What anti-Semitic journalists get wrong about Israel and the Palestinians

Kirsten Powers on Israel and the Palestinians, with my commentary:

What Evangelicals Get Wrong About Israel and the Palestinians 

American evangelicals need to realize that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no battle between good and evil. The more Christian view, far from blind loyalty to Israel, is recognizing the Palestinians’ humanity, says Kirsten Powers.

“Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Sadly, this isn’t Scripture you hear many evangelicals quoting when discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though Jesus uttered the words in the Sermon on the Mount. Instead of making peace, American evangelicals have mostly picked sides and offered unquestioning, blind loyalty to Israel, with little to no regard for the plight of the Palestinian people.

All of the peacemaking in the Levant since 1948 has been made by Jews wearing IDF uniforms. Negotiation and concessions by Israel to the Palestinians has always led to more violence (i.e. dead Israeli and Palestinian civilians, both killed by Palestinian aggression). Remember the Oslo Accords, and the blood that followed?

Even the successful Camp David accords were ultimately the result of Israeli tanks crossing the Suez canal and IDF encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army. Ariel Sharon, more than Carter and Sadat and Begin, was the real peacemaker.

“Declaring that evangelical Christians are ‘on the front line of defense for Israel in the United States of America,’ the Rev. John Hagee brought delegates to the Christians United for Israel Washington Summit 2012 to their feet with loud cheering and even the sounds of shofars being blown,” The Times of Israelreported in April 2012.

That same month, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told NBC News of evangelical support of Israel, “American evangelicals have it in their DNA: God blesses those who bless the Jews and curses whoever curses the Jews.”

During the GOP primary, many evangelicals expressed support for Newt Gingrich, who called Palestinians “invented people.” Someone from a country that is a few hundred years old complaining about “invented” national identities would be comical if the crux of his message weren’t so offensive. Such despicable nonsense is spouted for one reason: to dehumanize Palestinians. After all, if they are just invented, pretend people, then who cares what happens to them?

I care a lot what happens to Palestinians. I want them to stop killing Jews. When they stop that, we can talk about other stuff.

Since when is dehumanizing people—God’s creation—an acceptable Christian view?

Holding a people accountable for their murderous genocidal violence is not to dehumanize them. To excuse their atrocities is to dehumanize them.

On the other side, a smaller number of American Christians have sized Israel up as an apartheid state and support boycotts, divestment campaigns, and other measures aimed at threatening the legitimacy of Israel. They engage in maddening moral equivalency, falsely equating the Israeli government with terrorist organizations.

All moral equivalency-- that of Leftie Israel haters and of Kirsten Powers-- is morally the same.

Fortunately, some evangelicals are starting to push back at the old paradigm that support for one group requires opposition to the other. Christians who denounce Hamas threats to “burn Israeli cities” also find statements like this alarming: “The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages.” So said Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai this week.

Locker-room talk by a Israeli official when missiles are raining down on his cities is not the same thing as the official government policy of a elected terrorist gang.

It is not Israeli policy to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Actually, Israel recently sent Gaza back to Hamas, which is worse than sending it back to the Middle Ages. 

It is official Hamas policy-- wildly popular in the Gazan maelstrom of Jew-hatred-- to wipe Israel off the map. Presumably that doesn't mean that they intend to send six million Jews to Miami. 

One of the leaders pursuing a different approach is Todd Deatherage, cofounder of Telos Group, an organization that works with American evangelicals to help positively transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Deatherage is an expert Middle East hand as well as an evangelical: he was a State Department official in the Bush administration, where he worked on Middle East issues. He was also once an aide to former senator Tim Hutchinson (R-AR).

“What a lot of Christians don’t understand is the importance of realizing both people have legitimate connections to the land.”

The Jews' connections are to Jewish land. The Palestinians' connections are to Jewish land. 

They have similar aspirations, I guess.

“I strongly support the existence of Israel as a safe and secure homeland for the Jewish people; that is very important,” said Deatherage. “By the same token, I support Palestinian claims to their own state. I support the right of both peoples.”

Palestinians have never had a nation. Do you recall reading of much in the way of "calls for Palestinian Statehood" under the Ottomans? Me neither.

The Jewish people have three millennia of connection to the Levant, and for a millennium they had a great nation. Even in diaspora, the Jewish contributions to mankind have been immeasurable-- law and literature and science and theology and arts and Christ.

The Palestinian contribution to mankind has been airline hijacking.

Yes, Israel has every right to want to keep its citizens safe. Hamas sending rockets into Israeli neighborhoods, and as it did Tuesday, blowing up a bus in Tel Aviv, is intolerable. Israel has a right to a state. It has a right to defend itself. It has a right and reason to fear that people are trying to annihilate it, and the U.S. should stand with Israel against those who seek to destroy it. (Yes, I’m talking about you, Iran.) But evangelicals already know that. They just don’t acknowledge that the Palestinians also have rights.

Of course Palestinians have rights. For example, they have the right to vote. They elected terrorists. Hamas and Fatah are acting in their stead. Hamas and Fatah are murderous genocidal anti-Semitic gangs devoted to perpetual war and to the extermination of the Jewish people.

Palestinians exercised their rights. Now they can exercise accountability.

“What a lot of Christians don’t understand is the importance of realizing both people have legitimate connections to the land,” said Deatherage.

So Israel is like the Sudetentland. Palestinians need lebensraum.

Palestinians seem to have considerably more interest in the land that Jews are on than in land of their own. The primary purpose they put to land of their own is to build semtex vest stockpiles and rocket launch sites.

“You don’t have to reconcile them; you have to appreciate that both peoples have legitimate desires to live in dignity and peace.

Israeli peace means co-existence with Palestinians. Palestinian peace means non-existence of Jews.

Other than that, they're very similar.

A lot of people on both sides want to do that. Both sides have rejectionists who don’t want that.

I am unaware of any faction in Israel that advocates the extermination of Muslim Palestinians as a people.

I am unaware of any substantial faction in the Palestinian territories that does not advocate the extermination of Israeli Jews.

Both sides have read the story to be that the only thing that works is violence; the only thing the other side understands is violence. But there is no military solution to this conflict. This has to be solved through negotiations.”

The "negotiation" approach has been the bloodiest, giving terrorists and Jew-haters time and opportunity to kill... Jews.

Israeli security-- which also means Palestinian security, because it prevents war and suicide bombings-- has been the basis for all of the peace there has been in the Levant since 1948.

We need a new paradigm. It is possible to be at once pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-American, and pro-peace. 

No it is not. Any more than it is possible to be at once pro-Jewish, pro-Nazi, pro-American, and pro-peace. 

Can you pick out the term that doesn't fit? 

No matter what people may claim, the game doesn’t have to be zero-sum. Christians are inclined to see everything as a battle between good and evil.

Not everything is a battle between good and evil. This is, however.

This is a familiar place, an easier paradigm to navigate. But even where evil exists—and it does—basic Christian theology says there is no space in this world that can’t be redeemed by God.

Repentance needs to precede redemption. Yet Palestinian hate of Jews just grows and grows.

Deatherage urges American evangelicals to understand the Palestinian perspective. “Palestinians have a need for dignity and respect, and a deep attachment to the land,” he said. “That is why they will not leave; they are tenacious about staying on their land and that they have their own place. There is a deep attachment to place. The Palestinian Christians who are there are the inheritors of the early church. They have kept the flame of Christianity alive for the last 2,000 years. They are descendants of the first Christians.”

And if those Palestinian Christians will just stop all those rocket attacks and suicide bombings...

Many evangelicals will be shocked to learn there are Palestinian Christians living under Israeli occupation. But that shouldn’t be the reason to care. Regardless of the religion or ethnicity of the people caught up in this conflict, Deatherage said, “There are two peoples with two stories, and if you want to figure out how to be a peacemaker, to take what Jesus said seriously, then it behooves you to be able to listen to the other and ask, “What do I really need to do to be a reconciler in this very broken place?”

Christians would be wise to ponder that important question.

Jews have a Jewish state, as they should.

Palestinians have demonstrated clearly that they neither need nor deserve a state, anymore than gangs like Nazis or Bolsheviks need or deserve a state (did I mention that Palestinians were fervent Nazi supporters in World War II?).

The Palestinian state is Jordan. Egypt may want some of the rabid anti-Semites in Gaza, now that Egypt is a terrorist state itself. There is a fine political solution already in place.

I know that this is an inflammatory thing to say, what the heck: Kirsten Powers is an anti-Semite. Anyone who denies the Jewish people the simple right to self-defense from a rabble fanatically and historically bent on their extermination is expressing plain anti-Semitic views, just as the persistent insistence that black people had no right to resist lynch mobs (Democrat party policy from 1865 to the mid-20th century) was properly interpreted as racism.

There is no moral equivalence whatsoever between Israel and Palestine. Palestinians must not have a state, anymore than Nazis or Bolsheviks should have had a state. There are people whose behavior is so evil that they must never be granted the reigns of power.

The innocent Jews and Muslims murdered and repressed in this conflict are the victims of Islamic savagery, which should never be the charter of a nation.