Showing posts with label Lehava. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lehava. Show all posts

8 November 2023

Stop The Genocide – Stop The Ethnic Cleansing – Stop The Weaponisation Of The Holocaust

Israelis May Fool Themselves Into Thinking They are Fighting Nazis But What They Are Really Fighting is the Victims of Today’s Nazis


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Nothing was more obscene than the declaration of Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s London Ambassador, that ‘we are fighting the Nazis’. She declared that 600,000 Germans died when Britain bombed Dresden and Hamburg implying that Israel would commit a similar atrocity.

It clearly escaped Hotovely’s notice that bombing civilians was a Nazi speciality starting with the bombing of Guernica in Spain in 1937. Although she didn’t realise it what she was in effect saying was that the Nazis were the victims in WW2.

Rabbi Dov Lior, an out and out fascist, along with 80 other rabbis urge the bombing of Gaza's main hospital Al Shifa

Hotoveli is a racist religious nut who when Chair of the Knesset Women’s Committee invited the fascist, anti-miscegenation group Lehava to speak to the Knesset, explaining, “It is important to me to check systems to prevent mixed marriages, and Lehava are the most suitable for this.” Lehava’s methods mainly involve attacking Arab men who are thought to be after Jewish women.

Hotovely is not the only genocider. When Yoav Gallant, Israel’s War Minister, announced the beginning of Israel’s genocidal bombing, with its food, water and fuel blockade, he declared that “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Hitler was also fond of talking about human animals. In Mein Kampf he described Jews as ‘human cattle’. Heinrich Himmler, who was in charge of the SS and the implementation the Final Solution, declared in a speech in Poznań on 4 October 1943, that the Nazis were ‘the only people in the world’ to have taken a ‘decent attitude’ toward animals. They would be equally decent towards ‘human animals’. This was recorded and played at the Nuremberg trials. This can be found on p.131 of Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader.

What we are seeing is Israel’s inversion of the holocaust whereby Israel is the victim and the Palestinians are the Nazis. Israel has long claimed to represent the memory of the Jewish holocaust victims despite the fact that during the holocaust the Zionist movement was indifferent to the fate of Europe’s Jews.

Destruction in Gaza

By identifying itself with Europe’s dead Jews Israel, even as it subjugates and ethnically cleanses the Palestinians, imagines that it is the victim. Not only Israel. The German state, despite its own post-war record of reintegrating Nazis into top positions, has adopted the claim that Israel is the successor to those that it murdered.

There is nothing unusual in this. The American settlers believed they were the victim of the Indians and South Africa Whites similarly believed they were victims, a victimhood nournished by their experience in British concentration camps in the Boer War.

As Yehuda Elkana pointed out, when a false memory of the past participates in the political process, democracy itself is endangered. The weaponisation of the Holocaust has led to the marginalisation and dispossession of the Palestinians. It has made the oppressor into the oppressed.

The BBC in particular has ignored Palestinian child deaths in favour of White Israeli Children despite the disparity in numbers of those killed

Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz and former President and rector of the Central European University in Budapest, (before Israel’s friend, the anti-Semitic Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban forced it out as part of his campaign against George Soros) wrote a profound article The Need to Forget in Ha'aretz on 2 March 1988. Elkana argued that what happened in Germany could happen anywhere, and to any people, describing how the ‘majority of Israelis are consumed by a profound hatred of the Arabs’. Elkana described:

a profound existential Angst fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the holocaust … that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief… I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, this must never happen again, and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, this must never happen to us again.

Today we are seeing this angst play out in Israel. To most people the idea that Gaza’s refugees, ethnically cleansed by Israel once already, are the Nazis and their killers are anti-fascists would seem absurd yet  Zionists, so consumed as they are by their own righteous arrogance sincerely believe they are the victim.

When I described Israel as Hitler’s Bastard Offspring four years ago the Zionists went crazy but that is exactly what has happened. Israel has imbibed the values of Hitler’s Germany but inverted them. Now they are the herrenvolk and the Palestinians are the untermenschen.

It is no wonder that people like neo-Nazis like Tommy Robinson and Richard Spencer find so much in common with the Israeli ethno-nationalist state. Israel is their ideal state.

Israeli Doctors for Genocide

Palestinian doctors in Gaza in a message to Israeli doctors:

When I put a petition up asking members of Unite to sign calling for the union to support an immediate ceasefire Doctors in Unite were particularly well represented. Yet in Israel the exact opposite is the case. Doctors are war mongers and genociders.

Blood on an ambulance that Israel bombed - Israeli doctors would have approved

Over 90 Israeli doctors calling themselves “Doctors for the Rights of IDF Soldiers” urged the bombing of any and every hospital in Gaza. They argued that due to suspicion of “terrorist activity,” the hospitals are “a legitimate target for annihilation.” They claim that “ambulances that are evacuating patients to the south in order to be treated elsewhere are at their disposal.

What kind of doctor you might ask urges that hospitals of a people without an airforce or capability of striking back be bombed? Even if Hamas militants were in the ambulances it is still a war crime to bomb them. These Israeli doctors are not one jot different from the SS doctors who presided over the selection of who should live and who should die at Auschwitz, such as Dr Mengele. See Israeli doctors urge the bombing of Gaza hospitals

But the chief war criminal in Israel is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a speech on 28 October he declared that the enemy that Israel was fighting was Amalek, the mythical tribe that attacked the Israelites as they made their way from Egypt to the Sinai desert.

Netanyahu Evokes Amalek

Netanyahu read his Letter to Soldiers and Commanders exorting his listners to understand that

The current fight against the murderers of 'Hamas' is another chapter in the generations-long story of our national resilience.

'Remember what Amalek did to you.'

We will always remember the horrific scenes of the massacre on Shabbat Simchat Torah, 7 October 2023. We see our murdered brothers and sisters, the wounded, the hostages, and the fallen of the IDF and the security services.

In their name and on their behalf, we have gone to war, the purpose of which is to destroy the brutal and murderous Hamas-ISIS enemy, bring back our hostages and restore the security to our country, our citizens and our children.

In the first Book of Samuel God commands King Saul in the to kill every person in Amalek. The prophet Samuel tells Saul to

‘attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’ (Deuteronomy 25:17, Book of Samuel I  15:2).

It has been the standard interpretation of Amalek by those in Israel who advocate the extermination of the Palestinians to equate the Palestinians with Amalek. Now Netanyahu has just confirmed that.

Dr MengeleAmalek,Craig Mokhiber, Director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, in his letter of resignation stripped away any pretence that what was happening in Gaza was not genocide when he wrote to Volker Turk, the High Commissioner for Human Rights about what is happening in Gaza that:

This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities.

But amid the death and destruction and the murder of 5,000+ children in Gaza we should take hope that Israel is, despite the best efforts of groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, who, alongside Britain’s racist Home Secretary Cruella Braverman, are becoming hysterical in their desperation to prevent the massive demonstrations each Saturday against genocide in Gaza.

They say they are concerned that Jews in London will feel afraid to come into London! Well given the thousands of Jews who took part in the half million march on October 28th it is clear that anti-racist Jews have no problem joining in. There has been no hostility whatsoever to Jews marching alongside their Muslim brothers and sisters.

Of course racist Jews and non-Jews may not wish to encounter an anti-racist demonstration but it’s not because their physical safety is at risk but because the sight of Jews and non-Jews marching side by side is an alien sight to those who believe that humanity is divided into competing races. The kind of ideas that Cruella Braverman believes in with her repetitive use of the anti-Semitic term ‘cultural Marxism.’

New York’s Grand Central Station was completely taken over by thousands of Jewish human rights defenders standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people and demanding an end to Israeli tyranny. In doing so, they stripped away in an instant the Israeli hasbara propaganda point (and antisemitic trope) that Israel somehow represents the Jewish people. It does not. See Israeli War on Gaza Sparks ‘Largest Mass Mobilization of Jews in American History’

Israel is solely responsible for its crimes. It bears repeating, in spite of Israel lobby smears to the contrary, that criticism of Israel’s human rights violations is not antisemitic, any more than criticism of Saudi violations is Islamophobic, criticism of Myanmar violations is anti-Buddhist, or criticism of Indian violations is anti-Hindu.

In an article, Israel's Settlement Enterprise Celebrates a Great Victory, Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the reign of terror in the West Bank as the settlers, under the racist Gauleiter of the West Bank, Bezalel Smotrich, seek to ‘cleanse’ Area C of Palestinians. In much the same way the Nazis sought to ‘cleanse’ the Warthegau, the annexed part of Poland of Jews and Poles.

That is why I compare Israel to Nazi Germany. Not only their goals but even their methods bear comparison. Never has it been clearer as to what Zionism is about. Yet the leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, is determined to stay in lockstep with the United States in  his fulsome backing of Israel’s genocide in real time.

This has resulted in 330 councillors writing to Starmer demanding that he call for an immediate ceasefire. According to Starmer, if Israel stops its bombing that might lead to more violence whereas continued bombing of hospitals, schools, ambulances and homes is the way to peace. 250 Muslim councillors have also written to Labour’s toxic leader demanding that he change his position.

Meanwhile in Israel itself there has been a wave of intimidation against Israel’s Palestinian citizens who are considered a fifth column.  Samah Salaime wrote in +972 Magazine that

Last Saturday evening, the scenario that every Palestinian citizen of Israel has spent the past three weeks fearing began to materialize: a mob of hundreds of belligerent Jewish Israelis attempted to break into the dormitories at Netanya Academic College, where some 50 Arab students were trapped inside, fearing for their lives. For a while, the Israeli police did not intervene as the mob shouted “Death to Arabs” and “Go back to Gaza,” and tried to force their way in. Eventually, the students were rescued with the help of volunteers and under police protection. 

In the wake of these scenes, I am confident that every Arab mother who, like me, has a child studying in Israeli academic institutions, will be having trouble sleeping at night out of fear that her son or daughter will be the victim of a lynching. 

Ha’aretz described how

Videos of the riot showed the angry crowd storming the campus, waving Israeli flags, chanting “Death to Arabs” and attempting to break down the gates. The rioting crowd even attempted to break in and remove them forcibly.

There has been a wave of incitement against Israel’s Palestinian citizens yet not one Israeli Jew has been detained. Social media has been swamped with anti-Arab rhetoric and hate yet all those arrested have been Arabs such as Abd Elhadi. Best known for her role in the 2013 film “World War Z,” as well as several Israeli TV shows, the actor was detained after sharing images on Instagram of Yaffa Adar, 85, being taken hostage by Hamas, along with laughing emojis.

Abd Elhadi shared an image of Hamas forces breaching Israel’s security border, with a caption reading “Let’s go, Berlin style,” in an apparent reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It is of course understandable that after all the propaganda about the invincibility of Israel’s finest and the humiliations they have had to suffer that Israel’s Palestinian citizens should have felt elation at how easily Hamas fighters breached the security fence surrounding Gaza.

Adar’s remarks immediately prompted the Interior minister to ask if actor could be stripped of her citizenship for allegedly cheering Hamas assault. There is no instance of an Israeli being stripped of their citizenship, no matter now outrageous their racism. Imagine if those chanting ‘death to the Arabs’ were to lose their citizenship. There would be barely anyone left in Israel today. They’d have to start with the Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. See  Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi charged by Israel over Gaza post. The Israeli police have also threatened to expel any Palestinian Israeli who shows solidarity with the Palestinian Uprising of October 7  to Gaza.

Amira Hass refers to the Hamas attack being a pogrom. It wasn’t. It was the breakout from an open air prison of people who had suffered from a 17 year siege. We still don’t know the full story of what happened on 7 October. Undoubtedly there were atrocities committed by Hamas, in particular the firing on unarmed young people at the rave. But it is also clear that the Israeli military deliberately killed Israelis in order to prevent them being taken captive.

Given the alternative of swapping the 5,000 Palestinian hostages in Israel’s prisons or murdering their own citizens, the army preferred the latter option. It’s called the Hannibal Directive in which, faced with the possibility of an Israeli being taken hostage, the military should simply kill them and anything else in the vicinity.

Watch the video about 7 October YouTube would rather you didn't see

This Friday 6.30 the SLN will be holding a Zoom meeting with 5 speakers including a Jewish Holocaust Survivor, Stephen Kapos and noted journalist Asa Winstanley, author of weaponising anti-Semitism, and three other speakers including myself.

Please register and come alone.

11 February 2022

Apparently Calling for Freedom from the ‘River to the Sea’ is also ‘Anti-Semitic’!!

Freedom of Speech on Palestine and Zionism is Under Attack from the Zionists and ‘Education’ Minister Nadhim Zahawi


Later today there will be a Zoom meeting with Shahd Abusalama, who was suspended on 20 January from teaching at Sheffield Hallam University after complaints from unnamed Zionist groups. After a massive campaign in her support including from her own UCU branch (97% of whom voted in her favour) she was reinstated.

Also speaking will be Professor David Miller who was dismissed by Bristol University after having been targeted by the same Zionists. In addition Pete Jones, Shahd’s PhD supervisor and also myself will be speaking.

In the past week there has been a renewed frenzy by the racist Jewish Chronicle on the subject of ‘anti-Semitism’ at British universities. Especially after the successful picket of the Cambridge Union where Israel’s far-Right Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli was speaking.

There is a chant at Palestine demonstrations: ‘From the River to the Sea Palestine Shall Be Free’. Apparently this is not only anti-Semitic but it is criminal too! It must be the first time in history that calling for freedom from Apartheid is a criminal offence.

At least it is according to the idiot who is the Education Minister. Nadhim Zahawi, who proclaimed in The Telegraph that those who chant this slogan should be referred to the Police. (Ministers vow action after Hamas chant at Cambridge).

As the media get het up about Starmer being accused of having colluded in letting Jimmy Saville go free, we are marching ever onwards to a police state.

Someone should remind Zahawi and the other Zionist liars that B’Tselem, Israel’s largest human rights organisation, produced a report in January 2021 titledA regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid’. Presumably B’Tselem are ‘anti-Semitic’ too!

Hotoveli is the same person who invited the fascist Lehava Group into the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women to give advice on how to stop Jews and Arabs having relationships. Because just as in Nazi Germany, marriage between Jews and non-Jews is verboten (forbidden). That comparison by the way is also ‘anti-Semitic’ under the IHRA.Any form of relationship between Arabs and Jews in Israel is a social taboo.

On the web site of Lehava is the following piece of racist poison. Jewish women are not merely pure, unlike Arabs, they are daughters of kings! In a piece that could have been written by Julius Streicher, we have the following letter addressed to Jewish girls:

"To my dear Jewish sister, I wanted to ask of you, my sister, not to make my mistake, don't let some minority member bring you down and cause you to be impure. You're a king's daughter! The King of Kings! You have the privilege of being holy and pure, you're a Jewish woman! He wants you and the moment he gets his way you'll see what Hell is." (Letter on the Lehava website).

Hotoveli described the Nakba as "a very strong and very popular Arab lie." She clings to the Zionist fable that in 1948 the Palestinians left Israel of their own accord.  

Someone should tell her what her fellow right-winger, Bezalel Smotrich said recently to Israeli Palestine members of the Knesset that they "are here by mistake– because Ben-Gurion didn't finish the job and throw you out in 1948,"

The Jewish Chronicle has nothing to say about this racism because it’s target is non-Jews. In fact Smotrich, disgusting racist and ‘proud homophobe’ as he is, was at least being honest.

The Jewish Chronicle worked itself into a frenzy about the picket of Cambridge Union last week. Ministers vow action after Hamas chant at Cambridge their headline screamed.

Masked demonstrators at Cambridge University burned flares and screamed Hamas slogans during the Israeli ambassador’s visit on Tuesday – prompting outraged government ministers to demand action.

The masks were worn because of COVID, but to the JC anything to do with Palestinians is sinister. ‘From the river to the sea’ has become a Hamas slogan, despite being around long before Hamas was formed. This is nothing less than McCarthyist guilt-by-association.

Apparently it is genocidal to want the ‘Jewish’ state to be replaced by a democratic, secular state that doesn’t distinguish between Jew and non-Jew in terms of their civil and political rights.

The Jewish Chronicle’s editor Stephen Pollard is a founder member of the Islamaphobic Henry Jackson Society. Despite all the fulminating against anti-Semitism Pollard has no problem supporting genuine anti-Semites.  His one qualification is that they are also supporters of Zionism.

In 2009 Pollard went out of his way to defend a Polish fascist MEP Michal Kaminski who represent the town of Jedwabne in Poland. In July 1941 there was a pogrom in Jedwabne when Polish fascists herded up to 1500 Jews into a barn which they then set alight.

After a book by Jan Gross Neighbours revealed what had happened in Jedwabne there was a far-reaching debate in Poland. Most of the population of Jedwabne opposed a national apology but President Kwaśniewski disagreed and a memorial to those who had been murdered was erected in Jedwabne.

Kaminski was instrumental in urging residents to oppose the apology and to boycott the ceremonial event on 10 July 2001. The campaign against an apology had ‘strongly anti-Semitic overtones,’ according to Dr Rafal Pankowski, author of The Populist Radical Right in Poland. The Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich observed that

Mr Kaminski was a member of NOP, a group that is openly far-right and neo-Nazi. Anyone who would want to align himself with the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne… needs to understand with what and by whom he is being represented.

Far from denouncing Kaminski and the support he received from Conservative members of the European Parliament (they were members of the same ECR Group, Pollard went out of his way to defend him!

Pollard wrote ‘Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a friend to Jews’. When Jonathan Freedland, who is no slouch when it comes to making false accusations of anti-Semitism wrote Once no self-respecting politician would have gone near people such as Kaminski Pollard felt impelled to defend him:

“Jonathan Freedland attacked Michal Kaminski, the Polish MEP; Roberts Zile, the Latvian MEP; and me (Once no self-respecting politician would have gone near such people, 7 October). Freedland seems to have decided that Kaminski is an antisemite; but, far from this, Kaminski is – as his record in Brussels shows clearly – one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town where antisemitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.”

Pollard also wrote, in The Telegraph that Kaminski, "Far from being an anti-Semite is about as pro-Israeli an MEP as exists."

Kaminski, in an interview with Nasza Polska in March 2001, had argued that ‘Poles should not apologise for what they did until Jews apologised to them for their actions which included “murdering Poles”.’ The only problem was that over 90% of Polish Jews could not apologise, since they had been sent to Treblinka and Auschwitz.

There is a long history of anti-Semites combining hatred of Jews with love of Zionism. Adolf Eichmann in an interview after the war said that if he had been Jewish ‘I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine anything else.

Pollard has been particularly eager to defend genuine anti-Semites. One such was Roberts Zile, a Latvian MEP, who each March marched with the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS.

Nonetheless Pollard was perturbed about ‘anti-Semitism’ at Sheffield Hallam University where we are told that

‘Jewish students branded the institution a “hostile environment” after it employed Palestinian activist Shahd Abusalama to teach a course on “post-colonial media culture”, despite her praise for terrorists and provocative statements about “Zionists”.

You would have to be brain dead not to understand that it is not anti-Semitism but anti-Zionism that people like Pollard object to. Genuine neo-Nazis like Tommy Robinson, who was given a hero’s welcome at last May’s pro-Israel demonstration (at which Hotoveli spoke) are kosher but Palestinian demonstrators are ‘anti-Semitic’.

Protesters at the Cambridge Union event holding signs saying 'Zionist scum not welcome here' (John Nguyen)

We are told that a

‘100-strong mob gathered outside Cambridge Student Union on Tuesday, chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.

Yet despite Nadhim Zahawi’s strictures, ‘Cambridge, officers looked on.’  One can only wonder why! Perhaps they don’t realise that we live in a police state yet!

Police at the Cambridge protest (John Nguyen)

Universities Minister Michelle Donelan joined in telling the JC that ‘Universities should have a zero tolerance attitude to anti-Jewish racism on campus.  Support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism has been transformed into the new anti-Semitism. It recalls what George Orwell described as political speech.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.

I should also recall one particular incident that demonstrates just what a loathsome creature Pollard is. I wrote to him in 2010 about an American Jewish student, Emily Honochowicz, who went to demonstrate at the Qalandia checkpoint just outside Jerusalem. The Israeli military began attacking the demonstrators and Emily lost an eye. It was the same day as the Mavi Marmara. A tear gas canister was shot directly at her. I covered the story here. What could be more relevant than a Jewish student, whose only offence was to participate in a demonstration losing an eye (her family was later billed for her medical treatment!). But news like this is no news for a propaganda sheet like the Jewish Chronicle. Pollard wrote back

Dear Mr Greenstein,

Thank you for your email, which will make a fine addition to my 'delete' folder.

Stephen Pollard

From that day on I have had nothing but contempt for this vile lump of lard. 

Tony Greenstein

25 December 2021

The attack on Christian Palestinians as Jerusalem Church leaders warn of “a systematic attempt” to drive out Christianity

Xmas in Palestine as Israel bans Pilgrimages but allows Birthright Tours to Enter

In 1947 as part of Christian Palestinians Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, the UN proposed the internationalisation of Jerusalem under a separate regime. The UN sent Count Folk Bernadotte, the Swedish statesman to Jerusalem to make arrangements. The Zionist terrorist group Lehi/Stern Gang, a commanded by future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, assassinated him on 17 September 1948 with the connivance of the main terrorist group Haganah.

Bernadotte had personally saved 11,000 Jews at the end of the war from Nazi concentration camps. As Donald Macintyre observed ‘no blue Israeli plaque marks the spot, as it does for so many military and Jewish underground exploits of the period’.

The statement by the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem less than 2 weeks ago, about the harassment of the Church and the threat posed to its continued presence in Jerusalem was met by a predictable Zionist response. ‘What about Christians in other parts of the Middle East’ they cried as if that had anything to do with the treatment of the Christian Church in Jerusalem.

Of course the plight of Christians throughout the Middle East is a subject worthy of discussion in its own right. It might for example have something to do with the Western and Israeli attack on secular regimes throughout the region and their own promotion of fundamentalist Islamic regimes. For example it was the attack on Iraq which led to the demise of Christians in that country. Likewise the Saudi sponsorship of jihadi militias in Syria, aided and abetted by Israel and the United States, also led to attacks on Christians.

Justin Welby

The statement was endorsed in an article by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby together with the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem Hosam Naoum in the Sunday Times.

Naturally the statement was “heavily criticised by the Board of Deputies” as “deeply troubling”even though it’s none of their business. It has nothing to do with British Jews. But the Board’s main function today is to operate as an Israeli propaganda group. What didn’t trouble the Board was the attempt to displace Christians in the Christian Quarter or the attacks on Christian clergy.

The Zionist defence boiled down to the fact that ‘Israel’s 182,000-strong Christian population grew by 1.4 per cent in 2020’. Which was entirely irrelevant since the statement was issued on behalf of the Jerusalem churches in Occupied Jerusalem, where the number of Christians is declining, not on behalf of Israel’s Palestinians.


Instead of dealing with the actual complaints of harassment, violence and the expulsion of Christians from the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem, the statement from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs resorted to the usual blank denials: They termed the statement ‘baseless, and distort the reality of the Christian community in Israel.’ They went on to say that:

The statement by Church leaders in Jerusalem is particularly infuriating given their silence on the plight of many Christian communities in the Middle East suffering from discrimination and persecution.

Israel describes itself as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. Why then does it insist on comparing itself with all the dictatorships it’s in alliance with in the region rather than say Europe?

The overall number of Christians in Israel has risen but in east Jerusalem there is a steady decline GETTY IMAGES

What Israel’s defenders did not do was to address any of the points in the statement. It’s worth enumerating them.

Throughout the Holy Land, Christians have become the target of frequent and sustained attacks by fringe radical groups. Since 2012 there have been countless incidents of physical and verbal assaults against priests and other clergy, attacks on Christian churches, with holy sites regularly vandalized and desecrated, and ongoing intimidation of local Christians who simply seek to worship freely and go about their daily lives. These tactics are being used by such radical groups in a systematic attempt to drive the Christian community out of Jerusalem and other parts of the Holy Land.

Arson at the Church of the Multiplication of Loaves & Fishes

There has been a wave of attacks on both churches and moques in Israel. For example the arson attack at the Church of Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes. As the National Geographic reported:

The June assault was the latest and most dramatic sign of tension between Christians in Israel and a growing movement of Jewish extremists who seek to cleanse their nation of religious minorities.

A nun surveys the damage after an arson attack

The Church statement went on to say:

the failure of local politicians, officials and law enforcement agencies to curb the activities of radical groups who regularly intimidate local Christians, assault priests and clergy, and desecrate Holy Sites and church properties.

The statement called on Israel’s leaders to:

1.     Deal with the challenges presented by radical groups in Jerusalem to both the Christian community and the rule of law, so as to ensure that no citizen or institution has to live under threat of violence or intimidation.

2.     Begin dialogue on the creation of a special Christian cultural and heritage zone to safeguard the integrity of the Christian Quarter in Old City Jerusalem and to ensure that its unique character and heritage are preserved for the sake of well-being of the local community, our national life, and the wider world.

Suffice to say there was no response to this call. Responding to the statement, the World Council of Churches (WCC) acting general secretary Rev Dr Ioan Sauca said Christians in the Holy Land were a "threatened minority". They went on to say that:

"The statement issued by the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem highlights the increasing threat to the Christian presence in the Holy Land posed by attacks and incursions by radical groups who seek to destroy the religious and cultural diversity of the region," he said.

There was no response to this statement either. When they referred to ‘radical groups’ what they meant is the efforts of Ateret Cohanim which aims to build a 3rd Temple in Jerusalem by demolishing the Al Aqsa Mosque and Golden Dome and ethnically cleansing Jerusalem’s Palestinian inhabitants. These settlers are supported by the Israeli state itself. See Warnings of 'systematic attempt' to drive Christianity out of the Holy Land

There is an ongoing threat to evacuate two large buildings in the Christian Quarter, the Imperial Hotel and Petra Hotel. According to Ha’aretz

After a long legal battle, the hotels were transferred to the ownership of a Jewish organization that had bought the buildings, and which is now trying to evict the Palestinians who are running the hotels – and bring in Jewish families to live there. The heads of the Christian communities now fear that the change in ownership of the hotels – which were bought in a controversial deal by Ateret Cohanim 15 years ago using shell companies – could change the character of the Christian Quarter.

Israel’s courts have also played their part. They have consistently upheld the crooked land deals of Ateret Cohanim, often made with intermediaries who hold forged documents. The land deals were riddled with corruption yet Israel’s courts turned a blind eye.

According to Ha’aretz  one of the churches that suffers most from this is the Armenian Church, which is located near the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.’

“I’ve been in Israel since 1995 and never before have there been so many incidents like this,” said Father Koryoun Baghdasaryan, the chancellor of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

“Every day that I leave my home for the Church of the Holy Sepulcher or to visit family, I’m afraid something will happen to me. There were always curses and spitting, in recent years physical violence also started.”

Ha’aretz described how “Christians in the Holy Land want Jews to stop spitting on them”

‘A few weeks ago, a senior Greek Orthodox clergyman in Israel attended a meeting at a government office in Jerusalem's Givat Shaul quarter. When he returned to his car, an elderly man wearing a skullcap came and knocked on the window. When the clergyman let the window down, the passerby spat in his face.’

‘On Sunday, a fracas developed when a yeshiva student spat at the cross being carried by the Armenian Archbishop during a procession near the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City. The archbishop's 17th-century cross was broken during the brawl and he slapped the yeshiva student.’

In February 2018 the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was closed in a standoff with the city's municipality in protest at a proposed land expropriation law. The closure was prompted by two developments: the Jerusalem municipality's plan to tax the church's assets around the city and a bill to expropriate land already sold by the churches to private companies which violated a longstanding status quo.

The systematic campaign ... reaches now its peak as a discriminatory and racist bill that targets solely the properties of the Christian community in the Holy Land is being promoted. This reminds us all of laws of a similar nature which were enacted against the Jews during dark periods in Europe.”