Friend,
The Presbyterian Church (USA) is meeting presently in Minneapolis, among other things, to decide what to do with the Middle East Study Committee's report.
James Wall, a former editor of the Christian Century, has been following the ISraeli/Palestinian conflict closely for years. Here is his assessment of the stakes the descendants of John Calvin are facing this week. (JRK)
July 4, 2010...3:04 pm
219th Presbyterian Assembly Faces Its Moment of Truth
by James M. Wall
Presbyterian General Assembly delegates are in Minneapolis this week for their national gathering–held every two years–discussing, praying, arguing, and finally voting, on a wide variety of issues that will determine how the heirs of John Calvin will face the future.
This 219th General Assembly runs from July 3 through July 10.
In a nice bit of timing, John Calvin’s 500th birthday is celebrated on the final day of this year’s Assembly.
At some point during this week, the delegates (commissioners) will vote to approve or disapprove–parts or all–a report from their own Middle East Study Committee (MESC), a report two years in the making. written by a cross-section of church members, officials and clergy.
The MESC vote will be a moment of truth for the 219th Presbyterian General Assembly. Decisions made in Minneapolis will tell the world where the Presbyterian Church, USA, stands on Israel’s military occupation of 4 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.
The question before the PCUSA delegates will be simple:
Do we place our moral stamp of approval on the status quo, and call for more dialogue with our American Jewish friends, or do we say to the world that the status quo is immoral, unsustainable and a blatant rejection of the finest traditions of the Jewish faith.
What brought the PCUSA to this moment of truth?
If you want to be ready to fully understand this background and what will be happening in Minneapolis this week, it helps to have a crib sheet.
The Israel/Palestine Mission Network provides the crib sheet on its website, complete with daily updates during the Assembly.
Noushin Framke is writing a daily blog on the IPMN page. Here is a sample from the first day of the Asembly:
Just got back from the moderator election – went so late cuz there were 6 candidates and then we had a hanging chad/diebold issue – voting machines were not working and it took a while to fix the issue – it is not 11 pm and they just adjourned.
Cindy Bolbach from Arlington, VA elected as new moderator – an elder [laity], not clergy – she sure has a keen sense of timing and humor – I like her; she gets it – reminds me of Bea Arthur! and to the question of what about civil unions, she said i am for it but this church is not! Yup – well said.
Jeff Halper [Jewish activist who runs the anti-house demolition NGO in Palestine] did a great talk today on “Is it really apartheid?” He just gets better and better. I recorded the audio – i will see if I can post it on the site soon. [Italics added]
These Assembly meetings can be invigorating and tense. At its previous national meeting in 2008, the General Assembly ran into strong opposition from supporters of Israel inside and outside the denomination who forced the creation of a Middle East Study Committee (MESC). At the time, this was seen as a delaying tactic described as a victory for supporters of Israel.
Two years later the delay is over and the 219th Assembly is in session. The MESC has done its work and is ready with its report.
Members of the Committee were appointed by the three most recent PC (USA) moderators.
The Middle East Study Group spent the past two years in meetings and study sessions, supplemented by trips to Israel/Palestine, where committee members met with both Israeli and Palestinian religious and secular leaders.
The MESC Report will bring eight recommendations to the Minneapolis meeting
A special GA committee, “Committee 14″, will assume legislative control of the MESC report, formally presenting it to the entire Assembly, where it will either be adopted, modified, or rejected.
Delegates who arrived in Minneapolis determined to support the CMES proposals have the additional backing of almost all of the living moderators, both lay and clergy of the PCUSA who presided over the denomination from 1976 through 2010.
These previous moderators sent a “Support Letter for the Middle East Study Committee”, signed by 17 previous moderators, endorsing the findings of the MESC Report and asking delegates to support the recommendations.
This Assembly arrives for its work after the United Kingdom’s National Methodist Conference held its meeting June 24 to July 1 in Portsmouth, England. Delegates to that Conference approved eleven resolutions in a report entitled “Justice for Palestine and Israel”.
The World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary, Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, congratulated the Methodists for adopting “important and forward looking resolutions” and for action by the delegates that
called on the Methodist people “to support and engage with [the] boycott of Israeli goods” emanating from illegal settlements as their response to a call of the WCC in 2009, supported by Palestinian Christians in the “Kairos document” and a growing number of Jewish organizations, both inside Israel and worldwide.
The Conference also called for a full arms embargo as an important step towards a just peace in the region.
In addition to this favorable action from the British Methodists and the WCC, the Presbyterians in Minneapolis, should they support the findings of their CMES resolutions, will find considerable support outside the churches for favorable action.
One recent example of an important media voice speaking out against the Israeli policies comes from New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, who recently wrote from Gaza that Israel’s Occupation is “morally repugnant”.
In a second New York Times column, also written from Gaza, Kristof explored the tunnel system that has been getting around Israel’s blockade by trucking in supplies and materials through tunnels dug along the Egyptian/Gaza border.
After his visit to the tunnels, Kristof wrote that Israel should halt its blockade.
No amount of hasbara propaganda can resist the power of voices in the US, like an aroused church public and enlightened journalists like Kristof who have broken through the hasbara campaign barrier.
There is an encouraging parallel between a journalist of Kristof’s stature and the Presbyterian CMES members who made their own site visits to Palestine where they reached the conclusions that now appear in the CMES report to the General Assembly.
Hasbara as a tactic is losing some of its bite, yet another reminder of the wisdom in the phrase often used by Martin Luther King, Jr., “truth crushed to earth, will rise again”.
For those still unfamiliar with the term hasbara, Jane Adas provides a valuable description of the term in an essay she wrote for the November-December, 2009, issue of Link, a publication of Americans for Middle East Understanding (AMEU):
Hasbara literally means “explanation” and is often translated as “public diplomacy,” but can perhaps best be thought of as problem solving through marketing techniques, like rebranding (Israel as the victim of Hamas’ aggression), product placement (hide the Goldstone Report in the darkest, least-frequented corner of the shop), and promotional lingo (“The side that seems to want peace more will win…” from The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary).
Having identified the problem to be solved concerning Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon as Israel’s failure to explain its case, [Prime Minister] Netanyahu, soon after assuming office in February 2008, formed a National Information Directorate within the Prime Minister’s Office tasked with planning the media campaign for the Gaza operation and headed by “hasbara czar” Yarden Vatikay.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a strong pro-Israeli NGO in California, headed by Rabbi Abraham Cooper, has been a leading hasbara opponent of the MESC report.
Knowing the report was being developed, the Wiesenthal Center launched an all-out hasbara attack on the MESC report, long before the report was written.
The Wiesenthal Center sent out alerts to its own constituency and to members of the Presbyterian Church, especially delegates to the GA, urging them to send e-mails critical of the yet-to-be published report, to the Louisville headquarters of the denominations.
Members of the academic community are often recruited as hasbara “agents” for reasons future psychological studies will have to determine. No doubt “Friends of Israel” faculty colleagues, either from ethnic, academic or religious motivations, are helpful in making Israel’s case in long chats in the faculty lounge or at academic conferences. They may even have traveled together to visit Israel.
I earlier commented on the essay that appeared in the Christian Century before the start of this current General Assembly. The essay was written by Vanderbilt University Divinity School professors Ted A. Smith and Amy-Jill Levine.
If the delegates want to read a counter theological argument, supporting the CMES report, delivered without venom, I suggest they read a letter from my Jewish friend and colleague, Mark Braverman, which he has submitted to the Christian Century in response to the Smith-Levine essay.
Here is the opening portion of Mark’s letter:
The intent of the Presbyterian Middle East Study Group Report “Breaking Down the Walls” is clear: “To break down these walls that stand in the way of the realization of God’s peaceful and just kingdom.”
But in their critique of the report published in your June 29 issue, Ted Smith and Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University, strike at the heart of this message. They ask us to believe that the report advocates “a historical narrative that points indirectly to a single state—a new social body—in which a Palestinian majority displaces Jews.”
In a shocking distortion of the Study Group’s evocation of Ephesians 2:14, they claim that “’Breaking down the walls’ in order to form ‘one new humanity in the place of two’ evokes old echoes of theological supersessionism and transposes them into a political key.”
“Old habits die hard,” lament Smith and Levine. But it is the habit of crying anti-Semitism whenever Jewish sensibilities are disturbed or the actions of the State of Israel are questioned that we must urgently confront.
Before you vote in Minneapolis this week, you sons and daughters of John Calvin, read the entire text of Mark Braverman”s letter, which is posted here.
Years from now, when you remember this week, something tells me you will be grateful that Mark Braverman, a Jewish author, shared with us his timely reading of Ephesians 2:14.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Marlin and Sally Vis Weigh In
Friends,
Marlin and Sally, friends of FPI, divide their time between Michigan and the Middel (especially Isr/Pal). Here is their fresh "take" on conversations they are having with Jews and Palestinians "on the ground". JRK
Greetings!
Sally and I are preparing to leave for Jerusalem next week Tuesday, June 29. We are excited to be going back to our "second home." We love the people of this place, all the people, and miss them when we are in the States. We miss the place as well. It is a wonderful, mysterious, historic, conflicted and confusing land, and we love it and are drawn into it, because this is the place where God chose to flesh into and rise out of. You have to come with us some day. You just have to! (Look at details for trips in 2011.)
We hear from our many friends in the region that nothing much has changed, except to get worse. Our Jewish friends worry about the internal strife that is breaking out from under the surface and is threatening to further divide the Jewish population of Israel. The Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox are conducting daily protests, some which lead to ugly confrontation with Israeli police. The rest of the population is thoroughly fed up with their separatist ways and this tension is becoming more and more a problem within the Jewish population. Messianic Christians (Jewish people who claim Jesus as the Messiah, but still observe Jewish custom) are caught in the middle, often targeted by other Jewish people as traitors, or at best, "lesser Jewish." Pray for these brothers and sisters.
Israel's decision to ease the Gaza blockade is helpful and hopeful, even though we know it is a reluctant move that comes on the heels of the tragedy off the Gaza Coast. What we hear from our Palestinian friends is that this will help relieve some tension in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, but only a little, and only for a little while. Such is life for a people living under oppression. The primary flash point for Palestinians is the demolition of homes in East Jerusalem, and the expansion of settlements in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Our Christian brothers and sisters are caught up in both these issues and are as affected by them along with everyone else. We hear from these brothers and sisters that relations with Muslims continue to deteriorate as the pressure of the occupation takes its toll. When you can't strike out against your oppressor, then you strike out at those you can. Both our Christian and Muslim friends grieve this development, and we with them. Please pray for peace between all warring factions - the peace of Christ!
Twenty people will travel with us as we visit holy sites and with God's holy people. Pray for us. Pray for each person coming with us. Pray for the people we will meet along the way. Pray for eyes to see and ears to hear.
Visit our blog site for the latest posts.
Blessings and peace,
marlin and sally vis
Marlin and Sally, friends of FPI, divide their time between Michigan and the Middel (especially Isr/Pal). Here is their fresh "take" on conversations they are having with Jews and Palestinians "on the ground". JRK
Greetings!
Sally and I are preparing to leave for Jerusalem next week Tuesday, June 29. We are excited to be going back to our "second home." We love the people of this place, all the people, and miss them when we are in the States. We miss the place as well. It is a wonderful, mysterious, historic, conflicted and confusing land, and we love it and are drawn into it, because this is the place where God chose to flesh into and rise out of. You have to come with us some day. You just have to! (Look at details for trips in 2011.)
We hear from our many friends in the region that nothing much has changed, except to get worse. Our Jewish friends worry about the internal strife that is breaking out from under the surface and is threatening to further divide the Jewish population of Israel. The Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox are conducting daily protests, some which lead to ugly confrontation with Israeli police. The rest of the population is thoroughly fed up with their separatist ways and this tension is becoming more and more a problem within the Jewish population. Messianic Christians (Jewish people who claim Jesus as the Messiah, but still observe Jewish custom) are caught in the middle, often targeted by other Jewish people as traitors, or at best, "lesser Jewish." Pray for these brothers and sisters.
Israel's decision to ease the Gaza blockade is helpful and hopeful, even though we know it is a reluctant move that comes on the heels of the tragedy off the Gaza Coast. What we hear from our Palestinian friends is that this will help relieve some tension in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, but only a little, and only for a little while. Such is life for a people living under oppression. The primary flash point for Palestinians is the demolition of homes in East Jerusalem, and the expansion of settlements in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Our Christian brothers and sisters are caught up in both these issues and are as affected by them along with everyone else. We hear from these brothers and sisters that relations with Muslims continue to deteriorate as the pressure of the occupation takes its toll. When you can't strike out against your oppressor, then you strike out at those you can. Both our Christian and Muslim friends grieve this development, and we with them. Please pray for peace between all warring factions - the peace of Christ!
Twenty people will travel with us as we visit holy sites and with God's holy people. Pray for us. Pray for each person coming with us. Pray for the people we will meet along the way. Pray for eyes to see and ears to hear.
Visit our blog site for the latest posts.
Blessings and peace,
marlin and sally vis
Friday, June 11, 2010
Roger Cohen. NY Times. End the Occupation
June 10, 2010
Modern Folly, Ancient Wisdom
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK — I took a short break for my daughter’s bat mitzvah, Israel killed nine activists on a Gaza-bound ship in international waters, and its bungled raid prompted international uproar and Jewish soul-searching.
And so the last 10 days of my life were shaped by Middle Eastern rage, churning through 24-hour news cycles, and private joy framed in millennial Jewish tradition. I’ll try to sift through them here.
Often our outer and inner worlds diverge. We do our best to reconcile them, the daily juggle. Seldom have I felt the ugliness of the political — Yeats’s “weasels fighting in a hole” — and the consolation of the spiritual with such clarity.
Israel’s bloody interception of the Mavi Marmara and its motley crew was crass — another example of the counterproductive use of force — but nothing about it could justify the Turkish prime minister’s outrageous statement that the world now perceives “the swastika and the Star of David together.”
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the bristling leader who has given Kemal Ataturk’s secular Turkey an Islamic tinge and an eastward-looking inclination, should know better than to invoke the Nazis when speaking of a state that emerged from the ashes of European Jewry.
Israel is a liberal democracy stuck in the blind alley of a morally corrupting 43-year-old occupation that has made force its reflexive mode of operation. Several factors have nudged the country rightward: religious-settler extremism; obliviousness to the Palestinian plight now concealed behind walls; Russian-imported strands of Arab-baiting intolerance. But it is still a liberal democracy, home to a level of debate and openness unknown elsewhere in the Middle East. This needs broader acknowledgment.
What Israel in turn must realize — before it is too late — is that the real threat it faces today is not one of destruction but of de-legitimization. Its tactical lurches, often violent, do not add up to a strategy; they have resulted in a shocking erosion of Israel’s stature. I was talking the other day to the Israeli ambassador to a West European nation and he complained that he could rarely set foot on a university campus these days. Universities represent the future.
The only way to re-legitimize Israel and integrate it is an end to the occupation and the achievement of a two-state solution, with Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people and Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people. Israel cannot do this alone. Feckless Arab powers must step forward.
But Israel emphatically cannot do this, ever, by succumbing to a deeper and giddier embrace of those terrible twins, victimhood and force — terrible because at once addictive and blinding.
An ever larger share of the officer corps of the Israel Defense Forces comes from Orthodox or settler families. The mindset of secular Tel Aviv has migrated — as far as is feasible — to Europe and the United States.
Such rump Zionism does not bode well for an Israel that needs a crash course in restraint. Blockading Gaza is not difficult. But of course the blockade only nourishes the tunnel economy controlled by Hamas. Is this intelligent? Is this a strategy?
Jews have survived by using their minds. Israel was founded in the image of Jewish values debated and distilled over centuries. Before my daughter Adele chanted her Torah portion, with the sacred scroll unfolded before her, Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn used an image from Jewish mystical thought of the Torah as “black fire upon white fire.”
The notion here is that the word of God is fire, redoubled fire if you like, and that if you get too far from it you freeze, but if you draw too near to it you burn. “The word of God can actually destroy you if you get too close,” Bachman suggested.
With all the Middle Eastern charges and countercharges echoing dimly in my mind, these words about the peril of too fierce a zealotry resonated. Then Adele read from the scroll and her clear voice, her young mind and those ancient desert-sprung sounds took everyone far from sound-bite squalor.
Her portion was about the Korah rebellion and God’s sweeping punishment of it.
In her subsequent speech, she said, “I think that God didn’t understand that not everyone was behind this rebellion, only Korah and his followers, because He isn’t human. He doesn’t understand how the human race works, and Moses and Aaron do because they are humans. In my opinion that is the main reason that God has Moses and Aaron, to help Him understand the human race and help fix conflicts in a calm and rational way.”
Calling God’s harsh reaction “a hasty decision,” she suggested that “Judaism begins to teach us that God and humans together can be partners in keeping each other calm and rational.”
I’m not about to suggest a 12-year-old can solve the Middle East’s problems, but the distance between the wisdom in that sanctuary and the warring words of the modern-day absolutists of Israel-Palestine cleaving too close to the fire was so immense as to constitute a terrible betrayal — of youth and its hopes above all.
Modern Folly, Ancient Wisdom
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK — I took a short break for my daughter’s bat mitzvah, Israel killed nine activists on a Gaza-bound ship in international waters, and its bungled raid prompted international uproar and Jewish soul-searching.
And so the last 10 days of my life were shaped by Middle Eastern rage, churning through 24-hour news cycles, and private joy framed in millennial Jewish tradition. I’ll try to sift through them here.
Often our outer and inner worlds diverge. We do our best to reconcile them, the daily juggle. Seldom have I felt the ugliness of the political — Yeats’s “weasels fighting in a hole” — and the consolation of the spiritual with such clarity.
Israel’s bloody interception of the Mavi Marmara and its motley crew was crass — another example of the counterproductive use of force — but nothing about it could justify the Turkish prime minister’s outrageous statement that the world now perceives “the swastika and the Star of David together.”
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the bristling leader who has given Kemal Ataturk’s secular Turkey an Islamic tinge and an eastward-looking inclination, should know better than to invoke the Nazis when speaking of a state that emerged from the ashes of European Jewry.
Israel is a liberal democracy stuck in the blind alley of a morally corrupting 43-year-old occupation that has made force its reflexive mode of operation. Several factors have nudged the country rightward: religious-settler extremism; obliviousness to the Palestinian plight now concealed behind walls; Russian-imported strands of Arab-baiting intolerance. But it is still a liberal democracy, home to a level of debate and openness unknown elsewhere in the Middle East. This needs broader acknowledgment.
What Israel in turn must realize — before it is too late — is that the real threat it faces today is not one of destruction but of de-legitimization. Its tactical lurches, often violent, do not add up to a strategy; they have resulted in a shocking erosion of Israel’s stature. I was talking the other day to the Israeli ambassador to a West European nation and he complained that he could rarely set foot on a university campus these days. Universities represent the future.
The only way to re-legitimize Israel and integrate it is an end to the occupation and the achievement of a two-state solution, with Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people and Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people. Israel cannot do this alone. Feckless Arab powers must step forward.
But Israel emphatically cannot do this, ever, by succumbing to a deeper and giddier embrace of those terrible twins, victimhood and force — terrible because at once addictive and blinding.
An ever larger share of the officer corps of the Israel Defense Forces comes from Orthodox or settler families. The mindset of secular Tel Aviv has migrated — as far as is feasible — to Europe and the United States.
Such rump Zionism does not bode well for an Israel that needs a crash course in restraint. Blockading Gaza is not difficult. But of course the blockade only nourishes the tunnel economy controlled by Hamas. Is this intelligent? Is this a strategy?
Jews have survived by using their minds. Israel was founded in the image of Jewish values debated and distilled over centuries. Before my daughter Adele chanted her Torah portion, with the sacred scroll unfolded before her, Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn used an image from Jewish mystical thought of the Torah as “black fire upon white fire.”
The notion here is that the word of God is fire, redoubled fire if you like, and that if you get too far from it you freeze, but if you draw too near to it you burn. “The word of God can actually destroy you if you get too close,” Bachman suggested.
With all the Middle Eastern charges and countercharges echoing dimly in my mind, these words about the peril of too fierce a zealotry resonated. Then Adele read from the scroll and her clear voice, her young mind and those ancient desert-sprung sounds took everyone far from sound-bite squalor.
Her portion was about the Korah rebellion and God’s sweeping punishment of it.
In her subsequent speech, she said, “I think that God didn’t understand that not everyone was behind this rebellion, only Korah and his followers, because He isn’t human. He doesn’t understand how the human race works, and Moses and Aaron do because they are humans. In my opinion that is the main reason that God has Moses and Aaron, to help Him understand the human race and help fix conflicts in a calm and rational way.”
Calling God’s harsh reaction “a hasty decision,” she suggested that “Judaism begins to teach us that God and humans together can be partners in keeping each other calm and rational.”
I’m not about to suggest a 12-year-old can solve the Middle East’s problems, but the distance between the wisdom in that sanctuary and the warring words of the modern-day absolutists of Israel-Palestine cleaving too close to the fire was so immense as to constitute a terrible betrayal — of youth and its hopes above all.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Our Shadow Side
The Shadow over Israel
Until Palestine has its own 'legitimized' state within its internationally recognized borders, the Shadow will remain.
By Margaret Atwood
This article is part of a special edition of Haaretz, to mark Israel's book week.
The Moment
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage,
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
Climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
Recently I was in Israel. The Israelis I met could not have been more welcoming. I saw many impressive accomplishments and creative projects, and talked with many different people. The sun was shining, the waves waving, the flowers were in bloom. Tourists jogged along the beach at Tel Aviv as if everything was normal.
But… there was the Shadow. Why was everything trembling a little, like a mirage? Was it like that moment before a tsunami when the birds fly to the treetops and the animals head for the hills because they can feel it coming?
“Every morning I wake up in fear,” someone told me. “That’s just self-pity, to excuse what’s happening,” said someone else. Of course, fear and self-pity can both be real. But by “what’s happening,” they meant the Shadow.
I’d been told ahead of time that Israelis would try to cover up the Shadow, but instead they talked about it non-stop. Two minutes into any conversation, the Shadow would appear. It’s not called the Shadow, it’s called “the situation.” It haunts everything.
The Shadow is not the Palestinians. The Shadow is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, linked with Israeli’s own fears. The worse the Palestinians are treated in the name of those fears, the bigger the Shadow grows, and then the fears grow with them; and the justifications for the treatment multiply.
The attempts to shut down criticism are ominous, as is the language being used. Once you start calling other people by vermin names such as “vipers,” you imply their extermination. To name just one example, such labels were applied wholesale to the Tutsis months before the Rwanda massacre began. Studies have shown that ordinary people can be led to commit horrors if told they’ll be acting in self-defense, for “victory,” or to benefit mankind.
I’d never been to Israel before, except in the airport. Like a lot of people on the sidelines – not Jewish, not Israeli, not Palestinian, not Muslim – I hadn’t followed the “the situation” closely, though, also like most, I’d deplored the violence and wished for a happy ending for all.
Again like most, I’d avoided conversations on this subject because they swiftly became screaming matches. (Why was that? Faced with two undesirable choices, the brain – we’re told -- chooses one as less evil, pronounces it good, and demonizes the other.)
I did have some distant background. As “Egypt” at a Model U.N. in 1956, my high school’s delegation had presented the Palestinian case. Why was it fair that the Palestinians, innocent bystanders during the Holocaust, had lost their homes? To which the Model Israel replied, “You don’t want Israel to exist.” A mere decade after the Camps and the six million obliterated, such a statement was a talk-stopper.
Then I’d been hired to start a Nature program at a liberal Jewish summer camp. The people were smart, funny, inventive, idealistic. We went in a lot for World Peace and the Brotherhood of Man. I couldn’t fit this together with the Model U.N. Palestinian experience. Did these two realities nullify each other? Surely not, and surely the humane Jewish Brotherhood-of-Manners numerous in both the summer camp and in Israel itself would soon sort this conflict out in a fair way.
But they didn’t. And they haven’t. And it’s no longer 1956. The conversation has changed dramatically. I was recently attacked for accepting a cultural prize that such others as Atom Egoyan, Al Gore, Tom Stoppard, Goenawan Mohamad, and Yo-Yo Ma had previously received. This prize was decided upon, not by an instrument of Israeli state power as some would have it, but by a moderate committee within an independent foundation. This group was pitching real democracy, open dialogue, a two-state solution, and reconciliation. Nevertheless, I’ve now heard every possible negative thing about Israel – in effect, I’ve had an abrupt and searing immersion course in present-day politics. The whole experience was like learning about cooking by being thrown into the soup pot.
The most virulent language was truly anti-Semitic (as opposed to the label often used to deflect criticism). There were hot debates among activists about whether boycotting Israel would “work,” or not; about a one-state or else a two-state solution; about whether a boycott should exclude culture, as it is a bridge, or was that hypocritical dreaming? Was the term “apartheid” appropriate, or just a distraction? What about “de-legitimizing” the State of Israel? Over the decades, the debate had acquired a vocabulary and a set of rituals that those who hadn’t hung around universities – as I had not -- would simply not grasp.
Some kindly souls, maddened by frustration and injustice, began by screaming at me; but then, deciding I suppose that I was like a toddler who’d wandered into traffic, became very helpful. Others dismissed my citing of International PEN and its cultural-boycott-precluding efforts to free imprisoned writers as irrelevant twaddle. (An opinion cheered by every repressive government, extremist religion, and hard-line political group on the planet, which is why so many fiction writers are banned, jailed, exiled, and shot.)
None of this changes the core nature of the reality, which is that the concept of Israel as a humane and democratic state is in serious trouble. Once a country starts refusing entry to the likes of Noam Chomsky, shutting down the rights of its citizens to use words like “Nakba,” and labelling as “anti-Israel” anyone who tries to tell them what they need to know, a police-state clampdown looms. Will it be a betrayal of age-old humane Jewish traditions and the rule of just law, or a turn towards reconciliation and a truly open society?
Time is running out. Opinion in Israel may be hardening, but in the United States things are moving in the opposite direction. Campus activity is increasing; many young Jewish Americans don’t want Israel speaking for them. America, snarled in two chaotic wars and facing increasing international anger over Palestine, may well be starting to see Israel not as an asset but as a liability.
Then there are people like me. Having been preoccupied of late with mass extinctions and environmental disasters, and thus having strayed into the Middle-eastern neighbourhood with a mind as open as it could be without being totally vacant, I’ve come out altered. Child-killing in Gaza? Killing aid-bringers on ships in international waters? Civilians malnourished thanks to the blockade? Forbidding writing paper? Forbidding pizza? How petty and vindictive! Is pizza is a tool of terrorists? Would most Canadians agree? And am I a tool of terrorists for saying this? I think not.
There are many groups in which Israelis and Palestinians work together on issues of common interest, and these show what a positive future might hold; but until the structural problem is fixed and Palestine has its own “legitimized” state within its internationally recognized borders, the Shadow will remain.
“We know what we have to do, to fix it,” said many Israelis. “We need to get beyond Us and Them, to We,” said a Palestinian. This is the hopeful path. For Israelis and Palestinians both, the region itself is what’s now being threatened, as the globe heats up and water vanishes. Two traumas create neither erasure nor invalidation: both are real. And a catastrophe for one would also be a catastrophe for the other.
Until Palestine has its own 'legitimized' state within its internationally recognized borders, the Shadow will remain.
By Margaret Atwood
This article is part of a special edition of Haaretz, to mark Israel's book week.
The Moment
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage,
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
Climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
Recently I was in Israel. The Israelis I met could not have been more welcoming. I saw many impressive accomplishments and creative projects, and talked with many different people. The sun was shining, the waves waving, the flowers were in bloom. Tourists jogged along the beach at Tel Aviv as if everything was normal.
But… there was the Shadow. Why was everything trembling a little, like a mirage? Was it like that moment before a tsunami when the birds fly to the treetops and the animals head for the hills because they can feel it coming?
“Every morning I wake up in fear,” someone told me. “That’s just self-pity, to excuse what’s happening,” said someone else. Of course, fear and self-pity can both be real. But by “what’s happening,” they meant the Shadow.
I’d been told ahead of time that Israelis would try to cover up the Shadow, but instead they talked about it non-stop. Two minutes into any conversation, the Shadow would appear. It’s not called the Shadow, it’s called “the situation.” It haunts everything.
The Shadow is not the Palestinians. The Shadow is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, linked with Israeli’s own fears. The worse the Palestinians are treated in the name of those fears, the bigger the Shadow grows, and then the fears grow with them; and the justifications for the treatment multiply.
The attempts to shut down criticism are ominous, as is the language being used. Once you start calling other people by vermin names such as “vipers,” you imply their extermination. To name just one example, such labels were applied wholesale to the Tutsis months before the Rwanda massacre began. Studies have shown that ordinary people can be led to commit horrors if told they’ll be acting in self-defense, for “victory,” or to benefit mankind.
I’d never been to Israel before, except in the airport. Like a lot of people on the sidelines – not Jewish, not Israeli, not Palestinian, not Muslim – I hadn’t followed the “the situation” closely, though, also like most, I’d deplored the violence and wished for a happy ending for all.
Again like most, I’d avoided conversations on this subject because they swiftly became screaming matches. (Why was that? Faced with two undesirable choices, the brain – we’re told -- chooses one as less evil, pronounces it good, and demonizes the other.)
I did have some distant background. As “Egypt” at a Model U.N. in 1956, my high school’s delegation had presented the Palestinian case. Why was it fair that the Palestinians, innocent bystanders during the Holocaust, had lost their homes? To which the Model Israel replied, “You don’t want Israel to exist.” A mere decade after the Camps and the six million obliterated, such a statement was a talk-stopper.
Then I’d been hired to start a Nature program at a liberal Jewish summer camp. The people were smart, funny, inventive, idealistic. We went in a lot for World Peace and the Brotherhood of Man. I couldn’t fit this together with the Model U.N. Palestinian experience. Did these two realities nullify each other? Surely not, and surely the humane Jewish Brotherhood-of-Manners numerous in both the summer camp and in Israel itself would soon sort this conflict out in a fair way.
But they didn’t. And they haven’t. And it’s no longer 1956. The conversation has changed dramatically. I was recently attacked for accepting a cultural prize that such others as Atom Egoyan, Al Gore, Tom Stoppard, Goenawan Mohamad, and Yo-Yo Ma had previously received. This prize was decided upon, not by an instrument of Israeli state power as some would have it, but by a moderate committee within an independent foundation. This group was pitching real democracy, open dialogue, a two-state solution, and reconciliation. Nevertheless, I’ve now heard every possible negative thing about Israel – in effect, I’ve had an abrupt and searing immersion course in present-day politics. The whole experience was like learning about cooking by being thrown into the soup pot.
The most virulent language was truly anti-Semitic (as opposed to the label often used to deflect criticism). There were hot debates among activists about whether boycotting Israel would “work,” or not; about a one-state or else a two-state solution; about whether a boycott should exclude culture, as it is a bridge, or was that hypocritical dreaming? Was the term “apartheid” appropriate, or just a distraction? What about “de-legitimizing” the State of Israel? Over the decades, the debate had acquired a vocabulary and a set of rituals that those who hadn’t hung around universities – as I had not -- would simply not grasp.
Some kindly souls, maddened by frustration and injustice, began by screaming at me; but then, deciding I suppose that I was like a toddler who’d wandered into traffic, became very helpful. Others dismissed my citing of International PEN and its cultural-boycott-precluding efforts to free imprisoned writers as irrelevant twaddle. (An opinion cheered by every repressive government, extremist religion, and hard-line political group on the planet, which is why so many fiction writers are banned, jailed, exiled, and shot.)
None of this changes the core nature of the reality, which is that the concept of Israel as a humane and democratic state is in serious trouble. Once a country starts refusing entry to the likes of Noam Chomsky, shutting down the rights of its citizens to use words like “Nakba,” and labelling as “anti-Israel” anyone who tries to tell them what they need to know, a police-state clampdown looms. Will it be a betrayal of age-old humane Jewish traditions and the rule of just law, or a turn towards reconciliation and a truly open society?
Time is running out. Opinion in Israel may be hardening, but in the United States things are moving in the opposite direction. Campus activity is increasing; many young Jewish Americans don’t want Israel speaking for them. America, snarled in two chaotic wars and facing increasing international anger over Palestine, may well be starting to see Israel not as an asset but as a liability.
Then there are people like me. Having been preoccupied of late with mass extinctions and environmental disasters, and thus having strayed into the Middle-eastern neighbourhood with a mind as open as it could be without being totally vacant, I’ve come out altered. Child-killing in Gaza? Killing aid-bringers on ships in international waters? Civilians malnourished thanks to the blockade? Forbidding writing paper? Forbidding pizza? How petty and vindictive! Is pizza is a tool of terrorists? Would most Canadians agree? And am I a tool of terrorists for saying this? I think not.
There are many groups in which Israelis and Palestinians work together on issues of common interest, and these show what a positive future might hold; but until the structural problem is fixed and Palestine has its own “legitimized” state within its internationally recognized borders, the Shadow will remain.
“We know what we have to do, to fix it,” said many Israelis. “We need to get beyond Us and Them, to We,” said a Palestinian. This is the hopeful path. For Israelis and Palestinians both, the region itself is what’s now being threatened, as the globe heats up and water vanishes. Two traumas create neither erasure nor invalidation: both are real. And a catastrophe for one would also be a catastrophe for the other.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
The Words of an "On the Ground" Participant
Dear Friend,
The words of witness of an "on the ground" participant in the struggles among Isr's and Pal's are compelling. "Friend" Tom Arendshorst was part of a CPT (Christian Peacemaker Team) experience last month. He has written about it. Here is his April 10 report. Thank you, Tom. (He is a graduate of the Kroc Institute on Peace, at Notre Dame) JRK
TOM’S KROC O’PEACE JOURNAL #81
A Time to Sow, A Time to Reap
Saturday, April 10, 2010:
We’re up and away early this morning, packed for our two home-stay nights in the South Hebron Hills village of At-Tuwani. The villagers’ barley is ripe, ready for harvest, and last night Israeli settlers from the adjacent Ma’on settlement grazed sheep on the Palestinians’ grain, destroying 30-40% of the vital crop. We’re going to accompany the villagers as they harvest their crop. It’s what Christian Peacemaker Teams do.
From At-Tuwani we hike a mile or so south on a rocky path, past olive groves on the right and a small pine-cypress forest above us on the left (which harbors an Israeli “outpost” hamlet, illegal even under Israeli military (IDF) law but protected by the military), to the little green vale where villagers are already at work. The entire group of twenty or so are an extended family; with them are an old Chevy truck and a scattered flock of sheep and goats. We –- Sharon, Milena, Gloria, Fathiyeh, Marlin, and I --- pitch in, pulling barley up in bunches by the roots, shaking off the valuable soil, stacking the grain into shocks, carrying shocks to the trailer, happily sipping little cups of steaming sweet tea every half-hour. The thorns mixed in with the barley make me wish I’d brought some work gloves with me.
Farther down the wadi we see the olive grove hacked down by settlers a year ago, growing anew. As usual, that crime elicited no investigation or response from the military or police. Settler (or even IDF) attacks against Palestinians or their property are almost routine. Because Ma’on settlers, adults and teens, so often have attacked and harassed (rocks, insults, pushing, hitting) the schoolchildren who hike two miles from the hamlet of Tuba to the At-Tuwani school, whose only path takes them past the edge of the settlement, CPT has worked out a deal with the IDF to escort the kids past the settlement twice each day. The CPTers meet the children at each end, to assure their safety and phone the IDF commander when the military jeep doesn’t show up. It’s bottom-up peacebuilding, resisting barriers and working for measures of justice in one village. We hitch along, red CPT caps on our heads, to watch the kids arrive and depart.
Not long before our visit Ma’on settlers reported a missing sheep to the IDF. Soldiers went to the Tuba hamlet and “investigated” by ransacking the Palestinians’ homes but not even bothering to look in the sheep pen. On another occasion several Israeli settler youths, armed with automatic rifles, threatened camping Palestinian shepherds near where we harvested barley and incited a fight. In the struggle one of the settler youths was shot. The settlers ran home. The next day IDF soldiers found the shepherd boy who’d reportedly fired the gun and killed him in his family’s home. Within the last two months Israeli police have abducted and beaten a twelve-year-old At-Tuwani shepherd, later releasing him without charge, and two boys who’d been attacked by a group of settlers (no settlers were arrested, of course).
Hebron and the South Hebron Hills are hotbeds of Israeli security concern and settler violence against Palestinians. I’ve asked several experienced observers about these extreme settler behaviors; they consistently estimate that 20-25% of settlers are violent Zionist extremists, the rest just Jews taking advantage of the settlement opportunity to develop their lives in Israel. The Israeli government invites new immigrants to be settlers in Palestinian territory, gives them stipends to live in nice apartments, ensures them unlimited water and unquestioning military security, and tacitly encourages their hostile, disruptive incursions into Palestinian society.
Sharon, four other delegates and I spend a night in the home of Atta Jabber and his family on the outskirts of Hebron, hard up against the expanding settlement town of Kiryat Arba. Atta’s family has lived here, on their property with its vineyards, for generations back into time. A couple of years ago the IDF came with its Caterpillar bulldozers and demolished Atta’s family’s house. The community helped Atta rebuild. The bulldozers came again and destroyed his house again. An Israeli woman, angry at her government’s treatment of Atta’s family, paid for the home to be built a third time, and it stands intact. But the IDF also blew up Atta’s cistern and cut off his water supply to his family vineyards by building a lovely Israeli-only highway between his home and his family’s vines. Atta has been arrested without charge and beaten so both legs were broken.
Atta’s stories present dramatic examples of Israeli occupation cruelties. But he presents his history without dramatic flair or emotion, and surprises me by combining the Palestinian hope for their legal rights with affirmation of Israel’s continuing existence. Indeed, I have not heard from any Palestinian the much-publicized insistence (in our U.S. press) that Israel “not exist.” I do hear, from Atta and multiple other sources, Palestinians’ fear of extremists’ violence, the fear that Palestinian terrorist attacks will enable the Israeli government to ratchet up the violence of its reprisals and pressure.
Atta’s wife makes us a delicious dinner of rice and chicken, and we meet the kids. I meet Atta’s mother and, after a flashlight look at her eyes, assure the family that her two cataract surgeries look excellent. Exhausted and eager for rest after dinner and our evening of conversation; Sharon and I make ready to plop down on two of Atta’s mattress pads, but he and his wife insist that we take their bedroom --- and their bed. We sleep like wintering little bears.
Viewed from the sky, as if a topographical map, Israel’s extension of settlements and Wall into Palestinian territory emerges not as some “natural” definition of reality but as an advancing line of battle, a strategic war of conquest. Here is an important water source; the Wall amoebas it away from the Palestinians who have depended on it for centuries. Here are arable fields adjacent to a little town; the Wall, or a new Israeli-only highway, cuts between and isolates people from crops. Here is Palestinian East Jerusalem, or a city near the established “Green Line” border dividing Israel from Palestine; Israeli military, government, and judiciary combine to bulldoze homes, take over property and construct new “settlement” condominiums, with encircling military security zones inside surrounding Palestinian communities. Here is a village or valuable farm out on its own in the South Hebron Hills, in the corridor Ariel Sharon saw as territorial connector between Palestinian West Bank and Palestinian Gaza; new settlement fortress-towns are constructed on hilltops encircling or next to those vulnerable targets.
The pressure is inexorable. Together with its apartheid system of separate, discriminatory laws and selective enforcement, discriminatory education, incapacitating limitations of movement, water theft, and economic crippling, the settlement-and-Wall process is one of slow, civilized, strangulation of the Palestinian people and society, an ethnic cleansing.
Viewed from the sky over time, will the occupation succeed in “cleansing” Palestine of Palestinians?
Peace,
Tom
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate;
Only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness
multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. . . The chain reaction of
evil --- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars --- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
--- Martin Luther King, Jr.: Strength To Love
The words of witness of an "on the ground" participant in the struggles among Isr's and Pal's are compelling. "Friend" Tom Arendshorst was part of a CPT (Christian Peacemaker Team) experience last month. He has written about it. Here is his April 10 report. Thank you, Tom. (He is a graduate of the Kroc Institute on Peace, at Notre Dame) JRK
TOM’S KROC O’PEACE JOURNAL #81
A Time to Sow, A Time to Reap
Saturday, April 10, 2010:
We’re up and away early this morning, packed for our two home-stay nights in the South Hebron Hills village of At-Tuwani. The villagers’ barley is ripe, ready for harvest, and last night Israeli settlers from the adjacent Ma’on settlement grazed sheep on the Palestinians’ grain, destroying 30-40% of the vital crop. We’re going to accompany the villagers as they harvest their crop. It’s what Christian Peacemaker Teams do.
From At-Tuwani we hike a mile or so south on a rocky path, past olive groves on the right and a small pine-cypress forest above us on the left (which harbors an Israeli “outpost” hamlet, illegal even under Israeli military (IDF) law but protected by the military), to the little green vale where villagers are already at work. The entire group of twenty or so are an extended family; with them are an old Chevy truck and a scattered flock of sheep and goats. We –- Sharon, Milena, Gloria, Fathiyeh, Marlin, and I --- pitch in, pulling barley up in bunches by the roots, shaking off the valuable soil, stacking the grain into shocks, carrying shocks to the trailer, happily sipping little cups of steaming sweet tea every half-hour. The thorns mixed in with the barley make me wish I’d brought some work gloves with me.
Farther down the wadi we see the olive grove hacked down by settlers a year ago, growing anew. As usual, that crime elicited no investigation or response from the military or police. Settler (or even IDF) attacks against Palestinians or their property are almost routine. Because Ma’on settlers, adults and teens, so often have attacked and harassed (rocks, insults, pushing, hitting) the schoolchildren who hike two miles from the hamlet of Tuba to the At-Tuwani school, whose only path takes them past the edge of the settlement, CPT has worked out a deal with the IDF to escort the kids past the settlement twice each day. The CPTers meet the children at each end, to assure their safety and phone the IDF commander when the military jeep doesn’t show up. It’s bottom-up peacebuilding, resisting barriers and working for measures of justice in one village. We hitch along, red CPT caps on our heads, to watch the kids arrive and depart.
Not long before our visit Ma’on settlers reported a missing sheep to the IDF. Soldiers went to the Tuba hamlet and “investigated” by ransacking the Palestinians’ homes but not even bothering to look in the sheep pen. On another occasion several Israeli settler youths, armed with automatic rifles, threatened camping Palestinian shepherds near where we harvested barley and incited a fight. In the struggle one of the settler youths was shot. The settlers ran home. The next day IDF soldiers found the shepherd boy who’d reportedly fired the gun and killed him in his family’s home. Within the last two months Israeli police have abducted and beaten a twelve-year-old At-Tuwani shepherd, later releasing him without charge, and two boys who’d been attacked by a group of settlers (no settlers were arrested, of course).
Hebron and the South Hebron Hills are hotbeds of Israeli security concern and settler violence against Palestinians. I’ve asked several experienced observers about these extreme settler behaviors; they consistently estimate that 20-25% of settlers are violent Zionist extremists, the rest just Jews taking advantage of the settlement opportunity to develop their lives in Israel. The Israeli government invites new immigrants to be settlers in Palestinian territory, gives them stipends to live in nice apartments, ensures them unlimited water and unquestioning military security, and tacitly encourages their hostile, disruptive incursions into Palestinian society.
Sharon, four other delegates and I spend a night in the home of Atta Jabber and his family on the outskirts of Hebron, hard up against the expanding settlement town of Kiryat Arba. Atta’s family has lived here, on their property with its vineyards, for generations back into time. A couple of years ago the IDF came with its Caterpillar bulldozers and demolished Atta’s family’s house. The community helped Atta rebuild. The bulldozers came again and destroyed his house again. An Israeli woman, angry at her government’s treatment of Atta’s family, paid for the home to be built a third time, and it stands intact. But the IDF also blew up Atta’s cistern and cut off his water supply to his family vineyards by building a lovely Israeli-only highway between his home and his family’s vines. Atta has been arrested without charge and beaten so both legs were broken.
Atta’s stories present dramatic examples of Israeli occupation cruelties. But he presents his history without dramatic flair or emotion, and surprises me by combining the Palestinian hope for their legal rights with affirmation of Israel’s continuing existence. Indeed, I have not heard from any Palestinian the much-publicized insistence (in our U.S. press) that Israel “not exist.” I do hear, from Atta and multiple other sources, Palestinians’ fear of extremists’ violence, the fear that Palestinian terrorist attacks will enable the Israeli government to ratchet up the violence of its reprisals and pressure.
Atta’s wife makes us a delicious dinner of rice and chicken, and we meet the kids. I meet Atta’s mother and, after a flashlight look at her eyes, assure the family that her two cataract surgeries look excellent. Exhausted and eager for rest after dinner and our evening of conversation; Sharon and I make ready to plop down on two of Atta’s mattress pads, but he and his wife insist that we take their bedroom --- and their bed. We sleep like wintering little bears.
Viewed from the sky, as if a topographical map, Israel’s extension of settlements and Wall into Palestinian territory emerges not as some “natural” definition of reality but as an advancing line of battle, a strategic war of conquest. Here is an important water source; the Wall amoebas it away from the Palestinians who have depended on it for centuries. Here are arable fields adjacent to a little town; the Wall, or a new Israeli-only highway, cuts between and isolates people from crops. Here is Palestinian East Jerusalem, or a city near the established “Green Line” border dividing Israel from Palestine; Israeli military, government, and judiciary combine to bulldoze homes, take over property and construct new “settlement” condominiums, with encircling military security zones inside surrounding Palestinian communities. Here is a village or valuable farm out on its own in the South Hebron Hills, in the corridor Ariel Sharon saw as territorial connector between Palestinian West Bank and Palestinian Gaza; new settlement fortress-towns are constructed on hilltops encircling or next to those vulnerable targets.
The pressure is inexorable. Together with its apartheid system of separate, discriminatory laws and selective enforcement, discriminatory education, incapacitating limitations of movement, water theft, and economic crippling, the settlement-and-Wall process is one of slow, civilized, strangulation of the Palestinian people and society, an ethnic cleansing.
Viewed from the sky over time, will the occupation succeed in “cleansing” Palestine of Palestinians?
Peace,
Tom
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate;
Only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness
multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. . . The chain reaction of
evil --- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars --- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
--- Martin Luther King, Jr.: Strength To Love
Thursday, May 20, 2010
What's Wrong with Xns for Israel? Asks Tony Campollo!
Christian Zionism: Theology that Legitimates Oppression
by Tony Campolo 05-19-2010
I recently returned from a speaking engagement at the Bethlehem Bible College; and what I witnessed firsthand sent chills up my back. Listening to the horror stories told to me by oppressed Palestinians elicited feelings ranging from indignation to compassion. What was particularly upsetting were the pained questions of an elderly Christian Palestinian woman, who asked, “Why don’t our Christian brothers and sisters in America care about what is happening to us? Do they even know we exist? Do they know that their tax dollars paid for the Israeli tanks that destroyed my house and the houses of my neighbors?”
Twenty-five years ago, Bethlehem was 70 percent Christian. Today less than 15 percent of its population is Christian. Sometimes heartless and dehumanizing treatment that Bethlehem Christians have had to endure over the years has led most of them to emigrate to other countries. To this exodus, many religious Zionists say, “Good riddance!” Presently, 42 percent of all Israeli citizens believe that all Palestinians should be removed from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The most serious threats to the well-being of the Palestinians in general, and to the Christian Palestinians in particular, come not from the Jews, but from Christian Zionists here in the United States. They are armed with a theology created in the middle of the 19th century by a disaffected Anglican clergyman named John Nelson Darby in Plymouth, England. With this theology, called “Dispensationalism,” they argue that according to their interpretation of Genesis 15:18-21, the Holy Land should belong exclusively to the Jews. They contend that all of this land is what was promised to “the seed of Abraham” and, according to their interpretation of biblical prophecies, Jesus cannot return until all of this land is occupied by Jews, and all others are forced to leave.
Of course, the Darbyites completely ignore the fact that the Arab peoples are also the seed of Abraham, having descended to the present day from Hagar, one of Abraham’s servants. They fail to notice that Abraham affirmed both Isaac (his son by Sarah) and Ishmael (his son by Hagar) as his seed and called both to be present to bury their common father (Genesis 25:9). Furthermore, they are also prone to ignore that the land that Christian Zionists argue should be occupied only by Jews stretches from the Euphrates River to the Nile (Genesis 15:18-21). This includes the land now occupied by Arabs in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. That would mean that all of the Arabs in those countries would have to be forced to leave their homelands. I need not spell out the ramifications of what that would mean.
It should be noted that no prominent theologians until Darby (i.e., Calvin, Luther, Augustine, Aquinas) ever mentioned anything remotely resembling these claims made by dispensationalists. This Johnny-come-lately theology of John Nelson Darby has permeated American Protestantism via the publication in 1908 of the incredibly popular Scofield Reference Study Bible. Too often Evangelicals have treated the Scofield reference notes at the bottom of each page of scripture with almost as much reverence as they do the holy writ at the top of each page. So prevalent is Darby’s dispensationalist theology that most Evangelicals would be surprised to learn that his prophecies of a “rapture” and the historical events that he taught would accompany the rapture are nowhere to be found in Christian theology prior to the mid-19th century. Darby’s prophecies make the early church fathers, along with the apostle Paul, seem stupid since Christ could not possibly have returned during their own times, as they were prone to expect.
Darby’s influence on American Protestantism has recently received an enormous boost with the publication of the Left Behind series of books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Their series of books which are imagined accounts of events leading up to the rapture have sold more than 100 million copies.
You can gain some idea of the huge ideological support Christian Zionists have gained as of late by considering the extremist claims of television evangelist Pat Robertson, who says that Palestinian Christians have no right at all to any part of the Holy Land, even though in many instances it has been land that their ancestors have lived on for generations.
There are those who blame the Jewish lobbies for the 30 percent of all U.S. foreign aid that has gone to the State of Israel and which has enabled the Israelis to create the fourth most powerful army in the world. In reality, however, it is the Christian Zionists, led by such powerful televangelists as John Hagee who have been the primary sources of pressure on the U.S. Congress to financially back the Israeli military that has made the injustices I have described possible.
I personally have witnessed the sadness and disillusionment of Christian Palestinians who feel that their American Christian brothers and sisters could not care less about the sufferings that they must endure. What troubles them most is that their fellow Evangelicals in America have very little understanding of the way the entire Islamic world views what is happening in the Holy Land, and how American Evangelicals who unquestioningly support Israel’s policies are hindering evangelism among Muslims. They know that there is little understanding among American Christians that so many of the conflicts that exist between Muslims and Christians around the world are partially due to what is happening in the Holy Land. For instance, the media in the Muslim world has linked the oppression of Palestinians to the justification of attacks on Americans, in particular, and the western world, in general.
Given the historical existential situation, we, as American Christians, should lend support to the efforts to have safe and secure borders for the State of Israel and protection against terrorists; but we should be equally committed to having a well-established Palestinian state that also has safe and secure borders. We should be calling for the demolition of the separation wall that is as offensive as the Berlin Wall was. And we should be demanding that the border between these two states be the “green line” negotiated following the 1967 war.
Furthermore, we should be committed to a Palestine that has fair access to usable water and that its people have the same freedom to travel as Israelis presently enjoy.
We should be calling for justice for both peoples, because ours is a God who is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34) and calls on we Christians to be agents of reconciliation (II Corinthians 5:18).
Tony Campolo is founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE) and professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University.
by Tony Campolo 05-19-2010
I recently returned from a speaking engagement at the Bethlehem Bible College; and what I witnessed firsthand sent chills up my back. Listening to the horror stories told to me by oppressed Palestinians elicited feelings ranging from indignation to compassion. What was particularly upsetting were the pained questions of an elderly Christian Palestinian woman, who asked, “Why don’t our Christian brothers and sisters in America care about what is happening to us? Do they even know we exist? Do they know that their tax dollars paid for the Israeli tanks that destroyed my house and the houses of my neighbors?”
Twenty-five years ago, Bethlehem was 70 percent Christian. Today less than 15 percent of its population is Christian. Sometimes heartless and dehumanizing treatment that Bethlehem Christians have had to endure over the years has led most of them to emigrate to other countries. To this exodus, many religious Zionists say, “Good riddance!” Presently, 42 percent of all Israeli citizens believe that all Palestinians should be removed from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The most serious threats to the well-being of the Palestinians in general, and to the Christian Palestinians in particular, come not from the Jews, but from Christian Zionists here in the United States. They are armed with a theology created in the middle of the 19th century by a disaffected Anglican clergyman named John Nelson Darby in Plymouth, England. With this theology, called “Dispensationalism,” they argue that according to their interpretation of Genesis 15:18-21, the Holy Land should belong exclusively to the Jews. They contend that all of this land is what was promised to “the seed of Abraham” and, according to their interpretation of biblical prophecies, Jesus cannot return until all of this land is occupied by Jews, and all others are forced to leave.
Of course, the Darbyites completely ignore the fact that the Arab peoples are also the seed of Abraham, having descended to the present day from Hagar, one of Abraham’s servants. They fail to notice that Abraham affirmed both Isaac (his son by Sarah) and Ishmael (his son by Hagar) as his seed and called both to be present to bury their common father (Genesis 25:9). Furthermore, they are also prone to ignore that the land that Christian Zionists argue should be occupied only by Jews stretches from the Euphrates River to the Nile (Genesis 15:18-21). This includes the land now occupied by Arabs in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. That would mean that all of the Arabs in those countries would have to be forced to leave their homelands. I need not spell out the ramifications of what that would mean.
It should be noted that no prominent theologians until Darby (i.e., Calvin, Luther, Augustine, Aquinas) ever mentioned anything remotely resembling these claims made by dispensationalists. This Johnny-come-lately theology of John Nelson Darby has permeated American Protestantism via the publication in 1908 of the incredibly popular Scofield Reference Study Bible. Too often Evangelicals have treated the Scofield reference notes at the bottom of each page of scripture with almost as much reverence as they do the holy writ at the top of each page. So prevalent is Darby’s dispensationalist theology that most Evangelicals would be surprised to learn that his prophecies of a “rapture” and the historical events that he taught would accompany the rapture are nowhere to be found in Christian theology prior to the mid-19th century. Darby’s prophecies make the early church fathers, along with the apostle Paul, seem stupid since Christ could not possibly have returned during their own times, as they were prone to expect.
Darby’s influence on American Protestantism has recently received an enormous boost with the publication of the Left Behind series of books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Their series of books which are imagined accounts of events leading up to the rapture have sold more than 100 million copies.
You can gain some idea of the huge ideological support Christian Zionists have gained as of late by considering the extremist claims of television evangelist Pat Robertson, who says that Palestinian Christians have no right at all to any part of the Holy Land, even though in many instances it has been land that their ancestors have lived on for generations.
There are those who blame the Jewish lobbies for the 30 percent of all U.S. foreign aid that has gone to the State of Israel and which has enabled the Israelis to create the fourth most powerful army in the world. In reality, however, it is the Christian Zionists, led by such powerful televangelists as John Hagee who have been the primary sources of pressure on the U.S. Congress to financially back the Israeli military that has made the injustices I have described possible.
I personally have witnessed the sadness and disillusionment of Christian Palestinians who feel that their American Christian brothers and sisters could not care less about the sufferings that they must endure. What troubles them most is that their fellow Evangelicals in America have very little understanding of the way the entire Islamic world views what is happening in the Holy Land, and how American Evangelicals who unquestioningly support Israel’s policies are hindering evangelism among Muslims. They know that there is little understanding among American Christians that so many of the conflicts that exist between Muslims and Christians around the world are partially due to what is happening in the Holy Land. For instance, the media in the Muslim world has linked the oppression of Palestinians to the justification of attacks on Americans, in particular, and the western world, in general.
Given the historical existential situation, we, as American Christians, should lend support to the efforts to have safe and secure borders for the State of Israel and protection against terrorists; but we should be equally committed to having a well-established Palestinian state that also has safe and secure borders. We should be calling for the demolition of the separation wall that is as offensive as the Berlin Wall was. And we should be demanding that the border between these two states be the “green line” negotiated following the 1967 war.
Furthermore, we should be committed to a Palestine that has fair access to usable water and that its people have the same freedom to travel as Israelis presently enjoy.
We should be calling for justice for both peoples, because ours is a God who is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34) and calls on we Christians to be agents of reconciliation (II Corinthians 5:18).
Tony Campolo is founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE) and professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
The Two-State Solution is DEAD
Dear Friend,
I gave up on the "two-state" solution about three years ago, for all the reasons mentioned by Mr. Benvenisti in the article I'm sending you now.
The "indirect" negotiations (talking about what to talk about) are a sham, a charade, a foil, another attempt to "keep talking" so that nothing changes on the ground except more settlement expansion by the Israelis, at the expense of the Palestinians. Give it some more thought and ask Team Obama not to get embroiled in this needless track. The better track is to talk about the kind of society Israelis and Palestinians can share on this postage-sized piece of land. Israelis, give up the notion of a "Jewish" state. How racist is this? And now Bibi is bringing in the "religious factor" from the Old Testament, to buttress the secular idea upon which the Zionist state was founded 43 years ago. How bad is this? JRK
Is the Middle East on a peace process to nowhere?
Israeli iconoclast Meron Benvenisti says negotiations for a Palestinian state are an illusion that perpetuates the status quo
Ian Black, Middle East editor, in Jerusalem
A Palestinian demonstration in the West Bank. Meron Benvenisti is convinced that a two-state solution in the Middle East is doomed to fail. Photograph: Oliver Weiken/EPA
Meron Benvenisti has been talking, writing and arguing about the Israel-Palestinian conflict for much of the last 40 years. Now aged 76 he is as forceful, articulate and unconventional as ever – and convinced that President Barack Obama is doomed to fail in his attempt to cajole the two sides to hammer out a solution at the negotiating table.
Benvenisti, the Cassandra of the Israeli left, has long held the view that the occupation that began after the 1967 Middle East war is irreversible and that Israelis and Palestinians need to find an alternative to the elusive two-state solution that has dominated thinking about the conflict in recent years. Controversial and iconoclastic when he first advanced it, his thesis is gaining ground.
"The whole notion of a Palestinian state now, in 2010, is a sham," he told the Guardian at his Jerusalem home as the US intensified efforts to get the long-stalled peace process moving again. "The entire discourse is wrong. By continuing that discourse you perpetuate the status quo. The struggle for the two-state solution is obsolete."
George Mitchell, the US envoy charged with launching "proximity talks" between Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas – in the absence of direct negotiations – does not agree. Nor do Israelis who believe that without an end to the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state the Jewish majority and democratic character of their own state cannot survive. Abbas and his technocratic prime minister, Salam Fayyad, are working towards independence, though Palestinian opinion seems increasingly sceptical about the prospects.
Benvenisti's book, Sacred Landscapes, is one of the very best written on the conflict, interweaving the personal and the political. It is also deeply sympathetic to the Palestinians and their attachment to the land. He defines the Zionist enterprise bluntly as a "supplanting settler society" but also warns that using labels is a way of shutting down debate. He is wary of Holocaust-deniers and antisemites who try to recruit his dissident views to serve their anti-Israel goals.
Benvenisti, a political scientist by training, served as deputy mayor of Jerusalem after the 1967 war and was heavily influenced by his academic research on Belfast, another bitterly divided city. In the 1980's his West Bank Data Project collated and analysed the information that showed how the settlers were becoming fatefully integrated into Israeli society – under both Likud and Labour governments.
Israel's domination, he says, is now complete, while the Palestinians are fragmented into five enclaves – inside Israel, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the diaspora.
In this situation, the concept of two states is misleading. "What does it mean, a state? It's a solution for less than one quarter of the Palestinian people on an area that is less than 10% of historic Palestine." Palestinian leaders who are ready to accept this "are a bunch of traitors to their own cause". Ramallah, prosperous headquarters of Abbas's Palestinian Authority and the recipient of millions of dollars in foreign aid, is a "bubble in which those who steal the money can enjoy themselves".
Benvenisti's territorial assumptions are not based on the 2000 "Clinton parameters" which Yasser Arafat turned down, nor proposals submitted by Ehud Olmert to Abbas – which talk of Israel withdrawing from some 97% of the West Bank with compensating land swaps – but a far smaller area hemmed in by Jewish settlements, settler-only roads and military zones.
"For the last 20 years I have questioned the feasibility of the partition of Palestine and now I am absolutely sure it is impossible," he says. "Or, it is possible if it is imposed on the Palestinians but that will mean the legitimisation of the status quo, of Bantustans, of a system of political and economic inequality which is hailed as a solution by the entire world – unlike in South Africa.
"The entire paradigm is wrong. We are doing this because it is self-serving. It is convenient for us to stick to the old slogan of two states as if nothing has happened since we began advocating it in the 1980s."
Taken the salience of the settlement issue in the peace process – rows over Netanyahu's temporary freeze in the West Bank and new building in East Jerusalem triggered the recent crisis in US-Israel relations – it is startling to find that Benvenisti is so dismissive of it.
"Israel's domination of the West Bank does not rely on the numbers of settlers or settlements," he argues. "The settlements are totally integrated into Israeli society. They've taken all the land they could. The rest is controlled by the Israeli army."
Benvenisti relishes overturning conventional wisdom. "The Israeli left would like to make us believe that the green line (the pre-1967 border) is something solid; that everything that is on this side is good and that everything bad began with the occupation in 1967. It is a false dichotomy. The green line is like a one-way mirror. It's only for the Palestinians, not for Israelis."
He avoids speculating about future scenarios and makes do with the concept "bi-nationalism" – "not as a political or ideological programme so much as a de facto reality masquerading as a temporary state of affairs … a description of the current condition, not a prescription." And he sees signs that the Palestinians are beginning to adjust to the "total victory of the Jews" and use the power of the weak: demanding votes and human rights may prove more effective than violence, he suggests.
"The peace process," Benvenisti concludes, "is more than a waste of time. It is an illusion and it perpetuates an illusion. You can engage in a peace process and have negotiations and conferences - which have no connection whatsoever to reality on the ground."
I gave up on the "two-state" solution about three years ago, for all the reasons mentioned by Mr. Benvenisti in the article I'm sending you now.
The "indirect" negotiations (talking about what to talk about) are a sham, a charade, a foil, another attempt to "keep talking" so that nothing changes on the ground except more settlement expansion by the Israelis, at the expense of the Palestinians. Give it some more thought and ask Team Obama not to get embroiled in this needless track. The better track is to talk about the kind of society Israelis and Palestinians can share on this postage-sized piece of land. Israelis, give up the notion of a "Jewish" state. How racist is this? And now Bibi is bringing in the "religious factor" from the Old Testament, to buttress the secular idea upon which the Zionist state was founded 43 years ago. How bad is this? JRK
Is the Middle East on a peace process to nowhere?
Israeli iconoclast Meron Benvenisti says negotiations for a Palestinian state are an illusion that perpetuates the status quo
Ian Black, Middle East editor, in Jerusalem
A Palestinian demonstration in the West Bank. Meron Benvenisti is convinced that a two-state solution in the Middle East is doomed to fail. Photograph: Oliver Weiken/EPA
Meron Benvenisti has been talking, writing and arguing about the Israel-Palestinian conflict for much of the last 40 years. Now aged 76 he is as forceful, articulate and unconventional as ever – and convinced that President Barack Obama is doomed to fail in his attempt to cajole the two sides to hammer out a solution at the negotiating table.
Benvenisti, the Cassandra of the Israeli left, has long held the view that the occupation that began after the 1967 Middle East war is irreversible and that Israelis and Palestinians need to find an alternative to the elusive two-state solution that has dominated thinking about the conflict in recent years. Controversial and iconoclastic when he first advanced it, his thesis is gaining ground.
"The whole notion of a Palestinian state now, in 2010, is a sham," he told the Guardian at his Jerusalem home as the US intensified efforts to get the long-stalled peace process moving again. "The entire discourse is wrong. By continuing that discourse you perpetuate the status quo. The struggle for the two-state solution is obsolete."
George Mitchell, the US envoy charged with launching "proximity talks" between Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas – in the absence of direct negotiations – does not agree. Nor do Israelis who believe that without an end to the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state the Jewish majority and democratic character of their own state cannot survive. Abbas and his technocratic prime minister, Salam Fayyad, are working towards independence, though Palestinian opinion seems increasingly sceptical about the prospects.
Benvenisti's book, Sacred Landscapes, is one of the very best written on the conflict, interweaving the personal and the political. It is also deeply sympathetic to the Palestinians and their attachment to the land. He defines the Zionist enterprise bluntly as a "supplanting settler society" but also warns that using labels is a way of shutting down debate. He is wary of Holocaust-deniers and antisemites who try to recruit his dissident views to serve their anti-Israel goals.
Benvenisti, a political scientist by training, served as deputy mayor of Jerusalem after the 1967 war and was heavily influenced by his academic research on Belfast, another bitterly divided city. In the 1980's his West Bank Data Project collated and analysed the information that showed how the settlers were becoming fatefully integrated into Israeli society – under both Likud and Labour governments.
Israel's domination, he says, is now complete, while the Palestinians are fragmented into five enclaves – inside Israel, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the diaspora.
In this situation, the concept of two states is misleading. "What does it mean, a state? It's a solution for less than one quarter of the Palestinian people on an area that is less than 10% of historic Palestine." Palestinian leaders who are ready to accept this "are a bunch of traitors to their own cause". Ramallah, prosperous headquarters of Abbas's Palestinian Authority and the recipient of millions of dollars in foreign aid, is a "bubble in which those who steal the money can enjoy themselves".
Benvenisti's territorial assumptions are not based on the 2000 "Clinton parameters" which Yasser Arafat turned down, nor proposals submitted by Ehud Olmert to Abbas – which talk of Israel withdrawing from some 97% of the West Bank with compensating land swaps – but a far smaller area hemmed in by Jewish settlements, settler-only roads and military zones.
"For the last 20 years I have questioned the feasibility of the partition of Palestine and now I am absolutely sure it is impossible," he says. "Or, it is possible if it is imposed on the Palestinians but that will mean the legitimisation of the status quo, of Bantustans, of a system of political and economic inequality which is hailed as a solution by the entire world – unlike in South Africa.
"The entire paradigm is wrong. We are doing this because it is self-serving. It is convenient for us to stick to the old slogan of two states as if nothing has happened since we began advocating it in the 1980s."
Taken the salience of the settlement issue in the peace process – rows over Netanyahu's temporary freeze in the West Bank and new building in East Jerusalem triggered the recent crisis in US-Israel relations – it is startling to find that Benvenisti is so dismissive of it.
"Israel's domination of the West Bank does not rely on the numbers of settlers or settlements," he argues. "The settlements are totally integrated into Israeli society. They've taken all the land they could. The rest is controlled by the Israeli army."
Benvenisti relishes overturning conventional wisdom. "The Israeli left would like to make us believe that the green line (the pre-1967 border) is something solid; that everything that is on this side is good and that everything bad began with the occupation in 1967. It is a false dichotomy. The green line is like a one-way mirror. It's only for the Palestinians, not for Israelis."
He avoids speculating about future scenarios and makes do with the concept "bi-nationalism" – "not as a political or ideological programme so much as a de facto reality masquerading as a temporary state of affairs … a description of the current condition, not a prescription." And he sees signs that the Palestinians are beginning to adjust to the "total victory of the Jews" and use the power of the weak: demanding votes and human rights may prove more effective than violence, he suggests.
"The peace process," Benvenisti concludes, "is more than a waste of time. It is an illusion and it perpetuates an illusion. You can engage in a peace process and have negotiations and conferences - which have no connection whatsoever to reality on the ground."
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