An Open Letter to the Honorable Emmanuel Macron, President of France - by Dexter Van Zile

Why does France allow its sovereign territory in Jerusalem to be used as a staging ground for attacks on Jewish sovereignty in Israel?

Dexter Van Zile..
TOI Blog..
22 January '20..
Link: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/an-open-letter-to-emmanuel-macron-president-of-france/

To the Honorable Emmanuel Macron, President of France:

I just saw a video of your confrontation with the Israeli police at St. Anne’s Church in the Old City of Jerusalem. It was a brief vignette posted on Twitter, so I don’t know exactly what happened, but it looks like you were protecting the status of the church as sovereign French territory. It seems to be one of the goals you had for yourself before your current trip to Jerusalem.

I hope Israelis will reserve judgement about the confrontation. Like you said in the video, “Nobody has to provoke nobody.”

Words to live by!

I also hope the confrontation between you and the Israeli security officials doesn’t turn into a contretemps that gets distorted to make modern day Jews look like the folks who stoned St. Stephen all those years ago. Given that you praised Israeli security officials for protecting you while walking through the Old City, I don’t think it will.

But you never know. There’s a lot of demand for that sort of narrative these days and a lot of people in Jerusalem make a living meeting that demand. In fact, one person who has provided that sort of narrative, Yusef Daher, runs the Jerusalem Inter Church Center (JICC) whose office is located in St. Anne’s compound. While he’s there, Daher enjoys the protection of French sovereignty, which you so ardently defended.

In the past, Daher has portrayed legitimate Israeli security measures at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as a huge act of oppression against Christians worldwide. For example, Daher has unfairly portrayed Israeli efforts to prevent a stampede outside the church as an evil act against Christians in Jerusalem.

But I digress . . .

Let’s face it. The Old City is a stressful place to be. It is imbued with a lot of religious meaning and for the unprepared, Jerusalem can be a rough place to visit. Part of the shock is to see all these ordinary people, sovereign Jews especially, living out their daily lives in a city that is as central to the Western imagination and memory as Athens, Paris and Rome.

As a wise Christian friend of mine who lives in the Holy Land once told me, “People come to the Holy Land with a lot of baggage. When they get off the plane in Tel Aviv their baggage gets multiplied by a factor of 10,” he said. “And when they step into Jerusalem it gets multiplied by 100.”

Given that French sovereignty over St. Anne’s dates back to the 1800s, it’s likely the Israelis will have some sympathy for you. They know the importance of protecting sovereignty. If there is one group of people who know the dangers of losing sovereignty even better than the French, it’s the Israelis.

It’s interesting to note that that one of your predecessors, Jacques Chirac generated some controversy when he visited St. Anne’s in 1996. Apparently, St. Anne’s is a pretty neuralgic place for French Presidents.

Vraiment!

I don’t mean to add to your headaches, but given that you just defended French sovereignty over St. Anne’s in the Old City of Jerusalem, I feel compelled to ask you some questions about how France administers the property. The central issue is this: Why does France allow its sovereign territory in Jerusalem to be used by the JICC, which is led by Daher, as a staging ground for ideological and theological attacks on Jewish sovereignty in Israel?

If you pardon the expression, that doesn’t seem . . . kosher.

I raised this question with the folks in France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2018 and no one got back to me.

I even asked officials from the White Fathers, the Catholic religious order that operates St. Anne’s. They were pretty tight-lipped, but the one thing they did say is that St. Anne’s Monastery enjoys diplomatic protection, “just like an embassy.”

So, here is the relevant text of an email that I sent to the folks in France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in an email sent, interestingly enough, on June 6, 2018:

I am currently writing an article about an organization called the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine/Israel (EAPPI). EAPPI is an institution of the World Council of Churches (WCC) that sends activists into Israel and the West Bank. The organization has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism from a number of institutions and commentators in Israel and elsewhere for its tendency to promote anti-Israel propaganda both in the Holy Land and in the home country of EAPPI activists.

EAPPI is closely affiliated with another WCC institution — the Jerusalem Interchurch Center — whose general secretary, a Palestinian Christian by the name of Yusef Daher, has posted ugly anti-Israel propaganda on his Facebook page.

Surprise? Rabbis for Human Rights Helps World Council of Churches Engage in Damage Control - by Dexter Van Zile

...What EAPPI and now RHR have done is single out and magnify the impact of Israeli security measures in a way that legitimizes the hatred of Israel and Jews living in the West Bank. This behavior brings to mind a passage from RHR’s 2004 letter which warns that “People of conscience must act in awareness that the singling out, magnifying and sanctifying of Jewish sins has always been at the core of the terrible evil that we know as anti-Semitism.”

Dexter Van Zile..
Algemeiner..
10 February '19..

Almost fifteen years ago, the Israeli nonprofit Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) lambasted the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) for demonizing Israel. It happened after the PCUSA passed a divestment resolution at its General Assembly in 2004. In addition to calling on the church’s money managers to divest from the Jewish state, the resolution portrayed Israel as singularly responsible for the suffering caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In response to this outrage, RHR published a letter condemning the church for failing to offer “one word of criticism to the government of the Palestinian Authority despite its manifest multitude of profound sins against God and the Human Rights of Palestinians and Jews.” RHR also condemned the PCUSA for ignoring “the homicidal ideologies that have so sadly taken hold among some of our Palestinian neighbors.”

The letter closed with a call for the PCUSA to repent of its actions and to rethink its “relationship with the Jewish People and their State.” It was one of the most principled and unequivocal condemnations of Christian antisemitism to come down the pike since BDS became all the rage in mainline Protestant churches.

The folks at RHR must have lost this letter in their archives, because these days they are defending — not rebuking — another Christian institution that is facilitating in the same process of demonization that the PCUSA engaged in a decade and a half ago. To make matters worse, the group’s president, Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, engaged in the same type of one-sided discourse that RHR condemned in 2004.

(Continue to Full Column)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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What Did NGO Monitor Get Wrong About the EAPPI? (Hint: Nothing!) by Dexter Van Zile

...One interesting thought experiment for EAPPI and its supporters to engage in is to ask if they would affiliate with Jewish organizations that openly advocate for the murder of Palestinians because of where they live. If the answer is “no” — and it should be — then the question is why would they affiliate with Palestinians who advocate the murder and expulsion of Jews in the West Bank? Because that’s what EAPPI activists have done and it shows in the rhetoric they use when they return to their home countries from the Holy land.

Dexter Van Zile..
Times of Israel Blog..
06 February '19..

The Middle East Council of Churches (MECC), which represents beleaguered Christian communities located in Muslim-majority countries throughout the region, recently came to the defense of the World Council of Churches, accusing an unnamed Zionist group of defaming the organization’s activists who operate in the Holy Land under the aegis of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine Israel (EAPPI).

The communique was issued by the MECC’s executive committee, which met in Lebanon in late January. The communique declared that “participants condemn the unfair and vicious attack on the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Occupied Palestine led by one of the Zionist institutions.”

The level of contempt the MECC has for Israel and Israelis is pretty obvious. The MECC’s executive committee can’t even bring itself to name the organization in question, nor can it even mention the Jewish state — Israel — by name in its communique.

It’s disgusting. It’s as if the bishops and patriarchs in charge of the MECC are taking their cue from Arab extremists in the Middle East who still dream of destroying the “Zionist entity” in their midst. Somebody needs to tell the folks who run the MECC that the Middle Ages called and they want their antisemitism back.

Despite the MECC’s refusal to name the “Zionist institution” in question, it’s pretty clear that the unnamed “Zionist institution” is NGO Monitor which recently issued a damning and authoritative report on EAPPI.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Fools on the Ground: Examining the World Council of Churches in Israel and Its EAPPI ...by Dexter Van Zile

In the heart of Jerusalem's Old City, France is providing diplomatic cover for undercover anti-Israel activists. Infiltrating the Jewish State under the auspices of the World Council of Churches' EAPPI program, 'Ecumenical Accompaniers' are helping a terrorist movement to demonize Israel.

Dexter Van Zile..
Jerusalem Jornal..
17 June '18..
Link: http://jerusalemjournal.net/news-and-views/fools-on-the-ground-the-world-council-of-churches-in-israel-and-its-eappi-by-dexter-van-zile

These days, France is not a particularly good place to be a Jew. The country that gave us the Dreyfus Trial in 1894 and the round up of Jews at the Vélodrome d'Hiver in 1942 has been the scene of some terrible acts of violence against Jews in the 21st Century. In 2006, the world witnessed the murder of Ilan Halimi, the Toulouse and Montaban killings in 2012, and anti-Jewish riots in 2014. In 2015, the world witnessed the Hypercacher massacre and in 2017 the murder of Sarah Halimi. All this violence bespeaks of a breakdown in French society, a breakdown that is causing many Jews to leave the country and immigrate to Israel.

Who can blame them? In 2016, the Catholic News Agency reported, “Jews only comprise one percent of France’s population, but over half of the reported hate crimes in France were anti-Semitic in 2014.”

Once French-born Jews make it to Israel, France’s fecklessness follows them. In particular, France provides diplomatic cover to anti-Israel activists affiliated with the World Council of Churches (WCC), an ecumenical Christian institution with a sad history of being soft on Communism and more recently, jihadism, going so far as to obstruct efforts to address antisemitism at the UN’s anti-racism conference in Durban in 2001.

In particular, the French government provides diplomatic cover to the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine/Israel (EAPPI) in the compound of St. Anne’s Church located in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. The property was given to France by the Ottoman Empire to the French government in 1856 in gratitude for assistance given during the Crimean War. The church is managed by The Missionaries of Africa, sometimes called “The White Fathers,” a Catholic missionary organization established in 1868 with the goal of converting Arabs to Christianity.

Behind a stone wall and a sign telling people to keep out is a parking lot and a group of office buildings that houses the EAPPI and another WCC-supported institution, the Jerusalem Interchurch Center (JICC). By virtue of its presence in the St. Anne’s compound, EAPPI enjoys diplomatic refuge from Israeli law enforcement. Because the church is the property of the French state, Israeli police cannot enter into the property without permission from the French government. To underscore French sovereignty over the site, a French flag flies over the property.

Phillips - The Synod's shame

Melanie Phillips..
Daily Mail..
11 July '12..

Decent Christians are extremely upset, and rightly so, about the resolution passed at the General Synod a few days ago endorsing the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel. The EAPPI aims to bring ‘internationals to the West Bank to experience life under occupation’. Its mission is to ‘accompany Palestinians and Israelis in their non-violent actions and to carry out concerted advocacy efforts to end the occupation’, and it has called on supporters to stage sit-ins at Israeli Embassies, to hack government websites in order to promote its message and of course promote the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel.

The EAPPI is a one-sided organisation which presents Israel entirely falsely as the regional aggressor and the Palestinians as its victims, whereas the opposite is the case. Last year a senior Fatah official, Abbas Zaki, declared that if Israel left the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria this would mean the end of Israel altogether -- the Palestinians’ true goal which they had to keep quiet. And he was by no means the first Palestinian to say this.

But the EAPPI makes no acknowledgement that the sole reason for the ‘occupation’ is the refusal by the Palestinians to accept the right of Israel to be a Jewish state, and their resulting endless attempts to wage a war of annihilation against it by murdering Israeli citizens. Instead it casts Israel as the villain of the piece. In other words, the EAPPI promotes the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel, the inversion of truth and justice and the double victimisation of the targets of mass murder.