What
Christians Don't Know About Israel: Zionist State Exposed
15 December 2009By Grace Halsell
American Jews sympathetic to Israel dominate key
positions in all areas of our government where
decisions are made regarding the Middle East. This
being the case, is there any hope of ever changing
U.S. policy? President Bill Clinton as well as most
members of Congress support Israel—and they know why.
U.S. Jews sympathetic to Israel donate lavishly to
their campaign coffers.
The answer to achieving an even-handed Middle East
policy might lie elsewhere—among those who support
Israel but don't really know why. This group is the
vast majority of Americans. They are well-meaning,
fair-minded Christians who feel bonded to Israel—and
Zionism—often from atavistic feelings, in some cases
dating from childhood.
I am one of those. I grew up listening to stories of a
mystical, allegorical, spiritual Israel. This was
before a modern political entity with the same name
appeared on our maps. I attended Sunday School and
watched an instructor draw down window-type shades to
show maps of the Holy Land. I imbibed stories of a
Good and Chosen people who fought against their Bad "unChosen"
enemies.
In my early 20s, I began traveling the world, earning
my living as a writer. I came to the subject of the
Middle East rather late in my career. I was sadly
lacking in knowledge regarding the area. About all I
knew was what I had learned in Sunday School.
And typical of many U.S. Christians, I somehow
considered a modern state created in 1948 as a
homeland for Jews persecuted under the Nazis as a
replica of the spiritual, mystical Israel I heard
about as a child. When in 1979 I initially went to
Jerusalem, I planned to write about the three great
monotheistic religions and leave out politics. "Not
write about politics?" scoffed one Palestinian,
smoking a water pipe in the Old Walled City. "We eat
politics, morning, noon and night!"
As I would learn, the politics is about land, and the
co-claimants to that land: the indigenous Palestinians
who have lived there for 2,000 years and the Jews who
started arriving in large numbers after the Second
World War. By living among Israeli Jews as well as
Palestinian Christians and Muslims, I saw, heard,
smelled, experienced the police state tactics Israelis
use against Palestinians.
My research led to a book entitled Journey to
Jerusalem. My journey not only was enlightening to me
as regards Israel, but also I came to a deeper, and
sadder, understanding of my own country. I say sadder
understanding because I began to see that, in Middle
East politics, we the people are not making the
decisions, but rather that supporters of Israel are
doing so. And typical of most Americans, I tended to
think the U.S. media was "free" to print news
impartially.
"It shouldn't be published. It's anti-Israel. "
In the late 1970s, when I first went to Jerusalem, I
was unaware that editors could and would classify
"news" depending on who was doing what to whom. On my
initial visit to Israel-Palestine, I had interviewed
dozens of young Palestinian men. About one in four
related stories of torture.
Israeli police had come in the night, dragged them
from their beds and placed hoods over their heads.
Then in jails the Israelis had kept them in isolation,
besieged them with loud, incessant noises, hung them
upside down and had sadistically mutilated their
genitals. I had not read such stories in the U.S.
media. Wasn't it news? Obviously, I naively thought,
U.S. editors simply didn't know it was happening.
On a trip to Washington, DC, I hand-delivered a letter
to Frank Mankiewicz, then head of the public radio
station WETA. I explained I had taped interviews with
Palestinians who had been brutally tortured. And I'd
make them available to him. I got no reply. I made
several phone calls. Eventually I was put through to a
public relations person, a Ms. Cohen, who said my
letter had been lost. I wrote again. In time I began
to realize what I hadn't known: had it been Jews who
were strung up and tortured, it would be news. But
interviews with tortured Arabs were "lost" at WETA.
The process of getting my book Journey to Jerusalem
published also was a learning experience. Bill
Griffin, who signed a contract with me on behalf of
MacMillan Publishing Company, was a former Roman
Catholic priest. He assured me that no one other than
himself would edit the book. As I researched the book,
making several trips to Israel and Palestine, I met
frequently with Griffin, showing him sample chapters.
"Terrific," he said of my material.
The day the book was scheduled to be published, I went
to visit MacMillan's. Checking in at a reception desk,
I spotted Griffin across a room, cleaning out his
desk. His secretary Margie came to greet me. In tears,
she whispered for me to meet her in the ladies room.
When we were alone, she confided, "He's been fired."
She indicated it was because he had signed a contract
for a book that was sympathetic to Palestinians.
Griffin, she said, had no time to see me.
Later, I met with another MacMillan official, William
Curry. "I was told to take your manuscript to the
Israeli Embassy, to let them read it for mistakes," he
told me. "They were not pleased. They asked me, `You
are not going to publish this book, are you?' I asked,
`Were there mistakes?' `Not mistakes as such. But it
shouldn't be published. It's anti-Israel. '"
Somehow, despite obstacles to prevent it, the presses
had started rolling. After its publication in 1980, I
was invited to speak in a number of churches.
Christians generally reacted with disbelief. Back
then, there was little or no coverage of Israeli land
confiscation, demolition of Palestinian homes, wan ton
arrests and torture of Palestinian civilians.
The Same Question
Speaking of these injustices, I invariably heard the
same question, "How come I didn't know this?" Or
someone might ask, "But I haven't read about that in
my newspaper." To these church audiences, I related my
own learning experience, that of seeing hordes of U.S.
correspondents covering a relatively tiny state. I
pointed out that I had not seen so many reporters in
world capitals such as Beijing, Moscow, London, Tokyo,
Paris. Why, I asked, did a small state with a 1980
population of only four million warrant more reporters
than China, with a billion people?
I also linked this query with my findings that The New
York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington
Post—and most of our nation's print media—are owned
and/or controlled by Jews supportive of Israel. It was
for this reason, I deduced, that they sent so many
reporters to cover Israel—and to do so largely from
the Israeli point of view.
My learning experiences also included coming to
realize how easily I could lose a Jewish friend if I
criticized the Jewish state. I could with impunity
criticize France, England, Russia, even the United
States. And any aspect of life in America. But not the
Jewish state. I lost more Jewish friends than one
after the publication of Journey to Jerusalem—all sad
losses for me and one, perhaps, saddest of all.
In the 1960s and 1970s, before going to the Middle
East, I had
written about the plight of blacks in a book entitled
Soul Sister, and the plight of American Indians in a
book entitled Bessie Yellowhair, and the problems
endured by undocumented workers crossing from Mexico
in The Illegals. These books had come to the attention
of the "mother" of The New York Times, Mrs. Arthur
Hays Sulzberger.
Her father had started the newspaper, then her husband
ran it, and in the years that I knew her, her son was
the publisher. She invited me to her fashionable
apartment on Fifth Avenue for lunches and dinner
parties. And, on many occasions, I was a weekend guest
at her Greenwich, Conn. home.
She was liberal-minded and praised my efforts to speak
for the underdog, even going so far in one letter to
say, "You are the most remarkable woman I ever knew."
I had little concept that from being buoyed so high I
could be dropped so suddenly when I discovered—from
her point of view—the "wrong" underdog.
As it happened, I was a weekend guest in her spacious
Connecticut home when she read bound galleys of
Journey to Jerusalem. As I was leaving, she handed the
galleys back with a saddened look: "My dear, have you
forgotten the Holocaust?" She felt that what happened
in Nazi Germany to Jews several decades earlier should
silence any criticism of the Jewish state. She could
focus on a holocaust of Jews while negating a modern
day holocaust of Palestinians.
I realized, quite painfully, that our friendship was
ending. Iphigene Sulzberger had not only invited me to
her home to meet her famous friends but, also at her
suggestion, The Times had requested articles. I wrote
op-ed articles on various subjects including American
blacks, American Indians as well as undocumented
workers. Since Mrs. Sulzberger and other Jewish
officials at the Times highly praised my efforts to
help these groups of oppressed peoples, the dichotomy
became apparent: most "liberal" U.S. Jews stand on the
side of all poor and oppressed peoples save one—the
Palestinians.
How handily these liberal Jewish opinion-molders tend
to diminish the Palestinians, to make them invisible,
or to categorize them all as "terrorists. "
Interestingly, Iphigene Sulzberger had talked to me a
great deal about her father, Adolph S. Ochs. She told
me that he was not one of the early Zionists. He had
not favored the creation of a Jewish state.
Yet, increasingly, American Jews have fallen victim to
Zionism, a nationalistic movement that passes for many
as a religion. While the ethical instructions of all
great religions—including the teachings of Moses,
Muhammad and Christ—stress that all human beings are
equal, militant Zionists take the position that the
killing of a non-Jew does not count.
Over five decades now, Zionists have killed
Palestinians with impunity. And in the 1996 shelling
of a U.N. base in Qana, Lebanon, the Israelis killed
more than 100 civilians sheltered there. As an Israeli
journalist, Arieh Shavit, explains of the massacre,
"We believe with absolute certitude that right now,
with the White House in our hands, the Senate in our
hands and The New York Times in our hands, the lives
of others do not count the same way as our own."
Israelis today, explains the anti-Zionist Jew Israel
Shahak, "are not basing their religion on the ethics
of justice. They do not accept the Old Testament as it
is written. Rather, religious Jews turn to the Talmud.
For them, the Talmudic Jewish laws become `the Bible.'
And the Talmud teaches that a Jew can kill a non-Jew
with impunity."
In the teachings of Christ, there was a break from
such Talmudic teachings. He sought to heal the
wounded, to comfort the downtrodden.
The danger, of course, for U.S. Christians is that
having made an icon of Israel, we fall into a trap of
condoning whatever Israel does—even wanton murder—as
orchestrated by God.
Yet, I am not alone in suggesting that the churches in
the United States represent the last major organized
support for Palestinian rights. This imperative is due
in part to our historic links to the Land of Christ
and in part to the moral issues involved with having
our tax dollars fund Israeli-government- approved
violations of human rights.
While Israel and its dedicated U.S. Jewish supporters
know they have the president and most of Congress in
their hands, they worry about grassroots America—the
well-meaning Christians who care for justice. Thus
far, most Christians were unaware of what it was they
didn't know about Israel. They were indoctrinated by
U.S. supporters of Israel in their own country and
when they traveled to the Land of Christ most all did
so under Israeli sponsorship. That being the case, it
was unlikely a Christian ever met a Palestinian or
learned what caused the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This is gradually changing, however. And this change
disturbs the Israelis. As an example, delegates
attending a Christian Sabeel conference in Bethlehem
earlier this year said they were harassed by Israeli
security at the Tel Aviv airport.
"They asked us," said one delegate, "`Why did you use
a Palestinian travel agency? Why didn't you use an
Israeli agency?'" The interrogation was so extensive
and hostile that Sabeel leaders called a special
session to brief the delegates on how to handle the
harassment. Obviously, said one delegate, "The
Israelis have a policy to discourage us from visiting
the Holy Land except under their sponsorship. They
don't want Christians to start learning all they have
never known about Israel."
Grace Halsell was an award-winning journalist
and author. Her books include Journey to Jerusalem and
Prophecy and Politics. She passed away in 2000.
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