POST CHRISTMAS THOUGHTS......

 

A Merry But Meaningful Christmas

 Washington Watch
December 26, 2023

Dr. James J. Zogby ©

President

Arab American Institute

 

With genocide unfolding in Gaza, Christians in the Holy Land are having a difficult time feeling joy this Christmas season. Bethlehem has canceled its traditional celebrations. There will be no tree-lighting or festivities. Instead of setting up the traditional Nativity scene of Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus in a stable surrounded by shepherds and their sheep, Rev. Munther Ishaq, a Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, has erected the birth scene with the baby Jesus laying in rubble. Rev. Ishaq said that this was an appropriate representation because “if Jesus were born today, he’d be in solidarity with the suffering humanity of Gaza.” 

 

To be sure, there will be Christians in the West who will scoff at these Palestinian actions accusing them of miscasting or politicizing Christmas to suit their needs. In reality, however, the grossly distorted version of Christmas is its popular manifestation in the West where the trees, lights, Santa Claus and gift-giving have eclipsed the birth of Jesus as the dominant themes of the Christmas season. These innocent-enough traditions have been exploited by commercial interests, making the month before Christmas Day a crass non-stop blitz of enticements to buy and buy more. 

 

When Christmas in the West does involve religious themes, the birth narrative is presented as a sort of sanitized fairytale. The town of Bethlehem is silent and peaceful. “All is calm, all is bright,” and then the birth just happens, followed by rejoicing.  

 

Other aspects of the story we can glean from scripture and tradition, however, suggest a more complicated and more profoundly human subtext to the story. These have been glossed over in our contemporary retelling of the story but would have been both understood and unsettling to those who heard the story two millennia ago. 

 

Mary was a young girl, nine months pregnant, forced to ride a rough journey for days from Nazareth to Bethlehem, her husband Joseph’s family seat. On arrival, they found no place to stay and so were forced to spend their time in one of Bethlehem’s many caves. A tradition captured in the Qur’an tells of Mary as she was about to deliver, going off on her own and crying out in labor pains saying, at one point, “I wish that I had not been born.”  

 

We are also told in scripture that the new parents were warned that the Roman ruler of the region, feeling threatened that a child had been born who might challenge his authority sent his troops to slaughter newborns. This threat forces Mary and Joseph and their newborn infant to flee to Egypt to save their child’s life. 

 

When all the parts are put together, a different picture emerges than the one that has been popularized in our culture. In addition to the rejoicing at new life and the celebration of the child whom they understand will offer salvation, a more complete picture must include the starkness of the setting, the pain accompanying birth, and the normal fears of the new parents accentuated by their concern for his and their safety in the face of oppressive rule. 

 

And never forget Mary’s words on being told she would give birth to Jesus. She praises God, saying in part, 

 

“He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. 
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. 
He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty-handed.” 

 

As Rev. Ishaq notes, Jesus is to be seen in solidarity with and giving hope to suffering humanity. The baby in the rubble offers “hope of a new beginning coming out of destruction.” 

 

This more faithful rendition of the Christmas narrative aligns with today’s reality faced by Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem and Gaza. In Bethlehem, they are strangled and cut off from the rest of the West Bank by a 28’ high concrete wall and massive Jewish-only settlements built on their communal lands. They’ve lost access to their fields and vineyards and their ability to travel is severely constricted. In Gaza, Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes, which have been reduced to rubble, and then bombed or killed by sniper fire when they seek refuge in their churches. 

 

As I write this, I am reminded of the fact that more than 30,000 Palestinian women in Gaza are pregnant. Like Mary, they have no comfortable place to go to deliver their babies. Their homes are destroyed. From day to day, they are on the move to escape the relentless bombing. They, like Mary, live in fear. 

 

And so, Rev. Ishaq’s action is, in fact, the most appropriate way to commemorate Christmas, because the story of the birth of Jesus is an act of identification with suffering humanity and an expression of hope that comes with each new life. With this in mind, please have a “Merry but meaningful Christmas.” 

A powerful message and strong words paralleling and depicting the genocidal massacres taking place in the occupied Palestinian territories....  My many thanks to all, happy holidays and a hope for peace and dignity. 

Bertrand Russell’s Last Message: Israel-Palestine War

 

This statement on the Middle East was dated 31st January 1970, and was read on 3rd February, the day after Bertrand Russell’s death, to an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo.

Bertrand Russell in 1957

The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world. The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the imperial power because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.

The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate. The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.” Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements.

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled in masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery, not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.

All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict. Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967. A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long–suffering people of the Middle East.

 

These 54 years old words, pronounced by the great Bertrand Russel, are still applicable to the letter, the Western populations, in part, and their official political leaders and all the media propaganda and lobbies have decided to go on and turn an absolute blind eye, deaf ear and dead mind and soul.  No one would care to publish such words. 

One more example of how bias our Western media is, I'm asking why is not one reporter, journalist or commentator in any form of media nowadays asking the ex-president Trump his opinion of what's happening in Palestine and the illegally occupied territories, is he avoiding the subject ?? as maybe he's trying to benefit and gain from the increasing  numbers of voters who will stay away and not vote for Mr. Biden for his stance on the entire massacre and genocide of the Palestinian people, even declaring flatly that he's a Zionist, something that half of the world's Jewish population and world masses are finding it revolting, but both Biden and Trump are trying to benefit from it electorally, politically, financially and definitely not ideologically, again the media is fully an accomplice in such games. 

Finally, I wonder, how can we partner with Israel's genocide against the Palestinian population while condemning the Russian acts of aggressions in Ukraine, what's the difference between the two barbaric aggressions, or can we condemn the French resistance during W.W.2 as terrorism compared to the Palestinian reactions against occupation, apartheid and brutal annihilation.   

  As always my many, many thanks to all, happy holidays everyone.  

Why I'm another Jew finally embracing BDS.....

 By Matthew Gindin 
The Israeli state’s long slide into the magnification of all of its worst features has become a downhill slalom of late. Granted, the militant nationalist Zionism that underlies the state was born in injustice and bad decisions and is founded on a betrayal of both Jewish tradition and the lessons of Jewish history, but of late the situation has become so horrific that it is difficult to even talk about.
In recent years the Israeli government has declared that Jews alone have a right to self-determination in Israel and demoted Arabic from being an official language; aggressively continued moving Jews into the Occupied Territories as settlers while displacing Palestinians; implicitly or explicitly allowed Jewish settler violence against Palestinians, their farms, and their water sources; killed and jailed scores of Palestinians including children; made a legal distinction between the rape of a Jewish woman by a Jewish man and a Palestinian man (the latter carries the penalty of a terrorist act), and continued to countenance millions of Palestinians living in sealed off, poverty soaked, under-resourced, and policed ghettoes. In the last two days I read of allegations that Israeli police branded a Palestinian in custody on the face with a Star of David and saw footage of Jewish settlers, women and men, standing in a street to block the passage of a Palestinian ambulance.
The Kahanist (Jewish Supremacist) bloc which is now part of the ruling government of Israel, is composed of, or allied with, settlers with extreme, genocidal aspirations. I have recently seen video of a mother allied with this movement joyfully encouraging genocidal sentiments among her young children, as well as footage of other children raised by these people singing songs about killing Arabs. It is not just Arabs, whose existence is a symbol of everything which obstructs the Jewish purity of Israel, but also Christians, another symbolic enemy, who are being attacked. In recent months an Israeli journalist went “under cover” as a priest and was spat on in the street by Orthodox Jews. Video surfaced of a Christian monk being told to remove his cross by an Israeli soldier because it was offensive to the Jewishness of the city; there have been numerous incidents of Jewish settlers engaging in hate speech, violence and thuggery against Christians.
This is why after years of being on the edge, I am finally, belatedly, embracing the BDS movement, an international nonviolent movement which has aimed, for the last eighteen years, to apply the methods used against South African apartheid against Israeli apartheid. I have spent years defending those who do support BDS against scurrilous charges of antisemitism or deception about the nature of Israeli human rights abuses, without myself getting on board. Yet at this point I feel that all people of conscience, and all Jews who hold best values of our tradition in their hearts, should do so as well.
Here is why.
As I understand it, the BDS (Boycot, Divest and Sanction) movement is predicated on two things.
#1: the status quo for Palestinians in Israel is intolerable, and extreme pressure must be brought to bear both on the on the government and the relatively privileged members of the state (Israeli Jews) to change things.
#2: Palestinian civil society has requested internationals to show solidarity through BDS. BDS is a nonviolent movement founded by Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti (winner of the Gandhi Peace Award) and other Palestinian activists which is an alternative to the violent resistance of the Israeli state practiced by many Palestinian militants over the last several decades.
The origin of BDS among Palestinians distinguishes it from, for example, a call by a Canadian activist to boycott China, or Nike, or Myanmar. In this case, the victims themselves- Palestinians, are calling for BDS of Israel.
Why I Have Not Embraced BDS Before
In the Jewish community BDS is largely considered outside the bounds of acceptable discourse and action. In Vancouver where I live there is, as far as I know, only one Jewish Institution willing to openly rent space to Jewish organizations who promote it like IJV, the Peretz Centre for Secular Judaism. There is one more- Or Shalom Synagogue, where I worked for four years, willing to seriously allow BDS supporters and anti-Zionists (usually, if not always, an overlapping group) to engage in public community dialogue.
For the last three years I have worked as education director at Or Shalom, a role coming to an end this October due to downsizing in the organization. For the last few years I have felt that publicly embracing BDS would be a self-defeating obstacle to teaching and leading dialogues about the realties of the Israeli state and the history of Zionism within a Jewish institutional context. Now that I am moving away from a role as institutionally embedded Jewish educator, I don’t think that’s the case any longer.
I also want to give internal pressure it’s due. For some time I have in fact practiced an informal type of BDS- I have not attended Israeli Independence Day celebrations or collaborated in any form of celebration of the Israeli state, and when I have taught or spoken about Israeli it has solely been from a place of critique. Yet the situation now, which I feel is every bit as dire as that of Apartheid South Africa, and bears comparison with the most egregious human rights violations in human history, makes any form of collaboration or interaction with the Israeli state ethically intolerable.
On the Jewish calendar, we are now in the month of Elul, traditionally a time for confronting our own wrongdoings and reckoning with what we need to change. What could be more pressing for the global Jewish community than reckoning with the failure of Zionism and standing up to the evils perpetrated by the Israeli state, Kahanism, and Jewish supremacist settlers in our name?

A good and factual short article by a Jewish American columnist, fighting the officialdom political repression of free speech and acts being dictated by Zionist lobbies in America and all through the Western hemisphere.   I wonder would we have dared to call the French resistance during the Nazi occupation "terrorists" or a terrorist organization.     

My usual many thanks to all, stay safe and well.  

As Humanitarian Pause is ending, US Must Demand Change in Israeli Tactics and Must Not Provide a Blank Check for Netanyahu

 J Street statement.... November 30, 2023

J Street is deeply grateful that the humanitarian pause in place for the past week has brought the release of over 100 hostages, a break in fighting between Israel and Hamas, and a significant influx of humanitarian aid to Gaza.

We’ve shared in the joy of watching Israeli families reunite with loved ones, and we’ve shared in the horror of hearing stories of their captivity. And we’ve experienced profound concern and despair as we continue to learn more about the devastation and growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

We hope that the pause in fighting will be extended for days to come – as called for in the existing agreement or under new terms – with more hostages released and the delivery of substantially more humanitarian aid to meet the urgent needs of civilians in Gaza.

And let us be clear: We demand the immediate release of all hostages in Gaza and an end to indiscriminate rocket fire and terror attacks against Israel.

Sadly, we know that the halt in fighting is temporary, which is why it’s so important to articulate our views about what should happen next.

While J Street supports Israel’s right to take military action in accordance with international law to bring Hamas terrorists to justice and protect Israeli citizens, we echo the Biden Administration’s clear admonition to the Netanyahu government: “Be surgical, be targeted, be precise, try to minimize civilian casualties wherever possible.”

We are extremely concerned about the fate of Gazan civilians, including those displaced from the north, as the fighting moves south. We appreciate and agree with the White House spokesperson’s recent public statement: “We don’t support southern operations until the Israelis can show that they have accounted for all the internally displaced people of Gaza.”

At the same time, we are alarmed by Israeli actions in the West Bank – by both settlers and the Israeli army – that are leading to high civilian casualties and the displacement of families and entire communities. Every day, the Israeli government and extremist Israeli settlers are taking actions aimed at cementing permanent, undemocratic control over the West Bank and pushing the only viable path out of this crisis – the creation of an independent demilitarized Palestinian state – further out of reach.

These actions run totally counter to the long-term goals and interests that should be at the center of both Israeli and American policy: Long-lasting peace and security achieved through diplomacy and a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian and broader Israeli-Arab conflicts.

America’s continued support for Israel as fighting may soon resume should be grounded in two principles: (1) There must be guardrails around Israel’s conduct of the war (2) There can be no blank check for the Netanyahu government in the upcoming aid package.

We support the administration’s work with Israel to press for calculated, targeted operations, tailored to the threat Hamas presents and with a focus on special operations, anti-terror tactics and anti-tunnel operations.

The administration should make very clear that a resumption of widespread high-intensity bombing – and the resulting high civilian casualties – is unacceptable.

The greater the destruction inflicted on innocent Palestinian families, the higher the likelihood of mass forcible displacement; the harder it will be for anyone to govern post-war Gaza; the greater the risk this operation leads to retaliatory violence and terror; the deeper the fracturing of global support for Israel; and the greater the risk of regional escalation.

As Senator Chris Van Hollen has said, an absence of red lines in the conduct of this war “cannot be consistent with American interests and American values.” President Biden must make clear that the US will not provide unbounded support for a war led by Prime Minister Netanyahu if it has no limits and no exit strategy.

If Netanyahu cannot or will not adopt the restrained, strategic approach urged by the US and other key allies, this war will tragically lead only to more bloodshed, suffering and instability – without truly defeating Hamas, breaking the cycle of conflict or creating a path to a better future.

Regarding the Biden Administration’s request for supplemental assistance, the Senate is likely to consider – as early as next week – the President’s comprehensive request. This is a crucial opportunity for Congress to ensure that this next round of military aid is not a ‘blank check’ for Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Security assistance must genuinely advance American interests and Israeli security – which is not to be confused with supporting the agenda of Israel’s current far-right government.

Congress and the president should ensure – as security assistance is provided – that:

• All necessary mechanisms are in place and enforced to ensure US security assistance is delivered and used in compliance with both domestic and international law.
• No aid is diverted to enable settler violence or further steps that permanently deepen the occupation of the West Bank.
• Plans for the next phase of military operations will be highly targeted and provide maximum protections for civilians from potential harm.
• The delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza will be greatly increased and expedited.
• They are insisting on an Israeli commitment to ending the occupation of Palestinian territory in a defined and reasonable time following the end of hostilities.

There is no path to resolution of this conflict if Hamas retains the operational control of Gaza that made its brutal October 7 attack possible. But the path to a better future will also be out of reach if the US sets no guardrails for the Israeli government's military campaign and provides its assistance in the form of a blank check.

Our goal at J Street is clear – safety and peace for Israelis and Palestinians in states of their own. How these next weeks proceed will determine just how possible that goal will be when the fighting is done.

I copied the statement as I received it, few points could be debated to render the entire statement more fair and balanced, but like many Jewish voices nowadays, it's sensible and factual.... It represent a fair majority of American and International people.    As always, my many thanks to all my good readers for their time.