by Colin Hyde
Belizeans and our brothers and sisters in the Caribbean should never support or ignore apartheid, genocide, and the enslavement of people anywhere, not just because those things are horrifically wrong, but because we have been victims of those atrocities. Sadly, Israel is guilty of all of those things. Disappointingly, some leading Christians here have declared that Israel is justified in its actions. We do understand the dilemma of our fundamentalist Christian brothers and sisters. Because they believe in the literal Bible, they believe that Israel is above human reproach.
The Almighty Father could have chosen any tribe to birth Jesus. Bully for the Jews, the tribe that was chosen; but that blessing – which they don’t appreciate – we can’t, for that, allow them to have their way in the worst kinds of ways. Since WWII they brand anyone who questions their activities as anti-Semitic. Respect to the girls from Ireland who, at a recent basketball tournament refused to stand alongside Israel’s girls when Israel’s anthem was played, or shake hands with them, the Irish girls arriving at that stand after the Israeli girls launched charges of anti-Semitism at them. Now, while the Israelis do to the people of Gaza what Hitler and the Nazis did to them, the world is supposed to turn a blind eye.
It took quite long for our pastors to take off the blindfold. Our God is not for apartheid, genocide, and the enslavement of people.
What Israel is doing with the backing of fundamentalist Christians is causing great harm to the Christian flock. Spiritually, Israel doesn’t mind what happens to us. They think The Christ is an imposter, and they treated Him like the worst of criminals. Fundamentalist Christians, what we call die-haad in politics and sports, not only need to grasp the wrongness of their support of Israel’s devastation of Gaza, but also how their position is affecting our young people.
This war on Gaza, the Jews are scoring a great victory over Christianity. Our young people are seeing images and reading about this Israeli massacre and destruction in Gaza. They know that without Christian support the Zionists in Israel would have to go back behind their fences. They know this support is wrong, and it will cause them to fall away from the church, whose guidance they so sorely need.
I don’t know that young Jews support what their leaders are doing. Children and youth don’t have all the information needed to advise them, but they see things, and the lasting images are of their leaders murdering innocents. The only difference between what their army is doing in Gaza and what the Nazis did to their ancestors in Germany, is the scale.
Better late than never, they say; first, Reverend Benguche of the Methodists said these atrocities aren’t right, and now in the Friday Reporter we see that Pastor Lance Lewis has stepped out against the slaughter of innocents.
Back on November 16, in an interview with Love FM’s Vejea Alvarez, Pastor Lewis used the term “collateral damage” when he discussed what Israel was doing in Gaza. Speaking about Hamas’s attack on Israel, he told Vejea, “I’m saying to you that when you attack a nation in this way, you will incur the return in a very serious way on the part of Israel.” Though Vejea was incredulous, couldn’t believe the pastor’s justification of Israeli cruelty, Pastor Lance didn’t budge from his position.
It took too long, months too long; still, big respect to Pastor Lance, the head of the National Evangelical Association of Belize (NEAB), for telling the Reporter’s Michelle Sutherland that in his view, “Israel has gone too far!” Sutherland said Pastor Lance said he put the blame on Netanyahu.
Pastor Lance told Ms. Sutherland: “There are Christians on both sides! You are killing innocent people that are not connected to the situation with Hamas. You [Israeli government] are going too far. You cannot fully obliterate the whole group … Just draw the line and call it a day! You might feel bad that you didn’t achieve your target, but is your target to destroy an entire set of people? If you are trying to get after a small group of people, why kill everybody? Enough is enough! Time to stop the war, and just give peace a chance, that is what we are saying.” I will pass off his omitting to mention the innocent Muslims who are being murdered as a slip, an unfortunate lapse.
Pastor Lance told Ms. Michelle that the churches were about to review their stance, a stance which many think was very ugly. Just as in Israel, there’ll be some hardliners in the local leadership of the flock. Hopefully, those who have on blinders for this new Israel will get over their myopia.
Of course, there won’t be peace
A sneaky, weed-smoking Bob Marley fan put out a list of the top fifteen reggae songs, and gave the top spot to Peter Tosh with the song Legalize It, and ten of the next 14 spots went to Marley. I don’t know music. It’s possible that the songs of Slaytam Stoot: Toots & the Maytals are not reggae. If so, I am out of place to be very disappointed that someone could list the top 15 reggae songs and not one of Toots’ pieces made the grade. The weed world likes Legalize It. But where there is truth in the world, the song that tops every chart is Tosh’s Equal Rights.
A letter published in Yahoo says in Israel the saying goes that, if Hamas put down its weapons there would be peace, and if Israel put down its weapons there would be no Israel. I wouldn’t question the integrity of anyone who said that was the absolute truth. The letter writer said it’s in Hamas’s charter to eliminate Israel. Over the years Hamas has, in official pronouncements, tempered this position. But on that one I’m skeptical. We aren’t supposed to judge hearts, but a deer will be wise to be leery if a jaguar with its mouth full of canine teeth said it’s time to lie down on the lawn as brothers, as per the Bible prediction.
We know Bible history, and there Palestine’s story is littered with wars and rumors of wars. The sense I have is that, post the birth of Jesus, the area has known some peace when the Jews weren’t prominent, when dehn noh mi di run things. The Jewish Virtual Library says … “The Jewish state comes to an end in 70 A.D., when Romans begin to actively drive Jews from the home they had lived in for a millennium.” All the Jews didn’t disperse to the diaspora. Those who stayed kept their space and lived as best they could as a non-dominant force. Then along came the Zionists, who won the support of the newly constituted UN in 1948. It was bad enough for the mighty powers of the earth to excise land from the Palestinians and give the Zionists a country. The grief for the Palestinians was compounded when they tried to take back their land in 1967 and Israel, with the support of their friends, took away more land from them.
In 1977 the immortal Peter Tosh sang, “Everyone is crying out for peace, yes, None is crying out for justice. I don’t want no peace, I need equal rights and justice … Palestine is fighting for equal rights and justice, Down in Angola, equal rights and justice …” Equal rights and justice demands that Israel give back the land it took in 1967.
Israel claims that it’s a matter of security why it must rout Hamas, and the only way they can achieve that is by scorching the earth. Israel seeks justification before the world with these claims that Hamas was getting support from the UN. During the civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador, the genocidal militaries murdered Catholic missionaries on the pretext that they were helping the peasants. Someone has to tell the Zionists we have seen that card played before. What the UN is doing, and what the Catholics did, it’s about being humanitarian.