Activism

A Christmas plea to my Christian brothers and sisters

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

On this Christmas in the year 2018, hear my confession, and my plea:

I need help.

I need your help.

Many lives are at stake.

It is a big ask.

It would take courage, determination and commitment, love and grace.

In the wake of the Holocaust – the culmination of centuries of Christian anti-Semitism — my People, the Jewish People, felt a deep need for a safe and eternal refuge – a Jewish homeland — and persuaded the Western World to put it in the Holy Land, where we were outnumbered by Gentiles — Christians and Muslims.

Robert Herbst

We were historically powerless.  We were traumatized and fearful.  We thought our safety lay in accumulating power – military, economic, financial and political power – and in cleansing from our part of the Holy Land the Palestinian Christians and Muslims who had lived on the Land for millennia.  The notion of a Jewish homeland, where Jews would always be free to live among the other Peoples of the Holy Land, quickly morphed into a Jewish State which privileges Jews over all other peoples.  My People passed scores of laws discriminating against Palestinians in rights and resources.  We relegated millions of Palestinians to refugee camps where they have languished for generations.  We put millions of Palestinians under military occupation and rule.  We imported tens of thousands of Jewish religious fundamentalists who settled on Palestinian lands, thinking that our People – the Chosen People — were meant by God to rule over all of the Holy Land, from the River to the Sea.

In identification with our oppressors, we became oppressors ourselves.  We have become the most powerful nation – militarily and economically – in the Middle East.  But we have lost our Jewish religious, moral and ethical principles requiring us to refrain from oppressing others and to treat the stranger among us as our own.

We remain traumatized and fearful.  We now also fear those we have oppressed, that they might wish to do to us what we have done to them.

We are turning even more inward, more inured to killing, to maiming, to our own oppression of others. We put down Palestinian violent resistance to our oppression with an Iron Fist, and put down non-violent Palestinian resistance – the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) of Palestinian civil society – with arrest, detention, deportation, intelligence and hasbara (propaganda) operations abroad designed to punish and marginalize such resistance.

We have lost our way.

We are losing our children who, with the clear eyes of the young, see the truth of what we have wrought, what we have done to others, and what we have done to ourselves.

We need help.

We need your help.

You, who in the “Exceptional Nation” of my birth, — a Christian nation — have helped facilitate, finance and otherwise support this oppression, which has resulted in the reduction of the Christian population of the Holy Land from 11% to under 1% now.

I therefore beseech you, as you celebrate Christmas this year and enjoy the New Year and every New Year to come:

Speak up to your Jewish Brothers and Sisters!

Engage us in dialogue.

Those of you who have been to the Holy Land and seen with your own eyes the plight of Palestinians living under occupation, discrimination and oppression, speak up!  Express your concern, and your opposition to our oppression.

Those of you who have not been there, but who have read about conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, ask us questions.

Ask us how we justify what we do there.  Not just to the world, but to ourselves.

Ask us in interfaith meetings, of both clergy and laity.  Wherever you encounter us, speak up!

As I said, this will take courage, not to remain silent out of fear of offending us, or because of guilt over Christian anti-Semitism by your forebears.  We need you and your intervention.

Recognize our fear and trauma, but speak truth to our power.  Talk to us critically about what we are doing to the Palestinians.  Not once, not twice, but over and over again.  Oppose what we are doing, not out of hate, but out of love.

Love of truth, and of all our fellow men, women and children, who deserve to live with freedom, human rights and dignity.

Like the Jew whose birth you celebrate today, help us to recognize that we are one human family, and that we all must speak truth to power, wherever it oppresses rather than lifts people up.

Merry Christmas!

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Thank you, Robert Herbst. I for one, will do all I can to help.

‘Oppose what we are doing, not out of hate, but out of love.’

You’re not asking much are you? Opposition will never be seen as anything but hate! Marc Lamont Hill gave a very passionate speech at the UN and was promptly removed from CNN because their handlers cannot abide opposition. He has been vilified as antisemitic. Shame on jews who allow racist jews to be their mouthpiece. I think you’re preaching to the wrong choir Mr. Herbst.

‘Recognize our fear and trauma, but speak truth to our power.’

That should be conditional. Sorry, but the fear and trauma has been shoved down the collective throats of humanity in order to keep people looking over there and not over here. A palestinian child gets shot in the back – fear and trauma again? A wounded unarmed palestinian is shot in the head and the shooter congratulated on video – fear and trauma, again? A disabled palestinian man is summarily execuated – fear and trauma, again? 4 palestinian children playing on a beach and blown up – fear and trauma, again? 500+ palestinian children killed – let me guess, fear and trauma? A mother, father and baby burned alive – don’t tell me, fear and trauma? Exactly how many crimes is ‘fear and trauma’ supposed to cover?

This recent article seems timely:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/remember-christ-palestinian-refugee-181224101728798.html#ampshare=https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/remember-christ-palestinian-refugee-181224101728798.html

“Remember: Christ was a Palestinian refugee” Al Jazeera, Dec. 25/18, by Hamid Dabashi
(Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.)

“And when the angels said, ‘O Mary, indeed Allah gives you good tidings of a word from Him, whose name will be the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary – distinguished in this world and the hereafter and among those brought near [to Allah]'” (The Quran 3:45).

“There is something beautifully sacred about the moment in the Quran when the angels inform Mary she is about to give birth to Jesus. Angels bring her the good news. They tell her of how ‘He will speak to the people in the cradle and in maturity and will be of the righteous.’

“The sublime innocence of Mary at hearing this news can hardly be better captured in any scripture: ‘She said, ‘My Lord, how will I have a child when no man has touched me?’ [The angel] said, ‘Such is Allah; He creates what He wills. When He decrees a matter, He only says to it, ‘Be,’ and it is'” (The Quran 3:47).

“God Himself, according to the Quran, teaches Christ: ‘And He will teach him writing and wisdom and the Torah and the Gospel.’ (The Quran 3:48).

“Based on these and other Quranic passages, Muslims should have no theological problem marking, celebrating, rejoicing at the birth of Christ as a prophet sent by God.

“For every age, a ‘different’ Christ.”
“All of these may appear as strange and outlandish in a world plagued by religious bigotry and historical illiteracy. Generations of European depiction of Christ as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white man have made it difficult for European and North American Christians today to imagine him for what he was: a Jewish Palestinian refugee child who grew up to become a towering revolutionary figure.

“In his exquisite study, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (1985), the eminent historian and theologian Jaroslav Pelikan has demonstrated that, throughout history the image of Christ has gone through successive reformations, from a Jewish Rabbi to ‘Light of Gentiles,’ ‘the King of Kings,’ ‘the Son of Man,’ ‘the Monk who rules the World,’ ‘the Universal Man,’ ‘the Prince of Peace,’ to a liberator who inspired Lev Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr to ‘the Man who belongs to the World.’

“In the Latin American context, in particular, and through the emancipatory work of liberation theologians, the figure of Christ emerges as the revolutionary leader of the wretched of the earth.

“The Peruvian philosopher, theologian and Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez has revolutionised our contemporary understanding of Christ. In my own work on Islamic liberation theology, I have been deeply influenced by the work of Father Gutierrez, who next to the eminent Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas have brought the prophetic voices of Biblical exegesis to bear on our contemporary lives.

“For years at Columbia, I have been teaching a book called Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from The Heart: The Story of Elvia Alvarado (1989) in which there is a splendid a chapter called: Jesus was an Organizer.

“The Nazareth-born Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman has a short film called, Cyber Palestine (1999), in which he presents the story of a modern-day Mary and Joseph as they attempt to cross from Gaza into Bethlehem. As a parable of the Palestinian predicament in their own homeland, ‘Cyber Palestine’ captures the quintessence of the story of the birth of Christ under military occupation of the Romans then and the Zionists now.

“Imagine Christ as a Jewish Palestinian labour organiser refugee from Honduras! Donald Trump and his Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen would probably not have allowed him into the US.

“Against the grain of history”
“The dark days of Zionism laying a false claim on Judaism and Palestine alike are happily over. The lies of a gang of European settler colonialists trying to rob Jews of their ancestral faith and Palestinians of their historical homeland have finally come to a crushing defeat when Jews and Palestinians, and Jews as Palestinians, have come together to lay a post-Zionist claim on their ancestral faith and homeland alike.

“The massive propaganda to cast the resistance of Palestinians to the colonial occupation and theft of their homeland as a battle between ‘Jews and Arabs’ was so dominant in the la la land of the US and even Europe that the very idea that Palestinians are Christians, too, and that Jesus was, in fact, a Palestinian Jewish Rabbi scares and confuses the living daylight out of their slumbering ignorance.

“The very simple fact that Palestinians have historically been Jews, Christians, and Muslims was hard to digest in that la la land. By extension, also the very simple fact that Christ and Mary are two seminal figures in the Quran has also been seen as a strange proposition in this banality.

“Jesus was a Palestinian Jew who spoke Aramaic, a language in the same family as Hebrew and Arabic. He came from the same prophetic tradition as Prophets Moses and Mohammad.

“There are, of course, doctrinal differences between the figure of Jesus as he appears in the Quran and his divinity as understood in Christianity. Here it is crucial to remember the manner in which in both Persian poetry and Islamic mysticism, the figure of Christ expands into the far more pervasive icon of divine mercy. The seminal Sufi master Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) has in his works, particularly in the chapter, The Wisdom of Prophecy in the Word of Jesus, in his masterpiece, Fusus al-Hikam/Bezels of Wisdom, sought to bring conceptual harmony between the Muslim and Christian perceptions of Jesus.

“Through his doctrine of ‘Oneness of Being,’ Ibn Arabi accommodated the question of sonship in Christian doctrine: Jesus emerges as a ‘Perfect Man’ and ‘the Seal of Saints.’ Ibn Arabi cites the Quranic references to Jesus’ ability to bring a clay bird to life as an indication of the Divine Will.

“In the Muslim Sufis’ Christology, we have a solid body of evidence in which we see the current animus presumed between various religions of Palestine as political hogwash. We need literary knowledge, historical consciousness, and intellectual responsibility with all of which to dismantle the thick apartheid walls that ignorant hateful people are erecting among us all.

“Merry Christmas everyone! Remember Christ was a Palestinian refugee – a Jewish Palestinian refugee, who is the founding figure of Christianity, and a beloved prophet for Muslims. The rest is commentary.”

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It strikes me as:
– odd that Mr. Herbst – born, raised, educated, living and working in America – chooses to identify himself not as American or as Jewish-American but as a Jew;
– self-hating (as discussed in a recent thread) that he chooses to conflate his Jewish identity with that of Jewish supremacists (Zionists) and their unjust and immoral “Jewish State” project; and
– anti-Semitic that he chooses also to conflate all Jews with Zionism and the “Jewish State”.