“We are being led into an American brand—hear me clearly—of fascism, and most white Christians are supporting it,” ranted the George Soros-supported leftist Jim Wallis at a November 14 Arab Center Washington, DC, event. Amidst such deranged hyperbole and a litany of progressive lamentations, he and his fellow panelists promoted before a small audience of about 25 hackneyed denunciations of Israel and its conflicts with Palestinians.
The panel’s actual topic was “Evangelical Christians and US Middle East Policy,” but Wallis’ diatribes inspired no confidence in his views on this or any other topic. For this man who constantly proclaims himself an evangelical devoted to the Bible, America’s upcoming 2020 presidential elections portended political Armageddon. “If Donald Trump wins again, I don’t think that our institutions are resilient enough to hold on to democracy.”
Wallis claimed that he returned during his college years to the Christian faith of his upbringing after “Ho Chi Minh, Karl Marx, and Che Guevara weren’t satisfying me,” but his views suggested continued leftist influence. He reduced, for example, complex American immigration debates to strident polemics. “To dehumanize immigrants isn’t just lack of compassion; it’s anti-Christ,” he stated.
Accordingly, Wallis found in Israel’s disputed territories of the West Bank/Judea/Samaria another leftist morality play, despite the relative happiness and education of Palestinians compared to other Middle East populations. While overlooking the massive development of the Palestinians that Israeli rule enabled followed Israel’s expulsion of Jordanian occupiers from these territories during the 1967 Six-Day War, he cast Palestinians as facing Israeli exploitation. “Israeli settler kids” in these territories ask
how can we live the way we do up on this hill with our golf courses and swimming pools, and down at the bottom of the hill is this Palestinian village and what’s happening to them from what I can tell, from what I can hear, doesn’t feel right to me.
Likewise Wallis turned melodramatic when discussing Israeli security controls such as checkpoints. “When Christians get to the Middle East and they go through Israeli checkpoints, it’s a life-changing experience…that people need to go through,” he stated, contrary to the far more mundane experiences of this author and others. Wallis neglected to mention that many Palestinians miss the greater freedom of movement they once enjoyed before Palestinian terrorism in the 2000 Second Intifada only ended some five years later with such Israeli security measures.
Wallis’ received confirmation from his fellow panelist Alison Glick, a woman who has been called a “self-hating Jew” for her involvement with radical anti-Zionist organizations including Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Now the development director for the like-minded Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP), she suggested anti-Israel slanders of a Jewish people colonizing an alien land at the expense of supposedly indigenous Palestinians. She wondered whether
it’s OK that I as a Jew can leave my home in Philadelphia, go to Israel, become a citizen, live anywhere, be afforded rights, privileges, support, financial and otherwise that a Palestinian Muslim or a Palestinian Christian who has lived there for centuries are denied?
Glick lamented that Palestinians “go through these cattle shoots to get to work” when crossing Israel’s security barrier to work in Israel. She ignored the fact that Palestinians have no other choice if they want to enjoy Israeli jobs that offer pay and legal benefits unavailable under the corruption-ridden economy ruled by the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) dictatorship. She additionally propagated without evidence the canard that Palestinians have “their water and other resources literally taken out from under them” by Israelis.
The remaining panelist, Wallis’ good friend and anti-Israel Palestinian activist Jonathan Kuttab, currently an Arab Center non-resident fellow, tried to present himself as a witness to truths hidden from observers such as this author. Responding to his reference to a recent daylong bus tour through Samaria, Kuttab argued that such tours offer a “privileged status that you can avoid to see the actual suffering that’s taking place.” “It is not enough that you go there, it is also important that you go with a Palestinian guide, with a Palestinian institution,” he asserted as if these tour guides were more objective than this author’s Israeli guides.
By contrast, Kuttab’s entire discussion of touring the disputed territories ignored important security dimensions that speak to Palestinian society’s violent, oppressive nature. Israelis may not legally enter Area A, namely the 18 percent of the West Bank officially under PA security as well as political control, given the risk that terrorists might take Israelis hostage. Despite Kuttab’s complaints, such concerns make understandable that Israeli bypass roads around various Palestinian communities might facilitate “minimum contact” between Israelis and Palestinians.
Kuttab’s catalogue of errors included Christian Zionism. “Most evangelicals who take Christian Zionist positions do so out of ignorance of either the facts or of scripture,” he stated. The only mitigating caveat he offered was that Christian Zionists have a “great variety of views.”
Kuttab criticized that President Donald “Trump decided to break with almost one of the standard pillars of U.S. foreign policy.” He named the move of the American embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital in Jerusalem. Kuttab dismissed this move, called for by 1996 American legislation and overwhelmingly popular in Israel, as something “really initiated mostly by the evangelicals.”
Glick similarly unflatteringly described “nationalism combined with militarism” as among 20th century evangelical beliefs that furthermore “very much define the Christian Zionist movement.” She accused Christians in general and Christian Zionists in particular of slighting Palestinians from Christian backgrounds such as Kuttab. Many Christians “think that all Palestinians are Muslim, therefore equals danger, therefore equals they deserve what they get,” she stated without mentioning that Christians are a minuscule, persecuted minority among Palestinians.
The political insignificance of Palestinian Christians, and not Christian ignorance, helps explain why Glick has the impression that Christians dealing with Palestinian Christians “often refuse to engage with them.” Palestinian Christians are for Christian Zionists a “fact that really disrupts their view of the world,” for whom “it is more important for them to be Zionist in some ways than to be Christian,” she claimed. Yet in reality, the numerous Islamic references in the PA’s Basic Law vitiate attempts by her and previously by Kuttab to inflate the status of Palestinian Christians.
Perhaps most controversially, Glick and Wallis deigned to determine what is anti-Semitic in the context of discussing Israel. Without specification, Wallis conceded the existence of “genuine antisemitism on the left,” while claiming that sometimes accusations of antisemitism in debates over Israel are a “veto that can’t be accepted.” Glick concurred that “false accusations” of antisemitism are “with increasing frequency weaponized” by people who “don’t want to talk about Palestinian rights.”
Wallis’ deliberations over antisemitism appeared farcical given audience member Tom Getman, a former executive in the Palestinian territories for the anti-Israel Christian charity World Vision. He has notably made offensive comments about Jews and Israel both as a commentator for Wallis’ Sojourners publication and elsewhere. During the panel, Getman cheered Wallis’ remarks with clenched fist symbols while he praised Getman for having worked with the late dovish Republican senator from Oregon, Mark Hatfield. Getman’s written audience question read by Kuttab indicated what kind of radical Israel policies Getman thought Jews should follow: “Will Christian senators begin to follow Jesus like [Senator] Bernie [Sanders] is?”
In sum, the panel indicated the broad outline of how leftists are currently framing Israel as another intersectional example of oppression requiring “peaceful” resistance. Israeli Jews as a colonial class repress nonthreatening Palestinians (who are more multicultural than Muslim in character) and are interlinked globally with racists and Christian religious fanatics. Meanwhile, none of these falsehoods should raise suspicions of antisemitism. Such anti-Israel arguments are going to recur in the years to come; forewarned is forearmed.
Keys says
“Glick lamented that Palestinians “go through these cattle shoots to get to work” “.
Boarded a flight in the USA since 9/11 ? Yeah ? Well, Islam caused that and how to get to work in “Palestine”. You, Glick, do not want to know what else Islam caused.
gravenimage says
Social Justice Warriors Attack Israel
…………..
Disgusting.