Who will stand up for Israel?
By Kimberly C. Moore


"And the Canaanites were then in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, 'To your descendants I will give this land.'" The Book of Genesis

Most people agree that no other phrase has caused so much strife, so much controversy and so much hatred in the history of mankind, particularly toward the Jews, who claim the land of Israel as their own. In the last 4,000 years, anti-Semitism – the hatred of Jews - has gone in and out of fashion. In the last year, it has made a startling comeback.

Last summer, long before September 11th, my friend Lenny Cohen asked me, ":Who will stand up for Israel?": German protestant minister and World War II activist Martin Niemoller said, ":First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak out because I was not a Catholic. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a member of the unions. Then they came for me and, by then, there was no one left to speak out for me.": And so I quickly answered Lenny that I would stand up for Israel. He knew I had lived in Jerusalem during the Gulf Crisis and Gulf War, I had watched Iraqi SCUD Missiles rain down on Tel Aviv while listening to Palestinians in the Silwan Valley cheer and that, since then, I have become a Christian with a deep understanding of the Torah – The Holy Books of the Israelites. Soon after answering Lenny’s question, my conviction was put to the test by what I can only describe as a fresh spate of anti-Semitism.

Last year I moved to a small town, which appeared to be the picture-perfect postcard of genteel Southern living. A Christian I greatly admired began talking one day about Israel, proudly showing me a video of a project she had worked on there and chatting fondly about her friends in the Holy Land. I thought I had found a compatriot. But then much to my shock, she began spouting contempt for Israel and Israelis. She sent me a handwritten note, disparaging the ":greedy Zionist movement,": which filled my eyes with tears. She answered a question about suicide bombers by saying she understands their anger and asking me how the Palestinians should ":fight for justice…from a colonial power who is bent on getting rid of every Palestinian by some way or other.": I tried to explain to her the Israeli viewpoint, tried to talk to her about the discrimination, harassment and murder of Jews in Europe and Russia at the turn of the last century and why they wanted to settle in a homeland where they could be free. I even pointed out to her the sickening fact that Palestinian schoolteachers in Gaza instruct their pupils that they should ":kill Jews": and die for the cause of Palestine. I have seen numerous photographs of children, not much more than toddlers, toting around real guns and dressed up as suicide bombers in Gaza and Ramallah. This Christian continued e-mailing me things like Hanan Ashrawi’s ":wonderful": speech at the United Nations conference on racism in which the Arab League spokesperson said Palestinians are ":guilty only of an unwavering commitment to freedom, dignity and independence.": Ashrawi never once mentioned or apologized for Palestinian terrorist acts on Israelis and Americans during the last 50 years, and no one that whole week in August 2001 said that the Arabs wanting to kill Jews is racist. My friend also sent me an ":excellent article": titled ":Jews United Against Zionism,": which claims Israel can’t exist until the Messiah comes. I am puzzled as to why she would agree with this because, according to our shared religion of Christianity, He already has come. Not only did He come, Christ lived his 33 years on earth as an Israelite from the tribe of Judah – a Jew. Some Christians think that, loosely interpreted, Isaiah Chapter 11 states that those who believe in the Messiah will be grafted onto Israel’s family tree. Finally I pointed out to her that in 1942, Jews owned about one-third of the land in the Palestine Mandate. Her response was, ":No, they didn’t.": I gently continued that yes, actually they did. The Rothschild and Warburg families, along with others pooling their money, had gone in and bought a great deal of land when the Zionist movement began in the late 1800s. Some, however, argue that those who sold the land - including the mayors of Jerusalem, Gaza and Jaffa - had no legal right to do so. But the land the Palestinians are demanding now is the same land to which they said ‘no’ in 1947, when the United Nations proposed dividing Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab State. Most observers agree that Israel has not always treated the Palestinians fairly or humanely since 1948, and while the majority of thinking people want to see a Palestinian State established, they also know that the Palestinian Authority is one of the most corrupt governments the world has ever known and much of the Palestinian peoples’ suffering is due to the curse of poor leadership. They know the Palestinian people deserve better than Yasser Arafat.

The next test to my resolve came just a few days after a suicide bomber had blown himself up at the Sbarro Pizza restaurant in Jerusalem last summer, killing more than a dozen Israeli men, women and children, and maiming scores of others. The night it happened, I sat in a pizza restaurant in my hometown and felt guilty because I didn’t have to worry about things like that in the United States, the way my friends do in Israel. I didn’t have to look around at who is in a restaurant or worry if the book bag someone left behind has a bomb in it. I didn’t have to worry – or so I thought.

I occasionally go to a lovely Victorian hotel near my apartment, where I meet friends for dinner. One night, sitting at the end of the bar was a man who described himself to me as a Pakistani Moslem. Sami told me that he was a successful businessman in town and we chatted amiably at first as he sipped his beer. I asked him where he went to mosque and he responded that, when he did go, it was in a town about 45 minutes away. Then he brought up Yasser Arafat and told me how much he adores the Palestinian Authority president. ":I know some people say he is a terrorist, but I don’t care. I still love him,": Sami said. He continued that when Arafat had visited Pakistan, he had stayed in Sami’s grandfather’s house. I decided that, since he was drinking, I wouldn’t bring up all the atrocities perpetrated by Arafat and other Palestinian organizations, like the bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, along with the U.S. Marine barracks, in the 1980s, which left more than 300 Americans dead. Or the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. Or the hijacking of numerous airplanes, along with a Mediterranean cruise ship and the murder of an American tourist on board. Or any one of scores of suicide bombings. I also decided not to mention that Arafat has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the Palestinian Authority to line his own pockets instead of housing and feeding his own people. A few minutes later, Sami offered up that he hates Israel and will never accept its existence. I mumbled to my friend, who knows how I feel, that I was not going to say anything. But then he went too far when he said Israeli soldiers purposely kill Palestinian children. I asked him if he were aware that some Palestinian parents in Gaza sent their children to summer camp last year to learn how to be suicide bombers. His response? ":If I lived in Israel, I would be a suicide bomber, too.": When the horror of September 11th happened, I realized that Middle East terrorism has picked itself up and slammed itself into the American psyche forever, and I was just as unsafe in my little hometown as I would be in Jerusalem.

The final salvo in my personal war regarding Israel came in an internet chat room for ":thinking women": I used to like to visit. On September 11th, someone brought up the fact that Palestinians were celebrating the horror of thousands of innocent lives lost. (In addition, there were initial reports that The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had claimed responsibility for the attack. The PFLP is the same group that brought us a litany of airline hijackings in the 1970s.) Gretty logged on and excused the celebration, saying, ":If your home, your land and your people had been taken, pushed down or shot, you would want to kill the people responsible, too…The Bible – no, not even the Old Testament – promises any part of the Holy Land to anyone other than the native peoples thereof.": I’m still not sure which Bible she is reading, but it seems as though she is good friends with a Palestinian family in Texas, and has listened to them talk about being forced out of their homes at gunpoint in 1948, when Israel declared its independence and five Arab countries declared war on Israel. Following the war, Israel destroyed Arab villages and then would not allow most of the Arabs who left Palestine - about 700,000 - to return. They wound up living in squalid refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Syria. I posted quotes from documents like Israel’s Declaration of Independence, in which they say, ":We extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness…": I contrasted that with the 1968 Palestinian National Charter’s Article 15: ":The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine.": Gretty fired back, ":We find Israel offering to share Palestine and Jerusalem with the people who already owned it. I might write a resolution to let you live in peace with me in your house, and I will then agree to share the driving of your car with you, but how generous and ‘lawful’ is this…religious zealots disturb me; all religious groups, ‘Christians’ included.": I considered drifting away from the chat room without comment, but I could not – thanks to my commitment to Lenny. I left a note, telling the women that I would no longer be visiting – not because someone had called me a religious zealot, but because I felt some of the comments smacked of anti-Semitism. I wrote: ":Government officials with the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Iraqis, the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden himself all said the U.S. brought this horror on itself because our government supports Israel. Since we are now marching off to war over this, maybe it’s time people all over the world figure out where they stand on the Israel issue. Make a decision based on fact not rhetoric, on history not emotions.":

In the last few months, I have been shocked and saddened more by anti-Semitic remarks on a global scale – one from a Christian man I loved deeply. The Reverend Billy Graham was heard on tapes talking to President Nixon in the 1970s about how Jews run the media and they are ruining America.

":This stranglehold has got to be broken or this country’s going down the drain…if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something,": Graham told Nixon in 1972. ":A lot of Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country and I have no power and no way to handle them.": Graham has since apologized, saying he does not recall making the remarks, but he deeply regrets them. He added that "they do not reflect my views."

Synagogues have been burned and Jewish school children have been attacked in France.

The most heartbreaking incident of all came with the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whom I begged God to protect. Reports say a tape his kidnappers made of his murder contained the last words Pearl was forced to say at knifepoint. ":My father is a Jew, my mother is a Jew and I am a Jew.": Then his kidnappers slit Pearl’s throat, beheaded him and stabbed his body, which has not been found. Has it been so long that we have forgotten this kind of thing happened at Auschwitz during World War II? Have we forgotten the concentration camps, where 6 million European Jews were killed?

Anne Frank believed ":in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.": The Jewish teenager wrote that in her famous diary before she was dragged off to a concentration camp to die. But like her, in spite of the things I have heard in the last year from fellow Christians, friends and even strangers, I believe all people hold in them the potential for tremendous good, and I think there is hope for peace in Israel. I went back to Jerusalem for the first time in ten years last October and visited my friends on both sides of the green line. In Israeli West Jerusalem, a close friend agonized after a suicide bombing, ":I just don’t understand why they want this circus of pain of grief.": In Arab East Jerusalem, I visited my favorite antiques dealer and I cling to the hope that there are many more Palestinians like him. I know that there are millions of Israelis like him. ":We should start up the negotiations again,": he said. "Whether we like it or not, we are two people who will have to share the same land. That is the reality.":

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