Antony Loewenstein

I gave the following talk at the University of Sydney on 15 March:

With the delusion of maintaining a Jewish, democratic state – a concept that never existed post 1948 and even less so today with the occupation of millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and discrimination against Arabs in Israel proper – the Israeli leader sounds like any number of liberal Zionists desperate to maintain Jewish supremacy (at the expense of true democracy for all):

Israel’s prime minister said Tuesday that he still hopes to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians, because the alternative would be absorbing them into Israel and destroying the Jewish character of the state.

“I want to solve the conflict with the Palestinians because I don’t want a binational state,” Netanyahu told a rare news conference. “For as long as it depends on me, we will ensure the Jewish and democratic character of Israel.”

The statement was notable because it in effect concedes a key argument made by Netanyahu’s ideological opponents on Israel’s Zionist left: A pullout from territories the Palestinian claim for a state is not just a concession that could be made in exchange for peace — but also an imperative for an Israel that wants to remain a Jewish state that is also democratic.

Jews make up roughly 80 percent of Israel’s almost 8 million people. However, if Israel is combined with the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem — the lands it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war — then the Arab population nears parity, and in the view of some demographers is likely to become a majority soon.

Indeed, as the prospect of peace seems to grow more remote, increasingly there are voices on the Palestinian side predicting — as a threatened default rather than a desired outcome — a “one-state solution” in which Jews and Arabs have equal status.

The so-called “demographic argument” for a pullout has become more critical to the dovish Israeli opposition in recent years, especially since the Palestinian uprising of 2000-2005, punctuated by grisly suicide bombings that killed hundreds, left many in Israel distrustful of Palestinian intentions and despairing of ever reaching peace on agreed terms.

The continuing expanding colonies in the West Bank are a key reason that Israel has a grim future as a Jewish state (rightly pointed out by Andrew Sullivan).

But what of the argument, made by many Jews and others, that Israel is a refuge for the Jewish people and has the right to exist on this basis alone? The Magnes Zionist takes care of those arguments:

One may wish to argue that Israel provides a cultural center that has inspired a flourishing of Jewish culture outside of its borders. But that involves a Zionist reading of center and periphery that may not be even true. There was more of a Hebrew literary culture in the United States before the establishment of the state of Israel than afterwards, and while it would be wrong to blame territorial Zionism for that culture’s demise, it and the State of Israel bear some responsibility – just as the State of Israel has to bear some responsibility for the demise of Jewish communities in Arab lands, especially since it did everything within its power to bring those communities to Israel, and when they arrived, to melt them in the Israeli melting pot. To this day, official Israel looks askance at the growth of Jewish communities outside its because according to mainstream Zionism, one can only be fully Jewish in the Jewish State.

Which  brings me to the “place of refuge” dogma:  If Israel exists as a physical refuge to ensure the survival of the Jewish people, then it has failed miserably in that respect.  We are told by Israel’s leaders that the Jewish state is, or soon will be, under an existential threat from Iran, or from terrorism. If this is true, then will some one please tell me how Israel is a safer refuge for the Jews than, say, the United States, or even, Europe? More Jews have died because of the Israel-Arab conflict since 1945 than as a result of all other anti-Jewish behavior combined since 1945. And since much of the new anti-Semitism is correlated to Israel’s actions, not only is Israel a dangerous place for Jews living within its borders, it isn’t so good for the physical safety of Jews outside it either.

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I repeat – there is a moral distinction between settling refugees in lands in which they desire to live, and repatriating refugees to their own land. In the case of the Palestinian refugees, they have a right to return to their homeland, even if it adversely affects the rights of the Israeli Jews, because they were barred from returning to their homes – despite the calls of the UN. Had the Zionists said, prior to the founding of the state, that the only way a Jewish State can survive is through the forced transfer of most of its native Palestinians, nobody would have recognized the legitimacy of the state. And if somebody had, then that person, or state, would be wrong.

Something is stirring in the American, Jewish, liberal, Zionist heartland. Peter Beinart, former supporter of the Iraq war and tough Zionist, has become a very vocal and very public critic of occupying Israel. His “dream” is still to maintain so-called democratic Israel, an inherently undemocratic outcome for the countless Palestinians inside Israel, but this is an important step for such an establishment figure to make. His new book, The Crisis of Zionism, is nearly out.

Here is his article in Sunday’s New York Times:

To believe in a democratic Jewish state today is to be caught between the jaws of a pincer.

On the one hand, the Israeli government is erasing the “green line” that separates Israel proper from the West Bank. In 1980, roughly 12,000 Jews lived in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem). Today, government subsidies have helped swell that number to more than 300,000. Indeed, many Israeli maps and textbooks no longer show the green line at all.

In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called the settlement of Ariel, which stretches deep into the West Bank, “the heart of our country.” Through its pro-settler policies, Israel is forging one political entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — an entity of dubious democratic legitimacy, given that millions of West Bank Palestinians are barred from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.

In response, many Palestinians and their supporters have initiated a global campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.), which calls not only for boycotting all Israeli products and ending the occupation of the West Bank but also demands the right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes — an agenda that, if fulfilled, could dismantle Israel as a Jewish state.

The Israeli government and the B.D.S. movement are promoting radically different one-state visions, but together, they are sweeping the two-state solution into history’s dustbin.

It’s time for a counteroffensive — a campaign to fortify the boundary that keeps alive the hope of a Jewish democratic state alongside a Palestinian one. And that counteroffensive must begin with language.

Jewish hawks often refer to the territory beyond the green line by the biblical names Judea and Samaria, thereby suggesting that it was, and always will be, Jewish land. Almost everyone else, including this paper, calls it the West Bank.

But both names mislead. “Judea and Samaria” implies that the most important thing about the land is its biblical lineage; “West Bank” implies that the most important thing about the land is its relationship to the Kingdom of Jordan next door. After all, it was only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948 that it coined the term “West Bank” to distinguish it from the rest of the kingdom, which falls on the Jordan River’s east bank. Since Jordan no longer controls the land, “West Bank” is an anachronism. It says nothing meaningful about the territory today.

Instead, we should call the West Bank “nondemocratic Israel.” The phrase suggests that there are today two Israels: a flawed but genuine democracy within the green line and an ethnically-based nondemocracy beyond it. It counters efforts by Israel’s leaders to use the legitimacy of democratic Israel to legitimize the occupation and by Israel’s adversaries to use the illegitimacy of the occupation to delegitimize democratic Israel.

Having made that rhetorical distinction, American Jews should seek every opportunity to reinforce it. We should lobby to exclude settler-produced goods from America’s free-trade deal with Israel. We should push to end Internal Revenue Service policies that allow Americans to make tax-deductible gifts to settler charities. Every time an American newspaper calls Israel a democracy, we should urge it to include the caveat: only within the green line.

But a settlement boycott is not enough. It must be paired with an equally vigorous embrace of democratic Israel. We should spend money we’re not spending on settler goods on those produced within the green line. We should oppose efforts to divest from all Israeli companies with the same intensity with which we support efforts to divest from companies in the settlements: call it Zionist B.D.S.

This really a remarkable piece in The Economist that requires no explanation:

News flash: Israel is not master of its fate. It’s not terribly surprising that a country with less than 8m inhabitants is not master of its fate. Switzerland, Sweden, Serbia and Portugal are not masters of their fates. These days, many countries with populations of 100m or more can hardly be said to be masters of their fates. Britain and China aren’t masters of their fates, and even the world’s overwhelmingly largest economy, the United States, isn’t really master of its fate.

But Israel has even less control over its own destiny than Portugal or Britain do. The main reason is that, unlike those countries, Israel refuses to give up its empire. Israel is unable to sustain its imperial ambitions in the West Bank, or even to articulate them coherently. Having allowed its founding ideology to carry it relentlessly and unthinkingly into what Gershom Gorenburg calls an “Accidental Empire” of radical religious-nationalist settlements that openly defy its own courts, Israel is politically incapable of extricating itself. The partisan battles engendered by its occupation of Palestinian territory render it less and less able to pull itself free. It is immobilised, pinned down, in a conflict that is gradually killing it. Countries facing imperial twilight, like Britain in the late 1940s, are often seized by a sense of desperate paralysis. For over a decade, the tone of Israeli politics has been a mix of panic, despair, hysteria and resignation.

No one bears greater responsibility for the trap Israel finds itself in today than Mr Netanyahu. As prime minister in the late 1990s, he did more than any other Israeli leader to destroy the peace process. Illegal land grabs by settlers were tolerated and quietly encouraged in the confused expectation that they would aid territorial negotiations. Violent clashes and provocations erupted whenever the peace process seemed on the verge of concrete steps forward; the most charitable spin would be that the Israelis failed to exercise the restraint they might have shown in retaliating against Palestinian terrorism, had they been truly interested in progress towards a two-state solution. Mr Netanyahu believed that the Oslo peace agreements were a mirage, and his government’s actions in the late 1990s helped make it true.

Having trapped themselves in a death struggle with Palestinians that they cannot acknowledge or untangle, Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would not be a happy development for Israel. Neither was Pakistan’s, nor indeed North Korea’s. The notion that it represents a new Holocaust is overstated, and the belief that the source of Israel’s existential woes can be eliminated with an airstrike is mistaken. But Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis because, unlike the Palestinians, it can be fitted into a familiar ideological trope from the Jewish national playbook: the eliminationist anti-Semite. With brain-cudgeling predictability, Mr Netanyahu marked his meeting with Mr Obama by presenting him with a copy of the Book of Esther. That book concerns a plot by Haman, vizier of King Ahasuerus of Persia, to massacre his country’s Jews, and the efforts of the beautiful Esther, Ahasuerus’s secretly Jewish wife, to persuade the king to stop them. It is a version of the same narrative of repression, threatened extermination and resistance that Jews commemorate at Passover in the prayer “Ve-hi she-amdah”: “Because in every generation they rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”

Mr Netanyahu is less attractive than Esther, but he seems to be wooing Mr Obama and the American public just as effectively. The American-Israeli relationship now resembles the sort of crazy co-dependency one sometimes finds in doomed marriages, where the more stubborn and unstable partner drags the other into increasingly delusional and dangerous projects whose disastrous results seem only to legitimate their paranoid outlook. If Mr Netanyahu manages to convince America to back an attack on Iran, it is to be hoped that the catastrophic consequences will not be used to justify the attack that led to them.

Mr Netanyahu thinks the Zionist mission was to give the Jewish people control over their destiny. No people has control over its destiny when it is at war with its neighbours. But in any case, that is only one way of thinking of the Zionist mission. Another mission frequently cited by early Zionists was to help Jews grow out of the “Ghetto mentality”. Mr Netanyahu’s gift to Mr Obama shows he’s still in it.

Naturally enough it takes two astute American academics, Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of The Israel Lobby, to explain in the Financial Times that Iran isn’t the real issue for Israel:

On Iran, Mr Netanyahu is convinced it wants nuclear weapons, and that this goal threatens Israel’s existence. He does not think diplomacy can stop Iran, and wants the US to destroy its nuclear facilities. If Mr Obama refuses to order an attack, the Israeli leader would like a green light to do so.

Mr Obama and his advisers – including the military – see things differently. They do not want Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, but they do not believe a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an existential threat to Israel. After all, Israel has its own nuclear arsenal, and could obliterate Iran if attacked. US intelligence is also confident Tehran has not yet decided to build nuclear weapons. Indeed, US leaders worry that, no matter who does it, an attack would convince Iran it needs its own nuclear deterrent. They are correct.

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Robert Fisk explains (and mainstream journalists, including on ABC Radio’s AM this morning, who continually repeat White House and Tel Aviv propaganda against Tehran, should take note):

Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism – and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad, the Mad Caliph. And, of course, Nuclear Iran, preparing to destroy Israel in a mushroom cloud of anti-Semitic hatred, ready to close the Strait of Hormuz – the moment the West’s (or Israel’s) forces attack.

American blogger Richard Silverstein features a revealing figure from a leading Israeli newspaper:

Yisrael HaYom published today one of the more stark and telling statistics about the ‘success’ of the Occupation: in 2011, 722,000 Israelis lived beyond the Green Line, including in settlements and East Jerusalem.  This was a 5% increase over 2010.  That means that 1 in every seven Israelis lives outside of 1967 borders and explains why the country is rapidly becoming a unitary state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.  Bibiton and the settlers themselves are overjoyed with this development because it means they can continue pursuing their Apartheid Jews-only State.

In that case, it becomes critical to begin thinking, indeed demanding that if Israel refuses to end the Occupation and cede almost all territory outside the 1967 borders to a Palestinian state, then it must accord all individuals living in “greater” Israel full citizenship and rights.  We must stop talking about this as a possibility or eventuality, but as a reality.  Israel must be given a stark choice.  Either it’s one state from river to sea in the old Jabotinskyean anthem or the Occupation must end now.

A Sydney-based friend wrote the following letter to members of the Labor Party in early November 2011:

Dear Member

I wake this morning to hear once more, with dismay, of the craven obeisance of the Australian Labor government to the wishes of the United States in voting against the recognition of Palestine at UNESCO.  At least a vast majority of other member nations were not so pathetic and self-interested, and voted to recognise and hopefully speed an end to one of the most heinous human rights abuses currently being perpetrated on the planet.

I spent 10 days in the West Bank earlier this year, and as one of (very) few Australians who has thus witnessed first hand the nature of the oppression and discrimination being inflicted on the Palestinian people, I find it incumbent to inform as many people as possible of the actual situation in the Occupied Territories.  Naturally this includes informing Australian voters of the disgraceful track record of the Australian Labor Party in backing every policy and opinion of the Israeli government.

The ALP is in sufficient trouble without further alienating what is a core constituency, those informed and decent people who regard human rights as pre-eminent in the conduct of its foreign policy.  Especially those ALP members currently sitting in marginal inner city electorates in Australia should be aware that such policy decisions as that enacted overnight at the UN force all thinking Australian voters to direct their attention to the only party with a principled policy position on Palestine, the Greens, whatever misgivings we may have about other aspects of their policy-making.

I have recently given a presentation to group of interested Australians about my trip to the West Bank.  I would be very happy to give a similar presentation to ALP members and anyone else who is interested in what is really happening in Israel.  It might offer some balance to the views proffered to those ALP members who are so quick to accept Israeli-government sponsored junkets to the Middle East.

Regardless, I hope some realistic understanding of the oppressive policies of the Israeli government might inform future ALP decision making, and that voters interested in human rights will be able to look to the ALP once more as a party who can be trusted to defend the rights of suffering people around the world.

With the release of Gilad Shalit (and his subsequent call for peace and reconciliation) the ALP could begin with one small step and push Israel to lift its illegal blockade of Gaza.

A few days ago The Hon. Tanya Plibersek MP, Federal Member for Sydney and Federal Health Minister, responded and her comments show just how utterly compliant Canberra is with Washington on Middle East policy. We aren’t independent. We don’t think for ourselves. We parrot talking points given to us by DC. We don’t truly care for Palestinians and their freedom. And for that reason, Australia, along with America, will never bring peace to Palestine and they should both be shunned as honest peace-brokers:

Dear ****,

Thank you for your recent correspondence regarding Palestinian statehood.

Australia strongly supports a negotiated two-state solution that allows a secure Israel to live side-by-side with a secure and independent future Palestinian state.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Hon Kevin Rudd MP, underlined to both sides Australia’s strong support for a negotiated two-state solution during his visits to Israel and the Palestinian Territories in December 2010 and March and April 2011, and urged parties to return to negotiations.

I have raised this issue with the Foreign Minister who assures me that Australia’s decision to vote against the Palestinian resolution reflected Australia’s strong concern that consideration of Palestinian membership in UNESCO was premature.

The matter of Palestinian membership of the United Nations (UN) had only recently been placed before the UN Security Council (UNSC). 

Australia believed we should allow the process of UNSC consideration of Palestinian membership of the UN to run its course, rather than pre-empt it by seeking to address this question in different UN forums.

The Foreign Minister assures me that if a Palestinian resolution is introduced to the UN General Assembly the Australian Government will consider it carefully before deciding how to vote.

The Australian Government strongly supports the aspirations of the Palestinian people for their own state and is providing practical support for Palestinian institution-building in support of a future state.

On 18 September 2011 in New York Mr Rudd signed with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad a five-year, $120 million development partnership with the Palestinian Authority. 

This partnership includes regular budget support delivered through the World Bank. It is part of more than $300 million in development and humanitarian assistance Australia will provide to the Palestinian people over the next five years.

This increase is expected to place Australia in the top ten donors to the Palestinian Territories next year.

Australia has also launched a scholarship program focusing on disciplines critical to institution building including law and public sector management. Under this program Australia will provide up to 50 post-graduate scholarships to public officials and legal academics. The first scholars under the program will commence study next year.

Australia is also the 10th largest donor to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East – the main provider of social services to the 4.7 million Palestinian refugees.

Thank you for taking the time to write to me and letting me know your views on this important issue. Regarding federal issues in the future, it would be best for you to contact your Federal Member of Parliament, the Hon. Anthony Albanese MP and Member for Grayndler, as Kingston Rd Camperdown is outside the electorate of Sydney. 

Best wishes,

Tanya

Life in Palestine is often transmitted to the West by people who don’t live there, merely passing through. Father Peter Bray, the Vice Chancellor of Bethlehem University, has regularly written missives about reality under occupation. This is his Christmas message:

22nd December 2011

Greetings again from this holy place! I still find it amazing to be here in this place where the whole  Christian world focuses it attention in just a few days, the place where it all began – the place where  Jesus was born.

I have written a Christmas message for Bethlehem University to go to our supporters here and  around the world. However, this letter is directed to people I know from the past or with whom I  have made some special connections since coming here to Bethlehem University. I mentioned in my Christmas message on our website (www.bethlehem.edu) that the whole Christmas event is about bringing new life to people. This is something we are doing here at Bethlehem University.

What I want to do in this letter is take some small examples which I believe illustrates that. Rather than going over many things that are happening on campus, I want to focus on what Bethlehem University is doing in small isolated villages.  In August 2007 the Bethlehem University nursing programme began to be offered in the village of Qubeibeh. This was the outcome of some long discussions Brother Dan Casey, the then Vice Chancellor of Bethlehem University, had had with Sister Hildegard Enzenhofer SDS. Sister  Hildegard is responsible for a home for elderly women in Qubeibeh and in her work with the women in the village was constantly asked if it was possible to arrange some educational programme for the young people in this very isolated village. After thinking about it for some time  and consulting with others, she approached Brother Dan to ask that Bethlehem University offer the Nursing programme there.

What Brother Dan and Sister Hildegard began then has had amazing results. During the graduation ceremony at Bethlehem University on 10 June 2011 the first group of ten students from the programme in Qubeibeh graduated. It was an amazing experience for them and something their  parents and family were so proud to experience.

Qubeibeh is a small very traditional Muslim village isolated by the Israeli Separation Wall. Having the nursing programme offered in this village has had a significant impact on the lives of the students and their families, but also on the village.  Apart from the sound education the students at Qubeibeh are receiving, students there are being empowered. This is particularly noticeable among the young women in the programme. When the first group of students began they were rather unsure of themselves and the young women rather timid and reticent to be too involved. However, by the end of the programme that had changed remarkably.

Qubeibeh is a very conservative, traditional Muslim village where the father of a family is the dominant figure. The custom in the village has been that the father generally marries off a daughter when the best opportunity comes along. One young woman had discussed her future with her father and had built up the courage to indicate to her father that she did not want to get married until she had a master’s degree. He eventually accepted this and so she intends to follow that goal now she has graduated. This young woman mentioned that before this programme was available graduating from a university was a dream beyond the grasp of anyone in her village. As well, nursing was something girls were not encouraged to think about. Now looking back she says that the opportunity to study in the programme has changed her life and her future. It has also changed her family. With the opportunity to explore different ideas with others in the programme, she brought home new ideas to talk about. The impact on the family has led to a more open attitude towards different ways of seeing things and ways of thinking which has brought a new sense of life to the family.

The father of another young woman had decided to withdrawn her from the programme towards the end of the second year to marry her off to the son of a friend. She also had developed the courage to talk to her father about her desire to complete the four-year programme. She then enlisted the help of Sister Hildegard with the result that her father cancelled the engagement and allowed her to complete her study. It was wonderful for me to see her here at Bethlehem University for the graduation and to be introduced to her parents who were obviously so proud that their daughter had graduated from Bethlehem University. This young woman mentioned that being part of the programme not only changed her perception of nursing and learning, but also changed her personality. She is deeply grateful for the way she has grown.

At one stage last year there were some false rumours going around the village about what was happening during classes and about nursing not being a suitable occupation for girls to be involved in. Two sisters in the programme who heard about these rumours decided on their own initiative to do something about what was being said. They organize a group of the nursing students to visit the local schools and also to meet with parents to make sure these people understood what the truth of the situation was and to outline what a very worthwhile occupation nursing is. They began to challenge the mentality that existed among so many about nursing. Being prepared to take such a stand and do something about the rumours showed how the experience of being in the programme had inspired them and given them the courage to speak out! The awareness they have of the value of nursing and their willingness to confront the misconceptions about it, particularly in going into boys’ schools, took courage and determination, which they showed very clearly.

These examples of students being empowered are but scratching the surface of the impact Bethlehem University is having on individuals and this small village. Apart from individuals who are being empowered and educated, there have been changes in the attitudes of people in the village to the programme. Initially, among other things, there was concern about young men and women being in the same classroom and about the young women touching naked flesh. By the end of the second year of the programme these were no longer concerns and the arrangements in the programme had been accepted and supported by the vast majority of people in the village. One of the impressive things is that in a village where there is so much unemployment, every one of the students who graduated in June now has a job, in neighbouring health centres, in hospitals, in clinics and so on.

When I reflect on the impact Bethlehem University is having in that village I am reminded of Jesus’ mission that he came that we “may have life and have it to the full.” It seems to me that one of the fruits of Bethlehem University’s presence in Qubeibeh is that it is bringing life to people there in a way that had not been expected. The experience there has also reminded me of the quote attributed to St. Francis that we should “preach the Good News at all times and, if necessary, use words.” It seems to me that what is happening at Qubeibeh is that Bethlehem University is indeed preaching the Good News without using words!

So this past year has been the source of great encouragement for me when I visit villages like Qubeibeh and see the outcome of that work. I was also down south of Hebron for the graduation ceremony for a course the Bethlehem University Institute for Community Partnership ran. It was for women in three isolated villages and was designed to help them understand the very basic aspects of democracy: what it means to vote, how to identify candidates, how to decide what these candidates stand for, how to decide which candidate best represented what they valued, how to go about voting and so on. I found it very moving to listen to these women talk about how this course had given them, for the first time, some understanding of what democracy was about. They were excited about being so aware and empowered to be involved. This again is bringing life to these people and an example of living the Good News.

There are many other aspects of Bethlehem University I could talk about which highlight the value we are bringing to the lives of people here. However, all this takes place in the midst of occupation and increasing restrictions. Unfortunately, the Wall continues to be extended at an even faster rate.

People near Bethlehem are feeling the impact of that now. In the Cremisan valley in the next town to Bethlehem of Beit Jala, the extension of the Wall will cut some fifty eight families from their land and make it impossible for them to access land that has been in their families for generations. The continuation of this taking of Palestinian land has meant that the Bethlehem area is now only 13% of what it used to be. The Wall keeps rolling on and absorbing land. This extension of the Wall, the confiscation of Palestinian land, the destruction of homes, expansion of settlements and other restrictions is making it very difficult for the Palestinians to really believe that the Israeli government is serious about the peace process. Yet in the midst of all this the people remain resilient and positive. I find this amazing and inspiring.

I am very fortunate to have my sister and brother in law with me for three weeks to see something of this land and to celebrate Christmas with us. It is indeed a great blessing to have them here. As we move to celebrate Christmas in this holy place where it all began, I wish you God’s peace and a deepening awareness of what this extraordinary celebration is about. Peace and justice is at the heart of the incarnation and something we can all be involved in promoting. We can also stand in solidarity with people like the Palestinians who are suffering such injustice. Thank you for your support. Please keep us in your prayers as we here at Bethlehem University seek to be a source of new life for the Palestinian people.

Special Christmas blessing to you from this holy place.