The group’s “special ops mission” highlighting the summer 2024 effort advertises an “unforgettable adventure in the land of the Bible.” HaYovel’s map shows an Israel extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, including the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights.
Unmentioned is the contribution of such efforts in entrenching an Israeli apartheid system in the West Bank. Palestinians live there with inferior rights and increasingly are relegated to bantustans as settlers take more and more land for themselves with Israeli government backing.
It’s a Wild West settler-colonial reality – a variation on the false claim of a land without a people for a people without a land – and conservative Christians from the US, Canada and elsewhere are literally there for it.
Participants are told they will get to “experience and visit places in Israel where most people don’t get to go,” words obscuring the discriminatory legal framework applied to Palestinians in the West Bank.
Israel is described in one HaYovel video as “a small nation of only 7 million Jews,” simply writing out of existence the 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel. ….more