Palestinian Uprising Research Articles

Lebanese Perceptions of the Palestinian Uprising

Lebanese Perceptions of the Palestinian Uprising

American Jewish Response to the Palestinian Uprising

A rather remarkable article recently appeared in print. Not in Washington Post or New York Times. Not in Time or Newsweek. In 11 February issue of Washington Jewish Week, there a news analysis piece by Eric Rozenman, editor of Near East Report, newsletter of AIPAC, Israel lobby. article entitled The End of Zionist Century. In it, Rozenman predicted imminent establishment of a Palestinian state on West Bank and Gaza Strip, catalyzed by uprising. To apply cold calculus of body count, Rozenman asks, is it possible that less than two-score Palestinian Arab dead achieved more than tens of thousands of Arab fatalities in four major wars against Israel? He not sanguine about security implications a Palestinian state poses to Israel. But he says it coming. As Rozenman sees situation, it one thing for 3.5 million Jews in Israel to absorb 50,000 Druze. It another thing entirely to absorb 2.2 million Arabs living west of Jordan River. Somewhere between 50,000 and 2.2 million, Rozenman writes, the demographic 'red line' was crossed. Then came analogies with Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, South Africa.

Theology and the Palestinian Uprising: a Jewish Perspective

Some years ago, in an essay outlining Christian complicity in the Jewish Holocaust and the future of Christianity in light of that complicity, the German Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz wrote: ‘We Christians can never again go back behind Auschwitz: to go beyond Auschwitz, if we see clearly, is impossible for us by ourselves. It is possible only together with the victims of Auschwitz.’ When first read this statement strikes one by its boldness, and later by its depth. For Metz, the Jewish victims of Christian triumphalism and power stand before the Christian community, challenging the past but also serving as the key to the future. Of course, Christian and Jew had travelled together on a tortuous and bloody road for almost two millennia before the Holocaust; the present calls for a radically new way of journeying together, one of trust and ultimately of embrace.Over the past months, as the twenty-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has erupted in a veritable civil war, Metz’s statement had assumed a new relevance in a different context. For on the other side of power, the Jewish people have assumed a new and unaccustomed role in relation to the Palestinian people: that of oppressors. As some Christians continue to have difficulty in admitting their complicity in the suffering of Jews, the Jewish people find it almost impossible to admit to their own complicity in the suppression of the Palestinian people. Though Jewish empowerment, mandated by the suffering of the Holocaust, should be affirmed as a good, the present impasse in Israel and Palestine cannot be addressed outside the most obvious, to some the more contradictory, of options: solidarity with the Palestinian people.