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What
Christians Don’t Know About Israel
by Grace
Halsell
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? American Presidents 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.”
Grace Halsell is a
Washington, DC-based writer and author of Journey to Jerusalem and Prophecy
and Politics.
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