Gaza seize-fire (IV)

This has also affected the attitude of Nigerian Christians such that the matter of support for, or opposition to, the State of Israel has erroneously been made into a contentious religious issue between them and Muslims. This is all made possible because many Christians seem to believe that they have in common a Judeo-Christian identity […]

This has also affected the attitude of Nigerian Christians such that the matter of support for, or opposition to, the State of Israel has erroneously been made into a contentious religious issue between them and Muslims. This is all made possible because many Christians seem to believe that they have in common a Judeo-Christian identity and a particular set of values; but looking at Israel, the evidence for any such shared values is hard to come by.
Sometimes it is difficult to resist the laugh when one sees some Christian professors and leaders in the Middle Belt running around trying to advance the interest of Israel in Nigeria, affecting an affinity that doesn’t exist—doing so only because they imagine that this will displease Muslims; but it would really have been thoroughly amusing, were it not so pitiable and tragic. There is really no such shared tradition between the Zionist State and Christians, as we shall see.
What we see is the development of unending tension, violence, desecration of churches and acts of vandalism against Christians on a daily basis. The first reported incident of church desecration believed to be the worst took place in 1963, when ultraorthodox Zionist mobs of the Hever Peelei Hamahane Hatorati, the Society of Activists of the Torah Camp, simultaneously attacked churches and the Christian missions in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem. With Israeli victory in the 1967 war, desecration and vandalism against churches increased such that there was no denomination that was spared attack, and it all seemed to have official backing.
In his book Fifty Years of Israel, Donald Neff, former Israel Bureau Chief for Time magazine revealed that on Dec. 29, 1977, Christians in Israel and the occupied territories protested a new law passed by the Israeli parliament making it illegal for missionaries to proselytize Jews. The law made missionaries liable to five years’ imprisonment for attempting to persuade Jews to convert to Christianity, and three years’ imprisonment for any Jew who converted. The United Christian Council complained that the law could be “misused in restricting religious freedom in Israel.” Nevertheless, the law was passed on April 1, 1978, and it emboldened the vandals.
In the 1980s, with the Likud government in control, Zionist bigots had a mentor in office. On October 8, 1982,  they burnt down Jerusalem’s famous Baptist Church; and when the Baptist congregation tried  to rebuild the church, Zionists organised demonstrations against the project; and the Jewish District Planning Commission f=refused to grant a building permit. The Baptist took the matter to court and it dragged on to 1985 when the Israeli Supreme Court sided with the demonstrators and asked the Baptist to leave the all-Jewish area.
These attacks continued intermittently throughout the 1990’s, reaching a crescendo in May 2007 when the mayor of Yehuda, where Messianic Jews were distributing copies of the New Testament, had religious students confiscate all the bibles and burnt them in a public bonfire in front of a synagogue. Nothing happened to the book-burners, because they were apparently implementing the Israeli law against the preaching of Christianity in Israel.
In December 2009, prominent Palestinian Christian leaders, tired of Israeli repression of their people, released the Kairos Palestine Document, “A moment of truth.” Among the authors of the document are Patriarch Michel Sabah, Archbishop Attalah Hanna, Father Jamal Khader, Rev. Mitri Raheb, Rev.Naim Ateek and Rifat Kassis calling on churches and Christians all over the world to consider it and adopt it and put pressure on Israel until it abolishes all of what it labels as its ‘apartheid laws’ that discriminate against Palestinians and non-Jews.
On March 24, 2013, PLO Executive Committee Member Hanan Ashrawi spoke of her outrage at the increasing restriction of entry to Jerusalem for Palestinian Christians. “This is a religious and national occasion, a time for collective worship and celebration. The fact that so many Palestinian Christian communities are denied their simple human right to worship freely in their own capital city is unacceptable,” said Ashrawi. “There should not even be a question of needing permits to visit one’s own city,” she continued. “East Jerusalem is the occupied capital of the Palestinian people and freedom of worship is a basic human right for all of our Christian and Muslim citizens, a right which is being systematically and increasingly denied by a foreign occupying force.”
But the Israelis were wise enough to hide this reality form foreign visitors by allowing them unimpeded access and Ashrawi seized the opportunity to beg them to pray on behalf of their Palestinian brothers who had been denied access. She concluded by calling upon those who are able to enter Jerusalem for Palm Sunday, especially our “dearly welcomed pilgrims and tourists from outside of Palestine” to “represent their Christian brothers and sisters who live only a few kilometres away, and who are cruelly denied the opportunity to partake in this important occasion.”
On May 5, 2008, Father Issa Misleh of The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate denounced the Israeli measures denying Christian worshippers access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the use of force by Israeli security forces against Christian worshippers during Holy Saturday celebrations.
The following day, a reporter described what ought to have been a peaceful Christian procession on Palm Sunday and the Greek Orthodox Easter: “Instead of Christian worshippers, armed Israeli soldiers crowded the entrance to the Church. Instead of lighted candles, police batons were raised. Instead of musical bands playing their instruments, Israeli soldiers brandished their automatic weapons, and instead of celebrating, Palestinian Christians were confronted by Israeli police thugs, were beaten, and many were arrested.”
And throughout November 2011, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz was reporting that Christian clergy in the streets of the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem were being cursed upon and spat at by ultra-Orthodox Jews ‘as a matter of routine;’ and by February of the following year, spitting incidents were so prevalent that some priests had stopped visiting certain parts of the Old City. And this remains the situation today.
But real Israeli contempt for the holy two was given by the Hebrew graffiti sprayed over the door of the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem, the death place of the Holy Virgin Mary [AS] read: ‘Christians are monkeys;’ while other graffiti, which insulted the person of Jesus [AS] and the his Blessed Mother [AS], and which I am unable to repeat because it is Islamically  impermissible for me reproduce here even to prove my point, were of such blasphemous magnitude as would, in ancient times, have warranted not mere earthquakes or the overturning of cities as in Sodom and Gomorrah, but would have provided enough ground for the cataclysmic grinding of the entire cosmos to dust.
What have Christians done to deserve all this? If Israeli treatment of Palestinian Christians is just racialist because they are Arabs it will still have been bad enough; but, in this case, it is doubly badly so: because, in addition, that is also how they treat Christians of whatever racial stock including their own, as in the case of their treatment of Messianic Jews, who, because they believe in Jesus [AS], are regarded as misguided, fallen Jews and, for that very and only reason, are persecuted. This is evident even from accounts by some of its supporters, as seen in this post on the persecution of Christians in Israel in the blog of one Nathan Jones, a fanatical American supporter of Israel:
“Though I am a firm supporter and believe  that the modern  state of  Israel is the prophetic fulfilment of Ezekiel 37, I am not blind to the fact that Israel persecutes its Messianic Jewish believers. Some 15,000 Jewish believers in Christ reside in the nation of Israel. They believe that Yeshua (Jesus) is the Messiah the Jews are still waiting for. But, that belief flies in the face of the fundamental Orthodox Jews who firmly believe as the Gospel-time Pharisees did, that Jesus wasn’t kingly enough for them to be the Messiah. As an expression of their disbelief, the Orthodox Jews harass and even attempt to kill believers in Christ in Israel. Israel is not a safe place for Christians.”
Obviously, the religion of Christianity has nothing to do with Christians’ bad judgment in supporting Israel, and cannot therefore be held responsible for the consequences of the international political, sectarian or even pecuniary choices Christians in Nigeria decide to make. And at any event, Christians in Nigeria are within the confines of the free exercise of their inalienable personal democratic rights to decide who to associate with or which nation to support, including the Zionist State of Israel in spite of what has been said here about its treatment of Christians and the contempt [and perish that contempt] in which they hold the holy name and person of Jesus [AS], the Blessed Virgin Mary [AS] and the religion of Christianity in general. But when they do give that support, they shouldn’t try to pretend that this is on account of Christianity, or that it is even a good thing.
This narrative has been a rather lengthy look at only a few of the issues involved at length; but it is entirely justified by the issue at hand. No other country, idea or ideology has demonstrated this level of wanton disregard for human life and utter contempt for world opinion as Israel has done.
The other time I had cause to write on the same issue at similar length, His Excellency Moshe Ram, then ambassador of Israel to Nigeria, called Mahmud Jega, then editor of the Daily Trust, protesting why a respectable national newspaper like the Trust would “give a madman space for a whole month to write all that nonsense.” When Mahmud told me that, I asked him to tell His Excellency that my column was available to him for the same length of time if he thought he had the facts to refute the points I tried to make.
Unfortunately, His Excellency didn’t take the offer; but he told Mahmud that I couldn’t hop to make a point if all I could do was to quote words spoken by Zionist leaders more than 200 years ago. Well, for the moment, forgetting that actually none of the quotations was 200 years old; but even if any was, there was nothing wrong with the age of a fact, what was important was its veracity and relevance; and also forgetting that I could have quoted from enemies of Zionism in order to make an even more acerbic point, but chose instead, as he himself said, to quote “words spoken by Zionist leaders more than 200 years ago.” But, really, if we couldn’t depend on Zionist leaders to understand Zionism, on whom should we have depended?
Then I asked Mahmud to convey my response as accurately as he could; and fearing that it might be distorted in the retelling, instead of telling him I sent it as a text to him, hoping that he would forward it to His Excellency which was exactly what he said he did. In the message, I reminded His Excellency that, if a point could not be made using words spoken only 200 years ago as he said, what then would become of his Israel that based the justification for its existence and entire raison d’être on words allegedly spoken more than 3,000 years ago?
Up to the time he left Nigeria, His Excellency Ambassador Moshe Ram had not responded to my query; but the offer is still on.