Bishop questions attack by Chief Rabbi over disinvestment decision -19/02/06
A bishop has defended the Church's decision to review investment in companies used by Israel in the occupied territories, and called into question an attack on the decision by the Chief Rabbi. The Church of England Synod voted to review its £2.5m investment in Caterpillar, a bulldozer manufacturer. Christian campaigners say the company's bulldozers, in particular the D9 "armoured" version, have been used to flatten 12,000 Palestinian homes, and killed the US peace activist Rachel Corrie.
But Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, criticised the synod's decision as ill-judged along with other Jewish leaders. In unusually harsh language, Dr Sacks called into question the Jewish community's links with the church in a 1,500-word article in the Jewish Chronicle. Dr Williams wrote to the Chief Rabbi to insist that the vote did not represent a boycott or question Israel's right to exist or to self-defence.
But now Bishop of Hulme, Stephen Lowe, has said there had been an over-reaction to the decision by the Church. The Bishop of Hulme questioned Sir Jonathan Sacks’s argument that Israel needed support, not calling to account. He said Sir Jonathan had over-reacted to criticism of Israel. "I found the reaction to the debate in which I sat in the General Synod a little bit over the top. I do find it difficult that if you criticise anything to do with the Israeli government policy towards the Palestinians one is accused of anti-Semitism. I think that's actually wrong."
The Bishop has been joined by another Anglican who is a leading member of the church's peace and reconciliation movement. Writing in the Guardian newspaper, Canon Paul Oestreicher, who lost his Jewish grandmother in the Holocaust and was a refugee from Nazi Germany, says Jewish groups are engaging in moral blackmail in raising the issue of anti-semitism against critics of the Israeli government. He writes: "The main objective of my writing today is to nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it is practised today is in effect to be anti-semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler's racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail”.
7 comments:
"The main objective of my writing today is to nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it is practised today is in effect to be anti-semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler's racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail”. I don't know enough about this issue between the Church and the Israeli government to comment on anyone's motives. But the quote I pasted above strikes me as very true. I wrote a thesis on non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust a while back and got ripped up one side and down the other for being Anti-Semetic, which couldn't be further from the truth. My objective was to examine how we identify the Holocaust as a particularly "Jewish" event when there were more non-Jewish victims than Jewish ones. My argument was that as long as we miss how this was allowed to happen and what it really was, we would continue to have holocausts against minority groups of people. In my paper I wrote that the Jewish people were the single most persecuted group, but also took issue with how the numbers of dead were calculated. My argument was if the criteria to be considered a holocaust victim was to be targeted for your ethnic identity and to be killed by the Nazis both inside and outside of Germany, then why weren't the Ukrainians noted as a major victim group, similar arguments could be made for the Poles. Then I had to dissect "victims of war" from "holocaust victims" and examine how the groups were targeted and eliminated. The roles got very messy. But I digress, back to my original point, I've seen and experienced this happening, "if you don't agree with us on everything, you must be anti-semetic." There has to be room to disagree with someone's politics or whatever, without having the race card pulled on you.
It is the only time I jump up and down saying "I'm jewish" - because I disagree with A LOT that the Israeli gov is doing.
Of course, it means other "jews" get to call me a traitor/collaborator etc, but gentiles are more scared of being anti-semitic by disagreeing with me:-)
I am seriously worried that the whole history of WW2 & the holocaust is being lost to future generations, who see it as the "last of the pogroms", when in fact it was something far more horrifying, fundemental, and is repeated regularly across the globe.
Until we are able to have intelligent debate about the whole period, and look at it scientifically and dispassionately, we will never learn from it. Not properly.
Here is very well written rebuttal:
http://tinyurl.com/pggtq
I can say more to VV regarding Jews being singled out. But lets just look at Germany, Jewish born Germans were singled out as ethnicities by the Nazis, Ukrainian descendants in Germany were not. The only other group singled out were Gypsies, and though much smaller in numbers of course.
beaj - went and had a look at your article - that is EXACTLY the attitude I am talking about:
Israelis don’t want to wipe out Palestinians; Palestinians want to wipe out Israelis Really? Has she been there ans asked every single one of them? I have, and I found it pretty much 50/50. Most Israeli's thought the only way to end the conflict was to "wipe out" every single palestinian, and most palestinians thought the same about Israeli's. Not Jews, I hasten to add.
there was no such thing as a distinct Palestinian people – ...... ‘Palestine’ was an artificial colonial construct
Yeah, and Israel was constructed less than 60 years ago with a similar amount of national identity and historical basis.
The claim that Israel is ‘a cruel occupying power’ is a lie. The only reason it imposes hardship on the Palestinian Arabs is because they remain in a state of war against it.
Israel is quite definitely an occupying power. Whatever definition you want to use, it is occupying land that did not originally fall inside it's national bounderies! And while the new concept of suicide bombings has caused difficulties for every nationality - what reason did Israel have for the discriminatory laws regarding employment, property ownership, voting rights and travel during (relatively) peaceful times? If the UK had put the same restrictions on all Irish people during the IRA ombing campaigns we would have been villified accross the free world, and proabably now be in an all-out state of war!
As to "Jews being singled out" no-one is disputing 6million Jewish deaths, the atrocity of the olocaust or that Jews were a specific target of the Nazi's but....
"The fate of the Romani peoples paralleled that of the Jews after the beginning of World War II: systematic deportation and murder. First, western European Roma were resettled in ghettos. Then they were sent to concentration and extermination camps. Many Roma in the east--Russia, Poland, and the Balkans--were shot by the Einsatzgruppen. In total, hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma were killed during the Holocaust"source
"Christian Poles and other Slavs, notably Ukrainians and Byelorussians, were also primary targets of Nazi Germany hatred during World War II. To the Nazis, the Slavs were considered Untermenschen,or subhumans, and nothing more than obstacles to gaining territory necessary for the superior German race. This philosophy is apparent in Hitler's statement, "The destruction of Poland is our primary task. The aim is not the arrival at a certain line but the annihilation of living forces...."
"the Communist and Socialist parties and members of the trade unions resisted the Nazi regime. Especially in the early years of the Third Reich, political prisoners were a significant portion of the concentration camp inmates. At the end of July 1933, about 27,000 political prisoners were being held in concentration camps in "protective custody." During its twelve year existence, Dachau was always a camp for political prisoners"
Another religious group was specifically targetted too: "about 10,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were imprisoned in concentration camps. Of these, approximately 2,500 to 5,000 died in Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and other camps."
"an estimated 5,000-15,000 (homosexuals)were sent to concentration camps"
Add in the sterilization of Africn-Germans, mentally & physically disabled, and the many other people considered unfit to share the Aryan utopia, and it comes to an awful lot of non-jewish victims.
I think my attitude has gone from centrist to right wing when it comes to the Palestinians. Voting for Hamas to me was voting for terrorism. Just check out the Hamas website. Or go to my blog and check out the articles I put in about the situation.
Another thing is, you should look up the history of the green line. The West Bank is not Arab land, it is up for grabs in my opinion.
Israel was up for grabs too. 80% of Palestine was barren unowned desert in 1900. At the time of the partition Arabs owned 20%, Jews owned around 8%, and the rest was state land. It was up to Britain and the UN to make it a Jewish majority state. Arabs rejected the idea, but it wasn't up to them to reject it.
Since 1948, Israel has been under attack. I really have no sympathies towards the Palestinians. I'm sorry, but I am really on top of the situation and I admit I am most likely biased, but I am still sane and rational for the most part.
I wasn't aware that Jehovah Witnesses were Holocaust Victims. Even German born JW's?
Especially German born JW - they were the ones refusing to salute Hitler, bow to the flag & serve in the armed forces!
I'm not supporting Hamas. As I said in a post at the time, it's a scary, scary world in the ME right now, but I think it's important we don't say Israel can do anything they like because they are under attack. No other country gets that kind of tolerance.
On the Green Line - Israels bounderies were quite definitly defined in 1948. They now hold more land than then. Therefore they have obviously occupied land that wasn't originally theirs. Who it does belong to may well be disputed, but it is not Israeli - indeed most countries still refuse to even draw the lines on a map! Even the Israeli Gov't had accepted they were an occupying force - hence the agreement to pull out!
I do not have a solution to the problems there, but i can accept that both sides are to blame, and both sides are actively perpetuating the hatred.
Of course, if the palestinians living in the occupied territories had been given citizen status, and alowed to work, vote & pay taxes like the Israeli's there, they may not have voted for Hamas in the first place! Apart from the cultural diferences, I found the West bank palestinians to be a very friendly people - even though I was jewish. I did not see the same courtesy offered by Israeli's to my muslim friends or even worse, any visiting Germans!
I'm not a big fan of the settlers. I think the regime that started the settlements caused trouble, but they are fact now. You can't move 200,000 people. They have cities now.
Giving the West Bank and Gaza Arabs voting rights would be demographic suicide for Israel. If the Arabs had won just one of the 5 wars, there might not be very many Jews living in that region anymore.
The Arabs rejected the Partition, and as far as the West Bank is concerned. Jordan used to occupty it, but gave up all rights in the 80's. Therefore it is disputable territories at best, up for negotiations. But now that Hamas is in, and their stated goal is the death of Israel, Israel is not under any obligation to negotiate. I think the time is right for Israel to finalize it's borders, build a wall against the borders and defend attacks with a fierceness the Arabs haven't seen before.
Of course, they don't have to attack.
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