Israel Attacks Anti-Christian Zionists!

Dear Friend,

Today, an even greater and more successful anti-Christian Zionist conference comes to a close at Bethlehem Bible College.

The "Christ at the Crossroads" has had many iterations (the most recent in Philadelphia just before last Christmas).

The new thing is that it has caught the attention of Israeli authorities, who fear it will cut into one of their staunchest sources of support: Christian Zionists in the US.

A Christian Palestinian, Daoud Kattub, discusses the brouhaha in the attached link I'm sending. Check it out.

I'm also attaching a piece I did for a class I taught at "my congregation" a few years ago. It is a summation of Gary Burge's book debunking Christian Zionism. (Those not on my listserv, please request a copy at "friendsforpeace8atgmail.com")

To say (with Christian Zionists) that the present State of Israel has all the land deeded to them by God is a gross misreading of the Old and New Testament scriptures and must be exposed as heretical at every crossroads imaginable. Thank you, friends "At the Crossroads" for what you are doing! JRK

Here is the link:

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/03/christ-conference-evangelical-christian-palestine.html?utm_source=Al-Monitor+Newsletter+%5BEnglish%5D&utm_campaign=09102cc0bc-January_9_20141_8_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_28264b27a0-09102cc0bc-102307945

An Open Letter to Pope Francis

Dear Friend,
This May 2014, the Pope will visit Israel/Palestine.

SABEEL (a center of liberation theology with headquarters in Jerusalem) and FOSNA (Friends of Sabeel, North America) have joined in petitioning the Pope to advocate for the rights of the children and youth of Israel/Palestine.

You may read the Letter by going to the FOSNA site.

You may sign the petition/letter by following the prompt/link below.

Here is the press release that came out (yesterday) on Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2014


Ash Wednesday Letter to Pope Francis: Speak out against Targeting of Palestinian Children

In anticipation of the Pope’s May visit to the Holy Land, an Open Letter signed by over 200 bishops, clerics, members of religious orders and theologians from several faith traditions, was delivered today to Pope Francis. The letter asks the Pope to speak out against the Israeli army’s program of kidnapping, detention, and systematic abuse of Palestinian children and to call for an end to the occupation and colonization of Palestine.

The letter, whose signers include over 20 bishops, cites a recent UNICEF report that documents nighttime arrests, blindfolding and shackling of children between 12 and 18 years of age. Based on over 400 sworn testimonies, UNICEF concluded that the “ill-treatment of children who come into contact with the system appears to be widespread, systematic, and institutionalized throughout the process.”

“With this letter, we are raising the profile of the well-documented systematic mistreatment of Palestinian children,” said Rev. Don Wagner. “The Israeli government is purposefully going after children, who are clearly vulnerable, to deeply scare and traumatize them.”

Wagner is the National Program Director of Friends of Sabeel-North America (FOSNA.org), which initiated the letter. FOSNA supports the work of Sabeel, a Jerusalem-based peace and justice organization founded by Palestinian Christians.

The letter notes that similar concerns about the mistreatment of Palestinian children have been raised by Save the Children, the United Nations Commission Against Torture, Military Court Watch, Defense of Children International, and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization.

“The enthusiastic response to our request for signers to the letter indicates the urgency of these concerns,” Wagner said. “Now that the letter has been delivered, we would like to invite people worldwide to join this appeal to Pope Francis and raise this issue with their media, human rights organizations, and governments until this targeting of children and the occupation are ended."

The petition to support the letter is hosted at www.endtheoccupation.org/Letter2Pope

Wagner said that FOSNA initiated the letter in the hope that Pope Francis would speak out for the people of Palestine as he has boldly spoken for the poor and oppressed elsewhere.

“During his upcoming May visit, we want the Pope to publicly call upon the Israeli government to end its intentional mistreatment of Palestinian children,” Wagner said, “as well as to end its prolonged military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip and its punitive and illegal blockade of Gaza, where 51 percent of the 1.8 million residents are under the age of 18.”

The letter is the first step, Wagner said, in a larger campaign to educate and mobilize faith and other communities in an effort to end the abuse of Palestinian children and the occupation that oppresses them and their families.

BDS (Boycotts, Disinvestment, Sanctions)

Many of us have long felt BDS is one of the few nonviolent ways of getting the attention of the Israeli government in re their systemic treatment of the native Arabs.

Finally, this discussion is coming out into the open (no more hidden or forbidden). I'm enclosing several letters in response to a NY Times piece by Jodi Rudoren about BDS. One from the highly regarded Hanan Ashrawi. There are others. Faithfully, JRK

Is a Boycott of Israel Just?

FEB. 18, 2014

Regarding “In boycott, a political act or prejudice?” (Page 2, Feb. 12): It’s galling that in a piece on the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement, launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society in response to Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, Jodi Rudoren frames her story in terms of B.D.S. echoing the anti-Semitic boycotts of Nazi Germany, quoting several Israelis harshly critical of B.D.S. and just one Palestinian supporter. Ms. Rudoren even seems to endorse allegations that B.D.S. is anti-Semitic and directed at Jews rather than Israel and Israelis, writing, “Avoiding a coffee shop because you don’t like the way the boss treats his employees is voting with your wallet; doing so because the boss is Jewish — or black or female or gay — is discrimination.” Contrary to what Ms. Rudoren and the quoted B.D.S. critics suggest, the movement does not target Jews, individually or collectively, and rejects all forms of bigotry and discrimination, including anti-Semitism. B.D.S. is, in fact, a legal, moral and inclusive movement struggling against the discriminatory policies of a country that defines itself in religiously exclusive terms, and that seeks to deny Palestinians the most basic rights simply because we are not Jewish.

Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, Ramallah, West Bank

The writer is a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and head of the P.L.O. Department of Culture and Information.



The B.D.S. movement has nothing to do with animus toward Jews. Many American Jews, myself included, are vigorously working in support of B.D.S. — and there are more and more of us with every passing month. We target Israel for boycott not because we believe Israel is the worst human rights violator (we don’t), but because Israel is the single largest recipient of American foreign aid, more than $3 billion a year. As Jews, as taxpayers, as people of conscience, we have not only the right but the moral obligation to use boycott and divestment as strategies of nonviolent resistance to Israel’s systematic, racist mistreatment of Palestinians being done on our nickel and in our names.

Hannah Schwarzschild Arlington, Mass.

The Palestinian boycott call was initiated in 2005, decades after Zionists evicted Palestinians from the lands of the future Israeli state, after all of Palestine came under Israeli control and occupation, and after thousands of Palestinians had been tortured, detained or killed. International institutions have pointed to Israel’s violations of international law. Yet the United States and Western countries have ignored the harsh realities of Palestinian life and the widening system of superior privilege for Jews in Palestine. From the Israeli-Jewish cocoon it looks like an attack on Israel and the Jewish nation when the criticism of Israeli actions against Palestinians grows after decades of singular support for Israel and total silence on the Palestinian issues. Israel needs to learn to follow international law. The boycott is a teaching tool, nothing more.

Martina Lauer Chesterville, Ontario

Ms. Rudoren notes that Mark Regev, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman, believes the B.D.S. movement is holding Israel to a higher standard than any other country in the world. Actually, the opposite is true. Israel itself likes to portray itself as having higher standards than most, while at the same time violating these standards with apparent impunity. Israel is a signatory to the Declaration of Human Rights, yet has violated almost all of its articles. Israel, in its Declaration of Independence, promised to provide equal rights and justice to all residents of Palestine-Israel, but apparently never had any intention of doing so. Israel promised, as a provision of the United Nations recognition of their state, to adopt a Constitution, but has never done so.

In view of the massive unquestioned support of Israel by the American government, one might assume that Israel would be more cooperative in the search for peace and justice. This has obviously not happened. Resorting to proclaiming anti-Semitism every time there are questions as to the policies of the Israeli government is the fallback position when all else fails. This should not be allowed.

Doris Rausch, Columbia, Md.

Everybody Hates Us!

Dear Friend,

A few weeks ago I attached a Buzzfeed January 21 article to my 47 I/Ps "on the ground in I/P".

It was about a feud between Hussein Ibish of the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) one of my information sources and Ali Abunimah, another Palestinian here in the US among the Palestinian Diaspora. Ibish wants to champion the Two State solution (two states side by side in peace and security)and Abunimah wants to champion the One (pluralistic, democratic) State.

If you Google Buzzfeed, it will take you right to the article, an amazingly informative op-ed giving background few Americans are aware of. It is a microscopic glimpse into the divisions that hamper any progress in negotiations with the Israelis, who want to colonize all the land of their fore-bearers, at the expense of the natives of the land.

Two of the heavy hitters on my list got back in the discussion I invited, claiming that the ATFP was bought and paid for by the US government, implying that the One (pluralistic, democratic) State is the true goal of Palestinians.

I was prompted to compose this reply to my many friends in the I/P region where I visited in June, 2013:

Dear Friends "On the Ground",

AS you can see, only Mazin Qumsiyeh and Jonathan Cook responded to the article.
There is division among the ranks, it's true. I found great sympathy for a truly Palestinian State alongside Israel, among people I got to know on the ground (in June of last year).

This was surprising to me since there is great sympathy for one, democratic, pluralistic State among the Jews and Palestinians I have gotten to know in the US Diaspora (Miko Peled, THE GENERAL'S SON, e.g.).

Mazin and Jonathan strongly imply the "Two State" solution has been dead for a long time. It's hard to argue against that.

My sense is that one of the underlying I/P realities is that distrust of "the outside world" ("The World Will Always Hate Us and Want to Destroy Us), is part and parcel of the Israeli DNA. Some things don't change through the centuries. This is intractable, unyielding and truly disheartening to me (others?). "We are separate, different from you". The Holocaust reinforced 2,000 years of history. We will (finally) be in charge. This land fulfills "God's" promises to us from 3,500 years ago! (For example, see Genesis 21:8 - 10).

Military force, imposing my will against yours is the world's way of dealing with issues. I firmly disagree. There is a better way. Resisting unjust laws is part of it. Helping the helpless, caring for the abandoned and abused, working to heal brokenness, is the better way. Rebuilding destroyed homes (ICAHD). Working for BDS (Jewish Voices for Peace in the US).

For persons of faith (this is I), HOPE is part and parcel of our DNA. We never give up HOPE. We believe in what we do not see, cannot see. We live, act and believe against all the evidence to the contrary. We never give up, doing the right things, even though it goes against official policies. The villagers of Le Chambon in France during the Nazi era are a good example. Check it out.

In the final chapter of (Malcolm Gladwell's new book, DAVID AND GOLIATH, he tells the story of Le Chambon, France. When France fell to the Nazis in World War II, the local Huguenot pastor and his flock determined that if the Germans told them to do anything “contrary to the Gospel,” they would refuse.

The refusals included everything from signing loyalty oaths and giving fascist salutes to hiding Jews. What’s more, they told the Germans that they intended to resist.

What happened in Winnipeg (a mother named Denken offered someday, to forgive her daughter's murderer) and Le Chambon were examples of what Gladwell, borrowing a phrase from filmmaker Pierre Sauvage, whose family was protected by the people of Le Chambon, calls “weapons of the spirit.” It’s “the peculiar and inexplicable power that comes from within” (taken from Breakpoint, January 27, 2013).

Many of us are working to change the whole attitude of the US Congress toward Israeli injustices. Please keep up the nonviolent resistance to policies that violate human dignity and mutual self-respect. JRK for FPI

Insight Leading to Action!

Dear Friends,
Dear Friend,

As you can see, I'm sending fewer things out. Saving my powder for musket shots that capture the truth about the realities in I/P and show the way forward.

Ilan Pappe, a Jewish historian, self-exiled to the UK, is interviewed on Electronic Intifada, bringing to Americans truth that is not permitted in the US media. It is perceived as Anti-Semitic. Sentiments such as these, even though written by Jews, will not be found in any of our newspapers. Some of you (like me), may want to dare the editor of your local newspaper, to print it as a guest editorial. Ilan Pappe is widely respected all over the world, although he is no longer welcomed to teach in his own country, Israel. Truth hurts, especially if you can't stand it.

I want to thank my friends in the Israeli/Palestinian Mission Network of the PC(USA) for passing along this insightful interview.

It's not too long, but gives important, brief, historical perspective and answers questions people are asking. This is a good piece to send to people in your world who might be open to hearing "the other side of the story". (And John Kerry is trying so hard to do the impossible. When will we ever learn?)

The world celebrates the life and example of Nelson Mandela! Many of us are hopeful that the model exemplified by him in overcoming our Dutch brothers' and sisters' Apartheid administration, will be successfully used in overcoming an even worse kind of ethno-centric "Jewish State" that systemically discriminates against the native inhabitants (to say nothing about all the nasty details which I have fed you ad nauseam). Faithfully yours, JRK



“We don’t have the luxury to wait” for Israel to change on its own, says Ilan Pappe
Brussels

8 December 2013

Few, if any, historians have done more to unearth the truth about Israel than Ilan Pappe.

His 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine documented how the uprooting of more than 750,000 Palestinians was the direct consequence of a plan drawn up by Zionist leaders in 1947. It arguably remains the most serious study published yet of the Nakba (catastrophe), the violent expulsion of Palestinians leading to Israel’s formation the following year.

Pappe’s outspoken criticisms of Israel have resulted in him being isolated by many of his Israeli peers. When he supported a Palestinian-led campaign for an academic boycott of Israel in 2005, the president of Haifa University called on Pappe to resign his teaching post at that college. Since moving to the UK, Pappe has remained a prolific writer on both Israel’s past and present.

He spoke to The Electronic Intifada contributor Frank Barat. A longer version of this interview can be seen in the video [on their website].

Frank Barat: You have written about how the first Palestinian intifada took place in the 1930s. Can you explain its significance?

Ilan Pappe: I think it is important to go back to even earlier than 1936 in order to understand it. You have to go back to the late nineteenth century when Zionism appeared as a movement. It had two noble objectives, one was to find a safe place for Jews who felt insecure in a growing atmosphere of anti-Semitism, and the other was that some Jews wanted to redefine themselves in a national group, not just as a religion.

The problem started when they chose Palestine as a territory in which to implement these two impulses. It was clear — because the land was inhabited — that you would have to do it by force and you had to contemplate the depopulation of the indigenous people. It took time for the Palestinian community to realize that this was the plan.

By 1936, you could already see the beginning of the real result of this strategy: Palestinians were evicted from land purchased by the Zionist movement; Palestinians lost their jobs because of Zionist strategy to take over the labor market. It was very clear that the European Jewish problem was going to be solved in Palestine.

All these three factors pushed Palestinians for the first time to say “we are going to do something about it,” and they tried to revolt. You needed the all might of the British Empire to crush that revolt as it did happen. It took them three years; they used the repertoire of actions against the Palestinians that were as bad as those that would be used later on by the Israelis to quell the Palestinian intifadas of 1987 and 2000.

FB: This revolt of 1936 was a very popular revolt; it was the peasants that took up arms.

IP: Absolutely. The Palestinian political elite lived in cities of Palestine, but the main victims of Zionism up to the 1930s were in the countryside. That’s why the revolt started there — but there were sections of the urban elite that joined them.

I pointed out in one of my books that the British killed or imprisoned most of those who belonged to the Palestinian political elite and military or potential military elite.

They created a Palestinian society that was quite defenseless in 1947 when the first Zionist actions — with the knowledge that the British Mandate came to an end — had commenced. I think it had an impact on the inability of the Palestinians to resist a year later, in 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

FB: You moved to Exeter in the UK in 2007, but still go back to Israel very often. How has the situation evolved in Israel over the last few years?

IP: The task of changing Jewish society from within is formidable. This society seems to be more and more entrenched on its positions.

If you compare Israel today with the Israel I left, or the Israel I grew up in, the trend is to become more chauvinistic, ethnocentric, intransigent — which makes us all feel that peace and reconciliation are very far away if we only rely on our hope that Jewish society will change from within.

FB: Should we, therefore, put all our energy on applying pressure from the outside or should we still try to make Israelis change their views?

IP: The reason why we are all debating this is because on the ground the machine of destruction does not stop for one day. We therefore don’t have the luxury to wait any longer. Time is not on our side.

We know that while we wait, many terrible things are happening. We also know there is a correlation between those terrible things happening and the realization of the Israelis that there is a price tag attached to what they are doing.

If they pay no price for what they are doing, they will even accelerate the strategy of ethnic cleansing. It’s therefore a mixture.

We urgently need to find a system by which you stop what is being done now, on the ground, and to also prevent what is about to happen. You need a powerful model of pressure from the outside.

As far as people from the outside are concerned, international civil society, I think the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement is as good as it gets. Still, it can’t be the only model or factor.

There are two additional factors to make it a successful process. One is on the Palestinian side. The question of representation needs to be sorted [out]. You need a good solution.

Secondly, you need to have a kind of educational system, inside, that takes the time to educate the Israeli Jews about a different reality and the benefit it will bring to them.

If those factors all work well together, and we have a more holistic approach to the question of reconciliation, things could change.

FB: The two-state solution seems to be the only one that powerful governments are taking seriously. Why do you think they are refusing to entertain the idea of a one-state solution?

IL: I think two things are taking place. One is the issue of Palestinian representation.

The people that claim to represent the Palestinians from the West Bank became the representatives of the whole Palestinian people. As far as the West Bank is concerned, you see why a two-state solution is attractive. It could mean the end of military control. One can understand this.

But this disregards the other Palestinians: the refugees, the ones from Gaza and the ones that live inside Israel.

That’s one of the difficulties. You have certain groups of Palestinians that, in my opinion, wrongly, believe that this is the quickest way to end the occupation. I don’t think it is.

The second reason is that the two-state solution has a logical ring to it. It’s a very Western idea, a colonialist invention that was applied in India and Africa, this idea of partition.

It became a kind of religion to the extent that you do not question it anymore. You work out how best to get there. That is surprising. To my mind it makes very intelligent people take this as a religion of logic. If you question the rationality of it, you are criticized.

This is why a lot of people in the West stick to it. Nothing on the ground would ever change their mind.

Five minutes on the ground shows you that the one state is already there.

It’s a non-democratic regime, an apartheid regime. So you just need to think about how to change this regime. You do not need to think about a two-state solution. You need to think about how to change the relations between the communities, how to affect the power structure in place.

FB: The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said died ten years ago. You knew him well. Can you say why Palestinians looked up to him so much?

IP: We miss him very much. I don’t think only Palestinians looked up to him for inspiration. He was one of the greatest intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century. We all looked at him for inspiration on questions of knowledge, morality, activism, not only on Palestine. We are missing his holistic approach, his ability to see things from above in a more wholesome way.

When you lose someone like that, you have people that are taking the fragmentation that Israel imposes on the Palestinians and act as if this is a reality itself. What we need is to overcome the intellectual, physical and the cultural fragmentation that Israel imposes on us, Palestinians and Jews, and to strive to come back to something far more organic and integrated so that the third generation of Jewish settlers and indigenous native people of Palestine could have a future together.

Frank Barat presents Le Mur a des Oreilles, a monthly radio show focused on Palestine.

Getting Beyond Lydda, 1948

Dear Friend,
Lydda, 1948: A Revisiting

John Kleinheksel Sr. November 21, 2013

Every so often, we have an accurate snapshot of the basic reality of Israel/Palestine.
One such portrait comes from Ari Shavit’s Lydda, 1948, in The New Yorker, October 21, 2013, pp. 40-46), which is actually a central chapter in his book appearing this week entitled, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. This gentleman is now all the rage in America, given his status as a journalist with Ha’aretz from a distinguished 19th century immigrant family long associated with the Jewish State. (His great-grandfather, a prosperous lawyer, left England for Palestine in the 1890s to escape persecution).

There have always been at least two views of the meaning of Zionism: 1) The expansive view of Israel as a light to the nations, and; 2) the more exclusive view of Israel as a land/way for us, the Jewish people. The first, more outward-looking view was exemplified by the immigration to Palestine of Siegfried Lehmann, a German-born Jew who set up a youth village for homeless children just outside the ancient city of Lydda (Lod).

Beginning in 1927, his idea of Zionism was to live alongside of the inhabitants of the land instead of displacing them. In the words of Ari Shavit, he wanted Zionist Jews to fulfill an urgent national task in a manner that would benefit all of humanity . . . . a settlement movement not tainted by colonialism or chauvinism . . . . (O)n the contrary, it must somehow plant Jews in their homeland in an organic fashion, becoming a bridge between East and West (ibid, p. 40).

Those years between the Arab uprising in 1935-1938 and the declaration of the Jewish State in 1948 were formative years. By mid-1948, Siegfried Lehmann’s brand of Zionism was eclipsed by David Ben-Gurion’s view: It’s either they or we. There is no room for both of us in the same country. Although he has serious misgivings, Mr. Shavit clearly comes down on the side of Ben Gurion. Under fear of a possible Jordanian military attack, 250 Arabs were gunned down in the Great Mosque of Lydda by Israeli soldiers. Under the direct threat of death from the Israelis, a column of homeless Arab refugees marched South past Lehmann’s youth village and disappeared into the East.

Mr. Shavit wonders how Mr. Lehmann could have been so naive to think and act as though these two peoples could co-exist, side by side. “Contrary to every belief that Siegfried Lehmann held, [Arab Palestinians and Jews] cannot really see each other and recognize each other and make peace” (ibid, p. 46). Indeed. It is a matter of vision, imagination and attitude. Who says we cannot really see each other? Are you able to “see” me? Do we recognize one another? Will the chasm of “us-or-them” persist forever? It’s an attitude, a matter of mindset, Mr. Shavit. You appear to have the older, outdated Zionist mindset. Time has run out on that view!

Mr. Shavit, you “see” an unbridgeable chasm because you are trapped by the exclusive view of Zionism rather than the more expansive view. We had to take the Lydda valley [militarily] . . . . there was no other way. But the Arabs’ side, the Palestinian side, is equally clear: they cannot forget Lydda and they cannot forgive us for Lydda . . . . What is needed to make peace between the two peoples of the land may prove more than humans can summon . . . . So many years have passed and yet the column is still marching east. For columns like the column of Lydda never stop marching (ibid, p. 46).

Really? Never?

Of course the solution is more than humans can summon, Mr. Shavit. For this kind of peace we all need forgiveness, which is the language, not of humans, but of Divinity. There is no forgiveness if we are right in our own eyes, by what we “see”. When people and states see only their own way, and not the point of view of “The Other”, there is no guilt, no offense, and thus no forgiveness.

We will echo your gloomy pessimism if we continue to hold to the “us-or-them” mindset. How can you say the Ben Gurion version of Zionism succeeded when it destroyed over 500 Arab villages, conquering instead of sharing the land, where columns like the column of Lydda never stop marching (last sentence, ibid, p. 46).

Is there today, “no other way”? Will a column of refugees just keep marching away? Or do we need to draw upon something, some vision, some energy, some Source beyond us that will take us beyond the present impasse? In his Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote: There is one vice of which no one in the world is free, which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else . . . The vice I am talking of is Pride . . . Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind . . . . As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you (BreakPoint, November 18, 2013).

Mr. Shavit, you show uncommon insight into the roots of the present reality (we acted in an unforgiveable manner in nation-building), but please take it farther! Don’t remain stuck in an arrested state of development! Don’t conclude that Palestinians cannot forget or forgive “us” for Lydda and all the other villages that were destroyed. Are you the measure of whether anyone is capable of forgiving?

For some, perhaps many, an unforgiving spirit may prevail. And true, what has transpired can’t be undone. But can’t we move on? Can’t we confess this to “the other”? Where is this dialogue taking place? How do we get beyond the Separation Barrier between us? Are real people having these conversations? Might the negotiators in Jerusalem and Jericho address each other this way in the US-sponsored “talks” going on right now?

Both sides are going head-to-head. I suggest they go heart-to-heart as well. What if each side showed more vulnerability towards the other?

1) What if Jews came along side of their Arab counterparts and admitted: How could things have gone so wrong between us? We’re sorry we acted so badly against you when we wanted to escape persecution/extinction in Europe. We were desperate to set up our own nation. We knew you objected to it. You made that clear. Will you forgive us? How can we make it up to each other?

2) What if Arabs came along side of their Jewish counterparts and admitted: We hated it when more and more of you came to our land and you made it plain it was now YOUR land. It was plain you wanted to get rid of us. Will you forgive us for vengeful actions on our part? Can we make a new start?
Mr. Shavit seemingly cannot appreciate Isaiah’s view of Zionism where buckets of water from the wells of salvation overflow not just for the Frozen Chosen but for the goyim. Let the whole earth know what God has done (Isaiah 12:4-6, The Message).

Each of these traumatized people wants to claim the Victim role and justify their grievances by taking a pound of flesh from the other side (to borrow the image from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice).

In his November 16 New York Times column, “Something for Barack and Bibi to Talk About”, Tom Friedman urges both President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu to read Ari Shavit’s book. Mr. Friedman thinks Mr. Shavit’s realism might change “the conversation about Israel [and build] a healthier relationship with it” (last paragraph). That may be Tom, but I have my doubts.

Those of us who are people of faith want to draw upon the will, justice and love of the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaiah and Micah, Jesus and Paul to end the conflict; not see it perpetuated generation after generation.
Unless a change of heart comes about in both peoples, unless the bad blood is cleansed through mutual forgiveness and good faith attempts at restitution, the cycle of violence and counter-violence will continue to build up, exploding in volcanic eruptions that dwarf Mt. Etna and may engulf the whole world.

As people of faith, we differ from Mr. Shavit’s view. The columns of homeless refugees may NOT keep marching. Not all may be reconciled but both Jews and Arabs remaining in the land (and beyond), want to be treated with dignity, equality and respect. It takes a new mindset Mr. Shavit! So help us, God!

The Two State Illusion

Dear Friend,

You should know of my high regard for my friend Mark Braverman ()

He has written another piece that I am passing on to you.

Here is what I wrote in the "comment" section of his blog: It is consistent with your long-held conviction and stated position, relentlessly exposing the fatal flaw at the heart of the Zionist vision of 1897 and beyond. It must be recanted, rescinded, thus opening the door to a truly pluralist, democratic (One) State.

As I found on my two week study tour to I/P last June, there is virulent opposition to this position. It is considered treason of the highest order. One State dominated by “Jews” is by far, the preferred model.

The Two – State is a fig leaf to mask the commitment to a “Jews Only” State. One pluralist, democratic State is nowhere even on the horizon. Yet, there are SO MANY still trumpeting the Two-State "solution" (now being pursued by Sec. Kerry, Pres. Obama and Martin Indyk; among them, The American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), Peter Beinart, Peace Now (Amy-Jill Levine), Gershon Baskin, Uri Avnery, J Street (Jeremy Ben Ami), Hussein Ibish, and probably even Bishop Shori, are on the other side–wanting to “preserve the Zionist dream” by giving a few crumbs to their Palestinian neighbors.

Yet, there you are Mark. And Miko Peled and a hand-full of others, wanting to dismantle it from the ground up, and start over. All the best. And what a task (through KUSA) to get American ecumenical and evangelical congregations on board with this view. Whew. JRK


The Two State Illusion, Racism in Israel, and Jewish Hubris

October 30, 2013 at 11:08 am

On October 16 The Christian Century published my review of Rashid Khalidi’s Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. The fact that the Century reviewed Khalidi’s book is an indication of the media’s increasing willingness to present viewpoints that challenge the very basis of Israel as a Jewish ethnic nationalist entity. This shift reflects the reality that once you address present-day violations of Palestinian rights, you see that the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was the continuation of the program of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948 and continues to this day with the annexation and carving up of the West Bank and the inhuman siege of Gaza. You begin to understand that the dispossession of the Palestinians was the inevitable outcome of the project to set up a state for the benefit of one people. It is also becoming frighteningly clear that oppression and frankly racist policies on the part of Israel are not limited to occupied areas, but to the territory within the de facto borders of the State of Israel prior to the 1967 war.

Israel’s new racism

A recently released documentary demonstrates this with horrifying vividness. Ali Abunimah, Palestinian writer and activist and publisher of the Electronic Intifada, has reported on a video entitled “Israel’s New Racism: The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land,” produced by Max Blumenthal and David Sheen, a piece solicited — and then rejected — by the New York Times. According to Blumenthal, it has since gone viral on YouTube, with close to one million views. The ten minute piece documents vicious, racist attacks on African residents of Israel incited by prominent demagogues and several members of the Israeli Parliament. The piece presents voices, not only shrieking in public demonstrations but speaking calmly in office interviews, proclaiming that Israel is the land of the Jews and that non-Jews (especially those with black skin) are not welcome. The video is shocking — but it is not surprising. From our twentieth-century perspective, we understand all too well that ethnic nationalism breeds racism – that it is racism – and that oppression and violence – the bloody as well as the structural, state-sponsored kind – is the inevitable result. In his recently published Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, Blumenthal documents Israel’s escalating move to the political right, into what many would described as fascism. The problem, as I pointed out in my 2011 blog post about Peter Beinart and his brand of “progressive Zionism,” (a piece accepted and then rejected by The Nation), is not the occupation, nor is it the religiously-based racism of fundamentalist Jewish settler-colonists — the problem is a state founded on an ethnic nationalist ideology. “The late and deeply mourned Tony Judt,” I wrote then, “got it exactly right in his NYRB piece back in 2003: ‘The problem with Israel [is that]…it has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place.’”

For over half a century, much of the world, with the U.S. in the lead, has accepted and supported this anachronistic and, by Judt’s definition, illegitimate political entity. A central point of Khalidi’s book is how language has been used to deny the reality of a State of Israel that, by virtue of its founding principle of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine has never been willing to share the territory. Khalidi describes the history of U.S. involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “a carefully constructed realm of obscurity, a realm in which the misuse of language has thoroughly corrupted both political thought and action.” He documents how U.S. policy since the 1970s has embraced that denial by sponsoring a “peace process” that has advanced Israel’s expansionism, demonstrating how, I wrote, “language functions to obscure the reality of a colonial settler project that has resulted in the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinians…language used to maintain the destructive illusion of a process of negotiation between equal parties, rather than the reality of a powerless, stateless, occupied people at the mercy of a highly militarized state supported by the world’s only superpower.” Despite the futility of this approach to peacemaking, Khalidi points out, our government has pursued it doggedly, bowing to domestic political pressures and to Israeli stubbornness and persistence.

But things are changing. For an increasing number of Americans, the realization is dawning that the story they have been told is a distortion and that our government’s policies are bad, not only for the Palestinians, but for the citizens of Israel. Mainstream journalism, which, like politics, responds to the wind of public opinion, is reflecting this shift. Ian Lustick’s September 14 New York Times opinion piece “Two State Illusion” represents a sea change in NYT editorial policy with respect to Israel. Lustick’s piece was followed closely by Yousef Munayyer’s “Thinking outside the two state box” in the New Yorker’s online edition. “The reality now,” wrote Munayyer, “is that there is a single state. The problem is that it takes an apartheid form.” Rather than solving the problem that it was intended to solve, which is security and freedom from fear for Jews, Israeli policy has condemned the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel to continuing conflict. “It’s time” Munayyer writes, “to start thinking outside the Zionist box and look for solutions that secure the human rights and equality of all involved, not just the political demands of the stronger party.”

On a recent panel, which they shared with Jeremy Ben Ami of J Street (watch it or you access unedited transcripts of the entire panel presentation) Lustick and Munayyer spell out the political danger of clinging to the possibility that negotiations can bring about a fair and sustainable two state solution. The addresses by Lustick and Munayyer are riveting — and an excellent adjunct to Khalidi’s book. A key point made by both of them is that the implausibility of a fair partition at this point not only makes the negotiations pointless, but worse, perpetuates the conditions that make two states impossible, playing into Israel’s hands even more effectively than handing them the entire territory on a silver platter. In contrast, Ben Ami’s words give us a good look at the arguments that must be mustered to hold on to the “two-state illusion.” It is pretty much the brand of “progressive Zionism” that Peter Beinart has been offering up to preserve the Zionist dream: nothing is impossible if we wish for it hard enough and believe in it deeply enough. Commitment to the idea of Jewish nationalist homeland trumps reality, and certainly any commitment to equality for Palestinians, despite the language to the contrary — duly served up by those committed to saving Zionism — about full commitment to a state of their own for Palestinians.

Sad Zionists

Recently, Beinart, in his blog Open Zion, has adopted a strategy similar to that demonstrated by J Street in its recent annual conferences: broaden the tent to competing points of view, in particular to those advocating some version of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). In her recent piece in Open Zion, “If you want two states, support BDS,” Kathleen Peratis freely admits that her commitment to two states has her standing “on very narrow ground…that the current peace process is at best a Hail Mary.” “Sad Zionists,” is how she describes herself and those who cling to “our liberal Zionist dreams.” My question to Peratis is this: how sad are you willing to be? Are you willing to tolerate the sadness of letting go of the concept that an ethnic nationalist entity, a concept carried over from the late nineteenth century, is the answer to anti-Semitism? Are you willing to mourn the understandable mistake of political Zionism as the solution to our historic suffering, a forgivable (if and when we acknowledge the mistake) but all the same catastrophic wrong turn? Are we willing to be sad enough? And having tolerated that sadness, are we then able to contemplate, as I wrote in my critique of Beinart, that “[t]he end of Zionism will not be the disaster that so many Jews – and some Christians — fear. Rather, it will open the Jewish people to a future where the Other is embraced, rather than back to a past in which armies are mustered, walls are built, and enemies, real and imagined, are vilified and attacked. “Saving” Zionism by trying to make it into something it is not takes us in precisely the wrong direction.”

Like other progressive Zionists, Peratis sees commitment to political Zionism as integral to Jewish identity. What I find most unsettling, however, is not Peratis’ sentimental clinging to the “liberal Zionist dream” or the even more dangerous notion that “Fortress Israel,” as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has characterized the state, keeps Jews safe (indeed, it makes not only Jews, but the entire world less safe). As the title of her piece makes very clear, Peratis wants to say yes to (what she calls) BDS because it will help the two state solution. Here is what Peratis does not get: BDS is a Palestinian project. It is a call from Palestinian civil society, endorsed at the time of its inauguration in 2005 by 108 Palestinian political parties, unions, associations, coalitions and organizations representing Palestinian refugees, Palestinians under occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel. The goal of BDS is Palestinian human rights, not the preservation of the Zionist project. If we, as Jews, choose to support BDS, it has to be as world citizens (and if we are Americans, then in particular U.S. citizens) joining a global, universal human rights movement, a movement to say “No” to apartheid in our time. What hubris — what chutzpah — to attempt to co-opt the Palestinian call for BDS into supporting the failing, fundamentally flawed and, in the present scenario — it must be said — racist and anti-human rights cause that is the two state solution today. Holding on to two states is holding on to the Jewish state. And holding on to the Jewish state means suffering the consequences of such a project, consequences on such horrific display in the Sheen-Blumenthal video.

Is that sad enough for you?