Emile, N. asked me to post this to you.
No question that there are serious criticisms to be made about Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. But the backdrop to the development of hard policies is the historical identification of the religious leadership of the Palestinians with the Nazis, and the development of the Palestinian resistance to Israel in the direction of armed action and terror.
The deeper background is the experience of unrelenting hatred and discrimination against Jews, terminating in the attempt to exterminate them.
One can understand why such a persecuted minority would want its own slate, army, and police, and to be in full command of its own security.
That the Jews survived centuries of Christian persecution in numbers sufficient to ultimately allow them to found a state is held to be attributable to the weight given Paul's notion that, at the end of time, the Jews would be converted. It was this notion that prevented the pogroms of the medieval period from running to their full extent.
The two statements by Paul are in Romans. The great scholar of Christian-Jewish relations, James Parkes, commenting on them, says, "These two statements are important, for they preserved the Jews during the middle ages from complete extinction. For it was argued that if they were completely extinguished, there would be none to provide the converted remnant which was to be the final crown of the Church." |
