H.P. shop: Questionable connections

By Seth Mandel
Nov. 9, 2007

The North American retail chain Ten Thousand Villages is owned by a large Mennonite organization that accuses Israel of apartheid, advocates a one-state solution, and supports organizations that accuse the Israeli government of metaphorically crucifying Jesus, blame Israel for suicide bombings, and refer to the existence of "Israeli concentration camps," The Jewish State has learned.

The Ten Thousand Villages franchise on Raritan Avenue in Highland Park, owned by the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), opened in July of this year.

Middlesex County resident Beatrice Cheslow made a recent shopping trip to the Highland Park Ten Thousand Villages. Cheslow picked up a Judaica item, and, seeing that it was made outside of Israel, asked the store clerk if they carry any products from Israel.

Although the chain's Web site advertises products from the West Bank, which the store clerk confirmed to Cheslow, Cheslow was told that the store doesn't buy from Israel or China.

Cheslow said she was alarmed by the answer, since it connected Israel with China -- notorious for its trade practices and human rights abuses -- but disconnected Israel from the West Bank.

Cheslow contacted The Jewish State because, she said, the response she received from the store clerk made it clear that the company does not trade with "Jewish" Israel, yet the franchise opened in the heart of one of New Jersey's Jewish communities.

"I am stunned that they opened a store on Raritan Avenue," Cheslow said. "Really, it's amazing that they would do that."

Following Cheslow's call, an investigation by The Jewish State into the MCC showed that the MCC raises approximately 33 percent of its annual funds through Ten Thousand Villages, and its executive director sits on the Ten Thousand Villages board of directors.

Paul Quiring, who served as chairman of the Ten Thousand Villages board of directors until the end of October, was contacted by The Jewish State for this story; his successor, Alex Hartzler, told The Jewish State that Quiring would not comment.

In the past, Quiring testified before the United Nations on the "nature and purpose" of Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, which included Jerusalem. His testimony was prepared for the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

Quiring testified that Israeli settlements were "aimed at containing and isolating the Palestinian communities", intended "to ring the most populous Palestinian towns" and that the "string" of settlements "separates West Bank Palestinians from Israel."

Quiring went on to state that "all Israeli settlements constructed on the West Bank" are on land that was "in the domain of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or belonged to villages and individuals at the time of the occupation."

He testified that the land for Israeli settlements in the West Bank is acquired by purchase, expropriation, or confiscation, but added that an above-board sale of land from the Arabs to Jewish Israelis was rare, so the Israeli landowners, military, or government had to find another way to take hold of the land.

"As West Bankers are rarely willing, for political reasons, to sell land to Israeli institutions, the majority of the settlements have been built on land which was not sold, but was either expropriated or confiscated," Quiring said.

Quiring concluded to the U.N committee that Israeli settlement of the West Bank seeks to "transform" the territory, contrary to Israel's obligation to simply govern the territory after the "occupation."

"At best, the impact (of the settlements) will be disruptive -- at worst it will help to turn a people out of their land," Quiring said.

At the time, Quiring was the director of the Mennonite Relief Agency, and he has also served as the MCC's West Coast director.

Hartzler told The Jewish State that Quiring's views "are not reflective at all of Ten Thousand Villages."

Hartzler said the store has received a warm welcome from the Highland Park community, and added that Ten Thousand Villages in not a political actor in areas in which the organization trades, regardless of the existence of conflict in those regions. They are, he said, a Fair Trade Organization member seeking to give poor artisans access to the global market.

"That's simply all we do," Hartzler said.

The MCC's U.S. headquarters are located in Akron, Penn., down the street from its Ten Thousand Villages headquarters. In its own words, the "Mennonite Central Committee is the relief, development, and peace agency of Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches in North America. MCC seeks to demonstrate God's love by working among people suffering from poverty, conflict, oppression, and natural disaster."

However, last month, the MCC wrote a background piece on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The organization has several Middle East offices, one of which is called MCC in Palestine. MCC in Palestine provides a "Palestine Update" link for visitors to its Weblog site, www.mccpalestine.blogspot.com.

The essay, which is titled "How did the current situation in Israel/Palestine come to be?" claims to be providing "an objective introduction". In it, the unnamed MCC author doesn't name the 1948 war, but simply refers to it as "that war." After "that war," which was lost by the Palestinians and Arabs, the essay states, Israel had not only controlled more territory than the U.N. had mandated, but had already created the Palestinian refugee crisis.

"During the war Israel had gone through and told people (Palestinians and Jews) to leave their towns because war was approaching," the MCC author wrote. "Generally the people were told they would be able to return soon; unfortunately, in the territory that Israel now controlled, non-Jews were not allowed to come back to what had previously been their homes."

The MCC author then claimed that Israel created another refugee situation in the Six-Day War of 1967.

"Prior to 1967, the West Bank was part of the country of Jordan," the author erroneously stated, failing to mention that Jordan's control of the West Bank from 1948-67 was recognized by the international community as an illegal occupation of that land.

"When Israel took control of this region, they again refused to allow many non-Jews to come back to villages they had left," the MCC author continued.

The MCC is commemorating "40 Years of Naksa/60 Years of Nakba" this year as well, according to its Palestine Update -- that is, in June it marked 40 years since Israel's "illegal military occupation of these territories, another stage in a continuing catastrophe with daily military attacks, house demolitions, land confiscation, expanding Israeli colonies, and the Wall." With the 60^th anniversary of Israel's independence coming up in the spring, the MCC will be marking 60 years since the aforementioned "expulsion" of Arabs.

The MCC also participated in a dialogue with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in February 2007. J. Daryl Byler, director of the MCC's Washington office, wrote a letter to President George W. Bush praising the Iranian leader who has called repeatedly for Israel to be "wiped off the map" as a "religious man."

Byler, in a quote confirmed by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), described Ahmadinejad as "having a measured tone, seeming reasonable and having a witty personality."

According to a March 1 (the day Byler's quote ran) report on the Web site of Iran's official news service, the Islamic Republic News Agency, Ahmadinejad called Zionists "the true manifestation of Satan" and called Israel "the manifestation of the ugly soul of some usurper powers that support it."

A Sept. 26 discussion between Ahmadinejad and church leaders in New York City was moderated by Burt Lobe, who is the interim executive director of the Mennonite Central Committee.

Lobe, who also sits on the Ten Thousand Villages board of directors, was contacted by The Jewish State a week prior to press time, but had yet to return any requests for comment.

After serving as an MCC peacemaker in the Middle East, Sonia K. Weaver authored a book called "What is Palestine-Israel?" According to a CAMERA report, Weaver advocates a one-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict because, as she wrote in the book, the establishment of "one state would allow Palestinian refugees to return to their original homes."

The MCC supports several organizations it calls its Palestine Partners. These include the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, BADIL, and Stop the Wall.

Sabeel, based in Jerusalem, published a "Palestinian Christian perspective" on suicide bombers in Cornerstone, its quarterly English language publication. While it claims not to support suicide bombing, it states that all suicide bombers were born under Israeli military occupation, and should therefore be viewed as a product of aggression and oppression by Jews.

"It was in the crucible of the occupation that they were shaped and formed," the author, Naim Ateek, wrote. "And if Israel labels them as terrorists, they are, after all, the product of its own making."

Ateek, founder and director of Sabeel, went on to state the different types of Palestinians who become suicide bombers. One segment of the suicide bombing community is made up of, according to Ateek, young Palestinian men and women who "have been arrested and tortured in Israeli prisons and 'concentration' camps."

This was not Ateek's only comparison between Israeli officials and the Nazis who murdered more than 6 million Jews and more than 5 million other victims. Later in the article, Ateek claims that in 2001, then Israeli deputy public security minister Gideon Ezra suggested letting a suicide bomber know that the bomber's father would be harmed if he detonated himself in an attempt to kill civilians.

"Apparently, Ezra was basing his suggestion on a Nazi practice that used to arrest and inflict suffering on the families of those who were suspected of undermining the state," Ateek wrote.

Ateek later compared Palestinian suicide bombers to the Jewish biblical hero Samson.

"Was not Samson a suicide bomber?" Ateek wrote. "Is it legitimate to tell the story today by substituting the name Ahmad for Samson?"

Ateek also compared Jesus' crucifixion with that of the Palestinians, and even went so far as to say that because of the Israeli government "Jesus is on the cross again," this time represented by Palestinians.

In his own words: "Jesus is the powerless Palestinian humiliated at a checkpoint, the woman trying to get through to the hospital for treatment, the young man whose dignity is trampled, the young student who cannot get to the university to study, the unemployed father who needs to find bread to feed his family; the list is tragically getting longer, and Jesus is there in their midst suffering with them."

Ateek, additionally, organized a conference at a Boston church on Oct. 26 called "The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel" at which Archbishop Desmond Tutu spoke. The conference has been held in different U.S. cities since August.

Stop the Wall is an organization that accuses Israel of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and advocates the demolition of Israel's security fence. According to the Israel Security Agency, demolishing the fence would have a clear impact on the country: between September 2000 and the completion of the first section of the fence in August 2003, there were 73 mass murder attacks carried out against Israel from the West Bank, killing 293 Israelis and wounding 1,950.

Between August 2003 and the end of 2006, there were 12 such attacks, killing 64 Israelis and wounding 445. Stop the Wall calls for the destruction of that fence and putting an end to the post-1967 "Judaization" of Israeli land.

BADIL demands the right of return of all Palestinian refugees, accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing, encourages divestment from Israel and the boycotting of Israeli goods, and authored an article titled: "The Jewish National Fund (JNF): A Parastatal Institution Chartered to Dispossess and Discriminate".

BADIL refers to Israel's War of Independence as the "Zionist military effort in the 1947-48 War of Conquest."

The MCC also publishes the quarterly Peace Office Newsletter. One 2005 issue was devoted in its entirety to the evils of Christian Zionism. The Rev. Alex Awad, who authored a book called "Through the Eyes of the Victims: The Story of the Arab-Israeli Conflict", wrote one article in the newsletter called "Christian Zionism: Their Theology, Our Nightmare!"

In it, Awad makes statements such as "Christian Zionism influences its followers to be indifferent to the Biblical mandates on peace and justice"; "Zionism is militarizing the church"; "Israel confiscates Palestinian land, demolishes the homes of the poor, destroys their agricultural land and siphons off their water resources, while many Christian Zionists continue to bless Israel and sing her praises"; and "... the Bible is twisted into a manual for occupation."

Ten Thousand Villages has more than 160 retail stores in North America. According to the MCC's annual financial report, Ten Thousand Villages, between sales and donations, brings in just over $34 million a year, out of the MCC's total income of $102.4 million. The MCC reported a total of $3.7 million in net assets after expenses for the fiscal year 2006-07.

According to the report, costs associated with Ten Thousand Villages included cost of sales ($12.52 million), warehousing ($4.75 million), sales and marketing ($11.35 million), and administration ($3.224 million).

According to Ten Thousand Villages' annual financial report for the year ending March 31, 2007, the chain did more than $23 million in sales.