Pearls and Irritations

Last month, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an Israeli/American couple, Jon Polin and Rachael Goldberg, the parents of Hersh Goldberg Polin, an American/Israeli soldier who was a hostage with Hamas in Gaza, were afforded the respect and the courtesy of the convention when they were chosen to address the assembled members of the Democratic Party. 

Meanwhile, three Palestinian/Americans, also members of the Democratic Party, who asked to be considered to address the convention were not chosen, including Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, Illinois state Rep. Abdelnasser Rashid and Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric care physician who has treated patients in Gaza. They were denied the privilege.

In America, it seems, that if you are an American citizen of Palestinian or Middle Eastern origin you are denied this chosen-ness.

Last Sunday, 1 September, during yet another attack by Israeli forces in Rafah, they discovered the bodies of six hostages, one of them being Hersh Goldberg Polin, son of the two chosen speakers.

This news prompted the Justice Department in the US to issue terrorism charges against six Hamas leaders. The charges, they say, relate to the defendants’ central roles in planning, supporting, and perpetrating terrorist atrocities involving the murders and kidnappings of innocent civilians, including American citizens.

What about the murder of more than 40,000 Palestinians, 70% of which were innocent women and children? Is that worthy of condemnation and judgment?

It would seem not. After all, the Palestinians are not worthy to be chosen.

This last Friday, 6 September, we were confronted by the tragic news of the murder of a 26 year-old American citizen of Turkish origin, a human rights activist, Aysenur Ezji Eygi by Israel. According to one eye witnesses, “a soldier fired directly at the protesters, hitting the American activist in her head from behind”.

This is how the US State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, reacted to the murder of this American citizen.

The Biden Administration is ‘aware of the tragic death of an American citizen in the West Bank’ and officials were urgently gathering more information. And where were they getting this information from?
Israel, of course.

This is not an isolated incident, where an American administration, be it either Democratic or Republican, treats the murder of the un-chosen. Even if they are American citizens.

We have a plethora of evidence showing the callousness and disregard for the value of the lives of the American un-chosen citizens. 

Here are just a few examples:

There was the brutal killing of American activist, Rachel Corrie in 2003, when she was shovelled by an Israeli bulldozer when she was trying to protect a Palestinian home from being demolished.

Then there was the assassination of Palestinian/American world-renowned Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, when she was shot dead by a sniper while clearly wearing a press vest and helmet while reporting in yet another incursion by Israel in my city of birth, Jenin, in the West Bank in 2022.

The same year, 2022, 81-year-old American/Palestinian, Omar Assad, was randomly stopped on his way home from a card game with friends on a bitterly cold evening in January. According to the family lawyer, “Omar was dragged from the car by the IDF with such force that one of his shoes was wrenched from his foot and remained in the car. He was handcuffed with zip-ties, hands behind his back, his mouth covered with tape and his eyes were blindfolded or covered with a bag.” Omar never recovered. He died of a cardiac arrest soon after this brutal treatment. At the time, his widow said that, despite being an American citizen, she did not expect any action against Israel from the US. Two years later she has still heard nothing.

And what of Orwa Hammad, Jurkan Dogan, Mahmoud Shaalan, Tawfiq Abdul Jaber, Mohammad Khdour? All American citizens killed by Israel. What their families get from the good old US are platitudes and then they are rapidly forgotten.

This chosen-ness, or otherwise stems from a fanatical belief in an early passage in the Bible, which refers to Jews of ancient times being the Chosen People of God. This, of course, has been weaponised, twisted and employed to justify the theft of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of its people and culture.

This is how David Ben Gurion employed it when he was addressing The Peel Commission in 1936:

“I don’t need a mandate,” said avowed atheist, Ben Gurion, “The Bible is my Mandate.”

This same Ben Gurion said, “Since I invoke the Torah so often, let me state that I don’t personally believe in the God it postulates. I am not religious, nor were the early builders of Israel believers, yet their passion for this land stemmed from this book of books and The Bible is the most important book in my life.” (The Jewish Press, by Saul Jay Singer 10 March 2021).

Despite that, there are a number of Jewish rabbis and scholars who totally reject this idea of chosen-ness and that God gifted the Jews and only the Jews with the promised land of Palestine. This is but one of those scholars, Naomi Wolf, a Yale and Oxford graduate, American author and journalist:

“If you read Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy in Hebrew — as I do — you see that God did not ‘give’ Israel to the Jews/Israelites. We, as Jews, are raised with the creed that ‘God gave us the land of Israel’ in Genesis — and that ethnically ‘we are the chosen people’. But actually — and I could not believe my eyes when I saw this, I checked my reading with major scholars and they confirmed it — actually God’s ‘covenant’ in Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy with the Jewish people is not about ethnicity and not about a contract. It is about a way of behaving..

“God says: If you visit those imprisoned…act mercifully to the widow and the orphan…welcome the stranger in your midst…tend the sick…do justice and love mercy ….and perform various other tasks…Then you will be my people and this land will be your land.”

And it never says I will give this land to just you.

Oh, my good God! Visit those imprisoned?

Are you aware of what they do to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails?

I leave you to consider this as you cast an eye over the history of the current Israelites who have been occupying Palestine for the last 76 years. Do they actually live up to this covenant? Do they act mercifully? Do they welcome the stranger in their midst, do they love justice and mercy and tend the sick?

Or do they do the exact opposite? And, as such, do they deserve the sobriquet God’s Chosen People?

Share and Enjoy !

SHARE TWEET SHARE COPY EMAIL PRINT