What About "My Neighbor?"

(As Christians living in a nation of individual rights and dignities, we must not be heard to pass judgment on those who are refugees from the so-called “Promised Land.” In the name of Destiny, we in America pushed Native Americans onto the reservation, and now some insist that Israel’s divine right to the land justifies apartheid in Palestine…

What ought to make us repentant and humble becomes a template for export…

Stan Moody, author of “Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship” and “McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry.”)

For Many Palestinians, Right of Return Is Primarily Theoretical

Orly Halpern | Fri. Apr 13, 2007

Hussein Refugee Camp, Amman, Jordan - With spiky hair propped up by loads of gel, and a goatee with shaved vertical strips, Khaled Jamal would make a hip hair stylist in any Western metropolis. But Jamal, 22, is a Palestinian refugee, born in Amman to a family from Jaffa and Kafr ’Ana. His life centers on the corner of Alley #48 and Ein Jalout Street in the Jabal Hussein Refugee Camp, where he runs Khaled Professional Hair Salon, a tiny, rundown shop with just enough space for two old-fashioned barber chairs and a bench for waiting customers and talkative friends.

Though he wants out of the cramped camp of narrow alleys and squalid cement-block shacks, where he lives with some 30,000 other refugees, Jamal says that if he were to be given the right to return to his family’s ancestral land in modern-day Israel, he’d rather stay put.

“For me, I won’t return,” Jamal said. “I was born here, grew up here, live my life here and work here. I have nothing there — no friends, no work. I don’t know that place.”

Estimates say that the survivors and descendants of the roughly 700,000 Palestinians who fled their homes during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence now number 4.5 million. Although nearly all say that they want the right to return to their old homes — that is, to choose whether or not they would like to return — many are not interested in implementing that right.

In 10 days of traveling through Qatar, Bahrain and Jordan and meeting with Palestinians in each place, the overwhelming impression was of individuals preferring to make lives in the places where they live. Their stories seemed to illustrate the evolving hopes of a people whose circumstances have changed in the decades since their families fled with only what they could carry on their backs. Economically, politically and culturally, Israel and the future Palestinian state do not answer the needs and dreams of every Palestinian refugee.

It’s not only the members of the younger generation who prefer not to live within Israel’s borders. Older refugees also say that they would not go back. “I cannot live alone in Israel,” said Mohammad Lutfi Dassan, 58. Dassan’s parents also came from Kufr ’Ana. “I need my people,” he said. “In Arabic there is a saying: Paradise without people is worthless.”

Dassan was born in a West Bank refugee camp, months after his family fled the Israeli forces that captured his village. The recently retired electrical engineer, a father of six, has lived all his life in Kuwait and Jordan. Today he is deputy director of the Kufr ’Ana Unity Center, established in Amman by ex-villagers who succeeded financially, for the purpose of helping those who didn’t. Dassan estimates that some 20,000 survivors and descendants from the original 3,000 villagers are spread across Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the West Bank.

Moving to a future Palestinian state was not an option to him. “I’d rather stay in Jordan,” Dassan said in English. Nor did relocation to a foreign country attract him. “I visited Canada,” he said. “I didn’t like it. You know, we are old. It’s difficult to change one’s manner. But maybe for my children it’s okay.”

Some younger-generation refugees, like Jamal, hope that any eventual plan will include resettlement in a Western country. Exposed to the West through satellite TV and the Internet, many would like nothing better than to leave the region behind, along with its dictatorships and monarchies. “I’ll take a foreign passport tomorrow morning,” Jamal said.

But it must be Western. “Forget an Arab state or Russia. Someplace like Sweden, Germany, France, Canada,” Jamal said. “Those countries are stable, developed, respect human rights. They offer more opportunity.”

A friend hanging out at the salon told Jamal not to say such things to a journalist.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Jamal retorted. “Aren’t we free to speak our minds?”

The lack of interest in a return to Palestine does not surprise political scientist Mohammed Al-Masri of the University of Jordan’s Center for Strategic Studies. “Time was on the Israeli side,” Al-Masri said. He pointed to the younger generation’s lack of familiarity with Palestine, the terrible economic and security conditions in the Palestinian territories, and the discrimination faced by Arab citizens of Israel as reasons that refugees would choose to stay put or to go elsewhere.

“The Palestinian Diaspora also knows that differences now exist between them and the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza — societal and cultural,” he added.

But while many refugees wouldn’t return to their family homes, they repeatedly insist that they won’t give up their theoretical right to do so. They speak of a need for Israel to take responsibility for creating their problem, though Israel claims that the fault lies elsewhere, because the Arab states would not accept the 1947 United Nations partition of the land.

In Al-Masri’s view, “the refugees were blamed for leaving their homes. For years they have been trying to say they were forced to leave. They want acknowledgement from the Israeli state for the refugee problem.”

Al-Masri maintained, “the right of return does not only mean physical return to the homeland.” He cited a famous July 2003 survey by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. Out of 4,506 surveyed Palestinian refugees from 1948 and their descendants living in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon, only 10% expressed a desire to live inside Israel.

Dassan voiced understanding for Israel’s demographic dilemma. “I think the Israelis will not agree” to a mass refugee return, he said. “It will not be a Jewish state if 2 to 3 million return.” But he hoped that Israel would recognize the Palestinians’ right to return in theory — as distinguished from accepting its implementation.

“What we would like to know is if they agree to our right. Afterward, we can discuss how we can implement this right,” Dassan said. The implementation would be “in a measured way, which should be accepted by both the Arabs and the Israelis.”

But he said that Israelis also need to show understanding: “Most of our people were farmers. They lost everything. I was a small boy in a camp, I had no trousers. We suffered greatly.”

Individual desires sometimes divide refugee families. Hussein Okasha, 78, is waiting patiently for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to be resolved so that he can return “to Palestine.” He now lives down the street from Khaled’s salon in the Hussein camp, but he’s originally from Ramleh, which was once an Arab city with a few Jews but now is mostly Jewish with some Arabs.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever return to Ramleh, because “the Jews don’t want us,” but he would love to move to the West Bank. “I have children who don’t want to,” Okasha said, “but I want to return. I’d go to Jerusalem, Hebron or Nablus.”

His grandson, Mahmoud, 20, still dreams of returning to Ramleh. “Jordan is not my country. I am Palestinian,” said Mahmoud, who has been unemployed for more than a year. Unlike Jamal and his friends, Mahmoud is uneducated and unskilled. He does not know how to use the Internet, and he prefers to stay home rather than earn low wages. “I want to go back and farm my family’s land,” he said.

Mahmoud’s mother, Hussniyeh, 38, wants to stay in Jordan. “I’m used to it here,” she said. Her wrinkled face makes her look like a woman of 50. She feeds her family with U.N. food supplies and with “donations from here and there.”

Many refugees in other countries haven’t even experienced the Palestinian culture that’s been preserved in Jordan. “I am Bahraini,” (not his real name) said Nabil, 42, speaking in a heavy Gulf accent as we sat in a Bahrain nightclub drinking mint tea. An electrical engineer, he was born and bred in Bahrain and works for the Bahraini government, but he is officially classified as a displaced Palestinian.

As Bahraini and Lebanese male singers performed onstage, Nabil told me how his family became refugees. In the mid-1960s, his father left Gaza to study abroad. After the 1967 war, Israel prevented him and thousands of others from returning to their homes in the West Bank and Gaza.

Nabil has visited his father’s home, and has met his own aunts and uncles, but he has no desire to live there. In 2003 he happily received Bahraini citizenship, reportedly part of a policy by the Sunni-ruled government to dilute Bahrain’s Shiite majority.

“My roots are Palestinian, and I would like to be able to visit,” he said, “but I love Bahrain, and I can’t be away for more than a month without getting nervous. Palestine is my homeland, but Bahrain is my country.”

Not all Arab countries are as welcoming. In Qatar, Abdullah (not his real name), 20, identifies himself as a Palestinian refugee from Jibneh, today’s Israeli city of Yavneh, but he isn’t sure where it is. He shows me his driver’s license, which identifies him in Arabic as Palestinian, meaning he has no citizenship. But life in Qatar is not bad, even without a passport. He serves in the police and owns his own jeep, in which he takes tourists on rides across the dunes on his days off. He’s happy in Qatar. And like other Palestinians there, he hopes one day to get citizenship.

By contrast, Abu Ahmed (not his real name), 38, a taxi driver in Masharat in northern Jordan, has no intention of accepting anything but a return to his land — in Israel. “My grandfather had 250 dunams in Bisan,” he said, pointing across the Jordan River to what is now the Israeli city of Beit She’an. Most of the Beduin in Bisan fled across the valley for safety during the 1948 war. When the war ended, Israel would not allow them to return.

Now the Masharat taxi driver sees his land across the valley daily and waits “for a great Arab leader like Saddam Hussein” to return it. He’s in no rush. “It took the Muslims 700 years to get Palestine back from the Crusaders,” he said. “Israel has only held it for 60.”

Fri. Apr 13, 2007

Copyright © 2007 Forward Association, inc.

Christian Zionists - "Of" the World But Not "In" the World

("Christian Zionism, Robert O. Smith concluded, has a fundamental lack of earthly concerns, is divorced from reality, and undermines the work of politics. Its practical impact is the killing of people in the Holy Land. The recent statement by the Christian religious leaders of Jerusalem that warned against Christian Zionism's policies of racist intolerance and perpetual war was much needed, but it should have come from America's religious leaders." Good words from a wise man... Stan Moody, author of "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and "McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry.")

Christian Zionism: An Egregious Threat to Middle East Understanding

by CNI; Electronic Intifada; October 28, 2006

Christian Zionism, a belief that paradise for Christians can only be achieved once Jews are in control of the Holy Land, is gathering strength in the United States and forging alliances that are giving increasingly weird shape to American policy toward the Middle East. The nature of the movement and its detrimental impact on policy was the subject of the 22nd Capitol Hill public hearing presented by the Council for the National Interest yesterday.

A new Zogby International poll commissioned by the CNI Foundation shows that 31 percent of those surveyed in the national poll strongly believe or somewhat believe in the ideas behind Christian Zionism, defined as "the belief that Jews must have all of the promised land, including all of Jerusalem, to facilitate the second coming of the messiah." Other polls bear similar messages, that 53 percent of Americans believe that Israel was given by God to the Jews (Pew), and that 59 percent of the American public believes the prophecies contained in the Book of Revelations will come true (CNN/Time).

The international implications of such beliefs are profound, as an increasing number of Americans believe that God sets foreign policy goals. Rev. Robert O. Smith, Lutheran pastor at the University of Chicago, one of the speakers at the hearing, discussed the development of this belief that dates to the 19th century and how it has received a powerful new impetus with the founding this year of a new group of the Christian right called Christians United for Israel (CUFI). And yet while it works closely with Jewish Zionist organizations in the US, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to promote the continued occupation of Palestine by the Israel (land God has given the Jews), it works just as effectively in dehumanizing the original inhabitants of the Holy Land, both Muslims and Christians.

Another speaker, Rammy Haija, who teaches at Radford University, drew attention to the necessity in the Christian Zionist dogma for the Israelis to retain control not only of the whole of the occupied territory but also all of Jerusalem. Christian Zionists have pushed the militarist policies of both Israel and the U.S. in an effort to secure the Holy Land in preparation for the coming of the "promised land." As part of this strategy, the U.S. occupation of Iraq is deemed absolutely necessary.

The irony of the alliance between Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists is that the one ideology promotes the ultimate destruction of the other. As Smith pointed out, the "Christians United for Israel" is all about Israel, not about the Israelis, and only a little surface digging into Christian Zionism shows how anti-Semitic it really is. So much so that Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the ceaseless champions of Zionism in this country, has called the Christian right one of the direst threats to American Jews. This has not prevented top Israeli officials from paying homage to the Christian right, including Ariel Sharon (before he descended into a comatose state brought on by the withdrawal of the settlers from Gaza, Pat Robertson opined), the Israeli ambassador Daniel Ayalon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and a host of others. The ability of CUFI and other far right Christian religious leaders like Jerry Farwell and Pat Robertson to raise money for Israel, including Israeli settlements, is well documented.

Christian Zionism, Smith concluded, has a fundamental lack of earthly concerns, is divorced from reality, and undermines the work of politics. Its practical impact is the killing of people in the Holy Land. The recent statement by the Christian religious leaders of Jerusalem that warned against Christian Zionism's policies of racist intolerance and perpetual war was much needed, but it should have come from America's religious leaders.

The Council for the National Interest is a non-profit, non-partisan grassroots organization advocating a new direction for U.S. Middle East policy.

From "Christian Nationalism" to "Christian Zionism" in One Easy Goose-step

What is Christian nationalism?

by Michelle Goldberg | bio

(As an Evangelical, I find myself all too comfortable with the spattering of scriptural idiom that accompanies the writing and thinking of the Christian Right... It has been very difficult to view these fellow-believers as wolves in sheep's clothing, but that is exactly what they are, albeit "knowing not what they do." This revisionist history has deeper roots than any of us realizes...

Stan Moody, author of "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and "McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry.")

I began the book that would become "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism," shortly before the 2004 election. It was born out of my sense that large swaths of right-wing America were living in what seemed like an all-encompassing alternate reality, and that that reality was slowly, subtlety but inexorably crowding out truth and empirical fact in our national life. As a reporter for Salon, I'd written about the way religious fundamentalists who reject the very notion of secular science were given authority over things like international population policy and domestic sex education. I'd looked into the prevalent end-times beliefs that undergird Christian Zionism and lead some American evangelicals to support the most irredentist Israeli settlers. At conservative conferences where Republican leaders gathered, I would hear the most paranoid John Birch-style conspiracy theories passed off as conventional wisdom. Increasingly, the central cultural divide in America seemed not just political or religious but epistemological .

Often I had a hard time convincing friends and colleagues that people in positions of authority really took their seemingly extreme religious convictions seriously, and that those convictions were actually dictating public policy. Instead, they tended to assume that leaders who mouthed religious rhetoric were just cynically nurturing the false consciousness of their foot soldiers. There's actually something comforting about this view, because it makes ideological extremism comprehensible to outsiders. But I think it's too simple. Hannah Arendt wrote of how observers have often had a hard time taking totalitarian rhetoric seriously, because they assume it must be masking some other material motive. "Since virtually all of European history through many centuries had taught people to judge each political action by its cui bono and all political events by their particular underlying interests, they were suddenly confronted with an element of unprecedented unpredictability," she wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism." "Because of its demagogic qualities, totalitarian propaganda, which long before the seizure of power clearly indicated how little the masses were driven by the famous instinct of self-preservation, was not taken seriously."

To write "Kingdom Coming," I traveled all over America, going to megachurches and ministries, attending rallies and conferences, and visiting some of the government-funded faith-based initiatives that, under Bush, have slowly begun to replace secular social services. I immersed myself in the literature of the movement and even took to listening to Christian radio. I began to realize that what I was encountering was as much a totalistic political movement as a religious one. What I describe as Christian nationalism is not synonymous with evangelical Christianity or even Christian fundamentalism. It is, rather, a movement that purports to have extrapolated a complete governing program from the bible, and that claims divine sanction for its campaign of national renewal. It promotes a revisionist history in which the founders were conservative Christians who never meant to separate church and state, and in which America's true Christian character has been subverted by several generations of God-hating leftists. It explicitly condemns the Enlightenment and denies that Enlightenment values had anything to do with our nation's original ideals. The movement's literature is so vast, its alternative skein of pseudo-facts so intricate, that it often seemed totally impervious to outside argument.

And yet increasingly, as members of the movement assume positions of power, government decisions -- whether on stem cells, the role of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV, government funding of religious organizations, proselytizing in the military, and a host of other issues -- are made according to Christian nationalist dogmas. You don't just see it in the federal government -- if anything, it's even more pronounced on the state and local level, where I've often heard officials cite fake facts from Christian nationalist books at contentious school board meetings and the like. Indeed, the teaching of Christian nationalist history may turn out to be the next big educational battle after intelligent design -- a curriculum developed by several leaders in the movement has already been introduced in school districts nationwide.

Over and over again, I kept returning to Arendt, whose work helped explain so much of what I was encountering. "Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself," she wrote.

By citing Arendt, I am certainly not suggesting that theocratic dictatorship is imminent in America. Rather, I'm saying that the Christian nationalist movement has a proto-totalitarian ideology and structure, and that, while it only represents a minority of Americas, it has amassed more influence than those who cherish secularism and pluralism should be comfortable with. What I try to describe in "Kingdom Coming" is a subtle but powerful change in the way our country works -- the slow encroachment of conservative religious doctrines into government policy, the increasing sectarianism pervading politics and public institutions, the shift in the very way our society apprehends truth. As I write in the book, "As Christian nationalism gains influence, it is changing our country in troubling ways, and its leaders say they've only just begun. It is up to all Americans to decide how far they can go."