MennoLetters

MennoLetter from Jerusalem
Vol. V, No 6, June, 2006

A Mideast View by Mennonite Church Liaison,
Glenn Edward Witmer.

~~~~~~~~~~~

“Israeli signs placed on the Wall at the entrance to Bethlehem
greet Palestinians with the blessing, PEACE BE UNTO YOU.”
—Dr. Jeff Halper

“It is inconceivable that any Palestinian…
could accept this illegal [confiscation of land] as
a permanent solution to the continuing altercation in the Middle East.”
—President Jimmy Carter

“Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians
cannot be justified morally, legally, or even politically.”
—World Council of Churches

We used to call it ‘Reading between the lines.’ Now we must continue to check for nuances and translate special word usage when we listen to politicians or read news reports. Dr. Jeff Halper reminds us [next article] of George Orwell’s invention of the term Newspeak in his novel 1984—words can mean what we want them to mean! The fact that others hear them differently—to their own comfort and satisfaction—is a goal of the modern word industry.

When then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon assured us that the Wall was for security purposes and not to grab more Palestinian territory, many believed him. Others heard what he was really saying—reading between the lines—and didn’t accept a word of it as stated. Shortly after, his chief of staff admitted that part of the government’s goal was indeed to gain more land from the west Bank side, for Israel’s benefit. The new prime minister agrees.

Oh…I slipped! I shouldn’t have said, the Wall! That term bothers the government, which prefers to use the phrase, security fence. That concept sells better in the international press. Who wouldn’t support the idea of protecting oneself—from terrorists no less! But as I write this I am looking out my window toward the south, overlooking Bethlehem. Between me and the birthplace of Jesus is an eight-meter (28-foot) solid concrete Wall! Nothing subtle about it, and it cannot be hidden. There it is, soaring into the sky almost three times higher than the Berlin wall. [Which no one ever called a fence!] And it’s a mile inside the 1967 Green Line!

Oops! I see I made another linguistic slip: terrorist! The BBC was roundly criticized and threatened with the cancellation of their cable news channel in this country because they opted for more neutral terminology when referring to the activists on both sides. One side’s terrorist is the other side’s freedom fighter. Since news commentators are supposed to offer views from both sides and not promote one agenda, they needed to decide whether to speak of terrorists, militants, freedom fighters, combatants, occupiers or liberators. To their peril!

The news message being distributed is heard differently by those who listen, many of whom often hear only one side—sometimes because they don’t want to hear the other side.

To get the real story, however, you just may have to read between the lines. —GEW

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s address to both houses of Congress was perhaps the most skilled use of Newspeak since George Orwell invented the term in his novel 1984. (Olmert had help: author and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Weisel reportedly drafted large sections of the speech.) Just as Orwell’s totalitarian propagandists proclaimed WAR IS PEACE and Israeli government signs placed on the Wall at the entrance to Bethlehem greet Palestinians with the blessing PEACE BE UNTO YOU, so Olmert declared in Washington: Unilateral realignment is peace.

Because of Olmert’s use of Orwellian language we must listen carefully to what is said, what is not said, and what is meant.

What was said sounds fine if taken at face value. Olmert, extending “my hand in peace to Mahmoud Abbas, the elected president of the Palestinian Authority,” declared Israel’s willingness to negotiate with him on condition that the Palestinians “renounce terrorism, dismantle the terrorist infrastructure, accept previous agreements and commitments, and recognize the right of Israel to exist.” If they do so, Olmert held out Israel’s commitment to a two-state solution.

What wasn’t said? While reference to a Palestinian state sounds forthcoming, two key elements set down in the Road Map defining that state were missing: an end to the Israeli Occupation, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. “A settlement,” says the text of the Road Map to which Olmert and Bush constantly declare their allegiance, “will result in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel. The settlement will end the occupation that began in 1967.”

Olmert’s “convergence plan” (now renamed a realignment plan because it sounds better in [Newspeak] English) … cannot possibly give rise to a viable Palestinian state.

Olmert’s “convergence plan” (now renamed a realignment plan because it sounds better in [Newspeak] English), based on the massive “facts on the ground” Israel continues to impose unilaterally with overt American support, cannot possibly give rise to a viable Palestinian state. The “Separation Barrier,” which will be declared Israel’s permanent “demographic border,” takes 10% of the West Bank. That may not sound like much, but consider this: It incorporates into Israel the major settlement blocs (plus a half-million Israeli settlers) while carving the West Bank into a number of small, disconnected, impoverished ‘cantons’—hardly the basis for a viable state. It removes from the Palestinians their richest agricultural land and all the water.

The convergence plan also creates a “greater” Israeli Jerusalem over the entire central portion of the West Bank, thereby cutting the economic, cultural, religious, and historic heart out of any Palestinian state. It then sandwiches the Palestinians between the barrier/border and
yet another “security” border, the Jordan Valley, giving Israel two eastern borders. Palestinian freedom of movement of both people and goods is thus prevented into both Israel and Jordan but also internally, between the various cantons. Israel will also retain control of Palestinian airspace, the electro-magnetic sphere, and even the right of a Palestinian state to conduct its own foreign policy.

The Road Map, like international law regarding the end of occupations in general, also insists on a negotiated solution between the parties. Olmert made a great issue of Palestinian terrorism (playing on American sensibilities to this buzz-word), placing pre-conditions on negotiations. Israel is willing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, he said, if it renounces terrorism, dismantles the terrorist infrastructure, accepts previous agreements, and recognizes the right of Israel to exist (a right Israel has not recognized vis-à-vis the Palestinians). What is not mentioned is Israel’s Occupation which, regardless of an end to terror and negotiations, is being institutionalized and made permanent. For neither security nor terrorism are really the issue: Israel’s policies of annexation are based on a pro-active claim to the entire country.

Virtually no element of the Occupation—the establishment of some 300 settlements, expropriation of most West Bank land, the demolition of 12,000 Palestinian homes, the uprooting of a million olive and fruit trees, the construction of a massive system of highways to link the settlements into Israel proper, or the tortuous route of the Barrier deep in Palestinian territory—can be explained by security. Terrorism on all sides is wrong (let it be noted that Israel has killed four times more civilians than the Palestinians have), but to demand that resistance cease while an occupation is being made permanent is unconscionable.

And, finally, what was meant? Apartheid! The “A” word was missing from Olmert’s speech, of course, but the bottom line of his convergence plan is clear: the establishment of a permanent, institutionalized regime of Israeli domination over Palestinians based on separation between Jews and Arabs. Within six to nine months, according to Olmert’s timeline. Olmert may believe that Jews can succeed where Afrikaners failed, but history teaches us that in the end injustice is unsustainable. And convergence/realignment is nothing if not manifest injustice.

—Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a candidate, with the Palestinian peace activist Ghassan Andoni, for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Rep. Henry Hyde, showing the courage that has typified a political career now in its final months, is pleading the case of endangered Palestinian Christians to President Bush. A faithful supporter of Israel over many years, Hyde said in a letter sent to the White House: “I cannot be blind when Israeli actions seem to go beyond the realm of legitimate security concerns and have negative consequences on communities and lands under their occupation.” He urged the president to take up this issue with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during his visit to Washington last week.

Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, sent along with his letter a report based on visits to Israel and Palestine over the past two years. It contends that “the Christian community is being crushed in the mill of the bitter Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The Israeli security wall and expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the report continues, “are irreversibly damaging the dwindling Christian community.” This issue was not on the agenda of the Bush-Olmert talks. There is no sign that Bush studied the House report or even that it made its way through an unsympathetic National Security Council staff into his hands.

Hyde has been trying to get the attention of the Bush administration— and the world—since 2004, when he wrote Secretary of State Colin Powell expressing concern about Israeli policy. In 2005 Hyde took up the issue personally with Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres. At age 82, in his 32nd and last year in Congress, he is making what may be his final effort to get the president interested in what happens to less than two percent of Israel’s population.

Since his letter to Powell two years ago, Hyde wrote to Bush, “The situation has significantly worsened.” While backing Israel’s need to defend itself, he called it “important that United States support for Israel not be perceived as involving the affirmation of injustice.” Hyde’s committee report employs stronger language than the congressman has used previously. It calls for insistence that Israel “honor its pledge to stop settlement expansion,” and suggests that the security barrier is “a pretext for annexing territory.”

The report rejects the widespread impression that the Olmert regime really is abandoning the West Bank and disbanding the settlements. The report says that “the Bethlehem area is home to over 20 Israeli settlements and there are plans to build more. The settlements and the barrier completely encircle the Christian triangle of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour (Shepherds Fields).” In addition to causing housing and land shortages, “this construction physically obstructs the Bethlehem community from its spiritual, cultural, and economic lifeline in Jerusalem.”

Furthermore, the report contends that fundamentalist settlers in East Jerusalem “intend to establish their own brand of Jewish exclusivity” and have “Messianic aspirations on the Temple Mount.” That undermines the stability of Jerusalem as a future shared capital of Israel and Palestine, which is described as vital to US interests in a two-state solution.

“It would be helpful,” the Hyde report says, “if the United States Government committed itself to working with the Israeli government to end support for, and prevent the establishment of, new realities on the ground, which complicate a negotiated solution over Jerusalem, destroy its multicultural identity, and constitute an increase in the political volatility of the city.” But will George W. Bush be that helpful?

Israel bears the burden of responsibility for the present crisis in the Middle East, the World Council of Churches has announced, following a meeting of its Executive Committee in Geneva recently. The ecumenical organization stated Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians “cannot be justified morally, legally, or even politically.” The failure “to comply with international law” had “pushed the situation on the ground to a point of no return,” they concluded.

The WCC condemned the killing of innocent civilians by both sides in the conflict and called for the Palestinians to “maintain the existing one-party cease-fire toward Israel” and asked Israel to base its security on “the equitable negotiation of final borders” with its neighbours. However, the present disparities between Israel and Palestine were “appalling,” the WCC said.

“One side is positioning itself to unilaterally establish final borders on territory that belongs to the other side; the other side is increasingly confined to the scattered enclaves that remain. On one side there is control of more and more land and water; on the other there are more and more families deprived of land and livelihoods.

“On one side as many people as possible are being housed on occupied land; on the other side the toll mounts of refugees without homes or land. One side controls Jerusalem, a city shared by two peoples and three world religions; the other-Muslim and Christian-watches its demographic, commercial, and religious presence wither in Jerusalem,” the WCC said.

It also claimed a double standard was at work in the international community that favoured Israel, saying, “The side set to keep its unlawful gains is garnering support from part of the international community. The side that, despairing at those unlawful gains, used legitimate elections to choose new leaders is being isolated and punished. Democracy must be protected where it is taking root,” the WCC said, calling for a relaxation of American, British, and EU sanctions against Hamas. “Peace must come soon or it may not come to either people for a long time.”

The WCC’s Executive Committee called upon its 340 member churches in over 100 countries representing approximately 550 million Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant Christians to “share solidarity with people on both sides of the conflict,” and to “use legitimate forms of pressure to promote a just peace and to end unlawful activities by Israelis or Palestinians.

New Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has announced that Israel will take unilateral steps to establish its own geographical boundaries during the next four years of his administration. His plan, as described during the recent Israeli election and the formation of a new governing coalition, would take about half of the Palestinian West Bank and encapsulate the urban areas within a huge concrete wall and the more rural parts of Palestine within a high fence. The barrier is not located on the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and Palestine, but entirely within and deeply penetrating the occupied territories.

The only division of territory between Israel and the Palestinians that is recognized by the United States or the international community awarded 77% of the land to the nation of Israel and the other small portion divided between the West Bank and Gaza. Only about twice the size of Washington, DC, Gaza is now a politically and economically non-viable region, almost completely isolated from the West Bank, Israel and the outside world.

The Olmert plan would leave the remnant of the Palestinian West Bank with the same unacceptable characteristics. Deep intrusions would effectively divide it into three portions. The prime minister has also announced that Israeli soldiers will likely remain in the Palestinian territory, which will be completely encapsulated by Israel’s control of its eastern border in the Jordan River valley.

It is inconceivable that any Palestinian, Arab leader, or any objective member of the international community could accept this illegal action as a permanent solution to the continuing altercation in the Middle East. This confiscation of land is to be carried out without resorting to peace talks with the Palestinians, and in direct contravention of the “road map for peace,” which President Bush helped to initiate and has strongly supported.

Although former prime minister Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government rejected the key provisions of the road map by the Quartet of negotiators—the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia—it has been endorsed unequivocally by the moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Israel’s government had adopted carefully negotiated agreements at Camp David in 1978 and in Oslo in 1993. The basic terms of both of these historic accords would also be violated 0by Olmert’s plan, as would all of the UN Security Council’s resolutions on which the agreements were predicated and the nation of Israel was founded.

What is the alternative to this ill-advised move toward the unilateral confiscation and colonization of a major portion of the West Bank?

“…the recently elected Hamas legislators will neither recognize
nor negotiate with Israel while Palestinian land is being occupied.”

Good-faith negotiations should be initiated under the auspices of the international Quartet with President Abbas. During recent weeks, Abbas has been making the rounds of international capitals calling for the opportunity to find a path to permanent peace in the Holy Land. Although the recently elected Hamas legislators will neither recognize nor negotiate with Israel while Palestinian land is being occupied, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has expressed approval for direct Olmert-Abbas peace talks. He said, “The problem is not the Palestinian side or its consent to negotiations. ... If the (Palestinian) Authority chairman, as the elected president, wants to get the negotiations moving, we have no objection to that. If what Abu Mazen (Abbas) presents to the people as a result of negotiations serves its interest, then we too will redefine our position.”

It would be a mistake to underestimate the difficulty of finding a mutually acceptable agreement, but many Israelis, Palestinians, and international representatives are familiar with what must be its ultimate basic terms. They include reasonable border compromises based on the swapping of land, which could leave a substantial number of Israeli settlers undisturbed on Palestinian land. A mutual Israeli-Palestinian agreement would undoubtedly result in full recognition of Israel by all Arab nations, with normal diplomatic and economic relations, and permanent peace and justice for the Palestinians.

It would also remove one of the major causes of international terrorism and greatly ease tensions that could precipitate a regional or even global conflict.

—Former US president Jimmy Carter is founder of the non-profit Carter Center, advancing peace and health worldwide.

A.B. Yehoshua is still fighting the good old Zionist fight of the 20th century to convince world Jewry that they really ought to be living in Israel in order to have an authentically Jewish life. However, the challenge posed to world Jewry in the 21st century is a dramatically different one, and it is one which neither Yehoshua nor many of his critics are ready for. Whether you approach an understanding of life from an economic, political, technological, or ecological point of view, the central truth of the 21st century is that we live in an increasingly interconnected world. And whether it is looking at the possibility of nuclear proliferation and war, or an impending environmental catastrophe, more people are coming to understand the central moral insight of our time: that our well-being, as individuals, families, religious communities, and nations depends on the well-being of the entire world, and on the well-being of the planet itself.

So there is no “individual solution” for you or me as people, and there is no “national solution” for Israel or the Jewish people that doesn’t depend on providing for the economic, cultural, political, and spiritual fulfillment of everyone else. This is the central survival issue facing humanity today, and it makes the old 19th century nationalism and the 20th century struggles about Jewish identity seem like relics of an ancient past.

The central question for the Jewish people is this: Do we have anything of value to contribute to the human race either from the standpoint of our nationhood such as it is constituted in the State of Israel or from the perspective of our religious and spiritual heritage? And of course the answer is an old Jewish one: Yes and No.

Yehoshua is undoubtedly correct when he points to the fuller-bodied experience of having to put one’s ethical values into immediate use in the day-to-day experience of building a state and a society that living in Israel presents as a challenge to contemporary Judaism. Unfortunately, whether drawing upon secular nationalist or religious foundations, Israel’s Jews have done a remarkably bad job of this task, creating a society that has become a pariah among nations that never had any history of anti-Semitism, but which nevertheless have watched Israel treat the Palestinians with such ruthless disregard for their human rights as to make it unique among the economically advanced societies (though, in my view, far less a shonda [shame] than many other economically underdeveloped societies, and Russia and China).

“Jewish nationalism has reached a pinnacle of extremism in Israel, and has come to epitomize the political paradigm that humanity needs most to transcend.”

Nor has Israel been a light unto the nations when it comes to the treatment of its own poor, with such wealth disparities as to render it among the worst in the developed world. The scientific and technological advances in Israel are worthy of admiration. However, it is important to remember that Jews have been at the forefront of such achievements in whatever country they have lived for almost 200 years.

The fact remains that Jewish nationalism has reached a pinnacle of extremism in Israel, and has come to epitomize the political paradigm that humanity needs most to transcend. It is a disgrace for Jews everywhere that Israel is the best example of a society with utopian ideals that degenerated into the opposite of those ideals, and which conservatives use to demonstrate that humanity will always be involved in irresolvable ethnic conflict.

When the prophet Isaiah heard God proclaiming “my House will be a House of prayer for all peoples,” he was conveying a universal spiritual vision that has been lost by much of the Jewish religious world as it transformed Judaism into a cheerleader for the politics of a particular state. Jews in the Diaspora have not been particularly successful in providing an alternative…. How do we transform our Jewish state, our Jewish culture, our Jewish religion, our Jewish literature and the assumptions with which we read our holy texts, to nurture rather than restrict our capacities to empathize with and give priority to universal human needs?

Jewry the world over must develop those aspects of our heritage and our wisdom that could make a serious contribution to the human race in the 21st century. Unfortunately, A.B. Yehoshua hasn’t come to understand that yet.

—Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine.
His new book is The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right.

When the Ein Gedi Spa opened in 1986 to pamper visitors with massages, mud wraps, and therapeutic swims, customers walked just a few steps from the main building to take their salty dip in the Dead Sea. Nineteen years later, the water level has dropped so drastically that the shoreline is three-quarters of a mile away.

“The sea is just running out, and we keep running after it,” said Boaz Ron, manager of the resort. “In another 50 years, it could run out another kilometre.” It may sound redundant, but the Dead Sea, one of the world’s cultural and ecological treasures, is dying. In the last 50 years the water level has dropped more than 80 feet/25 metres and the sea has shrunk by more than a third, largely because the Jordan River has gone dry. In the next two decades, the sea is expected to fall at least 60 more feet, and experts say nothing will stop it.

The decline has been particularly rapid since the 1970s, when the water began dropping three feet a year. That created a complex domino effect that is slowly destroying some of Israel’s most cherished plant and wildlife reserves along the Dead Sea’s shores, a key resting stop along the migration route for 500 million birds that fly between Europe and Africa.

The main problem, experts agree, is that most of the water that once flowed into the sea—the saltiest large body of water in the world and, at 420 metres (1,370 feet) below sea level, the lowest point on Earth—is being diverted for drinking water and agriculture, so there is not enough to offset the high evaporation rate. In addition, Israeli and Jordanian industries on the south end of the sea are letting 720 million litres (180 million gallons) of the mineral-rich water evaporate every day—about 260 billion litres a year—to extract chemicals.

Some believe the best hope for a solution is to pump salt water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea via a proposed 200 km (120-mile) Red-Dead Canal, a $5 billion project that the Jordanian government is pursuing with international donors. In the end, he said, the sea will continue falling about three feet a year for the next 150 years or so, until the water becomes so supersaturated with salt that evaporation effectively stops. At that point the surface of the Dead Sea will be one-third smaller and about 130 meters (434 feet) lower than today.

Registrations is now being accepted for the May 2007
MennoJerusalem Pastors and Bible Teachers Study Program

Based at Jerusalem’s Tantur Ecumenical Institute, with on-site teaching/touring throughout Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.

Keynote lecturer: Dr. Perry Yoder, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, + 8 others.

For full information write to

MennoLetter from Jerusalem—including back issues and downloadable pdf versions—is also available at: http://www.mennonitechurch.ca/news/jerusalemletter

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Views expressed in MennoLetter are not necessarily those of the editor or of our church agencies: Mennonite Church WITNESS, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; Mennonite Mission Network, Elkhart, Indiana & Newton, Kansas, USA.

Content is copyrighted by the writer ©2006. If reprinting outside of local congregational publications, please request permission from the .

Peace/shalom/salaam from Jerusalem, – Glenn Edward Witmer

Number of visits since May. 2002 — 1,183 July10 2006