Churches in the United States need to add their voices to the calls coming from the heads of Palestinian churches in the Holy Land who are urging the global Christian community to stand with international legitimacy and justice.
Background on President Trump’s announcement regarding Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The issue has its roots in history and in the hearts of billions of adherents of the world’s three most populous religions. Billionaire Israel partisan Sheldon Adelson pushed for Trump’s move…
Netanyahu and the Israel lobbyists are leading Trump (over the advice of his generals) into a war with Iran – they are manufacturing Holocaust-level predictions that a non-nuclear Iran is preparing to ‘vaporize’ Israel, the most powerful, nuclear-armed state in the Middle East. See 10 examples of Israeli-authored policies, and 10 reasons why U.S. military officers support the Iran deal…
Chemi Shalev writes: Trump could turn out to be the Israeli right wing’s worst nightmare. Obama had to take into account the pro-Israel lobby, the Republican-led Congress and the staunch Israel supporters in his own Democratic Party. Netanyahu exploited them all. Trump is a completely different story. The GOP won’t dare confront him as it would Obama. A President who emphasizes “his personal belief that peace is possible and that the time has come to make a deal” is one who spells trouble for Jewish settlers and their champions…
Palestinians’ formative years are scarred by what they witness and experience living under the Israeli military occupation of their lands that has been in place 50 years: Israeli settler violence against them in their homes, destroying their property, theft of their land and burning of their crops… even some instances in which Israeli extremists have burned Palestinians in their homes while they were sleeping.
With a single exception, all the countries were targeted for attack in 2001, with similar plans in 1996, 1991, 1982, and the 1950s. The fact is that Trump’s action continues policies influenced by people working on behalf of a foreign country, whose goal has been to destabilize and reshape an entire region. The result has been devastating wars, massive refugee movement that is uprooting entire peoples and transforming parts of Europe, desperate terrorism, and now the horror that is ISIS. If this decades-long effort is not halted, it will increasingly devastate the region, our country, and the world…
The Trump administration is shaping its policy toward Israel and a potential peace settlement with the Palestinians in ways that may seem surprising for a president who had appeared to offer the government in Jerusalem a blank check on the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and other issues.”
Trump’s evolving settlement policy appears more lenient toward Israel than the Obama administration’s, but not as lenient as sought by many of Israel’s strongest backers. There may be more continuity with past policy on Israel and on Iran than many foreign policy analysts had expected.