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03 January 2011 By
Jonathan Cook Half a million trees planted over
the past 18 months on the ancestral lands of Bedouin
tribes in Israel's Negev region were bought by a
controversial Christian evangelical television channel
that calls itself God-TV. A sign posted a few kilometres
north of
Beersheba, the Negev's main city,
announces plans to plant a total of a million trees
over a large area of desert that has already been
designated "God-TV Forest". The
Jewish
National Fund, an international
non-profit organisation in charge of forestation and
developing Jewish settlements in Israel, received
$500,000 from God-TV to plant some of the trees,
according to the channel's filings to US tax
authorities last year. A coalition of Jewish and Bedouin
human rights groups have denounced the
project, accusing God-TV and the JNF of teaming up to
force the Bedouin out of the area to make way for
Jewish-only communities. No one from God-TV was available
for comment, but in a video posted on its website,
Rory Alec, the channel's co-founder, said he had begun
fundraising for the forest after receiving "an
instruction from God" a few years ago. He said God had
told him: "Prepare the land for the return of my
Son." Standing next to the "God-TV
Forest" sign, Alec thanked thousands of viewers for
making donations to "sow a seed for God", adding: "I
tell you Jesus is coming back soon!" Part of the forest has been
planted on land claimed by the Aturi tribe, whose
village, al-Araqib, is nearby. Al-Araqib has been demolished
eight times in recent months by the Israeli police as
officials increase the pressure on the 350 inhabitants
to move to Rahat, an under-funded, government-planned
township nearby. Earlier this year, Joe Stork, the
deputy director of
Human Rights Watch's
Middle East and North Africa division, criticised the
repeated attempts by Israeli authorities to eradicate
the village and displace its residents. "Tearing down an entire village
and leaving its inhabitants homeless without
exhausting all other options for settling
long-standing
land claims
is outrageous," he said.
Human Rights Watch
and other international human rights groups have
criticised Israel for harsh measures taken against the
people of al-Araqib and the other 90,000 Bedouin who
live in Negev villages that the Israel refuses to
recognise. They accuse the government of trying to
pre-empt a court case moving through Israeli courts
aimed at settling the Bedouin ownership claims. God-TV's involvement in the
dispute has prompted fresh concern.
Neve
Gordon, a politics professor at
Ben
Gurion University in Beersheba, said the JNF,
which has semi-governmental status in Israel, had set
a "dangerous precedent" in accepting money from
God-TV. "The Israeli authorities are
playing with fire," he said. "This dispute between the
Israeli government and the Bedouin is a long one that
until now focused on the question of
land rights. But the involvement of
extremist Christian groups like God-TV is likely to
turn this into a religious confrontation, and that
will be much harder to resolve." The JNF did not respond to
questions about its involvement with God-TV or the
Negev forest. Gordon said it was particularly
worrying that Alec was using the language of Biblical
prophecy in justifying his decision to finance the
forest. The channel, which has become one
of the most popular global evangelical stations since
its founding in Britain 15 years ago, claims a
potential audience of up to a half-billion viewers,
including 20 million in the United States.
Stephen Sizer, a British vicar and
prominent critic of Christian Zionist groups,
described God-TV as part of an evangelical movement
that believes Israel's establishment and expansion are
bringing nearer the "end times" – or the moment when,
according to Christians, Jesus will return for the
second time. Its followers, he added, believed
that, by dispossessing Palestinians of their land and
replacing them with Jews, Jesus's return could be
expedited. "Funding aliyah [Jewish
immigration] and
planting trees
in the desert may look innocuous but it's actually
their way to side with the Israeli right's hardline
policies towards the Palestinian population." Sizer said there was increasing
co-operation between Israeli institutions and
Christian evangelical groups, which have begun basing
their operations in Israel. God-TV has proclaimed itself the
only television channel to broadcast globally from
Jerusalem, following its relocation
there from the UK in 2007. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the head of
the
Union of Reform Judaism
in the US, has repeatedly called on Israel to sever
contacts with Christian Zionist and evangelical
groups, describing them as opposed to "territorial
compromise under any and all circumstances". God-TV has close ties to
Christians United for Israel (Cufi), an umbrella group
founded in 2006 by
John
Hagee, a Texan pastor, that lobbies on
behalf of Israel in Congress. Hagee, a frequent preacher on the
TV channel, has regularly courted controversy with
comments seen as anti-Semitic. Most notoriously, in a
sermon in the late 1990s, he called Adolf Hitler "a
hunter" who carried out God's plan for the Jews to
return to Israel by leaving them "no place to hide" in
Europe. Cufi and the other evangelical
groups have lobbied strenuously in Washington on
behalf of the illegal settlements in the
West
Bank and for Israeli control over the
holy sites in
East
Jerusalem, said Sizer.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime
minister, has been especially keen to seek out support
from Christian evangelical groups, according to Shalom
Goldman, a professor at Atlanta's Emory University,
who recently published a book on the
Christian Zionist movement. Last year Cufi announced a $38
million marketing drive to bring more Christian
tourists to Israel, including the establishment of a
"task force on global Christian relations" jointly
overseen by Hagee and Netanyahu. Haia Noach, the director of the
Negev Coexistence Forum, which campaigns for Bedouin
rights, said her organisation feared more of God-TV's
trees would be planted on Bedouin lands in the coming
weeks. A depot has recently been established close to
al-Araqib to store four bulldozers. "The villagers refuse to abandon
al-Araqib, even though it has been destroyed many
times. But once a forest is planted there, there will
be no chance to go back," she said. She said she feared the goal was
to build Jewish communities on Bedouin land. She cited
the case of Givat Bar, which was secretly established
by the government on part of al-Araqib's lands in
2003. Repeated letters to the JNF for
information about their forestation programme had gone
unanswered, she said. Awad Abu Freih, a community
leader at al-Araqib, said the house demolitions and
forest-planting were only the latest measures by the
government to remove the villagers. Repeated destruction of al-Araqib's
crops by spraying them with herbicides was ruled
illegal by Israel's Supreme Court in 2004. Efforts to move 90,000 Bedouin
off their lands close to Beersheba have been
intensifying since 2003, when the Israeli government
announced plans to move them into a handful of
townships. The Bedouin have resisted,
complaining that the official communities are little
more than urban reservations that languish at the
bottom of the country's social and economic tables. Jonathan Cook is a writer and
journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel.
His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran and the
Plan to Remake the
Middle East" (Pluto
Press) and "Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books).
His website is
www.jkcook.net. |
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