Israel’s new favorite christians

On 3 September, a Haaretz headline proclaimed: “Israeli Christian community, neither Arab nor Palestinian, are fighting to save identity.”

Datelined Baram National Park, Israel, the article is structured around the Aramean Heritage Camp, a late-summer camp in the Upper Galilee for kids from Israel’s Aramean community.

All you need to know about this community, apparently, can be boiled down to two points:

They are neither Arab nor Palestinian, although they speak Arabic.

They all want to join the IDF.

The article begins: “One camper here says she plans to join the Israel Defense Forces and become a ‘fighter’ after she graduates high school. The boys relaxing in the grass nearby nod their heads to indicate that they plan to do the same.”

A few paragraphs later, we hear from the camp’s director, Shadi Halul: “We are not part of the Israeli-Arab conflict, but somehow we’ve been pulled into it… We are not Arabs, and we are not Palestinians.”

It seems Halul has done a pretty good job of being pulled into the conflict, given the article’s specification that he is a former lieutenant in the IDF Paratroopers’ Brigade. He’s also engaged in a fair bit of pulling himself, lecturing the campers on “the importance of serving their country.”

Halul, we learn, is the spokesman for the Israeli Christians Recruitment Forum, founded by Israeli Greek Orthodox priest Gabriel Nadaf, who has received a “warm embrace… from the ruling Likud party and right-wing organizations.”

This is not the first time, of course, that Israel has glommed onto regional Christian communities in the anti-Arab struggle. The Maronites of Lebanon, for example, were long regarded by Zionists as a sympathetic ally and a civilized oasis amidst the Muslim hordes. This view has presumably been aided by a persistent habit among Maronite sectors of pretending not to be Arab.

Earlier this year, a friend and I were picked up hitchhiking in Beirut by an older Maronite man who enthusiastically informed us that the “real Lebanon” only extended from Gemmayzeh, a Christian neighborhood in the capital, to Batroun, a Christian coastal town to the north. Further conversation revealed that this man was a cousin of Fadi Frem, a former leader of the Lebanese Phalangist party and a main protagonist of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, one of the historical highlights of Israeli-Lebanese collaboration.

The nasty affair disposed of up to several thousand Palestinian civilians. Never mind that the founder of the Phalangists got the idea for his party from the Nazis.

Additional ironies accrue in the Haaretz article, which notes that the Aramean Heritage Camp is “located among the ruins of a Christian-Maronite village whose residents were expelled in the 1948 War of Independence.” This is a good deal more forthcoming than the official Israeli line on 1948, according to which villages were intentionally abandoned. But it’s not until later in the piece that we learn the precise significance of the expulsion, when Haaretz cites Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies researcher Dr. Amnon Ramon’s opinion on the Arameans’ “attempt to invent a new nationality”:

“Actually, he notes, many of the families who identify as Arameans, like Halul’s, were expelled from the village of Biram [in] 1948. By distancing themselves from Arab society, Ramon says, many hope they can convince the government to allow them to return to their old homes, as they’ve been promised for years. It is no coincidence that the site of their heritage camp is on the ruins of this town.”

Ramon also debunks Halul’s ludicrous demographic fantasy that between 30,000 and 40,000 persons would immediately change their nationality from “Arab” to “Aramean” if permitted by law, estimating that there are at most “a few hundred families” that self-identify as such.

There’s a reason for the saying: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” But it remains to be seen whether the Israelis permit anyone else to butt in on their monopoly over the right of return.

Haaretz charts Halul’s descent into ever deeper delusion with his claim that Israel is one of the few countries in the region where Christians aren’t threatened. Palestinian Christians—who self-identify as Palestinian and who make up the vast majority of the Christian population of Israel and the Palestinian territories—would presumably beg to differ with Halul’s calculation, given that they are subject to the very same institutionalized oppression as Palestinian Muslims.

An Electronic Intifada essay from 2006 details how Israeli persecution knows no religious bounds. In addition to being “denied basic religious freedoms [and] routinely prohibited from traveling very short distances to worship,” the cross-sectarian Palestinian reality includes “[d]aily experiences of humiliation at checkpoints, of land confiscation to make way for the separation barrier, the illegal occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory, lack of mobility and access to basic services, unemployment, poverty, and no sense of hope for a better future for [one’s] children.”

But no matter. Halul detects infinite human freedom in the fact that his female campers are able to wear short shorts: “You see how they dress? Just like the Jews. Where could they get away with that in any other country but here?”

As for other things the Israelis regularly get away with such as indiscriminate killing, the IDF presumably stands to benefit greatly from current efforts to institute a pre-army training program for Christian high school graduates. After all, the more Arabic-speaking Christians on board with the ritual slaughter of Palestinians, the more reasonable it looks.

(From the: Blog Telesur)