Help us recognize the many successes of the past year as we also look forward with excitement to upcoming programs. You will hear directly from youth involved in Kids4Peace and get updates on our work in the US and Jerusalem.
Tickets are $50 per person; there will be an opportunity to make an additional pledge of support at the event. The ticket price is fully tax-deductible, and all donations go directly to support the work of Kids4Peace as we develop a new generation of peace leaders.
Palestinian paramedics carry a protester injured during clashes with Israeli forces following a tent city gathering at the Israel-Gaza border, Apr 2, 2018. (photo: Said Khatib / AFP)
Living in Israel has turned me into a person who can live with a government that relates to African asylum-seekers and millions of Palestinians as property.
Living in Israel has hardened my heart. It has made me into a person who cannot believe that Israel will do the right thing. That Israel will make any effort at all to even begin treat the true cancer in our body — the occupation.
The best people I have ever met live in Israel.
They are tireless. They come in all colors and creeds. Their reservoirs of hope, goodness, giving for others, respecting the Other, striving for a better, more human, society — despite everything, despite hatred and graft and incitement and ill-will — are as boundless as they are inexplicable.
The Palestinian health ministry reported that on Friday 491 people were injured by live ammunition after Israeli forces fired on protesters who had gathered near the Israeli border in the besieged Gaza Strip.
A Palestinian journalist shot by Israeli forces during a mass demonstration along the Gaza border has died of his wounds.
Yaser Murtaja, a photographer with the Gaza-based Ain Media agency, was shot in the stomach in Khuza’a in the south of the Gaza Strip on Friday, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
Murtaja, 30, was hit despite wearing a blue flak jacket marked with the word “press,” indicating he was a journalist.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand where much of this comes from. Jews of all ethnicities bear the scars and the genetic memory of every manner of heinous racism, up to and including genocide.
It’s all too true, at the same time, that in a tragic given of human nature, the abused is at great risk of becoming an abuser.
This is Zionism as racism. This is Israel at 70.
This is a country which so demeans and dismisses and conflates Palestinian lives, that after a horrendous casualty rate in massive demonstrations at the Gaza border over the weekend, Eli Hazan, a spokesman for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, referred to the men, women, children and elderly protesters camped hundreds of meters from the border fence, and told i24 News Monday without flinching:
Palestinian using a slingshot at a protest in Gaza. (photo: Said Khatib / AFP / Getty Images)
When an entire people have concluded they have nothing to hope for and nothing to lose — that all their dreams will remain deferred for the foreseeable future — an explosion may be inevitable.
Both Palestinian Islamists and nationalists are out of options, out of ideas, and out of luck. The Palestinian public is out of patience and nearly out of hope. That’s a combustible formula.
The violence last Friday in Gaza, in which 18 Palestinian protesters were killed by Israeli troops near the border, was the worst since the war of 2014. But everything is in place for a significant escalation in coming weeks, particularly in mid-May.
A series of major tripwires are clustered tightly together: commemorations of the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding on May 14–15; mourning by Palestinians who regard the same event as their “catastrophe” and observe May 15 as “Nakba Day”; and the scheduled opening of a US Embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, courtesy of the administration of President Donald Trump.
Things are likely to get worse because Palestinians increasingly feel they have nothing left to lose. The “March of Return” last week drew unprecedented crowds of up to 30,000 Palestinians from all parts of Gaza society. In a festive and surreal atmosphere, vendors sold ice cream to picnicking families as young men risked their lives by approaching the border.
Pushing for Change: Mideast Focus Ministry Film Series V
This film explores the daily lives of Palestinian women living in the West Bank. It portrays their stories in a novel and eye-opening manner through footage captured by the women themselves. Their courage is inspiring as they persist in working for change — and to pave the way for future peace in the region.
Our concern is to help balance the limited and confusing media coverage of the Holy Land. We use compelling films as an entry point for reflection and discussion. As Christians, we respond to Christ’s call to seek justice and love the oppressed. As Americans, we ask: Can we reconcile this calling with our government’s massive financial support of Israeli military operations? We hope the time will come when Jews, Muslims and Christians will again come together in harmony in the Holy Land.
In this series, we see how people pushed to bring about a safe country for the Jewish people, and how today others are still push- ing for safety and change. Do our efforts for change lead to peace and justice . . . or not?
Israeli soldiers shoot tear gas from the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border as Palestinians protest in Gaza, Mar 30, 2018. (photo: Amir Cohen / Reuters)
The Israel Defense Forces consider “only” 16 casualties a “very significant achievement.”
“Just imagine what could have happened. Picture the outcome if they would have burst through the fence, even at a single point, and begun marching into Israel. It would have ended in a bloodbath. . . . We would have no choice but to employ enormous force, and that would have resulted in dozens, if not hundreds, of casualties. The images would have been a huge victory for the Palestinians.”
— Senior Israeli defense official, speaking anonymously
The March 30 Great March of Return to the Gaza border fence was nothing more than Act 1 of an unfolding drama, a dress rehearsal or possibly a pilot for what one can expect to see in the very near future. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are now preparing for April 17, Palestinian Prisoners Day, also the eve of Israel’s Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers, and for May 15, Nakba Day, also the day after the United States is expected to open its new embassy in Jerusalem. Further complicating matters, the latter event coincides with the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. The Great March of Return was initiated and orchestrated by Hamas in an attempt to change the rules of the game, create a new balance of power and send a message to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Palestinian people is far from over. Hamas is alive and kicking, and it is marching as well.
Hamas is in the process of losing its tunnels as a weapon. The IDF and Egypt have also successfully prevented the group from smuggling into Gaza rockets, missiles and other arms that could break the balance of power. Facing the most threatening dead end ever, Hamas found a way to reinvent itself: a popular, mass march by tens of thousands of people, all heading to the Israeli border at the Erez checkpoint, where they would trample the fence, break the Israeli siege and move on toward Jerusalem or at least to the southern town of Ashkelon. Images of IDF tanks and helicopters firing at civilians marching for their freedom would be Israel’s worst imaginable nightmare.
That is why the IDF has decided not to let that happen.
Pushing for Change: Mideast Focus Ministry Film Series V
This Israeli narrative film gives us an Arab’s eye view of contemporary life in Israel. It tells the story of an emerging Palestinian Rap Artist who has issues with his family and confrontations with rival Israeli rappers. Fraught with complexities and confusions in Lyd (Lod) — we get a sense of how diffcult it is to get a footing to push for change.
Our concern is to help balance the limited and confusing media coverage of the Holy Land. We use compelling films as an entry point for reflection and discussion. As Christians, we respond to Christ’s call to seek justice and love the oppressed. As Americans, we ask: Can we reconcile this calling with our government’s massive financial support of Israeli military operations? We hope the time will come when Jews, Muslims and Christians will again come together in harmony in the Holy Land.
In this series, we see how people pushed to bring about a safe country for the Jewish people, and how today others are still push- ing for safety and change. Do our efforts for change lead to peace and justice . . . or not?
An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man walks next to Palestinian women in Jerusalem’s Old City, Sep 10, 2015. (photo: Ammar Awad / Reuters)
Israel is far from being an apartheid state currently, but if it opts for minority rule of an Arab majority, it will have no choice but to adopt apartheid methods.
The updated population data have once again placed the inherent tension between Israel’s Jewish and democratic nature in the forefront of the political arena. While Israeli liberal-minded political forces argue that there is no contradiction and that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic, others on the political right and the left reject the idea.
The Israeli political right was caught off guard by the surprising official figures presented on March 26 at the Knesset by a representative of the Civil Administration, the army unit coordinating the Israeli government’s activities in the occupied territories. The representative indicated that the number of Jews and Arabs living under Israeli control in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean had reached parity at 6.5 million for each side.
Over the years, the Zionist left kept warning about the prospect of a Jewish minority in Israel controlling a Palestinian majority, with only a small number of them enjoying full civil rights. Yet the Israeli right kept dismissing these warnings. It countered with imaginary data showing that some 3 million Palestinians live in Israel and the occupied territories, compared with 6.5 million Jews. However, from the moment the true numbers were communicated to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee with the new data last week by the Israel Defense Forces, the leadership of the political right can no longer argue that political bias is skewing the figures. It is now forced to confront the figures. . . .
After promising to “get rid of them all” . . . the big mystery is why he made the decision in the first place to extend legal status to at least half of the 36,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Israel.
In the face of all of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s past capitulations, it was the most disgraceful, the most transparent. In comparison to all his reversals, it was the quickest, the most humiliating. The man had already taught us a chapter on zigzags and back-and-forths — in the story of the Western Wall egalitarian prayer space and the metal detectors at the Temple Mount, for example — but this time he outdid himself, in both speed and flexibility. A contortionist could only dream of having such a liquid backbone.
What we saw in the past 24 hours is a parody of a prime minister and a tragedy to the state he heads. There’s never been anything like it: The Israeli government signs an agreement with an international organization over an issue that is at the heart of the public debate and about which the government has a firm position. The prime minister declaims to his nation the details of the deal in a jubilant news briefing in the midst of the intermediate days of Passover, and within hours he backtracks.
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