Crime: Genocide

 

"They want us to sympathize with what the Jews suffered in the West and forget our sufferings at the hands of these "victims". 

 

They want us to understand their "Law of Return" and forget our "natural right for return".

They want us to forget the holiness of Jerusalem for us and remember their relationship with Jerusalem.

Nizar Sakhnini

 

"We must find the Palestinians’ week, painful spots, and press them, until they come to us on all four, begging for a cease fir."

Rehav Am Ze Evi, the zionist
Minister of Tourism

To the Editors of America

 

By Fr. Donald J. Moore, S.J.

 

Your editorial on No to Israel provides a beacon of hope for the many in this Holy Land who have raised their voices in protest against the Israeli Occupation, protests which rarely surface in Western media. The question I am asked most frequently, especially when talking with Palestinians: “Isn’t anybody listening?” Now I can give a clear affirmative answer. Many thanks. These voices of protest belong to Israelis and Palestinians, to Jews, Muslims and Christians, and they deserve a wider hearing. Let me cite a few examples.

 

Two months ago the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, published a letter from former I.D.F. officer, Rafi Miller, expressing his shock at the published picture of Israeli soldiers in Hebron, rejoicing as they dragged the body of a bleeding Palestinian whom they had shot. “It reminds me of cheetahs and hyenas, which kill and drag their prey. The problem is that these animals kill to survive. Our soldiers kill to maintain the occupation. When the Arab crowd lynched our soldiers in Ramallah, it was criminal, and they were savage; when our disciplined soldiers do it, it is heroic and civilized.” For this ex-officer the I.D.F. should quickly and fairly investigate the incident and punish any guilty soldiers “before the world wakes up and puts most of us on trial for crimes against humanity.” To the best of my knowledge no charges have ever been filed in this incident.

 

Israel Shamir, a Russian Israeli journalist, has pointed out that these are the “darkest days” for the people of Israel. He remembers back in 1968 as a young Russian Jew scribbling on the walls of his village: ‘Hands off Czechoslovakia’; he thrilled to hear the deep tones of the Russian Jewish poet, Alexander Galitch: “Citizens, our motherland is in danger, our tanks are on foreign soil!” He was proud of the Russian Jews who protested the presence of Russian tanks in Budapest and Prague and Kabul, and who were often beaten by the police. They valued honor above a misunderstood patriotism, humankind above nationalist ties. He heard also with pride about the many American Jews protesting their country’s intervention in Vietnam. But now it is Israeli tanks in an occupied land, Israeli soldiers who kill civilians, who demolish houses, who humiliate and degrade Palestinians and who impose a siege on their villages. Are Israeli intellectuals demonstrating on Israel’s equivalent of Pennsylvania Avenue or Trafalgar Square? Are American Jews raising their voice against these America-armed killers of Palestinian men, women and children? Are Russian Jews speaking up for the human rights of the “enslaved Gentiles” of the Holy Land? These are Israel’s darkest days because the worldwide silence of Jews indicates that the country’s policies are now rapidly undermining “the long term achievement of Jews” in humankind’s struggle for democracy, human rights and equality.

 

The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, has continuously appealed during these six months for justice and understanding. From the opening weeks of the Intifada he pointed out that the Palestinian revolt should not be considered simply a public disorder that has to be quelled and punished. The issue that must be faced is that a people who have been kept in hostage are struggling for their freedom. It is a struggle that must be carried out with love, not with hatred and vengeance. In his Lenten message he appealed to both Palestinian and Israeli to see God in one another. He called upon Israelis to see in Palestinians not the image of terrorists, of those who want to hate and kill, but rather the image of the poor and oppressed who are struggling for their liberty, their dignity, and a right to the land. He called upon Palestinians to see in Israelis, who withhold liberty in the name of security, carriers of the image of God whom we approach with love, not with anger, and whom we ask with the full force of the Spirit to put an end to oppression and occupation.

 

Samah Jabr, a medical student at Al Quds University, writes of her pain when she heard of the death of Ophar Rahoum, a 16-year-old Israeli boy lured to a rendezvous in the West Bank and then murdered. Her heart froze. She had written about the deaths of Palestinian youngsters in the Intifada, how each of them is loved and mourned. Was this any different? “Deliberately killing any child is evil, and I believe that as deeply as I believe anything.” No matter how much she personally had suffered because of the occupation, she could conclude: ”I do not wish death to anyone, Israeli or Palestinian – especially children.” The pain went further. One of her best friends was implicated in the murder and has been held incommunicado by Israeli authorities. She can only write: “I have never been more spiritually beaten.” She flinches when others try to justify the murder of Ophar: “What have we come to? Has oppression blurred our vision? Where is goodness? Where is God?” She ends her reflections with a plea to the world: “When will the Holy Land be holy? When will we learn that different as we are, we are all human beings? My prayer is to God’s people: help change the ring of destruction that surrounds us all. Please, please, Israelis and Palestinians and those who influence us from beyond our borders, help us on this tiny plot of earth to recognize, like it or not, that we are of one universal human family with the unique ability to choose love of each other over the determination to take whatever we want only for ourselves.”

 

As I write, the spiral of violence continues even as a new government takes over. There have been numerous expressions of outrage along with pleas for help prompted by the most recent action of the I.D.F. in digging a huge trench two meters deep isolating the Palestinian city of Ramallah from 25 other cities and towns with a population of 65,000. This complete closure deprives almost all of the villagers of food supplies and health care facilities. In some areas the Israeli bulldozers ripped through telephone and water lines servicing several of these villages, thus increasing the hardships on the population.

 

One of the hardest hit areas is the Christian town of Birzeit. Its Catholic pastor, Fr. Iyad Twal, said that cellular phones are the only means of communication with the outside world. He pleaded for Americans to raise their voices in protest: “Please keep our brothers and sisters in your prayers and raise your voices to put an end to this brutal occupation, and let the people live!” The 6000 students, faculty and staff at Birzeit University, which has been in continuous operation during the months of the Intifada, can no longer reach the university campus. Its communication facilities have been cut off so that the University has no means of maintaining contact with the outside world. In addition some 30000 school children in the area are prevented from attending school.

 

Ha’aretz noted in its coverage that the new closures “make it clear to Palestinian residents that there is a ‘price’ to be paid for continued attacks against Jewish settlers in the region.” It then went on to cite a frank admission of an I.D.F. officer: “It’s doubtful that the collective punishment of tens of thousands of people, in retaliation for the acts of a few isolated terror cells, can be justified.” But the vengeance goes on despite such reservations.

 

In response to these latest actions, Neta Golan, an Israeli peace-activist, said simply: “I am ashamed of being an Israeli.” I can empathize with her words. Whenever I hear the drone of Apache helicopters over Jerusalem enroute to Bethlehem or Gaza, when a family in Beit Jala shows me the remnants of the shell that destroyed their home with "made in the U.S.A.” clearly marked on it, when Palestinian children unfurl a banner for me, as they did in December, with the message “Merry Christmas, America. Thank you for your Christmas gifts,” accompanied by images of a tank, a helicopter, a rocket, I am ashamed of my government’s unqualified and uncritical support of the State of Israel.

 

In his long and distinguished career, Elie Wiesel has often mentioned that the vocation of the Jew is “to teach the world how to be human.” I have often been the witness and the beneficiary of such teaching. Now, however, it is becoming ever more evident to me that the policies of the State of Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinian people, constitute a betrayal, perhaps even a mockery, of this noble and ancient heritage of our Jewish sisters and brothers.

 

 

Donald J. Moore, S.J.

Pontifical Biblical Institute

 

Jerusalem

 

(On leave of absence from the Department of Theology, Fordham University)

 

 Long Live Palestine - http://listen.to/Long_Live_Palestine

Shattered Dreams

By Adel Altaher

My craving as a child to know about my homeland (Palestine) always landed me on my grandmother’s lap. My grandmother (Um Ziyad), God blesses her sole, was an amazing lady. It seemed as if all the kindness in the world had gathered in her heart. I always thought that my grandmother was an angel trapped on this Earth. This woman was so pure that she practically would not hurt an insect. She was very kind to us kids. She always gathered us around her and told us stories of all sorts. My favorite was her memories of Palestine.

I did not know then that the glows on her eyes when she spoke of Palestine were actually tears in her heart. My grandmother always dreamt of going back to Palestine. I heard her often say "Tomorrow when we go back to Palestine, we would do this or do that." This lady did not know much about politics or any thing of that sort, but with her simplicity she believed deep heatedly in her undisputed right of claiming back her stolen home.

My grandmother died of old age waiting to go back to Palestine.

My grandmother told me all sort of things; she spoke abundantly about the family home back in the small village. She said that my grandfather 'Abu Ziyad' and other few men in the village helped to raise its walls. "It was a very strong house." She said, "it was built out of stone bricks." She described all the events that took place in that house.

It always amazed me how to the very little detail my grandmother was able to remember. Now that I think of it, I believe that my grandmother was holding on to her memories, for that was all what has left for her, I guess she was passing on her will. She wanted us kids to know everything about Palestine, hoping someday we can all go back and claim what is rightfully ours.

My grandmother described the day when my dad (Ziyad) her eldest son was born. She told me about the big party they threw for him after his circumcision few days from his birth . She never stopped describing the details of Dad’s wedding, and she named those who attended the ‘Hinna' party. A bashful smile always found its way to her angelic face when she described herself dancing while carrying the lit candles on the 'Hinna' tray. She described all the rooms in the house, and she always referred to the big Olive tree that stood so solid in front of the house. She described the playgrounds where Dad used to play when he was in his young age, and she described the big mosque down the street where my grandfather used to spend most of his leisure time. She told me about the outdoors evenings around the campfire and under the fig tree. "Tea and coffee were always hot and available for the passing by." She said. She described the hills around the house, and she told me about grapevines at the neighbor's (Um-Ahmad´s) house. She told me about the Orange grooves that stood up the hill, and described how juicy the fruits were. Dad used to pick the Oranges and bring them home.

My grandmother told me every thing; I had her describe every thing; and I had her repeat everything. I was always thirsty to hear more. To me, she was describing heaven.

As a child with rich imagination, I captured all that was said. I kept it deep into my heart. I dreamt of picking up the Oranges and squeezing the juice out of them. I dreamt of visiting 'Um Ahmad' and picking the Grapes off her vines. I dreamt of setting around the campfire and eating the BBQ Corn while others enjoying my grandmother's tea. My grandmother always added fresh green mint leaves to the tea.

I listened, I imagined, and all I was able to do is dream.

As I was growing up the dream of having Palestine back grew up with me. The only time I was able to see my Palestine was made possible by holding a foreign passport. I was able to see my home as a tourist. It felt awkward seeing strange faces dwelling down the streets, and a strange flag hanging where our Palestinian flag once was blowing.

I could not help but remembering the stories that my grandmother used to tell me. What I saw did not look familiar; neither matched to my grandmother's descriptions. I found myself looking for the family home and hoped it was still standing. For long, I asked for directions, and finally with the help of some elders I was able to locate the house. It looked much different from the picture I drew in my mind. I imagined it much bigger. I wanted to walk into that house. I wanted to see the place where my family once lived. I wanted to live the memories that were captured for long in my heart and on the walls of that house. To my disappointment, the house was occupied. Strange faces were dwelling in my grandmother's house. I walked away with feelings of disappointment and went on looking for Um Ahmad’s house. As I recollect from memory, Um Ahmad’s house should be few houses down the narow path that ran between the nearby houses. I looked around, walked back and forth, but to my disappointment, there were no signes for any grapevines. I looked up the hill searching for the Orange grooves, but my sight was blocked with newly built compounds. Frustrated, disappointed and a wave of sadness attacked my heart. Every thing I dreamt of had long been gone. The dreams that held me to this land were shattered; the memories that grew into my mind had vanished; the roots that held me deeply attached to this land were extracted.

Strange angry feeling crossed through my mind and heart, a feeling of loosing what I am and who I am. I did not know what to do, or where to go. After all what is the point? The house is occupied, the grapevines are dead, and the Orange grooves were replaced with settlers' compounds. I felt there was nothing left for me to stay. With extreme sadness, I walked back to my family house and sat under the big Olive tree.

I never felt homeless until that point of time. I never knew what it meant to be raped, until I was raped of my dreams. I held on to the Olive tree and wiped a teardrop that forced its way missing the shattered dreams. I took a deep breath while thoughts of determination rushed into my mind. I thought to myself, they can steal my grandfather's house, they can kill Um Ahmad’s Grapevines, they can pull out all the Orange trees, but they could never--ever--be able to take Palestine out of my heart.

Long Live Palestine!

Rape of Dulcinea

 By Israel Shamir

 

The touching words of Elie Wiesel (Jerusalem in My Heart, NYT 1/25/2001) painted a beautiful portrait of the Jewish people, yearning for Jerusalem, loving and praying for it over the centuries and cherishing its name from generation to generation.

 

This potent image reminded me, an Israeli writer from Jaffa, of something familiar yet elusive. I finally made the connection by revisiting my well-thumbed volume of Don Quixote.  Wiesel's evocative article is so wonderfully reminiscent of the immortal love of the Knight of Sad Visage to his belle Dulcinea de Toboso. Don Quixote traveled all over Spain proclaiming her name. He performed formidable feats, defeated giants, who turned out to be windmills, brought justice to the oppressed, and so much more for the sake of his beloved. When he decided that his achievements made him worthy, he sent his arms bearer, Sancho Pansa, to his Dame with a message of adoration.

 

Now I find myself in the somewhat embarrassing position of Sancho Pansa. I have to inform my master, Don Wiesel Quixote, that his Dulcinea is well. She is happily married, has a bunch of kids, and she is quite busy with laundry and other domestic chores. While he fought brigands and restored governors, somebody else took care of his beloved, fed her, provided her with food, made love to her, made her a mother and grandmother. Do not rush, dear knight, to Toboso, or it would break your heart.

 

Elie, the Jerusalem that you write of so movingly is not now and never has been desolate. She has lived happily across the centuries in the embrace of another people, the Palestinians of Jerusalem, who have taken good care of her. They made her the beautiful city she is, adorned her with a magnificent piece of jewelry, the Golden Dome of Haram al Sharif,  built their houses with pointed arches and wide porches and planted cypresses and palm trees.

 

They do not mind if the knight-errant visits their beloved city on his way from New York to Saragosa. But be reasonable, old man. Stay within the frame of the story and within the bounds of common decency. Don Quixote did not drive on his jeep into Toboso to rape his old flame. OK, you loved her, and thought about her, but it does not give you the right to kill her children, bulldoze her rose garden and put your boots on her dining room table. All your words just prove that you confuse your desires with reality. If you must continue to ask why the Palestinians want Jerusalem? Because she belongs to them, because they live there and it is their hometown. Granted, you dreamed about her in your remote Polish hamlet. So did many people around the world. She is so wonderful and certainly worth dreaming about.

 

Elie, many people have adored this city across the ages.  Swedish craftsmen left their villages and moved there to build the lovely American Colony together with the Vesters, a devout Christian family from Chicago. You can read about it in the works of Selma Lagerlof, another Nobel Prize winner.  On the slopes of the Mount of Olives, the Russians built the dainty church of Mary Magdalene. Ethiopians erected their Resurrection monastery amid the ruins left by the Crusaders.

 

The British died for her and left as their architectural legacy the St George Cathedral and St Andrew's. The Germans built the lovely German Colony and nursed the city's sick in the Schneller Hospital. My devout great-grandfather moved into the protection of her thick walls in 1870-s from a Lithuanian Jewish village and threw his lot with the hospitable Jerusalemites. He found his eternal rest until the day of Resurrection on the slopes of Mount of Olives. None of them thought to rape their Dulcinea.  They just left bouquets of architectural flowers as testament of their adoration.

 

Those who love Jerusalem are legion.  It is disingenuous of Elie Wiesel to reduce the struggle for this city as a tug of war between Muslims and Jews.  It is a question of coveting property versus having the deed of ownership.  The resolution of this case should be based on the 10th commandment, observed by our fathers. They knew that veneration does not amount to the right of ownership. Millions of Protestants venerate the Catholic-owned Gethsemane Garden, but it does not transfer the garden into their hands. Millions of Catholics visit the Tomb of Mary, but it still belongs to the Eastern Church. For generations, the Moslems have come to kneel at the birthplace of Jesus in Bethlehem, but the church remains Christian forever.

 

What water did to Gremlins in Spielberg's movies, Zionism has inflicted on the jolly Jewish folk of Eastern Europe.  It caused them to carry out the ethnic clearing of Gentiles in West Jerusalem, to convert Schneller hospital and church into a military base and to build a Holiday Inn on top of the venerated shrine of Sheik Bader. The Israeli State forbids the Christians of Bethlehem to pray in the Holy Sepulcher and bans Moslems below the age of 40 from attending Friday prayers at al Aqsa mosque. These changes of the city by the Israeli government amount to her rape.

 

In order to justify this rape, you invoke the names of King Solomon and Jeremiah, quote the Koran and the Bible. Let me tell you a Jewish Hassidic tale, one you might have heard in your Polish schtetl. A Jewish midrash, a legend, mentions that Abraham had a daughter. A simple-minded Hassid asked his Rabbi, why Abraham did not wed his daughter and his son Isaac. The Rabbi responded that Abraham did not want to marry a real son to a legendary daughter.

 

The legends are the stuff the dreams are made of. Some are charming, some are horrible, and none is valid as a deed to the land or as a political platform.  Elie, you certainly would not like to lose your private home in New York because of a few verses written in the Book of Mormon. This game of spreading the Zionist gospel is becoming irrelevant, but I will play one more round with you for the entertainment of the crowd. As every archaeologist will tell you, King Solomon and his temple belong to the fantasy realm of Abraham's daughter. Moreover, and not that it matters, but the name of Jerusalem is not mentioned even once in the Jewish Holy Book, the Torah.

 

Elie, you want to play some more games?  I'll tell you more. The Jews are not even mentioned in the Jewish Bible. Get that thick book off of your shelf and check it. None of the great and legendary men you named, from King David to the prophets, were called 'the Jews'. This ethnonym appears the first and only time in the Bible in the Persian story of the very late Book of Esther. The self-identification of the Jews with the tribes of Israel and with the heroes of the Bible is as valid as the story of Rome being founded by the Trojan prince Aeneus. If the modern Turks, who call themselves 'the descendants of Troy' would conquer Rome, dynamite Borromini's baroque masterpieces and expel her inhabitants in order to re-establish the legacy of Aeneus, they would just be repeating the folly of the Zionists.

 

Our ancestors, the humble East European folk of Yids, whose language was Yiddish, had a tradition of adorning themselves with the impressive heraldic lions of Biblical heroes. Their claim of descent from these legends was as valid as the claims of Thomas Hardy's ambitious farmer girl Tess.  But event the fictional Tess did not conspire to evict the lords from their castle and claim the manor for herself.

 

Once, walking with the Christian pilgrims to the great Church of the Holy Sepulcher, I was stopped by a Hassidic Jew. He inquired whether my companions were Jews, and, receiving a negative reply, exclaimed in amazement: "What are these Goyyim Gentiles looking for in the holy city?" He had never heard of the Passion of Jesus Christ, whose name he used as a swear word. I am equally amazed that a Jewish professor from Boston University is as ignorant as the simple-minded Hassidic Jew. Jerusalem is holy to billions of believers: Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Christians, Sunni and Shia Moslems, to thousands of Hassidic and Sephardic Jews. Still, as a city, Jerusalem is not different from any place in the world; she belongs to her citizens.

 

Twenty more years of Zionist control of this ancient city would turn her into just another Milwaukee and forever ruins her charm. Jerusalem needs to be restored to its inhabitants. The seized properties in Talbieh and Lifta, Katamon and Malcha should be returned to their owners. Professor Wiesel, respect the Gentile property rights as you would like Gentiles to respect your right to your lovely house. The holy sites of Jerusalem are regulated by the 150 years old international statute (Status Quo) that should not be tampered with. Last attempt to touch it caused the siege of Sevastopol and the charge of the light brigade at Balaclava. Next attempt could cause the nuclear war.

 

Israel Shamir, is one of best-known and most respected Russian Jew writers and journalists. He wrote for Haaretz, BBC, Pravda and translated Agnon, Joyce and Homer into Russian.

Dear Dr. Hunter and Faculty of the Religious Studies Program:

 

 I am very disappointed that you have decided not to allow me to come in person to speak very briefly about accusations directed at me by one of your tenured faculty members. Given that religious hatred is central to most of the seemingly intractable violence facing the world today, I am amazed that discussing this moral issue is such a problem for a group of people trained to teach religion. Below is the statement I prepared to answer the slander which I feel has been used to discredit me with members of your program and, perhaps, beyond that. While I intended to send a written rebuttal, my request to you, Dr. Hunter, was simply to respond in person to those to whom an unsigned resolution was directed. Can this topic be so frightening that I cannot even say, ‘It isn't true' face to face?

 

 Below is my response to the resolution sent to me after the Marc Ellis visit. As you know the resolution was not signed nor was the note transmitting it to me.

 

Elizabeth Mayfield

 

Response to Resolution Against Betsy Mayfield
Presented to the Faculty of the ISU Religious Studies Program

By Betsy Mayfield 

 Not long ago, a Jewish woman in the Ames community chastising me because of my sympathies for the Palestinians said something to the effect, "You are forgetting that nothing in history compares to the Holocaust and the pain and prejudice we Jews have endured. When we were enduring it, people like you did not speak up and did nothing to help us. Your silence, your anti-Semitism condemned us."

 I thought a lot about this statement, partly because I have affection for the woman who said it, but also, because she made me think about why I am an active and public advocate for the Palestinian people today. It is precisely because I feel the culpability of my nation's and, to a great extent, most of my own religious community's choice to remain silent during the Holocaust and other great wrongs that I speak on behalf of the Palestinian people, now. I was born in 1941, so I wasn't saying much about anything then. But, I learned about the Holocaust and I learned about the Nuremberg Trials that followed. As I understand it, those trials were held to assess moral guilt. Nuremberg judged and placed blame on those who knew right from wrong, but who went along with evil or turned and looked away while evil was carried out. If the moral premises these trials espoused are to mean anything and to have effect on those of us who live now, then, the morality they divulged must be applied in the present day to all people everywhere, not to one group or another, but to all of us. Those of us in faith communities, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Asian and Native American religions, all of us, really, must accept responsibility for each other through commitment to justice.

 If we refuse to help even one group because we want power over them, how dare we talk of peace? It is our common duty to apply the moral lessons our religions teach through parable and truth to what we and our various cultures have evolved into. If we do this, then, the meaning of what happened in the Holocaust and the Inquisition, in the Crusades and in European conquest of America become relevant and our history is not lost to indifference, an emotional void sometimes more dangerous than hate.

 Ethnic cleansing and displacement of people are wrong whether they occur in Cambodia, Rwanda, Algeria, the former Yugoslavia or in the Middle East or right here in Ames, Iowa. For me, wrongs or hate perpetuated in countries such as America or Israel are particularly reprehensible. Many Americans, those who choose to learn, and most Israelis are educated and have a religious history that provides moral guidelines. Furthermore, Americans and Israelis live within the context of a world view with an availability of information never before so readily disseminated. Those of us who have the advantages of a free country, which supports personal development and understanding, be we Jew, Christian or Muslim, should have the backgrounds necessary to make it difficult or impossible for those who use religion for evil purposes to use us as tools to achieve their ends. Few of us in America who take positions on Palestine/Israel arrive at our awareness without any knowledge whatsoever of other people's points-of-view. Few of us have lived only in a Congolese jungle, a Sudanese enclave or within a totally controlled, fiercely status quo preserving patriarchal society. It behooves us to live as the three great monotheistic religions have taught: to do unto others as we would have others do unto us.

 I did not choose to be a Palestinian advocate. The cause chose me. Had I not stumbled into the Arab World more than 15 years ago, I probably wouldn't even know a Palestinian or a Muslim or an Arab. But, I met, worked and lived with Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims, and Jews and Christians. In the course of this life changing experience, vistas I never imaged opened to me. My experience in the Middle East was my epiphany.

 I went to Jerusalem; I felt at home there; not at all because of my own or others' religious icons or the Old City or Rachel's Tomb and the like, but because of the people on the West Bank and Gaza who took me in. I didn't always agree with them, I argued loudly with them and they with me, my behavior did not always fit nor did everyone I met come up to my expectations, but the crucial thing is: I loved many of the Palestinian people I met, and through their example of acceptance of me became more loving toward everyone everywhere. I could not dismiss the daily and, for some whom I met, lifelong, injustice that my country and many in my own culture had participated in allowing. I saw great wrong with my own eyes and in my own experience. That was a gift and a challenge.

 Now, returned to my beginning, my own culture and family, I cannot forget those I left in harms way. I, as an American of European ancestry, of liberal Protestant background, of democratic governmental experience, cannot be silent or refuse to speak about what my people have done to damage others, be it Jew, Roma, Native or Afro-American, birth-defect victim, unwed mother, unwanted child, Vietnamese, Mexican, Muslim, Palestinian. Unfortunately, time and space and being limit what I can do. If my speech is sensed as hate, then, I must make an effort to correct my rhetoric and this experience may very well help me do that as well as help remove carelessness in my approach to conversation. I do not object, however, to complaints about my personality or my style. The label anti-Jewish and hateful are the words I find slanderous. Criticism of the behavior of the state of Israel should not be automatically equated with racial or religious bias or prejudice any more than criticism of United States is considered un-American behavior. What is the logic that connects critics of the actions of a state or a political entity with universal hatred?

 Marc Ellis is Jewish. I admire his logic, his eloquence, his learning and his decidedly Jewish spirituality. That he happens to speak about the effects of injustice on people I personally and publically support is the interdependence that called me to do what I could to bring him to Ames, Iowa, and to Iowa State University. Marc Ellis's particular concern is Jewish spirituality; mine is the lives and happiness of people I love. We have come to similar conclusions even though we have arrived at our positions from very different paths of experience.

 To me, a university is a forum for freedom of speech. It was right and just that Marc Ellis be heard and that, even, I be heard, if I choose to speak. People may not want to hear what Marc has to say or what I have to say. Here in America, where most of the world's people would love to be, no one is forced to agree. We need listen and learn only if we hope to make the whole world acceptable and welcoming for people regardless of who they are or where they are born and live.

 People may not like the way I speak on behalf of the Palestinian people, but it is irresponsible at best and libelous and bigoted at worst to label me anti-Jewish and full of hate. I regret any indiscretions I have committed in my quest for expression, and I hope those of you who spread offensive words directed specifically at me will acknowledge your bias in this attack on my character and my motivation.

 

A Letter to Share with the World

 

 By: Thameen Darby to Betsy Mayfield

 

 Dear Betsy,

 

 I read a speech delivered by the former Israeli president, Ezer Weizman. I found it a romanticization of Zionism. Being one of the victims of Zionism, I know that this ideology has two faces: a tender, moralistic memory-enriched face that prepares its followers to cope with the other face. The other face is one of racism, fascism, and insensitivity to others' human rights. A similar two-faceted ideology is the source of power for most pathologically sick ideologies in the history of humankind. "Shoot and cry," some call it.

 

 The Nazis smothered their youth with the idealism of Nazism, teaching them to want a "pure" society, and giving them pride in the supposed superiority of the Germanic race and the build up of the Third Reich. This twisted battery of morals was able to compensate for the other face of Nazism. It made it possible for the Germans to willingly undertake a mass deportation of minorities and, beyond that, to kill millions of people through an acceptable and supposedly essential process of "purifying" their society.

 

 You have told me how Zionists whom you meet in America tell you that what happened to those of Jewish faith during the Holocaust was unique, the worst genocide in history, carried out systematically and that they must support Israel so that this can never happen again. I wanted you to see the Weizman speech. I wanted to de-construct it so you could understand how I see this particular man sinking to a false sentimentalization of the Zionist point-of-view. His speech concerns only his "pure" Jewish culture, race, people, whatever you want to call it. He discounts all others as if they were not even a part of history.

 

 For me, having experienced the Palestinian Nakba, not exactly like the Holocaust, but close enough, his words swim in a warm pool of lies, plots, twisted morals all leading to the death of innocent humans who lost their dreams and lives because of Zionist idealism, just as those of Jewish faith lost theirs to the ugly premises of the Third Reich. I think to myself, there were few, if any, Arabs in Germany before World War II, so how would Hitler have treated us had we been among those of Semitic heritage? Would being Arab have made a difference to Hitler?

 

 So, I started to write. When I touched my keyboard, I found myself not taking apart Weizman's arguments, but reconstructing his speech from my point-of-view and sentiments. I replaced the word Jew with Palestinian and episodes from Zionist history books to those we learn about as our heritage. Then, I gave rationales for the way I want this war to end. The results speak for themselves.

 

 Love,

 

 Thameen

 

 

"We are just like the flowers that I see now from my window. No matter how in the cold and harsh winter they are broken, no matter how in the hot summer they are burned and dried, no matter where in the autumn wind they are scattered, a day comes when they bloom again, fresh, young and so beautiful."

 

 The Rose amongst Roses

 

 The Palestinian

 

 Reconstruction of a Speech by Ezer Weizman

 

 By Thameen Darby

 

 It was fate that delivered me and my generation into this great era, a time when the Palestinians have to struggle for existence in their homeland. I no longer dwell on my family's land. I am a wanderer, a Palestinian who migrates from country to country, from exile to exile. All Palestinians in every generation have been as I. They still reside in the shadow of our trees, in the warmth of our homes, in previous generations, places, and events. I now wander, a refugee along the far-reaching paths of the world. I am dreaming of the day when I will migrate through the expanses of time, from generation to generation, down the paths of memory to my home in Palestine.

 

 Memory shortens distances. Four hundred generations have passed since my people first came into being; to me this seems like a few days. Only four hundred generations have passed since the pioneering Arabs, escaping the hot deserts of Arabia, fell in love with the green fields and hills of Palestine from which I have been expelled. Only three hundred generations have passed since my Cannanite ancestors built Deir-Salem, the City of the Sun. Deir-Salem's borders are lost to me; they are only a dream. Only two-hundred and fifty generations have passed since the mighty ships of my Canannite ancestors where carrying jars of purple dyes and the hearts of brave dreamy men, stroked the sea with the long oars of trireme's. Oh, that I could stand on the Canannite shore instead of being uprooted and placed far from the shore of my people's place. My people went as traders, not warriors, to spread the alphabet, mathematics, and the art of Arab civilization. We went to Spain. We went to India.

 

 Only two hundred generations have passed since a man named Abraham rose and climbed-up Mt. Sinai to take from God, from Allah, the laws for the country I have lived in since my birth. The grandfathers of our traditions welcomed the wisdom of Abraham and believed it came from God, from Allah. Our ancestors sold Abraham our snow-white sheep and gave him a tent in which to dwell. Our men of God respected Abraham because he did not steal our land or destroy our homes.

 

 Only two hundred generations have passed since the dark-eyed Philistines landed their elegant triremes at Lud and Ramlah and created art out of their fine glasswork. Then, a dark day came when the inhabitants of Lud and Ramlah, following the orders of a victorious general, passed into the terror of exile.

 

 Only one hundred generations have passed since a bare-footed Jesus Christ walked on the Sea of Galilee declaring that love and forgiveness are the most powerful and important motivators in the world. These ideas became Christianity and a great part of Islam, as well.

 

 Only seventy-generations have passed since the angels carried a trader called Muhammad supporting the message of Jesus Christ to the city of the prophets from where he rose to heavens. Only seventy-generations have passed since the tender steps of Omar the Just soothed the streets of Jerusalem and declared an era of human unity.

 

 And now? Only two-generations have passed since the shock and lasting pain of the Nakba traumatized my innocence. I, a descendant of the glorious Canannites and Philistines, and a believer in Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad; I, born amongst the olive trees have been witness to it all.

 

 I was a shepherd Canannite boy singing to my goats and sheep at Majdal. I loved a Philistine girl picking wild flowers and lilies at Gaza. I was a brave sailor at Acho. I built the first city at Jericho. I shaped limestone for the glory of the ancient god, Baal, and sacrificed animals for the beautiful Goddess Ishtar. I planted palms in the Jordan Valley. I raised cows in Askelan, and planted grapes and squeezed wine in Ashdod. I built Deir-Salem for the glory of the sun. I ploughed my fields and refused to sell them even when our wells were dry. I stayed and stayed as generations came and gone.

 

 Then, I lost my family at Deir-Yasin. I was pushed with my nation into exile. My home was stolen; my olive trees cut down. Bulldozers demolished my dreamy village, my mosque became a dance hall or a museum with a menorah atop our traditional dome. Arab Christian churches were hidden or denied in false explanations of Arab religions and cultures.

 

 I lived in a tent under the rain; I ate donated flour and oil. I died in the Kufr Qasim slaughter; I carried a gun in Lebanon and lost my dears in Sabra and Shatilla. I saluted the colors of my flag when I was twelve and threw stones at invaders' tanks when I was thirteen. I was shot, beaten, humiliated, tortured, arrested, sent to a concentration camp in The Negev. But I never forgot Palestine, the country where I was born, from which I had been exiled and which I come from and to which I shall return.

 

 Just as memories force us to respond within the context of our past, so does the virtue of hope prepare us for each day of our future. After all, in the past century alone we have been suspended between life and death, between hope and despair, between displacement and "rootedness". Ours is the terrible century of terror and injustice in which the Zionists and their friends destroyed our delicate society and established their national home on the ruins of ours. It is also the mind-boggling century of revival, of independence, self-discovery, and an endless hope for peace with justice. It is not truce that we want, but justice which assures the end of war.

 

 For more than a hundred years, we Palestinians have struggled against the darkness of injustice and ignorance. We did not leave our borders willingly; we left because of the horrors of ethnic cleansing. We cultivated our fields and planted grapes on our hills and as we did we saw that our land was being stolen piece-by-piece. Of course, we fought those who invaded us. We refused to sell our land to the foreigners. We suspected their ugly plans. We watched with horror, but we did not stand in line to see our end. We put aside our ploughs and picked up our stones. We had an Intifada. We were logistically weak and poor; all we had was the power of our determination.

 

 Agreements were signed, but the terms were not written down and the invaders continued on while the world watched and held the invaders' coats and ignored or misconstrued the intent of those who would take everything from us.

 

 Let me tell you, we Arab people are caught up by the power of men who long for their place on land instead of finding place within their souls. We see that those who cannot find solace or home within their hearts and souls cannot understand where we exist in our hearts and souls. They cannot see that spiritual power is more gratifying and stronger than military might and wrongful expropriation of other people's land.

 

 We Palestinians yearn for peace; we dream of it and pray for it. It appears at every juncture of our thought: in the Bible, the Quran, the songs, the breezes, lilies, and rain drops. Our religions, Christian and Muslim, give us our penchant for recalling our rights. Negotiators at the peace talks, great powers-that-be, say that we Palestinians cannot define what we want. We look from our sad eyes wondering how to be cautious and practical and fair. We ask only to be as we were, perhaps, only as we are. We want our families and neighbors near and far to be free to come and go; we want to work in our olive groves knowing that no soldiers will come and uproot our livelihood; we want our educations; we want to contribute to the world as we did in another age and time.

 

 We deal with the fragile, delicate process of peace suffused with hope, "sang-froid" and wisdom. It is not our inability to say what we want that stops peace in its tracts. Fascist ideas and racist plans are the sabbotageurs. The atmosphere is charged. We know that there is more behind the conflict than expansionist dreamers striving to destroy peace. We know that even those who love peace are apprehensive, and both camps still have unhealed wounds and fresh memories of spilled blood. For us, the youth of Palestine, the blood of our brothers and sisters cry out to us, our refugees still hold their door keys in their grasp, unable to believe or accept that a people who suffered so much themselves would come and take from us and never give back what they took.

 

 Many peace treaties have been signed in the course of history. They speak of economic relations and security arrangements, compensation and borders. We and our invaders sit today to discuss the practical. We are burdened by the questions of holiness: holy land, holy graves, and holy wars, holy places of worship. Holiness in the Holy Land seems only a memory. We think of the time of Joshua. Some Christians say that Joshua refused to do God's bidding and choose not to "smite" people just to allow Israelite expansionism. Some say he used reason to make a choice. Other Christians say that we Muslims think only of war. They forget the Templar knights, and Pontius Pilate and the Romans and Greeks and modern nations and the ever vocal Christian right who want none of us Semitic folk, Jew or Arab, to live in their hometowns.

 

 We are dealing today with people who allow ancient fundamentals of vengeance and settling of scores to intermingle these emotional responses with any notions of peace. We strive to be practical and judicious, but we step up to the conference table with feet soiled by the residue of the past. How can we help but remember the ramparts of Or Salim where we pruned our trees with one hand and clutched a weapon in the other.

 

 One recent agreement between the Zionists and the Palestinians includes a clause about educating Jews and Arabs without the rhetoric of hate. Those of us with educations believe that schools on both sides of Jerusalem's Road Number One must teach archeology and anthropology with sound historical material taken from both sides of our histories. Understanding must replace fear. It is not our religions that are the evil before us. Judaism, Christianity and Islam gives us rules to live by and in all our literature we can read about war and invasion and fear and hate as well as of love. The Christian version of our monotheistic religions sums up the meaning of our holy books in the lines, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Judaism and Islam assess morality with similar verses. Our holy books tell us how to live in peace; it is people who use religion as an excuse to carry out evil, to take what they want in primitive disregard for modern morality that has gotten us to where we are today.

 

 Do not dismiss what I say. We are trying to achieve a peace that will heal the wounds of ten million wounded souls. But ancient Crusader maps hang on the wall, and ancient Torah memories hover in the atmosphere, and primeval prophecies strive to fulfill themselves. Seated with us at the discussion table, watching us carefully, are guests from time immemorial, representatives of bygone eras: Canaanites and Philistines, Joshua and David, the Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ. Sometimes the burden is too heavy to bear. However, despite the difficulty and pain, it may also be the source of our strength and hope. Let us bear in mind that this Holy Land is composed not only of holy places, but also of homes and fields, factories, schools, and workshops. There are not only cemeteries and dead bones, but also live people whose fate is in our hands.

 

 We have invested too much time, resources, and physical and psychological effort in the struggle for our national existence. The struggle is still not over, but now we have work to do in our fields, schools, research institutes, workshops, and laboratories. Our true aspirations reside there, as well as in the battlefield for our rights. Our very essence is anchored in study and education. Those who fashion our ethics always prefer the pen to the sword.

 

 We are just like the flowers that I see now from my window. No matter how in the cold and harsh winter they are broken, no matter how in the hot summer they are burned and dried, no matter where in the autumn wind they are scattered, a day comes when they bloom again, fresh, young and so beautiful. From their tiny seeds, springs renewal. Amazingly, the soft green stems defeat the hard earth. They find the cracks amid the stones and raise their heads to face the bright sun. Could it be that those who would take our land have lost their feeling for the land as generations of them moved away from the soil and the ploughed fields and into the market place becoming new powerful governments where right is the product of might?

 

 Dear friends, we Palestinians are a people of memory and prayer. We are a people of words and hope. We have established empires and built castles and palaces. We have fashioned ideas; we have built memorials. Our dreams are towers of aspiration. For us, allowing Palestinians the right to return, even in principle, is a statement that could begin the process of soothing our pain and healing our wounds. It is a face saving apology, a quiet admission of culpability, and that Israeli power used to accomplish endless human rights violations will cease. We know we will not receive just reparation for every Palestinian who has lost a part of himself or herself to solidification and expansion of the state of Israel. We can live with personal pain if we can see that our national interests will receive respect and support from the Israeli government and the international community. That is what we want.

 

 Of course, our people will always want to come home. Some, however, will not return to the realities of land with little water, of a state without a strong infrastructure in competition with a well-financed neighbor with the educational expertise, military machine and international connections to stay put. We ask for the right of return; the details can come after the recognition.

 

 Internally, we are a weary people arising from a hundred years of internal and external strife. Tired as we are, our future will not blend into the here and now in peaceful, economic, social and spiritual growth unless the people of Palestine receive the respect and support that Zionists, Israelis, Americans and Europeans fully understand through their education and ability to absorb available information, more information than has ever been available to the human family before. We remember Dare- Salem, the Jerusalem of old, Al-Quds, opened for all the faithful and descendants of Abraham-Ibrahim, but we ask for the reality of a peace based on a strong foundation of morals and justice and we ask that this will be swiftly and speedily established so that both Israelis and Palestinians can get on with the business of showing the world that there are people alive today can say "no" to apartheid, violence, insistent emotional memories that cannot ease anybody's soul.

 

 Thameen Darby

 

 Medical Student at Al-Quds University

 Native of Palestine

 thameen@...

 

The Hills of Palestine

By Basima Farhat

 

The hills lying a coverlet
on the martyred,
stillborn children of
future generations.
Victim only to the
worlds attempt
at self-deception

 

Blanketing the children
that lie deep in
the crevices and caves,
with lies, untruths that
somehow,
successfully blind
the eyes of nations
far and wide

 

Desperate attempts to
seal the secret within our souls
Silencing forever the truth,
so that none would face their
shame, at turning away to our
plight

 

Time, in long ago,
held carvers of human faith
within these caves of our
present despair

 

Would they ask us to
kneel in homage to deceit,
as Satan, beguilingly, asked
of the fulfiller of destiny?

 

Test you,
your faith?
Defying all we know
as true?

 

Sleeping in the hills
a lion of heart
a soldier of innocence
a call of the wild
a garden of gentle winds

 

We climb the mountains
that once were hills
kissing the leaves of
the olive trees with
morning dew

 

Our spirits lie
softly upon the soil
and with claws,
dig graves for our
martyred children

 

Must we also lie in our
waking moments
within these graves?
Is it not suffering enough,
just to live and bury our
children?

 

Walking the streets
in search of flowers
we find our tortured
grasses crushed by
the weight of oppression,
Camouflaged as sickly
green tanks

 

Green, green grasses
of Palestine
forced to submission
by a mirrored and distorted
image of the color green.

 

How can they think this
color, so dull to our
pristine eyes
camouflage?
Yet it must be,
for the world only sees
the natural color of stones,
and we become the reviled

 

Paling, woefully, to the
magnificent green of our
grassy hills, turned mountains
Obvious, blatant distortions
of the green that our martyred
children are buried under
upon our hills

 

We pile our dead with
the stones that martyred
them, in homage to
their courage
Stone upon stone laid
to their breast we
raise the level of the sea
and the mountain grows

 

A test of faith,
or a test of humanity?

 

What human creation
made by the giver of life
could do, what is done
to our Palestine of our
carvers dream?

 

What holy sanction
could uphold such
violation of her
virgin soil?

 

Ravaged innocence.
Dust and smoke filled
skies her only
cover to those that would
shame her
Not at the unholy plight
befallen her.

 

Shame at the discourse,
created of human degradation
Shame at the love, devoid
within the eyes of
her rapist

 

Do I shame her
curled here in
a corner of
the olive storage
room?
Hiding, tears shed
at my own failure
to save her from her
enemy?

 

No! They shame her
by the talons of
mechanical claws
that rip her branches
strip her of her glory
and leave her,
foolishly comforted,
thinking she is of the dead

 

She is not dead!
She lives in the hearts
of the flowers
and her roots grow deep

 

She is of the living,
She is the young lovers
that gleaned her fields
to lie sweetly entwined
in her embrace

 

Is it our legacy to die?
Never to stand freely
upon her hills?
To lie beneath only as
fodder for the olives.

 

And, if we are to become
consummate in her earth.
What of we, oh!
What of we?

 

We, become a part of
the trees.
Kissed by the dew
on a soft rainy day
I, the leaf on the right,
you my neighbor
Touching each other
in solidarity

 

Shade to our martyrs
lying beneath us
Providing the trees
of Palestine her
sustenance.

 

What a glorious gift
they have given us
in the becoming of
the life's blood of our
future generations!

 

No victims lie here!
Courage and glory
are our heritage

 

Written upon the
tombstones by the
carvers of our faith

 

A story,
    of our courage,
        of our history,
            of our land

 

                Palestine!

 

 

Reporting Live From Gaza

By Alison Wier

I don't want to be overly dramatic, but I was sort of shot at yesterday.

I say "sort of" because I don't think the Israeli soldiers in their tower were trying to hit me, or the people with me... if that had been their purpose I have no doubt that they would have. There is massive evidence here that their aim is quite good. I think they were simply asserting their power. And I think they were trying to intimidate me, as a foreigner, into leaving the area.

There were no "clashes." There was no stone-throwing. Everything was quiet. I was being shown around Khan Yonis, a bullet-riddled refugee camp in southern Gaza filled with ragged barefoot kids and angry, resigned, perplexed parents. "Why are they doing this to us?" people kept saying to me... "Why they do this Palestine people? They say we guns. Where guns? Why America help Israel? Why America not help Palestinians?"

Houses were riddled -- and I mean riddled -- with bullets. There were 2-foot wide holes in roofs where mortars had come through. People showed me around their homes -- for the most part they had moved into areas away from the outside, where, they hoped, they would be safe -- huddled on mattresses on the floor. They showed me around one house right at the periphery of the camp. It had lovely, bullet-riddled archways inside, the remains of a tiled kitchen. When the children saw I was curious about the bullets, they gathered them for me by handfuls - smashed, distorted pieces of metal that tear through walls and people. Ill try to bring some back. I wonder if Israel will let me bring my souvenirs of their country.

They opened a door a few inches for me -- they were afraid to do more, they know what happens if you do -- and I could see a guard tower a feew hundred meters away. Even I was afraid -- usually so easily brave, armed with my middle-class American feeling of invulnerability -- I've read too many reports of injuries in just such situations... seen too many pictures of people with bandages over eyes that had been shot out. Earlier in the day I saw a picture of four boys probably about 7-12 sitting on chairs in a waiting room somewhere, looking at the camera with no expression on their faces, and each with a large piece of gauze where one of their eyes should be. They were the lucky kids -- these were only rubber bullets, and they hadn't gone on into the brain...

Did I say no expression? Perhaps the expression is beyond describing... of being old far beyond their small bodies.

So when I looked out at the guard tower where soldiers with sniper scopes and binoculars were no doubt watching us, I, too, was nervous.

We continued to wander around the camp -- groups of smiling children coming up, saying salaam, hello, giggling. The streets were Gaza sand --the ocean is probably only half a mile away... but these children never get to swim in it. There are soldiers inbetween.

Instead they play in the dirt.

I needed batteries for my camera, so we went to a tiny store. The owner gave us small glasses of strong coffee, and would take no money for the batteries.

Intense, frustrated, he pointed out what his life had become. He showed the inevitable bullet holes in his store, the larger hole where a missile had entered a store-room -- destroying what looked like 50 five-gallon jugs of oil. He showed me his house next door -- full of bullet holes, and told me about his children who luckily had remained uninjured, if trauma and subjugation don't count as injuries. He told me that all he wanted was peace, to live his life. Again, he asked why Israel was doing this, why America was doing this.

What could I answer? All I could try to do was explain that Americans don't know that this is going on -- that their newspapers and television don't tell them. And so Americans think it is a complicated issue, and that it doesn't involve them.

Amazingly, I don't find people hostile toward me, as an American, even though they so clearly know America's role in their suffering. By the way, "suffering" is a word they use often in trying to tell me what their lives are like. They always smile at me, shake my hand. When they hear I am from America, they virtually always say, "Welcome."

We wandered over toanother house, on the other side of town. I saw a family home no longer livable -- bullet holes everywhere, large hole in the roof -- another once-lovely home, and probably loved home, with an interior garden and children's toys, and bullets scattered on the floor.

It was when we went outside of this home that the gunshots occurred. We were behind a wall, and so it didn't feel scary. Of course, feelings lie -- I had seen numerous holes through such walls. They showed us another way out. At the time, I didn't take the gunshots personally. Once again, a middle-class American, I didn't think anyone was firing near me on purpose -- I thought it was just an accident, a coincidence.

But as I've thought about it further, I think I was wrong. Why then? there? In that particular part of town?

And this would fit the pattern I've heard about lately. A few days ago when the UN team investigating human rights violations was here in Gaza they were shot at. The Canadian Ambassador was shot at. A young American documentary filmmaker I met this morning, James, had been in Khan Yunis a few days ago, and had been shot at. He showed me footage of the Isaelis shooting at him: He is letting the camera roll as he walks on a dirt road following 5-6 small boys. None are throwing rocks. It is quiet. There is a tank at the end of the road -- this is nothing unusual. They continue walking. Suddenly there are gunshots, the camera tilts. No one is injured. But the Army has made its point. Except it didn't work. He went back today.

I asked him if he had a time-frame for making his documentary. He said until he ran out of money or got shot, whichever came first. It wasn't much of a joke.

Have you heard about the American stringer for AP who was shot a few months ago? -- a young woman, her name is in another notebook (I'm at an Internet Cafe in Gaza City with the slowest computers on earth) -- but I think she was about 26. Mark, a 30-year-old freelance English photographer I've just met, knew her, and told me about it. The Israelis shot her in the pelvis, destroying her spleen and uterus. They say it was an accident. She says they knew quite clearly that she was a journalist. Israel is apparently investigating how this could have happened. Was this reported in the press? Will we hear the results of the investigation? Wouldn't you think this would have been headlines? Shouldn't it have been? If she had been shot by Palestinians don't you think it would have been?

Another man today told me about working with a Fox film crew, when suddenly they were being shot at by the Israelis. They finally, barely managed to escape, and they filmed it all. But Fox never aired it. He told me the problem with the US coverage wasn't the crews, it was management back in the States. I believe him.

Some people in the refugee camp told me about a new gas bomb the israelis shot last weekend at them. They said it had black smoke, and a "good" smell. At least 40 people are still hospitalized from it -- I'm going to pin the number down tomorrow -- apparently there are people in several hospitals, so the true number could be considerably higher.

From the refugee camp we went to Al Amal Hospital, to meet the doctor and see the patients.. I saw a 22-year-old man in the ICU. He was moaning and had IVs in both arms. He said it felt like knives in his intestines. Sometimes he had trouble breathing. His mother and aunt were hovering over him. His little sister was sitting next to him. I went to another ward, and saw six more. I met a father who was obviously distraught -- two of his sons were in the hospital. I saw two men have seisures while I was there -- convulsing.

They all said the same thing. They had just been going about their lives when suddenly "bombs" came into their houses. some had been outside, and had gone in to rescue people because they thought the house was on fire. But they said there was no flame, just black smoke, and a good smell. In most cases nothing happened immediately, but after 10 to 15 minutes they collapsed... some became unconscious.

Israel is, as usual, denying that there was anything unusual about this gas. As usual, they are lying.

Apparently, this also explains a lot of the bias in the US press. The reporters in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv get their numbers and "facts" from military spokesmen. Information from Israeli sources is printed, information from Palestinian sources isn't.

You see, an Israeli is one of us. A relative, a friend's relative, a colleague's relative. We hear distorted versions of what is going on from these friends, and colleagues, and we think they know what they're talking about. And that they're not biased. Because they sound so reasonable and confident and knowledgeable. They say just enough about what is wrong about Israel, about the "two-sides" to seem neutral. This is bs.

The problem is when you know the truth, it is far too much to describe, far too cruel... far too diametrically opposite what we used to think and what everyone still thinks to express. It is hard not to sound fanatic, over-wrought, biased. The lie is too big, the repression too complete, the Palestinians' lives too horrible to write about reasonably. I find it difficult to write anything -- rare for me -- because there is so so so much. You have to retrieve and redefine the very words out of the newspeak that Israel has created of "closures" and "bypass roads" and "security."

So I think maybe I should try to take on just one topic at a time -- and for now, this new gas... Today I was going to visit the Ministry of Health for more information, and then back to the Khan Younis hospitals with Mark to take photos. But he didn't show up at the scheduled time. Probably something just came up. But over here you always worry...

Tomorrow I'll go.

As I said, there is so so so much to try to describe. Who will ever believe all this? Israel couldn't possibly be this cruel, this arrogant. Who will believe it? They must have a good reason...

There are two sides here, of course... just the way there was in South Africa's apartheid period...

I also visited two tiny encampments of women and children living in tents on the dirt. They were people who used to have homes in Khan Younis, but the Israelis decided to make a road through them -- for "security?" to divide the people? to terrorize them? just because they wanted to? who ever knows? an absolute conqueror doesn't have to explain -- so they bulldozed their homes and their date palms and orange groves. This is already far too long -- I won't go into the details of how they bulldozed them, how the people fled...

And the people are living in the dirt, and show me a bent-up aluminum wash pan that they retrieved from where their homes had been -- everything else, they said, was "under the land" Again, they asked me why america was helping Israel do this to them. Why did Bill Clinton do this? Would George Bush still do this? They're on a first-name basis with our presidents. And we don't even know about them. One old, newly poor woman knew all the international news -- she had been given a radio and listens to BBC, French broadcasts, German broadcasts, etc. She hears the Israeli statements. The US government positions... She's living in rags in the dirt now. Four months ago she and her husband had two homes -- they had just built another one for their son, who had been married just two months when his new home was bulldozed.

But you'll be glad to know the international community isn't ignoring these people. The Palestinians have been pleading for an international team for months to come over to protect them from the Israelis -- but the US keeps blocking this. Why??? Why??? How could this be even imagined to threaten Israel's "security"??? But you'll be happy to know that the international community isn't ignoring them -- it contributed the fly-covered, floor-less tents that the people are living in. Meanwhile, how much aid did we give to Israel today? Eight million was it? Sixteen million? And tomorrow we'll give it to them again, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day...

They gave me tea, as we sat surrounded by dirt, and told me to tell America to stop doing this to them. I'll try. Maybe you could try too.

SHARON’S MESSAGE TO THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE

 

By Hanan Ashrawi*

 

To every man, woman, and child in the Palestinian territories. YOU are my target; you will be made to suffer; and you shall pay for the original crime of being a Palestinian—and for being there.

 

Every camp, village, town, and city is hereby declared a prison. Instead of arresting each individual and having to build even more incarceration centers and foot the bill for your detention, I shall simply instruct the army to dig ditches and build barricades around your population centers, thus with one sweep render your isolation complete. Wherever you are, you’re under arrest at your own expense and in your own home.

 

School children may not reach their schools and college students are to stay home. Some of you might try to climb over the dirt barriers or walk around the ditches. Take your chance! After hours of misery you might find a tank (or more) lying in wait for you. You might find snipers on your hilltops or armored vehicles at your crossroads. Defy the siege at your own peril, and if you die don’t blame me. In my book, you’re guilty of the subversive act of seeking education. The same applies to your teachers and school administrators who are guilty of the equally heinous crime of attempting to teach. Besides, I can’t close down all your educational institutions with a military order: That would tarnish my new and improved image in the West (and my new ally Shimon might not like it). This way, your institutions will collapse by themselves and ignorance will prevail.

 

All patients seeking treatment (including cancer, kidney, and heart patients) are hereby forbidden to reach their hospitals and clinics. You shall suffer in silence and you shall die in silence, for you are guilty of daring to claim the same human treatment reserved for real people—not for subhuman genetic terrorists like you. All pregnant women will deliver in their own homes, or in ambulances and at checkpoints if they dare defy the siege. Should you suffer complications leading to the death of your infants (or to your own death), you have only yourselves to blame. For you are guilty of the ultimate crime of attempting to give birth to even more Palestinian terrorists. All mothers should know that no vaccination will be allowed to reach your children, for they deserve no protection against infancy and childhood diseases. They too will grow up to be a threat to our security.

 

All shopkeepers, tradesmen, industrialists, construction workers, businessmen (and women—we don’t discriminate) are hereby forbidden from engaging in any kind of gainful activity. Since you cannot go anywhere anyway, you might as well stay home and watch your families starve even if your warehouses are full of products you cannot market. You too are guilty for attempting to conduct a normal life in defiance of the occupation.

 

This applies even more directly to farmers and peasants and all those involved in agricultural activity. Is it not enough that we confiscated most of your land to build settlements for those brave settlers who had defied real hardships in New York, London, Moscow, and other such hostile places to come to the Land of Milk and Honey? You had no business being there, tilling the land and feeding your children. Now, we have to confiscate even more lands for these settlers to build by-pass roads (i.e. to bypass your reality) and to connect them to Israel directly without having to witness the mere fact of your existence. You call it apartheid? We call it security by the power of the gun.

 

If our brave settlers used their guns against you, uprooted your trees, destroyed your crops, and terrified your children, that’s the least they could do given the hardships they endured in their drive to grab more land. We, of course, are more than happy to provide them with the full protection and support of our army while they wreak havoc amongst you, and will distort our laws to find them innocent no matter whom they kill, maim, or injure from amongst you. When will you learn that you do not count? They do, and we will make sure that in this equation you finally learn that you are the zero.

 

Let me be painfully frank with you. I blame you for forcing us to besiege you, kill you, shell your homes, assassinate your activists and leaders, and perform other such distasteful tasks (even though, I must admit I have had a long and rich experience in invading Arab lands, murdering civilians and prisoners of war, and massacring Palestinians wholesale while destroying whole villages). You are truly exasperating. We made you a generous offer whereby we would annex only parts of your land (including our settlement clusters), expand settlements according to need (and will), annex Jerusalem and keep it under our sovereignty (while trying our best to render it Palestinian-free), and totally deny the Palestinian refugees their right to return. Yet, ungrateful wretches that you are, you persisted in your stubborn refusal. You claim international law and legitimacy? What nonsense! Only our law prevails, and we deem you illegal.

 

Despite all our attempts at persuasion (our gun ships, tanks, sniper fire, and military checkpoints are very subtle means of persuasion), you continued to deny us our rights to your lands and rights. We have to be able to help ourselves to that which is yours—what else is occupation for? What other use of power if not to be unleashed on the weak?

 

I therefore find you guilty and deserving of the utmost punishment (we may not have the death penalty in our laws, but we can carry out as many extra-judicial murders and assassinations as we please). You are guilty—for holding on to your humanity, for daring to exercise a collective (and individual) will, for refusing to succumb, for daring to claim equal rights before the law, for maintaining your dignity and a stubborn yearning for freedom.

 

We, on the other hand, should be free to inflict any type of pain and brutality on you, and it should be your lot to lie down and die quietly. You must not be allowed to disturb our peace or security. We have the right to drive you to desperation, and should you protest or react, not only will you be conveniently branded as terrorists, we will also pound you into submission while calling on you to "stop the violence" and "end terrorism."

 

Not only that, but we will stand up before CNN (and all the friendly Western press) to expose you for not accepting our hand stretched out to you in peace. Don’t worry. They’ll swallow it hook, line, and sinker. We’ve been feeding them our spin for years to the point where they’ve lost not only their critical judgment and journalistic integrity, but also their sense of sight and hearing when it comes to your image and narrative. They’re guaranteed to pay attention only when you harm an Israeli or provide them with a negative proof of our stereotype. So don’t count on any audience or sympathy in the world—for you are guilty and will be blamed.

 

And if you suffer from any misguided notion that the UN or any other global body will come to your rescue, rest assured it ain’t gonna happen!

 

Kofi Anan has been dispatched forthwith to prevent the destruction of statues (cultural heritage) in Afghanistan; he can’t be expected to deal with human reality at the same time. Besides, we might promise him a role in the peace process provided he behaves himself and looks the other way. We might have a harder time with your European friends, but they too can’t afford to irk us. As for the new US administration, don’t hold your breath. It, too, has decided to give me time to demonstrate my peace making skills. And I’m busy demonstrating those to the hilt, as you can see and feel. I will make peace with you if it takes everything that you have, including your land, lives, rights, and freedom.

 

My colleagues (including Chief of Staff General Mofaz and Minister of Defense General Ben Eliezer) concur with me. It is wonderful to be able to do my worst and still have Labor instruments (like Fuad) and apologists (like Peres) on my team. They certainly clean up my image! Besides, I’m not doing any much worse than Barak did. At least I’m not shelling your homes for now (the Americans didn’t like our use of their apaches for that purpose, and it didn’t look good before the cameras anyway).

 

So, if you know what’s good for you, please behave like good little natives and kiss the hand that beats you. Say YES to peace, my way, and I guarantee you an efficient apartheid system. In the meantime, stop the violence and stop being the terrorists that you are. As for me, I remain forever a pacifist and a humanist (my way). If only you would see it my way.

 

p.s. Note from Shimon (Peres). I really am pained at what you have to endure, but I’m truly helpless—having cast my lot with the Sharon’s, Lieberman’s and Ze’evi’s of this world. However, I will continue to work for my vision of new realities in the Middle East. This is only a sample of what it has in store for you. I have to rush and meet with my European colleagues and members of the press to let them know that Sharon isn’t all that bad. He is a new man for a new age. Given my (and his) history and age I have a tough job selling that spin! What do you think?

 

*Secretary General of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue Democracy (MIFTAH), and Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

 

 

 "Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in. "

 Thomas Jefferson

 (18th century American statesman)

 (D. Boorstin, THE AMERICANS)

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 

 "Those who labor in the earth are the Chosen People of God, if ever he had a chosen people. "

Thomas Jefferson

(NOTES ON VIRGINIA)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 

 "The Jews who have arrived would nearly all like to remain here, but learning that they (with their customary usury and deceitful trading with the Christians) were very repugnant to the inferior magistrates, as also to the people having the most affection for you; the Deaconry also fearing that owing to their present indigence they might become a charge in the coming winter, we have, for the benefit of this weak newly developing place and land in general, deemed it useful to require them in a friendly way to depart; praying also most seriously in this connection, for ourselves also for the general community of your worships, that the deceitful race - such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ - not be allowed further to infect and trouble this new colony. "

Peter Styvesant

(17th century Dutch governor in America.)

(Letter to the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company, from New Amsterdam, September 22, 1654.)

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 

 (This prophecy, by Benjamin Franklin, was made in a "CHIT CHAT AROUND THE TABLE DURING INTERMISSION," at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787. This statement was recorded in the dairy of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a delegate from South Carolina.)

 

 "I fully agree with General Washington, that we must protect this young nation from an insidious influence and impenetration. The menace, gentlemen, is the Jews. In whatever country Jews have settled in any great number, they have lowered its moral tone; depreciated its commercial integrity; have segregated themselves and have not been assimilated; have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion upon which that nation is founded, by objecting to its restrictions; have built up a state within the state; and when opposed have tried to strangle that country to death financially, as in the case of Spain and Portugal. For over 1,700 years, the Jews have been bewailing their sad fate in that they have been exiled from their homeland, as they call Palestine. But gentlemen, did the world give it to them in fee simple, they would at once find some reason for not returning. Why? Because they are vampires, and vampires do not live on vampires. They cannot live only among themselves. They must subsist on Christians and other people not of their race.If you do not exclude them from these United States, in their Constitution, in less than 200 years they will have swarmed here in such great numbers that they will dominate and devour the land and change our form of government, for which we Americans have shed our blood, given our lives our substance and jeopardized our liberty. If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years our descendants will be working in the fields to furnish them substance, while they will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude Jews for all time, your children will curse you in your graves. Jews, gentlemen, are Asiatics, let them be born where they will nor how many generations they are away from Asia, they will never be otherwise. Their ideas do not conform to an American's, and will not even thou they live among us ten generations. A leopard cannot change its spots. Jews are Asiatics, are a menace to this country if permitted entrance, and should be excluded by this Constitutional Convention. "

Benjamin Franklin

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 

 "They (the Jews) work more effectively against us, than the enemy's armies. They are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are engaged in... It is much to be lamented that each state, long ago, has not hunted them down as pest to society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America."

George Washington

(in Maxims of George Washington by A. A. Appleton & Co.)

 

 

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE ZIONIST-ARAB CONFLICT

 

 By Nizar Sakhanini

 

 PROLOGUE

 

 Palestine was the crossroads of the ancient world and still is a crossroads of the modern world. This geographic feature made Palestine "the passage way, the sea outlet, the cross-roads across which all the surrounding nations could jump at each other, perhaps annihilate each other. By taking and holding the Cross-roads, any one of them could also bar all the others out of this highway intersection."

 

 The first people to settle in the area, which was later became to be known as Palestine, were the Canaanites. The land was then named after them, the "Land of Canaan".

 

 As a result of its unique geographic location, Palestine was exposed to an endless number of conquerors that invaded and occupied the land for long or short periods of time after defeating and expelling the previous conqueror. After the original Canaanite city-states, outsiders almost continuously occupied Palestine.

 

 It is unanimously accepted that the Canaanites were the first to settle in Palestine and could be defined as its native owners. They received an admixture of blood from each of the invaders: Egyptians, Hyksos, Israelites, Persians, Philistines, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, or British. Each of these invaders came and left and none of them have any right to claim the land as his own. Those individuals, of the different invaders, who stayed, settled down and intermarried with the original native people, the Canaanites, became an integral part of the natives. Two of the invaders, however, left a lasting mark in Palestine:

 

 1. The Philistines who gave their name to the land, and

 

 2. The Moslem Arabs who gave their religion and language to the majority of the indigenous people.

 

 This indicates that both the Philistines and the Moslem Arabs have settled down as residents in the land in large numbers and intermarried with the native inhabitants, the Canaanites and whoever intermixed with them of the different invaders, and became an integral part of the indigenous people.

 

 "The position of the Arabs in Palestine is unique. Unlike all other foreign conquerors, they did not hold themselves aloof but, instead, made converts of the natives, settled down as residents, and intermarried with them, with the result that all are now so completely Arabized that we cannot tell where the Canaanites leave off and the Arabs begin." (Ilene Beaty, Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan - Political Rights, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1957. Reproduced in Walid Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest, Beirut, 1971, pp. 3 - 23).

 

 There is no doubt that the Israelites had a historical relationship with Palestine. Palestine, however, was not their birth land. They came to Palestine as invaders, like the many other invaders before and after them. Like all other invaders, new invaders later drove them out. The indigenous people of the land, the Canaanites, never left the land. They stayed together with whoever integrated with them from the different invaders of the country. The Palestinians residing in the land in 1897, in 1917, or before or after, represent the only legitimate owners of the country as the living survivors who inherited the land from the Canaanites and whoever intermingled and intermixed with them through thousands of years.

 

 On the other hand, the Jews of today are in no way the descendents of the Israelites who were driven out of Palestine by the Romans two thousand years ago. The Jews, like others, did not march through history as a pure race. Some of the original Israelites returned to Palestine in later years while others dispersed indefinitely. Some of them remained Jewish, but others were converted to other religions. More importantly, many of today's Jews were a result of conversions to Judaism from different ethnic groups that were not related to the original Israelites in any way. The Ashkenazim, for example, carry a large proportion of Khazar ancestry in them. The Khazars converted to Judaism in the 7th century and, when they were driven out of their empire in Khazaria by the end of the 10th century, emigrated en masse to Russia and Poland.

 

 BIBLICAL MYTHOLOGY

 

 The Bible is a major source of the Jewish relationship with Palestine. Karen Armstrong shed a light on this mythical relationship with Palestine as depicted in the Bible. The following paragraphs give a summary of the story.

 

 Abram left his home in Ur of the Chaldees (Mesopotamia) and journeyed to the Land of Canaan at about the year 1850 BC. He had been summoned to emigrate by a divine being who revealed that he had decided to be the special God of Abram and his offspring. Abram should change his name to Abraham as a sign of his new status, and should make a covenant agreement with God. In return God would bless him and his descendants. The children of Abraham would become a great people and God promised that he would give them the land of Canaan.

 

 The Israelites, Abraham's descendants, immigrated to Egypt at about 1700 BC. Their living conditions in Egypt deteriorated so much around 1250 BC that they were mere slaves. Then God intervened. He told his prophet Moses that he had to act and save his people. He must force Pharaoh to let the Israelites go free and then lead them "home" to the "Promised Land of Canaan".

 

 To help Moses, God terrorized the Egyptians by sending cruel plagues, and when Pharaoh remained obdurate in his refusal to free the Hebrew slaves, God sent the most terrible plague of all. The Angel of Death passed over the houses of the Jews and killed the first-born son in every Egyptian family (The Jews celebrate this event in the feast of Passover. It demonstrated their status as the "chosen people" as God had discriminated between them and the Egyptians).

 

 Moses died before reaching the Promised Land. It was Joshua who in about 1200 BC led the Israelites into the Land of Canaan and established the twelve tribes of Israel in the "Promised Land" by means of a long and utterly ruthless military campaign. When a town was conquered, it was duly put under a ban, which meant total destruction and extermination. Men, women, children and even the animals were massacred and the cities reduced to rubble.

 

 This "holy war" continued for another 200 years, under the Judges and heroes of Israel like Gideon, Deborah and Samson. As they exterminated their foes, the Israelites also tried to build up their own faith. As the pagan towns and shrines were destroyed, temples to Yahweh were built at Shiloh, Dan Bethel, Bethlehem and Hebron.

 

 King David conquered the Jebusite City of Jerusalem at about 1000 BC, which marked a turning point in the holy campaign. From this point Jerusalem would be consecrated to the One God, and because of this originally Jewish occupation the city would later become holy to Christians and Muslims too. In conquering Jerusalem, David departed from Joshuan practice. He did not massacre the Jebusites. It seems that he wanted to make the Jebusites his own personal followers, whose loyalty was assured because their survival depended totally upon him. Jews were beginning to feel more confident and able to exploit the people of Canaan instead of seeing them as absolute and therefore deeply disturbing enemies.

 

 Israelites established a monarchy under David and then under Solomon. The Kingdom under David had been torn apart internally and had modest borders, but Solomon established a strong state with significantly broader frontiers.

 

 Solomon built the "Temple", which was a magnificent building. The whole building was designed like a typical Canaanite temple and, instead of expressing the pure monotheism of Moses, the Temple had strongly pagan elements. Solomon also married foreign wives, which was anathema to the spirit of Judaism and directly opposed to God's specific instructions to Moses. Solomon was a religious and a wise man. Such policies reflected a tendency of assimilation with the surrounding culture.

 

 According to the Biblical mythology, God ultimately condemned and punished Solomon for this syncretism. How could the Jews retain their unique identity if they absorbed an alien culture? But later kings also flirted with paganism and assimilation, and the common people were fatally attracted to the pagan fertility cults of Canaan. When drought threatened their harvests, the Israelites found it natural to turn to the worship of Baal like their neighbors, who believed that they could manipulate their gods to force them to send rain.

 

 The Temple of Solomon was not the only sanctuary in the "Promised Land". The older temples continued to function and frequently the priests brought aspects of pagan worship into the rituals and liturgy of Yahwism. They were naturally influenced by the prevailing local religious climate and were not yet ready for the austere monotheism that the prophets and sages were developing.

 

 A political division paralleled this political strife. At about 927 BC, the northern tribes broke away from the southern kings in Jerusalem and formed their own kingdom which they called the Kingdom of Israel and which opposed the smaller Kingdom of Judah in the south.

 

 Never again would the Jews experience the unity and security they had known under Solomon. Further powerful neighbors who were building mighty empires in the Middle East constantly threatened their independence.

 

 King Tiglath-Peleser III of Assyria conquered the Kingdom of Israel at about 722 BC. The ten northern tribes of Israel were deported, forced to assimilate and were, in religious terms, annihilated. These ten lost tribes disappeared from history forever.

 

 The Kingdom of Judah was naturally appalled by this tragedy and the kings of Jerusalem desperately sought to protect themselves from such a fate. Some of them, like Kings Ahaz and Manassah, thought that syncretism and assimilation were the answer. But in the year 622 BC King Josiah sought a religious answer to the problem of Jewish survival. While repair work was done in the Temple, the high priest Hilkiah discovered an ancient manuscript. The Lord had told Moses that occupation of the Holy Land depended upon a scrupulous observance of the Torah. If the Israelite disobeyed God they would lose their land.

 

 Josiah had already seen the ten tribes disappear and after reading this manuscript he felt that the only way for the Kingdom of Judah to survive was by a return to religion and an absolute rejection of syncretism. He made the Jerusalem Temple the center of this revival of the religion of Moses and Joshua and for the first time Jerusalem and the Temple became essential to the Jewish religious experience. Worship in the Temple became obligatory for every Jew in Judea. All the other shrines were destroyed and their priests were invited to serve in the Temple of Jerusalem, where they could be supervised to make sure that they were not bringing pagan practice into the pure religion of the Jews. Only in the Temple was it permissible henceforth to make a sacrifice to God.

 

 But another view of Judaism was slowly emerging, which was making the Jewish faith a religion of the heart. Prophets like Amos and Isaiah insisted that Temple sacrifice was not enough. A good Jew must take care of the poor and the needy. The Lord loved mercy and compassion more than sacrifice and pilgrimage to the Temple. According to this view, external and liturgical conformity could not take the place of morality and justice.

 

 The new Babylonian Empire threatened to destroy the tiny Kingdom of Judah and the prophet Jeremiah foretold this ultimate disaster. Jeremiah also taught the Jews that the chosen people could still survive even in exile. Provided they remained faithful to the Torah and observed the covenant with Yahweh. God will still be their God as he had pledged to Abraham. In this prophetic view, Judaism did not depend upon the physical possession of the Holy Land.

 

 Babylon destroyed Jerusalem at about 589 BC and most of the inhabitants of Judea were deported to Babylonia, leaving behind only a few peasants and poor people.

 

 Exile to Babylon was traumatic, but the Jewish deportees did not disappear like the ten northern tribes. They were not forced to assimilate with the pagan population, but were permitted to live in separate Jewish communities and observe the commandments of the Torah.

 

 Some of the exiles lived in Babylon itself and others lived in a settlement on the banks of the Cheder in an area, which they called "Tel Aviv". A new individual element entered Jewish practice. Instead of compulsory worship, the Jews of Babylon became personally responsible for their own religious life. Each Jew renewed his own covenant to Yahweh. He had to learn the Torah himself and absorb it into his heart and mind so that it became his own. Without the Temple, the Book became more important and study of the Torah and the Prophets led many of the exiles to a deeper understanding of monotheism and Judaism. Personal accountability has become a hallmark of Judaism and in exile the importance of the individual was emphasized in quite a new way.

 

 A group of the deportees were unable to adapt fully to life in Babylon. All Jews certainly mourned the loss of Jerusalem, but to some, Jerusalem had become more precious because of its loss. They felt quite a new hatred of the goyim who had made it impossible for them to live a full Jewish life. To this group of the deportees, the physical "Land of Israel" was essential to their Jewish identity. Because the Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem, it was as if they were destroying their Jewish self. The amoral vengeance expressed in Psalm 137 springs from a desperate insecurity: "Beside the streams of Babylon we sat and wept.Jerusalem, if I forget you, may my right hand wither!".

 

 Yet the new inner confidence felt by the majority led some Jews to wait hopefully for a return to Zion (Jerusalem). In Babylon, the prophet Ezechiel and the anonymous prophet who is usually called the Second Isaiah promised the Jews that God would restore them to the "Promised Land". They would return to Jerusalem, rebuild the Temple and build Tel Aviv.

 

 Following the Medes and the Persians conquest of the Babylonians, Cyrus, the King of Persia, gave the Jews permission to return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple. At about 538 BC, some Jews (about 40,000) left Babylon and "Tel Aviv" and began the long journey home. Yet, most of the Jews remained behind in exile. They no longer saw physical possession of the Holy Land as essential to the Jewish identity. Furthermore they saw certain religious problems in the return: was it likely that their brothers would create the New Jerusalem of peace and justice, foretold by the Second Isaiah? In this view, a physical return to Zion actually endangered the shining religious ideal. It was surely more religious to look forward to a divine intervention in history that would establish the full redemption than to create an imperfect Jewish state. Keeping the Return and the redemption in the future tense would ensure that a yearning for salvation did not become muddied by the squalor of politics.

 

 The year 538, therefore, marked an important parting of the ways in Judaism that still persists. There are Jews who see the Land of Israel as essential to Judaism and consider that living in the physical land is obligatory for all Jews. There are other Jews who think that secular and political hegemony in Israel is dangerous and unreligious and most Jews have remained in the Diaspora.

 

 After 538 Babylon remained an important center of Judaism for centuries. There the Jews prayed facing Jerusalem, but kept it as a distant ideal. They were confident enough to develop a very different attitude towards the Gentiles. The Diaspora Book of Jonah shows real compassion to non-Jews. The lessons of the Book of Jonah have been important to Christians and Muslims as well as Jews. The goyim have learned far more from this compassionate Judaism than from the scriptures written in the Land of Israel after 538, like the Books of Maccabees, which speak mainly about new and violent holy wars there.

 

 The Jews who returned to Jerusalem in 538 discovered that other people were living there. In the north were pagans who had settled there when the ten tribes had been deported in 722. In Judea and Samaria dwelt the descendants of the Jews who had not been deported to Babylon. The returning exiles rejected both sets of people, calling them the am ha'aretz (the people of the land). They insisted that only those who had experienced the Exile were true Jews. They thus began a bitter debate about who really was a Jew, which still continues today.

 

 Jews who remained in the Diaspora were learning a new acceptance and compassion. The Jews who felt that physical occupation of the Promised Land was essential were making new enemies, who included other Jews. A religion which depends upon the physical possession of territory is necessarily more vulnerable than a religion which depends upon an interior, spiritual commitment, and will inevitably become more intolerant if threatened politically.

 

 At about the time of Christ, who was a Jew himself, the Essenes withdrew from the cities into the desert to live a pure Jewish life. They waged a holy war against the Jews of the establishment. The Essenes were also very important in the opposition to the Roman occupation of the Holy Land, which led to the Great Jewish Revolt of 66 - 73 AD. The Essenes and their fellow zealots all believed that the pagan occupation of the Romans was an abomination. They believed that the integrity of Judaism depended on the political independence of the Holy Land, which must be freed of the contaminating presence of the goyim. They believed that they must act to save their country, however hopeless the struggle. The suicidal tendency of these religious zealots, who had dragged their more moderate brethren into the disaster against their will, was clearly shown at Masada in the year 73.

 

 The last remaining Jewish rebels had gathered in the mighty fortress by the Dead Sea and were finally forced to surrender to the Roman army. When the Roman soldiers arrived, they discovered that the 960 Jewish men, women and children had preferred to take their own lives rather than submit to Rome.

 

 The Romans conquered Jerusalem and burned down the Temple. The "chosen people" lost their "Promised Land" for the second time. The Roman Empires (Western and Eastern) ruled Palestine until 614 AD. (Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today's World, pp. 4-14, citing the Bible).

 

 According to the religious Zionists, creating a Jewish State in Palestine was a fulfillment of a divine promise to Abraham: "Unto thy seed will I give this land." Judaism relationship to Palestine is not questionable. But so is the Christian and Muslim relationship. The country as a whole, and Jerusalem in particular, is holy to all of the three monotheistic religions.

 

 Does this relationship give the Jews any right for claiming Palestine as their own exclusive homeland?

 

 Alfred Gillaume, a British orientalist, provided the answer to this question. He pointed out that "it is generally supposed that these promises were made to the Jews, and to the Jews alone. But that is not what the Bible says. The words 'to thy seed' inevitably include Arabs, both Moslems and Christians, who can claim descent from Abraham through his son Ishmael. Ishmael was the reputed father of a large number of Arab tribes, and Genesis records that Abraham becomes the father of many north Arabian tribes through his concubine Keturah. The descendants of Ishmael have every right to call and consider themselves of the seed of Abraham. Moreover, when the covenant of circumcision was made with Abraham (Genesis xvii) and the land of Canaan was promised as an everlasting possession, it was Ishmael who was circumcised. Isaac had not then been born."

 

 Gillaume went on to state that " the covenant relation between Israel and God demanded loyalty from the people, and individual and corporate righteousness. Were the people to fail in these respects a terrible doom awaited them". Gillaume added, "the divine promises to the patriarchs have been annulled by the national apostasy. When the Assyrian captivity removed the population of Samaria, and the Babylonian captivity the people of Judah, the prophets saw in the disasters a vindication of the divine justice on a disobedient and gainsaying people." Gillaume goes on to conclude that: "the Old Testament prophecies, which predicted a return from Babylon and from all the lands whither the Jews, had been exiled were fulfilled. The Jews did return to Judea, they did rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, and they did rebuild the temple; and after fluctuating fortunes they did secure a brief period of political independence and expansion under the Maccabees. Thus the prophecies of the Return have been fulfilled, and they cannot be fulfilled again." Within the canonical literature of the Old Testament there is no prophecy of a second return from the Babylonian exile. After the Exile "all the Jews who wished to do so had returned to the Holy Land, though a great many more preferred to remain where they were and formed the Diaspora some of which, afterwards, formed the backbone of the Christian Church." Besides, "the last of the prophets died centuries before the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70." (Alfred Gillaume, Zionists and the Bible, Beirut, 1954. Reproduced in Walid Khalidi, ed. From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 197, pp. 25 - 30).

 

 Jewish, as well as Christian and Moslem relationship with Palestine is spiritual and could not be given to justify any political ends. In the words of Palestinian historian, Rashid Khalidi, "The idea that Jerusalem constitutes the exclusive property of one party, which has privileged rights there, is an old one. In ancient times, and many, many other times during its more than 40 centuries of history, Jerusalem has been conquered, and then treated as if it belonged to the conqueror alone. Each time, of course, the arguments used to justify such behavior went far beyond the simple conqueror's claim that might-makes-right. Most frequently, religious justifications were utilized to give a patina of legitimacy to such appropriations, and to the attendant dispossessions, which went with them.

 

 "While there was a fair share of hypocrisy and cant in the old approach, it generally relied in essence on the sword, sometimes quite unashamedly. I mention this ancient history not because I plan to focus on tales of Jebusites and Israelites, but rather because we are constantly told that there are special, privileged and exclusive Israeli claims to Jerusalem today because of the ancient attachment to it of the Jewish religious tradition.

 

 "All three of the monotheistic faiths which grew out of the Abrahamic heritage revere this tradition, both in general and as it applies to Jerusalem. But in fact, the ancient, enduring and indisputable attachment to Jerusalem of the Jewish religious tradition is today exploited to cloak what is at base no more than the old, brutal legitimization-by-conquest approach. We must remember that what is being argued by those who do this is NOT that this ancient and enduring religious attachment justifies a modern religious attachment or freedom of worship for Jews in Jerusalem today. What is being claimed is that this attachment takes precedence over all others, and that it is more ancient, more sacred, and more important than whatever others may feel for the Holy City. This in turn is used to justify exclusive Israeli sovereignty and control over the entire city today, both its Jewish and Arab sectors, and including its Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy places.

 

 Khalidi goes on to state that it is assumed that: "the sources whereby we know what we know of Jerusalem in the time of David and Solomon are genuine historical sources rather than accounts of religious traditions, myths and beliefs compiled over 500 years after their time.

 

 Khalidi then states that Christians and Muslims fully incorporated Jewish connection with Jerusalem into their central religious narratives. "The Christian Bible, the Old Testament is an integral part of the Scriptural under girding of faith -- and it is thus not just the Passion of Jesus which causes Christians to venerate Jerusalem, but also the traditions and beliefs which Christians share with Jews about the city.

 

 Similarly, Muslims believe in the Jewish connection with Jerusalem as an integral part of God's messages to mankind. They see the biblical prophets, without exception, as among their prophets and venerate them all, notably David and Solomon, and it is not simply the night journey of the Prophet Muhammad to Jerusalem described in Sura 17 of the Quran which causes them to venerate the city. What is at issue therefore is not the Jewish claim to Jerusalem: that claim is in fact endorsed and upheld by all believers in the Abrahamic tradition. It is rather the exclusivity of that claim, and its present utilization for political purposes.

 

 Khalidi concludes that the Israeli-Arab conflict "cannot be resolved on a basis of might-makes-right, nor can it be done by attempting to privilege one of two national claims, or one religious tradition among three, or one archaeological stratum in a city which has at least 21 known major strata.

 

 "This city includes two national communities which have been in conflict with one another for over five generations now, and that one has subjugated the other. For this reason they are rigidly segregated from one another in virtually every significant aspect of their existence, and are likely to continue in this fashion for at least some time into the future. Asserting the absolute primacy of one nationality in practice means the subjugation of the other. This is not to say that believing Jews or Christians or Muslims should not regard their affiliation with Jerusalem as special, unique and distinct; each group will naturally and necessarily do so. It is rather the assertion that their affiliation gives them the right to primacy in the here and now which is dangerous. Similarly, no one could expect either Palestinians or Israelis to cease to regard Jerusalem as the supreme focus of their national aspirations. They will continue to do so whatever we do. Rather, these aspirations have to be realized in such a way that their realization does not prevent the realization of the legitimate aspirations of others.

 

 "It is the task of those who seek a mutually acceptable resolution of the conflict over Jerusalem [as well as for the rest of Palestine] to resist these uncompromising and elemental tendencies in religion and nationalism, and to challenge the exclusivist political claims, which they engender. It might be easier than many expect to arrive at a consensus for a shared rather than an exclusivist solution. An exclusivist solution -- whatever the religious or other justification in which it might be dressed up -- is at bottom based on the bayonet and the barbaric argument that might-makes-right, and cannot possibly lead to peace or justice. I will not dwell on how important a just resolution of the issue of Jerusalem is to the achievement of an overall Middle East peace settlement. Of course, there is the possibility that I am being wildly naive in saying all of this. Perhaps we have not progressed since the days of the Jebusites. Perhaps mankind has not reached a stage where the idea of sharing can prevail. I prefer to take a somewhat more optimistic view, and to believe that we have progressed past the era of the caveman, and of our warlike ancestors and others who have fought over Jerusalem for centuries. If a compromise solution is possible, it will be one, which. respects the three different religious traditions.and the two national claims. The solution "will privilege none of them, but will rather enable all to share jointly in the wonders of this magnificent, beautiful, great, holy and cursed city, Jerusalem." (The complete text of the article is available in Al Ahram Weekly Oct 1-7, 1998).

 

 PALESTINE UNDER ISLAMIC RULE

 

 Palestine was conquered by the Moslem Arabs in the year 638 AD and became part of the Moslem Empire. Through time, the Moslem Empire, as all other empires through history, began to disintegrate. The Crusaders invaded the area starting in 1095 and ruled over Palestine for a period of about 200 years. However, before and after the Crusaders invasion, Palestine continued under different Moslem rulers until the Ottoman Turks gained control over the whole Moslem Empire. In 1517 the Ottoman Sultan Selim defeated the Mameluks, incorporated Jerusalem and Palestine into the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, which ruled Palestine until World War I.

 

 The Ottoman Empire began to weaken and disintegrate and became coveted by all the imperial powers of Europe. North Africa gradually fell under European colonial rule. Britain bought the Egyptian share in the Suez Canal Corp. in 1875, occupied Egypt in 1882 and began to look with interest at the areas to the East of the Suez Canal.

 

 BRITISH MANDATE in PALESTINE

 

 One of the aims of Britain's participation in WWI was the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the control of the region, which formed a land bridge from British-controlled Egypt to British-dominated India. This area, and especially Palestine, was also important for Britain because whoever controlled Palestine might also block the Suez Canal which was vital for the British Empire. France, on the other hand, had similar objectives and was mainly interested in Syria, including its Mount Lebanon coast. Moreover, Russia had its own interests in the region.

 

 To achieve its objectives, Britain made different, and contradictory, deals.

 

 The first deal was made with Hussein Ibn Ali, the Sherif of Mecca. Negotiations were made in a series of letters exchanged between Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner, in Cairo, and Sherif Hussein. In these negotiations, Hussein offered Arab contribution in the war against the Ottoman Empire in exchange for British support for an independent Arabian Hashemite Kingdom in the Arabian Peninsula, Great Syria (including Lebanon and Palestine), and Iraq. Accordingly, Hussein proclaimed a rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in June 1916.

 

 The second deal was made with France. On 16 May 1916, the Sykes-Picot agreement was signed between Britain, France and Russia according to which the whole Fertile Crescent was divided into British and French spheres of influence. Because of the communist revolution in the following year, Russia was out of the game.

 

 The third deal was made with the Zionists under Chaim Weizmann's leadership. In return to Zionist support for Britain in its war aims, Britain promised to support the Zionists in their project in Palestine. This support was reflected in the Balfour Declaration made in a letter dated 2 November 1917. The letter was sent to Lord Rothschild from Mr. (later Lord) Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary. It stated:

 

 "I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.

 

 "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

 

 "I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation." (NECEF, Palestine and The Palestinians, p. 119)

 

 The Balfour Declaration was not a reward for Weizmann for his services to the British government during World War I. Neither it was a mere response to the intensive Zionist lobbying led by Weizmann. Britain had an imperial interest in Palestine which, at the time, seemed to be compatible with the Zionist interests. Weizmann knew that very well. His letter to C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, on 12 November 1914 (quoted in Chaim Weizmann's "Trial and Error", p. 191) reflects this fact. Weizmann admitted that the British government was not impressed by the Zionist dreams by quoting what Mr. Asquith, the British Prime Minister, had wrote in his diary on 28 January 1915 (quoted in Trial and Error, p. 193).

 

 Palestine was invaded in 1917 by the British forces led by Allenby and was supported by some of the Arab troops headed by Sherif Hussein's son, Emir Faisal. Allenby captured Jerusalem in December. The Arab troops under Faisal, moved north into Transjordan and shared with the British in their campaign in Syria.

 

 Faisal was proclaimed as king in Damascus for a short period. France invaded Syria and expelled Faisal. He was later made king of Iraq under British control. Winston Churchill, the British colonial secretary chose Faisal's brother, Abdullah, to be the temporary governor of Transjordan in March 1921. Transjordan was eventually excluded from the British mandate on Palestine, which came into force on 29 Sept. 1923, and was given to Emir Abdullah under British hegemony.

 

 At the same time, the British were in contact with the Saudi leader, Abdul Aziz Ibn-Saud, through the India Office. They made an agreement with Ibn-Saud at the end of 1922, after he invaded Hijaz and controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula. The agreement defined the Saudi kingdom's borders with both Iraq and Kuwait, which were drawn by a British civil servant.

 

 The mandate in Palestine as approved by the League of Nations in 1923 was drafted to accommodate the objectives of the Zionist movement. It included a provision, which incorporated the Balfour declaration into the mandate. Even before the mandate was approved, the British Government decided to send a Zionist Commission, headed by Weizmann, to Palestine on January 1918 to assess the prospects of Zionist development and to allay Arab fears of Zionism. The Arab Bureau was convinced of the necessity of reconciling the two British clients in the Middle East.

 

 In a letter to Jon Kimche, Israel Sieff described the Zionist Commission as "the key to our future. Dr Weizmann had invited me to act as the secretary of the Commission and I was most happy to accept. For I had come to understand from what he told me that not only the fate of the Balfour Declaration but also the prospect of a Jewish state would depend largely on what the Zionist Commission would be able to achieve. We were, in fact, to lay the practical foundations of our state while we were still raging, and the future uncertain. It was to be our act of faith and to this now I devoted all my efforts. For we were to create the fait accompli that might well be decisive in the negotiations at the Peace Conference. Few people understood the significance of the Zionist Commission; Balfour did, Allenby did and so did we".

 

 A "Secret and Confidential" paper on the Zionist Commission was prepared by the War Office for the General Staff, which used as its source, amongst other intelligence material, private letters and telegrams which were dispatched by the Intelligence Directorate for the ZO. The paper stated that: "The Zionist Commission was planned by Dr Weizmann in conjunction with the Foreign Office". The paper stressed that Weizmann's policy of seeking a purely British protectorate in Palestine "conflicts radically with the Sykes-Picot Treaty", and that "one of the main political aims of the Zionists is to obtain the abolition of that treaty and to substitute for it a British Protectorate over the whole of Palestine." The paper also stressed the significant role which Weizmann was playing in convincing President Wilson of the importance to the US of "a non-Turkish Palestine" and of impressing on him that "a Jewish Palestine" was synonymous with a "British Palestine." (Jon Kimche, Palestine or Israel: The Untold Story of Why we Failed. 1917 - 1923, 1967 - 1973. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973, pp. 126 - 128, citing Notes on Zionism, Secret & Confidential, for the information of the General Staff; three papers dated February and April 1918, and February 1919; B19/22, 100-2/19 H & S 6839, wo, pp. 10 and 16).

 

 On 3 March 1918, Sykes to Emir Faisal enlisting his support of Zionism addressed an appeal:

 

 "I know that the Arabs despise, condemn and hate the Jews, but passion is the ruin of princes and peoples... this race despised and weak, is universal, is all powerful and cannot be put down... In the councils of every state, in every bank, in every business, in every enterprise there are members of this race...

 

 "...And remember these people do not seek to conquer you, do not seek to drive out the Arabs of Palestine; all they ask for is to be able to do what they have not done elsewhere, to return to the land of their forefathers, to cultivate it, to work with their hands, to become peasants once more. This is a noble thought in the soul of the Jews... they do not desire to go there in millions, what they desire is to be able to feel in Palestine a Jew may live his life and speak his tongue as he did in ancient times....I entreat you...look on the Jewish movement as the great key to Arab success...Stand up for Arab rights; uphold the rights of the Palestinian people; make good arrangements, but always as between friend and friend, equal and equal,... recognize them as a powerful ally." (FO 882/3)

 

 The British military administration in Palestine was constrained by the rules of war. Accordingly it maintained the status quo in Palestine. It closed the Land Registry Offices in November 1918 and did not facilitate, though it did not stop, Jewish immigration.

 

 In July 1920, the military administration was replaced by a civil administration, which was studded with Jewish Zionists. These included the High Commissioner, Herbert Samuel; the Attorney-General, Norman Bentwich; the Director of Immigration, Albert Hyamson; an official in the Department of Immigration, Dennis Cohen; the Principal Assistant Secretary to the government, Max Nurock; the Director of Commerce and Industry, Ralph Harari; and the Controller of Stores, Harold Solomon. Non-Jewish members of the administration included steadfast friends of the Jewish national home such as the Chief Secretary to the government, Wyndham Deeds and his successor Gilbert Clayton. (Sami Hadawi, Zionism and the Land of Palestine, a paper prepared and delivered as a speech in an International Symposium on "Zionism and Racism" convened in Tripoli, Libya, during the period 24 - 28 July 1976. The speeches were edited by Walter Lehn and published in book form. p. 6)

 

 The British role was significant in facilitating the realization of the Zionist dream. It was a breakthrough for the Zionists without which there was no way their dream could have been realized. However, it is important to note that Britain was looking after its own interests and was not trying to help either the Arabs or the Zionists.

 

 

 53 Years of Neo-Nazi Israel

 

 By E. Yaghi

 

www.ptimes.com

 

 Fifty three years after the Israeli Declaration of Independence, May 15, 1948. Zionists have kept up their implementation of the dispossession of the Palestinian people. From the early massacres of the indigenous population of the Palestinians in such places as Deir Yassin in 1948, where all the inhabitants of this peaceful village were wiped out by cold-blooded murderers, to the present settlements in Arab east Jerusalem, the Israeli policy has remained one and the same, how to take the land away from its original inhabitants.

 

 The Holocaust has long ago ended for Jews, who may or may not have actually been persecuted by Hitler's regime, but it has continued tragically for the Palestinians for over 50 years. There has been no international outcry over the loss of lives, indiscriminate torture of the Palestinian people, imprisonment with trail, confiscation of property, nor over the non-existence of self-determination and the lack of political and personal freedom. And there have been no epic movies made with sell-outs across the globe about the poignant sufferings of the Palestinians.

 

 The so-called Peace process has only been a camouflage for the Zionists to further suppress the Palestinian people and to effect their expulsion from their own land. It is a plot to further rid Palestine of Palestinians as well as gain an economic stronghold over Arab markets.

 

 Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, knew that the native Palestinians would resist the takeover of their country and he therefore suggested that they be dealt with brute force and military supremacy. Not hard to accomplish seeing that the Palestinians, even before the British Mandate, were not allowed weapons of any kind and so were almost helpless when they were invaded by the Jewish terror gangs and the Israeli army even prior to 1948 and afterwards.

 

 And how can we ever forget that the late Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, a proponent of the Peace Accords, had once announced a new policy towards Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, one of "force, power, and blows." It was at this time that civilians, mostly children, were rounded up by Israeli forces and severely and brutally beaten without reason. His assassination indeed was a kind of karma.

 

 Though not much is left of the original land of Palestine, Gaza and the West Bank are, according to Zionism, the Land of Israel to which the Jews have a historic right. When Israel came into control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it had more than 1 million Palestinians. Since that time, successive Israeli governments have increased the Jewish population and decreased the Palestinian one. Settlements have sprung up all over what's left of Palestine and there has been a quite successful systematic effort to destroy any form of Palestinian political leadership and prevent economic development. The physical separation of the West Bank and Gaza has made the two areas more like massive concentration camps than areas that are supposed to form a Palestinian state.

 

 Israel's most effective means of terrorism has been its aggressive wars and military attacks on civilian populations both within the confines of occupied Palestine as well as in neighboring countries such as Lebanon and Syria.

 

 What will the next fifty years see? The picture is far from bright as settlements continue, immigration of Jews from all over the world, encouraged, Palestinians further dispossessed of their land on a daily basis, and subjugated to inhuman treatment at the hands of the Israelis.

 

 Israel, the Frankenstein monster that America created, has made every day a Holocaust for the native inhabitants of the land they occupy.

 

 

Soothed  By a Little Girl's Love

Scars of Hatred

 

Author Norman Finkelstein once compared Palestinians to Native Americans. European settlers pushed them off their land, terrorized and killed their women and children and eradicated their means of livelihood. For defending themselves...

 

By SUSAN ABULHAWA

 

My day starts with the sweetest words my ears ever heard: "I wuv you, mommy," says Natalie, my "almost four" year old, as I drop her off at preschool.The morning is busy. At midday, I take a few moments to sift through my emails before dashing off to lunch. The first is an article from The Guardian newspaper (London) about Israeli "preventive attacks" that destroyed 10 Palestinian homes. Details follow about the Korabi family, just settling in at 8:30 p.m. when tank shells pound their home "sending the family of 17 scurrying for safety." Amidst the roar of tanks and screams of children, 18-year-old Osama didn't make it and was buried beneath his newly demolished home. I'm almost certain the story will not make major U.S. media outlets.

 

Next is yet another press release from Defense of Children International. This one, "Is anyone Listening?" details an Israeli attack on a Palestinian school for blind girls. My stomach knots as I read on about the breaking windows, and the cowering of young blind girls. DCI uses phrases like "gross
and systematic policy of child rights violations by the Israeli occupation." "I wuv you, mommy," comes back to me. I read on. There has to be some good news in these emails.Next is a statement from MADRE, a women's human rights organization, that Israeli forces are targeting Palestinian children with gunfire. "This is a horrifying thought and we do not make the allegation lightly," they said. But this is not news to me. How can people support this? Do they know?Is Natalie taking a nap or just lying on her mat during "quiet time" at school.

 

Then comes Amnesty International news. Elementary school children throwing rocks and one of them is shot in the head. From LAW, an affiliate of Paris-based Human Rights organizations, comes news of awful closures. An Israeli soldier raped a Palestinian woman in her home and the army later confirmed that "indecent acts" did take place. A Jewish settler gets community service and a fine for beating to death defenseless 11-year-old Hilmi Shusha. An Israeli soldier gets 49 days in jail for shooting a 12-year- old Palestinian boy walking home from school. It's all too much and I have to get back to work.Tonight I'm going to grant Natalie's nightly request to "read more books." I never know if she really wants to
read or just wants to delay going to sleep. It doesn't matter.

 

Then a story closer to home: Since 7-year-old Hiam lost her right eye to a soldier's bullet on her way back from school in December, she is afraid to go to school, will not play with other kids and doesn't talk much anymore. She clings to her mother all day and wets her bed at night. Both of them are in Connecticut now staying with my friend, Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, while Hiam gets fitted for an ocular prosthetic. I send an email to Mazin, the young Yale professor, humanitarian, and activist who runs on five hours of sleep. I often wonder why we have a leader like Arafat when we have people like Mazin among us. I know his big heart will nurture Hiam's spirit and bring something good back to her young life. But the knots remain as I check major U.S. papers on the Internet. Our horrors are rarely told. A defenseless society that has endured 53 years of dispossession and 34 years of a cruel military occupation is rising up again with stones. In the process, another generation of us is physically and/or psychologically maimed.

 

Norman Finkelstein once compared Palestinians to Native Americans. European settlers pushed them off their land, terrorized and killed their women and children and eradicated their means of livelihood. For defending themselves, they were branded as "savages," or, as Finkelstein puts it, "yesterday's terrorists."  I leave work a bit early to surprise Natalie during "circle time." Today I hug her a little tighter and a little longer. I could hold her like that forever but she is anxious to show me what she made and pulls out artwork from her cubby. I'm grateful to see the happy pictures she draws. I've seen what Palestinian children in the occupied territories draw and it isn't pretty.

 

At home, I make Natalie's favorite dinner, mac and cheese with chicken nuggets, and heat up leftovers for myself. We play for a while and watch Rug Rats. She gets water all over the bathroom while she takes a bath and runs around naked until I catch her to put on her jammies. We read before she falls off to sleep and I venture out in the cold to my front porch with a glass of wine. Grateful to walk out of my house without being shot at for breaking curfew, I remember Natalie's advice some weeks ago after she heard my prayers. "Mommy, you should wish on a star to protect Palestinians." "It works," she assures and offers a new toy as proof.My own childhood and random thoughts begin to flash in bits and pieces in and out of my mind. The Israeli soldier who told me my face looked like the donkey on which I posed for a photo; the children who told me to leave a pool with a chorus chant, "dirty Arab get out"; my two cousins, walking me to their home from the orphanage where I lived in East Jerusalem, who were forced by a band of soldiers to spit in each other's mouth's before they would let us pass; hand washing my clothes on the flat roof of the orphanage with 50 other girls who were more like sisters; picking bugs out of our food and lice out of each other's hair.

 

My experience of being strip-searched - women and girls lined up naked with the humiliated stares of modest Muslim women - a metal detector parting my legs at the Jordanian border when I was 10 years old; the desperation of my aunt who, after being expelled from East Jerusalem in 1967, sneaked back to her home alone with four children by hiking three days through the mountains to avoid detection by Israeli occupation forces; my father, my mother, my aunts and uncles - evicted; the Jewish family that now occupies my grandmother's home.

 

My ancient family, shattered; my rich culture reduced to subhuman images of terrorism; the first intifada; my escape; culture shock in the United States; high School, college and graduate school; growing up and living without family; the aloneness of my life like a branch cut from an ancient olive tree and slung to far corners of the earth; my struggle, as the first to be born on foreign soil, to reclaim my history and roots; the seemingly endless Palestinian tragedy of death, checkpoints, settlements, occupation, dispossession, and indignity caught between death and a fierce determination to be free.

 

The knots finally and suddenly unravel into tears as I realize how easily I could be the mother of a terrorized little girl with one eye shot out. The thought of Natalie suffering like that is profoundly heavy. I selfishly thank whomever or whatever out there that spared my little girl a life under occupation. I scout the most promising star and make a wish for Hiam and her mother. Then, with a wine-induced power, I summon all the stars and counsel them to act on DCFs plea to protect the children.  Natalie is sound asleep with the covers off. I cover her back up even though I know she'll have them off in a few minutes. Sometimes I can't believe my great fortune to be her mommy and deserve her love. I kiss her forehead and whisper "I love you, too. All is not well with the world, but my day ended as it began - with love.

 

Susan J. Abulhawa is a resident of Yardley. Her email address is sjabulhawa@..., March 16, 2001

A Beginner's Guide

 The Ten Commandments of jewish racism

 

  "What it means to be the chosen ones of Israel?"

 

By Rabbi Schlomo Goldstein

 

 1. If a territory had been ours for 500 years, and yours for 50  years, it belongs to us - you are merely residents.

 

 2. If a territory was yours for 500 years and ours for 50 years, it  belongs to us - borders must not be changed.

 

 3. If a territory had been ours 2500 years ago, but never since, it  belongs to us for it is the "Cradle of our Nation."

 

 4. If a majority of our people live there, the country belongs to us  - they must enjoy the universal right of self-determination.

 

 5. If a minority of our people live there, the country belongs to us  - they must enjoy the universal right of a minority and hence be   protected against your oppression.

 

 6. Our greed for expansion is really a Historical Necessity whilst  your desire for self-determination must be categorized as Fascism.

 

 7. Celebrating our Ethnic Heritage (real or invented) is a sacred  duty to God whilst yours is only racism.

 

 8. Inventing accomplishments for our people gives us a sense of  worth. Your accomplishments will be erased with the help of your  own kind.

 

 9. When we shout "Death to the Goyim (non-Jews)" it should be  understood as a pure act of kindness and understanding. However,  if non-Jews demand Human Rights for themselves it is considered  one a hate crimes against the children of Israel.

 

 10. All the above rules apply to us but not to you.

 

 

 Sweet Dream Turns Sour

 

 By Azzam Tamimi*

 

 Fifty three years ago the Jewish State of Israel was established in Palestine by the Zionist movement. As an alleged fulfillment of a biblical prophecy, or a divine promise, Israel was supposed to provide a safe haven for world Jewry; any Jew anywhere in the world could leave his home and travel to Palestine, acquire Israeli citizenship and realize his dream of returning to the Promised Land. By invoking the Bible, the secularist--mostly agnostic--pioneers of Zionism sought to rally support for the project.

 

 Before the Holocaust, this project not only attracted the support of a small number of Jews, but was also met with strong opposition in Orthodox Jewish circles because of its violation of the Jewish creed itself, which prohibited Jews from returning to the Promised Land until the coming of the Messiah.

 

 In celebrating the Fifty third anniversary of the Jewish State, many Jews have been reflecting on the dream that came true. Some of them admit, as has been shown by the numerous TV and radio programs and press articles prepared for this occasion, that the dream has not been that sweet. To start with, less than a third of world Jews have opted to benefit from the Law of Return and settle down in Palestine. What was supposed to be a country for all the Jews has proven to be a country for only a minority of them, especially for those who have been compelled to migrate to it.

 

 Examples are numerous, but one may cite the exodus out of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War when Jews, thanks to Hitler and then the victors in the war, were given no other alternative if they had to flee the hell of Europe, which no longer wanted them. The U.S. government itself did not want at the time any more Jews to migrate to the United States. Jews of Arab origin, who left their homes in Yemen, Iraq, Egypt and North Africa, would not have done so had it not been for the intimidating policy of the Zionist agency who went as far as bombing synagogues in Iraq to compel the Jews to flee. Another more recent case is that of the Ethiopian Jews.

 

 Famine, civil war and regional politics provided an ideal opportunity for them to set their eyes on a place that was at the time definitely safer and more comfortable than the home of their ancestors in Ethiopia. There is also the case of the Russians, who would have been delighted to go to America, their real Promised Land, had they been permitted to do so. They were forced to go to Palestine after the United States denied them entry visas. Many of them who settled in Palestine continue to have their eyes set on America.

 

 Secondly, the state of Israel has not been able to maintain its original secularist socialist character. Although the original Zionists used the Biblical promise for purely technical reasons, it was bound to backfire, as it did more vigorously during the past ten years or so.  Perhaps the founders of Zionism thought they could get away with turning Jews into a nation that could be rallied behind a nationalist cause without evoking Jewish religious dogma and whatever myths associated with it.

 

 Fifty three years after the establishment of the Jewish state, such presuppositions have been proven wrong. This is the main dilemma now facing secularist Jews inclined toward some form of peace with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. The phenomenon of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza is striking evidence that Zionism bore within it the seed of self-destruction. Interviews with representatives of these settlers, who come from as far as Latin America, North America and the former republics of the Soviet Union, show clearly that they justify the occupation of Palestinian land and the displacement of the original inhabitants on purely religious grounds, specifically that God promised the Israelites this land, which they allege was the home of their ancestors more than 2,500 years ago. A secularist discourse that is willing to exchange land for peace is irreligious in the eyes of the settlers, who claim they only came to Palestine in response to a divine call. It is this divine call that is now tearing the Jewish population of occupied Palestine into pieces and is threatening to set fire to this edifice that seems less resilient in the face of internal threats than to external ones.

 

 Thirdly, Jews who came to settle in the Promised Land discovered, to their dismay, the falsity of the Zionist myth that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land. The land had, and still has, a people. Some of them live in pockets of populations here and there in the West Bank and Gaza, but the majority of them are in refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries, still waiting to return. The Jewish inhabitants of Palestine offer all kinds of solutions. Some suggest that Palestinians should be transferred to other Arab countries because there is plenty of land there to take them, whereas Palestine is too small for the two peoples; anyway, it is divinely allocated exclusively for the Jews. Others suggest that Palestinians already displaced should be settled and turned into citizens of the countries they are already in. Those who remain in the West Bank and Gaza, it is suggested, may remain and be ruled by a Palestinian administration with very little sovereignty and must report regularly to the Israelis (the Oslo-based settlement).

 

 Fourth, the utopian Jewish democracy has been exposed as a project set up on a shaky foundation of deceit, aggression and racism. What is interesting to note, as Israel celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, is that this very ugly face of Israel is becoming obvious not only to third parties in Europe, America or elsewhere in the world, but also to some Israeli Jews as well. The more this painful reality becomes obvious to more Jews, the more they will agonize over how they have, whether directly or indirectly, played a part in realizing it. The more Jews that awake from their somber, the more difficult, and the more costly, it will be for Israel to exist.

 

 Fifth, Israel's success, not only in neutralizing the traditional Palestinian resistance movement (the PLO) but also in turning it into a policeman commissioned with all the dirty work that was previously taken care of by the Israeli occupation troops, is a short-lived success. When a wave of resistance is pacified, a more formidable resistance movement emerges. This is the story of the struggle that has been going on in Palestine long before Israel was established in response to foreign occupation. What distinguishes the current wave of resistance, led by Hamas, is that it has the broadest base ever since the occupation of Palestine in 1948. Hamas, unlike the PLO, does not believe it is capable alone of liberating Palestine, hence it does not call itself a liberation movement. The task of liberation is too big for a local, or even a regional, group to undertake singularly. Sharing the burden with 1 billion Muslims, one fifth of the world's population, is the strategy of this resistance movement.

 

 However, for liberation to take place, a change in the global balance of powers, which has since the turn of the century been in favor of creating a state for the Jews in Palestine, would have to take place. It is no secret that Israel could not be created, and could not have survived this long, without the financial aid and military support of the West, especially the United States of America.

 

 Palestinians who believe that their land will one day return to them, or to their children, are confident that local, regional and global changes are in the making. They are hopeful that Israel will not live to celebrate its centennial anniversary. If any has doubt that this is possible, history is recommended as a reminder that it is indeed possible.

 

 * Director of the London-based Liberty for the Muslim World

 

 

 The Promised Land of Broken Promises

 

 By Ramzy Baroud

 

 And the debate continues...

 

 Is there such a thing as the “Promised Land”?

 

 If there is, then what are its borders, to whom was it promised and why?

 

 As most of us already know, Zionist philosophy has used the biblical statement in Genesis (15:18) in which God promised to give His seed the land between the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates to support their political claims to the “Promised Land”.

 

 Assuming that the Bible is a reliable source for political allegation, Zionist philosophy regarding the “Promised Land” fails to address other biblical statements made by “God” regarding the same issue. For instance, in Genesis 21:13, “God” names Ishmael as His seed. Agreeing to that fact makes Ishmael the father of Arabs. “God” makes it clear, then, that Arabs are part of the promise. In addition, Galatians 3:27-29 clearly implies that all the believers in Christ “automatically” are the seed of Abraham.

 

 After this long cycle of biblical promises, Ephesians 2:12 excludes the Jews from the promise, because those without the belief in Christ are strangers. If this set of promises confuses you, you are not alone. Many more are still confused, even if some do not admit it.

 

 Instead of arguing for or against these biblical claims and statements (which will always isolate and anger certain groups), I have decided to take another route. I am going to assume that God has given his promise exclusively to the Jews. If this promise was delivered in a godly fashion, let it be. If not, we have to deal with two conclusions and choose that which we find fit. First, God has broken His promise, which in itself is hard to accept as a characteristic of God. Or secondly, God has never promised anything He could not fulfill to start with.

 

 David’s unfulfilled promise

 

 In the middle of this century, David was given a promise. He was told that his “Promised Land” was waiting for him to return. David was a German Jew who suffered the consequences of the political turmoil in Europe during that time. After suffering through much hardship for a few year, David’s dream seemed closer to reality that ever before. In no time, David arrived with his family, wife and three children at an agricultural settlement. He was told, “this is an empty desert and it’s our obligation ‘as Jews’ to make it fit to be called the Promised Land.” Two years after his arrival, David found himself holding a rifle and chasing Arabs out of their villages. In the beginning, David was not comfortable watching his friends shooting defenseless and unarmed Arab peasants. Later on, David decided to do whatever it took to clear the land from the “Enemies of God”. One day, David found himself killing an Arab child in the arms of his mother.

 

 At the conclusion of the “cleansing”, the “Promised Land” was cleared of 418 Arab villages and towns, which were destroyed, and 13,000 Palestinian Arabs were massacred. Over a million Arabs were displaced around the world, denied their human rights and dignity. Now, everything looks different. No more poor Arab villages and suspicious faces. David is lying on his comfortable couch watching TV. A picture of one of David’s children stands on the shelf. His name is Dani, an army officer in Hebron. Perhaps he is chasing little Arab kids with a more advanced rifle than the one his father once had. Even though a much older David seems preoccupied with his favourite programme on Israeli TV, a certain picture will never leave his mind. It is a picture of an Arab woman, weeping and begging for his mercy to spare the life of her son. David never listened to her that day and killed the boy. David looks around him, and with shame he cries. Then he asks himself ‘why didn’t I go somewhere else, any place else besides the “Promised Land?”

 

The Long Journey to Qundar

 

 Ishaq is an Ethiopian Jew. He lived in the Qundar region of Ethiopia most of his life. Through the years, Ishaq made many friends in the area where he lived. His friendships included Muslims and Christians. His best friend was Mohammed. Ishaq and Mohammed looked alike. Some people thought they were brothers. In the early 1980s, some blonde-haired, blue-eyed strangers were spotted in Ishaq’s small and isolated town. After frequent visits to the local leadership of the area, the strangers openly appealed to the people to “return home”. Even though Qundar was the only home Ishaq knew, he was driven to believe that he lived in exile, and the “Promised Land” (also known as Israel) was where he and his people belonged. Even though Ishaq was never a practicing Jew, long years of unemployment pushed him to seriously consider this new option. The youth of Qundar, who never stopped talking about the blondes and the beaches of the “Promised Land”, convinced Ishaq to search for the lost paradise.

 

 The journey to “Israel” was full of danger and hardships. With the help of some organized groups, Ishaq found his way to the Red Sea through Sudan, then on to Israel where he arrived along with a large group of Ethiopian Jews also known as “Flasha”. A few months after his arrival, Ishaq’s family joined his quest to the “land of milk and honey”.

 

 Many years have passed since Ishaq and his family settled in the low-income housing of one of the Israeli cities. So far, none of the promises made to Ishaq have been delivered. Since he arrived in Israel, he has never had a stable job or a reasonable income to make a living with dignity in an area where prices never go down. Once a month, Ishaq stands in a long line of immigrants waiting for the Government’s assistance check. The worst part in that embarrassing moment is when the cashier throws the check at him with disgust. Yet, Ishaq learned to live without complaining. As a responsible Israeli citizen, Ishaq donated his blood once every few months. He was told that if he does so, he might save the life of one Israeli soldier. A TV report was aired some time ago showing that the donated blood of the Flasha found itself in the big dumpster behind the blood bank. Some officials rushed to explain the conduct of the blood centres, saying that the danger of the AIDS virus from blacks is much greater than other races. Once again, with the same silent face, Ishaq shook his head with regret and said nothing.

 

 For a while Ishaq had been lecturing his little children about his “Promised Land”. However, the “Promised Land” he constantly talks about is different from the one he was originally told about. Qundar is what Ishaq believes to be his “Promised Land” and one day, he tells his family, they’ll return, regardless of all the danger and hardships.

 

 Graveyards for Jews only

 

 It was difficult for Haeem and his family upon their arrival in Israel from the Soviet Union. Even though they tried so hard, they didn’t fit with Israeli society. Abraham, Haeem’s oldest son, missed being part of a group. Despite the fact that he knew little to nothing about the politics of the region, Abraham joined the Israeli forces in Occupied South Lebanon. Abraham’s parents were filled with joy once they learned that their son would take his place in defense of his land.

 

 Last year, Abraham was killed in the fighting. Even though a great deal of sadness was felt by the “returned” family, a greater sense of pride was felt. With the blood of their son being shed for Israel, Haeem’s family felt that their quest for the “Promised Land” was complete. When Abraham’s body was brought back, neither official ceremony nor gunfire was heard anywhere around to honour the fallen warrior. What was more devastating to the already saddened family was the refusal to bury Abraham in a Jewish graveyard with religious ceremonies. Haeem was told that he didn’t complete all the steps needed to prove his family’s Judaism. After days of appeals and begging, Haeem was on his way, joined by his son’s body and his family, back to Russia. Russia was the place that Haeem chose to bury his son after the long journey to escape Russia. While Haeem gazed from the window at the “Land of Israel”, he didn’t see the “Promised Land” of milk and honey. Instead, he saw a heartless monster that no longer welcomed them and no longer cared

 

 Conclusion

 

 The stories of David, Ishaq and Haeem are true for so many promised Israelis. Once they reached the end of an imaginary rainbow called the “Promised Land”, they found nothing there except pain and regrets. Through the years, immigration to Israel was accompanied by a reversed immigration from Israel. Those who remained had to deal with many unanswered questions. In the end, some called on their government to come to terms with reality so they could truly feel at home. Others chose to play the role of the cowboys who chase behind Palestinian protesters (the Indians, in this case). With the accumulation of years, however, a greater sense of loss, shallowness and regrets intensified in the Israeli streets. In the midst of the madness, the two original suggested conclusions push themselves to the surface once again. Did God fail those who He granted (once upon a time) a promise? Or had He ever made promises to start with? For some, at least for now, the questions might remain unanswered. For others, personal beliefs or logic might be the judge to decide. For David, Ishaq, Haeem and others like them, the question was answered a long time ago. For them, Diaspora truly started the moment they left their respective homelands, be they Germany, Ethiopia, Russia and elsewhere.

 

 

 Al-Nakba: The Reality of a Dispossession

 

 By Ray Hanania*

 

 Al Nakba means many different things to many different Palestinians, scattered throughout the face of the globe.

 

 In English, the word is defined in various ways, although the most commonly accepted is "the Catastrophe."

 

 But even "catastrophe" cannot come close to accurately defining the true context and meaning of an event that has devastated so many Palestinian lives, paralyzed Palestinian culture, and incarcerated our Palestinian future.

 

 It represents a single moment in time. Yet this one great moment is measured in a distance that encompasses such great tragedy that is incomprehensible to any single human being.

 

 More than a national nightmare, Al Nakba is contradiction that confronts Palestinian identity: The realization of being unrealized; the existence of non-existence; the presence of being absent; moving forward with no movement; achieving without real achievement.

 

 Al Nakba has forced its victims into a perpetual state of suffering, caught between the beauty of what could have been and the tragedy of what is.

 

 It constrains even the most promising of conscious individual success with the pain of our collective failure. As Palestinians, we are constantly fighting a battle within ourselves, where even the greatest essence of achievement is overshadowed by the insurmountable and everlasting reminder of our national debacle.

 

 Al Nakba has manacled the gift of life that is given to all human beings on this planet who share a collective cultural and geographical focus.

 

 It has forced us into a gnarled culture of victimization and a luridly dark vocabulary of despair and despondency.

 

 We Palestinians can never really comprehend the true loss of our suffering or the real cost of Al Nakba.

 

 The question "What have we really lost?" is shackled by the limitations of our own imagination. After all, we are only human.

 

 I often try to imagine what has really been stolen from me by Al Nakba? And, I have difficulty visualizing in the vastness of my mind the true meaning of that loss.

 

 What could I have become, had the soul of my genealogy not been so violently uprooted? How can I even attempt to answer that question when I don't even know what options were even available to a young Palestinian child nurtured in an environment that might have venerated my rights?

 

 Instead, I live in a diaspora: Ironically, it is hand-me-down, a word borrowed from the suffering of the very people who were instrumental in my own wandering. Drifting. Meandering. Lost.

 

 Sometimes, it is a nightmare among my own people, divided by internal politics and divergent goals. Drowning in empty rhetoric. Smothering in shortsighted vanity. I did not choose to live in America. I was cast there in the backwash of Al Nakba.

 

 As I walk past the poverty stricken, poor souls who in their aimlessness beg for alms on the streets of America, the foreign land where my existence has found itself, I wonder who really is the homeless one? Him or me?

 

 I have this feeling that the poor should give to me. That I am really on the cold sidewalk, bundled in a tattered old blanket, hand outstretched begging for charity from the steady stream of passers-by who acknowledge me with patronizing looks and disrespectful pittance.

 

 Is that me? A pauper on the sidewalk of life, beseeching my existence to return?

 

 As a Palestinian, I deserve more than that. I deserve what could have been mine.

 

 No matter where I am in life, or what I become in my career, there is a black emptiness in my heart that pulls at me and tells me to come home.

 

 And I peer into that abyss and wonder out loud, through the suffering and pain that each Palestinian is forced to share . . . how?

 

 *Ray Hanania is a Palestinian Arab American writer and author. His columns are archived on the World Wide Web at (www.hanania.com).

 

 

Special Report http://www.washington-report.org

 

What Christians Don’t Know About Israel

 

By Grace Halsell

 

May/June 1998, pages 112, 126

 

American Jews sympathetic to Israel dominate key positions in all areas of our government where decisions are made regarding the Middle East. This being the case, is there any hope of ever changing U.S. policy? President Bill Clinton as well as most members of Congress support Israel—and they know why. U.S. Jews sympathetic to Israel donate lavishly to their campaign coffers. .

 

The answer to achieving an even-handed Middle East policy might lie elsewhere—among those who support Israel but don’t really know why. This group is the vast majority of Americans. They are well-meaning, fair-minded Christians who feel bond ed to Israel—and Zionism—often from atavistic feelings, in some cases dating from childhood.

 

I am one of those. I grew up listening to stories of a mystical, allegorical, spiritual Israel. This was before a modern political entity with the same name appeared on our maps. I attended Sunday School and watched an instructor draw down window- type shades to show maps of the Holy Land. I imbibed stories of a Good and Chosen people who fought against their Bad “unChosen” enemies.

 

In my early 20s, I began traveling the world, earning my living as a writer. I came to the subject of the Middle East rather late in my career. I was sadly lacking in knowledge regarding the area. About all I knew was what I had learned in Sunday School.

 

And typical of many U.S. Christians, I somehow considered a modern state created in 1948 as a homeland for Jews persecuted under the Nazis as a replica of the spiritual, mystical Israel I heard about as a child. When in 1979 I initially went to Jerusalem, I planned to write about the three great monotheistic religions and leave out politics. “Not write about politics?” scoffed one Palestinian, smoking a waterpipe in the Old Walled City. “We eat politics, morning, noon and night!”

 

As I would learn, the politics is about land, and the co-claimants to that land: the indigenous Palestinians who have lived there for 2,000 years and the Jews who started arriving in large numbers after the Second World War. By living among Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Christians and Muslims, I saw, heard, smelled, experienced the police state tactics Israelis use against Palestinians.

 

My research led to a book entitled Journey to Jerusalem. My journey not only was enlightening to me as regards Israel, but also I came to a deeper, and sadder, understanding of my own country. I say sadder understanding because I began to see that, in Mid dle East politics, we the people are not mak ing the decisions, but rather that supporters of Israel are doing so. And typical of most Americans, I tended to think the U.S. media was “free” to print news impartially.

 

“It shouldn’t be published. It’s anti-Israel.”

 

In the late 1970s, when I first went to Jerusalem, I was unaware that editors could and would classify “news” depending on who was doing what to whom. On my initial visit to Israel-Palestine, I had interviewed dozens of young Palestinian men. About one in four related stories of torture.

 

Israeli police had come in the night, dragged them from their beds and placed hoods over their heads. Then in jails the Israelis had kept them in isolation, besieged them with loud, incessant noises, hung them upside down and had sadistically mutilated their genitals. I had not read such stories in the U.S. media. Wasn’t it news? Obviously, I naively thought, U.S. editors simply didn’t know it was happening.

 

On a trip to Washington, DC, I hand-delivered a letter to Frank Mankiewicz, then head of the public radio station WETA. I explained I had taped interviews with Palestinians who had been brutally tortured. And I’d make them available to him. I got no reply. I made several phone calls. Eventually I was put through to a public relations person, a Ms. Cohen, who said my letter had been lost. I wrote again. In time I began to realize what I hadn’t known: had it been Jews who were strung up and tortured, it would be news. But interviews with tortured Arabs were “lost” at WETA.

 

The process of getting my book Journey to Jerusalem published also was a learning experience. Bill Griffin, who signed a contract with me on behalf of MacMillan Publishing Company, was a former Roman Cath olic priest. He assured me that no one other than himself would edit the book. As I researched the book, making several trips to Israel and Palestine, I met frequently with Griffin, showing him sample chapters. “Terrific,” he said of my material.

 

The day the book was scheduled to be published, I went to visit MacMillan’s. Checking in at a reception desk, I spotted Griffin across a room, cleaning out his desk. His secretary Margie came to greet me. In tears, she whispered for me to meet her in the ladies room. When we were alone, she confided, “He’s been fired.” She indicated it was because he had signed a contract for a book that was sympathetic to Palestinians. Griffin, she said, had no time to see me.

 

Later, I met with another MacMillan official, William Curry. “I was told to take your manuscript to the Israeli Embassy, to let them read it for mistakes,” he told me. “They were not pleased. They asked me, ‘You are not going to publish this book, are you?’ I asked, ‘Were there mistakes?’ ‘Not mistakes as such. But it shouldn’t be published. It’s anti-Israel.’”

 

Somehow, despite obstacles to prevent it, the presses had started rolling. After its publication in 1980, I was invited to speak in a number of churches. Christians generally reacted with disbelief. Back then, there was little or no coverage of Israeli land confiscation, demolition of Palestinian homes, wan ton arrests and torture of Palestinian civilians.

 

The Same Question

 

Speaking of these injustices, I invariably heard the same question, “How come I didn’t know this?” Or someone might ask, “But I haven’t read about that in my newspaper.” To these church audiences, I related my own learning experience, that of seeing hordes of U.S. correspondents covering a relatively tiny state. I pointed out that I had not seen so many reporters in world capitals such as Beijing, Moscow, London, Tokyo, Paris. Why, I asked, did a small state with a 1980 population of only four million warrant more reporters than China, with a billion people?

 

I also linked this query with my findings that The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post—and most of our nation’s print media—are owned and/or controlled by Jews supportive of Israel. It was for this reason, I deduced, that they sent so many reporters to cover Is rael—and to do so largely from the Israeli point of view.

 

My learning experiences also included coming to realize how easily I could lose a Jewish friend if I criticized the Jewish state. I could with impunity criticize France, England, Russia, even the United States. And any aspect of life in America. But not the Jewish state. I lost more Jewish friends than one after the publication of Journey to Jerusalem—all sad losses for me and one, perhaps, saddest of all.

 

In the 1960s and 1970s, before going to the Middle East, I had written about the plight of blacks in a book entitled Soul Sister, and the plight of American Indians in a book entitled Bessie Yellowhair, and the problems endured by undocumented workers crossing from Mexico in The Illegals. These books had come to the attention of the “mother” of The New York Times, Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

 

Her father had started the newspaper, then her husband ran it, and in the years that I knew her, her son was the publisher. She invited me to her fashionable apartment on Fifth Avenue for lunches and dinner parties. And, on many occasions, I was a weekend guest at her Greenwich, Conn. home.

 

She was liberal-minded and praised my efforts to speak for the underdog, even going so far in one letter to say, “You are the most remarkable woman I ever knew.” I had little concept that from being buoyed so high I could be dropped so suddenly when I discovered—from her point of view—the “wrong” underdog.

 

As it happened, I was a weekend guest in her spacious Connecticut home when she read bound galleys of Journey to Jerusalem. As I was leaving, she handed the galleys back with a saddened look: “My dear, have you forgotten the Holocaust?” She felt that what happened in Nazi Germany to Jews several decades earlier should silence any criticism of the Jewish state. She could focus on a holocaust of Jews while negating a modern day holocaust of Palestinians.

 

I realized, quite painfully, that our friendship was ending. Iphigene Sulzberger had not only invited me to her home to meet her famous friends but, also at her suggestion, The Times had requested articles. I wrote op-ed articles on various subjects including American blacks, American Indians as well as undocumented workers. Since Mrs. Sulzberger and other Jewish officials at the Times highly praised my efforts to help these groups of oppressed peoples, the dichotomy became apparent: most “liberal” U.S. Jews stand on the side of all poor and oppressed peoples save one—the Palestinians.

 

How handily these liberal Jewish opinion-molders tend to diminish the Palestinians, to make them invisible, or to categorize them all as “terrorists.”

 

Interestingly, Iphigene Sulzberger had talked to me a great deal about her father, Adolph S. Ochs. She told me that he was not one of the early Zionists. He had not favored the creation of a Jewish state.

 

Yet, increasingly, American Jews have fallen victim to Zionism, a nationalistic movement that passes for many as a religion. While the ethical instructions of all great religions—including the teachings of Moses, Muhammad and Christ—stress that all human beings are equal, militant Zionists take the position that the killing of a non-Jew does not count.

 

Over five decades now, Zionists have killed Palestinians with impunity. And in the 1996 shelling of a U.N. base in Qana, Lebanon, the Israelis killed more than 100 civilians sheltered there. As an Israeli journalist, Arieh Shavit, explains of the massacre, “We believe with absolute certitude that right now, with the White House in our hands, the Senate in our hands and The New York Times in our hands, the lives of others do not count the same way as our own.”

 

Israelis today, explains the anti-Zionist Jew Israel Shahak, “are not basing their religion on the ethics of justice. They do not accept the Old Testament as it is written. Rather, religious Jews turn to the Talmud. For them, the Talmudic Jewish laws become ‘the Bible.’ And the Talmud teaches that a Jew can kill a non-Jew with impunity.”

 

In the teachings of Christ, there was a break from such Talmudic teachings. He sought to heal the wounded, to comfort the downtrodden.

 

The danger, of course, for U.S. Christians is that having made an icon of Israel, we fall into a trap of condoning whatever Israel does—even wanton murder—as orchestrated by God.

 

Yet, I am not alone in suggesting that the churches in the United States represent the last major organized support for Palestinian rights. This imperative is due in part to our historic links to the Land of Christ and in part to the moral issues involved with having our tax dollars fund Israeli-government-approved violations of human rights.

 

While Israel and its dedicated U.S. Jewish supporters know they have the president and most of Congress in their hands, they worry about grassroots America—the well-meaning Christians who care for justice. Thus far, most Christians were unaware of what it was they didn’t know about Israel. They were indoctrinated by U.S. supporters of Israel in their own country and when they traveled to the Land of Christ most all did so under Israeli sponsorship. That being the case, it was unlikely a Christian ever met a Palestinian or learned what caused the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 

This is gradually changing, however. And this change disturbs the Israelis. As an example, delegates attending a Christian Sa beel conference in Bethlehem earlier this year said they were harassed by Israeli security at the Tel Aviv airport.

 

“They asked us,” said one delegate, “‘Why did you use a Palestinian travel agency? Why didn’t you use an Israeli agency?’” The interrogation was so extensive and hostile that Sabeel leaders called a special session to brief the delegates on how to handle the harassment. Obviously, said one delegate, “The Israelis have a policy to discourage us from visiting the Holy Land except under their sponsorship. They don’t want Christians to start learning all they have never known about Israel.”

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Washington, DC-based writer Grace Halsell is the author of 14 books, including Journey to Jerusalem and Prophecy and Politics.

 The 1948 Nakba: Facts and Lessons

 

 By Ibrahim Ghosheh*

 

 INTRODUCTION

 

 The 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, included very important and dangerous developments that affected most categories of Palestinian People and some Arab people, especially those who participated in the war against Jewish settlement activity. Therefore, it was strange that the 1950s witnessed a feverish rush of individuals to affiliate with political and Islamic movements and parties, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Baath party and the Communist party, and the Arab national movements. The younger Arab generation believed that they could treat the deep wounds of the Nakba and they could get rid of the colonization by gathering the Arabs round a unified idea. These desires and ambitions were embodied by the successful and unsuccessful coups and revolutions that prevailed in the 1950s. The Palestinian Nakba was the main reason that stood behind them. Later, the new regimes and revolutions became more involved in their local questions and forgot about Palestine and its Nakba.

 

 DIFFERENT SITUATIONS ON THE EVE OF NAKBA

 

 1. The Palestinian People

 

 The struggle against the Jewish settlers increased after the 1947 United Nations resolution regarding the Partition of Palestine No. 181. The struggle reached a peak in mid-May 1948 when the United Kingdom ended its mandate in Palestine. But the Palestinian struggle against the Jews had begun in 1917 following the Balfour Declaration.

 

 The main objective of the British mandate in Palestine, which continued for about 30 years, was to ensure the Jewish immigration from Europe, Russia and the Arab States and to offer them more Palestinian land. The Palestinian land that was owned by the Jews on the eve of the Nakba did not exceed 5.5% of Palestine. Other objectives were to provide military training to the Zionist terrorist groups, namely the Haganah, Irgun and Stern, and to oppress Palestinians and suppress their revolutions. Without the British, the Jews would not have been able to declare their State on 14 May 1948. The British mandate also chased away the Palestinian political leadership, represented by Haj Amin Al Husseini, which left the Palestinian People without a powerful leadership. The Jews, on the contrary, were united round Ben Gurion, and all the Zionist terrorist groups were also united.

 

 2-Arab Situation

 

 The situation of the Arab people and their governments were deteriorating. Their governments were formally independent, but in reality, they were subjected to the British and French colonization. Egypt was ruled by King Farouq, who was subject to Britain. The Jordanian army was led by a British officer, who was also assisted by the influential British officers. Syria and Lebanon were newly independent from the French colonization, and their armies were very weak. In Iraq, the pro-Britain Nouri Saed was ruling the country.

 

 3-Jewish situation

 

 The Jews, assisted by the British, built a military power. A number of Israeli leaders, named President Ezra Weisman and the former President Haim Hertzog, had served in the British army during the Second World War. The British made it easy for the Jews to smuggle weapons and build secret military factories. They also handed over their camps to the Jewish settlers before leaving Palestine. More than 70,000 Jews were carrying weapons against only 20,000 Arabs, including Arab soldiers, Palestinian resistants and the Muslim Brotherhood Mujahideen. Ordered by the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia supplied the Jewish settlers with weapons while most of their funding came from the United States.

 

 Arab-Israeli War

 

 After 5 May 1948, several Arab armies entered Palestine, most notably the Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi armies. Before that date, Palestinians had fought the Jewish settlers alone since 29 November 1947. The Jewish settlers conquered a number of Palestinian cities, namely Haifa, Jaffa, Safad and Acre, as well as a large number of Palestinian villages. The Arab armies were distributed over the different fronts, but, unfortunately, there was no coordination or cooperation among them. They did not back up each other. This tragedy was repeated in the June 1967 war. Although the armies fought bravely, they failed to keep their control on their fronts and were forced to retreat. The Arab armies committed a mistake by accepting the first Hudna (truce) in mid-1948 because the truce enabled the Zionists to bolster their forces with more soldiers and more weapons, including air fighters. They succeeded to break up the siege that was imposed by the Jordanian army and the Muslim Brotherhood Mujahideen on Western Jerusalem, which was about to surrender with 100,000 Jews inside.

 

 Facts and Lessons

 

 The Nakba affected every Palestinian family, the majority of which became homeless and of refugee status. Their villages and houses were removed, and the Zionists controlled 78% of Palestine. There are many lessons to be absorbed from Nakba, some of which are outlined below:

 

 1. While the Jewish settlers fought in Palestine with high religious and national morale, the Arab morale was much less. Only a few of the Arabs were fighting out of their Islamic faith or patriotism. There were many fighters of freedom in Palestine over the past 40 years. At the end of this period, the Islamist fighters seeking martyrdom (Mujahidoun) finally appeared, and they are mentioned in Surah Al-Isra'a in the Holy Qur'an.

 

 2. The Arab governments disarmed Palestinians when their armies entered Palestine in May 1948. Palestinians, who knew their land better than the Arab armies and who were more enthusiastic in defending their land, were in need of military training and weapons. Martyr Hassan Al Banna, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, requested permission from the Arab League to send 12,000 Muslim Brotherhood fighters to join their brothers in Palestine, but his request was rejected. One year later, Hassan Al Banna was assassinated, and his followers were imprisoned.

 

 3. The Jewish settlers committed several massacres against Palestinian civilians such as that in Deir Yassin, Dawaymeh, Lud and other places. The news of the massacres spread throughout Palestine, which horrified Palestinians in other areas and forced them to leave their homes. This is exactly what the Zionist leaders such as Ben Gurion, Shamir, Begin and others wanted.

 

 4. There was not a united Arab leadership to confront the united Jewish leadership. Every Arab army led the war alone. There was clear competition and distrust among the Arab leaders.

 

 5. Arab acceptance of the first truce in mid-1948 gave the Jews an opportunity to import weapons and to bring the air fighters and more troops.

 

 6. The Palestinian People, on the eve of UN resolution 181 (the Partition resolution) of 29 November 1947, needed political leadership to lead their fighting and struggle. The only prominent Palestinian leader at the time was Haj Amin Husseini who was abroad. If Haj Amin dared to enter Palestine at that time to be among his people, the Palestinian situation would have been better.

 

 7. A number of Arab governments, namely Morocco, Yemen, Iraq and Egypt, allowed their Jews to immigrate to Palestine where they became soldiers and terrorists fighting the Palestinians.

 

 *Hamas' Spokesman

 

 

This was a speech given at Westminster Cathedral for a Palestinian Remebrance service, on Saturday May 2, 1998. It is an eloquent speech that shows how many Palestinians feel about Al-Nakba.

50 Years On - Time for justice

Palestinian Remembrance service

 

 Westminster Cathedral

 Saturday May 2, 1998

Children of a Lesser God?

By Afif Safieh

Victims of the victims of European history, we the Palestinian people, Muslims and Christians alike, we were constantly denied our legitimate share of sympathy, solidarity and support. Our massive expulsion from our ancestral homeland, a revolting process of ethnic cleansing, was watched with either indifference or was welcomed with applause as " a miraculous simplification" of the difficult problem of the birth of a Jewish State in a country where there was an obvious overwhelming Arab majority.

 

 To add insult to the many injuries inflicted, while our society was taking care of our collective and individual scars, admiring voices were raised around the globe about trees and forests being planted.

 

 Yet, yet, yet nobody ever bothered to explain according to what value systems the planting of a tree justified the uprooting value systems the planting of a of a human being, according to which moral philosophy the planting of forests justified the uprooting of an entire people.

 

 Israel was supposed to be the answer to what was then known as result we became a question - "the Jewish question". As a the question of Palestine - awaiting still , in 1998, an equitable,adequate, satisfactory answer.

 

 50 Years On - it is time for justice.

 

 Throughout the last five decades, what has it meant to be a Palestinian?

 

 For 50 years, to be a Palestinian has meant belonging to a family that was shattered and scattered to the 4 corners of the earth.

 

 For 50 years, to be a Palestinian has meant to have lost one's plot of land, one's home, one's homeland.

 

 For 50 years, to be a Palestinian has meant to be displaced by force, time after time, from one place, one country to another, and under conditions of complete destitution.

 

 For 50 years, to be a Palestinian has meant to be stateless having no identity papers like the other inhabitants of our world, it has meant administrative complications throughout one's life, from womb to tomb, from birth to death.

 

 For those of us who had succeeded in staying in what had become the State of Israel, to be a Palestinian has meant, for 50 endless years, to be democratically degraded to the status of a third class citizen daily subjected to humiliation, harassment, and discrimination.

 

 For those of us who were ejected to the periphery, to be a Palestinian has meant, for 50 endless years, a miserable life in sub-human conditions in refugee camps clinging to a hope that still awaits fulfillment.

 

 For those of us in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 30 long years of military occupation, the longest military occupation in modern times, meant the gradual and rapid alteration of the demographic composition and mutilation of the architectural and physical landscape of what should become our State and that, in total defiance of International law and the international will.

 

 To be a Palestinian is to endure a constant denial of the tragedy that befell us, a denial of our sufferings which like all other denials is politically abominable and morally disturbing.

 

 To be a Palestinian means, at best, to repeatedly listen to the banalization of our pain.

 

 418 villages leveled to the ground in 1948 so as to make sure that the ejected and rejected would not return. Massacres: Deir Yassin, Ramle, AlLid, Kafar Kassem, Kibia, Sabra and Shatila ... thousand and thousands and thousands of martyrs, mostly civilians. Prisoners, tortured prisoners, thousands and thousands and thousands of prisoners on the long road towards freedom out of captivity and bondage.

 

 How does one measure pain? What are the criteria for the measurement of suffering? When is enough really enough?

 

 I was brought up at home, at school and in church to believe in universal principles, in universal values, to believe in one mankind in one humankind, only to discover that in the real world, in Realpolitik, there are, alas, not one humankind but different kinds of men and women.

 

 I was brought up to believe that God has created us after his own image only to learn, the hard way, that those who chose to oppress us have created a God after their own image.

 

 Up to now, Palestinian and Arab victims have been treated as though we were simply figures, just numbers who often go unmentioned as though we were faceless, nameless, fatherless, motherless, childless .... worthless. Oh God! Are we children of a lesser God?

 

 Ladies and Gentlemen,

 

 Your presence here today in Westminster Cathedral shows that our tears, that our blood, that our pain, that our suffering, that our aspirations do also count.

 

 Ladies and Gentlemen,

 

 I am fully confident that Palestine will soon rise again and as you know, we in Palestine, we in Jerusalem, we have had some previous experience in ... Resurrection.

 

Afif Safieh

The Palestinian General Delegate

to the United Kingdom

 

 

Copyright © 1998 Arabic Media Internet Network - Internews Middle East

Israeli Extremists and Christian Fundamentalists:

The Alliance

By Grace Halsell

March 23, 2001

At the time I began my research for my book Prophecy and Politics, I discovered the average American I met in Washington, DC, and New York was not interested in TV evangelists and their link to Israel. Neither were book editors. I went to 25 top editors in New York with my book idea on religion and politics. Michael Korda of Simon and Schuster was typical. "Jerry Falwell? Pat Robertson? Who is interested in those crazies?"

 

By the time my book came out those "crazies" were on the front page of every American newspaper and on every news channel. Of course, I didn't give them this instant fame, which extended throughout the world. Two of them earned it themselves by being in the middle of scandals.

 

The press told us that Jim Bakker had committed adultery and that Jimmy Swaggart regularly visited a prostitute. A fellow marine said Pat Robertson never had to dodge bullets in Korea because he had used his father's influence as a senator to escape front line duty. But almost everyone ignored the biggest scandal of all: the peculiar mixture of prophecy and politics professed by these and other Christian Zionists.

 

The Christian Zionists Message

 

What is the message of the Christian Zionist? Simply stated it is this: Every act taken by Israel is orchestrated by God, and should be condoned, supported, and even praised by the rest of us.

 

"Never mind what Israel does," say the Christian Zionists. "God wants this to happen." This includes the invasion of Lebanon, which killed or injured an estimated 100,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, most of them civilians; the bombing of sovereign nations such as Iraq; the deliberate, methodical brutalizing of the Palestinians-breaking bones, shooting children, and demolishing homes; and the expulsion of Palestinian Christians and Muslims from a land they have occupied for over 2,000 years.

 

My premise in Prophecy and Politics is that Christian Zionism is a dangerous and growing segment of Christianity, which was popularized by the 19th-century American Cyrus Scofield when he wrote into a Bible his interpretation of events in history. These events all centered around Israel-past, present, and future. His Scofield Bible is today the most popular of the reference Bibles.

 

Scofield said that Christ cannot return to earth until certain events occur: The Jews must return to Palestine, gain control of Jerusalem and rebuild a temple, and then we all must engage in the final, great battle called Armageddon. Estimates vary, but most students of Armageddon theology agree that as a result of these relatively recent interpretations of Biblical scripture, 10 to 40 million Americans believe Palestine is God's chosen land for the Jews.

 

Has the power of the Christian Zionists diminished?

 

I do not think so. Rather, we are seeing how the Christian Zionists, motivated by religious beliefs, are working hand in glove with politically motivated, militant Jewish Zionists around the world. It is the Christian support of Zionism that emboldens Zionists to believe they can dictate to relatively weak and dependent countries such as Austria, whom they may choose as their president.

 

It is the Christian support of Zionism that allows Manuel Noriega to remain the strongman in Panama, misusing his power, regardless of what harm he causes to the United States, his neighbors, and his people.

 

It is the Christian support of Zionism that enables the militant Israelis to take over Palestinian homes surrounding the Al-Aqsa mosque in pursuit of their well-documented plan to destroy Jerusalem's most holy Islamic site, sacred to a billion Muslims around the world-one-fifth of humanity.

 

Christian Zionists and the Iran-Contra Scandal

 

Remarkably,it was this Christian cult of Israel that brought us the Iran contra scandal, perhaps the most self-destructive act in the history of the United States. Marine Col. Oliver North, the perpetrator of this misguided series of actions, is a Christian Zionist. A born-again charismatic figure, he endeared himself to the militant Israeli Zionists who plotted Iran-contra. "He is more Israeli," said one Jewish general, "than we Israelis." This is often the case. In his zealotry, the Christian Zionist can become more Zionist, more militant, than the Jewish Zionist.

 

In the Iran-contra hearings, Sen. James McClure (R-ID) explained to North that the US had a stated policy of neutrality in the Iran-Iraq war. That policy differed radically from Israel's policy of selling arms to Iran. Yes, agreed North, the two policies were not the same. The question, to which McClure's efforts yielded no response, then becomes: Why would the US forego its American policy to pursue Israeli policy?

 

The answer, unfortunately, lies in the belief system of Christian Zionists: They believe that what Israel wants is what God wants. Therefore, it is perfectly acceptable to give the green light to whatever it is Israel wants and then conceal this from the American people. Anything, including lies, theft, even murder, is justified as long as Israel wants it.

 

Another perfect example of a Christian Zionist is Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI). Throughout the hearings on the Iran-contra scandal, the Hawaiian kept the focus on the contras and steered determinedly clear of any criticism of Israel. If, in answer to questions, witnesses sought to explain the seminal and continuing role of Israel, Inouye abruptly broke off the line of questioning that had led the hearings to this unwanted destination.

 

Despite the political problems created by its lay practitioners and the scandals that rocked some of its TV ministries, this belief system-this cult of Israel-has not been diminished.

 

Indeed, I hold that Christian Zionism threatens not just the lives of Palestinians and other Arabs, but the very existence of the United States. Because of the cult of Israel, we have become a nation that does not have its own Middle East policy, but the policy the government of Israel tells us to have.

 

Despite the terrifying aspects of the alliance of militant Christians with militant Jewish Zionists, I find some encouraging developments. In my visits to colleges, clubs, and churches around the country, I have found strong support for the message and warning in Prophecy and Politics. It has come not only from liberal congregations, but from across the whole spectrum of Christianity, including those Christians who call themselves fundamentalists. These supporters see Christ as the bearer to humanity of God's message of peace, brotherhood, love, and reconciliation. These Christians do not endorse either the cult of Israel or its killIngs and beatings of Palestinians.

 

I have found many such Christians in my frequent visits to my home state of Texas. There and all over this slowly-awakening land of ours, I have found a small but increasing number of ministers and lay people who are deeply alarmed by the cult of Israel and willing to stand up and speak out about it.

 

Grace Halsell is a Washington, DC-based writer and author of Journey to Jerusalem and Prophecy and Politics

Militant Coalition Of Christian Fundamentalist And Jewish Orthodox Cults Plots . . .

Destruction Of Al Aqsa Mosque

By Grace Halsell

(First Published In "The Washington Report On Middle Eastern Affairs", March/00- Vol. XIX, No.2, Pages 16-17)

For three decades, Gershon Solomon, a militant Israeli who heads an organization dedicated to the destruction of Jerusalem's most holy Islamic shrine, has led Zionist zealots in armed assaults on the Muslim grounds of Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, that encloses both the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosque.

No Israeli political leader has spoken out against the assaults on the Mosque, holy to a billion Muslims around the world. Moreover, no Israeli rabbi has condemned them. Indeed, beginning in 1967, many of the assaults were led by Jewish rabbis.

I first heard about the Israeli militants' intent to destroy the mosque in 1979 when I went to Jerusalem. I talked at length with Bobby Brown, and third-generation American from Brooklyn, flying to the Jewish state and instantly became a new citizen, confiscated land from Palestinians to help build an illegal Jewish settlement. "The mosque," he told me, "has got to go. It is a blot in our land."

Militant Jews such as brown and Solomon want a Jerusalem that is pure Jewish - without evidence of inhabitants of the other monotheistic faiths and their shrines. Surprisingly, millions of U.S. evangelical Christians endorse and financially support this Jewish plan.

Although united in the immediate goal of destroying the mosque, the Israeli militants and Christian zealots have different long-range agendas.

Secular Jews, such as Stanley Goldfoot, one of the perpetrators of the dynamiting in 1946 of the King David Hotel which killed some 100 Christian, Muslim and Jewish civilians, want the mosque destroyed for political reasons. Other Jews believe that the building of the temple on the Muslim grounds will usher in the Jewish Messiah.

A growing number of Christians embrace the idea that in all history, Israel is on the center stage. They say God has planned epochs of time ("dispensations") such as the "in-gathering of the Jews in the ancient land of Canaan. One epoch, they say, includes the present time when Jews are obligated to build a Jewish temple and re-institute animal sacrifice, Such epochs or "dispensations" are necessary, they say before Christ can return. Ironically, while Christian dispensationalists place Israel as the most important nation in all the world, they do respect or even like Jews- as Jews. Yet, because they believe Christ can only land in a "safe" area near Jerusalem, they make a cult of the land. They thus give total, unquestioned support to Israel.

Goldfoot and Solomon are welcome in countless U.S. pulpits, where Christian Zionists give generous donations of money, as well as their gold weeding rings and gold earrings to finance the mosque's destruction. They know its destruction might well trigger wars culminating in Armageddon, but the welcome this. They push Armageddon along, saying they, as "Born Again Christians," will be spared any suffering, because they will be "Raptured," wafted up into heaven to view the slaughter below. "I am not worried," Lynchburg, Virginia televangelist Jerry Falwell shouts. "You know why? I ain't gonna be here!"

This dispensationalist doctrine, less then 200 years old, pervades Assemblies Of God, Pentecostal and other charismatic churches, as well as the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention and countless so-called Bible churches and mega-churches. It's estimated that at least one out of every 10 Americans is a devotee of this cult.

In both Israel and the U.S., a conspiracy of silence reigns as militants lay siege to the Jerusalem mosque. No political leader - or religious leader- in Israel or the U.S. has addressed this issue. In the case of Israeli rabbis, if they themselves have not aided and abetted planned assaults on the mosque, they have kept silent. In the case of all major U.S. Christian church leaders - the voices that are heard throughout the land- if they themselves are not raising money to destroy the mosque, they keep silent about the conspiracy.

"I don't favor it," one Christian told me. "But if it happens" - the destruction of the mosque-"it doesn't mean I won't support." 

ASSAULTS ON THE MOSQUE

TWO GROUPS IN PARTICULAR are dedicated to the destruction of Jerusalem's most sacred Islamic shrine: the Militant Bloc of the Faithful or Gush Emunim, led by rabbis such as Moshe Levinger; Ateret Cohanim, a Jewish yeshiva composed of militant Jewish students and their rabbis. Fundamentalist, militant Christians, who also want the mosque destroyed, give support and financial aid to both of these Israeli organizations, as do wealthy American Jews.

Beginning in 1967, when Israel militarily seized Arab East Jerusalem, Jewish terrorists on more than 100 occasions have laid siege to the Muslim Mosque. Here are a few of the assaults:

August 1967. Chief Chaplain of the Armed Forces Shlomo Goren - later Israel's chief rabbi - leads 50 armed extremists onto Haram al-Sharif. "It is a holy commandment," Goren said, for Jews to go to the Muslim grounds, which Jews call the Temple Mount." Writing in an Israeli publication, Eti Ronel reports: "Many rabbis, including members of the Council of the Chief Rabbinate, support…..Jewish sovereignty" over Haram al-Sharif.

August 21, 1969. Jewish extremists set fire to Al Aqsa, destroying a priceless wood and ivory pulpit sent from Aleppo by the Muslim ruler Saladin. The arson prompts the United Nations Security Council to condemn Israel's failure to curb terrorist attacks on Islam's shrine. Four months later (12/19/69) a group of militant Jews storm their way to Haram al-Sahrif, in order, they claim, "conduct Hanukkah prayers."

March 3, 1971. Gershon Solomon leads Temple Mount Faithful followers onto Haram al-Sharif. After struggling with Palestinian guards, they are expelled. Three years later (3/3/74) Solomon again, with followers, storms the Mosque. Again (7/14/78) Solomon leads militant Jews onto the Islamic holy grounds. Palestinians stage protests. Israeli troops hurl tear gas to quell the rioting.

August 10, 1980. Three hundred Gush Emunim fanatics, heavily armed, overcome Palestinian police and storm the grounds, but are later dispersed. A month later (9/15/80) armed Gush Emunim settlers associated with Stanley Goldfoot and the Temple Mount Faithful again force their way onto the Mosque grounds. After scuffling with police they are evicted.

April 11, 1982. Alan Goodman, an Israeli citizen with a U.S. passport, marches into al Aqsa with an M-16 rifle and opens fire on worshippers, killing two Palestinians and wounding others. In November 1997, the Israeli government releases Goodman. Unrepentant, Goodman boasts, "I fulfilled my mission."

July 25, 1982. Yoel Lerner, a member of the militant Meir Kahane Kach movement, storms the mosque grounds with plans to dynamite and destroy the Dome of The Rock.

March 10, 1983. Armed Gush Emunim fanatics climb walls onto Haram al-Sharif, attempting to overcome security guards and take the mosque by storm. They have in their possession large quantities of explosives, automatic rifles and pistols. Twenty-nine are charged and held for trial.

September 21, 1983. An Israeli court acquits the 29 Jewish terrorists who six months earlier had laid siege on the mosque.

January 27, 1984. In the most ambitious plot to dynamite and destroy the mosque, Jewish terrorists, armed with 250 pounds of explosives, including dozens of grenades, boxes of dynamite and 12 rounds of mortar, attempt to dynamite and destroy the mosque. They are led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the most militant of Jewish extremists.

1994. The Israelis appoint Meir Davidson, a senior official of Ateret Cohanim, as municipal adviser on Palestinian properties. This signals the Israeli government will work closely with an organization whose aim is destruction of the mosque.

September 1996. Ateret Cohanim, funded largely through tax-exempt dollars donated by rich American Jews, including Miami millionaire Irving Moskowitz, opened a tunnel - excavated in secret night-time operations - that runs the length of the Al Aqsa complex. The controversial tunnel sparked intense fighting which claimed the lives of 60 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers. Israeli Prime Minister Binyiman Netanyahu proudly visited the tunnel, as have fundamentalist Christian leaders.

October 18, 1998. Gershon Solomon, with followers waving Israeli flags and blowing rams' horns, mounts a ramp to the mosque grounds. "The time has come to rebuild the Jewish Temple," said Solomon. To underscore this point, Solomon parked near an Old City gate a flatbed truck carrying a 4 ½ ton marble "cornerstone" for that new temple. __G.H.

----------------------------

Grace Halsell is the author of the book "Forcing God's Hand" which exposes the strange alliance between millions of U.S. Christians who make a cult worship of the land of Israel. The book explores the danger of this alliance: how it influences and often controls political decisions made in the White House and Congress. You can order the book by calling the American

"THE JEWS AND THEIR LIES"
(1543)
Volume 47: "The Christian in Society"IV, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971). pp 268-293
OF THE UNKNOWABLE NAME AND THE GENERATIONS OF CHRIST (1543)

"I had made up my mind to write no more either about the Jews or against them. But since I learned that these miserable and accursed people do not cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the Christians, I have published this little book, so that I might be found among those who opposed such poisonous activities of the Jews who warned the Christians to be on their guard against them. I would not have believed that a Christian could be duped by the Jews into taking their exile and wretchedness upon himself. However, the devil is the god of the world, and wherever God's word is absent he has an easy task, not only with the weak but also with the strong. May God help us. Amen. ***

"He did not call them Abraham's children, but a 'brood of vipers' [Matt. 3:7]. Oh, that was too insulting for the noble blood and race of Israel, and they declared, 'He has a demon' [Matt 11:18]. Our Lord calls them a 'brood of vipers'; furthermore in John 8 [:39,44] he states: 'If you were Abraham's children ye would do what Abraham did.... You are of your father the devil.' It was intolerable to them to hear that they were not Abraham's but the devil's children, nor can they bear to hear this today.

***

"They are the real liars and bloodhounds, who have not only perverted and falsified the entire Scriptures from beginning to end and without ceasing with their interpretations. And all of the anxious sighing, longing and hoping of their hearts is directed to the time when some day they would like to deal with us heathen as they dealt with the heathen in Persia at the time of Esther...

***

"On how they love the book of Esther, which so nicely agrees with their bloodthirsty, revengeful and murderous desire and hope. The sun never did shine on a more bloodthirsty and revengeful people as they, who imagine to be the people of God, and who desire to and think they must murder and crush the heathen. And the foremost undertaking which they expect of their Messiah is that he should slay and murder the whole world with the sword. As they at first demonstrated against us Christians and would like to do now, if they only could; have also tried it often and have been repeatedly struck on their snouts...

***

"Their breath stinks for the gold and silver of the heathen; since no people under the sun always have been, still are, and always will remain more avaricious than they, as can be noticed in their cursed usury. They also find comfort with this: 'When the Messiah comes, He shall take all the gold and silver in the world and distribute it among the Jews.' Thus, wherever they can direct Scripture to their insatiable avarice, they wickedly do so.
Therefore know, my dear Christians, that next to the Devil, you have no more bitter, more poisonous, more vehement and enemy than a real Jew who earnestly desires to be a Jew. There may be some among them who believe what the cow or the goose believes. But all of them are surrounded with their blood and circumcision. In history, therefore, they are often accused of poisoning wells, stealing children and mutilating them; as in Trent, Weszensee and the like. Of course they deny this. Be it so or not, however, I know full well that the ready will is not lacking with them if they could only transform it into deeds, in secret or openly.

***

"A person who does not know the Devil, might wonder why they are so at enemity with the Christians above all others; for which they have no reason, since we only do good to them.

***

"They live among us in our homes, under our protection, use land and highways, market and streets. Princes and government sit by, snore and have their maws open, let the Jews take from their purse and chest, steal and rob whatever they will. That is, they permit themselves and their subjects to be abused and sucked dry and reduced to beggars with their own money, through the usury of the Jews. For the Jews, as foreigners, certainly should have nothing from us; and what they have certainly must be ours. They do not work, do not earn anything from us, neither do we donate or give it to them. Yet they have our money and goods and are lords in our land where they are supposed to be in exile!

***

"If a thief steals ten gulden he must hang; if he robs people on the highway, his head is gone. But a Jew, when he steals ten tons of gold through his usury is dearer than God himself!

***

"Do not their TALMUD and rabbis write that it is no sin to kill if a Jew kills a heathen, but it is a sin if he kills a brother in Israel? It is no sin if he does not keep his oath to a heathen. Therefore, to steal and rob (as they do with their moneylending) from a heathen, is a divine service... And they are the masters of the world and we are their servants - yea, their cattle!

***

"I maintain that in three fables of Aesop there is more wisdom to be found than in all the books of the Talmudists and rabbis and more than ever could come into the hearts of the Jews...

***

"Should someone think I am saying too much - I am saying much too little! For I see in [their] writings how they curse us Goyim and wish as all evil in their schools and prayers. They rob us of our money through usury, and wherever they are able, they play us all manner of mean tricks... No heathen has done such things and none would to so except the Devil himself and those whom he possesses - as he possesses the Jews.

***

"Burgensis, who was a very learned rabbi among them and by the grace of God became a Christian (which seldom occurs), is much moved that in their schools they so horribly curse us Christians (as Lyra also writes) and from that draws the conclusion that they must not be the people of God.

***

"Now behold what a nice, thick, fat lie it is when they complain about being captives among us! Jerusalem was destroyed more than 1,400 years ago during that time we Christians have been tortured and persecuted by the Jews in all the world. On top of that, we do not know to this day what Devil brought them into our country. We did not fetch them from Jerusalem!... Yes, we have and hold them captive, as I would like to keep my rheumatism, and all other diseases and misfortunes, who must wait as a poor servant, with money and property and everything I have! I wish they were in Jerusalem with the other Jews and whomsoever they would like to have with them.

***

"Therefore the blind Jews are truly stupid fools...

***

"Now just behold these miserable, blind, and senseless people.

***

"...their blindness and arrogance are as solid as an iron mountain.

***

"Learn from this, dear Christian, what you are doing if you permit the blind Jews to mislead you. Then the saying will truly apply, 'When a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into the pit' [cf. Luke 6:39]. You cannot learn anything from them except how to misunderstand the divine commandments...

***

"Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and veheming his eyes on them.

***

"Moreover, they are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury. Thus they live from day to day, together with wife and child, by theft and robbery, as arch-thieves and robbers, in the most impenitent security.

***

"However, they have not acquired a perfect mastery of the art of lying; they lie so clumsily and ineptly that anyone who is just a little observant can easily detect it. But for us Christians they stand as a terrifying example of God's wrath.

***

"If I had to refute all the other articles of the Jewish faith, I should be obliged to write against them as much and for as long a time as they have used for inventing their lies-- that is, longer than two thousand years.

***

"...Christ and his word can hardly be recognized because of the great vermin of human ordinances. However, let this suffice for the time being on their lies against doctrine or faith.

***

"Did I not tell you earlier that a Jew is such a noble, precious jewel that God and all the angels dance when he farts?

***

"Alas, it cannot be anything but the terrible wrath of God which permits anyone to sink into such abysmal, devilish, hellish, insane baseness, envy, and arrogance. If I were to avenge myself on the devil himself I should be unable to wish him such evil and misfortune as God's wrath inflicts on the Jews, compelling them to lie and to blaspheme so monstrously, in violation of their own conscience. Anyway, they have their reward for constantly giving God the lie.

***

"No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.

***

"...but then eject them forever from this country. For, as we have heard, God's anger with them is so intense that gentle mercy will only tend to make them worse and worse, while sharp mercy will reform them but little. Therefore, in any case, away with them!

***

"Over and above that we let them get rich on our sweat and blood, while we remain poor and they such the marrow from our bones.

***

"I brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your rule-- if my counsel does not please your, find better advice, so that you and we all can be rid of the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews, lest we become guilty sharers before God in the lies, blasphemy, the defamation, and the curses which the mad Jews indulge in so freely and wantonly against the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, this dear mother, all hristians, all authority, and ourselves. Do not grant them protection, safe-conduct, or communion with us.... .With this faithful counsel and warning I wish to cleanse and exonerate my conscience.

***

"Let the government deal with them in this respect, as I have suggested. But whether the government acts or not, let everyone at least be guided by his own conscience and form for himself a definition or image of a Jew.

***

"However, we must avoid confirming them in their wanton lying, slandering, cursing, and defaming. Nor dare we make ourselves partners in their devilish ranting and raving by shielding and protecting them, by giving them food, drink, and shelter, or by other neighborly

***

"Therefore we Christians, in turn, are obliged not to tolerate their wanton and conscious blasphemy.

***

"Accordingly, it must and dare not be considered a trifling matter but a most serious one to seek counsel against this and to save our souls from the Jews, that is, from the devil and from eternal death.

***

"What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Let us apply the ordinary wisdom of other nations like France, Spain, Bohemia, et al., who made them give an account of what they had stolen through usury, and divided it evenly; but expelled them from their country;. For as heard before, God's wrath is so great over them that through soft mercy they only become more wicked, through hard treatment, however, only a little better. Therefore, away with them!

***

"How much more unbearable it is that we should permit the entire Christendom and all of us to be bought with our own money, be slandered and cursed by the Jews, who on top of all that be made rich and our lords, who laugh us to scorn and are tickled by their audacity!

***

"What a joyful affair that would be for the Devil and his angels, and cause them to laugh through their snouts like a sow grinning at her little pigs, but deserving real wrath before God.

***

"Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blaspemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath, of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the fear of God we must pratice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames. We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengenance a thousand times worse than we could wish them already has them by the throat. I shall give you my sincere advice:

First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. For whatever we tolerated in the past unknowingly - and I myself was unaware of it - will be pardoned by God. But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the Jews, existing right before our very nose, in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame Christ and us (as was heard above), it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves, as we very well know.

Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies. This will bring home to them that they are not masters in our country, as they boast, but that they are living in exile and in captivity, as they incessantly wail and lament about us before God.

Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. [...]

Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. For they have justly forfeited the right to such an office by holding the poor Jews captive with the saying of Moses (Deuternomy 17 [:10 ff.]) in which he commands them to obey their teachers on penalty of death, although Moses clearly adds: "what they teach you in accord with the law of the Lord." Thoses villains ignore that. They wantonly employ the poor people's obedience contrary to the law of the Lord and infuse them with this poison, cursing, and blasphemy. In the same way the pope also held us captive with the declaration in Matthew 16 {:18], "You are Peter," etc, inducing us to believe all the lies and deceptions that issued from his devilish mind. He did not teach in accord with the word of God, and therefore he forfeited the righ to teach.

Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let they stay at home. [...]

Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. The reason for such a measure is that, as said above, they have no other means of earning a livelihood than usury, and by it they have stolen and robbed from us all they possess. Such money should now be used in no other way than the following: Whenever a Jew is sincerely converted, he should be handed one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred florins, as personal circumstances may suggest. With this he could set himself up in some occupation for the support of his poor wife and children, and the maintenance of the old or feeble. For such evil gains are cursed if they are not put to use with God's blessing in a good and worthy cause.

Seventh, I commend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam (Gen 3[:19]). For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat. No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.

***

"But what will happen even if we do burn down the Jews' synagogues and forbid them publicly to praise God, to pray, to teach, to utter God's name? They will still keep doing it in secret. If we know that they are doing this in secret, it is the same as if they were doing it publicly. For our knowledge of their secret doings and our toleration of them implies that they are not secret after all and thus our conscience is encumbered with it before God.

***

"Accordingly, it must and dare not be considered a trifling matter but a most serious one to seek counsel against this and to save our souls from the Jews, that is, from the devil and from eternal death. My advice, as I said earlier, is:

First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss in sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire. That would demonstrate to God our serious resolve and be evidence to all the world that it was in ignorance that we tolerated such houses, in which the Jews have reviled God, our dear Creator and Father, and his Son most shamefully up till now but that we have now given them their due reward.

***

"To sum up, dear princes and nobles who have Jews in your domains, if this advice of mine does not suit you, then find a better one so that you and we may all be free of this insufferable devilish burden - the Jews...

***

"Let the government deal with them in this respect, as I have suggested. But whether the government acts or not, let everyone at least be guided by his own conscience and form for himself a definition or image of a Jew. When you lay eyes on or think of a Jew you must say to yourself: Alas, that mouth which I there behold has cursed and execrated and maligned every Saturday my dear Lord Jesus Christ, who has redeemed me with his precious blood; in addition, it prayed and pleaded before God that I, my wife and children, and all Christians might be stabbed to death and perish miserably. And he himself would gladly do this if he were able, in order to appropriate our goods...

***

"Such a desperate, thoroughly evil, poisonous, and devilish lot are these Jews, who for these fourteen hundred years have been and still are our plague, our pestilence, and our misfortune.

***

"I have read and heard many stories about the Jews which agree with this judgment of Christ, namely, how they have poisoned wells, made assassinations, kidnapped children, as related before. I have heard that one Jew sent another Jew, and this by means of a Christian, a pot of blood, together with a barrel of wine, in which when drunk empty, a dead Jew was found. There are many other similar stories. For their kidnapping of children they have often been burned at the stake or banished (as we already heard). I am well aware that they deny all of this. However, it all coincides with the judgment of Christ which declares that they are venomous, bitter, vindictive, tricky serpents, assassins, and children of the devil, who sting and work harm stealthily wherever they cannot do it openly. For this reason, I would like to see them where there are no Christians. The Turks and other heathen do not tolerate what we Christians endure from these venomous serpents and young devils...next to the devil, a Christian has no more bitter and galling foe than a Jew. There is no other to whom we accord as many benefactions and from whom we suffer as much as we do from these base children of the devil, this brood of vipers.

***

"We are at fault for not slaying them [the Jews].

***

"I wish and I ask that our rulers who have Jewish subjects exercise a sharp mercy toward these wretched people, as suggested above, to see whether this might not help (though it is doubtful). They must act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set in, proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow. Such a procedure must also be followed in this instance. Burn down their synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly with them, as Moses did in the wilderness, slaying three thousand lest the whole people perish. They surely do not know what they are doing; moreover, as people possessed, they do not wish to know it, hear it, or learn it. There it would be wrong to be merciful and confirm them in their conduct. If this does not help we must drive them out like mad dogs, so that we do not become partakers of their abominable blasphemy and all their other vices and thus merit God's wrath and be damned with them. I have done my duty. Now let everyone see to his. I am exonerated.

***

"My essay, I hope, will furnish a Christian (who in any case has no desire to become a Jew) with enough material not only to defend himself against the blind, venomous Jews, but also to become the foe of the Jews' malice, lying, and cursing, and to understand not only that their belief is false but that they are surely possessed by all devils. May Christ, our dear Lord, convert them mercifully and preserve us steadfastly and immovably in the knowledge of him, which is eternal life. Amen.

***

"They are the real liars and bloodhounds, who have not only perverted and falsified the entire Scriptures from beginning to end and without ceasing with their interpretations. And all of the anxious sighing, longing and hoping of their hearts is directed to the time when some day they would like to deal with us heathen as they dealt with the heathen in Persia at the time of Esther... On how they love the book of Esther, which so nicely agrees with their bloodthirsty, revengeful and murderous desire and hope. (1)
The sun never did shine on a more bloodthirsty and revengeful people as they, who imagine to be the people of God, and who desire to and think they must murder and crush the heathen. And the foremost undertaking which they expect of their Messiah is that he should slay and murder the whole world with the sword. As they at first demonstrated against us Christians and would like to do now, if they only could; have also tried it often and have been repeatedly struck on their snouts...
Their breath stinks for the gold and silver of the heathen; since no people under the sun always have been, still are, and always will remain more avaricious than they, as can be noticed in their cursed usury. They also find comfort with this: "When the Messiah comes, He shall take all the gold and silver in the world and distribute it among the Jews. (2) Thus, wherever they can direct Scripture to their insatiable avarice, they wickedly do so.
Therefore know, my dear Christians, that next to the Devil, you have no more bitter, more poisonous, more vehement and enemy than a real Jew who earnestly desires to be a Jew. There may be some among them who believe what the cow or the goose believes. But all of them are surrounded with their blood and circumcision. In history, therefore, they are often accused of poisoning wells, stealing children and mutilating them; as in Trent, Weszensee and the like. Of course they deny this. Be it so or not, however, I know full well that the ready will is not lacking with them if they could only transform it into deeds, in secret or openly. (3)
A person who does not know the Devil, might wonder why they are so at enemity with the Christians above all others; for which they have no reason, since we only do good to them.
They live among us in our homes, under our protection, use land and highways, market and streets. Princes and government sit by, snore and have their maws open, let the Jews take from their purse and chest, steal and rob whatever they will. That is, they permit themselves and their subjects to be abused and sucked dry and reduced to beggars with their own money, through the usury of the Jews. For the Jews, as foreigners, certainly should have nothing from us; and what they have certainly must be ours. They do not work, do not earn anything from us, neither do we donate or give it to them. Yet they have our money and goods and are lords in our land where they are supposed to be in exile!
If a thief steals ten gulden he must hang; if he robs people on the highway, his head is gone. But a Jew, when he steals ten tons of gold through his usury is dearer than God himself!
Do not their TALMUD and rabbis write that it is no sin to kill if a Jew kills a heathen, but it is a sin if he kills a brother in Israel? It is no sin if he does not keep his oath to a heathen. Therefore, to steal and rob (as they do with their moneylending) from a heathen, is a divine service... And they are the masters of the world and we are their servants - yea, their cattle!
I maintain that in three fables of Aesop there is more wisdom to be found than in all the books of the Talmudists and rabbis and more than ever could come into the hearts of the Jews...
Should someone think I am saying too much - I am saying much too little! For I see in [their] writings how they curse us Goyim and wish as all evil in their schools and prayers. They rob us of our money through usury, and wherever they are able, they play us all manner of mean tricks... No heathen has done such things and none would to so except the Devil himself and those whom he possesses - as he possesses the Jews.
Burgensis, who was a very learned rabbi among them and by the grace of God became a Christian (which seldom occurs), is much moved that in their schools they so horribly curse us Christians (as Lyra also writes) and from that draws the conclusion that they must not be the people of God.
Now behold what a nice, thick, fat lie it is when they complain about being captives among us! Jerusalem was destroyed more than 1,400 years ago during that time we Christians have been tortured and persecuted by the Jews in all the world. On top of that, we do not know to this day what Devil brought them into our country. We did not fetch them from Jerusalem!... Yes, we have and hold them captive, as I would like to keep my rheumatism, and all other diseases and misfortunes, who must wait as a poor servant, with money and property and everything I have! I wish they were in Jerusalem with the other Jews and whomsoever they would like to have with them.

Now what are we going to do with these rejected, condemned Jewish people?... Let us apply the ordinary wisdom of other nations like France, Spain, Bohemia, et al., who made them give an account of what they had stolen through usury, and divided it evenly; but expelled them from their country;. For as heard before, God's wrath is so great over them that through soft mercy they only become more wicked, through hard treatment, however, only a little better. Therefore, away with them!
How much more unbearable it is that we should permit the entire Christendom and all of us to be bought with our own money, be slandered and cursed by the Jews, who on top of all that be made rich and our lords, who laugh us to scorn and are tickled by their audacity!
What a joyful affair that would be for the Devil and his angels, and cause them to laugh through their snouts like a sow grinning at her little pigs, but deserving real wrath before God.
Maybe mild-hearted and gentle Christians will believe that I am too rigorous and drastic against the poor, afflicted Jews, believing that I ridicule them and treat them with much sarcasm. By my word, I am far too weak to be able to ridicule such a satanic brood. I would fain to do so, but they are far greater adepts at mockery than I and possess a god who is master in this art. It is the Evil One himself.
Even with no further evidence than the Old Testament, I would maintain, and no person on earth could alter my opinion, that the Jews as they are today are veritably a mixture of all the depraved and malevolent knaves of the whole world over, who have then been dispersed in all countries, similarly to the Tartars, Gypsies and such folk."

http://www.abbc.com/luther/index.htm

"We do not forbid you to believe in Christ, we order you to”

Prophet of Islam - Mohammad (PBUH)

 

GALILEE  FLOWERS

By Israel Shamir*

 

When in 1543, the typhoon-blown Portuguese schooners approached the shores of Japan, the astonished sailors could not believe their eyes: on a warm spring day, the tropical island ahoy was buried under snow. They were witness to one of the real Seven Wonders of the World, the flowers of sakura, the wild cherry of Japan. As soon as the benevolent heaven bestows this seasonal gift to earth, the Japanese forget their wives and kids, their duties, employers and bills; they just sit under the trees, drink sake wine and write poems, short and sharp as swords.

 

That is why, these days, leaving behind our man-made troubles, I sit under the white cloud of a tree and watch the beautiful white and pink blossoms of almond trees covering the hills of Galilee.  These lovely blossoms are our version of the Japanese sakura, and a chance to indulge in the custom of flower viewing. A honey aroma wafts through the air; the skies are crystal blue.  Yellow daisies dance on the lush green grass at the base of these almond wonders, interspersed by violet cyclamen and red anemones. The glorious backdrop is provided by the huge snow mass of Jebel al Sheikh (Mt Hermon). Palestine is a sister to Japan. These two hilly lands are home to stubborn mountain folk, devoted to their customs and ways.

 

For all the similarities in the landscape, there are differences.  The hill we sit on, all white like Jaffa sea surf, is the ruin of a village. If we were in Japan, it would be alive and humming. The village of Birim has been dead for fifty years. It is beautiful even in death, like Ophelia floating down the stream in the pre-Raphaelite painting of Millais. It was not ruined by war. Its Christian inhabitants were expelled from their houses well after the 1948 war. They were told to leave for a week or two, for ‘security’ reasons. They had no option but to believe the Israeli officers and move out. Their village was dynamited, their church surrounded by barbed wire. They went to Israeli court, they went to the government, commissions were appointed and petitions signed. Nothing helped. Ever since, for 50 years, they have lived in the nearby villages and on Sundays they continue to visit their church. Their lands were seized by their Jewish neighbors, but they still bring their dead to be buried in the church graveyard, under the sign of the cross.

 

Until the arrival of the Israeli army, this ruined village with its orphaned church was the home of the rural Christians of Birim who, for centuries of Moslem rule, lived in peace with their Moslem neighbors of Nebi Yosha and with the old Sephardi Jewish community of nearby Safed.  This little Guernica in the Galillee can single-handedly undermine the myth of a ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization opposing a ‘monstrous’ Islam. This myth lays at the foundation of the Christian Zionist movement; among its fervent supporters, one can find a friend of Mark Rich and a newly minted New York citizen, W. J. Clinton.

 

The problems of the Middle East are ugly enough without the current Moslem-bashing. The pro-Israeli pundits of the New York Times quote the blood-curling verses on Jihad, retell the old traditions of religious wars and persecutions, to ‘prove’ Islam’s cruelty and intolerance. They are repeated by a pleasant upper-class Jewish lady from London, Barbra Amiel. In a sotto voce, she writes about ‘exclusivist’ Islam and Jewish ‘moderation’. In order to incite hatred, Israel’s lobby works all the ropes. Before the rise of Israel, Arab sheiks were depicted as romantic heroes in movies acted by Rudolf Valentino. Nowadays, the pro-Israel producers of Hollywood turn out propaganda films on ill-shaven Moslem terrorists with the subtlety of Edward D. Wood, Jr. This new prejudice is amplified a hundredfold by the Christian Zionist Congress, claiming ‘protection for Christians of Palestine from the Moslem (?!) persecution’. These people obviously have not walked among the ruins of Birim.

 

Another email comes into my laptop, this time from Gaza. An American girl, Alison Weir from San Francisco evades Israeli bullets, comforts the scared Palestinian kids, and writes: “The problem is when you know the truth, it is far too cruel, far too diametrically opposite what we used to think and what everyone still thinks to express. The lie is too big, the repression too complete, the Palestinians' lives too horrible to write about reasonably”.

 

Well, Alison is right. We face a huge lie, an anti-Moslem blood libel, and it is time to stop it. I do not think that the problems of Middle East have anything to do with religion. But if the supporters of Israel want to wake up the sleeping ghost of religious intolerance, to incite Christians against Moslems, let us audit their balance.

 

If these Christian Zionists care for Christ, not only for Zion, let them learn what Jews and Moslems feel towards Christ. Rami Rozen expressed the Jewish tradition in a long feature in a major Israeli newspaper Haaretz[i]: “Jews feel towards Jesus today what they felt in 4 c or in the Middle Ages… It is not fear, it is hatred and despise”. “For centuries, Jews concealed from Christians their hate to Jesus, and this tradition continues even now”.  “He is revolting and repulsive”, said an important modern religious Jewish thinker.  Rozen writes that this “repulsion passed from the observant Jews to the general Israeli public”.

 

On Christmas Eve, according to a report in the Jerusalem local paper, Kol Ha-Ir[ii], Hassids customarily do not read holy books, as it could save Jesus from eternal punishment (the Talmud teaches that Jesus boils in hell[iii]). This custom was dying out, but Hassids of Habad, the fervent nationalists, brought it back to life. I still remember old Jews spitting while passing by a church, and cursing the dead, while passing by a Christian cemetery. Last year in Jerusalem, a Jew decided to refresh the tradition. He spat at Holy Cross, carried in the procession along the city. Police saved him from further trouble, but the court fined him $50, despite his claim that he just fulfilled his religious duty.

 

Last year, the biggest Israeli tabloid Yedioth Aharonoth reprinted in its library the Jewish anti-Gospel, Toledoth Eshu, compiled in the Middle Ages. It is the third recent reprint, including one in a newspaper. If the Gospel is the book of love, Toledoth is the book of hate for Christ. The hero of the book is Judas. He captures Jesus by polluting his purity. According to Toledoth, the conception of Christ was in sin, the miracles of Jesus were witchcraft, his resurrection but a trick.

 

Joseph Dan, a Professor of Jewish mysticism in Hebrew University in Jerusalem, writing on the death of Jesus stated: “The modern Jewish apologists, hesitantly adopted by the church, preferred to put the blame on Romans. But the medieval Jew did not wish to pass the buck. He tried to prove that Jesus had to be killed, and he was proud of killing Him. The Jews hated and despised Christ and Christians”. Actually, adds Prof. Dan, there is little place to doubt that the Jewish enemies of Jesus caused his execution.

 

Even today, Jews in Israel refer to Jesus by the demeaning word Yeshu (instead of Yeshua), meaning ‘Perish his name’. There is an ongoing argument, whether His name was turned into a swear word, or other way around. In a similar pun, the Gospel is called ‘Avon Gilaion’, the booklet of Sin. These are the endearing feeling of the friends of Christian Zionists towards Christ.

 

What about Moslems? The Moslems venerate Christ. He is called ‘The Word of God”, “Logos”, Messiah, the Prophet and is considered “a Messenger of God”,  along with Abraham, Moses and Muhammad. Many chapters of the Kor’an tell the story of Christ, his virgin birth and his persecution by Jews. His saintly mother is admired, and the Immaculate Conception is one of the tenets of Islam. The name of Christ glorifies the golden edifice of Haram a-Sharif. According to the Moslem faith, it was there that the founder of Islam met Jesus, and they prayed together.  The Hadith, the Moslem tradition, says in the name of the prophet, ‘We do not forbid you to believe in Christ, we order you to”. Moslems identify their prophet with Paracletes, the Helper (Jn 14:16) whose coming was predicted by Jesus. They venerate places associated with the life of Jesus: the place of Ascension, the Tomb of Lazarus, the Holy Sepulchre are adjacent to a mosque and perfectly accessible by Christians.

 

While Moslems do not consider Jesus – God, they proclaim him as the Messiah, the Anointed one, the Paradise Dweller. This religious idea, familiar to Nestorians and other early churches, but rejected by mainstream Christianity, opened the gates for those Jews, who could not part with the notion of strict monotheism. That is why many Palestinian Jews and Christians of the 7th century accepted Islam and became Palestinian Moslems. They remained in their villages, they did not depart for Poland or England, they did not learn Yiddish, they did not study the Talmud, but they continued to shepherd their flocks and plant almond trees, they remained faithful to their land and to the great idea of the fraternity of men.

 

In the south of Hebron, in the ruins of Susiah, one can see how in the course of two centuries a synagogue slowly evolved into a mosque, as the population of nearby caves abandoned the exclusionary faith of Babylonian wizards and adopted Islam. These shepherds still live there, in the same caves.  In the last year, the Israeli army has twice tried to expel them to provide more room for new settlers from Brooklyn.

 

Why, in this season of blossoming almond trees, do I brood on the sensitive subject of Jewish and Moslem attitudes towards Christ? Because one has to stop the mills of hatred operated by Israel’s supporters. Because the “Judeo-Christian” code language is being used to justify the barbed wire around Birim’s Church and the tanks around Bethlehem. Because there is a duty to remove an obstacle from the path of the blind.

 

The majority of the Christian Zionists are simple misled souls, people of good intentions but little knowledge. They think they ‘support Jews’, but they promote the Christ-hating spirit among the Jews. It was not in vain that a hero of the Zionist Bible, Exodus by Leon Uris, kept a poster in his room saying ‘We crucified Christ’.  It  was not in vain that an Israeli soldier on the roadblock of Bethlehem told me yesterday, ‘We starve the beasts’, referring to the native Christians of the city of Nativity.  It was not in vain that the Gospel was burned on a stake in Israel, while anti-Gospel literature is widely spread; that new immigrant Jews embracing Christianity are persecuted and deported; that every preacher of the Christian faith in Israel can be sent to jail according to new anti-Christian laws; that Israeli archaeologists erase the Christian holy sites and memories off the face of  the Holy Land.

 

To the leaders of the Christian Zionists, who surely know these facts, but lead their innocent flock on the path of the Anti-Christ, I say, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Christ to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone tied round his neck and be drowned in the deep sea” (Mt 18:6).

 

To my Jewish brothers I say: the opinions of medieval Jews do not bind us. Every Jew can decide for himself, whether to pray for the destruction of the Gentiles or to share the blessing of the Holy Land with the villagers of Birim and Bethlehem. Within the Jewish people, there were always spiritual descendants of the prophets who wished to bring peace and blessing to all the children of Adam. As true as this almond blossom, in you the prophecy will be fulfilled: ‘All the nations of the earth will bless you’ (Deut. 7).

 

* Israel Shamir is one of the best-known and respected Russian Jewish writers and journalists. He wrote for Haaretz, BBC, Pravda and translated Agnon, Joyce and Chandler into Russian. His articles The Rape of Dulcinea, Kid Sister and The Test Failed could be found on many Internet sites, http://www.thestruggle.org/, http://www.antiwar/, http://www.nilemedia/ etc. He can be reached at shamiri_@..., or write P.O.B. 23714 Tel Aviv 61236

The Price of Truth
Copyright: http://www.iviews.com
Published Friday May 18, 2001

By Hebah Abdalla

Israel's most ardent, right wing supporters have been relatively successful in silencing its critics.  Outspoken Palestinians have been labeled as extremists, Muslim groups have been labeled as terrorists, and everyone else has been called anti-Semitic.  In each case, their credibility has been called into question.  Robert Fisk, a long-time Middle East correspondent, has said that those who speak out against Israel are "vilified for telling the truth".

"...The degree of abuse and outright threats now being directed at anyone - academic, analyst, reporter - who dares to criticize Israel (or dares to tell the truth about the Palestinian uprising) is fast reaching McCarthyite proportions," wrote Fisk.

Indeed, Israeli supporters have smeared even the most well known Palestinian intellectual Edward Said.  Some have attempted to have him fired from various positions, while others have gone so far as to suggest he does not even have the right to call himself Palestinian.

In an article about Said called "My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications", Justus Reid Weiner makes the ridiculous assertion that Said, "in retailing the facts of his own personal biography over the years...has spoken anything but the plain, direct, or honest truth."

"Instead, he has served up, and consciously encouraged others to serve up, a wildly distorted version of the truth, made up in equal parts of outright deception and of artful obfuscations."

But now, especially since the outbreak of the second intifada, it has become increasingly difficult for these Zionists to discredit the growing number of Jews who have spoken out against the litany of atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli government.  To many of these pro-Israeli fanatics, these Jews are seen as a threat to their well-oiled propaganda machine, which has thus far been relatively successful in keeping American public opinion in their favor.  Unfortunately, some of these zealots have resorted to threats and intimidation. 

Recently Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine, a bimonthly Jewish publication covering political issues, has received death threats for his outspokenness over the unfair treatment of the Palestinians.  Rabbi Lerner has taken a strong stand on Israel, saying that they must end the occupation, dismantle settlements and take partial responsibility for resettlement of Palestinian refugees, including allowing hundreds of thousands of them to return to their homeland.

The California rabbi says that these "normal threats" have now taken a turn for the worse, and are now scaring his wife. 

The Web site http://masada2000.org, presumably run by supporters of the Jewish terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane, has identified Lerner as one of the five enemies of the Jewish people and printed his address and driving directions to his home.  As a result of this Web site, he's received hate mail and threats such as this one:

"You are a selfhating (sic) little kike. One bright day, someone will come and kill you. Wish you to rot in hell, pig"

And this one came from Hebron:

"YOU SUBHUMAN LEFTIST ANIMAL. YOU SHOULD BE ALL EXTERMINATED. YOU ARE THE LOWEST OF THE LOW LIFE."

Understandably concerned about these letters, Rabbi Lerner turned to the very organization established to protect Jews, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.  But the ADL is turning a blind eye, telling him that the threats are not a "hate crime".  However as the rabbi astutely points out, if someone were to give death threats to the head of the Conference of Presidents (a major Jewish organization) on the grounds of their stand on Israel, do you think that the Jewish community would say "well, it's not a hate crime, -it's merely political?" Not likely.

These groups like the ADL, which operate under the guise of human rights and democracy, care not to defend anyone, including one of their own, especially when he or she so boldly refuses to tow the party line.  Instead, they are treated like pariahs. 

So by refusing to defend Rabbi Michael Lerner, the people at the ADL are no better than the fanatics making the threats.