Ted Schmidt, Toronto, ON

“The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”

— Arundhati Roy

Historically driven by Western holocaust guilt we handed Israel a get-out-of-jail-free card. It intimidates and silences mainstream media politicians, civil society leaders, and many activists – by making the issue of Israel so toxic that none dare touch it. It has been the modern day third rail. Nobody wanted to be called an anti-Semite which you were deemed if you criticised the longest running occupation in history.

In 2003 after retirement from teaching I was editing the Catholic New Times and one day I picked up the phone to hear me called an “Effing Nazi” because I dared criticize Israel. I had been writing about Israel/Palestine since 1987 always insisting on a double solidarity, for the safety of all in the state of Israel but also defending the humiliated face of Palestine.

A decade ago I was called an anti-Semite by an old friend and then by a high school classmate, who five years later issued a needless apology. His wife was Jewish and now they both agreed with me! My crime – defending Palestinian rights.

Two years ago on an elevator the door opened and a man outside spying my lapel pin which simply stated End the Occupation, his face contorted in fury, screamed, “You should be killed.” Then as the door closed, “You should go there.” I had probably been there more than he had.

When I got off at the 14th floor to see my doctor he asked me on what floor this warm reception occurred. The same floor as the National Post and the Toronto Sun but it could have been Rosie Dimanno’s floor at the Toronto Star.

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously said: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” When I was 11 playing on a Jewish ball team I was called an effing kike. From then on I was never neutral. My faith like Bishop Tutu’s demanded a bias – on the side of those without voice, without power. The great Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama reminded me in his Water Buffalo Theology (1974) if Jesus was the spat-upon Christ, expect a little saliva on you if you try to follow him.

This truth of Zionism and Israel had been slow in coming. The original breakthrough was in the late 80s when the so-called “new historians”, all Israeli, Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev and Benny Morris got into the Israeli state archives and verified the Palestinian claim that the Jewish state had been built on the dispossession of the indigenous of Palestine called al Nakba. This was Arabic for “the catastrophe.”

Earlier as the 50s morphed into the 70s and 80s and religion became hobbled by suburban affluence both Jews and Christians suffered a diminution of power and vision. under capitalist domination breaking our solidarity with the oppressed. Christians chose charity (always needed) over justice as a gospel imperative.

As the Jewish community moved into the affluent suburbs a whirlwind torqued their Jewish identity. Many Jewish commentators maintained that after Israel’s dramatic triumph of the 6 Day War of June 1967 Judaism became Zionism and Jewish identity now was based on a fealty to a state in the Middle East rather than to historic Torah Judaism and its ethical tradition of God and the prophets. Prior to 1948, Judaism never needed a state.

Since those experiences in the early 2000s the justice of the Palestinian cause has gained traction, especially after the mass slaughter of innocents in the five “wars” on Gaza. Jews of conscience cried enough. The internet and social media had broken the unipolar narrative of Zionism and Israelotry and proclaimed a truth made much more visible and available by electronic media: Little Israel had become Goliath, a brutal state which treated Palestinians like Jews under Pharaoh. Zionism or Jewish nationalism had replaced Jewish ethics with state idolatry. The first commandment I’ve been shattered.

As the 21st century dawned and social media rapidly demolished Israeli propaganda and flooded inboxes with stunning pictures of Israeli cruelty, 20 years and five wars on a besieged people in Gaza, a largely civilian population hammered by the 4th most powerful army in the world, backed by nuclear weapons. Young Jews presented with instant electronic pictures of largely civilian deaths revolted and cried. Not in My Name, not in Gaza nor the occupied Territories where now 700,000 Jews were living on illegal occupied territory.

Something had to give. The cruelty was simply too blatant and too much, especially for a new cohort of American Jews raised on human rights, dignity and international law. There was a shocking realisation that they had been lied to in Jewish schools, summer camp and synagogue classes. They had never heard of the Al Nakba nor ethnic cleansing and in their subsidised trips to Israel, had never met a Palestinian .

The resurgence of another narrative, a more truthful one of Palestinian displacement increasingly drove tribal Jews to inchoate anger. They responded with brutal attacks, employing state sponsored trolls to vilify anybody who proclaimed justice for Palestine. Rabbis who should have known better remained silent. Catholic bishops remained silent still terrified to be accused of anti-Semitism. Our Catholic teachers’ union openly proclaimed justice as a cardinal value – but never for Palestinians. The third rail was still warm and it read: “Do not approach.” But then the logjam broke.

The Breakthrough 2021 2022

Three of the worlds most prestigious human rights organizations basically concluded that Israel merited the legal definition of an apartheid state where one group dominated another. Human Rights Watch, Israel’s own human rights NGO B’Tselem and the world’s most well known Amnesty International had come to the same conclusion, the same one that the Canadian Special Rapporteur On Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Michael Lynk had come to: The political system of entrenched rule in the occupied Palestinian territory which endows one racial-national-ethnic group with substantial rights, benefits and privileges while intentionally subjecting another group to live behind walls, checkpoints and under a permanent military rule…..satisfies the prevailing evidentiary standard for the existence of apartheid,” the report said.

This had been evident by 2008 when Yossi Sarid former Israeli Environmental minister summed up a new global consensus in Israel’s paper of record Haaretz: “What acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck – it is apartheid.”

Israel’s own brave B’Tselem put it like this: This is apartheid. The Israeli regime promotes and perpetuates Jewish supremacy between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

The Palestinian voice, the vox victimarum, where our theology told us to look for God, hardly needed the above conclusion. This voice scorned and overwhelmed by Israeli propaganda had been saying this for decades.

The Kairos Moment

The end result of this secular approbation, this damning conclusion, has freed up Christian denominations particularly in America to finally engage in the solidarity which Kairos Palestine had been asking for since 2008 when it stated and affirmed in 2020 in “Cry For Hope: A Call To Decisive Action: we Cannot Serve God And The Oppression Of The Palestinians.” We declare that support for the oppression of the Palestinian people, whether passive or active, through silence, word or deed, is a sin. We assert that Christian support for Zionism as a theology and an ideology that legitimize the right of one people to deny the human rights of another is incompatible with the Christian faith and a grave misuse of the Bible.

Therefore, we declare that any use of the Bible to legitimize or support political options and positions that are based upon injustice, imposed by one person on another, or by one people on another, transform religion into human ideology and strip the Word of God of its holiness, its universality and truth…Are you able to help us get our freedom back, for this is the only way you can help the two peoples attain justice, peace, security and love?

In the U.S.A., the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, the Episcopalians (Anglicans) and the Presbyterian Church have all been energised when the Holy Spirit blew through these secular organizations. Further the anti-Zionist voices of young Jews joined with the human rights groups to finally liberate Christian churches from the paralysis of holocaust guilt.

For members of the largest Christian denomination in Canada, the Roman Catholic Church, we wait in hope for the episcopacy to add its voice to the cry from Palestine.

Ted Schmidt is the former editor of the Catholic New Times.