[Peace-discuss] American Catholics vs. Christian Zionism

[Carl G. Estabrook]

[America is a national weekly magazine founded by 1909 in New York and  
published by the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.]

Out of Palestine
Solidarity with a displaced people
Elizabeth G. Burr | America | FEBRUARY 27, 2012

Recently I asked Dominique Najjar, a Palestinian Christian who lives  
with his wife and children in Minneapolis, why so many Palestinians  
are leaving Palestine. He told me the story of how he and two of his  
three brothers, all aspiring professionals, immigrated to the United  
States from East Jerusalem out of “economic necessity,” starting in  
the early 1970s. “My parents needed support,” he said, explaining that  
economic advancement was impossible under Israeli control. This took  
place within the first decade of the Israeli military occupation of  
the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, which  
began after the 1967 war and is illegal under international law.

But there is more to Mr. Najjar’s story. He and one of his brothers  
did not intend to emigrate permanently from their homeland. After they  
had moved to the United States, however, Israel revoked their  
Jerusalem residency status. Now they are given 90-day tourist visas  
when they return to their hometown, where their 89-year-old mother  
lives alone. Since none of her seven adult children enjoys residency  
status in Jerusalem any longer, none can do more than visit her. She  
receives daily “compassion and attention” from her Muslim neighbors  
next door. Najjar remarked that the revocation of his residency status  
is “all part of the Israeli effort to minimize the number of non-Jews  
in Jerusalem.”

It is difficult for citizens of other countries to appreciate what the  
occupation means for Palestinians who are not citizens of the country  
that rules them (unlike Israeli Palestinians who live in the  
recognized State of Israel). A reading of the 30 articles of the  
United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) reveals  
that very few of these rights are applied to occupied Palestinians.  
Directly relevant to Mr. Najjar’s story, for example, Article 13 (2)  
states, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his  
own, and to return to his country.” People of conscience are faced  
with the oppression of an indigenous population in their own homeland,  
and Christians worldwide must confront the truth that Palestinian  
Christians are walking down a long Via Dolorosa from which, without  
international intervention, the only exit is exile.

Indigenous Christians have lived in Palestine since the origins of  
Christianity about 2,000 years ago. Over the centuries other  
Christians immigrated to Palestine. Palestinian Christians comprised  
at least 15 percent of the Palestinian population in the late 19th  
century, under Ottoman Muslim rule, and about 7.5 percent by 1944, in  
the final years of the British Mandate. During the 1948 war, which  
resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel in much of  
historic Palestine, more than a third of Palestinian Christians were  
among the 750,000 to 800,000 refugees forced to flee their homes in  
Palestine. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has described Israel’s  
“war of independence,” which Palestinians call the nakba  
(catastrophe), as “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine” in his book by  
that title published in 2006.

The Lydda Death March

Audeh Rantisi, a Palestinian Christian, has written in The Link, a  
journal published by Americans for Middle East Understanding, about  
his family’s expulsion from Lydda, near Tel Aviv, in July 1948, along  
with that of thousands of other residents. An 11-year-old at the time,  
Rantisi witnessed: an infant being crushed to death by a cart after  
his mother lost hold of him, an Israeli soldier shooting to death a  
newly married young man who would not hand over his money, people  
dying of thirst and many more horrors. He reports that “scores of  
women miscarried, their babies left for jackals to eat.” On the fourth  
day of the “Lydda death march,” his 13-member family reached Ramallah,  
in the West Bank, “carrying nothing but the clothes we wore.” His  
father also took with him the key to their house. Generations of the  
Rantisi family had lived in Lydda for some 1,600 years.

Mr. Pappé is not alone among scholars who have identified a Zionist  
ideology of exclusion as the engine driving the expulsion of  
Palestinians in 1948 or who have interpreted Israeli policy since then  
as a continuing campaign of ethnic cleansing. By 2011 the Israeli  
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip had reached its 44th year.  
In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the occupation has brought  
the construction of scores of “settlements” in violation of the Fourth  
Geneva Convention, which currently house at least half a million  
Israeli settlers. Five years ago Israel had already expropriated 87  
percent of East Jerusalem and 75 percent of the West Bank for  
settlements, parks and military areas. Thus less and less Palestinian  
land is available for Palestinian housing, agriculture or other uses.  
Human rights abuses of Palestinians abound under the occupation, which  
appears designed to make their lives so unbearable that they will  
“voluntarily” leave.

The emigration of Palestinian Christians from the occupied territories  
to the West since 1967 has also reduced their number to the point  
where Christians currently account for less than 2 percent of the  
Palestinian population under occupation. And the rate of population  
growth for Palestinian Christians in the West Bank amounts to just  
half of their emigration rate. Without a stabilization or reversal of  
the net decline, the extinction of Palestinian Christians in the  
territories is conceivable. Even in 2006 only about 50,000 Palestinian  
Christians were living in the West Bank and Gaza.

What explains the ongoing exodus of Christians from Palestine? Some  
attempts at an explanation are misleading. In line with the  
Islamophobia notable in Europe and in the United States, Israeli  
propaganda points to tension and conflict with Palestinian Muslims,  
who comprise more than 98 percent of the Palestinian population under  
occupation, as the key reason for Palestinian Christian emigration.  
Israel has long encouraged political and religious division among  
Palestinians. Yet when I interviewed the Christian Palestinian  
secretary general of the East Jerusalem Y.W.C.A. in June 2009, she  
said that relations between Palestinian Muslims and Christians have  
been and remain largely positive. In her view “religious extremism”  
has been fostered by the environment of stress, chaos and conflict  
produced by the Israeli occupation. Indeed, there is a long history of  
good relations between Palestinian Muslims and Christians.  
Palestinians of both faiths experienced the catastrophe of 1948  
together, and since 1967 those in the West Bank and Gaza have  
experienced the catastrophe of the Israeli occupation together.

‘Pull’ and ‘Push’ Factors

Palestinian Christians have tended to be well educated, relatively  
advantaged economically and more likely than their Muslim counterparts  
to have contacts in the West. Those could be considered “pull” factors  
behind the Palestinian Christian exodus. The “push” factors are the  
economic, political and social consequences of the Israeli occupation,  
with its “apartheid wall,” checkpoints and segregated road system; its  
ever-expanding settlements, destruction of Palestinian agriculture and  
demolition of Palestinian homes; its lawless, weapon-toting settlers;  
and its incarceration, with systematic torture, of thousands of  
Palestinians.

A 2006 survey of Palestinian Christians conducted by the Palestinian  
Christian peace organization Sabeel confirms the decisive influence of  
these “push” factors. Romell Soudah, a faculty member in business  
administration at Bethlehem University, a Catholic institution, writes  
that “the continuous confiscation of land...coupled with restrictions  
on mobility and access, give the impression that people are living in  
a cage, dehumanized, with little hope for freedom and normal living.  
This situation...is the primary factor…forcing Christian Palestinians  
to leave.” These Israeli actions, plus water confiscation and economic  
strangulation, which drive unemployment and poverty levels upward, are  
seen as calculated means of emptying the land of Palestinians. Thus  
Christian Palestinian emigration is the most visible effect of  
Israel’s deliberate, if gradual, ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian  
population.

Why Care?

Why should Americans care if Palestinian Christians in the West Bank  
are leaving their homeland twice as fast as their population there is  
growing? The erasure of native Christians from Palestine should be  
unthinkable. Palestine is where Christianity originated, and  
Palestinian Christians have a unique status in the worldwide Christian  
community. Americans should be outraged that U.S. policy, buttressed  
by generous funding from their tax dollars, makes possible the Israeli  
occupation and its discriminatory policies.

These policies include a campaign to revoke the time-honored tax- 
exempt status of Christian churches and other Christian institutions,  
like the Lutheran Augusta Victoria Hospital on the Mount of Olives,  
and prohibition of access to holy sites (for example, barring West  
Bank Christians from visiting the Holy Sepulcher, traditionally  
regarded as the burial place of Jesus, in Jerusalem’s Old City).  
Orthodox Jewish harassment of Christian clergy in the Old City is  
commonplace. Hanan Chehata, a journalist, reports that “numerous  
churches have been destroyed during Israeli military incursions,  
divided from their congregations by the wall, and exposed to  
dilapidation.” Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity suffered physical  
damage during the Israeli incursion and siege of 2002. The wall now  
encircles Bethlehem, separating it from nearby Jerusalem; residents of  
Bethlehem are prevented from entering Jerusalem and vice versa. A  
majority of Bethlehem’s Christians hold Israel responsible for the  
departure of record numbers of Palestinian Christians from their city.

Yet Western Christians often fail to recognize the imperiled existence  
of their Palestinian co-religionists. Moreover, there are millions of  
Christian Zionists whose interpretation of New Testament prophecies  
allies them with Israeli Zionism and against the Christians of  
Palestine. They imagine that there is serious division between  
Palestinian Muslims and Christians, whereas the far more prevalent  
tension is between Palestinian Christians and some Israeli Jews  
(settlers, military and government leaders or those who represent  
them). The continued presence of Palestinian Christians in Palestine  
offsets the misperception that the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is  
really about relig ion—a conflict between Muslims and Jews, rather  
than one about land, human rights and international law.

A Palestinian Christian friend wrote to me recently regarding the  
typical pattern of Muslims and Christians working together  
cooperatively and harmoniously within Palestinian institutions and  
organizations. Among the examples she mentioned is the Rawdat El-Zuhur  
(Garden of Flowers) elementary school in East Jerusalem, which has a  
Christian principal, a Muslim accountant, a mixed teaching staff and a  
mixed student body. Rawdat El-Zuhur, she wrote, “serves the community  
irrespective of [the members’] faith.” Likewise at Birzeit University,  
north of Ramallah, the president is Muslim and the chairman of the  
board is Christian; the board members are mixed, as are the staff and  
the student body.

To their credit, Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessor, Pope John Paul  
II, are prominent among church leaders who have advocated worldwide  
Christian solidarity with Palestinian Christians. Informed American  
Christians committed to peace with justice are called to stand up both  
to Christian Zionism and to U.S. government underwriting of the  
illegal Israeli military occupation that is driving Palestinians, and  
disproportionately Christian Palestinians, out of their native  
country. In the prophetic words of the Anglican Archbishop Desmond  
Tutu, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen  
the side of the oppressor.”

Elizabeth G. Burr, who teaches part-time at Metropolitan State  
University in St. Paul, Minn, has been concerned with the Israel- 
Palestine issue for more than 40 years.

SOURCE: http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13275
Posted by Sam Bahour at 12:25 AM 9 March 2012
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