I've been sent an interesting article on the plight of Palestine's Christians. It makes grim reading. Perhaps someone who was involved in framing the anti-Israel motion to confernece - you are all reading this blog now - would like to give us the official Methodist version?
Read it yourself and ask why this sort of document and the issues it raises were not brought to our Methodist attention by the working party that drew up the poisonous report on Palestine.
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The public pronouncements of Arab Christians are often at variance with their private communications. This is because the Arab Christian is a greater offence to Islam than either the Jew or the rest of Christendom. Their existence challenges Islam's case to supersede Judaism and Christianity.
Islam is the ultimate Replacement Theology. If God has revoked His covenant with the Jews, then He can revoke His covenant with the Church. Islam claims that it is now the divinely appointed Way. It fails to understand, as do many Christians, that we have been grafted in to the olive tree and do not replace it.
Arab Christians are peculiarly vulnerable. Every time we oppose Israel, we strengthen the Islamic claim that God has abandoned the Jew. We also cut off the branch of which we are a part. This in turn strengthens the Islamic claim that God has abandoned the Church and revealed Himself as Allah. We who know Him by Name are supposed, now, to call him 'the god'.
The Arab Christian is God's witness in the Arab-Islamic Empire. We do very little to support them.
I see that you're now moderating your comments so I don't know if this will get through however it's worth a try anyway.
The report drew up on the accounts of Palestinian Christians. Many, many of them have said that settlements are a huge issue for them. Unfortunately this does not seem to fit with your own prejudices therefore you ignore it. The hardships the settlements cause for your brothers and sisters in Christ do not seem to matter to you. Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday openly writes "Well, Israeli soldiers can and do act with crude brutality. Israeli settlers can and do steal Arab water and drive Arabs off their land. ". I know you would prefer to ignore the issue but I don't see how anyone can.
Speak to the church in Bethlehem and ask them how you can help. Listen to the people they have chosen to represent them. I know you don't like what they say (you disliked it when the Palestinian Christian gave his own opinion at Methodist conference instead of repeating the line you would like him to say) but you can't pretend to care about the Palestinian church if wont speak to them or take on board what they have to say.
Ask them, does the 'security barrier' which cuts through communities help or hinder the church?
There is a new documentary out called "With God on Our Side" which has interviews with Christian zioninsts and Arab Christians. I would urge you to see it. Again, you may not like it as some of the Arab Christians don't say what you want them to say but I would still encourage you to hear about their experiences.
Thanks Tom and Ian, both very interesting comments.
Tom you say that I didn't like it when a Palestinian gave his view at conference. What I objected too was his dismissal of the Holocaust as a Zionist tool, his belief that Jews have used the Holocaust to make money and his "appreciation" of Hamas.
I have actually sat down with representatives of the Palestine Authority (not I stress since 1999) and discussed many of these issues.
I haven't been to Israel or Palestine recently and I know the situation to be very complex.
Part of my concern about the report that went to conference and the resulting decisions were that this complexity was not recognised.
There are many organisations working for a just peace. A the moment the Methodist Church is not among them. I trust it will soon join with those working for peace.
PS: If you respond I may not be able to moderate the posts for a good few hours as I am not near a computer for the rest of today or most of tomorrow! I've had to introduce moderation as I've had a spat of barmy comments on a post unrelated to this issue.
Palestinian Arab Christians are somewhat caught in the middle of this conflict. It is true that they are not the lambs they sometimes make out: Palestinian Christians adopted and promulgated some of the extremist anti-Zionist tone that modern Palestinian Arab nationalism took from the beginning. They both tended to side with the Muslims in agreeing that the Jews were generally a bad lot; had been punished with dispossession for their rejection of Jesus and the prophets, and that was the state in which they were largely to remain. While they were largely less or non-militant, from the early 19th century (with important exceptions), compared to Palestinian Arab Muslims, they did tend to acquiesce with Palestinian Islamic militant nationalism, excluding threats to expel or eliminate Palestinian and other Jews.
In Israel they have tended to be pacifistic, and in the West Bank following Israeli conquest.
They tend to side with their fellow Palestinian Arab Muslim nationalists in their hostility to Zionism, to Jewish nationalism, either denying Jews an historical right of restoration or return, or omitting to affirm one.
Palestinian Anglican Christians at Sabeel have been at the forefront of forging a modern Palestinian Christian liberation theology, which has tended to recapitulate the passion narrative as a national/nationalist one, with Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians as a kind of national-victim (Christ, effectively), essentially innocent, crucified/colonized by the alien Zionist Jews.
While adducing every Zionist Jewish sin they can, they do tend to minimize or whitewash Palestinian Arab Muslim and Christian sins.
But they are in an unenviable position. They cannot go too far in recognizing Israel, or any legitimacy or justice to the whole process whereby it was born i.e. Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, without being accused of being traitors to the Palestinian national cause. They are suspected of weakness or treachery by Islamists like Hamas, and some P.A., enough as it is.
Undoubtedly the separation barrier makes things more difficult. But one wonders just how much Palestinian Christians have done to promote peace and mutual recognition of both peoples, especially their leaders. While they often claim to pursue or promote Christian justice, it is a justice that, one examined, is more than a little narrowly Palestinian nationalist in outlook. Perhaps they had little choice: toe the nationalist line or face even more exclusion and persecution by their fellow Palestinian Arab Muslims.
Palestinian Christians could help matters by acknowledging some modicum of justice to Zionism, instead of toeing the Palestinian nationalist line that it was fundamentally illegitimate. They could also acknowledge the Palestinian Christian support or acquiescence in Palestinian Arab attempts to exclude, expel or eliminate Palestinian and other Jews from the land were fundamentally immoral.
The barrier was born because the PA chose a war. The settlements exist because the Palestinian national movement only chose partition in 1988, having waged an eliminationist war until then, Hamas even now.
Most settlements consist in suburbs of Jerusalem. Palestinian Christians could acknowledge the part they have played in that: Palestinian Christians and Muslims in large part excluded Jews from Jerusalem, and the land, for nigh on 2000 years (practised apartheid against them, really).
More recently, Palestinian Arab Muslims expelled Jews from East Jerusalem and Hebron from 1929, the Arabs generally from the Old City from 1948.
Palestinian Arab Christian leaders could at least acknowledge that Israeli Jews have very good reason to want that never to occur again, and little good reason to trust to the good will of either Palestinian Christians or Muslims.
A little honesty and self-examination might be nice. It's not just for Jews, you know.
'There is a new documentary out called "With God on Our Side" which has interviews with Christian zioninsts and Arab Christians.'
Which is a work of pro-Palestinian Arab Muslim and Christian nationalism, designed to show Christian sympathy for Zionism in its most extreme form, to delegitimise it (actually, in Stephen Sizer's words, to render it as a "heresy").
That is not justice, that is nationalist rhetorical polemic: you take whatever evidence you can to present your adversary in as negative a light as possible.
Most Christians who sympathise with Israel, in the US and elsewhere are more nuanced than that, and most support a two state solution.
I must say, based on available evidence, Sizer seems a reprehensible little fellow, a rather nasty throw back to the church fathers of old, without at least the honesty to admit that, as a people exiled and dispossessed as a punishment for their alleged rejection of Jesus and the prophets, is how Christians, especially Palestinian Christians, have regarded Jews for most of Christian history.
It would be nice if he allowed that, if Palestinian dispossession entails a right of return, so does a Jewish. And that Palestinan Arab Muslims and Christians both enacted or acquiesced in an attitude to Jews for most of the last 100 years that was exclucivist, expulsionist or eliminationist (i.e. hardly less than the apartheid which he and his ilk impute to Israel on a regular basis).
Or that Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians are hardly the national Christ crucified of the nationalist myth Sizer promulgates.
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