Not long ago I was invited to participate in an online webinar happening May 18th, 12:00 pm (Eastern Time) sponsored by the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME).
The discussion will focus on the different ways Americans and Israelis view themselves as “exceptional nations,” both fulfilling a unique, divinely ordained mission to world history.
The presidency of Donald Trump gave voice to evangelicalism’s (i.e., conservative Christianity’s) bellicose commitment to both Christian Nationalism (the belief that America is a Christian nation) and Christian Zionism (the belief that Christians must support the state of Israel).
Israel puts itself at the center of Jewish Nationalism.
How do these political beliefs relate to each other?
What does the Bible say about such things?
How should the Christian church relate to Israel and its continuing conflict with the Palestinian people?
I will share this conversation with Lisa Sharon Harper (founder and president of Freedom Road) and L. Daniel Hawk (Ashland Theological Seminary).
I hope you will join us for what, I am convinced, will be a fascinating conversation. For those who can’t make it, the webinar will be recorded and made available at the NEME website.
Imagine that one of these children is your son or daughter.
Imagine that you live under military law.
You have no civil rights; no freedom of speech; no freedom of movement or right to assemble; no right to protest or object to your mistreatment.
Imagine that you can be arrested without charge for anything at any time, based solely on the whim of the soldier who grabs you and throws you into the back of his truck.
Imagine that your child will be forcefully “interrogated” as he/she sits alone in a concrete cell surrounded by hostile, aggressive soldiers.
Imagine that these soldiers will hit, kick, slap, punch, ridicule, and humiliate your child with impunity. And you alone will be left to treat his/her injuries.
Imagine that you have no recourse for complaint. No one listens to your demands for an explanation. They may not even tell you where your child was taken.
Imagine that your complaints can only be heard by a military judge in a military court where Palestinians effectively never win a case.
This is Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.
Recently, one of Terry’s (my wife) Facebook posts was flagged and deleted for violating Facebook’s content policies.
Her censored comment advocated for Palestinian human rights in the Israeli occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She noted that it was the Israeli government, not the occupied Palestinians, who were regularly committing acts of terrorism.
That particular political observation is no longer permitted by the Facebook censorship policies — which we all know are expanding rapidly.
It’s more evidence of the power of the pro-Israel lobby in this country which would love to censor ALL criticism of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people living under its control.
Fortunately, the Jewish-led, Palestinian rights organization called Jewish Voice for Peace has begun a campaign on Facebook aimed at combating the Israel Lobby’s dangerous, anti-first amendment influence online.
In January 2021, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) announced a global campaign “Facebook, we need to talk” about the social media giant’s inquiry into whether criticism of the movement Zionism “falls within the rubric of hate speech as per Facebook’s Community Standards.”
In its current form, the controversy centers around forcing universities, social media platforms, and other public spaces to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) standard which defines current anti-Semitism to include “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel, overall a definition that would essentially shut down any criticism of the Zionist state.
According to Lara Friedman, the goal of Zionist groups who are pushing for this action “isn’t to get Facebook to deplatform antisemitism, but to get Facebook to deplatform criticism of Israel.”
In response, hundreds of activists, intellectuals and artists from around the world have launched a petition to ensure that Facebook does not include “Zionist” as a protected category in its hate speech policy—“that is, to treat ‘Zionist’ as a proxy for “Jew or “Jewish.” In its first 24 hours, the open letter gathered over 14,500 signatures, including such figures as Hanan Ashrawi, Norita Cortiñas, Wallace Shawn and Peter Gabriel.
“Cooperating with the Israeli government’s request,” the petition notes, “would undermine efforts to dismantle antisemitism, deprive Palestinians of a crucial venue for expressing their political viewpoints to the world, and help the Israeli government avoid accountability for its violations of Palestinian rights.”
Juan Cole has a new article at his news site, Informed Comment, discussing
Professor Juan Cole
the recent decision by the International Criminal Court to investigate numerous charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity made against Israel.
I examine these issues in my new book, tentatively titled, Like Birds in a Cage: How Bad Bible-Reading Leads Christian Zionists to Collaborate in Israeli War Crimes and Palestinian Suffering (Cascade, forthcoming).
Israel’s defensive public relations campaign is already in full swing, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others unleashing the now standard canard of accusing such investigations as expressions of antisemitic hatred.
This action by the ICC is an important first step that needed to happen years ago. What will come of it is anyone’s guess.
But I know this: Christians must stand on the side of justice and oppose all oppressors. That means that God’s people must stand with the Palestinian people while condemning Israeli racism and apartheid.
Here is professor Cole’s article:
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Friday, the International Criminal Court found that it had jurisdiction to consider war crimes and crimes against humanity and the crime of Apartheid in the Palestinian territories.
Israeli politician Abba Eban once quipped that Palestinians never lost the opportunity to lose an opportunity. But Palestinians have carefully, methodically created this opportunity to be heard in an international tribunal. It is the ruling Israeli right wing about which one can now quip about missing opportunities.
Israel has egregiously violated the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of people in Occupied territories by flooding its own citizens into the Palestinian Territories, by stealing Palestinian land from its owners and building squatter settlements on it, and by using disproportional force against Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza border.
The court will also look into war crimes by Hamas, which was elected in 2006 and retains control of the Gaza Strip.
It has been impossible for anyone to stop Israel’s repeated and serious crimes against the Palestinians because the United States backs them to the hilt and is deeply implicated itself in keeping Palestinians stateless. (The “two-state solution” long since became geographically impossible, and invoking it and an alleged “peace process,” as the Biden administration does, is just a way of keeping the Palestinians from enjoying any human rights).
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu cynically called the ruling “anti-Semitic,” in the ultimate debasement of a term that has otherwise been central to human rights struggles.
Filistin al-Yawm (Palestine Today) quotes Rami Abdu, head of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor as saying that the International Criminal Court announcement that it has jurisdiction over the Palestinian Territories represents a victory, won by many sacrifices, for justice, freedom and ethical values in the world. It is, he said, the fruit of a Palestinian struggle that has lasted decades to win recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
As a result, he said, Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes from various generations will gain the right to seek justice after decades of occupation and to see the perpetrators tried in the Hague. He cautioned, however, that “The decision does not mean the end of the road, and the task will not be easy. The hope is that the Biden administration will adopt a different course from its predecessor, and will refrain from putting any pressure on the court.”
In spring of 2020, Trump declared a national emergency as a pretext for being able to target justices and staff of the International Criminal Court with sanctions because they were looking into alleged crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan. These outrageous and ineffectual sanctions have been lifted by the Biden administration.
The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute circulated to UN member states in the late 1990s and finalized in 2002. The United States and Israel refused to sign or to recognize the court’s jurisdiction. Some 123 countries have, however, ratified the treaty and so incorporated it into their national law.
The court can take up cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and Apartheid committed by officials in the signatory states. It can apply sanctions to individuals in those governments after trying them. It does not sanction states but individuals. So far its cases have been entirely from Africa.
But the court’s hands are usually tied with regard to non-signatory governments. It cannot move against their officials unless the United Nations Security Council forwards a case to them. Thus, when the murderous regime of Muammar Gaddafi attacked civilians in winter-spring of 2011 during the Arab Spring youth revolt, the Security Council referred the case to the ICC. Its justices considered evidence against Muammar Gaddafi and his son Saif Gaddafi, as well as interior minister Abdullah Sanusi. Arrest warrants were issued by the court for these individuals on June 27, 2011.
The State of Palestine led by Mahmoud Abbas had little hope of the US Security Council asking the ICC to look into Israeli war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza, since the United States almost always uses its veto to protect Israeli officials from sanctions for their illegal occupation policies in the Palestinian Territories that they grabbed beginning in 1967.
The Palestinian David very carefully and with foresight therefore moved to join the International Criminal Court. The first obstacle they faced is that court members have to be members of the United Nations. Since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the eclipse of Labor in favor of the far, far right Likud and its offshoots, Israel’s policy against the Palestinian people has been predicated on preventing Palestinians from ever having a state. They are to be kept stateless and deprived of the basic human rights that come with citizenship in a state.
In 2015, the state of Palestine (as the UN calls it) acceded to the International Criminal Court and recognized its jurisdiction in the Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem.
This is like three dimensional chess on the part of the Palestinians. Because they now have what is called in the law “standing.” They are a permanent observer state at the UN and they are signatories to the Rome Statute.
Now just one step was left, which was to take to the ICC those Israeli officials operating in the Palestinian Territories in such a way as to violate the Rome Statute. Palestine did not hurry to do so, hoping that the government of Binyamin Netanyahu would see the legal peril and become more reasonable. But Netanyahu kept stealing their land and urging Trump to cut their funding (which he did), and by 2019 the Palestinians concluded that they had nothing left to lose by filing a claim.
The ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, declared a delay while she sought reassurances that the court had jurisdiction over Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
A little over a year later, she has been assured that it does, given the recognition of the Palestine Authority as the government of those region in the Oslo Accords.
As Mr. Abdu said, this step is more the beginning of something rather than its end. Netanyahu will attempt to obstruct the workings of the court. But this is a great day for the international rule of law, and all believers in human rights should rejoice.
Professor Juan Cole, who manages one of my favorite news blogs, Informed Comment, has written an article exposing apartheid Israel’s refusal to
Professor Juan Cole
distribute the covid vaccines to Palestinians in Israel or the Occupied Territories.
Yes, as I demonstrate in my forthcoming book on Christian Zionism, Israel is an ethnocratic state that prioritizes Jewish lives above all others.
Several of my friends in the West Bank have already contracted covid. Thankfully, none of
Journalist Robert Scheer
them have died, and all seem to have recovered fully.
Due to the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, and its perennial lack of funds (largely due to American and Israeli economic restrictions), the rate of infection is much higher than officially reported.
People are afraid to tell their bosses and supervisors when they do become sick, because they fear losing their jobs and being ostracized.
Cole’s article can be found at Robert Scheer’s new journalism site, Scheerpost.
The piece is entitled, “Israel’s Latest War Crime: Medical Apartheid.”
I have excerpted the article below, or you can read the entire piece here:
Some ten percent of Israelis have already been given the coronavirus shot, showing what an efficient government can do for its citizens with the right medical and administrative infrastructure. The Trump administration has not been able to ramp up the actual shots in arms, despite shipping millions of doses of vaccine to states and localities.
There’s just one problem with Israel’s success. It is only within Israel proper.
Israeli medical teams in Israel welcome the vaccine’s arrival…for them
Israel militarily occupies the Palestinian West Bank and keeps the little Palestinian Gaza Strip under blockade. In international law, Israel is responsible for the health and well-being of the people it militarily occupies. Not vaccinating them against a pandemic is a war crime.
You know how many shots Israeli physicians have given the Palestinians under their rule? None.
This, even though Israeli squatters who have stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank are being given the shot.
There has been a dangerous spike in cases and deaths during the past two months in the Palestinian Territories.
These statistics are almost certainly missing many cases and deaths, since Palestinians living under the Israeli boot have lost tens of billions of dollars in potential income and their medical infrastructure is ramshackle. There is a severe shortage, for instance, of intensive care units. On top of all that, the Trump administration has cruelly and ruthlessly slashed aid to the Palestinians and has knee-capped the UN Relief and Works Agency that used to help out Palestinian refugees. These are families ethnically cleansed by the Israelis in 1948 and 1967.
As far as the health ministry can tell, 13% of the Palestinian population tests positive for the virus and about 1% of those stricken end up dying. That would be 650,000 people stricken, of whom 6,500 will die. They wouldn’t die at that rate if they were getting the vaccine.
Gideon Levy, intrepid Israeli journalist for Haaretz newspaper
Gideon Levy is one of the bravest and most honest journalists in Israel. He writes for the daily newspaper Haaretz. Here is his most recent article on the Israeli army and its brutal treatment of Palestinian children.
I have visited the Al-Arroub refugee camp and spent a pleasant afternoon with a family there. All three sons had been arrested, beaten by Israeli soldiers. One had been shot. All for no particular reason:
Last week, we were in the Al-Arroub refugee camp, searching for an open area in which to sit, for fear of the coronavirus. There wasn’t one. In a camp in which house touches house, whose alleys are the width of a man and strewn with garbage, there’s nowhere to sit outside. One can only dream of a garden or a bench; there isn’t even a sidewalk. This is where Basel al-Badawi lives. A year ago, soldiers shot his brother dead, before his eyes, for no reason. Two weeks ago, Basel was snatched from his bed on a cold night and taken, barefoot, for questioning. We sat in his family’s cramped home and realized there was no “out” to go to. While we were there, Israeli soldiers blocked the entrance to the camp, as they occasionally do, arbitrarily, and the sense of suffocation only grew.
Basel Al Badawi in his home, with photo of Omar hanging on the wall, in Al Arroub refugee camp, November 2020. Credit: Alex Levac
This is Basel’s world and this is his reality. He is 16, a bereaved brother, who was abducted from his bed in the dark of night by soldiers. He has nowhere to go to except for school, which is closed for part of the week due to COVID-19. Basel is free now, more fortunate than certain other children and teenagers. Around 170 of them are currently detained in Israel. Other children are shot by soldiers, wounded and sometimes killed, with no distinction made between children and adults – a Palestinian is a Palestinian – or between a life-threatening situation and a “public disturbance.”
On Friday they killed Ali Abu Alia, a 13-year-old boy. It was a lethal shot to the abdomen. No one could remain indifferent to the sight of his innocent face in photographs, and his last picture – in a shroud, his face exposed, his eyes closed, as he was carried to burial in his village. Ali, as he did every week, went with his friends to demonstrate against the wild and violent outposts that sprouted out of the settlement of Kokhav Hashahar, taking over the remaining land of his village, al-Mughayir. There is nothing more just than the struggle of this village, there is nothing more heinous than the use of lethal force against protesters and there is no possibility that shooting Ali in the abdomen could have been justifiable. In Israel, of course, no one showed any interest over the weekend in the death of a child, one more child.
Mourners carry the body of Palestinian teenager Ali Abu Alia during his funeral in the village of Mughayir near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on December 5, 2020. Credit: ABBAS MOMANI/AFP
Up until the current school year, around 50 children from the shepherding community of Ras a-Tin studied at the school in al-Mughayir, the village of the deceased boy. They had to walk about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) each day, round trip, to attend. This year their parents, with the help of a European Commission aid organization based in Italy, built them a modest, charming school in the village. Israel’s Civil Administration is threatening to demolish it, and in the meantime it is harassing the pupils and teachers with surprise visits to check whether the toilets had been, God forbid, connected to a water pipe – in a village that was never connected to the power grid or the water supply. The children of Ras a-Tin must have known Ali, their former classmate, now dead.
The children did not know Malek Issa, of Isawiyah, in East Jerusalem. The 9-year-old boy lost an eye after it was hit by a sponge-tipped bullet fired by an Israeli police officer. On Thursday the Justice Ministry department that examines allegations of police misconduct announced that no one would be charged in the shooting, after 10 months of intensive investigation. It was enough for the policemen involved to claim that stones had been thrown at them, perhaps one of them hit the boy. But no video shows stones being thrown, nor is there any other evidence of this. Ali’s killers can also sleep in peace: No one will prosecute them. All they did was to kill a Palestinian child.
The 9-year-old Palestinian boy who was wounded in Isawiyah at Hadassah Ein-Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem, on February 18, 2020.Credit: Ohad Ziegenberg
These and many other incidents are taking place during a period that is among the quietest in the West Bank. This is the terror taking place, committed by the state. When we hear of such incidents in vicious dictatorships – children who are snatched from their beds in the middle of the night, one boy who was shot in the eye, another who was shot and killed – it sends shivers down our spine. Shooting at demonstrators? At children? Where do such things happen? Not in some faraway land, but rather just an hour’s drive from your home; not in some dark regime, but in the only democracy.
What would you think of a regime that allows the shooting of children, that abducts them in their sleep and razes their schools? That’s exactly what you must think of the regime here in our country [Israel].
Below is a 2 minute video showing Israeli soldiers randomly firing tear gas and rubber bullets in a West Bank Palestinian neighborhood.
I have witnessed and photographed identical behavior many times. I have also watched a video filmed by one of my friends showing Israeli soldiers shooting tear gas onto a neighborhood playground, causing little children, mothers, and grandmothers to flee.
The soldiers do not need “a reason” for doing these things. Their only reason is the fact that Palestinians are not Jews (even though there are Arab Jews in Israel called Mizrahis).
The fact that Palestinians dare to live on land that the Zionists want for themselves is all the reason Israel needs for making Palestinian life as unbearable as possible.
The Israeli army calls it “the searing of consciousness.” It’s similar to the torture techniques used by the CIA to reduce detainees to a state of “learned helplessness.”
Israel’s theory is that, eventually, the entire Palestinian population will learn that resistance is futile. They will learn to always do exactly as they are told; or, better yet, move somewhere else so that Israel can take all of their property without a struggle.
Rep. Ilhan Omar is someone I deeply admire. She is a woman of principle who does not hesitate (as far as I can tell) to speak out on behalf of the
Rep. Ilhan Omar
oppressed, whether in this country or abroad.
Rep. Omar is up for reelection in November. But as someone who defends the rights of the Palestinian people to live freely as equal citizens in the land of Palestine; as someone who condemns Zionist Israel’s continuous oppression of the Palestinians, she is coming under heavy attack from pro-Zionist, pro-Israel lobbying organizations in this country.
This opposition includes a growing number of death threats.
With all the baseless hysteria in the media nowadays worrying about Russian election interference, the continuing Big-Money election influencing efforts on behalf of Israel make other complaints pale in comparison.
But don’t say that out loud in public. You will be attacked as an antisemite by someone connected to AIPAC.
Here is an excerpt:
But the reaction to Omar has been especially hostile. Many charged that the furious response to her comments quickly devolved into Islamophobic attacks on one of the nation’s first Muslim Congresswomen. Trump capitalized on last year’s uproar, leading chants of “send them back” at his rallies, fanning phony outrage and prompting serious death threats.
The lobby and its allies have zeroed in on Omar for several reasons, said Zaha Hassan, a human rights attorney and visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Omar “unabashedly” has called out the lobby, supports BDS, has taken up Israeli human rights abuses, “and hasn’t backed down regardless of how many times folks have come at her with charges of antisemitism.”
“She has come out strongly in support of Palestinian human rights and she has not been afraid of calling what Israel is doing in terms of its control over Palestinian lives ‘apartheid’ — that’s what sets her apart,” Hassan said.
Still, other lawmakers and progressives are increasingly vocal in their criticism of Israel, and they haven’t faced an onslaught of attacks from the president, his supporters, Israel and centrist Democrats.
Hassan pointed to Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum, a white woman who represents a district next to Omar’s, who has similarly denounced Israel as an “apartheid” state but doesn’t face the same criticism.
That’s likely because Omar is an African-American, Muslim woman, Hassan said.
“She presents an easier target for some folks who want to delegitimize that kind of speech about Israel in terms of accountability and conditioning aid and those kinds of issues,” Hassan added.
Beyond that, Omar has become a leader of the pro-Palestine progressive movement, and knocking her out of office in August would represent a major win for Israel. The lobby’s willingness to spend over $2 million on that objective highlights its importance.
Mr. Levy is a modern day prophet; the lone voice calling for national repentance in the Israeli wilderness.
Although this article focuses on the retired general, and now leading Israeli politician Benny Gantz, you don’t need to know much about Gantz or Israeli politics to grasp Levy’s point.
Think of the way our government continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia so the Saudis can continue their treacherous attacks in Yemen.
Or look at the Federal agents attacking demonstrators with bats, gas, and
Benny Gantz
pepper spray across this country. All in the name of “restoring order.”
Here is an excerpt:
What the state can do, the individual cannot. Let’s leave aside the jargon where everything the other side does is terrorism and everything Israel does is for the sake of security. It’s common wisdom that what the state does is never considered violence, only self-defense. The state and the army can act as violently as they please, as much as they want, and go as crazy as they want. The state will always do this in the name of lofty values of defense. An individual who acts violently is an anarchist, a serial disrupter of law and order. There are laws that are also supposed to apply to countries, but Israel decided a long time ago that it is not bound by such laws.
And yet, is it possible that in one breath you can threaten violence and stand against it? Knowing the impact that state violence has on the way individuals act? One needs a special lack of self-awareness or a special degree of double standards to make such a claim. What Israel threatens to do in Lebanon is immeasurably more violent than anything the most dangerous anarchist could imagine. Israel’s actions in Lebanon have sowed much more anarchy and destruction than any demonstration. And so Gantz, and all his colleagues have no moral right to speak against violence. It’s almost the only language they know and it’s their bread and butter.
Ali Abunimah, author of the book The Battle for Justice in Palestine and editor at The Electronic Intifada, has written a good article explaining why many Zionist supporters of Israel, including groups like AIPAC and the Zionist Organization of America, are not only refusing to support “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations but are actively repudiating the movement.
It’s not hard to understand if we understand the truth about political Zionism and the reality of Palestinian life in and around Israel.
Below is an excerpt. You can read the entire piece here.
As protests sweep the world in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Israel lobby groups are struggling to appear on board with the Black Lives Matter movement while upholding their support for Israel’s racism.
While some are trying to jump on the anti-racism bandwagon, others are dispensing with subtlety altogether.
Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America, demanded that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, “immediately put Black Lives Matter on their list of hate groups.”
——
The Anti-Defamation League is also no more credible as a partner against racism, especially US police brutality.
with the Palestinian people?
As protests sweep the world in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Israel lobby groups are struggling to appear on board with the Black Lives Matter movement while upholding their support for Israel’s racism.