How can a person be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian? It’s not that difficult, says Michael Onifer, director of the Bethlehem Project.
“When you begin with the main thing and keep it the main thing, then you can deal with some of the complexities with Israel,” Onifer said in a recent interview on “The Line of Fire” radio show with Michael Brown.
“That’s why I easily arrived at a place where I am pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian in the sense that I want the best for the Palestinian people and I want to see the Palestinians released into their redemptive purpose.”
The main thing, according to Onifer, is the way he and other leaders talk to young people about Israel. He noted the millennial generation does not support Israel as strongly as previous generations have.
But Onifer, who directed the Israel Experience College Scholarship Program for 10 years, draws encouragement from some of the conversations he’s had with young people who have traveled with him to Israel as part of his program.
“When we talk to them about Israel from the context of God’s heart and from the context of the knowledge of the person of Jesus, Israel isn’t that much of an issue,” he explained.
One of the young people Onifer met through the Israel program was Joshua Charles, a public policy fellow at William Jessup University, a writer and researcher at the Museum of the Bible, and the author of the recent Amazon bestseller “Liberty’s Secrets: The Lost Wisdom of America’s Founders.”
It was Charles who coauthored Onifer’s newest book, “God, Israel, and You: The Scandalous Story of a Faithful God.”
Charles, a WND columnist, shares Onifer’s pro-Palestinian mindset. Joining Onifer on “The Line of Fire,” Charles declared the need to “free the Palestinians,” although not in the way people might think.
“When you’re in the West Bank and you’re talking with a lot of Palestinians, and I don’t claim any of these things are completely absent on the Israeli side, but there are a lot of prejudices at work, and there is vast historical ignorance,” he explained.
Charles said he saw this ignorance and prejudice at work when he met in Bethlehem with a group of Palestinian leaders, some Muslim and some Christian.
“We were talking about their version of events, the Palestinian narrative as they saw it, and what I discovered was they left out something very important, namely the Arab invasion in 1948,” Charles recalled.
The young scholar asked the Palestinians how they could chastise Israel while ignoring the fact that Arabs invaded Israel in 1948, immediately after the state of Israel was established. But they just gave Charles a look that told him they had no idea what he was talking about. Furthermore, the leaders’ belief that Israel is oppressing the Palestinians provided them moral justification for the suicide bombing of Israeli civilians, according to Charles.
“So there’s many different things that are going on in Palestinian culture that they quite frankly need to be freed of,” Charles concluded.
Onifer seconded Charles’ notion that Jew hatred and Israel hatred is an inescapable part of Palestinian culture.
“We need to have compassion for the Palestinian people, and in that compassion we need to understand that they have grown up in an environment where they have very limited opportunities to come to any other conclusion that hating Israel and the Jewish people,” Onifer said.
Even the small minority of Palestinian Christians who attend churches that teach the Old Testament are swallowing a false narrative on Israel, he warned.
“They are believing a historical and political narrative that’s divorced from all the facts on the ground,” Onifer cautioned. “It’s a big deal, and the Palestinians really need to be freed from the oppression of their own leaders.”
Onifer, who regularly works to develop relations between Jews and Palestinian Christians through his Bethlehem Project, acknowledged it might seem difficult to love Israel and the Palestinians at the same time. What it takes, he said, is wrestling with difficult issues like the wrath of God.
“It’s not a conflict, but it’s hard work, and I think a lot of people don’t want to do that work,” Onifer said. “They don’t want to wrestle with what ultimately become paradoxes of the Kingdom of God.”
He hopes his new book will help people, particularly millennials, navigate some of the complexities surrounding Israel and emerge with a greater understanding of the Jewish state and God’s redemptive purposes for the Arabs. He said it is crucial for young people to think critically about the situation in Israel.
“The way we understand Israel and the Jewish people eventually dictates how we understand the realities of covenant, which eventually informs how we relate to God himself,” Onifer explained. “If we miss Israel, we run the risk of chasing after a Western Jesus who’s not real, and we can miss the creator of the universe who wants to co-labor with us in the Earth.”
Onifer said the young people he takes to Israel typically come away with a sense of awe, which is only enhanced when he shows them the good work he is doing in the Palestinian community as well.
“I’ve found when you talk to a young person about what’s happening in Israel, when you invite them to consider the complexities of the security situation and what’s happening with the Palestinians, they actually get on board with supporting Israel a lot faster than going about it a different way,” Onifer revealed.
“That’s what the book (“God, Israel, and You”) does. We don’t whitewash Israel in any sense; what we do is we identify the reality that Scripture is full of individuals and nations that were flawed but used by God, and you have a part of the Christian body today that’s trying to write Israel out of God’s redemptive purposes because of what they’re doing wrong as a nation, and that simply doesn’t agree with the narrative of Scripture.”
Charles, for his part, is optimistic about the possibility of reconciliation between Jews and Palestinian Christians. In fact, he has seen it happen. He said he has a Palestinian friend, and a Muslim at that, who was rabidly anti-Israel before Charles introduced him to some Christians and Jews and opened up a positive dialogue regarding the Jewish state.
“The longer I’ve known him, he’s kind of awakened to the fact that he would rather be a citizen of Israel,” Charles said.
“And if a Palestinian Muslim can come around for Israel, perhaps Palestinian Christians can do the same.”
Charles believes for that to happen the older and younger generations will have to combine their best traits.
“I think the older generation, they’re theologically more astute but sometimes they’re relationally deficient, which I think is a big point we make in the book,” Charles said. “Whereas the younger generation is theologically less astute but I would say relationally more effective, and so I think if we can combine those two we’ve got a winning match.”
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/05/22/pro-israel-scholars-we-need-to-free-the-palestinians/
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