Tag: Zionism

Bethlehem Pastor Proclaims a Prophetic Word to the Western Church

Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac is a professor at Bethlehem Bible College as well as the pastor at the bethlehem Lutheran Christmas church. Terry and I often  worship at this church whenever we are in the West Bank.

Pastor Isaac understands that now is the time for a prophetic word addressed to the western church. He declares hard truths powerfully.

He is a Christian leader speaking to his fellow believers in the western Church — a Church that largely approves of Israel’s current campaign of destruction against his people. How can this be?

Our only proper response is repentance.

Bethlehem Churches Live Out the Biblical Tradition of Lament in War Time

I am privileged to count both the Rev. Drs. Mitri Raheb and Munther Isaac among my friends. You will meet them in this video from Democracy Now.

Together with the other Christian leaders of Bethlehem, they are speaking prophetically to the rest of the world as public celebrations have been cancelled in Bethlehem this Christmas.

Oh, they are not neglecting the wonder of Jesus’ birth. But they are grappling with the contexual realities of remembering Jesus’ birth while also suffering brutal Israeli attacks in both Gaza and the West Bank.

Thus, they haver turned to the Old Testament tradition of lament, that is crying out to God in protest against both worldly injustice and his apparent absence.

The western Christian church has become immune to the biblical concept of collective, corporate lament. Even when we try to construct a lament service, we don’t really know how to be comfortable with it.

In part, this awkwardness is due to American isolationism, ignorance, and lack of empathy for others.

We fail to identify with our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ because many don’t realize that Palestinian Christians exist.

We ignore the news of literal genocide occurring in Gaza because we are generally disinterested in the rest of the world.

And when we go to visit Israel, we are more feverish about visiting Zionist synagogue services than we are about worshiping with Palestinian brothers and sisters.

The Palestinian church is showing us once again what biblical lament means as they endure a multitude of the cruelest war time injustices.

As Gaza is Flattened, Land Theft and Ethnic Cleansing Continues Apace in the West Bank

Never before has the Jewish settlement movement held as much power as they do today. Several of their leaders are members of the Israeli cabinet. They now call the shots in the West Bank, accelerating Jewish attacks against Palestinians, stealing their homes, destroying their crops and killing them with impunity.

The following video compilation offers a glimpse into this world of daily threats and violence:

Meet My Palestinian Family as They Gather Together Following the Attack on Their Homes

Our friend, Layla, is a journalist working for the online news magazine, Mondoweiss. She filmed some members of the Amira and Al Azzah families after the Israeli soldiers, who had physically attacked them all, had finally left with Munther laying in the back of their truck.

This is our extended family in the West Bank. I admire their fortitude and resilience. I wish I was with them right now.

 

Munther Amira, Another Friend, is Kidnapped by Israeli Soldiers

Yesterday, I received the following message explaining the “arrest” (Israeli arrests are more like kidnappings) of my dear friend Munther Amira.

Munther is a well-known community leader who is committed to non-violence. I have watched him in action, working to defuse tense situations where Israeli soldiers were working to foment violence.

This is not the first time Munther has been arrested. He is a regular target of Israeli violence. If you are a praying person, I ask you to please pray for Munther’s release and safety.

Here is the notice from the Aida Youth Center about Munther’s arrest, (All emphasis is mine):

The Israeli occupation forces have arrested activist Munther Amira from his home in the Aida refugee camp. Munther is the the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Aida Youth Center. He is also an activist with the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC), a collection of grassroots activist in the West Bank.

Munther was violently arrested from his home around 3 in the morning. Israeli soldiers broke down the door of Munther’s mother’s home and violently beat up Munther’s younger brother Kareem for more than 15 minutes. They then broke into Munther’s house and began beating him while they locked his wife and children in a bedroom. They tied up Munther’s sons, and took a knife and slashed the t shirt of Munther’s youngest teenage son, because it had a map of Palestine on it.

They then dragged Munther out of his home, tied him up, blindfolded him and left him in the street for over an hour.

Israeli forces screamed at and shot live ammunition towards a young boy who was watching the arrest from the window of his house. Israeli forces also prevented ambulances from entering the camp to treat Munther’s brother Kareem who was badly injured.

After more than an hour, the soldiers abducted Munther and took him into the military base.

Munther’s brother Kareem is now in the hospital.

Munther is a prisoner of conscience. This is not the first time he has been targeted for his activism. In 2017 he was arrested for participating in a peaceful demonstration demanding the release of then child prisoner Ahed Tamimi. Munther was sentenced to 6 months in prison for “disturbing public order” and “participating in a protest without a permit”.

We demand the immediate release of both our colleagues Munther Amira and Anas Abu Srour from their illegal detention.

Please raise your voice to put as much pressure as we can in the media to #FreeMuntherAmira and #FreeAnasAbuSrour

“The Gospel” According to the Israeli Military

President Biden recently condemned Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza. Israel’s defenders reply by insisting that Israel’s bombs are carefully calculated to hit only designated targets; there is nothing indiscriminate about them.

A recent investigation by journalists at +972 magazine now explains how to resolve this seeming contradition. The massive bombing campaign is not indiscriminate. It only looks that way because  of a new Israeli computer program linked to artifcial intelligence.

The new AI program can isolate a vast array of possible targets within seconds and send misssles to each of them. As a result, the massive levels of damage caused by Israel’s bombing campaign is not only deliberate but well calculated.

It is precision bombing on a massive scale.

The Israeli military has so much confidence in this new AI killing program that it has been labeled “The Gospel” — a most repulsive, ghoulism blasphemy, in my view.

Below are selected excerpts from the article written by Yuval Abraham. It is titled “‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombmg of Gaza.” (All emphasis is mine):

The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.

. . . has seen the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (“matarot otzem”).

The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it.

Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

Give special attention to Israel’s bizarre rationale for excusing this murderous behavior. Israel is “not like Hamas,” we are told, because Israel deliberately targets civilians; knows exactly how many civilians will end up as ‘collateral damage’; and so is killing massive numbers of innocent men, women and children knowingly, intentionally.

And this makes Israel superior to Hamas?

Really?

Here we have a good illustration of how the arrogance of privileged power-brokers  can scorch the conscience, twist our sense of right and wrong, and rationalize even the most ludicrously cruel, murderous calculations.

Read the entire article here.

As the Horrors of Gaza Mount, Israel Becomes Increasingly Racist and Authoritarian

The following report from Al Jazeera news contains several stories. First, you will see images from the war in Gaza that the MSM seldom, if ever, show.

Second, a Palestinian-Israeli journalist describes the frightening increase in racist threats and authoritarianism emerging in Israeli society today.

The Case of My Friend, Anas, Is Brought Up on the Floor of the UK House of Commons

Anas’ illegal arrest and imprisonment is receiving international attention. Please continue to pray that he will be released and allowed to return home to his family. (For previous posts about Anas, see here and here.)

 

 

“What Would I Have Done?” We Now Know How to Answer that Question

What would I have done?

That’s the common question we usually ask ourselves when watching a movie like “Schindler’s List,” the academy award winning film about one man’s efforts to rescue Jews from Hilter’s gas chambers.

Schindler risked his life to save others. And he was not the only one.

Others such as the Dutch woman, Corrie Ten Boom, broke the law by hiding Jews inside their homes, risking their freedom while trying to rescue people like Anne Frank, who hid in her neighbor’s attic.

Even though the majority of German church pastors supported the Nazi regime, there was a small  minority of faithful ministers of the gospel who eventually lost their freedom because they would not remain silent in the face of Nazi criminality.

Books like Defying Hitler tell the stories of the many ways in which ordinary people in Nazi Germany said No, refusing to march with the majority who refused to speak up or to act out against the wanton atrocities unfolding around them.

Which, again, raises the question, What would I have done?

Would I have remained inactive and silent? Or would I have spoken up, protested, or used whatever means I had at my disposal to work against the genocide and save whomever I could?

Now we all know the answers to those questions. We don’t have to wait any longer.

We are living in a unique moment of history. For a real genocide, a horrendous program of ethnic cleansing is now occuring before our eyes.

Though the American/Western mainstream media gives it all scant attention, anyone with a wider bandwidth of human interest can watch the scandalous, ugly images of daily attrocities as they unfold in real time.

Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, The Electronic Intifada, The Gray Zone, and the Katie Halper Show (among others) are thankfully offering the news coverage that corporate America does not want us to see.

And that news is shockingly repetitious. For what Israel is now doing in Gaza and the West Bank “is a textbook case of genocide.” Those are not my words but the words of Craig Mokhiber, formerly the Director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights.

Mr. Mokhiber is the former director because he recently resigned from his position at the United Nations over its efforts to censor his reports on Israel’s attrocities in Gaza.

As a result, Mokhiber ranks among the heroes with Mr. Schindler and Corrie Ten Boom for doing what he could to speak out, protest, and even to hinder the genocide unfolding before our eyes.

He has shown us how he answers the question, “What would I have done?”

It is all too easy to cast ourselves as heroes in our own imaginations, especially when we have no contemporary circumstances to offer us an immediate heroic option.

So, I always imagine myself the hero. But today I do not need to imagine anything. I can face the evidence squarely by looking at my actions today.

What am I doing today to protest, to act, to work against the textbook case of genocide now being written in the pages of modern history with Palestinian blood?

This is the answer for both you and me.

If I am doing nothing to defend Palestinian life today, then that’s what I would have done to defend Anne Frank — nothing.

If I am doing nothing to protest the genocide now occurring in Gaza, then I would have remained silent as I inhaled the stench of Auschwitz.

We can all go to bed tonight knowing that we have answered the perpetually troubling moral question: What would I have done?

Can you still sleep well?

Update on My Friend, Anas, Who is Now Part of Israel’s Invisible Hostage Exchange

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.