ISRAEL: HAS DAVID BECOME GOLIATH?
By Rev. Ted Pike
13 Mar 08
During the past month, the world has again seen the wounds
of the Middle East open, gash-red in Gaza . In response to continuing
home-made rocket fire from Gaza , Israel hit back. Within several
days 120 Palestinians were dead. More than half were civilians, 1
in 5 being children. Two Israeli soldiers who were involved in the
fighting were killed, as well as one Israeli.
Israel says the continued terror of such rocket attacks justifies
collective punishment of a million and a half inhabitants of Gaza.
This includes heightening blockade of food, electricity, and essential
supplies around Gaza, which is now reduced to a virtual Israeli
concentration camp.
While 120 Palestinians died in two days, how many Israelis have
actually perished as a result of rocket attacks from Gaza? Only
14 in the past seven years. 1
Perspective on Terror
I do not approve of Palestinians raining rockets on Israel 's cities,
killing or maiming the innocent, including children. Yet we need
perspective on the balance of power - and terror, between Israel
and the Palestinians. The level of Israeli aerial bombardment of
innocent Palestinians through invasions of Lebanon , the West Bank
, and Gaza over the past decades vastly exceeds that of Palestinians
against Israel .
Israel 's invasions of Lebanon in, and earlier in 1982, were largely
provoked by firing of rockets from Lebanon into Israel. Although
terrifying to Israel's northern cities, they also left relatively
few dead. Consider though, Israel 's response in 1982 - a response
made possible by U.S. made bombs and fighter planes.
According to the Beirut police, some 18,000 Lebanese, largely Palestinian
refugees in Tyre and Sidon (many of whom were Christians) were slaughtered
by Israeli firepower. 2 Even the staunchest defenders of Israel,
including Stan Mooneyham, president of World Vision, were appalled
at the evident callousness of the Israelis to bombard non-strategic
civilian areas and prevent the delivery of relief and medical supplies.
Listen to this credible eyewitness, as recounted in World Vision
Magazine, September 1982:
Some say there was two hours’ notice. Others insist
there was none. In a camp of 60,000, it’s not easy to get the
word around, even when warning leaflets are dropped. . . . the first
planes came at five o’clock in the evening; from just after
midnight until eight the next evening the bombing was continuous. For
three days the pounding went on. Everybody here has friends
who died in the attack. A woman makes a chopping motion across
the knee of a baby another woman is holding, saying she saw a baby
at Ein-el-Hilweh who had both legs blown off.
There is no Ein-el-Hilweh anymore. Never before have I seen
such total destruction, not even in Managua , the earthquake-stricken
capital of Nicaragua . If the world’s war-makers and peacemakers
want to see what saturation bombing looks like, they should look
here. Israel, the country skilled in making the desert blossom
like a rose, knows also how to turn rose into desert.
Block after block of crumpled wreckage is
all that’s left.
Plus the unknown number of bodies. There must be hundreds
down there underneath the rubble - the permeating odor of decaying flesh
tells you that much. Refugees who escaped say that as many
as 8,000 died. The Red Cross puts the number at 1,500. Either
way, it’s one of the major massacres of modern times.
Mooneyham then describes the Israeli attack on Sidon in the darkness
of the early morning:
. . . at 2:30 Monday Morning, June 14, an aerial
bomb slices into Kineye School . It rips bodies apart, strews arms
and legs and pieces of what a second before had been living, breathing
human beings. The
concussion takes the rest.
No more running. No more crying. Now they sleep.
Now here I am three weeks later, where no observer is supposed
to be, seeing what no observer is supposed to see. The bodies and
pieces of bodies. . . .Kineye School is a charnel house; body fluids,
creeping across the basement floor from the stack of bodies, are
ankle deep in places. It is possible to count 50 or so bodies. The
rest are piled atop each other, hurled there by the blast that took
their lives. We are told there are 255 in the helter-skelter
pile.
Lest We Forget
The Israelis, of course, played down the casualties and damage
in Sidon, as well as Beirut. Yet Mooneyham, who managed to penetrate
the area much sooner than other western observers has this to report:
If the Israeli figure of 165 killed in Sidon is accurate, I saw
all but ten of those bodies in one school basement, still unburied
three weeks after the invasion. That says nothing about the township
of Ein-el-Hilweh just outside of Sidon which had a normal population
of 60,000 and was obliterated by saturation bombing.
As the head of an international relief organization bringing $400,000
worth of medical and relief supplies to the victims of the holocaust, Mooneyham
was astonished at the refusal of the Israeli conquerors to allow
distribution of such necessities, even after the fighting had ended
and the area was secure.
Early delivery attempts were thwarted on several occasions
by Israeli blockades. . . . causing costly delays. . . . Israel
refused all relief agencies access to occupied areas for more than
ten days of the worst need when quick action could have saved many
lives. The
Red Cross ship SS Anton (carrying World Vision relief supplies) was
refused permission on security grounds to land critically needed
supplies to Sidon two weeks after the invasion, although our people
in the city reported total security, with people fishing on the docks.
Although Mooneyham did not view other areas of Lebanon as closely
as his inspection of Tyre and its environs, what he saw there prompts
him to make an ominous comparison: “the sheer magnitude of
this one visible piece of the Israeli war machine is incredible.
David seems determined to become Goliath.”
Except for Mooneyham, there was no public criticism of Israel 's
1982 invasion by any major American evangelical leader. Nor was there
criticism of Israel for providing aerial lighting for the slaughter
of between 1,500 and over 2,000 innocent Palestinian men, women and
children in the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps.
Actually, there was more criticism of Israel from Jews. In the
New York Times, (August 5, 1985, p. 1) a Mr. Hareven, retired senior
Israeli military officer, is quoted as saying, " … Begin
called the Palestinians in Lebanon 'two-legged animals' and (Rafael)
Eytan (former Military Chief of Staff) referred to them as 'cockroaches
in a bottle.'" Richard Arens, brother of Israeli Defense Minister,
Moshe Arens, in an article in the Portland, Oregonian, ( May 15,
1983 ) said, "Relative to the Palestinians, he (Moshe) has complete
hostility and perhaps only thinly veiled ruthlessness. His reaction
to the massacres was 'nothing happened' and if it did they deserved
it… I have abandoned any hope of appealing to Israeli ruling
circles on humanitarian matters. They claim privileges as victims
of the holocaust, but it is difficult to appeal to them in behalf
of other victims of genocide."
Tragically, as we have seen this past month in Gaza , it is also
seem impossible to appeal to the compassion of at least 40 million
evangelicals. For them, only Jewish suffering is important.
Endnotes:
1. The Guardian, ( March 5, 2008 , page 33 of the Comment and Debate
Section) "To Blame the Victims for the Killing Spree Defies
Both Morality and Sense."
2. The number of dead as a result of Israel 's 1982 invasion is
now regarded as at least 19,500.
Rev. Ted Pike is director of the National Prayer Network, a Christian/conservative
watchdog organization.
Let the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith teach you how they
have saddled 45 states with hate laws capable of persecuting Christians: http://www.adl.org/99hatecrime/intro.asp.
Learn how ADL took away free speech in Canada and wants to steal
it now in the U.S. Congress. Watch Rev. Ted Pike's Hate
Laws: Making Criminals of Christians at video.google.com. Purchase
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