ISRAEL PERSECUTES CHRISTIANS IN PALESTINE

Wednesday 27 November, 2013

Israel Persecutes Christians in Palestine

Hameed Abdul Karim

“We  as  Palestinians  had  not  been  responsible  for  the  suffering  of  the  Jews  in  Europe,  yet  we  were  the  ones  who  were  chased  out  of  our  land  and  made  to  suffer  so  the  world  could  soothe  its  conscience  and  pretend  to  repair  the  evil  done  against  the  Jews.”   

-         Archbishop Elias Chacour

Biram is a village in Palestine. It was one of the 400 villages that were sacked by the invading European Jews in 1948 and to this day – 65 years after its destruction – the inhabitants are still yearning to return to the land of their forefathers who had lived there for centuries on end.

But Israel will not let them come back.

Israel’s ‘Hitlerain’  ‘Law of Return’ gives any Jew anywhere in the world the ‘right’ to live in Israel and Occupied Palestine whilst in the same breath it forbids any Palestinian that had been expelled from his ancestral land to return. In the case of Biram’s Christians, Israel had allowed a concession. They can bury their dead in the old and serene cemetery at the picturesque church and then leave. It so happens, only the dead Palestinian Christian can ‘return’ to his or her village.

Zionism and Nazism

This is the cruel and immoral principle of Zionism which is an ideology that’s only interested in making the whole of Palestine a state for the Jews and Jews alone. The Palestinians have no such privileges of ‘return’ since Israel’s long range plan is to eventually ‘cleanse’ the holy land of all goyim (gentiles). Adolf Hitler had the same policy. The only difference was that he wanted his land to be made pure for Aryans. Quite a few Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg for their racist crimes. The Jewish Zionists have won Nobel Peace Prizes and leaders of the ‘international community’ have rolled out the red carpet for some of the Israeli ethnic cleansers. We live with such rampant hypocrisy.

Destruction

The villagers of Biram had initially welcomed the Jews because they sympathised with them over their sufferings at the hand of the Nazis in Europe. They even fed them as honoured guests and gave them their beds while they slept in lofts. Such was the hospitality of the Christian Palestinians in the village of Biram as elsewhere in Palestine. Later the very same European Jews threw out the women and children from their very homes. They were later given refuge in the nearby village of Jish. The men were taken away in truckloads to live in refugee camps in Jordan. The residents of Jish had been slaughtered and their bodies were buried in a shallow mass grave which was discovered by the Biram children while playing football.

After the Jewish soldiers had left the men went back to claim their homes in Biram but the soldiers turned up again and chased them away. Later the Israelis sent the air force and flattened all the homes in the village to lie in ruins. Only the picturesque church stands today as mute testimony to the fact that Christians had once lived and thrived on this part of Occupied Palestine.

At the time of Israel’s creation by the UN Christians amounted to 20% of the population. Many of them had fled the Israeli persecution. Today they amount to less than 5% of the population.

But the Christians of Biram have not given up their claim to their ancestral land.

Demand to return to Biram

Not wanting to upset the Western sponsors the Israeli Supreme Court in 1951 had allowed the Christians of Biram to return to their village, but to this day succeeding Israeli governments have refused to abide by the Court decision even though the hoary claim that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East resonates in corridors of world powers and the world media ad nauseam.  

Today descendants of Biram’s Christian community have encamped in the national park where the town is located demanding that Israel honour the SC decision and allow them to return to their beloved Biram.

In an ironical twist the Israeli authorities have warned the protesters that they are trespassing on state land and have asked them to leave but the Palestinian Christians are sticking to their guns.

Father Afif Makhoul is the head of the Biram church and he hopes to bring the community back together to settle down on their own land. He told Al Jazeera that it is not his role to make a political statement. ‘But as priest of Biram I believe the parishioners should come back to their church’.