When my kids were active members with our church’s youth groups I got to know a man named Nabil as he had daughters very close in age to my sons. I learned that Nabil’s parents and grandparents owned two farms in Palestine that bore oranges, lemons, and limes. Then the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and Palestinian Christians by Jews started in 1948. Over the next three years Jewish soldiers seized or destroyed approximately 425 Palestinian villages, according to former North Park University professor or religion, Don Wagner. In Wagner’s Book, Dying in the Land of Promise, he estimates that 756,000 Palestinians and Palestinian Christians were forcibly removed with a majority becoming refugees. Nabil’s family was allowed to take only what they could while on foot with Jewish soldiers brandishing flamethrowers during the dispossession and “escort.” The farmland became the Ben-Gurion airport. Nabil’s family spent three years in a Jordanian refugee camp before coming to America.
President Jimmy Carter wrote a book in 2006 called Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. The Jewish military and government continues to separate Jews from non-Jews by building massive walls in excess of 20′ high, constructing more settlements for Jews on seized land, curtailing access to electricity, fuel, and clean water, and establishing checkpoints to restrict movement in what now have become the largest open-air prisons in the world: truly an apartheid state.
Several years ago I attended a lecture that featured two Chicagoans, Max Blumenthal (a Jew from the Rogers Park neighborhood) and Ali Abunimah. Mr. Blumenthal recounted many of the pro-discrimination laws passed by the Jewish legislature called The Knesset. Over 50 laws permit discrimination against Palestinians and Palestinian Christians in the areas of housing, education, dating, etc. These can be found in his book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. Mr. Abunimah is founder and director of Electric Intifada: https://electronicintifada.net/ (Check out some pictures.)
I had hoped and prayed that President Obama’s administration would decrease U.S. military aid to Israel, negotiate some sort of peace accord, and bring a small amount of justice to the oppressed affected by the apartheid state. Nope, not on his watch. The situation is well beyond dire, and can be best summarized by a poem I heard today, written by Gabrielle Spear. It is called “(terror)tory.”
