Freeman
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- Sep 30, 2009
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I just wait the day where the aliens will return to their khazaria homeland and let the people live in peace!
Israel’s purging of Palestinian Christians
by Jonathan Cook
NAZARETH, . There is an absurd scene in Palestinian writer Suad Amiry’s recent book “Sharon and My Mother-in-Law” that is revealing about Israeli Jews’ attitude to the two other monotheistic religions. In 1992, long before Israel turned Amiry’s home city of Ramallah into a permanent ghetto behind checkpoints and walls, it was still possible for West Bank Palestinians to drive to Jerusalem and even into Israel -- at least if they had the right permit.
On one occasion Amiry ventures out in her car to East Jerusalem, the half of the city that was Palestinian before the 1967 war and has since been engulfed by relentless illegal and state-organised Jewish settlement.
There she sees an elderly Jew collapsing out his car and on to the side of the road. She pulls over, realises he is having a heart attack and bundles him into the back of her own car. Not able to speak Hebrew, she reassures him in English that she is taking him to the nearest hospital.
But as it starts to dawn on him that she is Palestinian, Amiry realises the terrible problem her charitable act has created: his fear may prompt him to have another heart attack. “What if he had a fatal heart attack in the back seat of my car? Would the Israeli police ever believe I was just trying to help?” she wonders.
The Jewish man seeks to calm himself by asking Amiry if she is from Bethlehem, a Palestinian city known for being Christian. Unable to lie, she tells him she is from Ramallah. “You’re Christian?” he asks more directly. “Muslim,” she admits, to his utter horror. Only when they finally make it to the hospital does he relax enough to mumble in thanks: “There are good Palestinians after all.”
I was reminded of that story as I made the journey to Bethlehem on Christmas Day. The small city that Amiry’s Jewish heart attack victim so hoped she would hail from is today as much of an isolated enclave in the West Bank as other Palestinian cities -- or at least it is for its Palestinian inhabitants.
For tourists and pilgrims, getting in or out of Bethlehem has been made reasonably straightforward, presumably to conceal from international visitors the realities of Palestinian life. I was even offered a festive chocolate Santa Claus by the Israeli soldiers who control access to the city where Jesus was supposedly born.
Seemingly oblivious to the distressing historical parallels, however, Israel forces foreigners to pass through a “border crossing” -- a gap in the menacing grey concrete wall -- that recalls the stark black and white images of the entrance to Auschwitz.
The gates of Auschwitz offered a duplicitious motto, “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes you free), and so does Israel’s gateway to Bethlehem. “Peace be with you” is written in English, Hebrew and Arabic on a colourful large notice covering part of the grey concrete. The people of Bethlehem have scrawled their own, more realistic assessments of the wall across much of its length.
Foreign visitors can leave, while Bethlehem’s Palestinians are now sealed into their ghetto. As long as these Palestinian cities are not turned into death camps, the West appears ready to turn a blind eye. Mere concentration camps, it seems, are acceptable.
The West briefly indulged in a bout of soul-searching about the wall following the publication in July 2004 of the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion condemning its construction. Today the only mild rebukes come from Christian leaders around Christmas time. Britain’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was foremost among them this year.
Even those concerns, however, relate mainly to fears that the Holy Land’s native Christians, once a significant proportion of the Palestinian population, are rapidly dwindling. There are no precise figures, but the Israeli media suggests that Christians, who once constituted as much as 15 per cent of the occupied territories’ Palestinians, are now just 2 or 3 per cent. Most are to be found in the West Bank close to Jerusalem, in Bethlehem, Ramallah and neighbouring villages.
Israel’s purging of Palestinian Christians
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