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“You Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall Set You Free”
—CIA motto, etched in marble at their Langley, Va., headquarters

“What is Truth?”
—Pilate, to Jesus: John 18:38

“…Vocal dissent is of little weight,
if not linked with dissenting action.”
—John Howard Yoder

~MY VOICE ...
By Glenn Edward Witmer
When Silence is Consent

If the one who shouts the loudest is the most believable, then once again we have a group of American fundamentalists claiming the agenda for the Christian church, right in the Knesset of Israel. Two days ago the Jerusalem newspaper, Ha’aretz, ran this article: Evangelical Christians join Jerusalem Day Festivities, noting that “Israeli lawmakers joined visiting evangelical Christians in celebrating Israel’s reunification of Jerusalem 40 years ago. In a meeting at the Knesset, the evangelicals repeated their support for refusing to give up any land to the Palestinians in exchange for peace. Evangelicals support Israel as fulfillment of a precept of Jewish control over all the land promised in the Bible, which they see as a step toward redemption.”

The first problem with the story is the realization that many evangelicals do not support this publicity effort, nor the political stand it represents. It is a blatant move on the part of some Christian Zionists to dictate a position which promotes with their particular view of the biblical interpretations their denominations preach. But a large of group of other evangelicals could not identify themselves with such a stand—either theologically or politically.

The article continued: “David Rotem, a Yisrael Beiteinu MK, spoke out against various plans for peace with the Palestinians. ‘There is a Saudi proposal, an American proposal, a European Union proposal and a Palestinian proposal which are going to endanger the state of Israel,’ Rotem said, and the visitors responded with ‘Amen.’

“David Bogenrief from Iowa, a Christian Zionist, said a two-state solution is against the word of God. The 200 visitors from the US, Canada, England, and Africa handed over a brief letter of repentance, apologizing in the name of millions of Christians for crimes committed against the Jewish people throughout history in the name of ‘Christianity.’”

The local church leaders some months ago identified what is a crime in this matter—they pointed their fingers sharply at Christian Zionists whose preaching platforms do not represent the beliefs of a the majority of Christian interpretations. But no one will know if we are silent. —GEW

 

~OTHER VOICES . . .

Jerusalem Post Editorial
“There is the suspicion that evangelicals, as their name implies,
are out to convert Jews.”
Christian Zionists—The Sleeping Giant

“The sleeping giant of Christian Zionism has awakened. There are 50 million Christians standing up and applauding the State of Israel.” So began a speech by Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, before an AIPAC Policy Conference plenary earlier this week. His address may not have received as much media attention as those by Richard Cheney, Nancy Pelosi, Ehud Olmert, and Binyamin Netanyahu. It should have, however, because it could herald a critical new stage in the American-Israeli relationship.

The speech certainly did not lack clarity. “It is 1938,” Hagee said, “Iran is Germany, and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler. We must stop Iran’s nuclear threat and stand boldly with Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.”

“Today I humbly ask forgiveness of the Jewish people for …
the deafening silence of Christians in your greatest hour of need,
during the Holocaust.”

Neither, however, did he mince words regarding what any Jewish audience cannot help thinking when hearing such unabashed support from a Christian leader.

Hagee noted that those who committed the Holocaust were “baptized Christians ... in good standing with their Church.” He continued: “Today I humbly ask forgiveness of the Jewish people for every act of anti-Semitism, and the deafening silence of Christians in your greatest hour of need, during the Holocaust. We were not there. We cannot change the past, but together we can shape the future. Think of our potential future together: 50 million evangelicals joining in common cause with five million Jewish people in America on behalf of Israel is a match made in heaven.”

The AIPAC audience granted Hagee multiple standing ovations. The Jewish people, some surely thought, has been waiting two millennia to hear such unalloyed words of contrition and support, and they could not have come at a more propitious time.

“Hagee said further, “I do not target Jews for conversion.”

Understandably, offers of Christian assistance will continue to be met with a considerable degree of wariness. History aside, Jews and evangelical Christians are perhaps the ultimate “Odd Couple”—culturally, religiously, politically, and even geographically.

If all these obstacles are not enough, there is also Jewish concern regarding Christian motives, concern that necessitates careful consideration in building relationships. First, there is the suspicion that evangelicals, as their name implies, are out to convert Jews. Second, that their support is colored by doctrines of “rapture” and the apocalypse, in which a catastrophic global war plays an important part.

In a Jerusalem Post interview last year, Hagee responded that a growing majority of evangelicals no longer preach replacement theology—the doctrine that Christianity has replaced the Jewish people in the plans of God. As for himself, Hagee said further, “I do not target Jews for conversion.”

Jews and evangelicals will never agree on many issues, but the one on which they do agree is of overwhelming importance. It is natural, given history, that Jews are wary even of a hand outstretched in friendship, and caution is justified. The Jewish people, however, cannot afford, and arguably does not have the right, to simply dismiss a significant potential ally. — from the Jerusalem Post

By Eldad Beck
Hours after a historic visit to Jerusalem holocaust museum, a group of
German bishops tour the Palestinian Authority, say Israel is behaving like Nazis.
Bishops Equate Israel’s Actions to Holocaust

“This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.” The visit of 27 members of the German Bishops’ Conference to Israel included a historic first-time visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem as well as guided tours of sites holy to Christianity and meetings with Christian congregations in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority.

During their time in Israel the bishops uniformly made moderate and balanced statements, but once in the PA they provided German reporters accompanying them with a plethora of harsh proclamations against Israel. Their criticism received widespread coverage in the German media on Monday.

While crossing one of the checkpoints into East Jerusalem the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, told reporters: “This is something that is done to animals, not people.” Meisner, a resident of eastern Germany, said that the fence reminded him of the Berlin Wall and that in his lifetime he did not believe he would see such a thing again. As the Berlin Wall was brought down so will this wall be brought down, he said, adding that the fence served no purpose.

The delegation’s visit to Ramallah took place several hours after their visit to Yad Vashem and several of the bishops chose to equate the situation in the Palestinian Authority with the Holocaust.

“Israel has, of course, the right to exist,
but this right cannot be realized in such a brutal manner.”

“Cages in the image of ghettos,” said the Bishop of Augsburg of the territories. Augsburg was once under the spiritual leadership of Pope Benedict XVI, who was Archbishop of the Munich-Freising Archdiocese and his brother Monsignor Georg Ratzinger still resides there.

“Israel has, of course, the right to exist, but this right cannot be realized in such a brutal manner,” said Bishop Hanke, who later stated that he intends to amend this year’s Easter message to German churches so as to include the delegation’s political impressions from their visit to the territories and a demand to change the situation.

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By Jonathan Cook
Apartheid Looks like This
Jonathan Cook joins a watchdog group on duty in the West Bank,
documenting abuses and numberless humiliations that characterize the daily life of ordinary Palestinians under occupation.

The scene: a military checkpoint deep in Palestinian territory in the West Bank. A tall, thin elderly man, walking-stick in hand, makes a detour past the line of Palestinians, many of them young men, waiting obediently behind concrete barriers for permission from an Israeli soldier to leave one Palestinian area, the city of Nablus, to enter another Palestinian area, the neighboring village of Huwara. The long queue is moving slowly, the soldier taking his time to check each person’s papers.

The old man heads off purposefully down a parallel but empty lane reserved for vehicle inspections. A young soldier controlling the human traffic spots him and orders him back in line. The old man stops, fixes the soldier with a stare and refuses. The soldier looks startled, and uncomfortable at the unexpected show of defiance. He tells the old man more gently to go back to the queue. The old man stands his ground. After a few tense moments, the soldier relents and the old man passes.

Is the confrontation revealing of the soldier’s humanity? That is not the way it looks—or feels—to the young Palestinians penned in behind the concrete barriers. They can only watch the scene in silence. None would dare to address the soldier in the manner the old man did, or take his side had the Israeli been of a different disposition. An old man is unlikely to be detained or beaten at a checkpoint. Who, after all, would believe he attacked or threatened a soldier, or resisted arrest, or was carrying a weapon? But the young men know their own injuries or arrests would barely merit a line in Israel’s newspapers, let alone an investigation.

And so, the checkpoints have made potential warriors of Palestine’s grandfathers at the price of emasculating their sons and grandsons.

“Soon the checkpoints were also restricting movement
inside the occupied territories, ostensibly to protect the Jewish settlements built on occupied territory.”

I observed this small indignity—such humiliations now a staple of life for any Palestinian who needs to move around the West Bank—during a shift with Machsom Watch. The grassroots organization founded by Israeli women in 2001 monitors the behavior of soldiers at a few dozen of the more accessible checkpoints (machsom in Hebrew).

Checkpoints came to dominate Palestinian life in the West Bank (and, before disengagement, in Gaza too) long before the outbreak of the second Intifada in late 2000, and even before the first Palestinian suicide bombings. They were Israel’s response to the Oslo Accords, which created a Palestinian Authority to govern limited areas of the occupied territories. Israel began restricting Palestinians allowed to work in Israel to those issued with exit permits; a system enforced through a growing network of military roadblocks.

Soon the checkpoints were also restricting movement inside the occupied territories, ostensibly to protect the Jewish settlements built on occupied territory.

“There were 75 permanently manned checkpoints,
some 150 mobile checkpoints, and more than 400 places where roads have been blocked by obstacles.”

By late last year, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 528 checkpoints and roadblocks were recorded in the West Bank, choking its roads every few miles. Israel’s daily Ha’aretz newspaper puts the figure even higher: in January there were 75 permanently manned checkpoints, some 150 mobile checkpoints, and more than 400 places where roads have been blocked by obstacles.

As a result, moving goods and people from one place to the next in the West Bank has become a nightmare of logistics and costly delays. At the checkpoints, food spoils, patients die, and children are prevented from reaching their schools. The World Bank blames checkpoints and roadblocks for strangling the Palestinian economy.

Embarrassed by recent publicity about the burgeoning number of checkpoints, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last December that there would be an easing of travel restrictions in the West Bank. All to little effect, according to reports in the Israeli media. Although the army announced in mid-January that 44 earth barriers had been removed in fulfillment of Olmert’s pledge, it later emerged that none of those ‘roadblocks’ had actually been there in the first place.

—Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
His book Blood and Religion was published by Pluto Press last year.
Read the full article at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/833/re91.htm

By Rory McCarthy
“Occupied Gaza like Apartheid South Africa”

A UN human rights investigator has likened Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories to apartheid South Africa and says there should be “serious consideration” over bringing the occupation to the international court of justice. The report by John Dugard, a South African law professor, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, represents some of the most forceful criticism yet of Israel’s 40-year occupation.

Prof. Dugard said although Israel and apartheid South Africa were different regimes, “Israel’s laws and practices in the OPT [occupied Palestinian territories] certainly resemble aspects of apartheid.” After describing the situation for Palestinians in the West Bank, with closed zones, demolitions and preference given to settlers on roads, with building rights and by the army, he said: “Can it seriously be denied that the purpose of such action is to establish and maintain domination by one racial group (Jews) over another racial group (Palestinians) and systematically oppressing them? Israel denies that this is its intention or purpose.”

He dismissed Israel’s argument that the sole purpose of the vast concrete and steel West Bank barrier is for security. “It has become abundantly clear that the wall and checkpoints are principally aimed at advancing the safety, convenience and comfort of settlers,” he said.

Gaza remained under occupation despite the withdrawal of settlers in 2005. “In effect, following Israel’s withdrawal, Gaza became a sealed-off, imprisoned and occupied territory,” he said. “Such actions cannot be condoned and clearly constitute a war crime. Nevertheless, Israel’s response has been grossly disproportionate and indiscriminate and resulted in the commission of multiple war crimes.”
—excerpted from an article in The Guardian

By Nir Hasson, Ha’aretz
Palestine: Just Like Life under Pinochet

“The Palestinians’ lives under the occupation are reminiscent of the lives of Chile’s citizens under the dictatorship,” says Chilean Judge Juan Guzman, during a recent visit to Israel. “There, too, people who thought differently were considered enemies: They were imprisoned, tortured and killed. There, too, people couldn’t move from place to place, they didn’t have freedom and they didn’t have equality before the law. But here it’s harder. It has been going on for longer,” he added.

Guzman, 68, became known at the end of the 1990s as an investigative judge pursuing Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s military dictator between 1973 and 1990. Guzman waged a long legal battle against Pinochet. Despite the former dictator’s immunity, Guzman succeeded in filing several indictments against him and bringing him to trial. Pinochet’s trial was never completed because of his health, and he died a few months ago at age 91.

Guzman was in Israel as a guest of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and the Alternative Information Center (AIC) to examine indicting Israelis responsible for house demolitions in European courts. Thus far, legal proceedings have been initiated only against military officers. The committee wants to indict civilians as well.

ICAHD has a list of three officials from the Civil Administration, the Jerusalem municipality an the Interior Ministry who ordered the demolition of houses. It is seeking to submit investigation requests against the officials in a European country where the courts have the authority to address international human rights violations. Guzman is slated to give the international seal of approval to the move.

If such an investigation is opened, presumably arrest orders will be issued against the three and they will encounter difficulties in visiting Europe.

By Rima Merriman
Can a State be both Jewish and Democratic?
Israeli Arabs ask: “Who are we and what do we want?”

While Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza are scrambling to come up with a new national Palestinian vision, Israeli Arabs are looking for ways to wrest equal citizenship rights for themselves as non-Jews in a state whose reason for existence is to nurture Jewish identity and culture. According to a recent New York Times news item, “A group of prominent Israeli Arabs has called on Israel to stop defining itself as a Jewish State and become a ‘consensual democracy for both Arabs and Jews,’ prompting consternation and debate across the country.”

The report is called The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel and the strategies in the report will be implemented by The National Committee of the Local Arab Authorities in Israel. The term “Israeli Arabs”, as used above by the New York Times, is widespread inside and outside Israel, both in the media and in scholarly articles. The emphasis is on the second word–Arabs rather than on the qualifier Israeli. The alternative term Palestinian Israelis would come as a rude shock to many Israelis, even secular nationalists, conditioned as they are to think of the Palestinians amongst them (20 percent of the population) as a people who had no hand in the agrarian or industrial building of the Zionist State. These people are tolerated at best, so long as they submit themselves to the Zionist ideal. Arab Israelis, for example, must acknowledge “the existence of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people” before they can even participate in the political process (1992 Basic Law).

“The term ‘Israeli Arabs’ includes Muslim and Christian Arabs,
the remnant of indigenous Palestinians that had escaped
the ethnic cleansing of 1948…”

In one way, the subtext for this usage emphasizes the Zionist narrative: Jews (the majority of whom come from outside Israel) have a God-given right to live in historic Palestine, but the indigenous Palestinian is a generic Arab with only a tenuous sense of belonging to a specific geographic area. The term “Israeli Arabs” includes Muslim and Christian Arabs, the remnant of indigenous Palestinians that had escaped the ethnic cleansing of 1948, now numbering 1.3 million strong. Significantly, it does not include Jewish Arabs, who are referred to, instead, as “oriental Jews.” Nor does it include the dispossessed Bedouins (about 100,000), who are denied legal recognition and herded in the arid northeastern part of the Negev (the western and fertile part having been reserved for Jewish settlers).

But the term also accurately reflects the sense of schizophrenia as well as exclusion that Palestinians with Israeli IDs feel. As people residing in a State formed against their will, they are not Israelis, but “Palestinian Arabs in Israel, the indigenous peoples, the residents of the State of Israel, and an integral part of the Palestinian People and the Arab and Muslim and human Nation.” In their own words, they are simply “in Israel” and must now resolve their identity and take responsibility for themselves: “Who are we and what do we want for our society?”

The rising national consciousness among Palestinians in Israel is both courageous and thorny. Such consciousness aspires to counteract intangibles such as “intellectual and emotional transfer” and distancing from their Arab culture, as well as tangibles such as land, planning, and housing policies and economic strategies.

“the Israeli legal apparatus …has already legitimatized
the denial of equal citizenship rights for non-Jewish citizens.”

The predictable Israeli assault on this new consciousness will be ferocious, especially from the Jewish religious nationalist camp, but no less from the Israeli legal apparatus, which has already legitimatized the denial of equal citizenship rights for non-Jewish citizens. Israeli consternation will come from every corner, because Zionism, whether in its secular or religious variant, is basically about a nation of Jews (even though the majority is made up of foreigners to Israel) and for Jews.

“The emphasis of both has been on the Jewish nature of the State
and so compromising the rights of Israeli Arabs.”

The various segments of Israeli society may differ regarding ways of achieving security and peace, but there has been no significant practical difference, as far as Palestinians in Israel are concerned, between left and right Israeli governments. The emphasis of both has been on the Jewish nature of the State and so compromising the rights of Israeli Arabs. Israeli Arabs have plenty of reasons to deny Israel moral legitimacy and to fight for their rights: “We have been suffering from extreme structural discrimination policies, national oppression, military rule that lasted till 1966, land confiscation policy, unequal budget and resources allocation, rights discrimination, and threats of transfer.”

The new Israeli Arab strategies strike a reasonable balance between preservation of Arab identity and values (through institutional self rule in education, culture and religion) and achieving full citizenship and equality with the Jewish majority. Israeli Arabs are proposing a “consensual democracy” for Israel similar to the Belgian model. (Belgium is made up of communities of Dutch, French, and German speakers, with each group being able to elect its own parliament that governs such things as culture, education, and language).

Israeli consternation notwithstanding, the vision that Israeli Arabs are putting forward is consonant with the vision of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Hertzl. Hertzl envisioned an Israel where “The rabbis didn’t get involved in politics, the Arabs had full rights, the cities all had rapid transit, the workers had social benefits undreamed of in Europe, the choice of theater and opera rivaled...Vienna. Its people did not die violent deaths and the whole world exalted in its contribution to humankind.” It is a vision, unfortunately, that is good only for outside consumption, not for Israeli governments that are driven by a mentality of greed, fear, and paranoia untempered by guilt.

The journey of Israeli Arabs towards freedom will be long and arduous, not least because the Israelis have perfected the art of using bureaucratic procedures to block the implementation of legal advances when these do take place. But articulating their vision is a major step forward and an inspiration to Palestinians everywhere. Equality for Palestinians in Israel will never happen unless they themselves make it happen.
—The writer is a Palestinian-American living in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Canadian Government Forms Pro-Israel Lobby

The Canadian government is establishing an “Israel Allies Caucus” meant to mobilize support for the State of Israel and promote Judeo-Christian values amid a groundswell of Christian support for Israel around the world. The launching of the Canadian parliamentary lobby, which is based on the formation of the Knesset’s “Christian Allies Caucus” three years ago, comes six months after a similar lobby was established in the US Congress.

The establishment of the new pro-Israel lobby was officially announced in Ottawa in the presence of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canadian and Israeli parliamentarians, as well as members of the Canadian-Israel Friendship League. The event comes at a time of burgeoning relations between Israel and the largely supportive evangelical Christian community around the world. —Jerusalem Post

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