For the past three decades, Sabeel has billed itself as the voice of the beleaguered community of Palestinian Christians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. Over the years, Sabeel has been successful in convincing well-meaning, but largely ignorant Christians in the United States and Europe that the Palestinian people are innocent sufferers and the Israeli government their brutal oppressors.
Ateek has figuratively blamed Israel for the attempted murder of the infant Jesus, the crucifixion of Jesus the prophet, and for blocking the resurrection of Christ the Savior.
In the context of Christian-Jewish relations, language like this - which has preceded and justified the killing of Jews for nearly two millennia - is the equivalent of a noose hanging from a tree in the Old South. Its use during a time of violence can only serve to justify continued violence against Israeli civilians.
What is troubling is there are Jews standing up for Ateek and Sabeel’s dogma at events across North America.
Ellis himself sums up in his own words the "lesson" he draws from the Holocaust:
"To have the Holocaust part of Jewish success, to have the victims of the Holocaust become part of Jewish empowerment, is unsettling. To speak of the Holocaust without confessing our sins towards the Palestinian people and seeking a real justice with them is a hypocrisy that debases us as Jews”.
For Ellis, Israel is the embodiment of all that is evil and all that is wrong with Judaism today. His concept of Israel is of a bunch of "bullies" riding about in helicopters and firing senselessly at poor innocent Palestinian civilians for absolutely no reason at all (an image repeated ad nauseum in many of Ellis’ screeds).
Ellis is not alone as an acolyte for Sabeel. Note this excerpt from a recent JTNews.net article illustrative of the misshapen views of another Sabeel Jew, Mark Braverman:
Rabbi Yohanna Kinberg associate rabbi and education director of Temple B’nai Torah in Bellevue, Washington appeared at the University of Washington Hillel recently with Mark Braverman, executive director of the Holy Land Peace Project and the author of the book Fatal Embrace, about the relationship between Christians and Jews in Israel in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The discussion was called “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Jewish Spirituality, Tradition and Psychology,” and was hosted by the Kadima Reconstructionist Community.
Braverman said, he has come to think of the creation of the Jewish State as a mistake, claiming it can never be a truly democratic country if the basic tenets prize the rights of one group of people over another.
Braverman suggested that injustice in Israel is the result of . . . centuries of isolation and ghettoization that has led to Israel’s inability to find a place in its society for Palestinians.
“We see ourselves as a people apart. That’s the problem. And the evidence of that problem is the dark side of Israel,” he said.
During a question and answer session, Rob Jacobs, executive director of Israel advocacy group StandWithUs Northwest, asked Braverman to elaborate on the notion of Jews as “a people apart.” Jacobs referenced a statement he said Braverman had made the day before at a conference at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, hosted by Friends of Sabeel, intimating that the Jewish people’s alienation started almost 2,000 years ago when they refused to accept Jesus as the messiah.
“I haven’t converted to Christianity,” Braverman assured the audience. “But Jesus is a very powerful figure to me…. And I wonder what if Judaism had been able to make that shift? It would have put an end to our isolation and it might not have ended with us thinking we needed to go and create a Jewish homeland.”
Amid whispers from audience members in the back rows, Kinberg defended the decision of the world’s Jews not to become Christians.
“Hell yeah, it would have been a lot easier for us if we had all become followers of Jesus,” she said. “There might have been a lot less persecution. But we might also have ceased to exist.”
Van Zile had this comment about Braverman:
I also think it is dirty pool when Christians use Braverman to attack Israel. He is ultimately ambivalent about the continued existence of the Jewish people as ... Jews. But for some reason Christians love to invoke him as a credible Jewish voice concerning Israel.
Jews like Ellis and Braverman give aid and comfort to the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people.
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