GALILEE FLOWERS By Israel Shamir
Roger Alexander
By Israel Shamir
When in 1543, the typhoon-blown Portuguese schooners approached the
shores of Japan, the astonished sailors could not believe their eyes: on
a warm spring day, the tropical island ahoy was buried under snow. They
were witness to one of the real Seven Wonders of the World, the flowers
of sakura, the wild cherry of Japan. As soon as the benevolent heaven
bestows this seasonal gift to earth, the Japanese forget their wives and
kids, their duties, employers and bills; they just sit under the trees,
drink sake wine and write poems, short and sharp as swords.
That is why, these days, leaving behind our man-made troubles, I sit
under the white cloud of a tree and watch the beautiful white and pink
blossoms of almond trees covering the hills of Galilee. These lovely
blossoms are our version of the Japanese sakura, and a chance to indulge
in the custom of flower viewing. A honey aroma wafts through the air;
the skies are crystal blue. Yellow daisies dance on the lush green
grass at the base of these almond wonders, interspersed by violet
cyclamen and red anemones. The glorious backdrop is provided by the huge
snow mass of Jebel al Sheikh (Mt Hermon). Palestine is a sister to
Japan. These two hilly lands are home to stubborn mountain folk, devoted
to their customs and ways.
For all the similarities in the landscape, there are differences. The
hill we sit on, all white like Jaffa sea surf, is the ruin of a village.
If we were in Japan, it would be alive and humming. The village of Birim
has been dead for fifty years. It is beautiful even in death, like
Ophelia floating down the stream in the pre-Raphaelite painting of
Millais. It was not ruined by war. Its Christian inhabitants were
expelled from their houses well after the 1948 war. They were told to
leave for a week or two, for ‘security’ reasons. They had no option but
to believe the Israeli officers and move out. Their village was
dynamited, their church surrounded by barbed wire. They went to Israeli
court, they went to the government, commissions were appointed and
petitions signed. Nothing helped. Ever since, for 50 years, they have
lived in the nearby villages and on Sundays they continue to visit their
church. Their lands were seized by their Jewish neighbors, but they
still bring their dead to be buried in the church graveyard, under the
sign of the cross.
Until the arrival of the Israeli army, this ruined village with its
orphaned church was the home of the rural Christians of Birim who, for
centuries of Moslem rule, lived in peace with their Moslem neighbors of
Nebi Yosha and with the old Sephardi Jewish community of nearby Safed.
This little Guernica in the Galillee can single-handedly undermine the
myth of a ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization opposing a ‘monstrous’ Islam.
This myth lays at the foundation of the Christian Zionist movement;
among its fervent supporters, one can find a friend of Mark Rich and a
newly minted New York citizen, W. J. Clinton.
The problems of the Middle East are ugly enough without the current
Moslem-bashing. The pro-Israeli pundits of the New York Times quote the
blood-curling verses on Jihad, retell the old traditions of religious
wars and persecutions, to ‘prove’ Islam’s cruelty and intolerance. They
are repeated by a pleasant upper-class Jewish lady from London, Barbra
Amiel. In a sotto voce, she writes about ‘exclusivist’ Islam and Jewish
‘moderation’. In order to incite hatred, Israel’s lobby works all the
ropes. Before the rise of Israel, Arab sheiks were depicted as romantic
heroes in movies acted by Rudolf Valentino. Nowadays, the pro-Israel
producers of Hollywood turn out propaganda films on ill-shaven Moslem
terrorists with the subtlety of Edward D. Wood, Jr. This new prejudice
is amplified a hundredfold by the Christian Zionist Congress, claiming
‘protection for Christians of Palestine from the Moslem (?!)
persecution’. These people obviously have not walked among the ruins of
Birim.
Another email comes into my laptop, this time from Gaza. An American
girl, Alison Weir from San Francisco evades Israeli bullets, comforts
the scared Palestinian kids, and writes: “The problem is when you know
the truth, it is far too cruel, far too diametrically opposite what we
used to think and what everyone still thinks to express. The lie is too
big, the repression too complete, the Palestinians' lives too horrible
to write about reasonably”.
Well, Alison is right. We face a huge lie, an anti-Moslem blood libel,
and it is time to stop it. I do not think that the problems of Middle
East have anything to do with religion. But if the supporters of Israel
want to wake up the sleeping ghost of religious intolerance, to incite
Christians against Moslems, let us audit their balance.
If these Christian Zionists care for Christ, not only for Zion, let them
learn what Jews and Moslems feel towards Christ. Rami Rozen expressed
the Jewish tradition in a long feature in a major Israeli newspaper
Haaretz[i]: “Jews feel towards Jesus today what they felt in 4 c or in
the Middle Ages… It is not fear, it is hatred and despise”. “For
centuries, Jews concealed from Christians their hate to Jesus, and this
tradition continues even now”. “He is revolting and repulsive”, said an
important modern religious Jewish thinker. Rozen writes that this
“repulsion passed from the observant Jews to the general Israeli
public”.
On Christmas Eve, according to a report in the Jerusalem local paper,
Kol Ha-Ir[ii], Hassids customarily do not read holy books, as it could
save Jesus from eternal punishment (the Talmud teaches that Jesus boils
in hell[iii]). This custom was dying out, but Hassids of Habad, the
fervent nationalists, brought it back to life. I still remember old Jews
spitting while passing by a church, and cursing the dead, while passing
by a Christian cemetery. Last year in Jerusalem, a Jew decided to
refresh the tradition. He spat at Holy Cross, carried in the procession
along the city. Police saved him from further trouble, but the court
fined him $50, despite his claim that he just fulfilled his religious
duty.
Last year, the biggest Israeli tabloid Yedioth Aharonoth reprinted in
its library the Jewish anti-Gospel, Toledoth Eshu, compiled in the
Middle Ages. It is the third recent reprint, including one in a
newspaper. If the Gospel is the book of love, Toledoth is the book of
hate for Christ. The hero of the book is Judas. He captures Jesus by
polluting his purity. According to Toledoth, the conception of Christ
was in sin, the miracles of Jesus were witchcraft, his resurrection but
a trick.
Joseph Dan, a Professor of Jewish mysticism in Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, writing on the death of Jesus stated: “The modern Jewish
apologists, hesitantly adopted by the church, preferred to put the blame
on Romans. But the medieval Jew did not wish to pass the buck. He tried
to prove that Jesus had to be killed, and he was proud of killing Him.
The Jews hated and despised Christ and Christians”. Actually, adds Prof.
Dan, there is little place to doubt that the Jewish enemies of Jesus
caused his execution.
Even today, Jews in Israel refer to Jesus by the demeaning word Yeshu
(instead of Yeshua), meaning ‘Perish his name’. There is an ongoing
argument, whether His name was turned into a swear word, or other way
around. In a similar pun, the Gospel is called ‘Avon Gilaion’, the
booklet of Sin. These are the endearing feeling of the friends of
Christian Zionists towards Christ.
What about Moslems? The Moslems venerate Christ. He is called ‘The Word
of God”, “Logos”, Messiah, the Prophet and is considered “a Messenger of
God”, along with Abraham, Moses and Muhammad. Many chapters of the
Kor’an tell the story of Christ, his virgin birth and his persecution by
Jews. His saintly mother is admired, and the Immaculate Conception is
one of the tenets of Islam. The name of Christ glorifies the golden
edifice of Haram a-Sharif. According to the Moslem faith, it was there
that the founder of Islam met Jesus, and they prayed together. The
Hadith, the Moslem tradition, says in the name of the prophet, ‘We do
not forbid you to believe in Christ, we order you to”. Moslems identify
their prophet with Paracletes, the Helper (Jn 14:16) whose coming was
predicted by Jesus. They venerate places associated with the life of
Jesus: the place of Ascension, the Tomb of Lazarus, the Holy Sepulchre
are adjacent to a mosque and perfectly accessible by Christians.
While Moslems do not consider Jesus – God, they proclaim him as the
Messiah, the Anointed one, the Paradise Dweller. This religious idea,
familiar to Nestorians and other early churches, but rejected by
mainstream Christianity, opened the gates for those Jews, who could not
part with the notion of strict monotheism. That is why many Palestinian
Jews and Christians of the 7th century accepted Islam and became
Palestinian Moslems. They remained in their villages, they did not
depart for Poland or England, they did not learn Yiddish, they did not
study the Talmud, but they continued to shepherd their flocks and plant
almond trees, they remained faithful to their land and to the great idea
of the fraternity of men.
In the south of Hebron, in the ruins of Susiah, one can see how in the
course of two centuries a synagogue slowly evolved into a mosque, as the
population of nearby caves abandoned the exclusionary faith of
Babylonian wizards and adopted Islam. These shepherds still live there,
in the same caves. In the last year, the Israeli army has twice tried
to expel them to provide more room for new settlers from Brooklyn.
Why, in this season of blossoming almond trees, do I brood on the
sensitive subject of Jewish and Moslem attitudes towards Christ? Because
one has to stop the mills of hatred operated by Israel’s supporters.
Because the “Judeo-Christian” code language is being used to justify the
barbed wire around Birim’s Church and the tanks around Bethlehem.
Because there is a duty to remove an obstacle from the path of the
blind.
The majority of the Christian Zionists are simple misled souls, people
of good intentions but little knowledge. They think they ‘support Jews’,
but they promote the Christ-hating spirit among the Jews. It was not in
vain that a hero of the Zionist Bible, Exodus by Leon Uris, kept a
poster in his room saying ‘We crucified Christ’. It was not in vain
that an Israeli soldier on the roadblock of Bethlehem told me yesterday,
‘We starve the beasts’, referring to the native Christians of the city
of Nativity. It was not in vain that the Gospel was burned on a stake
in Israel, while anti-Gospel literature is widely spread; that new
immigrant Jews embracing Christianity are persecuted and deported; that
every preacher of the Christian faith in Israel can be sent to jail
according to new anti-Christian laws; that Israeli archaeologists erase
the Christian holy sites and memories off the face of the Holy Land.
To the leaders of the Christian Zionists, who surely know these facts,
but lead their innocent flock on the path of the Anti-Christ, I say,
“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Christ to sin,
it would be better for him to have a large millstone tied round his neck
and be drowned in the deep sea” (Mt 18:6).
To my Jewish brothers I say: the opinions of medieval Jews do not bind
us. Every Jew can decide for himself, whether to pray for the
destruction of the Gentiles or to share the blessing of the Holy Land
with the villagers of Birim and Bethlehem. Within the Jewish people,
there were always spiritual descendants of the prophets who wished to
bring peace and blessing to all the children of Adam. As true as this
almond blossom, in you the prophecy will be fulfilled: ‘All the nations
of the earth will bless you’ (Deut. 7).
Israel Shamir is one of the best-known and respected Russian Israeli
writers and journalists. He wrote for Haaretz, BBC, Pravda and
translated Agnon, Joyce and Chandler into Russian. His articles The Rape
of Dulcinea, Kid Sister and The Test Failed could be found on many
Internet sites, www.thestruggle.org, www.antiwar, www.NileMedia etc. He
can be reached at sham...@netvision.net.il, or write P.O.B. 23714 Tel
Aviv 61236