But the Crackdown Is.”
Here is a brief excerpt:
. . . Since then, the story of protesters endangering and threatening Jewish
students has been used to justify the brutal repression that they’ve been met with. But I spent the last week speaking to students across many campus encampments, and last Wednesday I made my way to Columbia’s encampment to get a picture of it for myself. My experience was decidedly different from the story we’ve been fed.
In the middle of the lawn, surrounded by a low buzz of students sitting in study circles, making art, pointing out a hawk that flew nearby, working on laptops, I met Atesh, a Columbia student who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of reprisal. He told me how meaningful it was for him to participate in his first Passover seder with about 100 other students and professors on the lawn. There, Jewish students had led their peers in songs and rituals. The Passover seder is a Jewish tradition that celebrates liberation and is rooted in community, inquiry, and questioning. It was a fitting celebration for the encampment.
As Atesh was talking to me, another student approached us, looking for a Jewish member of the encampment to connect with. Atesh shrugged and said, “We’re all Jewish. We’re all Palestinian.”
Later that day, I sat on the lawn with nearly 200 students to listen to Jewish students lead a teach-in about antisemitism. Some discussed their experiences growing up in predominantly Christian towns where pennies were thrown at them and conspiracy theories about Jews were ubiquitous. Others shared their impressions of why so many American Jewish communities feel connected to their Israeli counterparts and why conversations about Palestine are difficult to have. A few recounted why their opposition to the current war is rooted in their traditions and observance of Judaism. All of them expressed discomfort at having to take center stage. But they felt an obligation to do so because of the ways in which the “safety of Jewish students” has become a disingenuous rallying cry of everyone from liberal college presidents to MAGA-aligned politicians.
I am an Israeli-born Jew who has been involved in Palestine activism for over 20 years, and I have never experienced the level of solidarity and the depth of understanding about antisemitism that I am seeing across college campuses right now. In the past, I had seen antisemitism only on the fringe of the movement, turning up through an occasional odd and unsettling poster at a protest, summarily dismissed and removed by organizers. At the center of the movement, I always felt welcome and comfortable as an Israeli-born Jew. But, still, until the recent phase of the new movement for Palestine emerged on American campuses last fall, I had never before witnessed such a deliberate commitment to learning about and confronting antisemitism head on. . .
. . . “It is not that they care about Jewish students,” JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] member Maya, told me. “They actually care about Zionist students.” Among those arrested and suspended were many Jewish students, she said. “They do not care about the safety of the Jewish students that are in the camp or that are part of this movement. And they’ve shown that by arresting and by attempting to erase the fact that we even exist.” Anti-Zionist Jews, she explained, “are not part of [the administration’s] fight against antisemitism.” . . .
You can read the entire article here.
Helen Benedict has posted a good story at Counterpunch magazine investigating the student protests launched against the Gaza genocide.
The article is titled “The Distortion of Campus Protests Over Gaza.” I include a brief excerpt below:
. . . Even as the now-notorious student tent encampment there stretches through its second week, all is calm. Inside the camp, students sleep, eat, and sit on bedspreads studying together and making signs saying, “Nerds for Palestine,” “Passover is for Liberation,” and “Stop the Genocide.” The Jewish students there held a seder on Passover. The protesters even asked faculty to come into the encampment and teach because they miss their classes. Indeed, it’s so quiet on campus that you can hear birds singing in the background. The camp, if anything, is hushed.
Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside — the same kinds of students Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th — are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early hours of April 30th, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)
As a tenured professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, I’ve been watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7th, and I’ve been struck by the decorum of the protesting students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she was sitting in my class.
Given how horrific this war is, it’s not surprising that there have been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from the students have been “Bring back our hostages” on the Israeli side and “Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians” on the antiwar and pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different direction and protect the innocent. . .
You can read the entire article here.
Journalist, editorialist and former lawyer, Briahna Joy Gray, explains the motivations and concerns of the campus protests now sweeping the world.
Guess what. The truth about student protesters has nothing to do with the anti-demonstration messaging coming from the corporate media and the political class.
“Words are not violence; Zionism is.”
Today the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies published my article titled “Echoes of Slavery, Racial Segregation and Jim Crow: American Dispensationalism and Christian Zionist Bible-Reading.”
Below is the abstract, that is a brief summary of the article:
The apologetics of pro-slavery, pro-segregation Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were identical to the methods of biblical interpretation used by Dispensationalist Christian Zionists today. The ideology’s specific rules of ‘literal interpretation’ and ‘antecedent theology’ led both groups to similar conclusions about slavery and racial segregation, on the one hand, and Jewish privilege and Palestinian displacement, on the other. Abolitionist efforts to promote a Christ–like hermeneutic rooted in Christian morality points the way forward to correcting modern theologies, such as Dispensationalist Christian Zionism, that continue to sanction human oppression.
I believe that clicking the highlighted title above will allow access to the article online. However, if this does not work for you, let me know and I can send you a copy.
Yes, I too am disappointed by the numerous formating and editorial errors in my article. Yuck! Unfortunately, it is too late for me to do anything about it now…sigh…
