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Kindle Notes & Highlights
People of faith can read the Bible so that almost any perspective on a current issue will find some support in the Bible. That rich and multivoiced offering in the Bible is what makes appeals to it so tempting—and yet so tricky and hazardous, because much of our reading of the Bible turns out to be an echo of what we thought anyway.
The dispute between Palestinians and Israelis is elementally about land and secondarily about security and human rights.
The reality of history is that the land was indeed losable, as the city of Jerusalem was destroyed in the sixth century BCE and the monarchal state of Judah under the Davidic dynasty lost its political identity.
In the current state of Israel with its Zionist policies, the exclusion of the other (now the Palestinians) is a dominant motif. And while the state of Israel continues to “negotiate” with the Palestinians, the dominant Zionist appeal to land promises continues to hold intransigently to the exclusionary claim that all the land belongs to Israel and the unacceptable other must be excluded, either by law or by coercive violence.
The Bible is ambiguous about “the other.”
