Launch of Methodist Friends of Israel
Anglican Friends of Israel have just announced the following:
We are pleased to announce the launch of Methodist Friends of Israel. This comes at a critical time after the Methodist Church in Britain decided to boycott goods produced by Jews living in Judea and Samaria.
We look forward to co-operating with Methodist Friends of Israel on issues of common concern. We will bring more news on this as it develops.
For background information on the recent Methodist Church National Conference, in which they voted to boycott products from Israeli “illegal” settlements click: here, here, here, here, here, and here .
You can also view my guest post on this topic over at Harry’s Place
Tags: Church Life, Israel
July 25th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
In your article on Harry’s Place you wrote:
“The belief God will restore the Jewish people to the land is a theological one. It does not automatically translate into an “Israel right or wrong” position, or dictate any particular, specific, political position. Thus, one can be a Christian Zionist without this meaning a blank cheque for Israel to do as she pleases.”
I suspect that is where the majority of Methodists will stand. To be fair, I do know of some who hold a principled anti-Zionist position, but I know many more who (like myself) love Israel but cannot condone what they are doing to the Palestinians. I have been a friend of Israel since 1967, when I was a teenager confronted with a Middle Eastern war in which I had no idea who were goodies or baddies. Every other war I knew, I knew whose side I was supposed to be on. Watching Israel fighting for her life against the Arab nations surrounding her caught my imagination and my support. A few years later, I became a Christian, and Israel became part of my story. I have been captivated and fed by the Hebrew scriptures, and learning to read Hebrew was one of the richest blessings of my training.
Since then, I have been horrified by Israeli atrocities in Lebanon and Gaza. Of course I am just as angry about the continued attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah, but I didn’t expect anything better from them: they are hate-filled extremists. I expect rather more from the nation who gave us the prophets. When I translated and studied the prophets, I was struck by the emphasis on “zedek w’mishpat” – justice and rightness (please, not righteousness – that has become what I call stained-glass window religious language). I see little of that in current Israeli responses to Gaza or in building the Wall. It has become part and parcel of the long program of Israeli theft of Palestinian land – please read the Ha’aretz article on the latest theft of Palestinian land by the Israeli authorities: http://networkedblogs.com/64yzV.
I love Israel, and want them to find their place in God’s purposes. I do fear that by their policies, which drive people into an anti-Israel position, they may risk losing the Land for the third time (the first being 586 BC, the second being 70-136 AD). I am not in any way anti-Semitic, and I protest at the kneejerk reaction of those who have written off the Conference Report in such a simplistic way. I agree with your comment, which I quoted: to support the Jewish people does not mean I support all of Israel’s policies, neither does my criticism of Israel make me (or the Methodist Church) anti-Semitic.
July 27th, 2010 at 9:55 pm
Since you quote CHS for unbelievers, you may be interested in his views on Israel, one helpful site is here:
http://www.spurgeon.org/misc/eschat2.htm
September 28th, 2010 at 11:48 am
Please can you show me the evidence that the Gaza Strip and the so called ‘West Bank’ ever belonged to the Palestinians? That land was given to the Jews; inspired by the Balfour Declaration and ratified by international treaty by the League of Nations, then by the United Nation.
The Influence of Winston Churchill meant that about 73% of the land previously given by International Treaty was given to the Arab allies that became Trans Jordan and Iraq et al. The Jews reluctantly agreed to this dishonest but pragmatic demand, and they settled for what they could get in 1948.
The Palestinian Arabs were meant to live in the Jewish State, with no loss of rights. But they were enticed to leave Israel for a short time so the Arab states surrounding Israel could destroy the Jews. Most went into Trans Jordan where their people actually live and belong.
Israel won the war and left Palestinian Arabs from Israel in a chaotic and difficult dilemma. Wherre do they live, to whom do they belong?
In 1967 The Arab nations once again tried to destroy Israel, but the IDF not only defended their small country but actually took back land; Gaza and the West Bank, that was theirs in the first place.
Designating those territories to be a sovereign state of Palestine is totally against internatally agreed treaties and even more importantly the Bible’s account of what God had given in covenant with Abraham ( as far as I know, despite the despicable behaviour of Judah and Isreal, God NEVER rescinded that promise!
Israel has always had a harsh and violent side to their naure (what race hasn’t?) But you say you expected more of the nation that gave us the Prophets! What did the leaders of Judah and Israel do to most of their prophets, including John the Baptist and of course Jesus Christ? Lets get real here,; would any nation on earth including the
September 28th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
rafat and his cronies perpetuated and developed the Myth of a Palestinian nation. It is because of Jerusalem! Its all about this Holy City. The long term agenda for Islam is to destoy Israel and the Jewish people and to completely erredicate anything that speaks of Abraham’s God, and of Jesus Christ.
Wesatern Christians especially liberal minded Methodists and Anglicans need to wake up the the wasr that is really going on here!
Having a romantic ideal of ancient Israel and its prophets is blinding many to the spiritual warfare that is being fought in the Holy Land.
It belongs to God’s chosen people, Abraham’s legitimate son Isaac. God blessed Ishmael descendants with huge tracts of land, but never the land He promised to Jacob who was named Israel for a purpose.
There are many arabs living in Israel, who are better off there than in the arab states surrounding them. They know tooand want it for them selves. What was the Holy Land before the Jews returned in large numbers? It was a (with some small exceptions) a barren waste land!
There is so much more I would like to say, but I doubt it would make any difference. If you really love Israel, do some more research into the agenda og the palistian Authorities who are seen as moderate compared to the hot headed and hate filled Hamas. They want Jerusalem, all of it, and won’t rest until every Jew is destroyed or submits to Islam.
The crimes Israel has committed, compared to what Islam has done and is doing against the Jewish race and against the Christian world pales into insignificance.
Who are we to point the finger at the speck in the Jewish eye and deny the planks in our own? With our wars in Iraq and Afganistan and our ‘turn a blind eye’ to the hundreds of thousands of persecuted Sudanese, Timorese, Burmese and Indian Christians.
September 28th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Clive, the boundaries of the proposed states of Israel and Palestine were defined and established under international law in UN Resolution 181, the full text of which is available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/res181.htm. A discussion of the status of this Resolution vis-a-vis the British Mandate and the League of Nations is found at http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/world/israelborders.php, an essay by Professor Anthony D’Amato entitled “The Legal Boundaries of Israel in International Law.” It is quite clear in law that the West Bank and Gaza were given to the Palestinians. As to your comment “The Palestinian Arabs were meant to live in the Jewish State, with no loss of rights. But they were enticed to leave Israel for a short time so the Arab states surrounding Israel could destroy the Jews” – I entirely agree. The Arab states were definitely villains of the piece in 1948, and again in 1967, when it was only a pre-emptive strike to neutralise the Egyptian Air Force that saved Israel from what could otherwise have been military defeat, and again in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. But Israel’s actions in continuing to build settlements in the West Bank is unquestionably illegal under international law, provocative in the face of efforts to find a workable peace between the two communities, and guaranteed to cause continued friction as long as the Wall and settlements exist.
I do not deny the provocation and aggression by Palestinian and Arab terrorists. But there is wrong on both sides of this, and that needs to be acknowledged and addressed.
September 28th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Sorry for a large chunk of writing that somehow disappeared! Also for the many typos, which again I did not get time to correct!.
September 28th, 2010 at 12:42 pm
It’s one of those immutable laws of nature than typos always hide and camouflage themselves as proper words until you’ve posted. THEN they pop up and wave at you.
Computers. Stupid machines that can only add 1+1 lots of times very quickly. So how come they always outwit us?!
September 28th, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Will be replying when I’ve finished the painting
Regards
Clive McLaren
September 29th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Hi Tony, I accept Israel has many faults in its handling of settlements and the harsh treatment against Palestinian families in the West bank and East Jerusalem. The Wall too is a tragic and intimidating symbol of division and a red rag to their bullish Arab neighbours.
But I am concerned that Western Christians are sending very mixed and conflicting messages to both Jews and Muslims around the world, but especially in Israel .
Does the land of Israel belong to the Jews or does it not? Are very the flawed politically pragmatic to resolutions made by the UN to supersede the original 1922 League of nations plan and even more importantly to over-ride God’s promise to His people? As Christians should we not support God’s covenant.
The article below provides some interesting facts that throw a different light on this complex issue, and I feel shows how Israel cannot win no matter how humanitarian they should be; and how much land it concedes to the Palestinians; whose default position (along with most other Muslim nations) is the destruction of Israel.
Look forward to your response
Regards Clive
October 7, 2002
It’s time to look back on 14 fundamental geographical, historical, and diplomatic facts from the last century relating to the Middle East. These basic facts and figures were stressed in recent statements to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and its subcommission, to the surprise of representatives of both states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
1) After World War I Great Britain accepted the 1922 Mandate for Palestine, and then — with League of Nations approval — used its article 25 to create two distinct entities within the Mandate-designated area.
2) The territory lying between the Jordan River and the eastern desert boundary “of that part of Palestine which was known as Trans-Jordan” (nearly 78 percent) thus became the Emirate of Transjordan. This new entity was put under the rule of Emir Abdullah, the eldest son of the Sharif of Mecca, as a recompense for his support in the war against the Turks, and of Ibn Saud’s seizure of Arabia (Faisal, Abdullah’s brother, later received the even vaster Mandate area of Iraq).
3) Turning a blind eye to article 15, Great Britain also decided that no Jews could reside or buy land in the newly created Emirate. This policy was ratified — after the emirate became a kingdom — by Jordan’s law no. 6, sect. 3, on April 3, 1954, and reactivated in law no. 7, sect. 2, on April 1, 1963. It states that any person may become a citizen of Jordan unless he is a Jew. King Hussein made peace with Israel in 1994, but the Judenrein legislation remains valid today.
4) The remaining area west of the Jordan River (comprising about 22 percent of the original Mandate) was then officially designated “Palestine” by Great Britain. As stated in the 1937 Royal Commission Report, “the primary purpose of the Mandate, as expressed in its preamble and its articles, is to promote the establishment of the Jewish National Home.” This was now greatly restricted.
5) U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 (November 29, 1947) authorized a Partition Plan in this area: for an Arab and a Jewish state — and for a corpus separatum for Jerusalem. The plan was rejected by both the Arab League and the Arab-Palestinian leadership. Aided and abetted by the neighboring Arab countries, local armed Arab Palestinian forces immediately began attacking Jews, who counterattacked. On May 15, 1948, the armies of five Arab League states joined these militias in the invasion of Israel, but their armies failed in their goal of eradicating the fledgling state.
6) The armistice boundaries (1949-1967) left Israel with roughly 16.5 percent, or 8,000 sq. miles, of the original 1922 Mandate area (about 48,000 sq. miles), while about five percent — less Gaza, which was occupied by the Egyptians — was conquered and occupied in 1948 by British General Glubb Pasha, the commander of Abdullah’s Arab Legion. The historic regions of “Judea and Samaria” — their official names as indicated on all British mandate maps until 1948 — were annexed and became the “West Bank” of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1950. All the Jews were expelled from the area and from the Old City of Jerusalem; their synagogues, and even tombstones on the Mount of Olives, were destroyed.
7) Until King Hussein attacked Israel on June 6, 1967, Jordan’s recognized de facto boundaries covered 83 percent of Palestine (78 percent east of the Jordan river, and five percent to the west). Following its military defeat in the Six Day War, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan lost the “West Bank,” which it had illegally annexed 19 years earlier, retaining the huge “Transjordan” portion (78 percent) of the original League of Nations territory.
9) After the 1967 disaster, an Arab League Summit Conference held in Khartoum that November reacted negatively to U.N. Security Council Resolution 247: “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no concessions on the questions of Palestinian national rights.” This was also the determined position of the PLO. Apart from Egypt’s 1981 peace treaty with Israel, there was little change, for the next two decades, in this refusal to negotiate according to U.N. Resolution 242.
10) In those “West Bank and Gaza” areas, designated by the Oslo Accords of 1994 to be placed under the administration of the Palestinian Authority (covering about 5.5 percent of the “Greater Palestine” area on both sides of the Jordan), there is now a population of over 3,200,000, of whom about 35,000 are Christians, but none are Jews.
11) The population of the Jewish state — a state envisaged in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate, and confirmed by the U.N.’s 1947 decision — is now roughly 6,500,000, of whom roughly 20 percent are Arabs (120,000 Christians), Druze, and Bedouin citizens of Israel. Of the more than five million Jewish citizens, about one-half are those Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and their descendants, who fled or left their ancient homeland when massacres, arrests, and ostracism made life impossible (a further 300,000 emigrated to Europe and the Americas, where they number over a million).
12) Today, a tiny, vulnerable Jewish remnant — scarcely 5,000 persons — remains in all the Arab world, less than half of one percent from the near million who were there in 1948 (this does not include the 50,000 in Turkey and Iran, left of about 200,000 in 1945). These are the forgotten Jewish refugees from Arab lands, from countries that will soon be totally judenrein just as Jordan has been since 1922.
13) The 22 Arab League countries cover a global surface of over six million square miles, over ten percent of the land surface on earth. Israel, by contrast, covers barely 8,000 sq. miles.
14) Security Council Resolution 242 has now become the panacea for Arab states, yet their interpretation of its key operative paragraph does not correspond to the English original, which version alone is binding. In March 2002, a Saudi “peace plan” was approved by the Arab League in Beirut, but behind it lurks the former 1981 “Fahd Plan” — with a facelift — that would leave Israel with impossible borders. After the Iraqi menace has been resolved one way or another, what is needed for the “Middle East peace process” is a concerted effort to support the Mitchell plan, which could one day lead to true peace and reconciliation for the whole region. But the Palestinian Authority will only become a genuine partner with Israel, alongside Jordan and Egypt, if there is a radical break with the past, and a new spirit of mutual acceptance prevails between the Arab world and Israel — with individual and collective security and dignity for all. This will only be feasible if democratic institutions and a respect for human rights and the rule of law become the norm, as they now are not. And it will only be feasible if the Arab world recognizes the inalienable legitimacy of Israel’s existence in a part of its historical land.
— David G. Littman is a historian. Since 1986, he has been active on human-rights issues at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. His recent statements on this subject were made as a representative of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, a non-governmental organization.
October 5th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
To the Rev Tony Buglass
Sorry to find no response to my comments and borrowed facts.
Reagards
Clive
October 5th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Sorry you’ve had to wait for a response. I was away in London on business for the weekend, and have been working since then to catch up on local stuff, like running my churches and leading my circuit team.
The simple answer to the question as to whether UN Resolution 181 supersedes the 1922 League of Nations Mandate is ‘yes’. You can argue as much as you like that it is flawed – that is your opinion – but in fact, in international law, Resolution 181 stands. The litany of Arab wrongdoing does not excuse Israel’s illegal occupation and illegal settlements. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Now, as far as a solution is concerned – I have to say I do not see one. There are moderates on both sides who could enable a peaceful settlement, if it were not for the extremists on both sides. As long as the extremists refuse to acknowledge the rights of the other to exist in the land, there will be war.
October 6th, 2010 at 9:16 am
Thanks for replying, albeit a very short and simplistic response. But I do appreciate your role as a Minister is very demanding.
I agree that opinions are not set in stone, but you have not responded to the point (not opinion) that the Bible makes it clear that this land belongs to Israel, as a Minister I am perplexed by your putting so called international law (which overrode illegally its own precedent) above God’s promises!
With no detailed response from you it is difficult to know where you are coming from. My research has convinced me, that as and when Palestinians get the West Bank and Jerusalem, they with their deceitful allies will break every international law to suit themselves and begin the annihilation of all the Jews and Christian from the Holy City and Israel.
And finally if there are two parties, one is ‘stealing land’ the other is planning complete destruction of a people, who as judge to you deal with first?
Regards
Clive
Going on holiday for a couple of weeks, so take a break!
October 6th, 2010 at 12:30 pm
I suggest you read the biblical promises a little more closely. God promised the land to Abraham’s descendants, and according to Rom.4:16 that is all humanity (or at least all people of faith). Israel lost the Promised Land twice, once in 722 and 586 BC, once in 136 AD; Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed in 586 BC and 70 AD. The OT prophets explained the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests as judgment for Israel’s failure to live as God’s people should. The Roman destructions were presumably for the same reason, focussed in certain Christian traditions as punishment for the rejection of Messiah. I wonder if the same standards can be applied today, and that Israel is risking losing the Land again because they have ignored the clear teachings of the Torah concerning justice and truth. They have put their trust again in the modern equivalent of chariots and horses instead of in their God.
My response might have been simple, but I don’t think it was simplistic. I think the Christian Zionist fundamentalist reading of scripture, however, is very simplistic – like most fundamentalism, it offers prooftexts with very little consideration of context. At best, it is questionable. At worst, it is heresy arising from bibliolatry.