27 aug 2013
British Christians responded on Sunday 25th August, to 'A Moment of Truth', the Kairos Palestine document at the Greenbelt Arts Festival, in Cheltenham.
Rafaat Qasis, of the Kairos Palestine, told PNN that the document which was launched in 2009 by leading Palestinian Christians has received an international response in several countries and was reflected through the formation of committees and workshops that call for the actual work to implement what came in the document.
The document that was launched Sunday in Britain announced that Belfour Declaration, which is a November 2, 1917 letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild that made public the British support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, is a mistake and that it has betrayed the Palestinian people. It says, "It's one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history." Stressing that the declaration was silent on the political rights of the non-Jewish communities – in particular Palestinian Arabs – who by the start of the 1920s, made up almost 90% of the population in Palestine.
The Kairos Palestine document explains why British Christians have a particular responsibility toward the situation in Israel and Palestine and why there is an urgent need for them to be involved in supporting the call of the Palestinian Church for international action. It also identifies "the reality on the ground" in the Holy Land, the truth of life in the occupied Palestinian territories; West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
The document denounce Israel's brutal and cruel policies and measures it carries out against the Palestinians from daily humiliation of women, men and children, deaths of civilians, demolishing of homes, the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, the brutality of administrative detention, the relentless confiscation of land and natural resources, and thousands of olive trees destroyed. It also denounced the continuing construction of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian owned-land.
The document declared its commitment to listen to Palestinian voices and supports the growing Palestinian non-violent resistance movement, the release of prisoners from Israeli jails and the plight of thousands of refugees to return to their homeland. The document also encourages alternative tourism and spreading awareness to tourists and pilgrims about Palestinians' daily life under occupation.
The document also condemns Israel's blatant disregard for international laws and resolutions, and underestimation of the human rights, calling on societies and political leaders to put pressure on Israel and take legal actions to end the occupation and its brutal, arbitrary and racist practices towards the Palestinian people.
The document was built upon previous kairos documents such as Kairos South Africa, 1985, that called for confession, repentance and the rejection of violence. It challenges Christians around the world to hear the cry for justice and recognize that now is a crucial (kairos) moment to act now to attain justice, peace and security."
Rafaat Qasis, of the Kairos Palestine, told PNN that the document which was launched in 2009 by leading Palestinian Christians has received an international response in several countries and was reflected through the formation of committees and workshops that call for the actual work to implement what came in the document.
The document that was launched Sunday in Britain announced that Belfour Declaration, which is a November 2, 1917 letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild that made public the British support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, is a mistake and that it has betrayed the Palestinian people. It says, "It's one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history." Stressing that the declaration was silent on the political rights of the non-Jewish communities – in particular Palestinian Arabs – who by the start of the 1920s, made up almost 90% of the population in Palestine.
The Kairos Palestine document explains why British Christians have a particular responsibility toward the situation in Israel and Palestine and why there is an urgent need for them to be involved in supporting the call of the Palestinian Church for international action. It also identifies "the reality on the ground" in the Holy Land, the truth of life in the occupied Palestinian territories; West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
The document denounce Israel's brutal and cruel policies and measures it carries out against the Palestinians from daily humiliation of women, men and children, deaths of civilians, demolishing of homes, the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, the brutality of administrative detention, the relentless confiscation of land and natural resources, and thousands of olive trees destroyed. It also denounced the continuing construction of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian owned-land.
The document declared its commitment to listen to Palestinian voices and supports the growing Palestinian non-violent resistance movement, the release of prisoners from Israeli jails and the plight of thousands of refugees to return to their homeland. The document also encourages alternative tourism and spreading awareness to tourists and pilgrims about Palestinians' daily life under occupation.
The document also condemns Israel's blatant disregard for international laws and resolutions, and underestimation of the human rights, calling on societies and political leaders to put pressure on Israel and take legal actions to end the occupation and its brutal, arbitrary and racist practices towards the Palestinian people.
The document was built upon previous kairos documents such as Kairos South Africa, 1985, that called for confession, repentance and the rejection of violence. It challenges Christians around the world to hear the cry for justice and recognize that now is a crucial (kairos) moment to act now to attain justice, peace and security."
21 aug 2013
Unknown assailants threw a Molotov cocktail at a Roman Catholic monastery in Israel and scrawled racist graffiti on its walls, a police spokeswoman said Wednesday, in a suspected hate crime.
"A Molotov cocktail was thrown at the wall of the Beit Jamal monastery, near Beit Shemesh," in central Israel, Luba Samri said in a statement, adding that "it caught fire."
"Hebrew graffiti was also scrawled on the monastery walls, reading 'Gentiles perish' and 'revenge,'" she added.
According to Samri, the attack most likely took place overnight Monday.
"Police were investigating all directions, including nationalistic motivation," she said.
In past years, Christian sites in Israel have been targets of hate crimes by suspected Jewish extremists. These incidents come in addition to attacks against mosques, which have been linked to the "price tag" campaign of Israeli extremists opposed to state moves to dismantle unauthorized settler outposts.
Initially carried out against Palestinians in retaliation for state moves to dismantle unauthorized settler outposts in the occupied territories, "price tag" attacks became a much broader phenomenon with racist and xenophobic traits.
Another Price Tag Attack Targets Christian Monastery Near Jerusalem
A Christian Monastery in the Deir Jamal area, between Jerusalem and Ramla, was attacked by a Molotov cocktail, while racist graffiti, used by Price Tag extremist Israeli groups, were found on its exterior walls, the Arabs48 news Website has reported.
The Monastery is currently holding a number of summer camps; various Racist graffiti such as Price Tag and Revenge have been found in Hebrew on its exterior walls, the Arabs48 News Website has reported.
Patriarch Fuad Twal, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church, visited the monastery and strongly denounced the repeated attacks carried out by Israeli Price Tag extremists against churches and mosques in different parts of Palestine.
Greek Orthodox Archbishop, Atallah Hanna, also denounced the attack on Deir Jamal Monastery, and stated that the graffiti and the nature of the attack is similar to frequent attacks carried out by racist, extremist Israeli settler groups that do not believe in coexistence, and human brotherhood.
“We have witnessed increasing attacks against Islamic and Christian holy sites, and even graveyards, the message is to get us out of our land”, Hanna said, “But, our response is that we are here to stay, this is our homeland, those are our holy sites, and we reject all forms of racism and fundamentalism regardless of their origin”.
On Monday at dawn [June 24], a number of masked extremist Israeli settlers attacked 22 Palestinian cars in Beit Hanina, in occupied East Jerusalem, punctured their tires before drawing the Star of David on one of the vehicles, and wrote racist graffiti on the front wall of a local home.
Just one week earlier, Price Tag graffiti was also found on the outer walls of a Church in the Old City, the assailants also punctured tires of 28 Palestinian cars, and wrote racist graffiti in Abu Ghosh.
On Friday [June 14 2013] Israeli extremists set ablaze two Palestinian cars in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, in occupied East Jerusalem, and wrote racist graffiti, including Price Tag.
The extremists also wrote racist graffiti on some graves in the Christian Greek Orthodox graveyard in Jaffa.
The settlers wrote “Price Tag”, “Revenge”, and drew the Star of David on a number of graves.
They further wrote more racist graffiti on a wall of a building inhabited by the head of the Orthodox Society in Jaffa, and even wrote graffiti on the wall of the home Khaled Kaboub, an Arab District Court Judge in Tel Aviv.
On Thursday [June 13 2013] extremist settlers defaced a Christian Cemetery in Jaffa, and spray-painted “Price Tag”, and “Revenge” on tombstones.
On Friday [June 7 2013], Israeli extremists burnt a Palestinian car in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
Dozens of Price Tag attacks have been carried out against Churches, Mosques, Islamic and Christian graveyards, Palestinian lands and orchards [including burning and uprooting dozens of trees and farmlands], Palestinian property, and in some cases targeted Israeli peace groups.
On June 12 2013, the Israeli Police revealed that extremist Israeli groups carried out 165 Price Tag attacks against the Palestinians and their property, in the West Bank, and in the 1948 territories since the beginning of the year.
"A Molotov cocktail was thrown at the wall of the Beit Jamal monastery, near Beit Shemesh," in central Israel, Luba Samri said in a statement, adding that "it caught fire."
"Hebrew graffiti was also scrawled on the monastery walls, reading 'Gentiles perish' and 'revenge,'" she added.
According to Samri, the attack most likely took place overnight Monday.
"Police were investigating all directions, including nationalistic motivation," she said.
In past years, Christian sites in Israel have been targets of hate crimes by suspected Jewish extremists. These incidents come in addition to attacks against mosques, which have been linked to the "price tag" campaign of Israeli extremists opposed to state moves to dismantle unauthorized settler outposts.
Initially carried out against Palestinians in retaliation for state moves to dismantle unauthorized settler outposts in the occupied territories, "price tag" attacks became a much broader phenomenon with racist and xenophobic traits.
Another Price Tag Attack Targets Christian Monastery Near Jerusalem
A Christian Monastery in the Deir Jamal area, between Jerusalem and Ramla, was attacked by a Molotov cocktail, while racist graffiti, used by Price Tag extremist Israeli groups, were found on its exterior walls, the Arabs48 news Website has reported.
The Monastery is currently holding a number of summer camps; various Racist graffiti such as Price Tag and Revenge have been found in Hebrew on its exterior walls, the Arabs48 News Website has reported.
Patriarch Fuad Twal, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church, visited the monastery and strongly denounced the repeated attacks carried out by Israeli Price Tag extremists against churches and mosques in different parts of Palestine.
Greek Orthodox Archbishop, Atallah Hanna, also denounced the attack on Deir Jamal Monastery, and stated that the graffiti and the nature of the attack is similar to frequent attacks carried out by racist, extremist Israeli settler groups that do not believe in coexistence, and human brotherhood.
“We have witnessed increasing attacks against Islamic and Christian holy sites, and even graveyards, the message is to get us out of our land”, Hanna said, “But, our response is that we are here to stay, this is our homeland, those are our holy sites, and we reject all forms of racism and fundamentalism regardless of their origin”.
On Monday at dawn [June 24], a number of masked extremist Israeli settlers attacked 22 Palestinian cars in Beit Hanina, in occupied East Jerusalem, punctured their tires before drawing the Star of David on one of the vehicles, and wrote racist graffiti on the front wall of a local home.
Just one week earlier, Price Tag graffiti was also found on the outer walls of a Church in the Old City, the assailants also punctured tires of 28 Palestinian cars, and wrote racist graffiti in Abu Ghosh.
On Friday [June 14 2013] Israeli extremists set ablaze two Palestinian cars in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, in occupied East Jerusalem, and wrote racist graffiti, including Price Tag.
The extremists also wrote racist graffiti on some graves in the Christian Greek Orthodox graveyard in Jaffa.
The settlers wrote “Price Tag”, “Revenge”, and drew the Star of David on a number of graves.
They further wrote more racist graffiti on a wall of a building inhabited by the head of the Orthodox Society in Jaffa, and even wrote graffiti on the wall of the home Khaled Kaboub, an Arab District Court Judge in Tel Aviv.
On Thursday [June 13 2013] extremist settlers defaced a Christian Cemetery in Jaffa, and spray-painted “Price Tag”, and “Revenge” on tombstones.
On Friday [June 7 2013], Israeli extremists burnt a Palestinian car in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
Dozens of Price Tag attacks have been carried out against Churches, Mosques, Islamic and Christian graveyards, Palestinian lands and orchards [including burning and uprooting dozens of trees and farmlands], Palestinian property, and in some cases targeted Israeli peace groups.
On June 12 2013, the Israeli Police revealed that extremist Israeli groups carried out 165 Price Tag attacks against the Palestinians and their property, in the West Bank, and in the 1948 territories since the beginning of the year.
14 aug 2013
The Palestinian Christian Initiative (Kairos Palestine) issued a statement strongly denouncing the Israeli attempts to recruit Arab Palestinian Christians to the Israeli military. The statement came in response to the Israeli decision to form a joint committee of Palestinian Christians, and the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, with the aim to encourage and act on recurring young Arab Christians, living in the 1948 occupied territories, in the Israeli army.
Kairos stated that the officials who are encouraging enlistment in the occupation army are conducting provocative actions that harm Christian Churches, national interests and the Christians themselves.
“Those who call for recruiting Christians to the occupation army do not represent us, do not represent our Churches, and do not represent the Christians”, Kairos said, “It seems that some of those who have been deceived chose a wrong path that does not serve our interests and faith as Arab Christians”.
It added that trying to recruit the Christians is immoral, and harms the Palestinian Christian identity in the Holy Land.
The initiative called on the international community to shoulder responsibility and take real action regarding the oppression, displacement and racial discrimination adopted against the Palestinian people for more than six decades.
Kairos stated that the officials who are encouraging enlistment in the occupation army are conducting provocative actions that harm Christian Churches, national interests and the Christians themselves.
“Those who call for recruiting Christians to the occupation army do not represent us, do not represent our Churches, and do not represent the Christians”, Kairos said, “It seems that some of those who have been deceived chose a wrong path that does not serve our interests and faith as Arab Christians”.
It added that trying to recruit the Christians is immoral, and harms the Palestinian Christian identity in the Holy Land.
The initiative called on the international community to shoulder responsibility and take real action regarding the oppression, displacement and racial discrimination adopted against the Palestinian people for more than six decades.
11 aug 2013
Israeli military forces on Sunday stormed a church in the city of al-Khalil in the south of the occupied West Bank. According to Palestinian security sources, three Israeli military vehicles raided in the early morning hours the Moscobiya Church in the city of al-Khalil. No arrests were reported.
Meanwhile, the occupation forces arrested a 17-year-old Palestinian boy, following a raid on his house in the town of Khader near Bethlehem in the southern occupied West Bank.
Meanwhile, the occupation forces arrested a 17-year-old Palestinian boy, following a raid on his house in the town of Khader near Bethlehem in the southern occupied West Bank.
8 aug 2013
The Palestinian Christian Initiative (Kairos Palestine) issued a statement strongly denouncing the Israel attempts to recruit Arab Palestinian Christians, in historic Palestine to the Israeli military that occupies their people.
The statement came in response to the Israeli decision to form a joint committee of Palestinian Christians, and the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, with the aim to encourage and act on recurring young Arab Christians in the Israeli army.
Kairos stated that the officials who are encouraging enlistment in the occupation army are conducting provocative actions that harm Christian Churches, national interests and the Christians themselves.
“Those who call for recruiting Christians to the occupation army do not represent us, do not represent our Churches, and do not represent the Christians”, Kairos said, “It seems that some of those who have been deceived chose a wrong path that does not serve our interests and faith as Arab Christians”.
It added that trying to recruit the Christians is immoral, and harms the Palestinian Christian identity in the Holy Land.
“We need to be united, we need to protect our national identity, only our Arab, Palestinian, identity will be able to protect us, and protect our interests”, Kairos said, “Our choice will not be sectarian, but will only be national unity between all Palestinians regardless of their beliefs and faith”.
The statement came after Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered the formation of a committee to recruit Arab Palestinian Christians in the country to the Israeli military.
The decision was made after Netanyahu held a meeting on Monday with Father Jubrael Naddaf, known for his stances encouraging enlistment in the Israeli military despite massive objections the Palestinian Christian community in the country.
When Kairos Palestine was established in December of 2009, it published its mission statement calling for people, justice and equality, expressed it rejection to the Israeli occupation, all sorts of apartheid in the world, and called for justice and equality.
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
This document (Kairos) is the Christian Palestinians’ word to the world about what is happening in Palestine. It is written at this time when we wanted to see the Glory of the grace of God in this land and in the sufferings of its people. In this spirit the document requests the international community to stand by the Palestinian people who have faced oppression, displacement, suffering and clear apartheid for more than six decades.
The suffering continues while the international community silently looks on at the occupying State, Israel. Our word is a cry of hope, with love, prayer and faith in God. We address it first of all to ourselves and then to all the churches and Christians in the world, asking them to stand against injustice and apartheid, urging them to work for a just peace in our region, calling on them to revisit theologies that justify crimes perpetrated against our people and the dispossession of the land.
In this historic document, we Palestinian Christians declare that the military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity, and that any theology that legitimizes the occupation is far from Christian teachings because true Christian theology is a theology of love and solidarity with the oppressed, a call to justice and equality among peoples.
This document did not come about spontaneously, and it is not the result of a coincidence. It is not a theoretical theological study or a policy paper, but is rather a document of faith and work. Its importance stems from the sincere expression of the concerns of the people and their view of this moment in history we are living through.
It seeks to be prophetic in addressing things as they are without equivocation and with boldness, in addition it puts forward ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and all forms of discrimination as the solution that will lead to a just and lasting peace.
The document also demands that all peoples, political leaders and decision-makers put pressure on Israel and take legal measures in order to oblige its government to put an end to its oppression and disregard for the international law. The document also holds a clear position that non-violent resistance to this injustice is a right and duty for all Palestinians including Christians.
The initiators of this document have been working on it for more than a year, in prayer and discussion, guided by their faith in God and their love for their people, accepting advice from many friends: Palestinians, Arabs and those from the wider international community. We are grateful to our friends for their solidarity with us.
The statement came in response to the Israeli decision to form a joint committee of Palestinian Christians, and the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, with the aim to encourage and act on recurring young Arab Christians in the Israeli army.
Kairos stated that the officials who are encouraging enlistment in the occupation army are conducting provocative actions that harm Christian Churches, national interests and the Christians themselves.
“Those who call for recruiting Christians to the occupation army do not represent us, do not represent our Churches, and do not represent the Christians”, Kairos said, “It seems that some of those who have been deceived chose a wrong path that does not serve our interests and faith as Arab Christians”.
It added that trying to recruit the Christians is immoral, and harms the Palestinian Christian identity in the Holy Land.
“We need to be united, we need to protect our national identity, only our Arab, Palestinian, identity will be able to protect us, and protect our interests”, Kairos said, “Our choice will not be sectarian, but will only be national unity between all Palestinians regardless of their beliefs and faith”.
The statement came after Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered the formation of a committee to recruit Arab Palestinian Christians in the country to the Israeli military.
The decision was made after Netanyahu held a meeting on Monday with Father Jubrael Naddaf, known for his stances encouraging enlistment in the Israeli military despite massive objections the Palestinian Christian community in the country.
When Kairos Palestine was established in December of 2009, it published its mission statement calling for people, justice and equality, expressed it rejection to the Israeli occupation, all sorts of apartheid in the world, and called for justice and equality.
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
This document (Kairos) is the Christian Palestinians’ word to the world about what is happening in Palestine. It is written at this time when we wanted to see the Glory of the grace of God in this land and in the sufferings of its people. In this spirit the document requests the international community to stand by the Palestinian people who have faced oppression, displacement, suffering and clear apartheid for more than six decades.
The suffering continues while the international community silently looks on at the occupying State, Israel. Our word is a cry of hope, with love, prayer and faith in God. We address it first of all to ourselves and then to all the churches and Christians in the world, asking them to stand against injustice and apartheid, urging them to work for a just peace in our region, calling on them to revisit theologies that justify crimes perpetrated against our people and the dispossession of the land.
In this historic document, we Palestinian Christians declare that the military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity, and that any theology that legitimizes the occupation is far from Christian teachings because true Christian theology is a theology of love and solidarity with the oppressed, a call to justice and equality among peoples.
This document did not come about spontaneously, and it is not the result of a coincidence. It is not a theoretical theological study or a policy paper, but is rather a document of faith and work. Its importance stems from the sincere expression of the concerns of the people and their view of this moment in history we are living through.
It seeks to be prophetic in addressing things as they are without equivocation and with boldness, in addition it puts forward ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and all forms of discrimination as the solution that will lead to a just and lasting peace.
The document also demands that all peoples, political leaders and decision-makers put pressure on Israel and take legal measures in order to oblige its government to put an end to its oppression and disregard for the international law. The document also holds a clear position that non-violent resistance to this injustice is a right and duty for all Palestinians including Christians.
The initiators of this document have been working on it for more than a year, in prayer and discussion, guided by their faith in God and their love for their people, accepting advice from many friends: Palestinians, Arabs and those from the wider international community. We are grateful to our friends for their solidarity with us.
6 aug 2013
In a serious escalation of the Israeli attempts to divide the Arab community in the country, and amidst massive objections, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered the formation of a special committee to recruit Arab Palestinian Christians in the country to the Israeli military.
Netanyahu and a number of Christian “leaders” will be forming this committee in the coming two weeks; its main aim is to enlist Christians in the occupation army.
Israeli daily, Haaretz, has reported that the decision was made by Netanyahu following a meeting he held, on Monday morning [August 5, 2013] with Father Jubrael Naddaf, known for his stances encouraging enlistment in the Israeli military despite massive objections from the Arab Palestinian Christian community.
Naji Obeid, head of the Orthodox Council in Nazareth-Jaffa, and Lieutenant-reserve, Shadi Halloul, attended the meeting.
Haaretz said that the committee will be acting on recruiting Christians in the country, and will be acting on “protecting Christian recruits”, in addition to acting on the legal level to prosecute objectors, dubbed as “persons who incite violence and chaos”.
According to Haaretz, Netanyahu stated that “Christians in the country must be allowed to join the Israeli army and defend the state”.
Netanyahu added that he “salutes” those recruits, and that Israel “will not allow any person of group to threaten or harm them”.
Meanwhile, Arab Legislator in Israel, Bassel Ghattas, sent a letter to Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem, regarding acts by certain priests, especially Father Naddaf, who supports enlistment in the Israeli army and is encouraging Christian youths to join the Israeli occupation army.
Ghattas denounced the actions of Naddaf, and stated that those stances violate his moral and religious responsibility, adding that Naddaf is using his priesthood as the head of a well-respected Christian Palestinian community, to encourage the youths to enlist in the army that occupies and oppresses their own people.
“Naddaf is trying to strip those youths from their national identity”, Ghattas said, “He is trying to divide the Christian committee, and trying to strip the Christians from their identity and nationality”.
Ghattas added that the Arab Orthodox Christian committee in the country is a community of real patriots, leaders and freedom fighters, including Father Yacoub Al-Hanna in Al-Rama in the Galilee, George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Nayef Hawatma, secretary-general of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and many leaders and figures.
Ghattas added that Father Naddaf must be excommunicated and removed from his post, and that Naddaf must apologize to the Christian community.
Netanyahu and a number of Christian “leaders” will be forming this committee in the coming two weeks; its main aim is to enlist Christians in the occupation army.
Israeli daily, Haaretz, has reported that the decision was made by Netanyahu following a meeting he held, on Monday morning [August 5, 2013] with Father Jubrael Naddaf, known for his stances encouraging enlistment in the Israeli military despite massive objections from the Arab Palestinian Christian community.
Naji Obeid, head of the Orthodox Council in Nazareth-Jaffa, and Lieutenant-reserve, Shadi Halloul, attended the meeting.
Haaretz said that the committee will be acting on recruiting Christians in the country, and will be acting on “protecting Christian recruits”, in addition to acting on the legal level to prosecute objectors, dubbed as “persons who incite violence and chaos”.
According to Haaretz, Netanyahu stated that “Christians in the country must be allowed to join the Israeli army and defend the state”.
Netanyahu added that he “salutes” those recruits, and that Israel “will not allow any person of group to threaten or harm them”.
Meanwhile, Arab Legislator in Israel, Bassel Ghattas, sent a letter to Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem, regarding acts by certain priests, especially Father Naddaf, who supports enlistment in the Israeli army and is encouraging Christian youths to join the Israeli occupation army.
Ghattas denounced the actions of Naddaf, and stated that those stances violate his moral and religious responsibility, adding that Naddaf is using his priesthood as the head of a well-respected Christian Palestinian community, to encourage the youths to enlist in the army that occupies and oppresses their own people.
“Naddaf is trying to strip those youths from their national identity”, Ghattas said, “He is trying to divide the Christian committee, and trying to strip the Christians from their identity and nationality”.
Ghattas added that the Arab Orthodox Christian committee in the country is a community of real patriots, leaders and freedom fighters, including Father Yacoub Al-Hanna in Al-Rama in the Galilee, George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Nayef Hawatma, secretary-general of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and many leaders and figures.
Ghattas added that Father Naddaf must be excommunicated and removed from his post, and that Naddaf must apologize to the Christian community.
31 july 2013
Critics of a new Israeli army recruitment campaign say it’s designed to fragment the Palestinian community and make it more difficult to obtain their rights.
Leaders of Israel’s Palestinian minority have accused the Israeli authorities of intensifying efforts to push Christian and Muslim communities into conflict, as part of a long-running divide-and-rule strategy towards the country’s Palestinian citizens.
The allegations have been prompted by a series of initiatives to pressure Christian school-leavers into the army, breaking the community’s blanket rejection of the Israel army draft for the past 65 years.
Leaders from the Palestinian community, Christian and Muslim, who have spoken against this new enlistment effort have been called in for investigation by Israel’s secret police. In an Orwellian inversion, they have been accused of “incitement to violence.”
The issue first came to prominence last October when the defense ministry quietly staged a conference close to Nazareth, the effective capital of Palestinians in Israel, to promote military service among Christians.
The participation of three local clergymen in the conference sent shock waves through the Muslim and Christian communities.
The move was seen as a prelude to launching a more general recruitment drive among Palestinian Christians. Currently both Christians and Muslims, comprising nearly a fifth of Israel’s population, are exempt from conscription.
Instilling “Zionist values”
In an apparently related step in July, a Christian in Nazareth whose brother is an official in the defense ministry announced the establishment of a Christian-Jewish party. Municipal elections are due in late October.
The movement, which also runs an enlistment forum to encourage Christians to serve in the army, has paired with a far-right Jewish group, Im Tirtzu.
Im Tirtzu has been behind various McCarthyite campaigns, including pressuring Israeli universities to dismiss staff seen as left-wing; lobbying to strengthen “Zionist values” in the school curriculum; and seeking penalties for Israeli nongovernmental organizations supporting the rights of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Officials in Nazareth have warned that their city is at risk of becoming a flash-point for inter-communal fighting if Israel continues to stir up sectarian tensions.
Dominated by its Christian institutions but with a two-thirds Muslim majority, Nazareth has been struggling to temper sectarian divisions since the late 1990s. That was when the Israeli government promoted a provocative project to build a mosque next to the city’s main Christian pilgrimage site, the Basilica of the Annunciation.
Israel’s Palestinian Christians, numbering 125,000, or about nine percent of the Palestinian minority, are mostly located in Nazareth and its surrounding villages.
Divide and conquer
The issue of military service is an especially contentious one for the Palestinian minority, said Azmi Hakim, leader of the Greek Orthodox community council in Nazareth.
Most Palestinian citizens refuse to join the army because they reject the role of the Israeli military in oppressing other Palestinians and in enforcing an occupation that violates international law. However, there are strong objections on other grounds.
“Israel has tried to use military service as a way to break us up as a national group since the state’s earliest days,” Hakim said. “It wants us to be weak, separate religious communities incapable of organizing and demanding our rights.”
The Druze community, of a similar size to the Christian one, has been conscripted into the army since the 1950s. As a consequence, Israel designated the Druze a national group distinct from the rest of the Palestinian minority, and created a separate education system to inculcate “Zionist values.”
Israel has also persuaded some Bedouins to volunteer as army trackers. Otherwise, only a tiny number of Christians and Muslims request to have their exemption waived — in most cases, according to scholar Rhoda Kanaaneh, in the hope of accruing extra financial benefits related to army service.
Abir Kopty, a former Nazareth councilor, said that Israel had long tried to instill in Christians an insecurity towards their Muslim neighbors.
“Israel’s goal is to make Christians feel like a vulnerable minority and that they will be safer only if they have been trained by the army and have a gun. We hear Christian youngsters who consider enlistment saying things like, ‘I want to protect myself and my family,’” she said.
In similar fashion, Druze youths have been known to turn their weapons on Christian and Muslim neighbors when disputes have arisen. In one notorious incident, in 2003, Druze soldiers fired an anti-tank missile at a church in the village of Rama in the Galilee (“Communal pitfalls,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 6-12 March 2003).
Sectarian campaign
The pro-enlistment conference held in October was arranged by Ehab Shlayan, a career officer in the Israeli military from Nazareth who was recently appointed as “adviser on Christian issues” in the defense ministry.
It was staged in Upper Nazareth, a city established on Nazareth’s lands in the 1950s as part of Israel’s project to “Judaize the Galilee,” the area where the Palestinian community in Israel is concentrated. The mayor, Shimon Gapso, an ally of Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, helped sponsor the event.
Palestinian leaders said Gapso’s role was entirely cynical.
Last year Gapso described Nazareth as a “nest of terror” and called on the government to cut all funding to the city. He argued that Nazareth’s residents should be expelled to Gaza.
In recent years he has angrily denounced the growing trend for families from Nazareth, many of them Christian, to move to his city, with much of the migration spurred by land shortages that have made it increasingly difficult to build in Nazareth.
Palestinians now comprise as much as a quarter of Upper Nazareth’s population, but Gapso has publicly declared they are unwelcome. He recently erected large Israeli flags at all entrances to the city “so that people will know Upper Nazareth is a Jewish city.”
Gapso’s antipathy towards the Palestinian minority has demonstrably included Christians. In winter 2010 he banned Christmas trees from all public buildings, and has refused to allow the establishment of a church in his city.
Recent reports revealed that he secretly appointed a “settlement adviser” – Rabbi Hillel Horowitz, a settler from Hebron – on ways to bring extremist religious Jews to the city in the hope of driving out Palestinian residents “Mysterious ‘adviser on settlement affairs’ no. 13 on Habayit Hayehudi slate,” Haaretz, 11 January).
“Good Arabs”
News of the conference on recruiting Christian community members was revealed on social media a short time after it was held in October. More than 120 Christian teenagers were reported to have attended, mostly drawn from the local Greek Catholic and Maronite scout groups.
However, the fact that three senior clergy from Nazareth took part and spoke in favor of Christian enlistment has caused particular consternation.
They include 39-year-old Bishop Jibril Nadaf, from the Greek Orthodox community, the largest Christian denomination in Israel, and Father Masoud Abu Hatoum, of the Greek Catholic community.
Nazareth’s Greek Orthodox council, an elected body that represents the community’s interests in the city, immediately issued a statement denouncing Nadaf’s participation. A short time later the patriarch in Jerusalem, Theophilus III, barred Nadaf from entering the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation.
According to church officials, Theophilus will announce Nadaf’s relocation to Jerusalem in the next few weeks.
Azmi Hakim said Israel had been trying to find a way to recruit Christians to the army – to sever them from the 80 percent of the minority who are Muslim – since the state’s creation. The chief obstacle, he said, had been finding a religious leader who would give the initiative the stamp of the church’s approval.
“Now they think they have a way to split the Christian community by using Nadaf’s authority to justify an enlistment drive,” he said. “But only the council can speak for the community.”
Nadaf has also been criticized by Palestinian members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, including MK Haneen Zoabi from the Balad party and MK Muhammad Barakeh from Hadash. Both have called for his dismissal.
So far Nadaf has remained defiant. He stated in June: “We want young Christians to be completely integrated into Israeli society, and this means also carrying an equal share of the burden. Our future as a Christian minority is wrapped up in the future of the State of Israel” (“Arab pastor: Our future is with Israel,” Israel Today, 9 July).
Nadaf’s mention of “sharing the burden” was a reference to a government campaign to justify continuing to deny Palestinian citizens their rights unless they either serve in the military or perform an equivalent civilian service.
Nadaf has since received public calls of support from government ministers, most notably from the justice minister Tzipi Livni and the interior minister Gideon Saar.
Activists harassed
Likud MK Miri Regev, who heads the Knesset’s interior committee, this month criticized the Palestinian MKs’ intervention, calling them “Trojan horses in the Knesset.” She accused them of “incitement against a Christian priest who encourages young Christians to enlist in the IDF [Israel’s military].”
The Israeli publication Ynet reported that the police had received “a green light” to question the MKs for possible incitement (“Arab MKs to be questioned on suspicion of incitement,” Ynetnews.com, 3 July).
Those who have led opposition to the conference have found themselves called in for interrogation by the police and Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet. They have been warned that they are under investigation for “incitement to violence.”
Hakim said he had been called for interrogation on three occasions since he and the council denounced Nadaf.
He was also phoned by the Shin Bet two hours before the council met to issue its statement: “They warned me, ‘This is bigger than you or the council.’ They told me not to get involved.”
He has faced a hate campaign and death threats ever since the council issued its statement. “Shortly afterwards, I received an anonymous phone call identifying my children, my place of work and my home address. I was told people would come for me, to behead me,” he said.
He has repeatedly complained about a Hebrew hate site on Facebook created in his name. Despite repeated complaints to the police, nothing appears to have been done to remove the page.
Azmi Hakim, the Greek Orthodox community leader in Nazareth, was required to sign a statement that he would not approach or contact Nadaf but has refused to sign another stating that he would not mention his name.
Abir Kopty was also called for interrogation after writing a blog post in Arabic and English criticizing those who participated in the conference.
The Shin Bet have demanded of all those brought in for interrogation an unexpected condition: that they agree to provide a DNA sample.
Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with the Adalah legal center for the Arab minority in Israel, said the requirement to submit to a DNA test was illegal in both Hakim and Kopty’s cases.
This month Adalah sent a letter to the attorney general saying there was no basis for an investigation of either of them. Bishara said: “This is clearly a free speech matter and the investigations are a transparent attempt to intimidate and silence them.”
New Jewish-Christian party
In an apparent sign that Israeli officials are now keen to push ahead with enlistment, a new Jewish-Christian party was established in Nazareth this month called “Sons of the New Testament.”
The founder, Bishara Shilyan, a 58-year-old former merchant navy captain, has several sons who volunteered for the army. His brother, Ehab Shilyan, works for the defense ministry as an adviser on Christian issues.
Bishara Shilyan, who refers to himself as an “Arabic-speaking Israeli Christian,” told the New York-based Jewish weekly the Algemeiner Journal: “We live in Israel, and I feel a part of the state and the Jewish People. Israel belongs to the Jews, and we are part of it.”
The campaign is reported to have already increased enlistment among school leavers. According to the Maariv newspaper, 90 Christians joined the Israeli military in recent months, a threefold increase from 2010.
Shilyan’s party has sought to play on Christian fears of what it describes as a growing “Muslim threat” in the region, as Islamic movements struggle for power in neighboring countries such as Egypt and Syria. “People see what’s happening now in Lebanon, Egypt and Syria,” Shilyan told the Times of Israel. “They understand where we’re living” (“New Christian Arab party calls for IDF enlistment,” 10 July 2013).
That message was echoed in an editorial in The Jerusalem Post, which rallied to Bishop Nadaf’s side: “Trying to survive under the Muslim thumb inside Israel’s Arab sector, Christians have kept a low profile, striven to give no offense and toed even the most extremist line to evince loyalty and avoid risk. … Those young Christians now eager to break the cycle should be encouraged, not discouraged” (“Father Nadaf,” 26 June).
Shilyan’s forum has been coordinating with the defense ministry in arranging regular meetings with Israeli Jewish Knesset members. The Israeli military recently announced that it had made Christian conscription easier at the nearest office in the Galilee, in Tiberias.
Shilyan is among those arguing that the Israeli military could increase enlistment numbers if it stopped assigning Christians to the Bedouin Reconnaissance Battalion, where they serve alongside Bedouin soldiers.
Sectarianism
The Israeli military also has a poor track record in its treatment of Palestinian soldiers. It was recently widely reported that, under pressure, the military had finally agreed to allow non-Jewish soldiers killed in action to be buried in the same cemeteries as Jewish soldiers, although they will be kept in separate rows.
The matter came to a head on Memorial Day this year because the chief of staff, Benny Gantz, following traditional practice, laid a wreath on the grave of the last Jewish soldier to have been killed over the past year. As a result, he overlooked a soldier whose Jewishness was in doubt.
According to some observers, Shilyan has received support from a small group of Palestinian Christians based in the nearby town of Kafr Yasif who have adopted Christian Zionist positions. This has led to suggestions that the party may be receiving funds from Christian Zionist groups in the United States.
Hakim said the government’s latest efforts to recruit Christians to the army were a continuation of its meddling in Nazareth in the late 1990s, in what has come to be known as the “Shihab al-Din affair.”
In the run-up to the arrival of Pope John Paul II for the millennium celebrations in Nazareth, the Israeli government gave the go-ahead to a group of Muslims to build a large mosque in a square in front of the Basilica of the Annunciation, the destination for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. The square is the resting place of Shihab al-Din, a nephew of the Crusaders’ nemesis, Saladin.
The decision surprised observers, both because the mosque threatened to overshadow the Basilica and because it required unprecedented Israeli state recognition of Muslim claims to restitution of property confiscated in the 1948 war.
As the Muslim group took over the site, tensions escalated and by Easter 1999 violent clashes between Muslims and Christians were reported on front pages around the world.
Israel later reneged on its promises to the Muslim group and in 2003 demolished the foundations of the mosque that were under construction (“Divide and destroy,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 3-9 July 2003).
Widely-held suspicions in Nazareth are that the government sought to inflame sectarian violence in Nazareth at that time, shortly before peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian leadership at Camp David in 2000, to help strengthen Israel’s case that only it could be entrusted to look after the holy sites in Jerusalem in a final-status agreement.
Accounts from Camp David suggest that Israel’s prime minister at the time, Ehud Barak, remained adamant that Israel should have exclusive sovereignty over the al-Aqsa compound of mosques in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Longstanding policy
The latest moves to recruit Christians to the army echo earlier efforts by Israeli officials, as part of a policy that sought to undermine the Palestinian population’s cohesion and its national identity.
A key figure among the Christians in the state’s early years was George Hakim, the Greek Catholic bishop for the Galilee.
According to Hillel Cohen, author of Good Arabs, a book about early collaboration by Palestinian leaders, Hakim sold church lands close to Nazareth in the early 1940s to Jewish pre-state organizations. He also established a Christian militia during the 1948 war.
It was therefore perhaps unsurprising that he and many of his followers, unlike most other refugees, were allowed to return from exile in Lebanon at the end of the war in 1949.
Hakim went on to transform the Catholic Scouts into a Zionist youth movement opposed to the Communist party, a joint Jewish-Arab party popular among Israel’s Palestinian citizens. It was then the only non-Zionist political movement allowed.
In 1958 Hakim considered signing an agreement with the army similar to that of the Druze leadership, but found little support among the wider Christian community. A photograph in Good Arabs shows Hakim seated next to Druze leader Sheikh Amin Tarif at an Israeli military parade for Independence Day in 1959.
The logic of Israel’s moves to recruit the Christians and Druze was explained in 1965 by Shmuel Toledano, the prime minister’s Arab affairs adviser: “The communal frameworks of religious and linguistic groups should be fostered, except for the Muslim, and the individuality of each and every separate community should be consolidated.”
Recent events highlight that this policy formulated in the state’s early years – to use sectarian differences to isolate the largest Palestinian community, of Muslims, from their Christian and Druze compatriots – holds to this day.
With Palestinian communal solidarity seen as a serious threat to the state’s Jewishness, Israel would prefer to push Muslims, Christians and Druze into open conflict.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His new website is jonathan-cook.net.
Leaders of Israel’s Palestinian minority have accused the Israeli authorities of intensifying efforts to push Christian and Muslim communities into conflict, as part of a long-running divide-and-rule strategy towards the country’s Palestinian citizens.
The allegations have been prompted by a series of initiatives to pressure Christian school-leavers into the army, breaking the community’s blanket rejection of the Israel army draft for the past 65 years.
Leaders from the Palestinian community, Christian and Muslim, who have spoken against this new enlistment effort have been called in for investigation by Israel’s secret police. In an Orwellian inversion, they have been accused of “incitement to violence.”
The issue first came to prominence last October when the defense ministry quietly staged a conference close to Nazareth, the effective capital of Palestinians in Israel, to promote military service among Christians.
The participation of three local clergymen in the conference sent shock waves through the Muslim and Christian communities.
The move was seen as a prelude to launching a more general recruitment drive among Palestinian Christians. Currently both Christians and Muslims, comprising nearly a fifth of Israel’s population, are exempt from conscription.
Instilling “Zionist values”
In an apparently related step in July, a Christian in Nazareth whose brother is an official in the defense ministry announced the establishment of a Christian-Jewish party. Municipal elections are due in late October.
The movement, which also runs an enlistment forum to encourage Christians to serve in the army, has paired with a far-right Jewish group, Im Tirtzu.
Im Tirtzu has been behind various McCarthyite campaigns, including pressuring Israeli universities to dismiss staff seen as left-wing; lobbying to strengthen “Zionist values” in the school curriculum; and seeking penalties for Israeli nongovernmental organizations supporting the rights of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Officials in Nazareth have warned that their city is at risk of becoming a flash-point for inter-communal fighting if Israel continues to stir up sectarian tensions.
Dominated by its Christian institutions but with a two-thirds Muslim majority, Nazareth has been struggling to temper sectarian divisions since the late 1990s. That was when the Israeli government promoted a provocative project to build a mosque next to the city’s main Christian pilgrimage site, the Basilica of the Annunciation.
Israel’s Palestinian Christians, numbering 125,000, or about nine percent of the Palestinian minority, are mostly located in Nazareth and its surrounding villages.
Divide and conquer
The issue of military service is an especially contentious one for the Palestinian minority, said Azmi Hakim, leader of the Greek Orthodox community council in Nazareth.
Most Palestinian citizens refuse to join the army because they reject the role of the Israeli military in oppressing other Palestinians and in enforcing an occupation that violates international law. However, there are strong objections on other grounds.
“Israel has tried to use military service as a way to break us up as a national group since the state’s earliest days,” Hakim said. “It wants us to be weak, separate religious communities incapable of organizing and demanding our rights.”
The Druze community, of a similar size to the Christian one, has been conscripted into the army since the 1950s. As a consequence, Israel designated the Druze a national group distinct from the rest of the Palestinian minority, and created a separate education system to inculcate “Zionist values.”
Israel has also persuaded some Bedouins to volunteer as army trackers. Otherwise, only a tiny number of Christians and Muslims request to have their exemption waived — in most cases, according to scholar Rhoda Kanaaneh, in the hope of accruing extra financial benefits related to army service.
Abir Kopty, a former Nazareth councilor, said that Israel had long tried to instill in Christians an insecurity towards their Muslim neighbors.
“Israel’s goal is to make Christians feel like a vulnerable minority and that they will be safer only if they have been trained by the army and have a gun. We hear Christian youngsters who consider enlistment saying things like, ‘I want to protect myself and my family,’” she said.
In similar fashion, Druze youths have been known to turn their weapons on Christian and Muslim neighbors when disputes have arisen. In one notorious incident, in 2003, Druze soldiers fired an anti-tank missile at a church in the village of Rama in the Galilee (“Communal pitfalls,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 6-12 March 2003).
Sectarian campaign
The pro-enlistment conference held in October was arranged by Ehab Shlayan, a career officer in the Israeli military from Nazareth who was recently appointed as “adviser on Christian issues” in the defense ministry.
It was staged in Upper Nazareth, a city established on Nazareth’s lands in the 1950s as part of Israel’s project to “Judaize the Galilee,” the area where the Palestinian community in Israel is concentrated. The mayor, Shimon Gapso, an ally of Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, helped sponsor the event.
Palestinian leaders said Gapso’s role was entirely cynical.
Last year Gapso described Nazareth as a “nest of terror” and called on the government to cut all funding to the city. He argued that Nazareth’s residents should be expelled to Gaza.
In recent years he has angrily denounced the growing trend for families from Nazareth, many of them Christian, to move to his city, with much of the migration spurred by land shortages that have made it increasingly difficult to build in Nazareth.
Palestinians now comprise as much as a quarter of Upper Nazareth’s population, but Gapso has publicly declared they are unwelcome. He recently erected large Israeli flags at all entrances to the city “so that people will know Upper Nazareth is a Jewish city.”
Gapso’s antipathy towards the Palestinian minority has demonstrably included Christians. In winter 2010 he banned Christmas trees from all public buildings, and has refused to allow the establishment of a church in his city.
Recent reports revealed that he secretly appointed a “settlement adviser” – Rabbi Hillel Horowitz, a settler from Hebron – on ways to bring extremist religious Jews to the city in the hope of driving out Palestinian residents “Mysterious ‘adviser on settlement affairs’ no. 13 on Habayit Hayehudi slate,” Haaretz, 11 January).
“Good Arabs”
News of the conference on recruiting Christian community members was revealed on social media a short time after it was held in October. More than 120 Christian teenagers were reported to have attended, mostly drawn from the local Greek Catholic and Maronite scout groups.
However, the fact that three senior clergy from Nazareth took part and spoke in favor of Christian enlistment has caused particular consternation.
They include 39-year-old Bishop Jibril Nadaf, from the Greek Orthodox community, the largest Christian denomination in Israel, and Father Masoud Abu Hatoum, of the Greek Catholic community.
Nazareth’s Greek Orthodox council, an elected body that represents the community’s interests in the city, immediately issued a statement denouncing Nadaf’s participation. A short time later the patriarch in Jerusalem, Theophilus III, barred Nadaf from entering the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation.
According to church officials, Theophilus will announce Nadaf’s relocation to Jerusalem in the next few weeks.
Azmi Hakim said Israel had been trying to find a way to recruit Christians to the army – to sever them from the 80 percent of the minority who are Muslim – since the state’s creation. The chief obstacle, he said, had been finding a religious leader who would give the initiative the stamp of the church’s approval.
“Now they think they have a way to split the Christian community by using Nadaf’s authority to justify an enlistment drive,” he said. “But only the council can speak for the community.”
Nadaf has also been criticized by Palestinian members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, including MK Haneen Zoabi from the Balad party and MK Muhammad Barakeh from Hadash. Both have called for his dismissal.
So far Nadaf has remained defiant. He stated in June: “We want young Christians to be completely integrated into Israeli society, and this means also carrying an equal share of the burden. Our future as a Christian minority is wrapped up in the future of the State of Israel” (“Arab pastor: Our future is with Israel,” Israel Today, 9 July).
Nadaf’s mention of “sharing the burden” was a reference to a government campaign to justify continuing to deny Palestinian citizens their rights unless they either serve in the military or perform an equivalent civilian service.
Nadaf has since received public calls of support from government ministers, most notably from the justice minister Tzipi Livni and the interior minister Gideon Saar.
Activists harassed
Likud MK Miri Regev, who heads the Knesset’s interior committee, this month criticized the Palestinian MKs’ intervention, calling them “Trojan horses in the Knesset.” She accused them of “incitement against a Christian priest who encourages young Christians to enlist in the IDF [Israel’s military].”
The Israeli publication Ynet reported that the police had received “a green light” to question the MKs for possible incitement (“Arab MKs to be questioned on suspicion of incitement,” Ynetnews.com, 3 July).
Those who have led opposition to the conference have found themselves called in for interrogation by the police and Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet. They have been warned that they are under investigation for “incitement to violence.”
Hakim said he had been called for interrogation on three occasions since he and the council denounced Nadaf.
He was also phoned by the Shin Bet two hours before the council met to issue its statement: “They warned me, ‘This is bigger than you or the council.’ They told me not to get involved.”
He has faced a hate campaign and death threats ever since the council issued its statement. “Shortly afterwards, I received an anonymous phone call identifying my children, my place of work and my home address. I was told people would come for me, to behead me,” he said.
He has repeatedly complained about a Hebrew hate site on Facebook created in his name. Despite repeated complaints to the police, nothing appears to have been done to remove the page.
Azmi Hakim, the Greek Orthodox community leader in Nazareth, was required to sign a statement that he would not approach or contact Nadaf but has refused to sign another stating that he would not mention his name.
Abir Kopty was also called for interrogation after writing a blog post in Arabic and English criticizing those who participated in the conference.
The Shin Bet have demanded of all those brought in for interrogation an unexpected condition: that they agree to provide a DNA sample.
Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with the Adalah legal center for the Arab minority in Israel, said the requirement to submit to a DNA test was illegal in both Hakim and Kopty’s cases.
This month Adalah sent a letter to the attorney general saying there was no basis for an investigation of either of them. Bishara said: “This is clearly a free speech matter and the investigations are a transparent attempt to intimidate and silence them.”
New Jewish-Christian party
In an apparent sign that Israeli officials are now keen to push ahead with enlistment, a new Jewish-Christian party was established in Nazareth this month called “Sons of the New Testament.”
The founder, Bishara Shilyan, a 58-year-old former merchant navy captain, has several sons who volunteered for the army. His brother, Ehab Shilyan, works for the defense ministry as an adviser on Christian issues.
Bishara Shilyan, who refers to himself as an “Arabic-speaking Israeli Christian,” told the New York-based Jewish weekly the Algemeiner Journal: “We live in Israel, and I feel a part of the state and the Jewish People. Israel belongs to the Jews, and we are part of it.”
The campaign is reported to have already increased enlistment among school leavers. According to the Maariv newspaper, 90 Christians joined the Israeli military in recent months, a threefold increase from 2010.
Shilyan’s party has sought to play on Christian fears of what it describes as a growing “Muslim threat” in the region, as Islamic movements struggle for power in neighboring countries such as Egypt and Syria. “People see what’s happening now in Lebanon, Egypt and Syria,” Shilyan told the Times of Israel. “They understand where we’re living” (“New Christian Arab party calls for IDF enlistment,” 10 July 2013).
That message was echoed in an editorial in The Jerusalem Post, which rallied to Bishop Nadaf’s side: “Trying to survive under the Muslim thumb inside Israel’s Arab sector, Christians have kept a low profile, striven to give no offense and toed even the most extremist line to evince loyalty and avoid risk. … Those young Christians now eager to break the cycle should be encouraged, not discouraged” (“Father Nadaf,” 26 June).
Shilyan’s forum has been coordinating with the defense ministry in arranging regular meetings with Israeli Jewish Knesset members. The Israeli military recently announced that it had made Christian conscription easier at the nearest office in the Galilee, in Tiberias.
Shilyan is among those arguing that the Israeli military could increase enlistment numbers if it stopped assigning Christians to the Bedouin Reconnaissance Battalion, where they serve alongside Bedouin soldiers.
Sectarianism
The Israeli military also has a poor track record in its treatment of Palestinian soldiers. It was recently widely reported that, under pressure, the military had finally agreed to allow non-Jewish soldiers killed in action to be buried in the same cemeteries as Jewish soldiers, although they will be kept in separate rows.
The matter came to a head on Memorial Day this year because the chief of staff, Benny Gantz, following traditional practice, laid a wreath on the grave of the last Jewish soldier to have been killed over the past year. As a result, he overlooked a soldier whose Jewishness was in doubt.
According to some observers, Shilyan has received support from a small group of Palestinian Christians based in the nearby town of Kafr Yasif who have adopted Christian Zionist positions. This has led to suggestions that the party may be receiving funds from Christian Zionist groups in the United States.
Hakim said the government’s latest efforts to recruit Christians to the army were a continuation of its meddling in Nazareth in the late 1990s, in what has come to be known as the “Shihab al-Din affair.”
In the run-up to the arrival of Pope John Paul II for the millennium celebrations in Nazareth, the Israeli government gave the go-ahead to a group of Muslims to build a large mosque in a square in front of the Basilica of the Annunciation, the destination for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. The square is the resting place of Shihab al-Din, a nephew of the Crusaders’ nemesis, Saladin.
The decision surprised observers, both because the mosque threatened to overshadow the Basilica and because it required unprecedented Israeli state recognition of Muslim claims to restitution of property confiscated in the 1948 war.
As the Muslim group took over the site, tensions escalated and by Easter 1999 violent clashes between Muslims and Christians were reported on front pages around the world.
Israel later reneged on its promises to the Muslim group and in 2003 demolished the foundations of the mosque that were under construction (“Divide and destroy,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 3-9 July 2003).
Widely-held suspicions in Nazareth are that the government sought to inflame sectarian violence in Nazareth at that time, shortly before peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian leadership at Camp David in 2000, to help strengthen Israel’s case that only it could be entrusted to look after the holy sites in Jerusalem in a final-status agreement.
Accounts from Camp David suggest that Israel’s prime minister at the time, Ehud Barak, remained adamant that Israel should have exclusive sovereignty over the al-Aqsa compound of mosques in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Longstanding policy
The latest moves to recruit Christians to the army echo earlier efforts by Israeli officials, as part of a policy that sought to undermine the Palestinian population’s cohesion and its national identity.
A key figure among the Christians in the state’s early years was George Hakim, the Greek Catholic bishop for the Galilee.
According to Hillel Cohen, author of Good Arabs, a book about early collaboration by Palestinian leaders, Hakim sold church lands close to Nazareth in the early 1940s to Jewish pre-state organizations. He also established a Christian militia during the 1948 war.
It was therefore perhaps unsurprising that he and many of his followers, unlike most other refugees, were allowed to return from exile in Lebanon at the end of the war in 1949.
Hakim went on to transform the Catholic Scouts into a Zionist youth movement opposed to the Communist party, a joint Jewish-Arab party popular among Israel’s Palestinian citizens. It was then the only non-Zionist political movement allowed.
In 1958 Hakim considered signing an agreement with the army similar to that of the Druze leadership, but found little support among the wider Christian community. A photograph in Good Arabs shows Hakim seated next to Druze leader Sheikh Amin Tarif at an Israeli military parade for Independence Day in 1959.
The logic of Israel’s moves to recruit the Christians and Druze was explained in 1965 by Shmuel Toledano, the prime minister’s Arab affairs adviser: “The communal frameworks of religious and linguistic groups should be fostered, except for the Muslim, and the individuality of each and every separate community should be consolidated.”
Recent events highlight that this policy formulated in the state’s early years – to use sectarian differences to isolate the largest Palestinian community, of Muslims, from their Christian and Druze compatriots – holds to this day.
With Palestinian communal solidarity seen as a serious threat to the state’s Jewishness, Israel would prefer to push Muslims, Christians and Druze into open conflict.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His new website is jonathan-cook.net.
19 july 2013
The Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation announced in a press release that the esteemed and highly revered spiritual leader of Jerusalem, His Beatitude Archbishop Nourhan Manougian has joined the foundation's International Advisory Board.
HE Archbishop Nourhan Manougian, the 97th Patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic (Orthodox) Church, Jerusalem, was elected on January 24, 2013 during the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Archbishop Manougian will join the other heads of churches in Jerusalem and the United States who are working with and supportive of the HCEF mission to the presence of the Christians in the Holy Land.
HCEF continues to build its international advisory board and foster unity to provide teamwork to support our people. Members of HCEF's Advisory Board are spiritual leaders and respected members of the community who support efforts to bring justice, peace and prosperity to the Christians of the Holy Land, and who also share HCEF's goals for humanitarian support of those who suffer oppression in the Holy Land.
Archbishop Nourhan Manougian was born in Aleppo, Syria. He studied at the seminary of the Catholicosate of Cilicia in Antelias, Lebanon. In 1966, he was accepted to the theological seminary of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem. His days as a student at the Patriarchate culminated in his ordination to the priesthood and his membership in the St. James Brotherhood in 1971. A year later, he was appointed the pastor of the Armenians of Switzerland. Subsequently, he returned to the Middle East and served as the pastor to the Armenian communities of Jaffa and Haifa. In 1980, he was assigned the position of pastor of the Armenian community of Holland.
Manougian visited the US and pursued his graduate studies at New York's General Theological Seminary. He subsequently served the Eastern Diocese as the pastor of St. Mark Church of Springfield, Mass., and then St. Kevork Church of Houston, Texas. Upon returning to Jerusalem, Manougian was elected Grand Sacristan of the Holy See in 1998. A year later, Catholicos of all Armenians Karekin II elevated him to the rank of bishop.
On behalf of the HCEF Board of Directors, Sir Rateb Rabie, KCHS, HCEF President and CEO welcomes Archbishop Nourhan Manougian in this statement, "We are confident that the diversity of our Advisory Board and the quality of its members are the best hope for preserving the Christian presence in the Holy Land." He further expressed his gratitude to the Advisory Board whose members continue to be an outstanding source of support, morally, financially and spiritually, for HCEF in its commitment to its mission and efforts to ameliorate the living conditions of the Christians in the Holy Land.
HE Archbishop Nourhan Manougian, the 97th Patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic (Orthodox) Church, Jerusalem, was elected on January 24, 2013 during the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Archbishop Manougian will join the other heads of churches in Jerusalem and the United States who are working with and supportive of the HCEF mission to the presence of the Christians in the Holy Land.
HCEF continues to build its international advisory board and foster unity to provide teamwork to support our people. Members of HCEF's Advisory Board are spiritual leaders and respected members of the community who support efforts to bring justice, peace and prosperity to the Christians of the Holy Land, and who also share HCEF's goals for humanitarian support of those who suffer oppression in the Holy Land.
Archbishop Nourhan Manougian was born in Aleppo, Syria. He studied at the seminary of the Catholicosate of Cilicia in Antelias, Lebanon. In 1966, he was accepted to the theological seminary of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem. His days as a student at the Patriarchate culminated in his ordination to the priesthood and his membership in the St. James Brotherhood in 1971. A year later, he was appointed the pastor of the Armenians of Switzerland. Subsequently, he returned to the Middle East and served as the pastor to the Armenian communities of Jaffa and Haifa. In 1980, he was assigned the position of pastor of the Armenian community of Holland.
Manougian visited the US and pursued his graduate studies at New York's General Theological Seminary. He subsequently served the Eastern Diocese as the pastor of St. Mark Church of Springfield, Mass., and then St. Kevork Church of Houston, Texas. Upon returning to Jerusalem, Manougian was elected Grand Sacristan of the Holy See in 1998. A year later, Catholicos of all Armenians Karekin II elevated him to the rank of bishop.
On behalf of the HCEF Board of Directors, Sir Rateb Rabie, KCHS, HCEF President and CEO welcomes Archbishop Nourhan Manougian in this statement, "We are confident that the diversity of our Advisory Board and the quality of its members are the best hope for preserving the Christian presence in the Holy Land." He further expressed his gratitude to the Advisory Board whose members continue to be an outstanding source of support, morally, financially and spiritually, for HCEF in its commitment to its mission and efforts to ameliorate the living conditions of the Christians in the Holy Land.
