From ICMEP Social Media Director, Zach Heimach, to Rep. Stutzman, Senators Banks and Young
Hello Rep. Stutzman,
As someone with a Master of Divinity degree, a Christian from northeast Indiana who is pastoring a church in our district, I must insist more be done to protect the human, civil and political rights of Christians and all citizens living in the West Bank.
I returned from spending over two weeks in the Holy Land in June. The blatant disregard for law itself on the part of the Israeli military police and Israeli settlers was shocking to witness, for someone who grew up in America and believes in the rule of law. I watched settlers bulldoze a Palestinian man’s yard (he has the deed going back to the Ottoman Empire) in full view of Israeli military police cameras, the settlers only ashamedly leaving when they realized Americans were watching them. I talked to a woman from Bethlehem who was suddenly prohibited by the Israeli government from entering Jerusalem where she is in graduate school, whose now entire career is interrupted. Taybeh, a Christian village, was set on fire by Israeli settlers while I was there — a man working at our hotel distraught because he was raised there and his family still lives there.
This is all part, and emblematic of an ideology which believes certain people should have political and civil rights, and others shouldn’t — where people are treated unequally under the law. This is unsustainable, and a recipe for disaster, as we have seen. I met with three different Nobel Peace Prize nominees, Israeli and Palestinian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish, who all expressed that this “occupation” system, this system where people are treated differently under the law and civil rights are denied, is the main cause of violence and conflict. As people’s lives are strangled, I must oppose this, as well as our government’s massive funding of the current Israeli government.
All citizens in the Holy Land — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Palestinian, Israeli — deserve to live in peace.
Zach Heimach