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I have visited Israel only once: twenty years ago or more, for an interfaith conference held at a study centre just outside Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate, and then a quick tour up and around the Galilee. I came away thinking that “the question of Israel/Palestine” was the first subject I had ever studied that got more complicated and confusing the more I studied it.

I think I understand the situation better today than I did then. But it remains a conundrum—and now a conundrum on fire.

Meanwhile, lots of people think it isn’t a conundrum at all. Student protesters think it’s obviously true and good that Israel must withdraw from Gaza, that the Palestinians must have their own state, and that Israel instead must—well, what?
“From the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, Palestine must be free” is a phrase—going back to the 1960s coined by the Palestine Liberation Organization (the Hamas of its day)—to indicate a Palestinian state replacing the Jewish one. That sounds simplistic, if not genocidal, to me.
But I was also nonplussed by the recent utterance of a Christian pastor. He told his congregation that we Christians ought to “pray for the peace of Israel” and in particular support the local synagogue, who could be presumed to be anxious about the rise of antisemitism.
I wasn’t sure he quite understood the scriptural source of that phrase, about which more below. More bothersome, however: I waited in vain for him to mention other people in that region and in our own locale for whom we ought also to pray.
He didn’t mention Palestinian Christians, there or here, who are our brothers and sisters in Christ. Nor did he mention Islamic Palestinians, who have a list of significant grievances and who are undergoing most of the suffering there today, as well as Muslims here in Canada who stand with them as cobelievers—and who are our neighbours.
I worried about how this well-intentioned gesture might actually damage the reputation of the church among the community—taking sides in a fraught situation, implicitly disparaging a growing immigrant population, and so on. It was a dangerous move to make on its own.

The rest of the article can be read HERE.