What I would caution against, however, is a kind of endemic problem in contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue, especially anywhere such dialogue comes anywhere near the politics of the land of Israel. That problem is this: without meaning to, sometimes Christian critique of Israeli policies feels an awful lot like ordinary, typical Christian theological supersessionism, the kind which has been literally and figuratively “putting down” Jews (and Judiasm) for centuries.

You know what I’m talking about: Judaism is the ancient law of the “Old Testament”, which is vengeful and tied to tribal lands and ancient custims, as opposed to the universal, loving God and Bible of the Christians.

In NO WAY do I suggest that you, Rich, hold such views- I know you don’t. But it’s just so easy to talk about Israel- which has and creates all kinds of problems- in a way that slips into certain ways of thinking which feel all wrong to the Jews reading or hearing it. For example, quoting a book which lumps the European conquest of the Americas, the Afrikaaner regime in SA, and the Zionist enterprise of Jewish resettlement has the effect of saying to me: you Jews don’t even know or understand your own history, you don’t even realize what you were doing, and we, the nice Christians of European descent, who possess a greater truth than you can see, are going to tell you.

Here are some facts which make the “Zionism= Colonialism” equation problematic: Jews have had a more or less continual presence in the land we call Israel for about 2000 years, and had a continual history of oppression and slaughter in the Christian and Muslim countries in which they lived- including many bad years in the USA- prior to 1947.

Since before 1947, and right up until today, there are Muslim leaders who declare on a regular basis that every Jew should be killed- not every Israeli, but every Jew. Thus, to me, it’s impossible to see the Israel-Palestinian conflict outside the wider context of Islamic sense of “chosennes”, to use your words, which usually denies Jewish rights or realities.

What one person calls a colonial enterprise, we call a desparate attempt to find a place where the world won’t kill us, and the only real place were that could be was the place we’d always been.

That doesn’t make every Israeli policy right, it doesn’t justify nasty irredendist settler violence, it doesn’t mean Palestinians don’t also have rights to and in the Land, it doesn’t mean that hard compromises aren’t required on all sides, it doesn’t mean that anybody who criticizes Israel is anti-Semitic, it doesn’t mean that people of all faiths shouldn’t be calling attention to the human rights abuses which indeed happen in any situation of military occupation.

It does mean that imagining the reality of both sides includes really learning more about the Jewish historical experience and the history of Zionism, and talking about Jews in ways that does not presume to name the Jewish historical experience from the safe haven of the American midwest. We ALL have our work to do in learning to probe the nuance of conflict, which might include not being hasty to judge complicated, long conflicts through an incomplete (note, not wrong, just incomplete) set of conceptual lenses.

Well, this is more than I intended to write, and I’ll be happy to respond more later, but in any event, Rich, I applaud, now as always, the valuable work that CPT does.

be well,

Rabbi Neal Loevinger