Dear Friend,
The Israeli/Palestinian Mission Network (IPMN) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has issued a statement I hope you will read (and send along to persons in your world).
It accurately summarizes the current situation, unmasks true Israeli intention to colonize the whole of Isr/Pal, and perpetuate the Occupation of the Palestinian people.
The US continues to take its cue from the Israeli right wing government instead of assessing its own strategic interests in the ME and standing up to Israel. The situation is more dire than our media lets on. The tail continues to wag the dog. Lamentable. But understandable in light of diminishing influence by the US over affairs there (or anywhere else). World leadership is transitioning away from the Americans.
(Disclosure: I attended the IPMN annual conference this fall in Louisville, KY). JRK
Contact:
Noushin Framke, Communication Chair: info@theIPMN.org
Israel to Palestine: "You are Damned if You Do, and Damned if You Don't"
NEW YORK — Nov. 3, 2011 — The Israel Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA)* (IPMN) condemns the announcement by the Israeli government to accelerate expansion of settlement construction and financially sanction the Palestinian Authority as a response to the successful bid by its leadership to join UNESCO this week. The IPMN calls upon President Obama to take a clear, public stand against this decision because it threatens any hope that peace negotiations can occur between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the foreseeable future.
By this action, Israel's intentions have become quite clear: It will expand settlements when the Palestinians are at the negotiating table; and, it will expand settlements when they are not at the table. With this move, Israel is taking away the legitimate choice all peoples have of seeking relief within the appropriate international structures dedicated towards global community and peace building. In addition, in light of reports by Israel's own generals that the Palestinian Authority has played a major role in reducing extremist violence, it is absurd to cut off funds to an official Palestinian entity that is helping to achieve nonviolence inside the pressure cooker of Israeli apartheid.
Historically, in regard to settlement building, the facts cannot be disputed: Israel has been expanding them at break neck speed under the leadership of every one of its prime ministers since the Six-Day War in June 1967. The pace has even accelerated following the breakdown of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Israeli historian, Gershom Gorenberg has pointed out why settlement expansion, and not peace negotiations, is the top priority for Israeli leadership: "What we're seeing is a classic example where a diplomatic initiative has the effect of accelerating settlement construction. When there is a fear or suspicion that a diplomatic process might actually take place...there is a tendency among settlement supporters within the government to try to speed things up."
Complicating matters is the recent announcement by the United States State Department to withhold $60M from UNESCO, as dictated by U.S. law (1990 & 1994) requiring the withdrawal of financial support from any U.N. entity that admits Palestine into its membership. Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO) described what is at stake as a result of this decision: "The United States is on the brink of abandoning its decades-long leadership in several international organizations-a process that will fundamentally undermine American national security and economic interests ... UNESCO leads global efforts to bring clean water to the poor, promotes educational and curriculum building in the developing world, and manages a tsunami early warning system in the Pacific, among other important tasks."
The Palestinians will be applying for membership in all 16 U.N. agencies in the coming months. These include the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). If these U.N. agencies vote to admit Palestine as UNESCO did so overwhelmingly, will the United States continue to withdraw its support in a time when its leadership in such areas is so greatly needed? Will the United States actually find itself in the position of sabotaging efforts towards global stability and well-being because of its indefensible, parochial view that Palestine can only seek terms of a just peace through the methods or channels the U.S. has approved? Will the U.S. stand against Palestinian membership in U.N. agencies just to satisfy Israel even at the cost of U.S. interests elsewhere in the world?
The Israel Palestine Mission Network regrets that an effort by Palestinian leadership to work within the structures of the greatest international peacekeeping and peacemaking body in the world can lead to even more isolation of Israel and the U.S. and further undermine peace, security and justice not only in the Middle East but globally. The network calls upon all Christian, as well as interfaith bodies to contact our national leadership at every level to make our financial and military aid to Israel contingent upon an immediate halt to the building and expansion of illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
*Established by action of the 2004 General Assembly, the IPMN seeks to demonstrate solidarity, educate about the facts on the ground, and change the conditions that erode the humanity of both Israelis and Palestinians, especially those who are living under occupation in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. The network speaks TO the Church not FOR the Church.
--
John
jandskleinheksel@gmail.com
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Huge Influx of (Christian) Immigrants to Israel
Dear Friend,
Here is a fascinating article on the mostly HIDDEN influx of non-Israeli (Christian) guest workers changing the demographics of our region.
Most informative, and what does it mean further down the road? Filipina, African, Indian. and other (mostly Roman Catholic) Christians now outnumber Arab Christians five to one.
With thanks to the American Task Force on Palestine (AFTP) for bringing it to our attention. JRK
In the Holy Land, a changed Christian world
Matti Friedman
The Statesman (Analysis)
October 27, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/in-the-holy-land-a-changed-christian-world-...
The schedules for Mass at the two Roman Catholic churches in Jaffa, on Israel's Mediterranean coast, reveal a change that has dramatically, if quietly, altered the face of Christianity in the Holy Land.
The two Masses in Arabic for the town's native Arab Christian population are outnumbered by four in English, attended mainly by Filipina caregivers. Then there are others in Spanish, for South Americans; French, for African migrants; three South Asian languages, including Konkani, spoken in the Indian district of Goa; and, for a generation of Christians raised among Israel's Jewish majority, Hebrew.
In September, a colorful celebration for Indian Catholics alone drew 2,000 people. That's twice the total number of native Catholics in the parish.
For centuries, Christianity here meant the ancient communities of Christian Arabs. They were here when Israel was created around them in 1948, and they have kept their distinct identity within the Jewish state since. The past two decades, however, have seen one of the most significant influxes of Christians into the Holy Land since the Crusades, and it has created a wholly new Christian landscape shaped by the realities of Israel.
The newcomers include guest workers from dozens of different countries who provide the economy with cheap labor, and asylum-seekers from Sudan, Eritrea and elsewhere in Africa who sneak across the border from Egypt. And for the first time, there is a significant population of non-Arab Christian Israeli citizens, mainly immigrants from the former Soviet Union who, unlike Arabs, are fully assimilated into the Jewish Israeli mainstream.
Their presence has created new challenges for local churches that are simultaneously, like churches across the Mideast, facing the uncertain future of their local flocks. The numbers of Israel's 110,000 native Arab Christians have largely stagnated: They're not shrinking, but neither are they growing, as many young people leave for the West, squeezed by the conflict between Jews and Muslims and party to the general sense of neglect shared by Israel's Arab citizens.
Father Ramzi Sidawi, an Arab Catholic from Jerusalem, is the parish priest in Jaffa. Outside the church windows, he said, he now listens every day to children from Africa and the Philippines playing in Hebrew, the language of their schools and their parents' employers.
"You have to divide yourself, switch between languages. We have to serve everybody," he said. "The biggest challenge is to maintain the community united and not divided."
That's a difficult task, considering the gulf of language and culture that divides the newcomers from each other and from Arab Christians. There don't seem to be overt frictions or resentments, but in practice, Sidawi said, there is little contact among them beyond shared Masses on Christmas and other festivals. The non-Arabs who attend church in Jaffa, for example, live elsewhere, mainly in foreign worker-dominated districts of nearby south Tel Aviv.
If one counts all of the people in Israel who are neither Jewish nor Muslim, these newcomers outnumber Arab Christians by more than five to one. The number of newcomers who are practicing believers is far smaller, but by some estimates they equal or outnumber the members of local churches.
"This creates concern for some that in the long term there could be a change in who the Christians of the Holy Land are, and concern about what will happen to the historic churches," said Amnon Ramon, who has researched these demographic changes as an expert on Christianity in Israel at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.
There are enough newcomers now for a Catholic cathedral in every major Israeli city, said Rev. David Neuhaus, who heads the Church's vicariate for Hebrew-speakers.
"We do not have enough clergy, and we do not have enough places to pray," he said. So services are held in ad hoc locations or in the existing Arab churches.
Clergymen now find themselves dealing with problems like Sudanese asylum-seekers trying to prove paternity without papers, choir members deported by Israeli immigration police, and children who go to Jewish public schools and are drawn not by their parents' Christianity but by the culture of their Israeli peers.
On a recent Sunday, the chapel at the Ratisbonne monastery in downtown Jerusalem rang with the sound of hymns in Tagalog, one of the languages of the Philippines. Most of the worshippers were women who serve as caregivers for elderly Israelis.
There were 5,000 Filipino workers in Israel when Father Angelo Beda Ison, a Manila-born Franciscan who tends to the local Filipino community, arrived in 1991. Today there are 40,000.
For the first time, the Catholic Church has to deal with Catholic kids who are assimilating into a Jewish majority. There are now several thousand children born to foreign workers who speak Hebrew as a first language, celebrate Jewish holidays with their classmates and are subject, like children everywhere, to the pull of the mainstream.
To bolster their faith, the local church has produced a catechism in Hebrew — "Meet the Messiah" — provides classes on Christianity in Hebrew and invites them to a Catholic summer camp, Rev. Neuhaus said. The church now has 25 clergymen tending to the transient populations, some brought in from the workers' countries of origin, he said.
Catholics are not the only Church dealing with demographic shifts.
Immigrants from the former Soviet Union began moving to Israel en masse in the early 1990s. Among the 1 million who came, about a third were not Jewish according to Jewish law but qualified for citizenship because they had a Jewish spouse or lineage. Among them were an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 practicing Christians, mostly Orthodox.
So the Russian Orthodox Church now holds services in Hebrew every week in Jerusalem.
"The Church never dreamed of such an arrival," said Father Alexandr Winogradsky, the priest who leads those services and a convert from Judaism originally from Ukraine. His job is to "try to acculturate the Church within the new Israeli culture and language."
Some of the new members, especially the young, are so assimilated into the Israeli mainstream they are uncomfortable entering a church, he said. Winogradsky goes to meet them, dressed in cassock and cross, for confession in cafes instead.
The tiny Ethiopian Orthodox Church, too, has been dealing with its own newcomers: asylum seekers from Eritrea reaching Israel in increasing numbers, smuggled in from Egypt by Bedouin. At a baptism ceremony on the Jordan River earlier this year, Eritreans were the most noticeable group.
These disparate groups of Christians share one trait — they have gone almost unnoticed by the majority of Israelis.
"This is a population that is present and absent at the same time," said Hana Bendcowsky of the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations. "No one here knows anything about their lives."
Here is a fascinating article on the mostly HIDDEN influx of non-Israeli (Christian) guest workers changing the demographics of our region.
Most informative, and what does it mean further down the road? Filipina, African, Indian. and other (mostly Roman Catholic) Christians now outnumber Arab Christians five to one.
With thanks to the American Task Force on Palestine (AFTP) for bringing it to our attention. JRK
In the Holy Land, a changed Christian world
Matti Friedman
The Statesman (Analysis)
October 27, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/in-the-holy-land-a-changed-christian-world-...
The schedules for Mass at the two Roman Catholic churches in Jaffa, on Israel's Mediterranean coast, reveal a change that has dramatically, if quietly, altered the face of Christianity in the Holy Land.
The two Masses in Arabic for the town's native Arab Christian population are outnumbered by four in English, attended mainly by Filipina caregivers. Then there are others in Spanish, for South Americans; French, for African migrants; three South Asian languages, including Konkani, spoken in the Indian district of Goa; and, for a generation of Christians raised among Israel's Jewish majority, Hebrew.
In September, a colorful celebration for Indian Catholics alone drew 2,000 people. That's twice the total number of native Catholics in the parish.
For centuries, Christianity here meant the ancient communities of Christian Arabs. They were here when Israel was created around them in 1948, and they have kept their distinct identity within the Jewish state since. The past two decades, however, have seen one of the most significant influxes of Christians into the Holy Land since the Crusades, and it has created a wholly new Christian landscape shaped by the realities of Israel.
The newcomers include guest workers from dozens of different countries who provide the economy with cheap labor, and asylum-seekers from Sudan, Eritrea and elsewhere in Africa who sneak across the border from Egypt. And for the first time, there is a significant population of non-Arab Christian Israeli citizens, mainly immigrants from the former Soviet Union who, unlike Arabs, are fully assimilated into the Jewish Israeli mainstream.
Their presence has created new challenges for local churches that are simultaneously, like churches across the Mideast, facing the uncertain future of their local flocks. The numbers of Israel's 110,000 native Arab Christians have largely stagnated: They're not shrinking, but neither are they growing, as many young people leave for the West, squeezed by the conflict between Jews and Muslims and party to the general sense of neglect shared by Israel's Arab citizens.
Father Ramzi Sidawi, an Arab Catholic from Jerusalem, is the parish priest in Jaffa. Outside the church windows, he said, he now listens every day to children from Africa and the Philippines playing in Hebrew, the language of their schools and their parents' employers.
"You have to divide yourself, switch between languages. We have to serve everybody," he said. "The biggest challenge is to maintain the community united and not divided."
That's a difficult task, considering the gulf of language and culture that divides the newcomers from each other and from Arab Christians. There don't seem to be overt frictions or resentments, but in practice, Sidawi said, there is little contact among them beyond shared Masses on Christmas and other festivals. The non-Arabs who attend church in Jaffa, for example, live elsewhere, mainly in foreign worker-dominated districts of nearby south Tel Aviv.
If one counts all of the people in Israel who are neither Jewish nor Muslim, these newcomers outnumber Arab Christians by more than five to one. The number of newcomers who are practicing believers is far smaller, but by some estimates they equal or outnumber the members of local churches.
"This creates concern for some that in the long term there could be a change in who the Christians of the Holy Land are, and concern about what will happen to the historic churches," said Amnon Ramon, who has researched these demographic changes as an expert on Christianity in Israel at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.
There are enough newcomers now for a Catholic cathedral in every major Israeli city, said Rev. David Neuhaus, who heads the Church's vicariate for Hebrew-speakers.
"We do not have enough clergy, and we do not have enough places to pray," he said. So services are held in ad hoc locations or in the existing Arab churches.
Clergymen now find themselves dealing with problems like Sudanese asylum-seekers trying to prove paternity without papers, choir members deported by Israeli immigration police, and children who go to Jewish public schools and are drawn not by their parents' Christianity but by the culture of their Israeli peers.
On a recent Sunday, the chapel at the Ratisbonne monastery in downtown Jerusalem rang with the sound of hymns in Tagalog, one of the languages of the Philippines. Most of the worshippers were women who serve as caregivers for elderly Israelis.
There were 5,000 Filipino workers in Israel when Father Angelo Beda Ison, a Manila-born Franciscan who tends to the local Filipino community, arrived in 1991. Today there are 40,000.
For the first time, the Catholic Church has to deal with Catholic kids who are assimilating into a Jewish majority. There are now several thousand children born to foreign workers who speak Hebrew as a first language, celebrate Jewish holidays with their classmates and are subject, like children everywhere, to the pull of the mainstream.
To bolster their faith, the local church has produced a catechism in Hebrew — "Meet the Messiah" — provides classes on Christianity in Hebrew and invites them to a Catholic summer camp, Rev. Neuhaus said. The church now has 25 clergymen tending to the transient populations, some brought in from the workers' countries of origin, he said.
Catholics are not the only Church dealing with demographic shifts.
Immigrants from the former Soviet Union began moving to Israel en masse in the early 1990s. Among the 1 million who came, about a third were not Jewish according to Jewish law but qualified for citizenship because they had a Jewish spouse or lineage. Among them were an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 practicing Christians, mostly Orthodox.
So the Russian Orthodox Church now holds services in Hebrew every week in Jerusalem.
"The Church never dreamed of such an arrival," said Father Alexandr Winogradsky, the priest who leads those services and a convert from Judaism originally from Ukraine. His job is to "try to acculturate the Church within the new Israeli culture and language."
Some of the new members, especially the young, are so assimilated into the Israeli mainstream they are uncomfortable entering a church, he said. Winogradsky goes to meet them, dressed in cassock and cross, for confession in cafes instead.
The tiny Ethiopian Orthodox Church, too, has been dealing with its own newcomers: asylum seekers from Eritrea reaching Israel in increasing numbers, smuggled in from Egypt by Bedouin. At a baptism ceremony on the Jordan River earlier this year, Eritreans were the most noticeable group.
These disparate groups of Christians share one trait — they have gone almost unnoticed by the majority of Israelis.
"This is a population that is present and absent at the same time," said Hana Bendcowsky of the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations. "No one here knows anything about their lives."
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