Friend,
Here is a prayer update from our friends at MUSALAHA, JRK
Dear Friends,
We are at a most busy and fruitful time of the year. God has provided us the opportunity for many outlets of reconciliation building through summer camps, follow-ups, women’s groups, seminars and conferences. Below is a report from a women’s conference we had for our new women’s group.
Last month, Musalaha brought a group of 20 Israeli and Palestinian women to Cyprus to begin the journey of reconciliation. Our time in Cyprus was blissful, peaceful, productive. We learned about listening, the stages of reconciliation and the character of a reconciler. The time was fruitful, filled with laughter and fellowship.
In reflecting about the trip upon my return, some of the things that stand out most were my experiences traveling to Cyprus and returning home. Leaving Israel was quite an ordeal. Our mixed group of women was questioned, delayed, looked at suspiciously. “What could Israelis and Palestinians possibly have to do with one another?,” was the unasked question.
All this was soon forgotten as we were finally allowed to board our plane. For four days, we were visitors in Cyprus. There was no ever present security, no daily talk of existential threat or the delays and frustrations of checkpoints. No one looked at us strangely, stopped us, or asked us questions with skepticism. We were able to speak freely, share with each other from our hearts and experiences, and learn from one another.
And then we came home very early in the morning on May 5. As my taxi driver took me home, he told me he lived in the same neighborhood as I…and then he digressed into racial slurs and bigoted comments about the Arab neighborhoods and communities bordering ours. And my heart sank, because I knew I was home.
Recently I read a short parable that I found provoking, motivating and encouraging.
One day, a young man has a dream. He lives in a world in which following Christ is illegal. He is summoned to court, and as he stands before a judge he sees the evidence laid out against him. There are pictures of him attending religious events and services, religious books and music taken from his home, journal entries in which he discussed his faith, and his well-worn Bible attesting to his daily reading of that sacred text. He sits in fear, awaiting the verdict that would bring either imprisonment or death. Denying his faith crosses his mind, but he tries to push it away, pray and maintain resolve. After some time, the judge summons him to stand before him, and declares him not guilty. His fear dissipates into immediate relief, but as the verdict sinks in, he becomes indignant, and angry. He demands an explanation for the rendering of such a verdict. The dream ends with the judge’s words: “The court is indifferent towards your Bible reading and religious meetings; it has no concern for worship with words and a pen. Continue to develop your theology, and use it to paint pictures of a comforting world in your mind. We have no interest in such church-going artists who spend their time creating mental images of a better world. We exist for those who would lay down that brush, and their life, in a Christ-like endeavor to create such a world.”[1]
Herein lays the challenge and vocation. Work for reconciliation is met with skepticism, wariness, fear, suspicion and disbelief. And many times, it’s quite tiring. But this is our challenge. This is our vocation. It’s far too easy to be ignorant and hole up within our respective communities, imagining that we are wronged and in the right, holding tightly to our favorite prejudices. But in encountering the other, we grow and learn and change – speaking peace, passing the peace, and creating spaces for peace to happen. And so we endeavor to create such a world.
By Ambreen Tour
Musalaha Administrator
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Barack Obama on Isr/Pal Principles
Dear Friend,
Here are the exact remarks President Obama spoke in Cairo, Egypt earlier today in regards to Israelis/Palestinians. Very interesting that they are the second of seven "issues of tensions between America and the Muslim Middle East".
In other words, the addressing and resolving of the Isr/Pal conflicts are seen in the context of improved relationships among US and all our Islamic (and Israeli) neighbors in the Middle East. It is further interesting that he chose to come to Saudi Arabia and Egypt before visiting Israel/Palestine, as if to underscore the larger context of the Isr/Pal matter. It is an Arab state/American issue, not just an issue of Israelis and Palestinians.
Therefore, Israelis and Palestinians must see it too, in the larger context of respect for human rights that each and all of us are called upon to accord to one another, respectful of the deeply human nature of our fears, aspirations, grievances and present realities.
I think we must support our President in his call for a "new beginning", a "remaking" of the region according to the Talmud/Torah, Qur'an, and "Bible" expectation that we "do to others as we would have them to do us". (He also has some pointed things to say in re "religious freedom" (i.e., not only Muslims free to express themselves religiously, as in the US, but Christians freely to express themselves religiously, as is NOT the case in many places in the ME).
Now, we all have to put the right actions into place, consistent with a reiteration of these intentions. JRK
The second major source of tension that we need to discuss is the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world.
America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.
Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.
On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.
For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers - for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.
That is in Israel's interest, Palestine's interest, America's interest, and the world's interest. That is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience that the task requires. The obligations that the parties have agreed to under the Road Map are clear. For peace to come, it is time for them - and all of us - to live up to our responsibilities.
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.
Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist.
At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.
Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel's security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.
Finally, the Arab States must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities. The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state; to recognize Israel's legitimacy; and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.
America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs. We cannot impose peace. But privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away. Likewise, many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state. It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true.
Too many tears have flowed. Too much blood has been shed. All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.
Here are the exact remarks President Obama spoke in Cairo, Egypt earlier today in regards to Israelis/Palestinians. Very interesting that they are the second of seven "issues of tensions between America and the Muslim Middle East".
In other words, the addressing and resolving of the Isr/Pal conflicts are seen in the context of improved relationships among US and all our Islamic (and Israeli) neighbors in the Middle East. It is further interesting that he chose to come to Saudi Arabia and Egypt before visiting Israel/Palestine, as if to underscore the larger context of the Isr/Pal matter. It is an Arab state/American issue, not just an issue of Israelis and Palestinians.
Therefore, Israelis and Palestinians must see it too, in the larger context of respect for human rights that each and all of us are called upon to accord to one another, respectful of the deeply human nature of our fears, aspirations, grievances and present realities.
I think we must support our President in his call for a "new beginning", a "remaking" of the region according to the Talmud/Torah, Qur'an, and "Bible" expectation that we "do to others as we would have them to do us". (He also has some pointed things to say in re "religious freedom" (i.e., not only Muslims free to express themselves religiously, as in the US, but Christians freely to express themselves religiously, as is NOT the case in many places in the ME).
Now, we all have to put the right actions into place, consistent with a reiteration of these intentions. JRK
The second major source of tension that we need to discuss is the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world.
America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.
Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.
On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.
For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers - for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.
That is in Israel's interest, Palestine's interest, America's interest, and the world's interest. That is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience that the task requires. The obligations that the parties have agreed to under the Road Map are clear. For peace to come, it is time for them - and all of us - to live up to our responsibilities.
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.
Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist.
At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.
Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel's security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.
Finally, the Arab States must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities. The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state; to recognize Israel's legitimacy; and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.
America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs. We cannot impose peace. But privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away. Likewise, many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state. It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true.
Too many tears have flowed. Too much blood has been shed. All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
The Facts on the Ground
Dear Friend,
Here is the issue in a nutshell. Thanks to the NY Times for today's article by Isabel Kershner.
The gradual take over of previously occupied Palestinian land and homes has and will continue, despite US appeals for a "HALT". This is the reality. One state, two state discussion is irrelevant to the more underlying issue. Enfranchisement. Self-determination of people. The right to live, vote, work, build homes, raise families by ALL parties in the land. First class vs. second class status. Occupier vs. occupied. Oppressor vs. oppressed. Treating "The Other" with respect, giving each their "due" as fellow human beings; acknowledging each parties existence and place in the sun on God's good earth.
As long as the Israelis have the attitude: "This is our land, you no longer belong here", there will be insoluble problems between the Israelis and the Arab Palestinians. These are the underlying issues as always. Your servant, JRK
June 2, 2009
Israel and U.S. Can’t Close Split on Settlements
By ISABEL KERSHNER
KFAR TAPUAH, West Bank — Thirty Israeli couples are on a waiting list to move into the Kfar Tapuah settlement, which teems with children on the hilltops south of Nablus. Some on the list grew up here. But there is not an apartment available for sale or rent, or even a stifling trailer to be had.
If Israel built all the housing units already approved in the nation’s overall master plan for settlements, it would almost double the number of settler homes in the West Bank, according to unpublished official data provided to The New York Times.
The decision of whether to build, and how much, goes to the heart of the tensions between the administrations of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Obama, an unaccustomed and no-budge conflict between Israel and the United States. Washington is standing firm against any additional settlement construction in the West Bank, including what Israel argues is necessary to accommodate what it terms “natural growth.”
That term has been defined vaguely by Israeli officials, meaning for some that settlements should expand to accommodate only their own children. But Mr. Netanyahu, of the conservative Likud Party, made his own wider position clear on Monday. He said that while Israel would not allow new settlements and that some small outposts would be removed, building within the confines of established settlements should go on.
Israel “cannot freeze life in the settlements,” he said, describing the American call as an “unreasonable” demand.
And in fact, whatever the American demands and Israeli definitions, the reality is that no full freeze seems likely.
The issue is, in part, political: Mr. Netanyahu is trying to hold together a fractious coalition, including parties that favor settlement building and oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state. He must contend with an aggressive settler movement, emboldened by support from Israeli governments for decades and determined to continue building, if necessary through unofficial means.
“It is important for the world to know we won’t stop,” said Doron Hillel, 29, the settlement council head and one of the first children born here after it was founded about 30 years ago. “These decrees make things difficult, but they strengthen us. We will continue to build and grow.”
A partial freeze has been in place for several years, but settlers have found ways around the strictures. Twenty trailer homes have been assembled in Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, for young families over the past year. The Samaria Council, which represents settlers in the northern West Bank, has brought in 150 trailers. Thousands of permanent houses have been illegally constructed within existing settlements, and settlers have recently bulldozed new roads through fields to link up the outposts.
Critics argue that successive Israeli governments have turned a blind eye to this construction and that they have contributed more broadly to settlement growth.
The settlers’ annual population growth, at 5.6 percent, far outstrips the Israeli average of 1.8 percent. But official data from the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel shows that while about two-thirds of that is a “natural” increase, as defined by settler births in relation to deaths, one-third stems from migration. There is also a disproportionately high level of state-supported building in the settlements compared with most regions of Israel.
And many critics of the settlement movement dispute the notion that settlers’ children have an absolute right to continue living in their parents’ settlement.
“A newborn does not need a house,” said Dror Etkes of Yesh Din, an Israeli group that fights for the rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories. “It is a game the Israeli government is playing” to justify construction, he said.
Underlining the competing pressures on Mr. Netanyahu, extremist settlers rioted on Monday in various parts of the northern West Bank, stoning Arab vehicles, burning tires and setting fields alight, according to a witness and the police. They were protesting the government’s recent actions against some tiny outposts. Several Palestinians were wounded. Six Israeli settlers and a rightist member of Parliament were arrested and later released.
The Israeli population of the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem, has tripled since the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort started in the early 1990s, and it now approaches 300,000. The settlers live among 2.5 million Palestinians in about 120 settlements, which much of the world considers a violation of international law, as well as in dozens of outposts erected without official Israeli authorization. Israel argues that the settlement enterprise does not violate the law against transferring populations into occupied territories.
According to the newly disclosed data, about 58,800 housing units have been built with government approval in the West Bank settlements over the past 40 years. An additional 46,500 have already obtained Defense Ministry approval within the existing master plans, awaiting nothing more than a government decision to build.
The data began to be compiled in 2004 by a retired brigadier general, Baruch Spiegel, at the request of the defense minister at the time, Shaul Mofaz. The Defense Ministry has long refused to make the data public, but it has since been leaked and obtained by nongovernmental groups. Mr. Etkes analyzed the master plans in the Spiegel data, together with a colleague from Bimkom, an Israeli group that focuses on planning and social justice.
Under international pressure, construction in the settlements has slowed but never stopped, continuing at an annual rate of about 1,500 to 2,000 units over the past three years. If building continues at the 2008 rate, the 46,500 units already approved will be completed in about 20 years.
In Kfar Tapuah, a group of young Israelis who grew up here decided about six years ago that when they married, they would stay. The population has more than doubled since then, to 150 families from 60. Like in other West Bank settlements, nobody counts individuals here: the rate of new births makes that impossible.
Revitalized from within, the community also attracted young couples from other settlements and from cities in Israel who were seeking a lifestyle that combined relatively cheap suburban comfort with the national-religious ideal of settling the land.
Kfar Tapuah has a reputation as an extremist settlement, having become a base for the followers of the virulently anti-Arab Rabbi Meir Kahane after he was assassinated in 1990. It now seems overrun by young children. A $150,000 state-of-the-art playground recently went up, a second kindergarten just opened and a third is planned.
“This is our land from the beginning of days,” said Aviva Herzlich, 67, most of whose 10 children and more than 40 grandchildren live in and around the settlement. “We do not have anywhere else.”
Here is the issue in a nutshell. Thanks to the NY Times for today's article by Isabel Kershner.
The gradual take over of previously occupied Palestinian land and homes has and will continue, despite US appeals for a "HALT". This is the reality. One state, two state discussion is irrelevant to the more underlying issue. Enfranchisement. Self-determination of people. The right to live, vote, work, build homes, raise families by ALL parties in the land. First class vs. second class status. Occupier vs. occupied. Oppressor vs. oppressed. Treating "The Other" with respect, giving each their "due" as fellow human beings; acknowledging each parties existence and place in the sun on God's good earth.
As long as the Israelis have the attitude: "This is our land, you no longer belong here", there will be insoluble problems between the Israelis and the Arab Palestinians. These are the underlying issues as always. Your servant, JRK
June 2, 2009
Israel and U.S. Can’t Close Split on Settlements
By ISABEL KERSHNER
KFAR TAPUAH, West Bank — Thirty Israeli couples are on a waiting list to move into the Kfar Tapuah settlement, which teems with children on the hilltops south of Nablus. Some on the list grew up here. But there is not an apartment available for sale or rent, or even a stifling trailer to be had.
If Israel built all the housing units already approved in the nation’s overall master plan for settlements, it would almost double the number of settler homes in the West Bank, according to unpublished official data provided to The New York Times.
The decision of whether to build, and how much, goes to the heart of the tensions between the administrations of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Obama, an unaccustomed and no-budge conflict between Israel and the United States. Washington is standing firm against any additional settlement construction in the West Bank, including what Israel argues is necessary to accommodate what it terms “natural growth.”
That term has been defined vaguely by Israeli officials, meaning for some that settlements should expand to accommodate only their own children. But Mr. Netanyahu, of the conservative Likud Party, made his own wider position clear on Monday. He said that while Israel would not allow new settlements and that some small outposts would be removed, building within the confines of established settlements should go on.
Israel “cannot freeze life in the settlements,” he said, describing the American call as an “unreasonable” demand.
And in fact, whatever the American demands and Israeli definitions, the reality is that no full freeze seems likely.
The issue is, in part, political: Mr. Netanyahu is trying to hold together a fractious coalition, including parties that favor settlement building and oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state. He must contend with an aggressive settler movement, emboldened by support from Israeli governments for decades and determined to continue building, if necessary through unofficial means.
“It is important for the world to know we won’t stop,” said Doron Hillel, 29, the settlement council head and one of the first children born here after it was founded about 30 years ago. “These decrees make things difficult, but they strengthen us. We will continue to build and grow.”
A partial freeze has been in place for several years, but settlers have found ways around the strictures. Twenty trailer homes have been assembled in Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, for young families over the past year. The Samaria Council, which represents settlers in the northern West Bank, has brought in 150 trailers. Thousands of permanent houses have been illegally constructed within existing settlements, and settlers have recently bulldozed new roads through fields to link up the outposts.
Critics argue that successive Israeli governments have turned a blind eye to this construction and that they have contributed more broadly to settlement growth.
The settlers’ annual population growth, at 5.6 percent, far outstrips the Israeli average of 1.8 percent. But official data from the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel shows that while about two-thirds of that is a “natural” increase, as defined by settler births in relation to deaths, one-third stems from migration. There is also a disproportionately high level of state-supported building in the settlements compared with most regions of Israel.
And many critics of the settlement movement dispute the notion that settlers’ children have an absolute right to continue living in their parents’ settlement.
“A newborn does not need a house,” said Dror Etkes of Yesh Din, an Israeli group that fights for the rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories. “It is a game the Israeli government is playing” to justify construction, he said.
Underlining the competing pressures on Mr. Netanyahu, extremist settlers rioted on Monday in various parts of the northern West Bank, stoning Arab vehicles, burning tires and setting fields alight, according to a witness and the police. They were protesting the government’s recent actions against some tiny outposts. Several Palestinians were wounded. Six Israeli settlers and a rightist member of Parliament were arrested and later released.
The Israeli population of the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem, has tripled since the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort started in the early 1990s, and it now approaches 300,000. The settlers live among 2.5 million Palestinians in about 120 settlements, which much of the world considers a violation of international law, as well as in dozens of outposts erected without official Israeli authorization. Israel argues that the settlement enterprise does not violate the law against transferring populations into occupied territories.
According to the newly disclosed data, about 58,800 housing units have been built with government approval in the West Bank settlements over the past 40 years. An additional 46,500 have already obtained Defense Ministry approval within the existing master plans, awaiting nothing more than a government decision to build.
The data began to be compiled in 2004 by a retired brigadier general, Baruch Spiegel, at the request of the defense minister at the time, Shaul Mofaz. The Defense Ministry has long refused to make the data public, but it has since been leaked and obtained by nongovernmental groups. Mr. Etkes analyzed the master plans in the Spiegel data, together with a colleague from Bimkom, an Israeli group that focuses on planning and social justice.
Under international pressure, construction in the settlements has slowed but never stopped, continuing at an annual rate of about 1,500 to 2,000 units over the past three years. If building continues at the 2008 rate, the 46,500 units already approved will be completed in about 20 years.
In Kfar Tapuah, a group of young Israelis who grew up here decided about six years ago that when they married, they would stay. The population has more than doubled since then, to 150 families from 60. Like in other West Bank settlements, nobody counts individuals here: the rate of new births makes that impossible.
Revitalized from within, the community also attracted young couples from other settlements and from cities in Israel who were seeking a lifestyle that combined relatively cheap suburban comfort with the national-religious ideal of settling the land.
Kfar Tapuah has a reputation as an extremist settlement, having become a base for the followers of the virulently anti-Arab Rabbi Meir Kahane after he was assassinated in 1990. It now seems overrun by young children. A $150,000 state-of-the-art playground recently went up, a second kindergarten just opened and a third is planned.
“This is our land from the beginning of days,” said Aviva Herzlich, 67, most of whose 10 children and more than 40 grandchildren live in and around the settlement. “We do not have anywhere else.”
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Mutual Respect is What is Being Asked
Dear Friend,
Jeff Halper is always a good read. When you hear Netanyahu asking the Palestinians to "recognize" the Jewishness of the Zionist state, he is really asking for respect. Palestinians also ask for "respect", an admission from Israelis that they "exist", side by side with Jews, who have first class status and Palestinians, who have second class status. It is not symmetrical. It has always been one-sided. "Where is the love"? is the question. When will the Israelis begin to hear the anguished cries of the oppressed and occupied, the disenfranchised and maligned? (Here I go preaching again). Read Jeff Halper for yourself. JRK
NETANYAHU CHOOSES WAREHOUSING
Jeff Halper
May 25, 2009
Would Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu say the magic words “two states” after his meeting with President Obama? All Israel held its breath. (He didn’t). The gap between the two is wider than those words could ever have bridged, however. Obama, I believe, sincerely – perhaps urgently – seeks a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, a pre-condition, he understands, to getting on with larger, more pressing Middle Eastern issues. Netanyahu, who rejects even the notion of a Palestinian mini-state as grudgingly accepted by Barak, Sharon and Olmert, is seeking a permanent state of “warehousing” in which the Palestinians live forever in a limbo of “autonomy” delineated by an Israel that otherwise encompasses them. The danger, to which we all should be attuned, is that the two sides might compromise on apartheid – the establishment of a Palestinian Bantustan that has neither genuine sovereignty nor economic viability.
For his part, Obama seems to understand the strong linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the hostility towards the West so prevalent in the Muslim world. His administration has been quite candid about the need to move forward on Palestine in order to deal with the Iranian nuclear issue, and his ability to withdraw from Iraq, stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan and deal with the challenge political Islam poses to the “moderate” Arab states also depend, to a meaningful degree, on forging a new relationship with the Muslim world , which requires an end to the Israeli Occupation.
Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have already presented the outlines of their new “reframing” of the conflict:
(1) The Iran threat is preeminent, uniting the US and Israel into a strategic alliance and completely overshadowing the Palestinian issue;
(2) Such “slogans” (as Lieberman characterized them) as occupation, settlements, settlers, land for peace and even the “simplistic” two-state solution must be abandoned in order to “go forward” according to a new slogan: “economy, security, stability” – meaning improving the Palestinian economy while ensuring Israel’s security. The stability that results (Lieberman invokes the “stable” situation between the Greek and Turkish populations of Turkish-occupied Cyprus as his model) will then somehow facilitate some future and vague peace process;
(3) Israel will continue to expand its “facts on the ground.” Just the day before the Netanyahu/Obama meeting the building of a new settlement was announced – Maskiot, in the Jordan Valley, the first settlement to be officially established in 26 years. Two days after returning from Washington, Netanyahu further declared: “United Jerusalem is Israel's capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided.” It then announced that it will continue building within the “settlement blocs.” Just a month before, on the day Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell were to arrive in the country, the Israeli government announced that it would conduct massive demolitions of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem. This “in your face” approach signals the Administration that Israel is not about to accept dictates, as the Minister for Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon put it, testing just how assertive Obama will be.
(4) Both the US and Israel seek broader involvement in the peace process by the Arab states, but once again, Israel has its own particular spin on that. While the US is formulating a comprehensive approach to peace and stabilization in the entire Middle East region (which King Abdullah of Jordan calls a “57-state solution” whereby the entire Arab and Muslim worlds would recognize Israel in return for a genuine end to the Occupation), Israel’s formula of putting “economic peace” before any politically defined peace agreement tries to create a state of normalization between Israel and the Arab/Muslim world that would relegate the Palestinian issue indefinitely to the back-burner. Given the record of the so-called “moderate” Arab states, and given the opposition to a rising Iran they share with Israel, their involvement does not necessarily bode well for the Palestinians.
Then there all the mechanisms for delaying or undermining negotiations:
· Creating insurmountable political obstacles, such as the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state.” Netanyahu well knows that the Palestinians will not accede to that, the fact that such recognition would prejudice the equal status of Palestinian citizens of Israel, a full 20% of the Israeli population, being an important consideration. The fear of further ethnic cleansing (“transfer” in Israeli parlance) is a real one. When she was Foreign Minister, Tsipi Livni stated clearly that future of Israel’s Arab citizens is in a future Palestinian state, not in Israel itself. And remember, last year the Israeli Parliament passed a law requiring a majority of two-thirds to approve any change in the status of Jerusalem, an impossible threshold. Similar legislation, supported by the government, will be passed on other issues such as dismantling settlements and ratifying any peace agreement.
· Delayed implementation. OK, the Israeli government says, we’ll negotiate, but the implementation of any agreement will wait on the complete cessation of any resistance on the part of the Palestinians. “Security before peace” is the way the Israeli government frames it. Since, however, there has never been any indication that Israel would agree to a viable Palestinian state, and since Israel views any resistance, armed or non-violent, as a form of terrorism, “security before peace” actually means “stop all resistance and you may get a state.” The catch here is that if Palestinians do stop their resistance they are lost. Without Palestinian pressure, Israel and the international community would lack any motivation for making the concessions necessary for a genuine solution. And even if an agreement is reached, “security before peace” means that it will not be implemented until Israel unilaterally decides the conditions are ripe. This so-called “shelf agreement” erects yet another insurmountable obstacle before any peace process.
· Declaring a “transitional” Palestinian state. If all else fails – actually negotiating with the Palestinians or relinquishing the Occupation not being an option – the US, at Israel’s behest, can manage to skip Phase 1 of the Road Map and go directly to Phase 2, which calls for a “transitional” Palestinian state before, in Phase 3, its actual borders, territory and sovereignty are agreed upon. This is the Palestinians’ nightmare: being locked indefinitely in the limbo of a “transitional” state. For Israel, such a situation is ideal, since it offers the possibility of imposing borders and expanding into the Palestinian areas unilaterally while seeming to respect the Road Map process.
Needless to say, all of this is to avoid a real two-state solution, the very idea of which is anathema to the Likud-led government. More than a decade ago Netanyahu set out his vision of Palestinian self-determination: somewhere between “state-minus and autonomy-plus.” The best, if bleakest term for what Israel is intending for the Palestinians is warehousing, a permanent state of control and suppression in which the victims disappear from view and their situation, emptied of all political content, becomes a non-issue.
Although the Obama Administration may truly desire viable two-state solution and even understands all Israel’s tricks, it is also clear that without significant pressure it cannot be achieved. And here is where the real problem arises. Israel’s trump card has always been Congress, where it enjoys virtually unanimous bi-partisan support. And Obama’s own Democratic Party, which received almost 80% of the Jewish vote in 2008, has always been far more “pro-Israel” than the Republicans. It may well be that Obama and Mitchell will try to take American policy in a new and more assertive direction and the leaders of his own party will balk, fearful of not being re-elected.
In this case, the “compromise” between the desire to resolve the conflict and the inability to move Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories so that a viable Palestinian state may emerge may be nothing less than apartheid. The difference between a viable Palestinian state and a Bantustan is one of details. Already signs are that the Obama Administration will allow Israel to keep its major settlement blocs, including a “Greater” Jerusalem, and prevent the Palestinians from having sovereign borders with the neighboring Arab states. Since few appreciate the crucial meaning of such details, Israel believes that it can finesse an apartheid situation in the guise of a two-state solution. Over the past decades the job of civil society has been to force governments to fulfill their responsibilities and enter into a political process that will actually lead to a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Now that that process is upon us, our task is now to keep it honest.
(Jeff Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at.)
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions is based in Jerusalem and has chapters in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Please visit our websites:
www.icahd.org
www.icahduk. org
www.icahdusa. org
Jeff Halper is always a good read. When you hear Netanyahu asking the Palestinians to "recognize" the Jewishness of the Zionist state, he is really asking for respect. Palestinians also ask for "respect", an admission from Israelis that they "exist", side by side with Jews, who have first class status and Palestinians, who have second class status. It is not symmetrical. It has always been one-sided. "Where is the love"? is the question. When will the Israelis begin to hear the anguished cries of the oppressed and occupied, the disenfranchised and maligned? (Here I go preaching again). Read Jeff Halper for yourself. JRK
NETANYAHU CHOOSES WAREHOUSING
Jeff Halper
May 25, 2009
Would Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu say the magic words “two states” after his meeting with President Obama? All Israel held its breath. (He didn’t). The gap between the two is wider than those words could ever have bridged, however. Obama, I believe, sincerely – perhaps urgently – seeks a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, a pre-condition, he understands, to getting on with larger, more pressing Middle Eastern issues. Netanyahu, who rejects even the notion of a Palestinian mini-state as grudgingly accepted by Barak, Sharon and Olmert, is seeking a permanent state of “warehousing” in which the Palestinians live forever in a limbo of “autonomy” delineated by an Israel that otherwise encompasses them. The danger, to which we all should be attuned, is that the two sides might compromise on apartheid – the establishment of a Palestinian Bantustan that has neither genuine sovereignty nor economic viability.
For his part, Obama seems to understand the strong linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the hostility towards the West so prevalent in the Muslim world. His administration has been quite candid about the need to move forward on Palestine in order to deal with the Iranian nuclear issue, and his ability to withdraw from Iraq, stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan and deal with the challenge political Islam poses to the “moderate” Arab states also depend, to a meaningful degree, on forging a new relationship with the Muslim world , which requires an end to the Israeli Occupation.
Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have already presented the outlines of their new “reframing” of the conflict:
(1) The Iran threat is preeminent, uniting the US and Israel into a strategic alliance and completely overshadowing the Palestinian issue;
(2) Such “slogans” (as Lieberman characterized them) as occupation, settlements, settlers, land for peace and even the “simplistic” two-state solution must be abandoned in order to “go forward” according to a new slogan: “economy, security, stability” – meaning improving the Palestinian economy while ensuring Israel’s security. The stability that results (Lieberman invokes the “stable” situation between the Greek and Turkish populations of Turkish-occupied Cyprus as his model) will then somehow facilitate some future and vague peace process;
(3) Israel will continue to expand its “facts on the ground.” Just the day before the Netanyahu/Obama meeting the building of a new settlement was announced – Maskiot, in the Jordan Valley, the first settlement to be officially established in 26 years. Two days after returning from Washington, Netanyahu further declared: “United Jerusalem is Israel's capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided.” It then announced that it will continue building within the “settlement blocs.” Just a month before, on the day Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell were to arrive in the country, the Israeli government announced that it would conduct massive demolitions of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem. This “in your face” approach signals the Administration that Israel is not about to accept dictates, as the Minister for Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon put it, testing just how assertive Obama will be.
(4) Both the US and Israel seek broader involvement in the peace process by the Arab states, but once again, Israel has its own particular spin on that. While the US is formulating a comprehensive approach to peace and stabilization in the entire Middle East region (which King Abdullah of Jordan calls a “57-state solution” whereby the entire Arab and Muslim worlds would recognize Israel in return for a genuine end to the Occupation), Israel’s formula of putting “economic peace” before any politically defined peace agreement tries to create a state of normalization between Israel and the Arab/Muslim world that would relegate the Palestinian issue indefinitely to the back-burner. Given the record of the so-called “moderate” Arab states, and given the opposition to a rising Iran they share with Israel, their involvement does not necessarily bode well for the Palestinians.
Then there all the mechanisms for delaying or undermining negotiations:
· Creating insurmountable political obstacles, such as the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state.” Netanyahu well knows that the Palestinians will not accede to that, the fact that such recognition would prejudice the equal status of Palestinian citizens of Israel, a full 20% of the Israeli population, being an important consideration. The fear of further ethnic cleansing (“transfer” in Israeli parlance) is a real one. When she was Foreign Minister, Tsipi Livni stated clearly that future of Israel’s Arab citizens is in a future Palestinian state, not in Israel itself. And remember, last year the Israeli Parliament passed a law requiring a majority of two-thirds to approve any change in the status of Jerusalem, an impossible threshold. Similar legislation, supported by the government, will be passed on other issues such as dismantling settlements and ratifying any peace agreement.
· Delayed implementation. OK, the Israeli government says, we’ll negotiate, but the implementation of any agreement will wait on the complete cessation of any resistance on the part of the Palestinians. “Security before peace” is the way the Israeli government frames it. Since, however, there has never been any indication that Israel would agree to a viable Palestinian state, and since Israel views any resistance, armed or non-violent, as a form of terrorism, “security before peace” actually means “stop all resistance and you may get a state.” The catch here is that if Palestinians do stop their resistance they are lost. Without Palestinian pressure, Israel and the international community would lack any motivation for making the concessions necessary for a genuine solution. And even if an agreement is reached, “security before peace” means that it will not be implemented until Israel unilaterally decides the conditions are ripe. This so-called “shelf agreement” erects yet another insurmountable obstacle before any peace process.
· Declaring a “transitional” Palestinian state. If all else fails – actually negotiating with the Palestinians or relinquishing the Occupation not being an option – the US, at Israel’s behest, can manage to skip Phase 1 of the Road Map and go directly to Phase 2, which calls for a “transitional” Palestinian state before, in Phase 3, its actual borders, territory and sovereignty are agreed upon. This is the Palestinians’ nightmare: being locked indefinitely in the limbo of a “transitional” state. For Israel, such a situation is ideal, since it offers the possibility of imposing borders and expanding into the Palestinian areas unilaterally while seeming to respect the Road Map process.
Needless to say, all of this is to avoid a real two-state solution, the very idea of which is anathema to the Likud-led government. More than a decade ago Netanyahu set out his vision of Palestinian self-determination: somewhere between “state-minus and autonomy-plus.” The best, if bleakest term for what Israel is intending for the Palestinians is warehousing, a permanent state of control and suppression in which the victims disappear from view and their situation, emptied of all political content, becomes a non-issue.
Although the Obama Administration may truly desire viable two-state solution and even understands all Israel’s tricks, it is also clear that without significant pressure it cannot be achieved. And here is where the real problem arises. Israel’s trump card has always been Congress, where it enjoys virtually unanimous bi-partisan support. And Obama’s own Democratic Party, which received almost 80% of the Jewish vote in 2008, has always been far more “pro-Israel” than the Republicans. It may well be that Obama and Mitchell will try to take American policy in a new and more assertive direction and the leaders of his own party will balk, fearful of not being re-elected.
In this case, the “compromise” between the desire to resolve the conflict and the inability to move Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories so that a viable Palestinian state may emerge may be nothing less than apartheid. The difference between a viable Palestinian state and a Bantustan is one of details. Already signs are that the Obama Administration will allow Israel to keep its major settlement blocs, including a “Greater” Jerusalem, and prevent the Palestinians from having sovereign borders with the neighboring Arab states. Since few appreciate the crucial meaning of such details, Israel believes that it can finesse an apartheid situation in the guise of a two-state solution. Over the past decades the job of civil society has been to force governments to fulfill their responsibilities and enter into a political process that will actually lead to a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Now that that process is upon us, our task is now to keep it honest.
(Jeff Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions is based in Jerusalem and has chapters in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Please visit our websites:
www.icahd.org
www.icahduk. org
www.icahdusa. org
Sunday, May 17, 2009
What President Obama REALLY Should Do!!
Obama's Mistaken Middle East Peace Strategy or No More Negotiations to Nowhere!
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
While doves in the American Jewish community are lining up to support President Obama in his supposed confrontation with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the hard-nosed supporters of the Occupation can sigh with relief. Nothing proposed by Obama is likely to change the realities on the ground in the West Bank.
Obama's insistence that negotiations begin again between Israel and the Palestinians toward a final settlement agreement sounds "tough" and "standing up to Israel" only to those who have no historical memory. But Netanyahu and the Israeli right-wingers who now run the Israeli government remember very well the willingness of a previous Likud prime minister (and former underground terrorist) Yitzhak Shamir to participate in just such negotiations in the early 1990s. Shamir explained to his constituents that he could sit in such negotiations for the next twenty years and still never concede anything that would resemble a viable Palestinian state: that is, one not still dominated by Israeli settlers, with their own exclusive roads and military protectors, which would make such a state nothing more than a string of Palestinian cities isolated from each other.
Why then will Netanyahu resist such negotiations? Why will the 50% of the Congress that showed up at the AIPAC conference--to prove their loyalty to Israel's most extreme rightist government ever--also do everything they can to block Obama were he to decide to demand for Israel to start negotiating a 2 state solution? Because the Right has learned that it works to press for far more than they can settle with,and then appear to be "compromising" when they are actually giving little more than what they really wanted in the first place. .
Over the past several decades, by vehemently staking out extreme positions the Right both in Israel and the U.S. have managed to shift the center of public discourse far to the Right. Positions once advocated by centrist Labor Party people in Israel (dismantling all the settlements in the West Bank, not just the so-called "illegal settlements") or by centrist Democrats like Clinton in the US (universal health care) are labeled "extreme leftist" views (health care is now called "socialism," for example).
In response, yesterday's centrists, now stuck with the label "left of center," think they are doing well if they can achieve success by "winning" concessions that were once the positions of moderate Republicans or moderate Likudniks. So the Democrats in the U.S., and now the peace forces in the Jewish community, imagine that they are winning some serious victory if they get those peace negotiations started again, when there is no reason to believe that they would lead to the kind of Palestinian state that is economically and politically viable, and to a just settlement for Palestinian refugees-the only outcome that could actually provide the preconditions for lasting security for Israel.
Don't put it past Netanyahu to make a dramatic "concession," either when he meets with Obama at the White House or when Obama visits Israel: that Israel IS willing to acknowledge the goal of a two state solution and even to start negotiations again, if the Palestinians (including Hamas) renounce all violence (something the US won't do in regard to its mission in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan) and if they agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish atate (though the US would never recognize, say, Saudi Arabia as a Muslim state--because we'd never want to impose a particular religious or ethnic identification on any state we recognize). Still, I don't put it past Netanyahu to let go of these demands at some point in the process, because he is a wily negotiator who knows how to deal with U.S. pressure--namely to appear to be making huge concessions while actually implementing none of them. Thus, when he was Prime Minister in the 1990s, he acceded to Bill Clinton's desire to appear to be making peace, but after a torturous process agreed to Israel to allow Palestinians some autonomy (not sovereignty) over about 2/3 of the West Bank (less than 14% of pre-48 Palestine). Meanwhile, he encouraged expansion of settlers so that between the signing of the Oslo Accord at the White House in 1993 and the time that the 2nd Intifda began in 2000 the number of settlers on the West Bank had actually doubled (though to be fair, part of that process took place with the blessings of Rabin before he was murdered by an Israeli right-wing religious fanatic and by Ehud Barak who now serves at Defense Minister in Netanyahu's government). The point here is that Netanyahu knows how to play "cat and mouse" excellently, and unless the US is prepared to impose a fair settlement agreement, Netanyahu could easily agree to start negotiations again and then produce nothing that would satisfy even the most beaten-down and ready-to-compromise Palestinian Authority leadership.
So should the Obama administration suddenly start acting tough, using the power of the U.S. purse to pressure Israel to make significant concessions? Would that be the equivalent on the Left of the successful strategies of the Right in recent decades?
The answer is no. Not at this point, given the current configuration of American and Israeli politics. To do so would require Obama to spend lots of his political capital on an approach that is unlikely to succeed, given the likelihood that such pressures would be undercut by the AIPAC-subservient Congress and would not be understood or supported by the American people, Such pressure would be resisted massively by an Israeli government made up of parties that made no attempt to hide their opposition to the creation of a viable Palestinian state anytime in the foreseeable future (their sole goal: delay, delay, delay). And count on the extremist elements in Hamas, themselves quite content to let Israel continue the Occupation and make it so hard on Palestinians that more and more will be driven to Hamas' Islamic fundamentalist worldview or to its "armed struggle" perspective (though we do remember that Hamas has offered a twenty year cease-fire with Israel within which time a final settlement could be negotiated if Israel were to stop its violence against Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank and release Palestinian prisoners held without trial under horrific conditions), to take some kind of provocative violent actions to undermine any movement for peace, just as extremists among the Israeli settlers have been doing quite consistently in the past several years.
A far more effective strategy would be for the Obama Administration to forget about positioning itself as a neutral convener of negotiations, and instead develop and popularize in the U.S. and Israel the details of what a fair and just solution would be:
1. the creation of a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza (with small border modifications mutually agreed upon to allow Israel to retain control of the historically Jewish parts of Jerusalem and to incorporate some border settlements, in exchange for giving Palestine equal amounts of land) that had full control of its own borders,
2. an international force that would protect both countries from the terrorist fringes in both populations that will likely resist any peaceful accommodation,
3. generous reparations for Palestinian refugees as well as for Jewish refugees who fled Arab countries,
4. fair sharing of the water and other resources,
5. Israeli settlers allowed to stay in their West Bank homes, but only as citizens of Palestine with no vote in Israel and subject to the laws of the Palestinian state without recourse to Israeli courts or armies,
6. a Truth and Reconciliation commission empowered to require testimony and to stop all teaching of hatred or demeaning of the "Other" in schools, media and religious institutions.
Obama could take another step that would help make this case to the American public:he should start a series of high profile meetings with those in Israel and the US who have been advocates for peace and for a genuine reconciliation of the heart between Israelis and Palestinians. The American people must be exposed to the voices and experiences of all the stakeholders, especially the many moderate Palestinians. But also let Obama introduce the American people to the vigorous debates that go on within Israel and within the worldwide Jewish diaspora itself, so that AIPAC is not the only voice being heard. Let Obama bring to the attention of the American public Israeli voices like Avrum Burg, Yossi Beilin, Uri Avnery, Rabbi Arik Aschermann, and American organizations like J Street, Brit Tzedeck, the American Friends Service Committee, the Rabbis for Human Rights, Churches for Middle East Peace, the Network of Spiritual Progressives, the Shalom Center, and Tikkun.
And don't underestimate the impact that Obama could have in Israel itself were he, on his visit in June and in subsequent visits, explain to the Israeli public and the Palestinian public how to understand the way the other side sees their situation, why both sides need a fundamental new attitude of open-hearted compassion and genuine repentance, and why, if both sides can approach the issue from that standpoint and accept the points articulated above, both sides could achieve what they need: peace, security, and self-respect.
Such a compassionate discourse, if it became the center of a serious campaign to change public opinion in Israel, Palestine and the U.S. (with the kind of money behind it that the US used to try, during the surge in Iraq to change its image among Sunnis and Shi'ites), could even have the impact of weakening the public support that Hamas has been building in the past decade, though we can be sure that they and their counterparts among Israeli ultra-nationalist and Jewish fundamentalist extremists, will do all they can to undermine this kind of peace-generating effort.
If Obama were to teach the American public and Israeli public how to understand both sides of this struggle as having legitimate claims and legitimate anger, recognize their need to overcome past humiliations and trauma, and simultaneously advocate for this solution, he might foster the kind of American and Israeli majorities that would enable him to, at some later point, use American power to impose peace if the two parties can't get there any other way.
You personally can help by sending these ideas to the White House yourself, ask your local and national media to carry this kind of analysis as well as their more limited pro-AIPAC views, and also by challenging your own elected Congressional representatives (in the House snd Senate) to realize that this approach is the best way to achieve peace and security for Israel--not the way of capitulating to the AIPAC demand that the US never put forward a substantive analysis of what we in the US are for in terms of a settlement agreement! You could also circulate this to people on your email lists, and you could JOIN as a dues paying member Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives and help us raise the money to hire organizers to build the organization that puts forward these ideas (at www.spiritualprogressives.org). You can help us get interns to volunteer for the summer of for the Sept 09-June 2010 year, and you could volunteer time yourself to help us do outreach from your own computer and your own telephone (in which case, contact Kay@tikkun.org). Donations to Tikkun are tax-deductible, and you can also put Tikkun in your will as a charitable bequest.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine www.tikkun.org , chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco.
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, TIKKUN Magazine
rabbilerner@tikkun.org
510 644 1200 Office
web: www.tikkun.org
email: info@spiritualprogressives.org
Copyright © 2008 Network of Spiritual Progressives®.
2342 Shattuck Avenue, #1200
Berkeley, CA 94704
510-644-1200 Fax 510-644-1255
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
While doves in the American Jewish community are lining up to support President Obama in his supposed confrontation with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the hard-nosed supporters of the Occupation can sigh with relief. Nothing proposed by Obama is likely to change the realities on the ground in the West Bank.
Obama's insistence that negotiations begin again between Israel and the Palestinians toward a final settlement agreement sounds "tough" and "standing up to Israel" only to those who have no historical memory. But Netanyahu and the Israeli right-wingers who now run the Israeli government remember very well the willingness of a previous Likud prime minister (and former underground terrorist) Yitzhak Shamir to participate in just such negotiations in the early 1990s. Shamir explained to his constituents that he could sit in such negotiations for the next twenty years and still never concede anything that would resemble a viable Palestinian state: that is, one not still dominated by Israeli settlers, with their own exclusive roads and military protectors, which would make such a state nothing more than a string of Palestinian cities isolated from each other.
Why then will Netanyahu resist such negotiations? Why will the 50% of the Congress that showed up at the AIPAC conference--to prove their loyalty to Israel's most extreme rightist government ever--also do everything they can to block Obama were he to decide to demand for Israel to start negotiating a 2 state solution? Because the Right has learned that it works to press for far more than they can settle with,and then appear to be "compromising" when they are actually giving little more than what they really wanted in the first place. .
Over the past several decades, by vehemently staking out extreme positions the Right both in Israel and the U.S. have managed to shift the center of public discourse far to the Right. Positions once advocated by centrist Labor Party people in Israel (dismantling all the settlements in the West Bank, not just the so-called "illegal settlements") or by centrist Democrats like Clinton in the US (universal health care) are labeled "extreme leftist" views (health care is now called "socialism," for example).
In response, yesterday's centrists, now stuck with the label "left of center," think they are doing well if they can achieve success by "winning" concessions that were once the positions of moderate Republicans or moderate Likudniks. So the Democrats in the U.S., and now the peace forces in the Jewish community, imagine that they are winning some serious victory if they get those peace negotiations started again, when there is no reason to believe that they would lead to the kind of Palestinian state that is economically and politically viable, and to a just settlement for Palestinian refugees-the only outcome that could actually provide the preconditions for lasting security for Israel.
Don't put it past Netanyahu to make a dramatic "concession," either when he meets with Obama at the White House or when Obama visits Israel: that Israel IS willing to acknowledge the goal of a two state solution and even to start negotiations again, if the Palestinians (including Hamas) renounce all violence (something the US won't do in regard to its mission in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan) and if they agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish atate (though the US would never recognize, say, Saudi Arabia as a Muslim state--because we'd never want to impose a particular religious or ethnic identification on any state we recognize). Still, I don't put it past Netanyahu to let go of these demands at some point in the process, because he is a wily negotiator who knows how to deal with U.S. pressure--namely to appear to be making huge concessions while actually implementing none of them. Thus, when he was Prime Minister in the 1990s, he acceded to Bill Clinton's desire to appear to be making peace, but after a torturous process agreed to Israel to allow Palestinians some autonomy (not sovereignty) over about 2/3 of the West Bank (less than 14% of pre-48 Palestine). Meanwhile, he encouraged expansion of settlers so that between the signing of the Oslo Accord at the White House in 1993 and the time that the 2nd Intifda began in 2000 the number of settlers on the West Bank had actually doubled (though to be fair, part of that process took place with the blessings of Rabin before he was murdered by an Israeli right-wing religious fanatic and by Ehud Barak who now serves at Defense Minister in Netanyahu's government). The point here is that Netanyahu knows how to play "cat and mouse" excellently, and unless the US is prepared to impose a fair settlement agreement, Netanyahu could easily agree to start negotiations again and then produce nothing that would satisfy even the most beaten-down and ready-to-compromise Palestinian Authority leadership.
So should the Obama administration suddenly start acting tough, using the power of the U.S. purse to pressure Israel to make significant concessions? Would that be the equivalent on the Left of the successful strategies of the Right in recent decades?
The answer is no. Not at this point, given the current configuration of American and Israeli politics. To do so would require Obama to spend lots of his political capital on an approach that is unlikely to succeed, given the likelihood that such pressures would be undercut by the AIPAC-subservient Congress and would not be understood or supported by the American people, Such pressure would be resisted massively by an Israeli government made up of parties that made no attempt to hide their opposition to the creation of a viable Palestinian state anytime in the foreseeable future (their sole goal: delay, delay, delay). And count on the extremist elements in Hamas, themselves quite content to let Israel continue the Occupation and make it so hard on Palestinians that more and more will be driven to Hamas' Islamic fundamentalist worldview or to its "armed struggle" perspective (though we do remember that Hamas has offered a twenty year cease-fire with Israel within which time a final settlement could be negotiated if Israel were to stop its violence against Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank and release Palestinian prisoners held without trial under horrific conditions), to take some kind of provocative violent actions to undermine any movement for peace, just as extremists among the Israeli settlers have been doing quite consistently in the past several years.
A far more effective strategy would be for the Obama Administration to forget about positioning itself as a neutral convener of negotiations, and instead develop and popularize in the U.S. and Israel the details of what a fair and just solution would be:
1. the creation of a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza (with small border modifications mutually agreed upon to allow Israel to retain control of the historically Jewish parts of Jerusalem and to incorporate some border settlements, in exchange for giving Palestine equal amounts of land) that had full control of its own borders,
2. an international force that would protect both countries from the terrorist fringes in both populations that will likely resist any peaceful accommodation,
3. generous reparations for Palestinian refugees as well as for Jewish refugees who fled Arab countries,
4. fair sharing of the water and other resources,
5. Israeli settlers allowed to stay in their West Bank homes, but only as citizens of Palestine with no vote in Israel and subject to the laws of the Palestinian state without recourse to Israeli courts or armies,
6. a Truth and Reconciliation commission empowered to require testimony and to stop all teaching of hatred or demeaning of the "Other" in schools, media and religious institutions.
Obama could take another step that would help make this case to the American public:he should start a series of high profile meetings with those in Israel and the US who have been advocates for peace and for a genuine reconciliation of the heart between Israelis and Palestinians. The American people must be exposed to the voices and experiences of all the stakeholders, especially the many moderate Palestinians. But also let Obama introduce the American people to the vigorous debates that go on within Israel and within the worldwide Jewish diaspora itself, so that AIPAC is not the only voice being heard. Let Obama bring to the attention of the American public Israeli voices like Avrum Burg, Yossi Beilin, Uri Avnery, Rabbi Arik Aschermann, and American organizations like J Street, Brit Tzedeck, the American Friends Service Committee, the Rabbis for Human Rights, Churches for Middle East Peace, the Network of Spiritual Progressives, the Shalom Center, and Tikkun.
And don't underestimate the impact that Obama could have in Israel itself were he, on his visit in June and in subsequent visits, explain to the Israeli public and the Palestinian public how to understand the way the other side sees their situation, why both sides need a fundamental new attitude of open-hearted compassion and genuine repentance, and why, if both sides can approach the issue from that standpoint and accept the points articulated above, both sides could achieve what they need: peace, security, and self-respect.
Such a compassionate discourse, if it became the center of a serious campaign to change public opinion in Israel, Palestine and the U.S. (with the kind of money behind it that the US used to try, during the surge in Iraq to change its image among Sunnis and Shi'ites), could even have the impact of weakening the public support that Hamas has been building in the past decade, though we can be sure that they and their counterparts among Israeli ultra-nationalist and Jewish fundamentalist extremists, will do all they can to undermine this kind of peace-generating effort.
If Obama were to teach the American public and Israeli public how to understand both sides of this struggle as having legitimate claims and legitimate anger, recognize their need to overcome past humiliations and trauma, and simultaneously advocate for this solution, he might foster the kind of American and Israeli majorities that would enable him to, at some later point, use American power to impose peace if the two parties can't get there any other way.
You personally can help by sending these ideas to the White House yourself, ask your local and national media to carry this kind of analysis as well as their more limited pro-AIPAC views, and also by challenging your own elected Congressional representatives (in the House snd Senate) to realize that this approach is the best way to achieve peace and security for Israel--not the way of capitulating to the AIPAC demand that the US never put forward a substantive analysis of what we in the US are for in terms of a settlement agreement! You could also circulate this to people on your email lists, and you could JOIN as a dues paying member Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives and help us raise the money to hire organizers to build the organization that puts forward these ideas (at www.spiritualprogressives.org). You can help us get interns to volunteer for the summer of for the Sept 09-June 2010 year, and you could volunteer time yourself to help us do outreach from your own computer and your own telephone (in which case, contact Kay@tikkun.org). Donations to Tikkun are tax-deductible, and you can also put Tikkun in your will as a charitable bequest.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine www.tikkun.org
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, TIKKUN Magazine
rabbilerner@tikkun.org
510 644 1200 Office
web: www.tikkun.org
email: info@spiritualprogressives.org
Copyright © 2008 Network of Spiritual Progressives®.
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Friday, May 15, 2009
A Personal Word from a Palestinian Doctor
Dear Friend,
Arab and Israeli "extremists" work to derail meaningful conversation to end the stalemate. Below is a "letter" from a Palestinian general practitioner, who wants to say something to President Obama. Thanks to TIKKUN for bringing his blog to our attention.
It is no longer acceptable that people on one side scream "Death to Arabs" and from the other, "Death to Israel".
At least one Israeli has expressed his contempt for the "good" doctor (in the comments section), but the doctor's words go to the heart of the issues that need to be addressed and resolved. I hope you agree and continue to act and pray, pray and act. JRK
An Open Letter to Presideent Barak Obama
April, 6, 2009
Dear President Obama,
In approaching the task of addressing you directly about a personal issue, I feel daunted by the abyss that separates the two of us in status and power. I am a retired public health physician, attempting to maintain a hold on his sanity and physical health by puttering around his garden in a Palestinian village in Galilee. You are the president of the nation most of humanity envies and desires to join, burdened with the task of saving the world from economic and political chaos and now from nuclear war.
Yet I find enough shared experiences between us to embolden me to speak to you as an equal in humanity if in no other regard. Like you, I am a product of Hawaii, where I attended university at the time your late parents did, and of Harvard, where we both received our professional training. I subsequently returned to my village and worked among my people to treat their illnesses and improve their wellbeing physically, mentally and socially with varying degrees of success and frustration. Unlike you, I came up fast against the glass ceiling set very low for Palestinian citizens of Israel like me. I have written a book of memoirs (see last below) that documents my professional struggle over three and a half decades. It would be a great honor for me if you were to read it as part of your education on the issues of my community and of our potential as a bridge for peace in the Middle East.
Now to the subject of my message, Mr. President: The newly-elected prime minister of Israel, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Mr. Avigdor Lieberman, plan evict me from my home and to take away my garden. These two persons and their fellow ministers were democratically elected to their positions and will use ‘democratic’ means at their disposal to legitimize my disenfranchisement as have previous Israeli governments done in the past. The difference is that the current leaders are explicit and aggressive about disadvantaging me based on my ethnicity. They have devised a way to blame me for my victimhood. They intend to ask me to sign an oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state, a state that defines itself as exclusive of me and my people.
Democracy, Mr. President, may be the best political system, but, alas, it is no guarantee of justice and equality when it is abused to give unrestricted power to an exclusivist majority. My community, citizens of Israel since its establishment, makes up a fifth of the country’s population but owns a constantly shrinking share of the land that currently stands at 3% of the total. Our towns and villages receive 3-5% of municipal budgetary allocations. Our infants and children die at over twice the level of our Jewish co-citizens -- and the relative ratio is rising of late. Our two communities continue to live in racially segregated residential areas often separated by walls and barbwire. Mr. President, I am not writing of the West Bank or Gaza but of neighborhoods in ‘mixed cities’ within the Green line.
You are the lead protector and promoter of true democracy in the world. As such, I call on you, Mr. President, to stand up to such corrupting practices presented to the world under the guise of sound democratic principles.
And as a fellow human being, I ask you, Mr. President, to put yourself momentarily in my position and consider how I should react to the racially-based transfer designs of these politicians. Here, in the person of Avigdor Lieberman, is another presumably equal co-citizen of Israel who calls openly for my disqualification from our shared citizenship because I want to be equal to him under the laws of our common country. He insists on having me step down from our presumed common stand of equality and kowtow openly to his privileged status as the son of a certain race and religion. Would you do that, Mr. President, were it to be demanded from you by a fellow American citizen, be he Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic or Asian immigrant, or even a Native American?
As an alternative, Mr. Lieberman wants me transferred out of the country though I have lived on land I inherited legally from forefathers who almost surely have better claim to descent from the ancient Hebrews than his. And mind you, Mr. President, my residence in the home he wants me evicted from predates the establishment of the state he wants to appropriate as his, and his alone, while he is a recent immigrant from Moldova. Would you, Mr. President, take a loyalty oath confirming your second-class status?
Mr. Lieberman’s best-case scenario for tolerating my existence in his vicinity is to have the homes of the likes of me re-zoned into one of the Bantustans he envisions, to be created and run by remote control from behind an ethnic separation wall. Would you succumb gracefully, without protest, to such a scheme, Mr. President?
You have to understand, sir, that I speak here of life-and-death issues for me and my family. Mr. Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Minister, attained his impressive status through an openly racist election campaign that featured mass rallies at which calls of “Death to Arabs” were standard. Would you trust such a man with your future in the international arena, Mr. President? I surely hope not: but the majority of Israeli citizens seem to have done exactly that.
That is where I sense danger, sir; in the assigning of my fellow countrymen of responsibility for our common future to fascist and untrustworthy representatives. Past injustices, and those were many and massive against my people, were never so clearly foretold as the ones the current Israeli government threatens to perpetrate against me, my family, my village and my people. It is with this clearly articulated plan of my transfer in mind that I call on you to use the undeniable prestige of your office to stop such plans from being implemented. I ask you, sir, to reassure me that you will never permit such schemes to be on any agenda discussed in the presence of representatives of the United States of America. I need that in order to be able to sleep, Mr. President.
With my best wishes for a peaceful and happy Easter for you and your family and for all of humanity, I remain,
Sincerely,
Hatim Kanaaneh , MD , MPH
Author of 'A Doctor in Galilee : the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel ', Pluto Press, 2008
Active Blog: http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/
Arab and Israeli "extremists" work to derail meaningful conversation to end the stalemate. Below is a "letter" from a Palestinian general practitioner, who wants to say something to President Obama. Thanks to TIKKUN for bringing his blog to our attention.
It is no longer acceptable that people on one side scream "Death to Arabs" and from the other, "Death to Israel".
At least one Israeli has expressed his contempt for the "good" doctor (in the comments section), but the doctor's words go to the heart of the issues that need to be addressed and resolved. I hope you agree and continue to act and pray, pray and act. JRK
An Open Letter to Presideent Barak Obama
April, 6, 2009
Dear President Obama,
In approaching the task of addressing you directly about a personal issue, I feel daunted by the abyss that separates the two of us in status and power. I am a retired public health physician, attempting to maintain a hold on his sanity and physical health by puttering around his garden in a Palestinian village in Galilee. You are the president of the nation most of humanity envies and desires to join, burdened with the task of saving the world from economic and political chaos and now from nuclear war.
Yet I find enough shared experiences between us to embolden me to speak to you as an equal in humanity if in no other regard. Like you, I am a product of Hawaii, where I attended university at the time your late parents did, and of Harvard, where we both received our professional training. I subsequently returned to my village and worked among my people to treat their illnesses and improve their wellbeing physically, mentally and socially with varying degrees of success and frustration. Unlike you, I came up fast against the glass ceiling set very low for Palestinian citizens of Israel like me. I have written a book of memoirs (see last below) that documents my professional struggle over three and a half decades. It would be a great honor for me if you were to read it as part of your education on the issues of my community and of our potential as a bridge for peace in the Middle East.
Now to the subject of my message, Mr. President: The newly-elected prime minister of Israel, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Mr. Avigdor Lieberman, plan evict me from my home and to take away my garden. These two persons and their fellow ministers were democratically elected to their positions and will use ‘democratic’ means at their disposal to legitimize my disenfranchisement as have previous Israeli governments done in the past. The difference is that the current leaders are explicit and aggressive about disadvantaging me based on my ethnicity. They have devised a way to blame me for my victimhood. They intend to ask me to sign an oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state, a state that defines itself as exclusive of me and my people.
Democracy, Mr. President, may be the best political system, but, alas, it is no guarantee of justice and equality when it is abused to give unrestricted power to an exclusivist majority. My community, citizens of Israel since its establishment, makes up a fifth of the country’s population but owns a constantly shrinking share of the land that currently stands at 3% of the total. Our towns and villages receive 3-5% of municipal budgetary allocations. Our infants and children die at over twice the level of our Jewish co-citizens -- and the relative ratio is rising of late. Our two communities continue to live in racially segregated residential areas often separated by walls and barbwire. Mr. President, I am not writing of the West Bank or Gaza but of neighborhoods in ‘mixed cities’ within the Green line.
You are the lead protector and promoter of true democracy in the world. As such, I call on you, Mr. President, to stand up to such corrupting practices presented to the world under the guise of sound democratic principles.
And as a fellow human being, I ask you, Mr. President, to put yourself momentarily in my position and consider how I should react to the racially-based transfer designs of these politicians. Here, in the person of Avigdor Lieberman, is another presumably equal co-citizen of Israel who calls openly for my disqualification from our shared citizenship because I want to be equal to him under the laws of our common country. He insists on having me step down from our presumed common stand of equality and kowtow openly to his privileged status as the son of a certain race and religion. Would you do that, Mr. President, were it to be demanded from you by a fellow American citizen, be he Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic or Asian immigrant, or even a Native American?
As an alternative, Mr. Lieberman wants me transferred out of the country though I have lived on land I inherited legally from forefathers who almost surely have better claim to descent from the ancient Hebrews than his. And mind you, Mr. President, my residence in the home he wants me evicted from predates the establishment of the state he wants to appropriate as his, and his alone, while he is a recent immigrant from Moldova. Would you, Mr. President, take a loyalty oath confirming your second-class status?
Mr. Lieberman’s best-case scenario for tolerating my existence in his vicinity is to have the homes of the likes of me re-zoned into one of the Bantustans he envisions, to be created and run by remote control from behind an ethnic separation wall. Would you succumb gracefully, without protest, to such a scheme, Mr. President?
You have to understand, sir, that I speak here of life-and-death issues for me and my family. Mr. Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Minister, attained his impressive status through an openly racist election campaign that featured mass rallies at which calls of “Death to Arabs” were standard. Would you trust such a man with your future in the international arena, Mr. President? I surely hope not: but the majority of Israeli citizens seem to have done exactly that.
That is where I sense danger, sir; in the assigning of my fellow countrymen of responsibility for our common future to fascist and untrustworthy representatives. Past injustices, and those were many and massive against my people, were never so clearly foretold as the ones the current Israeli government threatens to perpetrate against me, my family, my village and my people. It is with this clearly articulated plan of my transfer in mind that I call on you to use the undeniable prestige of your office to stop such plans from being implemented. I ask you, sir, to reassure me that you will never permit such schemes to be on any agenda discussed in the presence of representatives of the United States of America. I need that in order to be able to sleep, Mr. President.
With my best wishes for a peaceful and happy Easter for you and your family and for all of humanity, I remain,
Sincerely,
Hatim Kanaaneh , MD , MPH
Author of 'A Doctor in Galilee : the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel ', Pluto Press, 2008
Active Blog: http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Arab Christians in Palestine/Near East
Dear Friend,
An article on Arab "Christian" presence in the "Near East" in light of the Pope's visit there now. JRK
Christian Arabs and 'peace and justice'
By Daoud Kuttab
The Jordan Times - Sunday, May 10, 2009
The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Jordan and Palestine is a perfect opportunity to review and declare the role of Christian Arabs in the peace process.
To begin with, it is important for all to know that Arabs have been in Palestine and Jordan before Islam and Christianity. References to the word “Arab” and its derivatives are mentioned hundreds of times in the Old and New Testaments. The Biblical figure of Job is said to be Arab and Arabs were among the many attending the sermon on the day of Pentecost by St. Peter when 3,000 (among them Arabs) became Christians. Acts 2 refers to Arabs having heard the sermon in their own tongue.
Arab Christians have, therefore, been an integral part of Palestine and the Middle East region since at least the Day of Pentecost. The role of Arab Christians in modern Arab nationalism was best reflected in George Habib Antonius’ book “The Arab Awakening”. Antonius (1891-1941) was one of the first historians of Arab nationalism. Born of Lebanese-Egyptian parentage and a Christian (Greek Orthodox) Arab, he served in the British Mandate of Palestine. His 1938 book “The Arab Awakening” was written as Palestine was slipping from Arab control.
Antonius traced Arab nationalism to the reign of Mehmet Ali Pasha in Egypt. He argued that Arab nationalism was a product of the West, especially of Protestant missionaries from Britain and the United States. He saw the role of the American University of Beirut (originally the Syrian Protestant College) as central to this development.
The number of Arab Christians vary. Wikipedia states that Christians today make up 9.2 per cent of the population of the Near East. In Lebanon, they now number around 39 per cent of the population, in Syria about 10 to 15 per cent. In Palestine before the creation of Israel estimates range up to as much as 40 per cent, but mass emigration has slashed the number still present to 3.8 per cent.
Israeli Arab Christians constitute 2.1 per cent (or roughly 10 per cent of the Arab population). In Egypt, they constitute between 9 and 16 per cent of the population (the government figures put them at 6 per cent).
Around two-thirds of North and South American and Australian Arabs are Christian, particularly from Lebanon, but also from Palestine and Syria.
While the number of Christian Palestinians in Jerusalem and the occupied territories has dwindled over the years, they are still a key component of the Palestinian and Arab peoples of the region. Activists blame violence, occupation and uncertainty, coupled with opportunities (or lack thereof) for work and emigration, as the main reason for the flight of Christian Palestinians to the Americas, Australia and Europe.
While the world looks at the Arab-Israeli conflict from an Arab-Israeli point of view, or a Jewish-Islamic one, the role and contribution of Arab Christians cannot and need not be ignored.
Unlike followers of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, Christians have no religious attachment to physical locations. Scholars refer to the response of Jesus to the Samaritan woman’s question about whether to worship in Jerusalem or in the Sumerian mountains. Jesus replied to her: “Neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
Christian Arabs, however, believe that a lasting resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict must both address the national aspirations of the Palestinians (of which they are part) and provide for the spiritual needs of the faithful, including Christians.
In this regard, Palestinian Christians are perhaps angriest with a radical but effective group of Christians who try to give Biblical support and legitimacy for the Israeli aggression against Palestinians. An entire industry that has been well endowed has cropped up in the West, attempting to hijack the Christian theological debate in favour of what is now referred to as Christian Zionism.
Right-wing governments in Israel and the US seem to be natural feeding grounds for these fundamentalists. Palestinian Christians have forcefully rejected this position and some established evangelical voices have also come up to debunk these myths and insist on the need for justice as an integral part of any peaceful resolution in the region.
The visit of the Pontiff has stirred plenty of interest in the contributions Christians can make to the peace process. Israel’s attempts to ban the Aida refugees in Bethlehem from erecting the stand for the visiting Pope by the 28-foot-high wall is perhaps the most glaring worry the Israeli occupiers have about the visit of the Pontiff. They fear precisely what Arab Christians insist on: that a truly Christian position on the Israeli-Arab conflict will not be merely satisfied with a call for peace, but will necessarily also include a call for justicefor Palestinians.
“Peace and justice” is the message of people of faith from the entire world, and is certainly the focus for Arab Christians.
The writer is director of media NGO Community Media Network in Jordan and Palestine. He comes from a Palestinian Christian family that traces its ancestry in Jerusalem 600 years. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.
http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=16528
An article on Arab "Christian" presence in the "Near East" in light of the Pope's visit there now. JRK
Christian Arabs and 'peace and justice'
By Daoud Kuttab
The Jordan Times - Sunday, May 10, 2009
The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Jordan and Palestine is a perfect opportunity to review and declare the role of Christian Arabs in the peace process.
To begin with, it is important for all to know that Arabs have been in Palestine and Jordan before Islam and Christianity. References to the word “Arab” and its derivatives are mentioned hundreds of times in the Old and New Testaments. The Biblical figure of Job is said to be Arab and Arabs were among the many attending the sermon on the day of Pentecost by St. Peter when 3,000 (among them Arabs) became Christians. Acts 2 refers to Arabs having heard the sermon in their own tongue.
Arab Christians have, therefore, been an integral part of Palestine and the Middle East region since at least the Day of Pentecost. The role of Arab Christians in modern Arab nationalism was best reflected in George Habib Antonius’ book “The Arab Awakening”. Antonius (1891-1941) was one of the first historians of Arab nationalism. Born of Lebanese-Egyptian parentage and a Christian (Greek Orthodox) Arab, he served in the British Mandate of Palestine. His 1938 book “The Arab Awakening” was written as Palestine was slipping from Arab control.
Antonius traced Arab nationalism to the reign of Mehmet Ali Pasha in Egypt. He argued that Arab nationalism was a product of the West, especially of Protestant missionaries from Britain and the United States. He saw the role of the American University of Beirut (originally the Syrian Protestant College) as central to this development.
The number of Arab Christians vary. Wikipedia states that Christians today make up 9.2 per cent of the population of the Near East. In Lebanon, they now number around 39 per cent of the population, in Syria about 10 to 15 per cent. In Palestine before the creation of Israel estimates range up to as much as 40 per cent, but mass emigration has slashed the number still present to 3.8 per cent.
Israeli Arab Christians constitute 2.1 per cent (or roughly 10 per cent of the Arab population). In Egypt, they constitute between 9 and 16 per cent of the population (the government figures put them at 6 per cent).
Around two-thirds of North and South American and Australian Arabs are Christian, particularly from Lebanon, but also from Palestine and Syria.
While the number of Christian Palestinians in Jerusalem and the occupied territories has dwindled over the years, they are still a key component of the Palestinian and Arab peoples of the region. Activists blame violence, occupation and uncertainty, coupled with opportunities (or lack thereof) for work and emigration, as the main reason for the flight of Christian Palestinians to the Americas, Australia and Europe.
While the world looks at the Arab-Israeli conflict from an Arab-Israeli point of view, or a Jewish-Islamic one, the role and contribution of Arab Christians cannot and need not be ignored.
Unlike followers of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, Christians have no religious attachment to physical locations. Scholars refer to the response of Jesus to the Samaritan woman’s question about whether to worship in Jerusalem or in the Sumerian mountains. Jesus replied to her: “Neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
Christian Arabs, however, believe that a lasting resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict must both address the national aspirations of the Palestinians (of which they are part) and provide for the spiritual needs of the faithful, including Christians.
In this regard, Palestinian Christians are perhaps angriest with a radical but effective group of Christians who try to give Biblical support and legitimacy for the Israeli aggression against Palestinians. An entire industry that has been well endowed has cropped up in the West, attempting to hijack the Christian theological debate in favour of what is now referred to as Christian Zionism.
Right-wing governments in Israel and the US seem to be natural feeding grounds for these fundamentalists. Palestinian Christians have forcefully rejected this position and some established evangelical voices have also come up to debunk these myths and insist on the need for justice as an integral part of any peaceful resolution in the region.
The visit of the Pontiff has stirred plenty of interest in the contributions Christians can make to the peace process. Israel’s attempts to ban the Aida refugees in Bethlehem from erecting the stand for the visiting Pope by the 28-foot-high wall is perhaps the most glaring worry the Israeli occupiers have about the visit of the Pontiff. They fear precisely what Arab Christians insist on: that a truly Christian position on the Israeli-Arab conflict will not be merely satisfied with a call for peace, but will necessarily also include a call for justicefor Palestinians.
“Peace and justice” is the message of people of faith from the entire world, and is certainly the focus for Arab Christians.
The writer is director of media NGO Community Media Network in Jordan and Palestine. He comes from a Palestinian Christian family that traces its ancestry in Jerusalem 600 years. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.
http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=16528
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