Gaza: "Humanitarian Implosion";
Jewish Seminarians Shot Down;
Bush Messes Up Gaza Even More
In the miserable Israeli-Palestinian Hundred Years War, there were several pieces of worse than usual news lately.
David Rose at Vanity Fair showed that the Bush administration tried to provoke a Palestinian civil war and a coup by the PLO against the elected Hamas government. Those plans went awry, leaving Hamas more powerful than ever. George W. Bush, Condi Rice and National Security Council adviser (and Iran-Contra criminal) Elliott Abrams clearly couldn't jointly make a pancake from buckwheat flour, much less run the world. I mean, imagining making a rock-bottom bad situation even worse by devious plots that have no chance of success.
The Bush Plan for Democracy impelled the administration to strong-arm the Israelis into letting Hamas run in January, 2006. But then Bush and the Israelis refused to honor the results when Hamas won and formed a government. They cut off aid to the Palestinians (which, yes, did affect medical care and other necessities), arbitrarily kidnapped and imprisoned government ministers and representatives, and then attempted to provoke a civil war and a coup. (And the same people blame the Palestinians for not being able to keep order!)
Politics aside, Eight Human Rights organizations warned that Gaza is facing the worst humanitarian crisis since Israel occupied the territory in 1967. Israel keeps the 1.5 million Gazans stateless and under perpetual siege, denying them needed fuel and supplies, even food. Statelessness and immobilization on this scale can only be described as a form of slavery.
The full report on Gaza's misery is here in pdf format. Highlights:
' Movement in and out of Gaza is all but impossible
and supplies of food and water, sewage treatment,and basic healthcare can no longer be taken for granted. As a result of the blockade and collapse of the economy, there is little money to buy food and limited food to buy. Food prices are rising and wheat, flour, baby milk, and rice, among other essential goods, are increasingly scarce. . .
. . . The Gaza economy is no longer on the brink of
collapse – it has collapsed. In the last 6 months, the majority of private businesses have shut down and 95% of Gaza’s industrial operations are suspended due to the ban on imported raw materials and the block on exports 26. Entire sectors including construction and agriculture have ground to a halt, 3,500 factories out of 3,900 have closed in the last 6 months resulting in some 75,000 job losses in the private sector as a whole . . .
The number of people living in absolute poverty in
Gaza has increased sharply. Today, 80% of families in Gaza currently rely on humanitarian aid compared to 63% in 2006 4. This decline exposes unprecedented
levels of poverty and the inability of a large majority of the population to afford basic food. . .
Unemployment in Gaza is close to 40% and is set to rise to 50% 7. The private sector – that generates 53% of all jobs in Gaza – has been devastated, businesses have been bankrupted and 75,000 out of 110,000 workers are now without a job. At present, 95% of Gaza’s industrial operations are suspended because they cannot access inputs for production nor can they export what they produce . . .
The blockade is destroying public service infrastructure in Gaza. The Israeli government prevents the repair and maintenance of the electricity and water service infrastructure in Gaza by prohibiting the import of spare parts. The impact of this is amplified by Israel’s parallel punitive restrictions on fuel and electricity to Gaza. Hospitals cannot generate electricity to keep lifesaving equipment working or to generate oxygen, while 40-50 million litres of sewage continues to pour into the sea daily 14. In September 2007, an UNRWA survey in the Gaza Strip revealed that there was a nearly 80% failure rate in schools grades four to nine, with up to 90% failure rates in Mathematics 15. In January 2008, UNICEF reported that schools in Gaza had been cancelling classes that were high on energy consumption, such as IT, science labs . . . '
A more personal account of the catastrophe in Gaza recently appeared at Tomdispatch.com. Note that the Israeli government lies and says there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. I mean, really.
But beyond the grinding human rights calamity there has been hot war recently. The Arab League postponed a new diplomatic initiative toward the conflict when the Israelis killed 120 Gazans with air strikes and ground operations. Many of those killed were innocent women and children. The attack came in response to continual small homemade rocket attacks on Sederot, an Israeli town in striking distance of the Gaza Strip, by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other similar small terror groups. One such rocket attack recently killed an innocent Israeli. But, really folks, there is such a principle in contemporary warfare of proportionate response. 120 to 1?
Then on Thursday the horrible news came that a terrorist had come into a Jewish seminary and started shooting the students, killing 8 and wounding 10. They were just 15 and 16 years old, and were studying the Bible. Teenagers. In Lebanon, Hizbullah tied the attack to a new group formed in memory of the assassination of Imad Mughniyah, the Shiite Lebanese guerrilla who had attacked Americans and had coordinated resistance to Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. Me, I doubt there is a connection to Hizbullah, the leader of which, Hassan Nasrallah, is a publicity hog.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the seminary killings saying "We condemn all attacks against civilians, be they Palestinian or Israeli . . ." Hamas, on the other hand, responded differently:
' "This heroic attack in Jerusalem is a normal response to the crimes of the occupier and its murder of civilians," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said.
Another spokesman, Taher al-Nunu, blamed the attack on the Israeli government and its deadly military strikes in the impoverished territory, adding that "we have warned before about the responsibility of the escalation in Gaza and warned of Palestinian anger." '
So this tableau is totally miserable and reflects poorly on human beings in general as a species. What can you say in the face of war crimes by Israel against the Gazans, and the crimes against humanity of some Palestinians who turn to terrorism?
I found the steady, clear-eyed and wise voice of Rabbi Michael Lerner on this cesspool of a war to lend some spiritual comfort.
'Murders at a Yeshiva in Jerusalem
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun
Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives unequivocally condemn the killings of students at Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem today. Just as last week we prayed for a speedy recovery of Israelis and Palestinians wounded in the fighting in Gaza and the bombings of Sderot, so today we pray for a speedy recovery for those who were injured in this ghastly attack. The wounds of two thousand years of exile and the holocaust are inevitably restimulated by this kind of attack, and tragically the price will likely be paid by Palestinian civilians, who in turn will fight back and then the price will be paid by other Israelis. Thus the seemingly endless cycle of violence will continue.
We at Tikkun feel equally grieving for the people killed by vicious and immoral terrorists at the Yeshiva Mercaz HaRav (the ultra-nationalist religious center that developed the ideology which inspired religious Zionists to believe that they had a God-given right to settle and hold on to the territories without regard to the consequences for the Palestinian people already living there) as we do for the victims of Israeli terror (which in the past week killed 120 people, many of them children, many of them sitting in their homes when Israeli troops randomly fire-bombed and murdered them, as documented by the same international human rights organizations that today condemned the attack in Jerusalem by terrorists). We understand that these killings can only be understood in the context of the 60 year old struggle between these two communities, and that nothing short of a full peace accord that will require a new open-heartedness on both sides can possibly break this horrible cycle of violence.
We similarly mourn the people in Sderot and Ashkelon terrorized by bombs from Hamas, as we did for those people who die in the Gaza and West Bank areas because the check points prevent them from getting to the doctors they need, and the many children suffering from malnutrition because of Israel's slow starvation of the country and cutting off of supplies. Of course there is no "moral equivalency" here, because as Talmud and other religious and spiritual traditions teach, every single life lost is a unique tragedy, and no life lost can be compared to or the loss justified in terms of the life lost of others. '
Subscribe to Tikkun, and send money.
And consider supporting the Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. Remember, Jesus was a Palestinian Jew and every sixth Palestinian is a Christian who traces his or her roots to the early Christian community in places like Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Why don't most Christians care about them, if they won't just care about human beings in general?
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/07/2008 12:20:00 AM
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11 Comments:
Dear Professor,
Thank you for reminding us about Palestinian Christians. I still mourn the death a few years ago of one of this people's most ardent and eloquent (and reviled)spokesmen, Columbia's Edward Said, a stateless person in every sense, a vocal advocate for Arabs and Muslims, an enemy of both extreme Zionists and the PLO (he thought Arafat was corrupt), and a Christian.
We should also pause in shame and grief over the fate of the millenia-old Christian Church of Iraq, a group largely tolerated by Saddam (for the selfish reason that he knew they could never hope to succeed him).
OK, the killed were from 15 to 26 years old and they were no more no less than cadres of the settler occupation movement - so much one could found even in Reiter's piece. And others were ARMED, at least one of them, and one more is a paratrooper who has a rifle in his home (as usual in Israel). In short, there was NOT an attack on simple "studying the Bible. Teenagers." They were NOT for ex, anti-Zionist religous Jews who have eshivas in Jerusalem too. they were more like cadets of the occupation army (or even a paramilitary).
And, by the way, they study not so much Bible as Talmud and commentaries justifying the occupation, ethnic cleansing and mass-murder of non-Jews. Rav Kook who founded the eshiva was a very (un)famous for his racism
By the way, I am an Israeli
I've a number of Palestinian friends and the refrain I hear today I've heard countless times before
No one cares
I don't think "slavery" is a strong enough metaphor or label for the Gaza situation. A slave is at least valuable property. A slave would get better treatment than this. It is really hard to communicate the intensity of the vulnerability and hopelessness this situation creates.
What Hamas did was unspeakable. But Israeli and US officials, including Obama, share the blame.
The lesson they have taught Hamas is that when Hamas attempts to participate in legitimate political reform, they are ignored or destroyed. When they attack, they are not ignored. They are heard.
I learn so much here.
I should pay tuition.
Nowhere else did I get the backstory on that particular Yeshiva.
When I first heard of the killings in the Yeshiva,
I thought of the one where I enjoyed Friday evening meal in the Old City.
I felt some relief when I learned that the attack was at another school. But the tragedy was just as great.
oh, the inhumanity.
your Avid Student
Thanks Juan, for writing this discription and analysis of Gaza. It is the Arab-Israeli conflicts which, after all, has engender the conflict in Iraq about which you so eloquently write.
Of course, the homemade rockets shot from Gaza to settlement of Sderot was not the initial trigger of Israel’s killing spree. Nor did the Gazans launch their homemade rockets out of the blue for no reason, as is regularly portrayed by the press. Days before the Gazan rockets started to fall, Israel assassinated a Hamas leader also killing five other bystanders. Many many rockets from Cobra and Apache helicopters, F 16 fighters and pilotless drones have been falling of the Gaza strip consistently over a long period of time, concomitant with the usual barbaric sprees house destructions.
About a year ago I calculated that Israel was killing Palestinians at an average of 2.71 per day since the beginning of the second Intifada in Oct of 2000. As of the summer of 2005, Israel had killed 50,000 Palestinians since Israel became a state, according to an estimate by Ilan Pappe, which appeared in Foreign Policy at that time.
It is a no-brainer, I do not see how anyone with any intellectual intregrety can deny it – A state that must imprison 3.5 million people in an outdoor prison for 40 years in order to maintain itself as a racially pure, or nearly racially pure, state, has no moral right to exists.,
What price does the world pay for the existence of the racially exclusive state of Israel? It is incalculable in terms of the constant warfare and human suffering it has generated.
wjm
In addition to Rabbi Michael Lerner and Tikkun, I believe Ali Abunimah at the Electronic Intifada and the editors of Jewish Voice for Peace are also eloquent advocates for peace and justice for the Palestinians, in addition to being incisive analysts of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Here's a sampling of their analyses:
As has been widely reported, a gunman in Jerusalem opened fire at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva yesterday, killing 8 students (most of them children) and wounding at least 9. At a time like this, there are two different sets responsibilities to the victims: one is to mourn the brutal deaths of these boys and young men. At the same time, we need to work to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, which requires us to understand the context in which this act of terrorism occurred. Failing to understand this atrocity within the overall context of the occupation reinforces the right-wing line that Palestinian violence is motivated simply by anti-Semitism, blood hatred, or Biblical feuds. Although the gunman’s specific motives are unclear, this killing comes at a moment that the New York Times somewhat delicately describes as a time of “tension”. Israel’s latest attack on Gaza has left over 130 Palestinians dead, half of them civilians. Just yesterday, a 20 day-old infant was buried after being shot in the head by Israeli soldiers. Another contextualizing factor is the nature of the yeshiva where the attack took place, a key institution in the militant settlers’ movement, which has been stealing land from Palestinians in the occupied territories for decades, believing God intended the land for Jews. These horrific killings are utterly unjustifiable, and Hamas’ praise for the operation is both contemptible and chilling. It is important not to let this sort illegitimate act of terrorist violence obscure the legitimate and urgent grievances of the Palestinian people under occupation and in exile. It is vital to keep this in mind, because whatever the specific motivations of the gunman might have been, terrorist violence like this is almost always a symptom of Israel’s expansionist policies and is unlikely to end until the occupation is over. Below are the following pieces: 1) A contextualization by Ali Abunimah 2) An explanation about the nature of the yeshiva from Ha’aretz 3) An article reporting the condemnation of the killings by the Organization of the Islamic Conference 4) A statement by the Coalition Against the Gaza Siege Judith Norman A DEFEATED POLICY, NOT A DEFEATED PEOPLE By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 7 March 2008 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9381.shtml Compared with the international silence that surrounded Israel's recent massacres of Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Gaza Strip, condemnation and condolences for the victims of the shooting attack that killed eight students at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem has been swift. "I have just spoken with [Israeli] Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert to extend my deepest condolences to the victims, their families, and to the people of Israel," US President George W. Bush said. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added his "condemnation" and "condolences," as did EU High Representative Javier Solana. The day before the Jerusalem attack, Amira Abu 'Aser was buried in Gaza. She had lived just 20 days on this earth before being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house of friends she and her family were visiting. Needless to say, she had not been firing rockets at Sderot when she was killed. One of the house's inhabitants was found the next day, shot dead and his head crushed by an army jeep, an apparent victim of an extrajudicial murder by Israeli forces. (http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9375.shtml) But confirming their status in the eyes of the "international community" as less than complete human beings, neither Amira's killing, nor any of the dozens of Palestinian civilian victims of Israel's onslaught in Gaza have merited condemnation or condolences. The fallacy that lies behind the differential concern for the lives of innocent Israelis and Palestinians is that the massacre in Jerusalem and the massacres in Gaza can be separated. Israeli deaths are "terrorism," while Palestinian deaths are merely an unfortunate consequence of the fight against "terrorism." But the two are intricately linked, and what happened in Jerusalem is a direct consequence of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for decades. Let me be clear that the killing of civilians, Israeli or Palestinian, is wrong, repugnant, and cannot bring this one-hundred-year war caused by the Zionist colonization of Palestine to an end. There will be an Israeli propaganda effort -- as always -- to present Palestinian violence as being simply motivated by hatred, and divorced from the context of brutal occupation that Palestinians live under. What greater proof could you need than an attack on religious students, devoting their life to the study of the Torah? We cannot expect much analysis in the media of why the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva might have been chosen as a target. Was it mere coincidence that the school, named for Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and led after his death by his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, is the ideological cradle of the militant, Jewish supremacist settler movement Gush Emunim? Unlike other sects in Israel which sought exemption of their students from military service, Gush Emunim encouraged its followers to join the army and become the armed wing of religious nationalist Zionism. Gush Emunim settlers, many of them, like Moshe Levinger, graduates of Mercaz HaRav, founded the most extreme and racist settlements in the Occupied West Bank, including the notorious colonies in and near Hebron whose inhabitants have made life miserable for Palestinians in the city and forced many of them out of their homes. It is the militant settlers of Gush Emunim who still honor Baruch Goldstein who murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in February 1994. It is in Hebron that the Gush Emunim settlers spray "Arabs to the gas chambers" on Palestinian houses. It is possible that the Mercaz HaRav gunman did not know or care about any of this, that any target he could identify as Israeli would have satisfied his desire to exact revenge. In 2002, Israeli army chief Moshe Yaalon declared that "the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people." This would be achieved by the massive and constant application of force until they got the message. The same philosophy was elaborated in 2004 by Professor Arnon Soffer, one of the architects, with former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, of the 2005 Gaza "disengagement." Soffer, an avid supporter of turning Gaza into a hermetically-sealed pen for unwanted Palestinians, explained that if Palestinians fire a single rocket over the fence into Israel, "we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won't allow their husbands to shoot Qassams [rockets], because they will know what's waiting for them." Soffer predicted that in a few years' time, "when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam." With Palestinians closed in, "The pressure at the border will be awful," Soffer predicted. "It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day." To be fair, Soffer did display a human side: "The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings" ("It's the demography, stupid," The Jerusalem Post, 21 May 2004). For decades Israel has been exercizing with ever-escalating brutality this deliberate strategy to crush through force and starvation a civilian population in rebellion against colonial rule. To Israel's vexation, the Palestinians are not playing their part. After sixty years of expulsions, massacres, assassinations of their leaders, colonization, torture, and mass imprisonment, the Palestinians have utterly failed to understand that they are a "defeated people." The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank endure unprecedented oppression by the Israeli army and settlers without resorting to violence in response, but they maintain an inextinguishable determination to endure until they regain their rights. If the methods the Palestinian resistance has sometimes used are reprehensible, they have also been typical for anti-colonial resistance movements throughout time, as William Polk shows in his book Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism and Guerilla War from the American Revolution to Iraq, and Robert Pape demonstrated through his study of suicide bombing in Dying to Win. Is it not time for the rest of the world to step in and force Israel at last to understand the same thing, so that the senseless bloodshed can finally stop and all the people of the country -- Israelis and Palestinians -- can begin to imagine a future other than an endless parade of funerals? -- Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006). --------------------- Mercaz Harav - the flagship of national-religious yeshivasBy Yair ShelegHa’aretz07/03/2008http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/961727.html The Mercaz Harav rabbinic college is the most prominent yeshiva in the religious Zionist world. It trained the movement's leading rabbis as well as many yeshiva heads, city rabbis, and teachers in religious colleges and high schools. The school was central in shaping the evolution of religious Zionism. As the flagship of national-religious yeshivas, the religious right is bound to attribute greater symbolic meaning to a terrorist attack here than anywhere else. Founded in 1924 by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, then chief Ashkenazi rabbi during the British Mandate, it is seen as the first yeshiva to be Zionist in spirit. Rabbi Kook called it "the central world yeshiva," wishing to set it as a model for a new yeshiva concept, integrating traditional Talmud studies with Jewish philosophy, Bible and even Jewish history, geography and literature. The last three subjects were never actually taught there. After its founder's death in 1935 it was named Mercaz Harav after him, and became synonymous with Rabbi Kook's teachings. In its first decades the college had few students and at times it was not clear whether it would survive. The turning point came in the '50s, when graduates of Bnei Akiva religious schools and high-school yeshivas seeking higher religious education flocked to Mercaz Harav, the only Zionist yeshiva. The prominent Beni Akiva rabbi Moshe Zvi Neria, a student of Rabbi Kook's, encouraged students to go to Mercaz Harav, which was headed from 1952 by Rabbi Abraham Kook's son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, until his death in 1982. The foundations for the religious settlements in the West Bank were forged in Mercaz Harav, whose student Hanan Porat set out to restore the Jewish settlement in Gush Etzion immediately after the Six-Day War. The founders of Gush Emunim, a religious political movement that encouraged Jewish settlement of land they believe God promised the Jews, came from Mercaz Harav after the Yom Kippur War. Rabbi Kook encouraged his students to go out and fight for the settlements in the West Bank. He himself took active part in these struggles. Rabbi Kook was very strict about modest clothes for women and the separation of men and women. After his death in 1982, his successor Rabbi Avraham Shapira, who also served as chief rabbi, clashed with Kook's favorite student Rabbi Zvi Tau. Tau's people said that Shapira, who came from an ultra-Orthodox background, was wiping out the college's unique theological character and turning it into another run-of-the-mill yeshiva. The clash led to an official split in 1997, after Shapira introduced to the yeshiva a teachers' training institute, which Tau and his people saw as an "idol in the temple." Tau and his people left and established the Har Mor rabbinic college, which became quite powerful and dominant. Last year, after Shapira's death, his son Rabbi Yaakov Shapira succeeded him as yeshiva head. The yeshiva's well-known graduates include Rabbi Haim Druckman, Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Yaakov Ariel, Rabbi Zfania Drori, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, Rabbi Yoel Bin-Noon and Rabbi Hanan Porat. Other graduates include the Irgun's first commander David Raziel and Maariv newspaper founder Azriel Carlebach. Today, the yeshiva has about 500 students, including 200 students in the yeshiva's kollel (post-graduate division). -------------- http://www.africasia.com/services/news/newsitem.php?area=mideast&item=080307161534.2n3583ya.php 07/03/2008 16:15 JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia, March 7 (AFP) Islamic organisation condemns Jerusalem attack The Islamic world's biggest political bloc on Friday condemned the killing of eight Israeli teenagers in a Jerusalem religious school, saying it abhorred "violence and terror." In a rare reaction to an anti-Israeli attack, the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference expressed "grave concern over, and condemned the recent killings of students in the west Jerusalem," a statement released here said. OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu also "reiterated the position of the OIC against any act of violence and terror anywhere in the world," the statement added. The OIC includes Iran, which is steadfastly hostile to Israel. But Ihsanoglu said he hoped "that this condemnation of the OIC would open up the eyes of those who remained silent during the violence directed against innocent civilians, including children of Palestine." "This vicious cycle of killing must be stopped," the statement said. He urged "all parties concerned to act with calm and restraint in the face of this tragic event." Eight students, most aged 15 and 16, were shot dead late Thursday at the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva, a theological school in predominantly Jewish west Jerusalem. Another nine were wounded. The gunman, a Palestinian from east Jerusalem, was shot dead by police. -------- The Coalition Against the Gaza SiegePress Release, March 7, 2008 Bloodshed does not compensate for bloodshed-Ceasefire Now! The Coalition Against the Gaza Siege calls for an immediate end to the killing and violence, on both sides of the conflict. Bloodshed does not compensate for bloodshed, and revenge is no solution. Any attack on, wounding or killing of unarmed civilians - as happened in the attack on the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva as during the IDF attacks and bombings of Gaza and in the shooting of missiles at Sderot, Ashkelon and the Western Negev - must end forthwith. It is the civilians on both sides who are exposed to harm and who pay the full price for the manoeuvres of the political and military leaderships. We call upon the leaderships, of both sides, including all organizations and parties, to cease all violence immediately. We call upon the international community and the world public opinion to firmly demand an end to the mutual killing and bloodshed. In order to achieve that, we call for a full and mutual ceasefire, as a first step negotiating an end to the occupation and an end to the conflict between the two peoples, to a full peace which is the only hope for our future. Contact: Adi Dagan 0508-575730, Adam Keller 0506-709603, Angela Godfrey 054-7366393, Yaakov Manor 050-5733276 ................................................................--------Jewish Peace News editors:Joel BeininRacheli GaiRela MazaliSarah Anne MinkinJudith NormanLincoln ShlenskyAlistair Welchman ------- Jewish Peace News sends its news clippings only to subscribers. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or manage your subscription, go to www.jewishpeacenews.net
Why don't most Christians care about them, if they won't just care about human beings in general?
More than likely, I'd wager, they're not the right kind of Christians.
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Why don't most Christians care about them, if they won't just care about human beings in general?
Prof. Cole:
Perhaps you've heard that two mainline denominations, the Presbyterians and the Methodists have considered divestment of Israel. The Presbyterians divested in 2004, and then changed policy slightly in 2006, and the Methodists are voting on it now.
I'd like to think they're doing that because they care about all humans, but I personally tend to think it's because they are applying a higher standard to Israel than to other states, but, anyway, they may not be two of the most activist denominations, but they speak for many Americans, and they seem to be standing up for the Palestinians.
This blockade will destroy the gazan economy and its people. bit by bit until they are merely dependent on the goodwill of Israel.
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