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Israel - The Frontline Is Everywhere, page 9
by Lloyd Howell
Jesus
As mentioned earlier, I had some difficulty with the fact that Christianity did not appear to be welcome in his homeland. Once when walking the streets of Jaffa I met a loud and outspoken man who claimed to be a Jew who had found the messiah Jesus. He had told me some stories; one of a rabbi friend who, he said, he had convinced to accept Jesus who was thereafter threatened [by his fellow rabbis] to be silent or lose his life. He wanted me to call this rabbi on the phone and tell him of the rally but he warned me to say nothing if his wife or children answered the phone! However he scoffed at the idea of his own life being in danger. He said he simply did not care to walk in fear once he knew Jesus.
Many Jews seem to gloss over what is sensitive and central to Christians. It seems so very difficult for them to admit that maybe some faction of themselves once had something to do with the death of a good man, Jesus - be he the messiah or simply another rabbi. Even Jesus’ basic goodness was rejected as discovered by one [task force] team that met a rabbi who proclaimed that Jesus was evil for he had taught people to disobey the [holy] Mosaic Law [given by YHWH]!
However some very special Jews, who were able to go beyond the pain associated with examining the life of Jesus, we also met. One task force member who had a meeting with a chief rabbi of one city reported that when he apologized to the rabbi for the historical shortcomings of Christians to Jews he was surprised to hear the rabbi turn the tables on him and say with a smile: ”I accept your repentance. But if Jesus had not been persecuted by Jewish leaders and handed over to be murdered by the Romans, and if the early [Hebrew] Christians had not been persecuted by Jews, there would be no [Christian] anti-Semitism today.” Oh how smoothly things would go if significant numbers of people could reach these types of conclusions with respect to each other’s shortcomings.
Another example is Imam Bundakji, now a task force supporter, whose older, yet infant, brothers had been killed by Jewish militia shooting randomly & purposefully into homes of Palestinian villages in 1948 in efforts to drive them out of the land of Israel. Subsequently, in the same year, Haitham Bundakji was born in a refugee camp in Jordan where he grew up. For years he watched his mother’s tears and, seething with hate, attacked the first Jew he met, when, as a teenager, he arrived in Greece. He later moved to America and always got in to fights with Jews, spoke out and organized against them. He was their sworn enemy until one day, when on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Allah spoke to him through the verses of the Koran and brought about a profound change of heart. He is now the imam of a major California mosque that has made many interfaith breakthroughs with surrounding Jewish communities. He now even looks forward to the possibility that perhaps his son will one day marry a Christian or a Jew.
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