The ICEJ Promotes Zionist Propaganda and Shares the Guilt

Today I received a fundraising email from the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem.  The ICEJ is a American based, Christian Zionist organization that spreads Israeli government talking points, whatever they may be.

Here are the letter’s first two paragraphs:

“In the last 3 months, more missiles have been fired at Israel than in the last 3 years combined.  About 600% more! Night after night, families have been awakened by the piercing sound of warning sirens, knowing they have only seconds to scramble for cover, fearing their home will be the next one destroyed…

“Terror kites and incendiary balloons have filled the skies over southern Israel for months, burning over 8,500 acres of crops, trees, and nature reserves and filling homes and communities with choking smoke.”

Let’s put this letter into perspective.

Israel has unilaterally confined nearly 2 million Palestinians within a 141 square miles (approximately 25 miles long, averaging 6 miles wide) area called Gaza.  The people of Gaza are fenced in, trapped, and they are not allowed to leave.  Even those suffering from serious medical conditions are commonly prevented from traveling by ambulance to the nearest Israeli hospitals.  All the Gazan hospitals have been bombed.

The Gaza fence is not Israel’s southern border, as Zionist propaganda claims.  It is a tightly controlled prison fence, guarded by the Israeli military.

Until 2010 it was official Israeli policy to control food imports into Gaza in order to maintain the entire population at the borderline of malnutrition.  The Israeli government calculated that each Palestinian needed only 2,279 calories/day.  Available food stuffs were restricted accordingly.

Fishing is/was a major industry for the Gazan economy.  Since Israel imposed its blockage against the Gazan people in 2007, fishing areas are severely restricted by the Israeli navy.  Israel arbitrarily limits Palestinians fishermen to a 6 mile fishing zone.  But even within that narrow limit Israeli naval vessels regularly attack fishermen and destroy their boats.

Israel arbitrarily declared a 300 meter wide “no man’s zone” extending from the fence encircling Gaza.  It is now a free-fire zone, where anyone — man woman or child — can be shot and killed.  Besides shrinking the size of Gaza dramatically, all of this land is private property, much of it farmland now made inaccessible by Israeli fiat.

Beginning this past March, thousands of Palestinians began making weekly marches at the Gaza fence, protesting their imprisonment.  Israeli soldiers use live ammunition to kill, maim and cripple innocent Palestinian civilians every time they march.

Thus far, Israeli soldiers have killed at least 130 people (including journalists, medics and children).  They have seriously wounded, crippled and maimed at least 20,000 people.  Let that sink in.

But such bloodshed in Gaza is not unusual.

Israel’s last concerted attack on Gaza in 2014, called Operation Protective Edge, inflicted massive civilian casualties.  According to the United Nations Office on Humanitarian Affairs Israeli bombers, missiles and planes killed — do I need to remind my reader that the Palestinians have none of these weapons? — more than 2,250 people.  At least, 1,462 of them were civilians, 551 children, and 299  women.

11,231 Gazans were injured, including 3,436 children and 3,540 women. Over 1,500 children were orphaned.  18,000 housing units were demolished.

From July through August, the Israeli military carried out more than 6,000 airstrikes on Gaza, many of them hitting residential buildings.  The army reported using 5,000 tons of munitions, including 14,500 tank shells and 35,000 artillery shells.  These figures do not include precision-guided missiles or aerial bombing.

So, it is not surprising that the people trapped in Gaza, who are regularly used for target practice and shot like fish in a barrel, protest their captivity.  Wouldn’t you?

Some of them build home-made rockets and fire them into southern Israel.  These are not “guided” missiles.  They are generally very short range, and Israel boasts that the majority of these missiles are intercepted by their “Iron Dome” anti-missile system.

But, of course, they can still be deadly.  Between 2001 and 2014, 44 Israelis (30 civilians and 14 soldiers) were killed by rockets and mortars fired from Gaza.  I don’t know the cumulative figures since then.

Every Christian must condemn violence, whatever form it takes.   We grieve for every Israeli, especially unarmed civilians, killed or injured by Gazan rockets.  God’s people are called to be instruments of peace in this violent world.

Yet, who grieves for the Palestinians?

Apparently, not the ICEJ.  Nor the millions of other Christian Zionists in the west who never give a second thought — in fact, they never give a third, fourth or fifth thought — to Palestinian suffering.  We are morally incurious, never bothering to learn about the inconvenient millions who  happen to stand in the way of Israel’s plan for a purified ethnic state forever populated by a Jewish majority.

How blind God’s supposed people can be.

It is a profound spiritual blindness that reveals the truth about the hearts of American evangelicals.  Our hearts are hard.  Hard as granite.

We raise our hands in church and shed tears of joy for ourselves whenever the Lord seems to answer our self-centered prayers for excess.  A bigger house.  A better job.  A pretty spouse.  A longer vacation.  You name it.

And all the while we are applauding and helping to finance one of the more horrendous crimes against humanity in the modern world.

The typical evangelical would rather go to Israel as a tourist, walk where Jesus walked, get weak in the knees over a visit to the Western (Wailing) Wall, and never give a thought to the weekly slaughter of innocent human lives occurring only a few miles south of Jerusalem.

Neither do the majority of tourists ever think to worship with their Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ who weep and suffer every day beneath the massive boots of Zionist thugs.

We are those thugs.

The boots are ours.

Palestinian blood stains the American church indelibly.  The Lord Jesus will not forget our guilt.  He will judge us all when The Day finally arrives, saying:

“Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,  I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”  (Matthew 25:41-43)