I appreciate your strong commitment to peace and to our shared humanity, and that you're willing to continue speaking out about the evils we are watching (and funding).
I'd like to point out a couple places your words didn't quite ring true. The first is actually in separating Palestinians from Jews in terms of God's plans and purposes. It does make for a bit of a nice package: Jews created to be a blessing, Palestinians one of the intended recipients of that blessing. But we have to stop and ask ourselves how we are even defining who is "in" and who is "out" of a people group. Jews and Palestinians share the same DNA. Many Jews have admixture from Europeans and Palestinians have admixture from Arabs, but both have been shown to be directly descended from the people who lived in the land in the time of Jesus and long before. The Palestinian church traces its roots back to the very first JEWISH followers of Jesus in the first century. They are not foreign to the land in some way that Jews are not. They are not less children of Abraham. They are indigenous to the Holy Land, and the situation there would be helped, I think, if we all started to recognize that.
The second point is your connecting the establishment of Israel with the Holocaust. Yes, the Holocaust gave the Zionist project the moral authority it needed to become a reality, but it started in the 19th century, and it was oddly both a response to antisemitism and antisemitic itself. Many Europeans saw it as a great way to "encourage" the Jews in their midst to remove themselves. The only Jewish MP at the time was the only MP to vote AGAINST the Balfour Declaration, because he recognized this. Absolutely, centuries of oppression in Europe have consequences. But we should recognize that the impetus that led to the state of Israel today is bound up in that oppression in a more complex way than merely being a pendulum swing in the other direction.
I appreciate your strong commitment to peace and to our shared humanity, and that you're willing to continue speaking out about the evils we are watching (and funding).
I'd like to point out a couple places your words didn't quite ring true. The first is actually in separating Palestinians from Jews in terms of God's plans and purposes. It does make for a bit of a nice package: Jews created to be a blessing, Palestinians one of the intended recipients of that blessing. But we have to stop and ask ourselves how we are even defining who is "in" and who is "out" of a people group. Jews and Palestinians share the same DNA. Many Jews have admixture from Europeans and Palestinians have admixture from Arabs, but both have been shown to be directly descended from the people who lived in the land in the time of Jesus and long before. The Palestinian church traces its roots back to the very first JEWISH followers of Jesus in the first century. They are not foreign to the land in some way that Jews are not. They are not less children of Abraham. They are indigenous to the Holy Land, and the situation there would be helped, I think, if we all started to recognize that.
The second point is your connecting the establishment of Israel with the Holocaust. Yes, the Holocaust gave the Zionist project the moral authority it needed to become a reality, but it started in the 19th century, and it was oddly both a response to antisemitism and antisemitic itself. Many Europeans saw it as a great way to "encourage" the Jews in their midst to remove themselves. The only Jewish MP at the time was the only MP to vote AGAINST the Balfour Declaration, because he recognized this. Absolutely, centuries of oppression in Europe have consequences. But we should recognize that the impetus that led to the state of Israel today is bound up in that oppression in a more complex way than merely being a pendulum swing in the other direction.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading!