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~MY VOICE…
By Glenn Edward Witmer
Flying One’s True Colors

The problem is the flag! Not the yellow flag of the losing Fatah party trying to out-wave the green flag of the victorious Hamas party. I mean the blue and white Israeli flag…blue stripes and Star of David on a white background. “Like the tallit [prayer shawl] Jews wear,” someone explains, “with the blue symbolizing God’s heavenly arc of protection over Israel.”

But for the leader of Hamas, those two blue stripes represent the outer land borders from the Euphrates River to the Mediterranean which Israel covets. “They must change their flag since it insists on occupying land we will not give up.” The Israeli presence on “holy Islamic” land remains a stumbling block for any thought of agreement between these difficult partners.

For the international community—the ‘Quartet’ of the USA, European Union, Russia, and the UN—the election result is a major embarrassment,” wrote commentator Ali Abunimah. “They, along with high paid columnists and think tanks that generate so much of their com-mentary, had held on to the notion that ‘Palestinian reform’ rather than an end to the Israeli occupation was the way to resolve the conflict.” It may be their ideal, but it’s not very real.

Hamas rejected a call by the Quartet to renounce violence and recognize Israel. Sami Abu Zuhri said, “The Quartet should have demanded an end to (Israeli) occupation and aggression, not demanded that the victim should recognize the occupation and stand handcuffed in the face of the aggression.”

It is astounding that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had to admit the US failed to comprehend the depth of Palestinian hostility toward their current leadership. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Rice said, speaking of her own staff. “It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse [on Palestinian affairs].” She should be embarrassed to say that—she was here in person, and she has staff here. They should be listening to all voices, not just ones they like to hear, and be aware of real issues, not just ones they want to promote.

Hamas has a military wing—and practices unconscionable acts of terror with it, reports of which are featured in news coverage around the world. Less known is that the party also has a well functioning social service arm that builds schools and clinics, pays teachers, provides nutrition aid to mothers, and a host of similar daily needs of the population. That cannot annul the horror of their terrorism, but it helps explain why so many people would vote for them.
Having a homeland to live in, food to eat, and a job to go to—that’s what gets votes.
And it’s a big part of what the flag-waving is all about. —GEW

~OTHER VOICES…

By Art Gish, CPT, At-Tuwani, West Bank
“As a striking contrast, Israeli soldiers drove up and walked toward us with their semi-automatic rifles ready.”
Peace Among the Olive Trees

Early last month over one hundred Palestinian olive trees near the village of At-Tuwani in the South Hebron Hills were cut down, most likely by persons from the nearby Israeli settlement of Ma’on. The next morning nearly one hundred Palestinians and internationals gathered to mourn this horrific loss. A week later about thirty Israelis associated with Ta’ayush, an Israeli peace group, joined about seventy Palestinians and internationals in that demolished olive grove to remove all the severed olive branches, make clean cuts on the trees so that the trees can heal more easily, and clean up the mess.

“…the willingness of the Palestinian Muslims to accept these Jews,
when they suspect it was other Jews who destroyed their olive trees.”

It was a joy to see Muslims, Jews, and Christians working together, demonstrating that peace and reconciliation are possible. It was especially impressive how these Israelis had come to work with the people who are supposed to be their enemies. Yet more impressive is the willingness of the Palestinian Muslims to accept these Jews, when they suspect it was other Jews who destroyed their olive trees. These Israeli Jews had come to these Palestinians to express solidarity, but also as an act of repentance for what their own people and their Jewish culture had become.

As a striking contrast, Israeli soldiers drove up in a Hummer and walked toward us with their semi-automatic rifles ready. Present in that field were two possible futures: one of peace and cooperation, and one of domination and control. After working in the olive grove, the Israeli activists walked to the neighboring Palestinian village of Tuba. The purpose of their visit was to express their condolences to a farmer whose lentil field had just been destroyed a few days earlier by Israeli settlers, and to the farmer’s brother who had just received a death threat from an Israeli settler.

Interfaith cooperation must include standing in solidarity with the oppressed, together resisting oppression, asking each other for forgiveness, and embodying in our relationships the seeds of the new social order for which we pray.

On that day we celebrated our common faith in the middle of a demolished olive grove.
—from a CPT release

By Amira Hass
“Both sides agree that it is Israelis who are damaging vineyards and plantations.”
It’s Not the Olive Trees

There is something very human about these stumps of olive trees, hundreds upon hundreds of them, their amputated branches reaching skyward as if to ask for help. The Israeli police counted 733 trees that were uprooted in 2005. But according to the (incomplete) list of 29 incidents of agricultural sabotage documented by the human rights groups during the last 10 months, a total of 2,616 trees were sabotaged: uprooted, stolen, burned, chopped, sawed. In Salem alone, 900 trees were uprooted four times. Both sides agree that it is Israelis who are damaging vineyards and plantations.

The accumulation over the past few months of images of trees destroyed “by unknown individuals” has been sufficiently shocking to lead the attorney general to attack the helplessness of the authorities to focus law enforcement activities “on the settlements that are recognized as problematic.”

The shock, however, is selective. The Israel Defense Forces have uprooted thousands of olive and fruit trees, cultivated lands and greenhouses, and continue to do so in order to secure the roads they use and to increase visibility for soldiers, to build watchtowers, checkpoints, and the separation fence—and in order to pave more and more roads and construct security fences around the settlements.

“For some reason, security always ends up with
the effective plundering of more Palestinian land
for the benefit of the neighboring settlement…”

In the village of Qafeen alone, 12,600 olive trees were uprooted for the separation fence. Thousands more trees—perhaps tens of thousands—and thousands more acres of the West Bank are trapped behind the walls and fences and buffer zones surrounding the settlements. In Qafeen 100,000 trees are imprisoned behind the fence, and throughout most of the year their owners are prevented from reaching them. All they can do is gaze on the neglect from afar.

The reason given is ‘security,’ but for some reason security always ends up with the effective plundering of more Palestinian land for the benefit of the neighboring settlement, or in order to widen and blur the Green Line, and the annexation of the land to Israel.

The people who are shocked ignore the fact that the plantations in Salem and Tawana are next to roads that are closed to Palestinian traffic, because they run between Israeli settlements. It is the IDF that closes and blocks these roads, like hundreds of kilometers of excellent asphalt throughout the West Bank that are closed to any Palestinian traffic.

The uprooting of 100 trees sabotages the ability of an entire family to support itself. Closing roads sabotages the economic vitality of the entire Palestinian people. The IDF talks about the need to protect Israeli citizens. So why is anyone shocked when those same Israeli citizens continue to stretch the logic of Israel’s control over the occupied territories?

According to that logic, Israel has the right to institute a double legal standard in the occupied territories: one for Jews, another for Palestinians. Unlimited rights for Jews in housing, freedom of movement, livelihood, infrastructure, and land and water use, versus an organized system of stripping the Palestinians of human and civil rights. According to that logic, Palestinians must make do with increasingly smaller “land cells” whose private ownership they can prove. The broader expanses, whose ownership is not registered with the Israel Lands Administration, automatically belong to Israel and the settlers’ councils. A minority of Israelis is not waiting for the IDF and the state to destroy; they continue to destroy on their own.

It is easy to be shocked by a minority and to forget the responsibility of the whole.
—from Ha’aretz

Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Stolen
Israeli Military Invades CPT Apartment, Arrests Team

For the fourth time in a period of three weeks an Israeli military patrol invaded the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) Hebron office and apartment a month ago. Following their search they had the Israeli police arrest all five CPTers present. In the ninety minutes after the CPTers were removed from the apartment, the office was forcibly entered and four computers, one videotape, two cameras, and three cell phones were taken.

Throughout the month the CPT team had been documenting and filming home invasions by this six-man Israeli military patrol. Each time CPTers filmed the Israeli military patrol in a Palestinian home in the old city of Hebron, the CPT apartment was then invaded and searched. On each occasion the CPT team asked the soldiers to leave their weapons outside our house, as the team prohibits anyone from bringing weapons into the house.

CPTers also asked to see the order for the search, but none was ever produced. The Israeli soldiers gave conflicting answers to questions about whether they were invading the home on their own initiative or if they had orders to do so. Their responses included: “We are looking for terrorists/guns,” “You disturbed us yesterday,” and “Because we can.”

CPTers reminded the soldiers that CPT has demonstrated absolute commitment to non-violence over ten years in Hebron, and that they would be welcome to come anytime without their weapons. When soldiers still insisted on entering with weapons in hand, CPTers videotaped the searches.

Walking around the apartment, the soldiers showed interest in a bowl of old sound grenades, used tear-gas canisters, rubber-coated bullets, and shells that past CPTers picked up from the streets in Hebron. The soldiers passed these items around, and then one decided that the two or three dented cartridges constituted weapons. CPTers pointed out that it would be dangerous or impossible to place those bullets into a gun.

Ninety minutes later, while the five CPTers who had been arrested were still being held at Kiryat Arba police station, CPTers Art Gish and Kathie Uhler arrived at the apartment and found the street door open, the office door forced, and items removed. An Israeli soldier was posted on the roof of the house across from our home the entire time. One hour later the five CPTers were released on their own recognizance and returned home.
The stolen items were not returned.
—from a CPT release

Toward a Theologically Correct Judas?
Two Views:

1/ By Uri Avnery

“No Christian… will ever forget the picture
of the contemptible traitor who kisses Jesus.”

Judas Iscariot is headed for a makeover. According to news reports, cardinals close to the new pope recommend a change in the Catholic Church’s attitude towards him: exit the treacherous Jew who turns the messiah over to the cohorts of the evil High Priest, and enter the apostle who simply fulfilled his role in the Divine design. After all, it was God who decided that his son should die on the cross.

A well-intentioned effort, but a pathetic one! No Vatican decision can alter the image of Judas in the New Testament: a despicable informer who received “thirty pieces of silver” for his betrayal of the son of God. No Christian who absorbs this story in his childhood will ever forget the picture of the contemptible traitor who kisses Jesus at the moment of betraying him to his executioners. Nothing will help except changing the biblical text itself, and that, of course, is not so easy.

If one of the other eleven apostles had betrayed Jesus, the consequences would perhaps not have been so horrible. But since Judas sounds in many languages like Jews, the betrayal is associated in the consciousness of Christians with Jews in general. Multitudes of Jews throughout history have been butchered because of this. The Nazi battle-cry of “Judah Verrecke!” (Perish, Jews!) paved the way to the gas chambers.

Perhaps this had some influence on the young neo-Nazi who ran amok last month in a Moscow synagogue, stabbing and wounding ten people. That act lit up all the red lights. Again “the rise of anti-Semitism in the world” became a major subject, again the alarm bells shrilled.

There is indeed a growing danger of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism—two different phenomena that can appear both together and separately. But it is not connected with primitive skinheads like the Moscow knife-wielder. It is much more dangerous, and the fuel that feeds them exists in other places and on other levels.
—from Ha’aretz, Jerusalem

2/ By Clifford Longley: BBC’s Thought for the Day, January 16, 2006

“This denigration of Judaism is what has recently
been called the “teaching of contempt.”

The revisionists are said to be looking again at a man whose name is a byword for betrayal, Judas Iscariot. When a Vatican theologian recently proposed his rehabilitation, the media linked this with fragments of ancient writing known as the Gospel of Judas due to be published later this year, though they are purportedly about him rather than by him. In both cases the issues raised are theological. If Christ was destined to die as part of his mission to save humanity, as the Church traditionally teaches, then why should blame be attached to those who brought this about? Weren’t they part of God’s plan, just doing God’s will?

The answer of course is yes and no, which is not very satisfactory. I am not sure this is the real issue anyway. The more closely one looks at what Judas is supposed to have done, the more difficult it is to see how he deserves all the odium heaped on him down the ages. It’s another case of history being written by the winners. He is a tragic figure rather than an evil one, more Hamlet than Macbeth.

We are told in the New Testament’s slightly conflicting versions that Judas tipped off the High Priests about where Jesus would be, the night he was arrested. But as Jesus himself remarked, that was hardly necessary as he wasn’t in hiding. Judas was so horrified to have played a role in Jesus’ death, which he had never envisaged, he returned the infamous thirty pieces of silver and then went and hung himself. So was this in stark contrast to the other eleven disciples, who stood loyally by Jesus to the very end? Indeed not! By the time Jesus was dead, every one of the remaining eleven, with the possible exception of St. John, had gone to ground. Even St. Peter denied knowing him.

So the idea that Judas alone could never be forgiven for his part in this ‘necessary sin’, to quote the Good Friday liturgy, is absurd.

But it soon became part of another agenda. And that was about portraying the Jews as a whole tribe of Judases, for had they not rejected their messiah and handed him over to be executed? For which they would never be forgiven? This denigration of Judaism is what has recently been called the “teaching of contempt” for the Jews—the idea that they had rejected God, so God had rejected them; and if life was hard for them in the Christian centuries to come, they’d brought it on themselves.

And thus was the cultural soil of Europe poisoned against the Jews, ready for Hitler to reap his dreadful harvest in the Holocaust.

The teaching of contempt has been emphatically repudiated by Christian leaders since then, but a lot of loose ends still need tidying up. And ending the exploitation of Judas as an icon of treachery is one of them.
—from BBC Radio

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“…Some sort of violent reaction
in response to even worse actions
should be expected and accepted.”

By Dr. Khaled Batarfi, Saudi Arabia
Where is the Arab Media Outrage?

“So, where is your media outrage? Instead you show Western hostage beheadings, allow Muslim fanatics to preach on TV and radio, and publish hate speeches against Christians and Jews. Where is the shame? Where are your principles? You should be campaigning for peace, tolerance and human rights, and against intolerance, women and minority abuse, and religious fanaticism. That is the holy role of the media, Arab journalists!”

That is a summary of an American scholar’s comments during an international conference convened last month in Dubai on the role of the media to enhance the security of Gulf states.

In my response, I said to him: What you are calling for is a classic academic and professional question discussed for ages in journalism schools and forums. Is our role to educate, preach, and enlighten the public or just to provide accurate, updated, and objective information? Do we campaign and rally for causes we support, or just provide an open marketplace of ideas and a neutral forum for debate and discussion?

The Western media—the American in particular—stand for independence and neutrality: you give the masses well-investigated and researched reports and news stories, supported by available evidence, background information, and analysis. You allow all parties to have equal access to the public. You don’t take sides or make judgments, except in editorials. It is up to your audience to decide what and whom to believe, accept, and side with. End of role!

“Journalists in non-democratic countries are justly accused
of being tools of propaganda.”

When riots erupted in Los Angeles after the acquittal of four white policemen accused of brutally beating black motorist Rodney King in 1991, the media covered the events, but did not then campaign for black rights or review a long history of abuse and enslavement.

Journalists in non-democratic countries are justly accused of being tools of propaganda, mouthpieces of the rulers, and ideologically committed to one school of thought. They marginalize different viewpoints, campaign for causes, and serve their owners interests.
Yet most new independent media in the Arab world are moving away from the old ways.

They attempt to provide as-is news and multi-perspective commentary. If you don’t like what is written, write a letter to the editor. As long as your perspective, no matter how different or unique, is published or aired, you can’t complain about the equal opportunity and space given to those you disagree with.

In evaluating Arab media performance, we need to distinguish between mainstream media and underground outlets. The first is owned and supervised by governments and media corporations. Their policies prevent them from preaching religious hatred or siding with terrorists. Professional coverage of events requires comprehensive reporting from all sides.

The mainstream media never aired beheading videos and pictures, as some websites did. But it was such brutal acts, together with coverage of the suicide bombing of civilian compounds in Saudi Arabia and wedding parties in Jordan, which made most people see the ugliness of the terrorist organizations they may once have admired, believed, or tolerated.

The media ultimately does reflect the public’s mood. In a world where the anger against Western policies has been boiling for decades, you cannot expect much sympathy for colonizers and occupiers. A minimum level of tolerance for some sort of violent reaction in response to even worse actions should be expected and accepted.

—Dr. Batarfi is a Saudi journalist with Arab News. Visit the website at www.arabnews.com

From The Jordan Times
Jordanian King Urges Christian Leaders
to Stand Together to Protect Jerusalem

His Majesty King Abdullah [of Jordan] recently called for a unified stance between churches in the Holy Land and their Western counterparts in order to face up to the challenges facing Jerusalem and its Christian Arab residents. At a meeting with a delegation representing Christian religious leaders from Europe and the US, the King urged the churches to meet regularly to assess ways to protect Jerusalem and its Christian Arab citizens, warning against attempts to depopulate the Holy City of its residents and strip away its identity.

Over 50 Catholic bishops and other church leaders from North America and Europe were on a solidarity mission with Christians in the Holy Land. King Abdullah acquainted the religious leaders with Jordan’s efforts to promote religious tolerance and coexistence, citing the Amman Message which Jordan released in 2004 to spell out the true spirit of Islam.

Bishop William Skylstad, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, praised King Abdullah’s peace efforts and his persistent endeavors to launch and support dialogue between the followers of the three monotheistic religions. He also commended Jordan’s Constitution, which guarantees religious freedoms in the Kingdom.

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The following item is taken from the February issue of The Word on the Street, a new e-zine from First-century Nazareth Village.

To request your own monthly e-mail copy

A Date… with History

A 2,000-year-old date seed planted about a year ago has sprouted and is now over a foot tall. It is the oldest seed to ever produce a viable young sapling and is being grown at Kibbutz Ketura in the Negev. The Judean date seed was found together with a large number of other seeds during archaeological excavations carried out close to Masada near the southern end of the Dead Sea, the last Jewish stronghold following the Roman destruction of the Temple in the year 70 CE.

The age of the seeds was determined using carbon dating, and has a margin of error of 50 years, thus dating them from right before or right after the Masada revolt ending in 73 CE.

Elain Solowey of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, who is raising the plant, said the young tree now has five leaves (one was removed for scientific testing) and is 14 inches tall. Solowey has named it Methuselah, after the 969-year-old grandfather of Noah, the oldest human being recorded in the Torah. Solowey said that although the plant’s leaves were pale at first, the young tree now looks “perfectly normal.”

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More articles—with photos and art illustration—are available on the Nazareth Village website. Go to www.nazarethvillage.com and click on the home page icon for The Word on the Street.

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