Ateek’s Legacy

 It is time, and more than time, that two books by Jacques Ellul - and one long essay - were translated into English.  Everything else in his oeuvre has been; but not those three, and they are badly needed.

'Un Chretien Pour Israel', from 1983, which contains a masterly dissection of the 1968 PLO Charter, and states that said charter, of the supposedly secular Fatah, is "a perfect expression of the Jihad", and which also contains a magnificent dissection of the massive and malevolent propaganda campaign against Israel - and Jews - conducted by the Muslims and also, at that time (1980s and previous) by the Soviets; 'Ce Dieu Injuste? Theologie Chretienne pour le Peuple d'Israel', which is primarily for a Christian audience and is a brilliant re-reading of a number of Christian scriptural passages that have often been read in an antisemitic manner but which Ellul shows need not - indeed ought not - to be read that way; and 'Les trois piliers du conformisme', which splendidly and in short order demolishes the usual canards trotted out when Muslims are trying to bamboozle naive and hopeful Christians or Jews...'we worship one God', 'Abrahamic faiths', 'religiions of the book'.

It was reading 'Un Chretien pour Israel' - struggling through it page by page with the aid of my trusty French dictionary and a six-month crash course on 'Reading French' under my belt - that permanently immunised me against the kind of nonsense peddled by the likes of Naim Ateek, just around the time that the Palestinianists had really begun to blitz the evangelical protestant community (which has tended to be pro-Israel) with a storm of lying sob-stories about how the Pooor Palestinians were being oppressed by the Evil Joooz of Israel.

I agree with Van Zile except for the following statement: "Given that Jewish soldiers evicted Rev. Dr. Ateek from his home in 1948 when he was an 11-year-old boy, it’s understandable that he would be angry at Israel."  

Ateek, who promotes the orthodoxies of the Palestinian "narrative" never fails to leave out the full context of the war of 1947 - 49: Arab aggression against Israel.  The day after the UN voted to partition the Palestine Mandate into an Arab State and a Jewish State (Nov 29, 1947) the Arab side began attacking the Jews of Palestine with the stated aim of preventing the emergence of the Jewish state.  Arab volunteers in the form of the Arab Leauge-funded Arab Liberation Army poured into Palestine, as did units of the Iraqi army, and joined the fight against the Jews of Palestine. 

During this civil war period, which lasted until May 15, 1948, there were mutual atrocities on both sides.  Numerous Jewish communities were attacked and destroyed and the survivors expelled by Palestinian Arabs and the ALA.  Jews, too, committed some atrocious acts including some evictions of Palestinian Arabs.  Most of Palestine's Arabs who fled, however, did so by choice, not at Jewish gunpoint.

On May 15 , 1948 when Israel declared independence -- recognized both by the U.S. and the USSR -- six Arab armies declared war and invaded Israel with the stated intention to destroy the state and massacre its Jewish population.  In the ensuing fighting, more Jewish communities were destroyed, as were Palestinian Arab communities.  One reuslt of the war was the Transjordanian Arab Legion occupation of Judea and Samaria, renaming it the "West Bank," and "East" Jerusalem.  The Arab Legion expelled all Jews from the east side of Jerusalem, destroyed the Jewish Quarter, including the dynamiting of the 500 year old Hurva Synagogue - rebuilt and rededicated only last year.

Ateek and other propagandists for the Palestinian cause routinely ignore this fuller context, refuse to acknowledge that Arab aggression directly caused a war that resulted in the Palestinian refugee issue.  Also ignored is the same Arab governments, urged on by Palestinian leaders, expelled some one million of their Jewish citizens, most of whom are now living in Israel with their children, grand-children and great-grandchildren.

Until Palestinians acknowledge the role their leaders played in creating their "Nakba" and everything else that followed from that, there simply will not be peace. 

 Re. Israel, the Jews and the Arab Muslims (and the rest of the Ummah, or Mohammedan Mob).

Any educated person in the modern west should do or have done two things.

One: in conjunction with Jacques Ellul's 'Ce Dieu Injuste?' they should read James Parkes 'The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue' and Malcolm Hay 'The Foot of Pride' (aka 'Europe and the Jews').  That chronicles, devastatingly, one type of antisemitism.  

Two: they should also read Andrew Bostom 'The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism' and Martin Gilbert 'In Ishmael's House' and Norman Stillman 'The Jews of Arab Lands' and watch the documentary, 'The Forgotten Refugees'.

I also advise a read of Australian lighthorseman Ion L Idriess' 'The Desert Column' which includes a gripping account of the so-called 'Palestine campaign' in 1917, from Egypt through Sinai and as far as Jaffa where he was badly wounded and unable to continue fighting (hence, he was not able to witness and describe the taking of Jerusalem and, later, Damascus).  He was part of the allied army that swept north from Egypt, ending Ottoman Turkish Muslim rule and, therefore, also breaking the grip of the Empire of Islam on the ancient homeland of the Jews.

 He speaks with obvious admiration of the little Jewish communities the Australian soldiers encountered in what is now Israel.  The Aussies warmed to the Jews, whereas bitter experience had taught them that the Beduin Arab Muslims, and every other kind of Muslim, were not to be trusted as far as you could throw them.

 This is his summary of the situation of the Jews in their own ancestral homeland, as he understood it to be and have been, under Ottoman [Muslim] rule.  It cannot be bettered, for brevity and harsh accuracy.

"Lots of them [that is, the Jews] have had a hard time from the Turks.  They seem to live between two devils, the Turk and the Arab.  Apparently the Turk prevents the Arab from massacring them outright, because the Jews are a very handy people to squeeze taxes from...".

He wouldn't have known about the dhimma, or jizya, but he describes the predicament of these Jews under Muslim rule - which is also the predicament of any dhimmi minority - pretty well.  There will be those Muslims who prefer to keep the dhimmis alive in order to have a milch-cow to exploit; and there will be those Muslims who prefer simply to kill them.  Depending on which type of Muslim is currently ascendant, the dhimmis will either eke out an existence as miserable near-slaves...or suffer mass-murders, expulsions and forced 'conversion'.

That is the condition that the Jews rebelled against, in order to establish Israel. And that is the condition to which the Ummah, or Mohammedan mob, desires once again to reduce the Jews of Israel.

The other three books I would commend to all who pass through seminary - and indeed to anyone in the West and beyond, whether Christian or secular - are: James Parkes, 'The Story of Jerusalem', James Parkes 'Whose Land?' (which puts comprehensively paid to the common and false belief that the land of Israel was entirely Judenrein between AD 70, or AD 135, and the entry onto the scene of the Zionists in the late 19th century); and a book I have often mentioned in these Comments, John Roy Carlson's Cairo to Damascus.

Carlson witnessed with his own eyes - and describes - the Muslims' ethnic cleansing of the ancient Jewish Quarter of the Old City, as a Jewish community that had been established there since the 12th century at least, was driven out by the Jordanian Army.  They were driven out in the clothes they stood up in, and their houses and synagogues rifled and looted and then destroyed by the triumphant Muslims.  Had the Jordanians not at that point been commanded by the Islamophile Arabophile 'Glubb Pasha', the Jews might well have been massacred rather than merely being expelled; but, immediately post-Shoah, being associated with something like that would have been just a tad embarrassing for the British government, no matter how much they hated those uppity Zionists.

Carlson also sums up, in a lapidary footnote, the whole business of the flight of non-Jewish persons, mostly Muslim and mostly Arab, in 1947-49.

In the text proper, on pp 234-5 of the 1951 hardback edition of Cairo to Damascus, we read - 

"some fifty thousand Arabs had fled Jaffa".

The attached footnote, at the bottom of the page, reads thus (I have bolded certain key passages):

"This flight-psychosis, which prevailed among the Arabs and ultimately resulted in the frantic exodus of many Moslems and Christians, is a difficult phenomenon to explain.  It was a mass hysteria induced by poor morale and by fear of revenge and retribution for the Arab massacres and lootings [that is, Muslim massacres and lootings of Jews - CM] from 1920 on. 

"Arab leaders - particularly in the Mufti's Higher Committee - urged residents to clear the fighting areas, promising them that Palestine would be cleared of Jews within thirty days after the Mandate ended.

"After the Jews had been pushed into the sea [note: the Muslims really did say this, Carlson heard them say it with his own ears, to his face  - CM], Arab leaders said, Palestinians could return to their homes and at the same time share in Jewish booty.  They implied that those who refused to leave were pro-Zionist; such people were threatened with retribution.

"In contrast I [Carlson] know of instances where the Jews begged the Arabs, particularly the Christian elements, to remain, guaranteeing their safety and full respect for property.

"These Christians, however, joined the fleeing Moslems, fearing the promised retribution following the promised Arab victory.

"As an instance, the Armenians, who had always got along well with Arab and Jew alike, joined the panicky Moslems, horror-stricken by the memory of the Turkish massacres.

"Wealthy merchants, physicians, bankers, politicians and other leaders were the first to leave.  Later came the poorer elements until, by the time the Mandate expired, those remaining were largely only the ill and the aged, the looters, and the innocents.

"The exodus figure of 750 000 or more Arabs is sheer propaganda, a fictional number that cannot be supported by the facts.  The populace in the country from Jerusalem north to Jericho was not disturbed by the fighting, nor were the Arabs and Christians resident in the congested area within the quadrangle formed by Ramallah, Tularm, Jenin and Nablus - Palestinian territory now annexed by Jordan.

"It must also be pointed out that many of the Moslem so-called refugees were homeless, nomadic wanderers in the first place.  Poor, non-refugee Arabs, such as those in Gaza, have claimed refugee status in order to qualify for American aid."  END CARLSON'S FOOTNOTE.

And to go with Carlson's full-length and eye-opening book there is also Martha Gellhorn's classic article, 'The Arabs of Palestine', which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1961.  

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/the-arabs-of-palestine/4203/

If one wishes to find out, for instance, when 'Gaza' was first called an open-air prison, one must read Gellhorn's article.  She calls it a prison - because of the barrage of Mohammedan Arab 'madhattery' that she encountered there as elsewhere,  she also later compared it to a lunatic asylum! - created and run by...MUSLIM EGYPT, by which it was in 1960 ruled and administered.

And she relates a conversation she had with an Italian Catholic priest, living within Israel, who had extensive contact with the Arabs there, the Christians and the Muslims.  I quote: 'he told me that the Arabs [that is, the Arab Muslims - CM] said, "First we will finish with the Shabbaths, and then with the Sundays.  They never changed their ideas.  They went around looking at the women and the houses they would take when they managed to get rid of the Jews and the Christians".' END QUOTE.

IslamoChristians like Naim Ateek are suicidal fools, blinded by hate - and fear? - to the point where the instinct for self-preservation has been suppressed.

The dhimmi Jew-hater Naim Ateek and all the others like him - far too many, both inside Israel, today, and elsewhere - do not realize, or else refuse to acknowledge to themselves, that all their zealous hating of the Jews and the malicious lies they tell in order to further the Arab/ Muslim jihad against Israel, will earn them no favours: if they get their wish and Israel is destroyed, then if they (the likes of Naim Ateek) are really lucky, they might be permitted to go on living, as despised and degraded serfs, trampled upon and domineered over by their Muslim overlords...