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God Hears the Cry of the Oppressed
“Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt. Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry. My anger will be aroused, and I will kill you with the sword; your wives will become widows and your children fatherless.” Exodus 22: 21 – 24
The Old Testamenst clearly teaches us that the land of Canaan is not owned by the Jewish people. Leviticus 25:23 informs us that…”“The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is Mine and you are but aliens and My tenants”. 3,000 years of Jewish tradition and 2,000 years of Christian tradition affirm that the occupation of the land of Canaan by the Jewish people has been conditional upon their adherence to the religious and ethical traditions of the Torah. These ethical traditions demand that the Jewish people treat non-Jews in a manner reflecting the very heart of God towards all humanity. No sense of arrogant entitlement to the land of Canaan is condoned by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Rabbi Moshe Sober sums up the tradional idea of the relationship of Jews to the land of Israel:
“The notion that we can do whatever we please, to any kind of temptation, or engage in any form of foolish self-aggrandizement without fear of penalty because we have an inside track to the Almighty is the plain opposite of religious faith. It is in fact an affront to the Divine, whose authority to determine the course of history we are usurping. The traditional penalty for this sin is to be sent to face a hostile world with no lucky breaks, no Divine assistance whatsoever, until we learn that only those who are performing God’s will can count on His assistance. Such blind faith is not really a faith in God at all, but rather faith in ourselves. It makes a tool out of the Almighty. It turns Him into a kind of “secret weapon” whose purpose is to guarantee our success at whatever we fancy. It is an idolatrous concept that masks what is actually an irrational belief in our own invincibility” (Sober, 1990, p. 30, 31).
Zionist ideology hardly places the current state of Israel within the confines of the conditions of their tenancy agreement with the Lord God. Rabbi Isaac Breuer (1883–1946) tells us that:
“Zionism is the most terrible enemy that has ever arisen to the Jewish nation. The anti-nationalistic Reform engages it [the Jewish nation] at least in an open fight, but Zionism kills the nation and then elevates the corpse to the throne.”
In response to the disobedience of the Jewish people in Israel with regards to the ethical demands of the Lord, God sent His prophets to warn Israel of their impending exile if they did not repent and treat the vulnerable amongst them as if they were one of their own:
“ if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever.” Jeremiah 7:6,7
“ This is what the LORD says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of his oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the alien, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.” Jeremiah 23:3
“You are to distribute this land among yourselves according to the tribes of Israel. You are to allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the aliens who have settled among you and who have children. You are to consider them as native-born Israelites; along with you they are to be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel. In whatever tribe the alien settles, there you are to give him his inheritance,” declares the Sovereign LORD.” Ezekiel 47:21-23
When Israel ignored the cry of the alien in the land, God sent prophets to call them to repentance. God held Israel to account for not listening to the voice of those who were oppressed in the land.
In 2005, 170 civil Palestinian organisations (many of them Christian) called on the world to enact a program of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions against the Zionist state of Israel in order to bring them into line with international law regarding the human rights of the Arabs of Palestine and Israel. This BDS program is the “cry of the oppressed in the land” to God Himself. God has promised in His word that He will hear their cry and bring justice. It is the cry against the illegal occupation of the West Bank with its illegal settlements, Israeli only highways, checkpoints and house demolitions as well as the siege of Gaza.
God’s love for the Jewish people only acts to make them more accountable for their behaviour in the land of Israel, not less. They have no legitimate occupation of the land outside the ethical and religious conditions of their tenancy. It is because of God’s love for them that He resists their colonialist project to ethnically cleanse the land of Palestine. The BDS movement is the will of God for the Zionist state of Israel and as such it can not be thwarted. The quicker the Zionists, be they Christian or otherwise, come to realise this, the better for all the peoples of the Middle East.
References:
Sober, M. (1990). Beyond the Jewish State: Confessions of a Former Zionist. Summerhill Press, Toronto.
Craig Nielsen
ACTION FOR PALESTINE
Zionist Double Speak
According to Benjamin Netanyahu, everyone knows that the pre-Six Day War borders between Israel and the West Bank are militarily indefensible for Israel. How one comes to such a conclusion is beyond me. If the pre-67 borders are indefensible then how is it that Israel managed to exist with those borders from 1949 to 1967 without being destroyed? How is it that Israel was even able to not only defend itself in the Six Day War when those borders were in place, but managed to defeat the Arab armies and actually increase its territory?
Apparently if Israel goes back to the borders it had with the West Bank in 1967, the Israeli military, the best equipped and trained defense force in the region by a mile, will suddenly not be able to defend the citizens of Israel from attack. Its 200 nuclear missiles will disarm themselves and the billions of dollars of military hardware paid for by the U.S. will become inoperable. If Israel goes back to the 67 borders then the international community, including the U.S., will not be able to stop the Arab nations from attacking the Zionist state. Despite the fact that both Hamas and Fatah (as well as all 21 Arab nations) have agreed to a full peace treaty and recognition of Israel if they go back to the pre-67 borders, the Zionist belief that all Arabs will attack Israel must be accepted by everyone.How is it that maintaining the occupations will deter Arab violence, when the Israelis maintain that they have been the victims of Arab violence and hatred while the occupation has been in place? How would ending the occupation act to inflame the Arabs even more? Is Netanyahu crazy?
Netanyahu must decide whether Israel means to permanently occupy the West Bank or not. His complaint that going back to the 67 borders will cut off the settlements from Israel is totally offensive. Did Israel not realize that from day one of the occupation? The words of Ariel Sharon in 1973 should clearly reveal Zionist duplicity on this matter:
“We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlement in between Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlement, right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody will be able to tear it apart.”
The illegal settlements created by Israel since 1967 were made to end any chance of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu’s words only add further confirmation (as if any were needed) of the reality of Zionist lies and duplicity. The statements by Netanyahu that Israel is ready to make generous concessions to the Palestinians is as offensive as it is false. Netanyahu needs to be reminded that allowing Palestinian rights to equality and self determination are not generous gifts from Israel, but is what Israel is mandated to do by international law and the very word of God.
The real reason that Israel does not want to go back to the pre-67 borders is simply that it will have to give back part of what it has stolen. I have never come across a thief to this day that was happy to give back what they had taken so much trouble to steal. All thieves need to arm themselves against their enemies, their acts only create enemies and their “friends” (often just more thieves) desert them when trouble comes.
Zionist greed for Palestine knows no sense or reason. The 1947 partition plan was a “great deal” for them at the time. They were given 55% of the land when they consisted of only 30% of the population and over 80% of them had arrived in the last 25 years. But this was not enough for them. David Ben Gurion stated in his diaries:
“The Jewish State now being offered to us is not the Zionist objective. Within this area it is not possible to solve the Jewish question. But it can serve as a decisive stage along the path to greater Zionist implementation. It will consolidate in Palestine, within the shortest possible time, the real Jewish force which will lead us to our historic goal.”
After the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes in 1948, Israel was granted another 23% of Palestine even though this land had been obtained during the course of a war and hence was illegally acquired. Israel should have never been given this territory. Once again the Zionists were given preferential treatment. But this was still not enough for them. The Zionist goal that Ben Gurion hinted at was the creation of a Zionist state that encompasses all of historic Palestine, has a population of Arabs that can never be more than 20% of the population (not the 45%to 50% that existed in 1947 and needed to be ethnically cleansed by the Zionists at that time) and was legally owned by Jewish people in a way that could never be achieved by non-Arabs in Israel no matter how long they have lived there.
Netanyahu’s claim that the Jewish people will not get a second chance, portray his utter rejection of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Israel is no-one’s saviour. It is and never has been the key to the Jewish people’s survival. Fortunately for the Jewish people God will not reject them, but He will not indulge them in their colonialist program for ever. God’s desire for justice and equality for the Arabs of Palestine will be the undoing of the Zionist state unless they repent.
Craig Nielsen
ACTION FOR PALESTINE
The Samaritans
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the most well known parables of Jesus in the New Testament scriptures. The parable has for many years been used as a means to challenge the self righteous to understand the nature of the command, “love thy neighbour”. The searing challenge to our easy definitions of loving ones fellow human beings that comes from this parable is derived from the answer that Jesus gives to the question, “who is my neighbour?”.
The explanation of this parable takes place between the fervent “expert in the law” and Jesus, when he first asks Jesus how he may obtain eternal life. Jesus responds by asking the “expert” what the Law has to say about such matters. After answering correctly, Jesus further responds to the “expert” by telling him that if he does these things he will live. The scriptures reveal that the man, wanting to justify himself, then asked Jesus the question that we all would rather Jesus did not answer in the way he did. Rather than telling the man who his neighbour is, enabling the man to then seek out such people, bestowing a selfless gift of devotion to them so as to obtain eternal life, Jesus challenged the man to understand rather what it was to be somebody else’s neighbour, in a manner that ran counter to the prevailing prejudices of those days.
The title of the parable reveals the prejudice that lies behind the reality of this famous story told by Jesus in response to the questions of “an expert in the law”. The parable would be better described as, The Parable of the Samaritan. The inclusion of the term “good” reflects the innate prejudice that has been carried down the ages towards the people that have dwelled in the region of Samaria.
It has long been understood that the sting in the tail of Jesus’ parable is that the man described in the story that behaved as a neighbour to the man who had been robbed and beaten, was a Samaritan. Samaritans were despised by “pure blood” Jews and the feelings were mutual. Jesus deliberately chose a man in the story, to stand as an example of a real neighbour, from those people whom the Jewish audience would never have naturally considered to be “good”. The Samaritans lived in the northern, mountainous regions of what is known today as the West Bank. That region had previously been over-run by the Assyrians as they conquered the rebellious Northern Kingdom of Israel. The Assyrians had intermarried with the Israelites and the resulting “pollution of the descendants of Abraham” meant that the Samarians were looked down upon by self righteous Jews. The tale has further bite due to the fact that we are told that both a priest and a Levite (highly respected figures in the Jewish culture of the day) happened upon the man who had been robbed and left for dead but cared nothing for his plight. The Samaritan, however, takes pity on the man and deals with him as a true neighbour.
The deep offence that this parable would have had for the “expert in the law” could hardly be understated. The term “expert in the law” is used to signify all those who consider themselves to be justified in their hatred for certain types of people and hence justified in their non-neighbourly actions towards them. To portray one of those for whom the self righteous keep their most fervent prejudice, as being the real neighbour to the man, and pleasing to the Lord in the process, is the ultimate counter culture parable. God brings low the self righteous by lifting up those very ones for whom the self righteous justifiably point the finger of scorn. The prejudices of the self righteous (however well founded the “experts in the law” may think they are in having them) become a millstone around their necks. Jesus exposes their prejudices and treats them with incomparable disdain.
The intensity of the irony to this story has not waned over the centuries. Never more intense is that paradox in the very region of Samaria today. Samaria is inhabited today by what could only be called the most demonised people in the world. The daily violation of their rights to self determination in their place of birth, a right considered obligatory for everyone else in the world, goes on without a blink of an eye by the self righteous purveyors of power in the free world. So intense is the prejudice against them that any who openly deny them the right to determine their own future in the land they have inhabited for centuries, can do so with complete confidence that they are behaving in the Godliest fashion possible. To even contemplate doing otherwise would be proof positive to the peers of the righteous that the devil had deluded them into rebellion against God’s plan of salvation. Any hint of sympathy, let alone solidarity, for the Palestinian’s plight is deemed Satanic. Like a litmus test of ones devotion to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; if concern for Palestinian rights is detected, warning signals go up and a legion of pointed fingers and hysterical voices are raised as one to immediately denounce the evil doer amongst us!
Godly wisdom tells us that all Palestinians and their supporters are either terrorists or complicit with terrorism, just as all those who opposed Apartheid in South Africa were communists, long haired anti-establishment hippies and general undesirables. Solidarity with such evil doers is equivalent to being a terrorist sympathiser. To hint at even just a freeze on illegal settlement projects in the West Bank is ultimate proof that your heart is sided with the devil. Nothing could be more reasonable and plain. All suffering of the Palestinian people is brought on by themselves. They are the consummate case of a people who are their own worst enemies. They foolishly elect leaders who are the cheer leaders for genocide and hatred of God’s people, just as the Devil has always done throughout history. Palestinians are the enemies of God by their own choice despite Israel’s continued attempts at trying to make peace with them; the Jewish people bending over backwards, making concession after concession to them while the Jihadists spit in the face of reason and justice in their lust for Jewish blood! Such a people can never be given their rights til they prove themselves worthy by submitting to the will of God via His chosen people, the Zionists. Palestinians must relinquish their demonically inspired desire to have rights to self determination in the land that God has given to the Zionists as an unconditional possession in an eternal covenant. Injustice to Palestinians with regards to land rights in Eretz Yisrael is as contradictory a notion as one plus one equals three. All resistance to Zionism is illegitimate and equivalent to rebellion against God Himself. The United Nations vindication of Palestinian grievances is in opposition to God and has only been thwarted by the Christian nation of the U.S. There is no oppression of Palestinians by the State of Israel; only a democratic nation acting in fairness, compassion and justice towards a savage and uncivilised people that have hatred of Jews inbred in them.
The Zionist narrative of a heroic people, the survivors of the Holocaust, bravely creating a home for themselves in the land of their fore-fathers against the pitiless anti-Semitism of the Arab world is accepted as Gospel truth. The Palestinian story of their ethnic cleansing and dispossession, at the hands of the Zionists, from the land the Palestinians and their ancestors have lived in for many hundreds of years, despite the fact that Arabs played no part in the crimes of the Nazis, is silenced completely and any attempt to revive it is looked upon with suspicion of anti-Semitic motives. The easily verifiable truth that anti-Semitism was never a part of elite or popular Arab culture, as it was in Europe, has been kept hidden from the gaze of the general public. The good relationship that Jews and Palestinian Arabs enjoyed before the Zionist invasion, as well as the overwhelming religious Jewish resistance to Zionism, is likewise kept well hidden. The destruction of 25,000 Palestinian homes in Gaza and the West Bank is fully deserved and morally respectable in the eyes of the leaders of the world’s democracies. Only Palestinians commit acts of terror against the democratic nation of Israel (in no way provoked by the actions of the Israelis but clear evidence of the Palestinians innate lack of worth as a people and displaying to the world that the withholding of Palestinian so-called rights is entirely justified). The Zionist State only wishes to live in peace and defend its borders. Surrounded by hostile Arabs who have no other wish but to push the Jews into the sea, Israel has no choice but defend itself from terrorism.
The unholy alliance of Islam and the secular left is submitted as even further proof (as if any more were necessary) of the demonic origins of Palestinian Solidarity movements, ignoring the alliance of the religious Christian Right with a secular Zionism which as been at war with Orthodox Judaism for one hundred years. Palestinian Christians must understand that God loves Palestinians despite being silent (if not applauding) as Israeli bulldozers demolish their houses. This is the Gospel of God’s love to Palestinians. It is a Gospel that assuages the guilt of European anti-Semitism by placing it at the feet of a people not involved in the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
The profound challenge of this parable to treat one another with compassion finds its roots right at the very heart of the story of the Jewish people. The message of the Exodus was that Jews should be merciful to non-Jews in the land just as God had been merciful to the Jews while they where in slavery in Egypt. They were to resist the temptation to demonise those different from them even as the Egyptians had previously demonised the Hebrews during the time of their bondage in that land.
The interpretation of this parable by the great theologian, Karl Barth, gives even greater insight. Barth sees that the parable was meant to show the “expert in the law” that it was he that lay naked in the road; battered and helpless and that Jesus was the Samaritan that behaved as a brother to him. In effect the parable says that we can not be truly merciful unless we have first received mercy. How can the Zionists be merciful to their Palestinian brothers and sisters when in their eyes all the world hates the Jewish people with merciless hatred? The answer is that they must first abandon their view that the world is or has always been merciless to the Jewish people. Only then will they give up their “destructive entitlement” in the land promised by God, by mercy and grace, to the descendants of Abraham.
Who could be more demonised than these Palestinian Arabs? Perhaps only their current oppressors, some 65 years ago when the Jewish people were demonised by a nation from civilised, Christian Europe many hundreds of miles from Palestine. How would Jesus tell this parable (The Parable of the Good Palestinian Arab) to a Jewish audience in the Knesset today? Who would be more offended by it than the Zionists and their Christian sycophants? When Jesus came to the land of Palestine the first time, he ate with sinners, tax collectors and harlots. He spoke with gentile women, Samaritans and all those who incurred the wrath of the Godly. He nullified the prejudices against them with this great parable and validated their rights to fairness and justice; determined on the same basis as such things are determined for those who pour scorn on the very ones whom Jesus stood up for and scripture calls us to do, as Jesus did then, in our time in the land of Palestine.
Craig Nielsen
ACTION FOR PALESTINE
Israel-Palestine 