Prior to the exercise of convenience marketed as the disengagement from Gaza it became known that compensation of around $250,000 per individual was expected by the 8,500 Gaza and the 700 or so West Bank settlers facing relocation from their illegal, Jewish-only colonies. A spate of opinion ensued. There were those who felt that Congress should not grant Sharon’s request since the settlements were built despite Congress’ on-the-record objections, some who thought it should have been included in the $82 billion requested by Bush for Iraq thereby cinching its passage, then others who wanted to make the aid conditional and still do for various reasons.
Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) is a legislator who believes the aid should be conditional. In a letter addressed to Secretary of State Colin Powell on 25 March 2004 he complained that “The current route of the separation fence as proposed by the Israeli Ministry of Defense will divide Bethlehem from Jerusalem, which threatens to stifle Christian life by preventing access to holy sites, places of prayer, and the contiguity of the Christian population.” When the letter was excerpted by Robert Novak in Israel’s Christian problem [ 1 April 2004 CNN ] the Israelis were offended Hyde did not speak with them first.
Catholic clergy and laity from the U.S., inspecting the deplorable conditions for Christians in the Holy Land, have found the attitude of the Israeli military and bureaucracy ranges from uncooperative to hostile.
When worried Catholics first visited Hyde last year to tell him of the havoc wrought by Sharon’s wall, he told them to come back with proof. A delegation headed by the Rev. Donald Rooney of Fredericksburg, Va., and the Rev. John J. Podsiadlo of Baltimore did just that in March. They returned to Hyde bearing photographs, taken despite the objections of Israeli soldiers.
“If we do not turn the tide of events,” Fathers Rooney and Podsiadlo wrote after they returned, “Christian charity, sacred sites and the living Christian community in the Holy Land will be destroyed.” The wall, the priests said, “could forever change the Holy Land and the people who live in and visit this cherished historic land.”
So when Hyde confronted Shimon Peres during a meeting of the House International Relations Committee on 6 April 2005 saying the West Bank segregation wall was still “drastically undermining the mission of Christian institutions and the social fabric of their communities in the Holy Land” and that he remained concerned about “growing illegal Israeli settlements and their infrastructure . . . on religious freedom,” he was providing an update. Yet this reiteration reportedly surprised the seasoned diplomat Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres who was in Washington to generate support for the $2.2 billion supplement. He responded that “Palestinian Christians face graver threats from Palestinian Muslims than from Israel.”
Press Release: 3 December 2005
Open Bethlehem
Pope Benedict – First New Citizen of Bethlehem
His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI accepted a Bethlehem passport from the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, today (Saturday 3rd December). His Holiness becomes the first new citizen of Bethlehem following the launch of ‘Open Bethlehem’, an international campaign to save the city.
Bethlehem faces a state of emergency following the completion of an 8 metre high illegal cement wall at the entrance to the city that separates Bethlehem from Jerusalem and other Palestinian towns. With the Israeli wall and other closures, including militarised fences and illegal Jewish settlements, Bethlehem has been reduced to its urban core: a modern-day ghetto town.
In issuing a passport, Bethlehem is granting citizenship to those who “uphold the values of a just and open society (and) remain a true friend of Bethlehem, through its imprisonment”, according to the passport’s citation.
Leila Sansour- the chief executive of Open Bethlehem is currently in London. She says: “We are appealing to the Pope as well as all citizens of the world to help us uphold the message that was born in our city. Bethlehem- a name that resonates with millions of people around the world with a message of peace and hope for mankind is today an open-air prison. Over 400 entire Christian families have emigrated from the city in the last four years. We cannot allow the depopulation of Bethlehem and the erosion of a 2000 year-old heritage that anchors Christianity in the Middle East”.
The Palestinian delegation included the Palestinian Minister of Tourism Ziad Al Bandak, a native of Bethlehem, who stressed that new developments on the ground are damaging to an already fragile tourist industry as the critical Christmas season approaches.
Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, pastor of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem and authour of Bethlehem Beseiged: Stories of Hope in Times of Trouble, would take issue with Peres’ disingenuousness but who would know? As Hillary Rodham Clinton proved on her recent visit to Israel, Palestinian voices are irrelevant, no matter their religious affiliation.
A letter to Senator Rodham Clinton from Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb
I was surprised last week when I saw your picture in Ha’aretz (November 15, 2005), which was taken near the Wall, just outside of our town. I know that many Palestinians would have loved to welcome you in their homes in Bethlehem, but you did not come to visit us. Perhaps you simply did not have time to stop by and greet us, the people who would be the other half of any agreement which would allow Israel to live in security and peace. Or perhaps while you had Bethlehem in the background of the publicity photos, you had certain of your constituents in New York in the forefront of your mind. In one month’s time you will be singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” I wonder how you will sing it this year, having declared your support for transforming our “little town” into a big, open-air prison, leaving no green space for our children to play or our olive trees to grow?
Although discussion of the supplemental aid package was tabled in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, negotiations resumed in November, the request revised from $2.2 billion to $1.2 billion for development of the Negev and Galilee.
* Israel is asking for US aid to relocate settlers from the Gaza Strip to areas in the Galilee and the Negev for “development” where Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute a majority and a large minority, respectively. This threatens to dislocate more of these remaining Palestinian citizens of Israel from their homes and lands. Already “development” has been used to remove hundreds of Bedouin families in the Negev and to destroy their crops.
* Many settlers have moved from illegal settlements in the Gaza Strip to illegal settlements in the West Bank, rather than to Israel. (Source) The United States cannot provide Israel with money to compensate Gaza settlers who move to expropriated Palestinian land in the West Bank.
Moving on
The settlements have left Gaza and are heading for the West Bank, writes Graham Usher from Sanur
The established settler leadership may have been alarmed by the language and the speed of the collapse but believed the “resistance” had served its purpose. “This expulsion has raised people’s consciousness about the necessity to settle Judea and Samaria (the West Bank),” said Benzl Lieberman, head of the Settler Council.
Ariel Sharon may be thinking along similar lines, even though his final map of the West Bank may differ from Lieberman’s. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post on 22 August, Sharon paid homage to the settlements and gave clues to his vision of Israel’s eastern border.
“Because of the settlements we can pray at the Cave of the Patriarchs (in Hebron),” he said. If not for the settlement movement “it would not have been possible to renew the settlement in Gush Etzion (near Bethlehem) or incorporate Rachel’s Tomb (in Bethlehem) inside Jerusalem’s fence; or have Maale Adumim (near Jerusalem) and its satellites, Beit El, Shilo, the Ariel bloc or the security zone overlooking the coastal plain.”
This is not simply a vision. Last week the Israeli army began issuing expropriation orders to build the West Bank wall around Maale Adumim “and its satellites”. If built as routed, Maale Adumim will divide the West Bank as surgically as Netzarim did to Gaza.
The aim now is to people the new border, with the settlers again playing the role of pioneers. Contrary to promises made to the US, the settlers in Gaza are not being relocated in the Negev and Galilee. Many of them are going to the West Bank. Netzarim, for example, has decamped in Ariel. Gaza’s Morag and Shirat Hayam settlements are en route to Ofra and Kadumim. Ariel, Ofra and Kadumim are all settlements deep in the heart of the West Bank. “We don’t move anyone, people can go wherever they want,” said Sharon.
Evangelical Christians are another matter as this snapshot of a meeting between Benjamin Netanyahu and preacher John Hagee at “an event organized by ‘the parliamentary lobby for relations with Christians'” clearly shows, according to Lily Galili in Rapture – or raptor [11 November 2005 Haaretz ].
The event in the Knesset hall was like a meeting of an extreme underground cell. Even MK Yuri Stern (Yisrael Beiteinu), the chairman of the lobby, and National Union MKs Benny Elon (a member of the lobby) and Effi Eitam and Zvi Hendel (who arrived as guests) sound like spokesmen for Gush Shalom in comparison to the speech by Hagee, who controls a huge empire and knows precisely what God wants. Neither of them, of course, are very enthusiastic about Sharon or Bush.
“We believe God owns the land and has deeded it to the Jewish people – a deed that cannot be canceled or amended – not by the road map to peace, not by the EU, not even by the president of the United States,” Hagee declared. He also suggested that God will settle accounts with any nation that pressures Israel to divide the Land of Israel: “I do not consider it an accident that the very same week Jews were driven out of Gaza and placed in tent cities in Israel, the hand of God, through Hurricane Katrina, drove Americans out of their homes to live in tent cities in America.”
A Palestinian Christian Appeals For A Shared Jerusalem
by Munib Younan
6 December 2005 The Daily Star
This year we were blessed with a rare opportunity to celebrate the Jewish High Holidays at the same time as the Holy Month of Ramadan. Both Ramadan and Yom Kippur call for repentance and fasting. Sukkot, which commemorates the Hebrews’ wandering homeless in Sinai after their deliverance from oppression in Egypt, invites pondering the wandering of this life and reminds us we are all just pilgrims in God’s world. At the center of it all is Jerusalem, with all its pluralistic richness, not only holy to the three monotheistic faiths, but also claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians as their capital. Of all places in God’s creation, it is meant to be a place open to all and shared by all.
This month of feasts should have encouraged us to see hope and promise together in Jerusalem. Instead, it became a showcase for exclusive claims of one religion over another, of freedom for some at the expense of others.
On the road to Jerusalem the first day of Sukkot, I was shocked to see a truck with two large stone blocks engraved with words proclaiming them to be the “cornerstones of the Third Temple.” Adherents from the Christian Evangelical Right and some Jewish zealots were once again trying to begin the Third Temple on the sacred Temple Mount to hasten the coming of the Messiah. The problem is that the “Temple Mount” overlaps the “Haram al-Sharif,” the third holiest site for Muslims, which now holds the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques. There have been several plots to destroy these sites by zealots disregarding the unequivocal ruling of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate that it is forbidden for Jews to walk there because the Third Temple can only be built once the Messiah comes.
If Congress approves the $1.2 billion supplement unconditionally it will be tactically agreeing with whatever percentage of 70 million American Evangelical Christians who believe it is necessary to eradicate Arabs in Israel in order to hasten the return of the Messiah. As if Jesus would approve?