[WCUSP] JONATHAN COOK "Israel's purging of Palestinian Christians"

[yvonne simmons]

.
> Subject: Fw: JONATHAN COOK "Israel's purging of
> Palestinian Christians"
> Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2007 16:08:15 -0800
> 
> On the Wrong Side of the Clash of Civilizations
> 
> Israel's Purging of Palestinian Christians
> 
> 
> by Jonathan Cook in Nazareth 
> 
> CounterPunch
> 9 January 2007
> 
> 
> http://www.counterpunch.org/cook01092007.html
> 
> There is an absurd scene in Palestinian writer Suad
> Amiry's recent book 
> "Sharon and My Mother-in-Law" that is revealing
> about Israeli Jews' attitude 
> to the two other monotheistic religions. In 1992,
> long before Israel turned 
> Amiry's home city of Ramallah into a permanent
> ghetto behind checkpoints 
> and walls, it was still possible for West Bank
> Palestinians to drive to 
> Jerusalem and even into Israel -- at least if they
> had the right permit.
> 
> On one occasion Amiry ventures out in her car to
> East Jerusalem, the half of 
> the city that was Palestinian before the 1967 war
> and has since been 
> engulfed by relentless illegal and state-organised
> Jewish settlement.
> 
> There she sees an elderly Jew collapsing out of his
> car and on to the side 
> of the road. She pulls over, realises he is having a
> heart attack and bundles 
> him into the back of her own car. Not able to speak
> Hebrew, she reassures 
> him in English that she is taking him to the nearest
> hospital.
> 
> But as it starts to dawn on him that she is
> Palestinian, Amiry realises the 
> terrible problem her charitable act has created: his
> fear may prompt him to 
> have another heart attack. "What if he had a fatal
> heart attack in the back 
> seat of my car? Would the Israeli police ever
> believe I was just trying to 
> help?" she wonders.
> 
> The Jewish man seeks to calm himself by asking Amiry
> if she is from 
> Bethlehem, a Palestinian city known for being
> Christian. Unable to lie, she 
> tells him she is from Ramallah. "You're Christian?"
> he asks more directly. 
> "Muslim," she admits, to his utter horror. Only when
> they finally make it to 
> the hospital does he relax enough to mumble in
> thanks: "There are good 
> Palestinians after all."
> 
> I was reminded of that story as I made the journey
> to Bethlehem on 
> Christmas Day. The small city that Amiry's Jewish
> heart attack victim so 
> hoped she would hail from is today as much of an
> isolated enclave in the 
> West Bank as other Palestinian cities -- or at least
> it is for its Palestinian 
> inhabitants.
> 
> For tourists and pilgrims, getting in or out of
> Bethlehem has been made 
> reasonably straightforward, presumably to conceal
> from international 
> visitors the realities of Palestinian life. I was
> even offered a festive 
> chocolate Santa Claus by the Israeli soldiers who
> control access to the city 
> where Jesus was supposedly born.
> 
> Seemingly oblivious to the distressing historical
> parallels, however, Israel 
> forces foreigners to pass through a "border
> crossing" -- a gap in the 
> menacing grey concrete wall -- that recalls the
> stark black and white images 
> of the entrance to Auschwitz.
> 
> The gates of Auschwitz offered a duplicitious motto,
> "Arbeit macht frei" 
> (Work makes you free), and so does Israel's gateway
> to Bethlehem. "Peace be 
> with you" is written in English, Hebrew and Arabic
> on a colourful large 
> notice covering part of the grey concrete. The
> people of Bethlehem have 
> scrawled their own, more realistic assessments of
> the wall across much of 
> its length.
> 
> Foreign visitors can leave, while Bethlehem's
> Palestinians are now sealed 
> into their ghetto. As long as these Palestinian
> cities are not turned into 
> death camps, the West appears ready to turn a blind
> eye. Mere concentration 
> camps, it seems, are acceptable.
> 
> The West briefly indulged in a bout of
> soul-searching about the wall 
> following the publication in July 2004 of the
> International Court of Justice's 
> advisory opinion condemning its construction. Today
> the only mild 
> rebukes come from Christian leaders around Christmas
> time. Britain's 
> Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was
> foremost among them 
> this year.
> 
> Even those concerns, however, relate mainly to fears
> that the Holy Land's 
> native Christians, once a significant proportion of
> the Palestinian 
> population, are rapidly dwindling. There are no
> precise figures, but the 
> Israeli media suggests that Christians, who once
> constituted as much as 15 
> per cent of the occupied territories' Palestinians,
> are now just 2 or 3 per 
> cent. Most are to be found in the West Bank close to
> Jerusalem, in 
> Bethlehem, Ramallah and neighbouring villages.
> 
> A similar pattern can be discerned inside Israel
> too, where Christians have 
> come to comprise an ever smaller proportion of
> Palestinians with Israeli 
> citizenship. In 1948 they were nearly a quarter of
> that minority (itself 
> 20 per cent of the total Israeli population), and
> today they are a mere 10 per 
> cent. Most are located in Nazareth and nearby
> villages in the Galilee.
> 
> Certainly, the continuing fall in the number of
> Christians in the Holy Land 
> concerns Israel's leadership almost as keenly as the
> patriarchs and bishops 
> who visit Bethlehem at Christmas -- but for quite
> the opposite reason. 
> Israel is happy to see Christians leave, at least of
> the indigenous 
> Palestinian variety.
> 
> (More welcome are the crazed fundamentalist
> Christian Zionists from the 
> United States who have been arriving to help
> engineer the departure of 
> Palestinians, Muslims and Christians alike, in the
> belief that, once the Jews 
> have dominion over the whole of the Holy Land,
> Armageddon and the 
> "End Times" will draw closer.)
> 
> Of course, that is not Israel's official story. Its
> leaders have been quick 
> to blame the exodus of Christians on the wider
> Palestinian society from 
> which they are drawn, arguing that a growing Islamic
> extremism, and the 
> election of Hamas to lead the Palestinian Authority,
> have put Christians 
> under physical threat. This explanation neatly
> avoids mentioning that the 
> proportion of Christians has been falling for
> decades.
> 
> According to Israel's argument, the decision by many
> Christians to leave 
> the land where generations of their ancestors have
> been rooted is simply a 
> reflection of the "clash of civilisations", in which
> a fanatical Islam is 
> facing down the Judeo-Christian West. Palestinian
> Christians, like Jews, 
> have found themselves caught on the wrong side of
> the Middle East's 
> confrontation lines.
> 
> Here is how the Jerusalem Post, for example,
> characterised the fate of the 
> Holy Land's non-Muslims in a Christmas editorial:
> "Muslim intolerance 
> toward Christians and Jews is cut from exactly the
> same cloth. It is the same 
> jihad." The Post concluded by arguing that only by
> confronting the jihadis 
> would "the plight of persecuted Christians -- and of
> the persecuted Jewish 
> state -- be ameliorated."
> 
> Similar sentiments were recently aired in an article
> by Aaron Klein of 
> WorldNetDaily republished on Ynet, Israel's most
> popular website, that 
> preposterously characterised a procession of
> families through Nazareth on 
> Eid al-Adha, the most important Muslim festival, as
> a show of strength by 
> militant Islam designed to intimidate local
> Christians.
> 
> Islam's green flags were "brandished", according to
> Klein, whose reporting 
> transformed a local troupe of Scouts and their
> marching band into "Young 
> Muslim men in battle gear"... "beating drums".
> Nazareth's youngsters, 
> meanwhile, were apparently the next generation of
> Qassam rocket engineers: 
> "Muslim children launched firecrackers into the sky,
> occasionally misfiring, 
> with the small explosives landing dangerously close
> to the crowds."
> 
> Such sensationalist misrepresentations of
> Palestinian life are now a staple 
> of the local and American media. Support for Hamas,
> for example, is 
> presented as proof of jihadism run amok in
> Palestinian society rather than 
> as evidence of despair at Fatah's corruption and
> collaboration with Israel 
> and ordinary Palestinians' determination to find
> leaders prepared to counter 
> Israel's terminal cynicism with proper resistance.
> 
> The clash of civilisations thesis is usually
> ascribed to a clutch of American 
> intellectuals, most notably Samuel Huntingdon, the
> title of whose 
> book gave the idea popular currency, and the
> Orientalist academic Bernard 
> Lewis. But alongside them have been the guiding
> lights of the neocon 
> movement, a group of thinkers deeply embedded in the
> centres of American 
> power who were recently described by Ynet as mainly
> comprising "Jews 
> who share a love for Israel".
> 
> In fact, the idea of a clash of civilisations grew
> out of a worldview that 
> was shaped by Israel's own interpretation of its
> experiences in the Middle 
> East. An alliance between the neocons and Israeli
> leaders was cemented 
> in the mid-1990s with the publication of a document
> called "A Clean Break: 
> A New Strategy for Securing the Realm". It offered a
> US foreign policy 
> tailor-made to suit Israel's interests, including
> plans for an invasion of Iraq, 
> authored by leading necons and approved by the
> Israeli prime minister 
> of the day, Binyamin Netanyahu.
> 
> When the neocons rose to power with George Bush's
> election to the White 
> House, the birth of the bastard offspring of the
> clash of civilisations -- 
> the war on terror -- was all but inevitable.
> 
> Paradoxically, this vision of our future, set out by
> American and Israeli 
> Jews, is steeped in fundamentalist Christian
> religious symbolism, from the 
> promotion of a civilised West's crusade against the
> Muslim hordes to the 
> implication that the final confrontation between
> these civilisations 
> (a nuclear attack on Iran?) may be the End Times
> itself -- and thereby lead to 
> the return of the Messiah.
> 
> If this clash is to be realised, it must be
> convincing at its most necessary 
> confrontation line: the Middle East and more
> specifically the Holy Land. The 
> clash of civilisations must be embodied in Israel's
> experience as a civilised, 
> democratic state fighting for its very survival
> against its barbarian Muslim 
> neighbours.
> 
> There is only one problem in selling this image to
> the West: the minority 
> of Christian Palestinians who have happily lived
> under Muslim rule in 
> the Holy Land for centuries. Today, in a way quite
> infuriating to Israel, these 
> Christians confuse the picture by continuing to take
> a leading role in 
> defining Palestinian nationalism and resistance to
> Israel's occupation. They 
> prefer to side with the Muslim "fanatics" than with
> Israel, the Middle 
> East's only outpost of Judeo-Christian
> "civilisation".
> 
> The presence of Palestinian Christians reminds us
> that the supposed "clash 
> of civilisations" in the Holy Land is not really a
> war of religions but a 
> clash of nationalisms, between the natives and
> European colonial settlers.
> 
> Inside Israel, for example, Christians have been the
> backbone of the 
> Communist party, the only non-Zionist party Israel
> allowed for several 
> decades. Many of the Palestinian artists and
> intellectuals who are most critical 
> of Israel are Christians, including the late
> novelist Emile Habibi; the writer 
> Anton Shammas and film-makers Elia Suleiman and Hany
> Abu Assad 
> (all now living in exile); and the journalist
> Antoine Shalhat (who, for reasons 
> unknown, has been placed under a loose house arrest,
> unable to leave Israel).
> 
> The most notorious Palestinian nationalist
> politician inside Israel is Azmi 
> Bishara, yet another Christian, who has been put on
> trial and is regularly 
> abused by his colleagues in the Knesset.
> 
> Similarly, Christians have been at the core of the
> wider secular Palestinian 
> national movement, helping to define its struggle.
> They range from exiled 
> professors such as the late Edward Said to human
> rights activists in the 
> occupied territories such as Raja Shehadeh. The
> founders of the most militant 
> wings of the national movement, the Democratic and
> Popular Fronts for 
> the Liberation of Palestine, were Nayif Hawatmeh and
> George Habash, both 
> Christians.
> 
> This intimate involvement of Palestinian Christians
> in the Palestinian 
> national struggle is one of the reasons why Israel
> has been so keen to find 
> ways to encourage their departure -- and then blame
> it on intimidation by, 
> and violence from, Muslims.
> 
> In truth, however, the fall in the number of
> Christians can be explained by 
> two factors, neither of which is related to a clash
> of civilisations.
> 
> The first is a lower rate of growth among the
> Christian population. 
> According to the latest figures from Israel's Bureau
> of Census Statistics, the 
> average Christian household in Israel contains 3.5
> people compared to 
> 5.2 in a Muslim household. Looked at another way, in
> 2005 33 percent of 
> Christians were under the age of 19, compared to 55
> percent of Muslims. In 
> other words, the proportion of Christians in the
> Holy Land has been eroded 
> over time by higher Muslim birth rates.
> 
> But a second factor is equally, if not more,
> important. Israel has established 
> an oppressive rule for Palestinians both inside
> Israel and in the occupied 
> territories that has been designed to encourage the
> most privileged 
> Palestinians, which has meant disproportionately
> Christians, to leave.
> 
> This policy has been implemented with stealth for
> decades, but has been 
> greatly accelerated in recent years with the
> erection of the wall and numerous 
> checkpoints. The purpose has been to encourage the
> Palestinian elite 
> and middle class to seek a better life in the West,
> turning their back on the 
> Holy Land.
> 
> Palestinian Christians have had the means to escape
> for two reasons. First, 
> they have traditionally enjoyed a higher standard of
> living, as city-based 
> shopkeepers and business owners, rather than poor
> subsistence farmers in 
> the countryside. And second, their connection to the
> global Churches has 
> made it simpler for them to find sanctuary abroad,
> often beginning as trips 
> for their children to study overseas.
> 
> Israel has turned Christian parents' financial
> ability and their children's 
> increased opportunities to its own advantage, by
> making access to higher 
> education difficult for Palestinians both inside
> Israel and in the occupied 
> territories.
> 
> Inside Israel, for example, Palestinian citizens
> still find it much harder 
> to attend university than Jewish citizens, and even
> more so to win places on 
> the most coveted courses, such as medicine and
> engineering.
> 
> Instead, for many decades Israel's Christians and
> Muslims became members 
> of the Communist party in the hope of receiving
> scholarships to attend 
> universities in Eastern Europe. Christians were also
> able to exploit their ties 
> to the Churches to help them head off to the West.
> Many of these overseas 
> graduates, of course, never returned, especially
> knowing that they would be 
> faced with an Israeli economy much of which is
> closed to non-Jews.
> 
> Something similar occurred in the occupied
> territories, where Palestinian 
> universities have struggled under the occupation to
> offer a proper standard 
> of education, particularly faced with severe
> restrictions on the movement of 
> staff and students. Still today, it is not possible
> to study for a PhD in 
> either the West Bank or Gaza, and Israel has blocked
> Palestinian students 
> from attending its own universities. The only
> recourse for most who can 
> afford it has been to head abroad. Again, many have
> chosen never to return.
> 
> But in the case of the Palestinians of Gaza and the
> West Bank, Israel found 
> it even easier to close the door behind them. It
> established rules, in violation 
> of international law, that stripped these
> Palestinians of their right to 
> residency in the occupied territories during their
> absence. When they tried to 
> return to their towns and villages, many found that
> they were allowed to 
> stay only on temporary visas, including tourist
> visas, that they had to renew 
> with the Israeli authorities every few months.
> 
> Nearly a year ago, Israel quietly took a decision to
> begin kicking these 
> Palestinians out by refusing to issue new visas.
> Many of them are academics 
> and business people who have been trying to rebuild
> Palestinian society 
> after decades of damage inflicted by the occupying
> regime. A recent report 
> by the most respected Palestinian university, Bir
> Zeit, near Ramallah, 
> revealed that one department had lost 70 per cent of
> its staff because of 
> Israel's refusal to renew visas.
> 
> Although there are no figures available, it can
> probably be safely assumed 
> that a disproportionate number of Palestinians
> losing their residency rights 
> are Christian. Certainly the effect of further
> damaging the education system 
> in the occupied territories will be to increase the
> exodus of Palestine's 
> next generation of leaders, including its
> Christians.
> 
> In addition, the economic strangulation of the
> Palestinians by the wall, the 
> restrictions on movement and the international
> economic blockade of the 
> Palestinian Authority are damaging the lives of all
> Palestinians with 
> increasing severity. Privileged Palestinians, and
> that doubtless includes many 
> Christians, are being encouraged to seek a rapid
> exit from the territorities.
> 
> From Israel's point of view, the loss of Palestinian
> Christians is all to the 
> good. It will happier still if all of them leave,
> and Bethlehem and Nazareth 
> pass into the effective custodianship of the
> international Churches.
> 
> Without Palestinian Christians confusing the
> picture, it will be much easier 
> for Israel to persuade the West that the Jewish
> state is facing a monolithic 
> enemy, fanatical Islam, and that the Palestinian
> national struggle is really both 
> a cover for jihad and a distraction from the clash
> of civilisations against 
> which Israel is the ultimate bulwark. Israel's hands
> will be freed.
> 
> Israelis like Amiry's heart attack victim may
> believe that Palestinian 
> Christians are not really a threat to their or their
> state's existence, but be sure 
> that Israel has every reason to continue persecuting
> and excluding 
> Palestinian Christians as much, if not more, than it
> does Palestinian Muslims.
> 
>
_______________________________________________________
> 
> Jonathan Cook is a British writer and journalist
> living in Nazareth, Israel. 
> His book, �Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of
> the Jewish and Democratic State�, 
> is published by Pluto Press. His website is
> http://www.jkcook.net
> 
> 
> 



 
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