This article was published on the Cranmer blog site recently and generated quite a response.  It includes a critique by AFI of Christian Aid's 'virtual pilgrimage' through the Holy Land during Lent.

Cranmer has been asked by the Anglican Friends of Israel to bring this matter to the attention of his readers and communicants, and he is delighted to do so. There is perhaps no more subtle manifestation of anti-Semitism than Replacement Theology, and for a Christian charity to propagate it, whilst no surprise, constitutes the perpetuation of a religio-political deception which goes back almost 2000 years. The Church, both Roman Catholic and Protestant strands, has historically maintained that due to the fact the Jews rejected Jesus as their Messiah, God saw fit to pour out his wrath upon them in AD70, destroying their temple and extinguishing their nation, leaving them to exile and oblivion. St Augustine was so persuaded, as was Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius, Ignatius of Antioch, Jerome, John Chrysostom - the Council of Nicea in 325AD purposely changed the celebration of the Resurrection from the Jewish Feast of First Fruits to Easter in an attempt to disassociate it from Jewish feasts. The Council stated: 'For it is unbecoming beyond measure that on this holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews. Henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people...'

Replacement Theology is therefore seen to have an enduring heritage. But it is insidiously anti-Semitic. And it is concerning that the otherwise laudable charitable efforts of Christian Aid should be tarnished with the belief that, because of their rebellion against God in their rejection of Jesus, God has replaced Israel with the Church, and so the Church now inherits all of the blessings promised to Israel. The Anglican Friends of Israel respond:

The poor have much cause to be very grateful for Christian Aid.

It has transformed the lives of millions of needy people in desperate situations by helping them to help themselves. It is renowned for partnering with organisations in the developing world and for its campaigns which raise awareness of injustice and oppression.

This year, over Lent, Christian Aid drew attention to Palestinian suffering much as it has during past Christian festivals. Many people support the work of Christian Aid, but this campaign was explicitly aimed at Christians, taking the form of a ‘virtual pilgrimage’ through the Holy Land and unfolding daily throughout Lent.

Each daily reflection upon a location or subject concluded with Christian prayers and several Christian clergy contributed, including Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham and Canon Naim Ateek of Sabeel. It was expedited expertly, and professionally.

But many of the messages conveyed during the journey were jarringly at odds with Christian notions of justice and with the Scriptures upon which they were ostensibly based.

Pilgrims’ met Palestinians both Muslim and Christian as well as Israelis both Jewish and Arab. As Christian Aid told their story it gradually materialised into the version of events that has become known as the ‘Palestinian Narrative’.

In this version of the conflict, the Israelis, far from wanting to live in peace with their Arab neighbours, are hungry only for Palestinian land: Palestinians are miserable victims of sufferings caused solely by Israel; heroic Palestinian ‘Davids’ resist the Israeli ‘Goliath’ armed with video cameras and ‘accompaniers’, only resorting in extremis to weapons and suicide bombings; and Christian Palestinians emigrate solely because of Israeli (rather than Islamist) oppression.

Such a narrative requires selective reporting to justify it, and, sadly, Christian Aid obliged. For example the ‘pilgrims’ were shown Palestinian homes destroyed by Israel, but told little about the destruction produced by the suicide bombers who had lived in them, and nothing at all about the thousands of dollars paid by Iran’s agents Hamas and Hezbollah to the bombers’ families in compensation for having a ‘shaheed’ (martyr) in the family.

Christian Aid showcased marvellous work being done for children traumatised by violence in Gaza. But Israeli actions alone were cited as the source of violence.

Why did Christian Aid not condemn Hamas’ reign of terror? And why was the indoctrination of Palestinian School children to hate and murder Jews not cited as a traumatic factor in the children’s mental development?

Heaping blame only upon Israel as the source of Palestinian suffering scarcely reflects the justice which Christian Aid champions so effectively. And can it really be right – especially given the dark history of Christianity in relation to Jews – to invite Christians worldwide to place the blame solely upon the world’s only Jewish state for a conflict in which there are many players?

Christian Aid’s skewed presentation of Israel’s security measures also made uncomfortable reading. Wrenched from the context of Arab terrorism, Israel’s actions were presented as malicious attempts to humiliate Palestinians. For example, Christian Aid criticised the inconvenience caused to Palestinians at checkpoints without mentioning that terrorist-bound weapons and explosives are regularly intercepted there.

The legitimate land disputes created by Israel’s security fence were highlighted, but the huge reduction in terror attacks against Israeli civilians since its construction was ignored. Apparently, Palestinian inconvenience and humiliation concern Christian Aid’s contributors more than threats to Israeli lives.

Even more troubling is Christian Aid’s account of recent Middle East history. Israel’s acceptance of the UN resolution 181 – which robbed her of half the land promised the Jews by the League of Nations mandate – is ignored, as is the Arab rejection of it and their subsequent attack on Israel in 1948 whilst the world looked on. Instead, Israel’s foundation is presented solely in terms of Palestinian dispossession.

We hear much from Palestinians who lost their homes when Israel became a nation, but not about the tragedy of many Palestinians who – duped by leaders who assured them that they could return after the Jews had been ethnically cleansed – abandoned homes in Israel only to find that they had lost everything when Israel won the war.

There was such a profound imbalance that only a few posts looked at the suffering of Israelis. A father mourning his child, killed in a suicide bombing, and the battered town of Sderot and its beleaguered inhabitants, merited just one entry. No mention of the tyranny of falling rockets that Israelis endure daily.

Christian Aid lets pilgrims down in this respect. Such omissions and imbalances subtly undermine Israel’s legitimacy, feeding the anti-Semitic discourse found in the Arab press, left-wing newspapers and chattering-class drawing rooms. Pilgrims were led into the mists of obfuscation. They deserve better than that.

Of course, Israel does not get everything right in respect of its Arab citizens or citizens of the Palestinian Territories. Christian Aid quite reasonably highlights some injustices and deplorable incidents. But in focusing solely upon Israel’s actions whilst resolutely ignoring key causes of Palestinian misery – for example, the systematic corruption of Palestinian leaders, the chaotic government, the billions of squandered aid dollars and Arab dedication to Israel’s destruction – Christian Aid betrays their Christian pilgrims – not to mention those Palestinians who need every friend they can get to speak honestly into their situation.

Crucially, in the short address which forms the climax to Christian Aid’s virtual pilgrimage, the Bishop of Durham tells ‘pilgrims’ that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection have nullified the covenant God made with Abraham and his descendants over the land we now call Israel – the Replacement Theology thinly cloaked throughout the pilgrimage now surfaces.

In Replacement Theology, the restoration of Israel becomes not a fulfilment of an overarching Scriptural discourse, but an irrelevance at best, and, at worst, a terrible mistake: the return of the Jews to their ancient land is not a sign of God keeping his promises but an illegal assault of colonial interlopers.

In the context of Christian Aid’s rejection of the scriptural discourse of the Covenant between Abraham and God, the reasons for their embrace of the Palestinian narrative become clear: it is the only one which fits their theology. But the distortions and imbalance necessary to sustain this narrative, together with the abandonment of a key scriptural theme – the faithfulness of God’s promises – demonstrate the shortcomings of Replacement Theology.

It is disappointing to see Christian Aid leading its Christian supporters down such a destructive and deceptive path. Indeed it makes the organisation part of the problem rather than the solution.

Published in The Spectator :

Well waddya know – Ha’aretz is running IDF Gaza atrocity claims. Its story today begins:

During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property, say soldiers who fought in the offensive. The soldiers are graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College in Tivon. Some of their statements made on Feb. 13 will appear Thursday and Friday in Ha’aretz. Dozens of graduates of the course who took part in the discussion fought in the Gaza operation. The speakers included combat pilots and infantry soldiers. Their testimony runs counter to the Israel Defense Forces’ claims that Israeli troops observed a high level of moral behavior during the operation. The session's transcript was published this week in the newsletter for the course’s graduates.

Yet the next paragraph states, as the first example of behaviour that departed from ‘a high level of moral behavior’, that the soldiers’ testimonies

include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her two children [my emphasis].

Mistakes happen in war-time. But this is clearly not an example of having ‘killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement’.

More soldiers’ testimonies are to be published by Ha’aretz tomorrow. It may be that there are indeed examples of what it claims in its first paragraph -- and which turn out to be true. After all, there isn’t an army anywhere in the world where there are no lapses. Where they do occur, the perpetrators must always be brought to book.

But now look at this from blogger Jameel at The Muqata (via Israel Matzav): 

Channel 2 TV Army correspondent Roni Daniel stated at 6:30 PM this evening, that he personally tracked down one of the soldiers interviewed for the Ha’aretz article. Apparently the soldier’s testimony to Ha’aretz wasn't based on anything he personally saw or witnessed, rather based on rumors and hearsay he heard (and the soldier wasn’t even in Gaza!)

In Ha'aretz, asking

Can Israel dismiss its own troops’ stories from Gaza?

reporter Amos Harel states:

 If the IDF really never heard about these incidents, the reasonable assumption is that it did not want to know... It seems that except for isolated incidents, the rule is ‘you don’t ask, we won’t tell.’

But how can it be reasonable for Ha’aretz to present rumour and hearsay as fact? 

As far as the world’s press is concerned, however, the allegations are all true. The story has already spread, with no note of scepticism or caution, that Israeli soldiers claim they deliberately killed Palestinians in Gaza.  But in the Jerusalem Post, Herb Keinon provides some rather important context for these allegations:

The second piece of context is Dani Zamir, the head of the [pre-military preparatory] program, who had the soldiers’ words transcribed and published. A story in Ha’aretz on Thursday said that in 1990 Zamir, then a parachute company commander in the reserves, was tried and sentenced to prison for refusing to guard a ceremony where ‘right-wingers’ brought Torah scrolls to Joseph’s tomb in Nablus.

Zamir, in an interview on Israel Radio on Thursday, said that the soldiers from Operation Cast Lead who spoke at the meeting reflected an atmosphere inside the army of ‘contempt for, and forcefulness against, the Palestinians.’

Zamir himself appears in a 2004 book titled Refusnik, Israel's Soldiers of Conscience, compiled and edited by Peretz Kidron, with a forward by Susan Sontag. The book, which earned commendation from no less a personage than Noam Chomsky, includes a section by Zamir, described as ‘an officer in the reserves from Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar who was sentenced to 28 days for refusal to serve in Nablus and now heads the Kibbutz Movement’s preparatory seminary for youngsters ahead of their induction in the army.’

‘With stupid resolve and the smugness of the all-knowing, primitive preachers and unbridled nationalists are leading and misleading us to calamity, while Pompeii is preoccupied with watching boxing matches and with banquets in advance of the disaster,’ he wrote. ‘I see a volcano in the land where one-third of the inhabitants are banned, by dint of their national and ethnic origins and geographical location, from voting as equals, where they don’t have basic civic rights and where thousands are detained under administrative decree - under a military justice system that is farcical.

'A land, a third of whose inhabitants have been subjected to extended military occupation for over 20 years - which means restrictions of rights and a different code of law for Jewish and Arab residents in the selfsame land - is not a democratic country. Accordingly, collaboration with a regime or government that forces or orders me to be part of an anti-democratic apparatus that leads to self-destruction, disintegration and national decay, along with the utter denial of its own foundations, is illegitimate, unjust and immoral, and will remain so as long as the state does not take one of only two feasible actions: annexation of all or most of the territories conquered in 1967 and granting full civil rights to those residing there; or withdrawal from densely populated areas and a settlement that will release us of responsibility for the residents of those areas, who will chose for themselves whatever regime they desire (of course with security arrangements included).’

That was what Zamir wrote in 1990, reprinted in 2004. The testimonies of the soldiers that he brought to the public’s attention seem to corroborate - what a coincidence - his thesis.

That thesis is of course malicious nonsense from start to finish – not least for the blindingly obvious reason that Gaza and the West Bank are not part of Israel, which cannot therefore be expected to treat its inhabitants as if they were its citizens. The IDF is properly holding an inquiry into the soldiers’ claims. But surely the question should be asked of the IDF how a man with Zamir’s insubordinate and bigoted record and unbalanced views can be entrusted to train soldiers at all.

Ha’aretz in turn is driven by an obsessive hatred of ‘the occupation’ which has long distorted its judgment and destroyed its integrity. Its executives have been heard to boast in the past that they had no qualms about manipulating the paper’s news coverage in order to maximise pressure on the government to get out of the West Bank and Gaza.

Israel’s army is the most moral in the world – quite suicidally so, in fact. No other army would  take such pains to avoid killing civilians – in circumstances where they are being used either as human shields or human bombs -- as does the IDF (pictured above helping Palestinians out of their weapons smuggling tunnel).  Maybe these allegations about deviations from those high standards in Operation Cast Lead are true. But if they turn out to be false or exaggerated, then the contribution by Ha’aretz to the frenzied demonisation of Israel now taking place around the world -- weakening it when it is facing a genocidal threat from Iran -- will have been wicked indeed.