Passover and Easter bring fear and un-freedom to Israel and West Bank

Israeli Occupation Announces Closure of the West Bank
PNN
06.04.12

On Friday, 6th April, Israeli military spokesman announced the imposition of a comprehensive closure on the Palestinian territories starting from Thursday evening until Saturday evening on the occasion of the Jewish Passover festival.
He also said that the decision to impose closure came under orders from the Minister of Defense Ehud Barak.
During the closure period, people are not allowed to enter Israel except those in need of medical and humanitarian aid and special cases only once they have obtained the required permits from the Israeli civil administration.

A dark Easter for Palestinian Christians

By Richard Stearns, Washington Post
04.04.12

Each year during Holy week, Christians around the world anticipate what come call the “Old Faithful” of miracles.

At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — built over the traditional site that encompasses Jesus’ tomb and the place of his crucifixion — the archbishop enters the tomb after being inspected by Jewish authorities to ensure he has no means of lighting a fire. After saying prayers and worshiping the risen Christ, the candles miraculously alight.

The ceremony has been performed for centuries; records of the event reach back to the ninth century. Across more than a millennium of Muslim, European, or Jewish rule, the purported miracle has been an inspiration to thousands of pilgrims who flock to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to spread the fire into the rest of Jerusalem.

Once it is brought out of the tomb, the light is spread from person to person, candle by candle, and out into the world. It is a beautiful sight as worshipers from different Christian traditions line the darkened streets holding candles and spreading the light of Jesus Christ. The ceremony reflects the peaceful spread of Jesus’ message from one person to another. Called “Holy Fire Saturday,” this event also prefigures the Easter celebration the following day in which Christians celebrate Jesus’ triumph over death itself.

While Christians mark Christmas as the “silent night” in which God himself took on human flesh, on Easter we proclaim, “Christ the Lord is risen today,” in the words of the old hymn. It’s a miracle not of light, but of life defeating death.

But for the past several years in Jerusalem, the mood on Holy Saturday and the rest of Holy Week has not been one of rejoicing and triumph but instead one of trial and tribulation.

Because of travel restrictions in past years, the vast majority of Christians living in the West Bank have been stopped at checkpoints and prevented from attending one of the most important religious services of the year. Israeli authorities require permits for entering Jerusalem. Local Christians estimate that only 2,000 — 3,000 permits are provided, despite the overwhelming desire among the 50,000 Palestinian Christians to travel from the West Bank and Gaza for the Easter week celebrations in Jerusalem.

Those who make it across checkpoints and into Israel are still barricaded by numerous walls and other security obstructions. As a result, even many who have permits are unable to make it to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In 2010, a Palestinian colleague of mine at World Vision, who had warm memories as a child of the Holy Fire service, was able to return to the Holy Sepulchre. She described the scene for those able to gain entrance to the church: “The crowd, striving to stay joyful, could still feel the change of what Easter had now become and the dark cloud of checkpoints, police forces, and denial of entry that had obscured the joy of this holiday.”

While the ancient Christian communities around Jerusalem await the miracle of the Holy Fire this week, I pray for another miracle — one that would give full religious freedom to the Christians in the West Bank and Gaza. Holy Week has long been a time of pilgrimage to Jerusalem; Christians have worshiped there since the birth of the church, and these sites are a core aspect of the devotion of Palestinian believers.

The restrictions on travel for worship are not only in force during Holy Week, but also for routine Sunday services, weddings, funerals, and baptisms throughout the year. Certainly, Israel can take care of its own security concerns while accommodating peaceful Palestinian Christian worship.

In a recent letter by 80 Palestinian Christian leaders, including the Greek Orthodox archbishop of Jerusalem, Palestinian Christians spoke out against the lack of religious freedom inside Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. They complained of being forced to endure an “assault on our natural and basic right to worship.”

Along with the rest of the world’s Christians, I celebrate a God who brings light from darkness and life from death. And I pray for another miracle this Holy Fire Saturday, one that would remove all restrictions on the freedom to worship for the Christians of the Holy Land.

Richard Stearns is the U.S. president of World Vision, a global Christian humanitarian agency.
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Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the USA, said “It’s a libelous article”. “The army and security services have created a situation where virtually any Christian in the West Bank can visit the Holy Places in Jerusalem on Good Friday and Easter.” He estimated that some 20,000 entry permits had been issued this year.

A holiday of (selective) freedom: thoughts for Passover

Passover thoughts on Zionism and Israel’s siege mentality, and a bit of hope in the form of the local ‘occupy’ movement.

Haggai Matar, +972 blog

05.04.12

Normally I would not pay much attention to anything signed by “Latma” – a Hebrew right-wing media watchdog and satire site. This time, however, I think they’re on to something. The clip they released for the coming holiday – “Happy Passover Bro!” – is catchy, easy going, and most importantly I think it is something that most Jewish Israelis can relate to. And this, to me, is quite sad.

Latma use one of the oldest tricks in the Israeli right-winger book: take a Jewish or a Zionist holiday, wrap it up with a smile and slogans of unity and brotherly love, and what do you get? A condensed capsule of siege mentality of a united and caring “us” vs. an alien and eternally threatening “them.”

“Settler, leftist, or angry screamer – doesn’t matter, you’re my bro!” goes the song, to the tune of Aretha Franklin’s “Think,” linking us directly to the holiday spirit with repeated chants of “freedom.” The song goes on about the differences between left and right, or opposing football clubs, but all these, say the good people at Latma, are nothing in the face of our decades-long tradition of vouching for one another.

This nationalistic ethos of Jews looking out for one another as a group no matter what is at the core of most political thought and practice in Zionist Israel. You see it in the media and in politicians’ rhetoric, and just recently we saw it in the High Court’s ruling on the mass pardon granted to right wingers arrested while protesting against the disengagement, when justices called the dismantling of illegal settlements a “national trauma.”

And so Latma releases this video clip, which so many Israelis can relate to, and once again Jews in Israel will celebrate the holiday of freedom while a general blockade is imposed on the West Bank (as is the procedure for any Israeli holiday), and soon we’ll be celebrating Memorial Day while forgetting all those killed by our army, and then Independence Day, neglecting those who still live under our boot of occupation. The holidays will be celebrated, and a feeling of joyful unity will be in the air, but it will once again be Jewish unity – exclusive and alienating to everyone else.

Yet there is hope
Perhaps for the first time in Israeli history, there is now a second, competing ethos, which could challenge the dominant Zionist one. In the past two weeks, there has been talk of a revival of last summer’s J14 movement for social justice, and small demonstrations and minor “occupation” events are starting to sprout up. As I wrote after one of the bigger demonstrations last year, I believe J14 has the potential to replace the right wing, chauvinistic and siege-mentality elements of Zionist discourse with one that favors cross-national solidarity based on class lines. The slogans and the spirit of the movement seem to be drifting towards defining “us” as the middle, working and poorer classes, as opposed to the capitalist “them.”

Of course this is not something that changes in a day. Most Jews who participated in demonstrations last year surely define themselves as Zionists, and most would probably find themselves agreeing with and enjoying the Latma song. This to me represents the split at the heart of the struggle: on the one hand, there is an internationalist leftist ethos based on equality for all, and on the other is the Zionist background of the activists themselves. While some anti-occupation activists consider this to be a reason to abandon J14, and thus dub it a “struggle to preserve Jewish privilege,” I find hope in the fact that for the fist time there is actually a relevant movement in mainstream Israeli politics that has a fighting chance against nationalism. And it’s our job to be part of the struggle to take it in the right direction.

Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter Sermon 2012 – God raised Jesus to life

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams says that the ultimate test of the Christian religion is not whether it is useful, beneficial or helpful to the human race but whether or not its central claim – the resurrection of Jesus Christ – actually happened.

The full text is below

Anglican Communion News Service: ACNS5085
08.04.12

It just might be the case that the high watermark of aggressive polemic against religious faith has been passed. Recent years have seen so many high-profile assaults on the alleged evils of religion that we’ve almost become used to them; we sigh and pass on, wishing that we could have a bit more of a sensible debate and a bit less hysteria. But there are a few signs that the climate is shifting ever so slightly – not towards a mass return to faith but at least towards a reluctant recognition that religion can’t be blamed for everything – indeed that it has made and still makes positive contributions to our common life.

Two new books on the economic crisis, one by the American Michael Sandel, the other by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, both rather surprisingly float the idea that without some input from religious thinking our ludicrous and destructive economic habits are more likely to go unchecked. And, notoriously, Alain de Botton’s recent book on how to hold on to the best bits of religion without the embarrassing beliefs that go with it created quite a public stir. If it doesn’t exactly amount to a religious revival, it does suggest that a tide may be turning in how serious and liberal-minded commentators think about faith: no longer seen as a brainless and oppressive enemy, it is recognized as a potential ally in challenging a model of human activity and social existence that increasingly feels insane, a model in which unlimited material growth and individual acquisition still seem to trump every other argument about social coherence, international justice and realism in the face of limited resources. We may groan in spirit at the reports of how few young people in our country know the Lord’s Prayer, but there is plenty to suggest that younger people, while still statistically deeply unlikely to be churchgoers, don’t have the hostility to faith that one might expect, but at least share some of the Sandel/Skidelsky/de Botton sense that there is something here to take seriously – when they have a chance to learn about it. It is about the worst possible moment to downgrade the status and professional excellence of religious education in secondary schools – but that’s another sermon…

So we have reason to feel thankful that things appear to be moving on from a pointless stalemate. Yet, granted all this, and given all the appropriate expression of relief Christians may allow themselves, Easter raises an extra question, uncomfortable and unavoidable: perhaps ‘religion’ is more useful than the passing generation of gurus thought; but is it true? Easter makes a claim not just about a potentially illuminating set of human activities but about an event in history and its relation to the action of God. Very simply, in the words of this morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we are told that ‘God raised Jesus to life.’

We are not told that Jesus ‘survived death’; we are not told that the story of the empty tomb is a beautiful imaginative creation that offers inspiration to all sorts of people; we are not told that the message of Jesus lives on. We are told that God did something – that is, that this bit of the human record, the things that Peter and John and Mary Magdalene witnessed on Easter morning, is a moment when, to borrow an image from the 20th century Catholic writer Ronald Knox, the wall turns into a window. In this moment we see through to the ultimate energy behind and within all things. When the universe began, prompted by the will and act of God and maintained in being at every moment by the same will and action, God made it to be a universe in which on a particular Sunday morning in AD33 this will and action would come through the fabric of things and open up an unprecedented possibility – for Jesus and for all of us with him: the possibility of a human life together in which the pouring out of God’s Holy Spirit makes possible a degree of reconciled love between us that could not have been imagined.

It is that reconciled love, and the whole picture of human destiny that goes with it, that attracts those outside the household of faith and even persuades them that the presence of religion in the social order may not be either toxic or irrelevant after all. But for the Christian, the basic fact is that this compelling vision is there only because God raised Jesus. It is not an idea conceived by the spiritual genius of the apostles, those horribly familiar characters with all their blundering and mediocrity, so like us. It is, as the gospel reading insists, a shocking novelty, something done for and to us, not by us. How do we know that it is true? Not by some final knock-down would-be scientific proof, but by the way it works in us through the long story of a whole life and the longer story of the life of the community that believes it. We learn and assimilate its truth by the risk of living it; to those on the edge of it, looking respectfully and wistfully at what it might offer, we can only say, ‘you’ll learn nothing more by looking; at some point you have to decide whether you want to try to live with it and in it.’

And what’s the difference it makes? If God exists and is active, if his will and action truly raised Jesus from the dead, then what we think and do and achieve as human beings is not the only thing that the world’s future depends on. We do all we can; we bring our best intelligence and energy to labour for reconciliation and for justice; but the future of reconciliation and justice doesn’t depend only on us. To say this doesn’t take away one jot of our responsibility or allow us to sit back; as Pascal said, we cannot sleep while Jesus is still in agony, and the continuing sufferings of the world are an image of that agony. But to believe that everything doesn’t depend on us delivers us from two potentially deadly temptations. We may be tempted to do something, anything, just because we can’t bear it if we aren’t making some visible difference; but to act for the sake of acting is futile or worse. Or we may be consumed with anxiety that we haven’t done enough, so consumed that we never have time to be ourselves, to give God thanks for his love and grace and beauty. We may present a face to the world that is so frantic with fear that we have left something undone that we make justice and reconciliation deeply unattractive. We never acquire the grace and freedom to give God thanks for the small moments of joy, the little triumphs of sense and kindness.

And these things may be of real importance when we look at what seem to be the most completely intractable problems of our day. At Easter we cannot help but think about the land that Jesus knew and the city outside whose walls he was crucified. These last months have seen a phase of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians yet again stalling, staggering and delivering little or nothing for those who most need signs of hope. Everything seems to be presented as a zero-sum game. And all who love both the Israeli and the Palestinian communities and long for their security will feel more desperate than ever. A visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, will convince you why the state of Israel exists and must go on existing. A visit to any border checkpoint will convince you that the daily harassment and humiliation of Palestinians of all ages and backgrounds cannot be a justifiable or even sustainable price to pay for security. Listening to a rabbi talking about what it is like to witness the gathering up of body parts after a terrorist attack is something that can’t be forgotten; neither is listening to a Palestinian whose parent or child has been killed in front of their eyes in a mortar bombing.

So how do we respond? By turning up the volume of partisanship, by searching for new diplomatic initiatives, by pretending it isn’t as bad as all that after all? If we believe in a God who acts, we have to go beyond this. We have to put immense energy into supporting those on the ground who show that they believe in a God who acts – those who continue, through networks like One Voice and the Bereaved Families Forum, to bring together people from both sides and challenge them to discover empathy and mutual commitment – what Stephen Cherry of Durham in a wonderful book on forgiveness has called ‘distasteful empathy’, a feeling for the other or the enemy that we’d rather not have to develop. Small moments of recognition and kindness. We have to prod and nag and encourage the religious leadership in the Holy Land on all sides to speak as if they believed in a God who acts, not only a God who endorses their version of reality. We have to pray, to pray for wisdom and strength and endurance for all who are hungry for peace and justice, pray that people will go on looking for a truly shared future. And we Christians in particular have to look for ways of practically supporting our brothers and sisters there through agencies like the Friends of the Holy Land or the Jerusalem and Middle East Church Association – to help them stay in a context where they feel more and more unwelcome, yet where so many of them remain because they want to play a full part in creating this unimaginable shared future – because they believe in a God who acts. These are the priorities that all Christian leaders would want to flag up this Easter in our concern for what many call ‘the land of the Holy One’.

One situation among many – but how can it not be on our minds and hearts at this time of the Christian year, this central moment of hope? Such situations can so readily draw us towards despair – including the despair of hyper-activism and unfocused anger. To believe in a God who raises Jesus from the dead is never an alibi, letting us do less than we thought we would have to. But it is a way of allowing in our own thoughts and actions some space for God to emerge as a God who creates a future. Someone once remarked that resurrection was never something you could plan for. But what we can do is to make the space, the silence, for the act of God to come through. When all’s said and done about the newly acknowledged social value of religion, we mustn’t forget that what we ultimately have to speak about isn’t this but God: the God who raised Jesus and, as St Paul repeatedly says, will raise us also with him. Even if every commentator in the country expressed generous appreciation of the Church (and we probably needn’t hold our breath…), we’d still be bound to say, ‘Thank you – but what matters isn’t our usefulness or niceness or whatever: it’s God, purposive and active, even – especially – when we are at the end of our resources. It’s the moment when the wall becomes a window.’