|
Essay, I appreciate your point of view and I will admit that I am open minded about this issue. While I agree with your contention that this is not a religious issue, I think that you will agree that there are many religious overtones in the discussion. At minimum, some of the original justification for the 1948 creation of an Israeli State was based on christian (small “c” to me) millennial thought and a Jewish belief that this was ‘homeland” based on the belief that God had granted this land to them. My question there is: what happened between 70 A.D. and 1948? To be fair, much of the problem was that League of Nations “formed” the State in 1948 without support from surrounding Arab countries. It has been a battle ever since and it would be easy to blame the Arabs for everything; however, from the Arab perspective there is a legitimate question about ownership of the territory. In making this point, please don’t get the idea that I support the Palestinian cause or that I think that Israel is all wrong. My point is: there are two sides to this issue and the lack of people realizing this is part of the problem. In modern times, there are accounts of Jewish settlement in the area as far back as the 1880’s, I am not sure that you can go much beyond that with adequate proof, but I would be happy to see it. The Palestinian claim to the area is not any stronger, in my opinion. So who’s land is it? Well, one thing I know is that it isn’t a place where many Christians are present or probably overly welcome as residents. Of course, to me, that puts it in the same category as much of the Islamic world, China and many other places. It makes you appreciate a free society. Will the road map work? The real goal of a Palestinian State for the world is that then someone can be held accountable for the murdering (because I believe that its outside of war) of Jews. It’s a great idea, but when the prevailing opinion is that Israel has no right to the land, it may be pretty hard to have any conflict end.
|
