Blog Post

A H Harry Oussoren • Apr 29, 2024

End Settler Colonialism in Palestine

A Personal Witness  --  for those impatient with too long texts, there are action ideas at the end of the piece. 

1.     I have been the product of a Christian cultural context in which antisemitism was and still is a malignancy. I absorbed that culture through church, school, family, and culture in which I grew up. I was born in a time when Jews were being killed only for being Jews by so-called Aryan Nazi German leaders and their willing murdering agents.  The murder of 6,000,000-plus Jews is a blot on the whole human family, an affront to God, and the most evident of the too-many criminal occasions when the powerful demonized and eliminated the less powerful and innocent vulnerable human members of a religion, tribe, nation, ethnicity,  gender, some “other” human diversity. The holocaust is an unforgiveable crime against humanity and the Jewish people.


2.     As a mature person, I have sought to shed the inherited antisemitism, by appreciating Jewish culture and its faith heritage. I sought out cooperative and collaborative relationships with Jewish individuals and communities and became better able to discern truth from lies and prejudices. I have appreciated the special human gifts and wisdoms Jewish peers have shared and lived and am grateful for their patience with my ignorance.


3.     I must admit that my knowledge of the history of Palestine and its people in the 20th century was shallow and inadequately informed.  It is only in the last decade that I have been able to gain more understanding of the fundamental dynamics that have underlain the frequent flash points of conflict and political intrigue that have become public.


My awareness of the  anti-apartheid liberation movement in South Africa increased my general awareness, particularly as I talked with South Africans.   I learned that tarring the movement with the label “communist” was a ploy that had traction in the western world and particularly in the USA and UK. 


I became aware of Canada’s own settler colonial history which began with a relationship between European entrepreneurs and Indigenous peoples for mutual convenience and support, and ended with the creation of an apartheid state as legislated in the Indian Act of 1876 (frequently amended). Dispossession of lands and resources, subjugation leading to assimilation and cultural and human genocide, and economic and social and spiritual marginalization were the outcomes. As part of the settler colonial agenda, Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Inuit, and Metis) have also been dehumanized labelled savages, animals, and other epithets to provide settlers with reason to hate, diminish, and disdain their amazingly peaceable and spiritual Indigenous hosts to Turtle Island.  My church has not yet confessed its part in nor formally repudiated this apartheid regime legislated in the Indian Act. 


The Russian invasion of Ukraine is yet another of the many stories of settler colonization seeking to expand imperial power and to subjugate a vulnerable neighbour – more learning. 


4.     These learnings of history and biblical-spiritual learnings have propelled me into the quest of truth, resistance to false authority, and justice-based peace for the human family.  I have understood that the apparent victors in the colonization dynamic create false narratives to “justify” their actions and to gain the support of their own people. Truth is the first victim in war and in colonization struggles, and has been whether it is with Nazi Germans, Afrikaners, Canadian settler churches and governments, Russian nationalist leaders, Chinese politicians with Uighurs, or, with political Zionist ideologues and their advocates.


5.     The genocide currently being carried out by Israel against Palestinians in both Gaza and the Occupied Westbank and East Jerusalem is consistent with settler colonial patterns in world history.  The issue is fundamentally summed up by the sentence of intention:  we must enlarge our control/possession/governance over as much of Palestine as we can by any means at our disposal and diminish/reduce/destroy/evict/ethnically cleanse/kill as many Palestinians/Arabs to ensure that this region is and remains the homeland for Jews.

a.     This is the vision or ideology expressed in early political Zionist writings.

b.     It is articulated as the goal of Zionist political leaders to be pursued intentionally and persistently under military political Plan D (for Dalet, the 4th Hebrew alphabet letter), requested by David Ben-Gurion before he became Israel's first prime minister. (See Jewish UK Historian Ilan Pappe’s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”. London, One World Publications, 2006-2023. pp. 86-126 passim.)(Google: “Plan D” for Wikipedia summary)

c.     The vision is the motivation for the horrors that the subjugated Palestinian people have had to live with (and resist)  for 76 years, from Partition in 1948 – the Nakba (Catastrophe) - and before.   That regime became the "normal" which the state of Israel dominated and USA facilitated in  "peace processes" intended to institutionalize the colonized reality.


This agenda is implemented by what an Amnesty International report describes as “…massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians … all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. …  This system is maintained by violations … found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention."


The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines apartheid as a system designed to maintain one racial group's domination over another through policies or practices that include murder, bodily or mental harm, arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment, poor living conditions, denial of basic rights, racial segregation, exploitative labour practices, and persecution of opponents.

https://www.readthemaple.com/heres-what-amnesty-internationals-report-calling-out-israeli-apartheid-means-for-canada/


The Canadian Jewish social and political commentator Naomi Klein,  writes:

Political Zionism: It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land – a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate. Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/24/zionism-seder-protest-new-york-gaza-israel?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

 Read also Naomi Klein's  reflections on the Israeli genocide:  https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGe5q2cGw/

 

6.     While Israel claims the “right to defend itself” from Palestinian resistance and assaults, Palestinians, as subjugated and occupied people, have the “right to resist”.  To be sure, when resistance involves crimes against humanity, then rights trespass into illegality - whether perpetrated by Israelis or Palestinians.  But the history since Partition (and before) is replete with illustrations of Israel using militant resistance as an excuse and as seize-able military opportunity to take more Palestinian lands and villages, and to “ethnically cleanse”, kill, expel, or imprison resisting Palestinians in vastly disproportionate measures - injustice abounds well beyond self-defense. 

 

7.     Israel has operated as if it were a state that has earned “impunity" - because of the holocaust?  It has not! Its crimes against humanity and its war crimes, its disregard of UN General Assembly resolutions, UN Security Council judgements, and verdicts and advisory decisions of the International Court of Justice clearly attest to Israel’s disregard and disdain of the international community and violations of its standards, including the 4th Geneva Convention.   Current rumours suggest the International Criminal Court is on the verge of criminally prosecuting Israeli decision makers.


Israel has been accorded and has counted on the complicity and the all-too-ready support of the United States of America with its powerful veto in the Security Council, and on both political support and war material supplies from the USA, Germany, Canada for its terrorizing actions; and, finally, it counts on its home-grown and safely-guarded nuclear weapon.  These and too many other actions are the marks of a “rogue” state which will not observe the foundational and legal international declarations for peace, justice, and lawful order on Earth.  Its accomplices are also vulnerable to criminal prosecution.


8.     Israel has been aided in this self-granted “impunity” by its political allies, compliant media sources, and a very well-developed and influential international lobby which has spun a convincing but false narrative to gain widespread support especially in western nations, and to discredit and dehumanize the Palestinian victims of Israeli Zionism.  Antisemitism – an evil – has been weaponized. Advocates of truth, justice and peace have been pilloried and too often prosecuted as antisemitic for critiquing Israel’s Zionist settler colonial apartheid policies and brutal military control.


9.     The United Church of Canada in the 1970s had signals from insightful and courageous witnesses about the fundamental Zionist agenda, but the Church as part of Christendom was still too guilt-ridden because of its historic contribution to the antisemitic agenda, especially during the second World War years.  It too often prevented Church bodies from  engaging critically the political Zionist agenda and its colonizing implications.


Even the 2022 – 44th General Council side-stepped adopting critical analyses sent from regional Church Councils addressing Israel’s Zionist intentions.  The Church’s current governing bodies have not yet condemned the current genocide in Gaza and the Occupied Westbank.


10.  Now after a life-time of experience and too much historical evidence, I can no longer simply accept the pro-Israel lobby’s false interpretation of the reality in Palestine  that blames Palestinians as the aggressors. It’s time my Church also adopted a more evidence-based critical position and a Gospel-driven course of action. To do so would be to take a substantial step along with a rising tide of voices to diminish the suffering and tyranny which Palestinians have been compelled to live under for 76 years. It is time – especially after the total destruction of Gaza and the murder of far more than 35,000 women, children, and men, to embrace the persistent biblical faith and the call of the Spirit guiding the whole Church to be witnesses to the truth and bearers of the Good News of liberation, abundance, kinship, and justice-based peace. 

 

The issue in Palestine is not a conflict between two protagonists or several religions. It is simply the colonial settler domination and apartheid-based ethnic cleansing and genocide by Israel of the indigenous Palestinian people. This is a tragic and costly parable of victims falsely transformed into the presumed aggressors, by the real aggressors who themselves have been transformed from being victims of one of history’s most evil extirpation of humanity to become the terrorizing aggressors seeking imperial hegemony of the entire Palestinian terrain at the cost of its indigenous people.

(Witness the parable’s lived reality by viewing Joshua Vis' Youtube video  “The Law and the Prophets”:
 
https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+video+%22The+Law+and+the+Prophets%22&oq=youtube+video+%22The+Law+and+the+Prophets%22&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggA

 

11.  As a member and minister of The United Church of Canada, I am impatient with the leadership of my Church's unwillingness to express clearly its abhorrence of Israel’s apartheid and genocidal settler colonial policies and the flagrant and persistent violation of international law and order.   I await our Church's clear take on the political situation.  It's not a new role!


Truth, peace and justice for the one global family and for all Creation is the Creator’s heart’s desire and it must always be ours. All the peoples who inhabit Palestine have a right to self-determination, the right to live peaceably and justly in their homeland, and the right to share equitably the bountiful gifts of the Creator.  The current Kairos Ceasefire Pilgrimage takes ecumenical steps in the right direction.     

https://www.kairoscanada.org/gaza-ceasefire-pilgrimage/calls-for-action.   See the Pilgrimage's core convictions  https://www.gazaceasefirepilgrimage.com/core-convictions.   

I believe our Church can do more.  The General Council as an act of repentance could confess:  "Both the sins of omission in not standing with the Palestinian people, or in the sins of commission where there has been active support for what experts overwhelmingly identify genocidal intent in the ongoing war on Gaza."  (Ecumenical Kairos Pilgrimage final core conviction.)


We too can be in solidarity with our Palestinian sisters and brothers.   We can express our concern with and for Israelis and Jewish neighbours also praying for an end to these endless rounds of death and destruction.   Who doesn't want to learn to live in just peace and mutual appreciation?   


The Spirit is calling us all to act faithfully - individually, as a family, as a community of faith, as a regional Council, as a denomination, as a nation.   Our local congregation has a Focus Group for learning more.  We've had a pilgrimage to Parliament Hill, some of us march weekly  to call for justice and peace, walking from the Human Rights monument to Parliament and beyond.  We've written to federal government politicians and opposition leaders, to civil society organizations like Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME.ca) and we've grappled with underlying issues.   


And as a United Church member I and others have written to the Moderator (CLansdowne@united-church.ca) , the General Secretary (MBlair@united-church.ca), the General Council Executive (GCE@united-church.ca) to encourage them to take even more steps that witness on all our behalf,    Every action can contribute something to the lengthy arc of justice and God's indefatigable habit of mending the world.  The Spirit is calling, especially via the voices of Palestinian sisters & brothers.


Pilgrim Praxis

By A H Harry Oussoren 26 Mar, 2024
Call to Action for Justice & Peace in Palestine
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