Key Issue:Kairos Palestine Document

Many of the authors of the Kairos Palestine Document are active anti-Israel and pro-BDS activists with Documented histories of radical activism in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

1. Naim Ateek

•  Naim Ateek is the founder of Sabeel, an NGO that promotes BDS campaigns against Israel, and is a proponent of supersessionism and related antisemitic theologies.
• In June 2018, Ateek spoke at a Friends of Sabeel – UK conference titled “The Continuing Nakba” about the “individual duty to stand-up and do what we can, calling on us to act on Boycotts, Sanctions and Divestments as well as to engage in Morally Responsible Investment.”
• Ateek has reportedly stated that “if the Jewish people had a right to a homeland it should be in Germany, not Palestine.”
• In 2014, Ateek wrote a chapter for “Zionism Unsettled,” an “educational resource” published by the Presbyterian Church, writing that, “Zionism commits theological injustice by its appeal to God, history, and race.” Moreover, Ateek adds that Zionist claims are partially based on “the erroneous claim that all Jews are racial descendants of the Israelites of biblical times” (pg. 57- booklet on file with NGO Monitor).
• In a February 2011 speech during a Sabeel conference in Bethlehem, Ateek stated that “The establishment of Israel was a relapse to the most primitive concepts of an exclusive, tribal God.”

2. Rifat Odeh Kassis

• Kassis is the former General Director of Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P). Several past and current DCI-P board members and employees have ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a terrorist organization designated as such by the US, EU, Canada, and Israel.
• Kassis was formerly the International Coordinator and project manager for World Council of Churches and former member of an advisory group for DanChurchAid.
• On September 23, 2014, Kassis spoke at a memorial service for Hashem Abu Maria, the coordinator of Defense for Children International-Palestine’s community mobilization unit, organized by the PFLP. The memorial service also featured speeches by leaders of the PFLP. The courtyard where the memorial service took place was decorated with PFLP flags, posters, and pictures of prominent PFLP figures, such as founder George Habash and former leader Ahmed Sa’adat. Nearly all of the audience is dressed in PFLP apparel.
  • Following Hashem Abu Maria’s death, he was hailed by the PFLP as a “leader,” which issued an official mourning announcement.
• In a 2011 op-ed, Kassis promoted the antisemitic canard that Uri Rosenthal, at the time the Jewish Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, has dual loyalties, rendering him “so blind, so brazen, so hypocritical and so unjust,” and claiming that he “makes his own country a partner” in “Israel’s injustices.”

3. Mitri Raheb

• Mitri Raheb, Pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL), has led Sabeel delegations to Israel.
• At the 2010 Christ at the Checkpoint conference, Raheb offered an antisemitic and debunked racial theory for why Jews are not “the people of the land”: “I’m sure if we were to do a DNA test between David, who was a Bethlehemite, and Jesus, born in Bethlehem, and Mitri, born just across the street from where Jesus was born, I’m sure the DNA will show that there is a trace. While, if you put King David, Jesus and Netanyahu, you will get nothing, because Netanyahu comes from an East European tribe who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages” (emphasis added).

4. Lucy Talgieh

• Lucy Talgieh is the Women Coordinator at Wi’am, which promotes BDS campaigns against Israel, utilizes “apartheid” rhetoric, and seeks to demonize Israel through Christian theology.
• On February 5, 2019, Talgieh posted a letter that refers to the “daily Holocaust of his people in the occupied Palestinian Territory, and his city of occupied Jerusalem.”
• In a May 18, 2018 interview, Talgieh fails to acknowledge the use of violence (including Molotov cocktails, stone throwing, IEDs, and other methods) and involvement of terror groups in orchestrating the violence along the Gaza border, falsely stating that Palestinians were “killed in cold blood, although they posed no threat.” She also inaccurately claimed that the US embassy move was “in violation of international law. The offender is the superpower that supposedly calls for respect for this law…they move the embassy to Jerusalem on a bridge of Palestinian bodies…the act is considered an attack against the historical, legal, natural and national rights of the Palestinian people. It undermines the status of the United Nations and the rule of international law and thus constitutes a threat to international peace and security.”
• In February 2016, was a signatory on a call of Palestinian Feminists in Palestine and Diaspora declaring support in “stand[ing] with the struggle of the indigenous/native Palestinians against the colonial apparatuses used by the Israeli occupation regime.” According to the call, “our duty is to engage in this struggle, in accordance with our respective circumstances, and to encourage international solidarity movements, the most effective of which is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement” (emphasis added).

5. Yusef Daher

• Daher is the head of the Jerusalem Inter Church Centre (JIC), which hosts EAPPI’s Jerusalem Office.
• Daher is one of the editors of “Faith under Occupation,” EAPPI’s core publication that places sole blame on Israel for the difficulties faced by Christians in the Holy Land. It also seeks to “disprove” what it calls “unfounded Israeli and Christian Zionist propaganda that Palestinian Christians are depopulating due to Muslim fundamentalism in Palestinian society.
• In 2015, Daher spoke at a BDS event titled “ISRAEL: A Palestinian Christian Perspective.”
• In 2010, he spoke at a conference in Stockholm, where he stated, “We supported BDS we believed in the result that BDS can make and actually we… said that a full system of sanctions should have implemented on Israel long time ago…this is where we call our brothers and sisters to go for boycott. First personally and individually, and then convincing the churches and the churches to convince their governments…”

6. Michel Sabbah

• Founder of Society of St Yves, an Israeli NGO that petitions Israeli courts and represents defendants in cases relating to “Jerusalem Residency,” “House Demolitions,” “Land Confiscation,” and “Family Unification.”
• In 2016, Sabbah wrote a prayer for the children of Gaza, referring to Israel as the children’s “jailors” and as “those who obstinately want us to remain in war, death, under occupation and humiliation.” Sabbah blamed Israel for the conflict, and claimed that “No one incites” the children.