Galilee Flowers
February 25, 2001
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).
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