“On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” (John 20:19-23)
Like other Western colonial-settler experiments, for over 70 years, Zionists have been systematically erasing the culture and history of indigenous Palestinians to justify their forced removal and the theft of their land. Ilan Pappe, in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, calls this ‘memorocide’ and in The Palestine Nakba, Nur Masalha elaborates,
“The founding myths of Israel have dictated the conceptual removal of Palestinians before, during and after their physical removal in 1948… The de-Arabisation of Palestine, the erasure of Palestinian history and the elimination of the Palestinian’s collective memory by the Israeli state are no less violent than the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and the destruction of historic Palestine.”
This is why books such as Ancestral Journeys and Western Missions are so vital in recording the memories and eyewitness accounts of Arabs and Palestinians who experienced the arrival of Western colonialists to the Middle East, were co-opted into their wars, witnessed the rise of Zionism and then became refugees in the Palestinian Nakba. Anita Damiani-Shanley’s book will most certainly help perpetuate their heritage and rightful historic claim to Palestine.
Ancestral Journeys is however much more than the story of two families, one Arab and the other Scottish joined in marriage. It traces the influence of missionaries, archaeologists, traders and colonialists competing with each other for a share of the Near East as the Ottoman Empire met its demise. Richly illuminated with family photos, the three main chapters trace the ancestral journeys of Damiani-Shanley’s extended family from Scotland and Lebanon to Iraq and then to Palestine. A fourth chapter traces the role of the Anglican Church in Palestine.
A graduate in Theology and Religious Studies, Mariam also has a postgraduate degree in Conflict Regulation in Divided Societies. Mariam has previously worked with Tearfund in their operational response in the Kurdish region of Iraq as well as working on the West and Central Africa desk. Mariam is a Technical Specialist for Peacebuilding, supporting peacebuilding projects in the Middle East, Central Asia, Latin America and West Africa – providing strategic and technical support to teams globally as well as conflict transformation training.
Canon Garth Hewitt is a member of the Peacemaker Board of Reference and former founding trustee. Garth’s commitment to social justice pervades his music and led him to found the human rights charity Amos Trust in 1985. Having recently retired from Amos Trust, his focus now is on the Garth Hewitt Foundation. Garth’s catalogue of music is accessible here.
The Stones Cry Out – Voices of the Palestinian Christians, a film by Yasmine Perni is now viewable on Vimeo.
“The voices of Palestinian Christians have all too often been drowned out in the turmoil of events. This is their story, in their voices, from the Nakba of 1948 until today.”
The Joint Advocacy Initiative Olive Tree Calendar 2021 is now available. You may order your desired desk/table hard copy/copies, from the JAI, at: info@jai-pal.org, to be posted to you. Please state your detailed postal address, mobile/telephone number, and desired number of copies, in your order.
Canon Garth Hewitt, founder of Amos Trust, comments on Julian Assange’s extradition hearing. Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006, facing extradition to the USA.
Thomas Getman is president of a private consulting group that specializes in international, United Nations and Non Governmental Organization affairs and university seminars and workshops on UN Reform and humanitarian interagency partnership building. He was World Vision’s executive director for international relations with tenure until March 1, 2009. In this role, he managed World Vision’s liaison activities with the UN and the World Council of Churches and was responsible for diplomatic relations with UN government member missions in Geneva and with countries on sensitive tax, staff and protocol negotiations.
He served until 2009 on the board of principals for the UN Deputy Secretary General for Emergency Relief in the UN Office of the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and as chair of a premier NGO consortium the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA).
The Methodist Federation for Social Action together with United Methodists for Kairos Response recently hosted an online seminar on Christian Zionism with Revd Dr Munther Isaac and myself speaking. You can watch the seminar here. An outline of my presentation and additional resources are accessible here.
Thomas Jefferson once asked the rhetorical question:
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?”
In the 18th Century, on both sides of the Atlantic, there would likely have been a consensus that the answer was self-evident – our civic responsibility is but the outworking of our higher responsibilities to God. When the same revolutionary spirit infected the North American Colonies as it had France, it became a more debatable question there also. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which Jefferson helped write, provided one solution – separate church and state. Originally this was intended to protect the church from the state. But since 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted it to mean that religion and government must stay separate for the benefit of both. Not so today. In an increasingly secularized world, most Americans and many Europeans believe the Church should keep out of politics.
