Sacred Christian site Emmaus destroyed by Israel
“The Road to Emmaus,” 1877 painting by Robert Zund. The Gospel of Luke account remains beloved reading and gives inspiration to spiritual retreats. United Methodist News Service.
By Alison Weir | Israel-Palestine News | April 15, 2023
Emmaus is a profoundly important place in Christianity. The Bible says that after Jesus’ death and resurrection, he appeared before two of his disciples while they were walking on the road to Emmaus, although at first they didn’t recognize him. When they arrived in Emmaus, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it in pieces, and gave it to them.
In 1967, after Israel launched its Six Day War, Israel expelled the inhabitants of Emmaus and obliterated almost all traces of the village, along with two other Palestinian villages nearby. This was part of the Israeli strategy, in the words of an Israeli historian, “to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible” (a strategy initiated in the 1948 war to establish the modern state of Israel and then to erase the Palestinian presence).
Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes Emmaus before it was leveled: “Schools, mosques, an ancient church, olive presses, paths to fields and orchards, bubbling streams, mountain air, sabra bushes, carob and olive and deciduous trees, harvested fields, graves, water cisterns.”
Israel then “brought in the bulldozers and destroyed and detonated and trampled. Not for the first time, not for the last. And the owners of all that beauty – the elderly, the children, the infants – heard and watched the explosions from a kilometer or two away.”
The villages’ inhabitants then “trekked for days through the mountains to Ramallah, leaving their belongings behind. Four seniors and a one-year-old baby died along the way. The elderly and disabled residents who were unable to leave their homes had their houses demolished on top of them. Eighteen were killed, buried underneath the rubble.”
IDF soldiers expel the residents of Imwas (originally named Emmaus) from their village (source)
In 1972 Israel built its popular Canada Park on the location, named after Jewish Canadians who had been persuaded to donate for the venture. Hass writes that the park “was designed to conceal and bury” its war crime.
Christians often focus on the Biblical Emmaus story
Today, Christian pastors often retell the story of Jesus’ appearance to his disciples in Emmaus.
The numerous paintings of this sacred event are featured on Christian websites around the country. The story is often used as an inspirational message to Christians, for example, to become “more committed to serving others.” […]
Yet, almost none of the sites featuring the Biblical story of Emmaus seem aware of the modern story, and of the people made homeless and in need of help – perhaps because so few know these facts. As author Grace Halsell wrote in a powerful essay, most Christians are unaware of what they don’t know about Israel. “They were indoctrinated by U.S. supporters of Israel in their own country and when they traveled to the Land of Christ most did so under Israeli sponsorship.”
A moving film recounting the facts about Emmaus, “Ritorno a Emmaus” (Return to Emmaus), was broadcast on Swiss Italian Television on May 29, 1987 but was not shown in the U.S. This is the first time it’s available in English:
2 Comments »
Leave a comment
Featured Video
Israeli forces killed 8-year-old Ritaj’s family
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
Got His Gun: Lost His Legs, Arms, and Penis
By David Swanson | War is a Crime | October 27, 2013
Ann Jones’ new book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story, is devastating, and almost incomprehensibly so when one considers that virtually all of the death and destruction in U.S. wars is on the other side. Statistically, what happens to U.S. troops is almost nothing. In human terms, it’s overwhelming.
Know a young person considering joining the military? Give them this book.
Know a person not working to end war? Give them this book.
Jones presents the choice before us in the clearest terms in the introduction:
Contrary to common opinion in the United States, war is not inevitable. Nor has it always been with us. War is a human invention — an organized, deliberate action of an anti-social kind — and in the long span of human life on Earth, a fairly recent one. For more than 99 percent of the time that humans have lived on this planet, most of them have never made war. Many languages don’t even have a word for it. Turn off CNN and read anthropology. You’ll see.
What’s more, war is obsolete. Most nations don’t make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious ‘coalition.’ The earth is so small, and our time here so short. No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business.
Jones begins her book with that distinguishing feature of war: death. The U.S. military assigns specialists in “Mortuary Affairs” to dispose of the dead. They dispose of their own sanity in the process. … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Aletho News- Ukrainian military stole money intended for fortifications – media
- Is the U.S. blackmailing India over assassination allegations to be more hostile toward China and Russia?
- West mired in Ukraine crisis due to unwillingness or inability to confront reality
- NATO boss attacks China over Russia ties
- Israeli forces killed 8-year-old Ritaj’s family
- Global Temperatures and Reduced Cloud Cover
- Israel Stopping All Aid To Gaza, Journalist Tells Sputnik
- Shameless
- Only one power could stop Israel’s Rafah invasion – but it dropped the ball
- Israelis use Palestinian kids as human shields: Rights group
- If Americans Knew
- Who’s Funding AIPAC’s Political Spending Barrage?
- For Columbia and a Powerful Donor, Months of Talks and Millions at Risk
- Columbia crackdown led by university prof doubling as NYPD spook
- Disaster unfolds all over Gaza, West Bank – Day 219
- Israeli airstrikes in southern Gaza, invasion in central Gaza, carpet bombing in north – Day 218
- Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center
- Fighter jets, attack drones hammer Rafah; catastrophe looms – Day 217
- What it’s like to be used as a human shield by the Israeli army
- Detailed study finds 99% of pro-Palestine protests at US universities are peaceful
- VIDEO: Armenian Christians under siege by Israel
- Richie Allen
- The Richie Allen Show Returns Tomorrow Wednesday April 24th
- Call Richie Today Monday March 11th From 4.30pm
- Connect To The Richie Allen Show WhatsApp Today
- NHS Asks Patients To Choose From 12 Genders, 10 sexual Preferences & 159 Religions
- The Richie Allen Show Moves To A New Time Slot From Monday Nov 20th
- Starmer Will Sack Shadow Ministers Who Vote For Gaza Ceasefire
- AI Tool Can Predict Heart Attacks Years In Advance
- Nepal Bans TikTok To Preserve Social Harmony
- Bloke Appointed Boss Of Womb Health Charity
- WHO – “Gaza’s Biggest Hospital Becoming A Cemetery”
- No Tricks Zone
- Using Nets On The Seafloor To Retrieve Seafood ‘Roughly The Same As Running 100 Coal-Fired Plants’
- New Paper: Global Warming Leading To HIMALAYAN COOLING, Preventing Glacial Melt!
- DNA Evidence Reveals Domestic Cats, Dogs, African Wildcats, Frogs Lived In The Arctic 9000 Years Ago
- -80°C: Antarctic Vostok Station Records “Extreme Winter Cold”…Not Even Winter Yet!
- The German E-Vehicle Nightmare, 2024 Q1 Sales Plummet 14%… “Graveyard” For Unsold Cars
- Newly Discovered 90,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Reveal How Much Higher Sea Levels Used To Be
- Germany’s Economic Bloodbath Worsens As Green Revolution Causes Economy To Bleed To Death
- Water Vapor Absorbs 84 Times More Radiation Than CO2 … Clouds Drove 89% Of 1982-2018 Warming
- The 97% Consensus Claim Is In Fact 97% Bogus
- Post-1980s Increases In Shortwave Radiation Explains Europe’s Warming Trends Far Better Than CO2
Aletho News 
The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories. Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter (2014). “The Jimmy Carter Library”, p.759, Simon and Schusterhttps://www.azquotes.com/quote/653533
LikeLike
I sent an account of the fate of Imwas to the Guardian years ago. My letter was published (it probably wouldn’t be today), but I fear it has not had much of an impact. You never know, though: it may have opened a few eyes here and there.
LikeLike