Palestinian Christians denounce priest for claiming Israel grants them freedom
Patrick O. Strickland
A
photo published by the Israeli prime minister’s office on Flickr shows
Jibril Nadaf with Benjamin Netanyahu in August 2013.
9448118017_69f698ef3b_o.jpg
Yara
Salameh was shocked when she watched Jibril Nadaf, a priest from
Nazareth, repeat a call on fellow Palestinian Christians to serve in the
Israeli military.
Nadaf
claimed Israel was the only country in the Middle East where Christians
are “not persecuted” during a speech to the United Nations Human Rights
Council on 23 September.
“I
couldn’t believe it,” said Salameh, a 25-year-old pharmacist from the
village of Turan, home to both Christians and Muslims, located in the
Galilee region of present-day Israel.
“He
represents no one but himself. The army he wants us to join is the same
one shedding the blood of our innocent brothers and sisters —
Palestinian blood just like ours,” she told The Electronic Intifada.
Nadaf
is active at the local Greek Orthodox Church in Yafa al-Naseriyye, a
Palestinian village near his native Nazareth. In October 2012, he joined
the Forum for Drafting the Christian Community, an organization that
promotes military conscription for Palestinian Christians in Israel.
Though
military service is not mandatory for Palestinian Christians, Israel
has in recent years promoted voluntary conscription among them.
“This
is just another evil plot to make us view our struggle from a religious
point of view, and it is rubbish,” added Salameh, whose grandparents
were forced out of the almost entirely Christian village of Iqrit in the
Galilee region during the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine
by Zionist forces.
Signing a death warrant?
And
despite Nadaf having become widely known and extremely vocal, most
other Palestinian citizens of Israel have roundly rejected his calls to
serve in Israel’s military, which for decades has occupied Palestinian,
Syrian and Lebanese lands in violation of international law.
An
estimated 1.7 million Palestinians carry Israeli citizenship and live
in cities, towns and villages across the country. Together they
constitute a diverse community of people from Muslim, Christian and
Druze religious backgrounds, and hold a wide array of political
affiliations.
According
to the Haifa-based legal center Adalah, more than fifty Israeli laws
restrict the political expression of and limit access to state resources
for all Palestinian citizens of Israel, regardless of religious
background or political affiliation.
Nadaf,
however, made no mention in his speech at the United Nations of the
dozens of anti-Palestinian laws or the widespread discrimination
Palestinians in Israel face in every aspect of life.
Those who campaign against Israel, he said, “are signing the death warrant on the last free Christians in the Holy Land.”
Palestinian activists and political leaders in present-day Israel condemned Nadaf’s speech.
According
to the rightwing news site The Times of Israel, Nadaf was brought to
Geneva to deliver the speech by The Face of Israel, a group affiliated
with the Israeli government.
“Working to divide”
Basel
Ghattas is a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, with Balad,
a political party representing Palestinians in Israel. He is a vocal
opponent of the ongoing efforts to conscript Palestinian Christians into
the military.
Nadaf
went to the United Nations to speak “with the Israeli administration,
and that reveals what his true goals are,” Ghattas told The Electronic
Intifada. “He serves the rightwing Israeli establishment by working to
divide Christians and Muslims. It’s about marketing Israel’s policies.”
The
widespread resistance to Nadaf’s program and Israeli efforts to
increase military conscription haven’t stopped Benjamin Netanyahu’s
government from further attempting to divide the Palestinian minority
along sectarian lines.
In
September, Gideon Saar, the Israeli interior minister known for his
anti-Palestinian views, ordered the country’s population registry to
allow Christians to register as “Aramean” rather than “Arab” on official
identification documents (supposedly a reference to ancient
Aramaic-speaking peoples in the region).
“It’s
ridiculous,” Ghattas added. “They are trying to use the spread of
extremist Islamist groups in Syria, Iraq and even Lebanon to claim
Israel protects Christians. But Palestinian Christians are persecuted by
the Israeli occupation.”
He
added that “the majority of Christians [in present-day Israel] are
against this plan, and we’re confident that [conscription] won’t be
victorious.”
“Racist goals”
In
July 2013, The Times of Israel reported that a group of Palestinian
Christians associated with Nadaf in Nazareth and elsewhere were planning
to establish Sons of the New Testament, a new political party that
supports Christian enlistment in Israel’s occupation army.
“This
is really crazy and dangerous,” Waad Ghantous, a 23-year-old activist
whose grandfather was expelled from the Galilee village of Kufr Birim in
1948, told The Electronic Intifada. “As Palestinians living in the
occupied ’48 territories [present-day Israel], we shouldn’t help Israel
succeed in its colonial [and] racist goals by volunteering to divide
ourselves even more.”
“Christian,
Muslim, Druze, Aramean – it doesn’t matter,” she said. “The West Bank,
Gaza, Jerusalem or Haifa — it still doesn’t matter. We are all
Palestinians, and it is occupation no matter where we live or what our
political and religious backgrounds are.”
Back
in February, Israeli politician Yariv Levin proposed a law that would
create separate representation for Christians and the rest of the
Palestinian community in Israel on a national employment committee.
activestills13988503153mk9j. jpg
Students at Tel Aviv University protest a government plan to enlist Palestinian Christians in the Israeli army, April 2014.
(Shiraz Grinbaum / ActiveStills)
Though
it remains unclear how much support these efforts enjoy, a clear
majority of Palestinians in Israel have campaigned continuously against
both enlistment and the top-down efforts to divide them.
Eighteen
Palestinian groups in Israel subsequently issued a joint statement
denouncing the draft law as “colonial” and “sectarian.”
The
statement decries the legislation for the parallels it shares with
“approaches adopted by the apartheid regime in South Africa, and by
France in its colonial rule in Algeria, among others.”
“It
is a policy that seeks to fragment the original people of the land into
small groups with narrowed identities to replace their national
identity,” the statement adds.
Israel’s
designs for Christians come as a growing number of conscientious
objectors are emerging among Palestinian Druze, a religious minority
that has been required to serve in Israel’s military since a minority of
Druze religious leaders signed an agreement with the government in
1956.
“Sectarian warfare”
“The
movement against conscription is growing very fast, and people know
about the dangers of serving in the military much more than before,”
said Fady Asleh, a founding member of Refuse, one of the leading groups
campaigning against mandatory military service for Palestinian Druze.
“But
at the same time, the Zionist groups and Israeli institutions are
working on their project to conscript us more than before, as well. We
have a lack of institutions to represent Palestinians [in present-day
Israel],” he said. “Israeli institutions have threatened to condition
our rights on our ‘loyalty’ to the state. That is neither moral nor
legal.”
“Israel
is well aware that this has nothing to do with religion,” Asleh added.
“It’s about sectarian warfare being imposed on Arabs here by an
occupier. Israel dreams of bringing up a new generation that thinks
about its religious sect before its Palestinian national identity.”
Baladna,
a Haifa-based Palestinian advocacy group and signatory of the
statement, has also been at the forefront of campaigning against
military conscription.
“It’s
important that we all understand that Nadaf is basically an Israeli
tool,” Nadim Nashif, director of Baladna, told The Electronic Intifada.
“He goes to the UN the US, and Europe on trips funded by Israel and
Zionist groups.”
Though
Nashif believes Israel’s conscription project is doomed to failure, he
said “it is very important to continue resisting” Israel’s attempts to
conscript Palestinians of any background into the military.
“The main risk we face by inaction is that [military service] will one day be mandatory,” he warned.
Patrick
O. Strickland is an independent journalist and frequent contributor to
The Electronic Intifada. His reportage can be found at www.postrickland.com. Follow him on Twitter: @P_Strickland_.
Tags: Jibril Nadaf sectarianism Palestinian citizens of Israel UN Human Rights Council Palestinian Christians
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