Open Letter to the Iona Community in Response to your Statement re: Israel/Palestine

Feb 22, 2017 by

from Christian Friends of Israel:

In light of the unity that should exist between brothers and sisters in Christ, it is with a sense of sadness that we feel it necessary to respond to your statement on the situation in Israel.

What you refer to as a ‘settler colonial project’ was an international mandate to establish a national homeland for the Jewish people. That mandate recognised the need for such a homeland after the Jews had suffered persecution in many countries for many centuries. Even during the mandate period their suffering increased, culminating in the Holocaust – the darkest period in human history.

If Britain should apologise for anything, it should not be the Balfour Declaration, but their dreadful mistreatment of the Jews during the mandate period, repeatedly disarming Jewish communities and leaving them to suffer at the hands of their Arab neighbours, as in the Hebron massacre in 1929.

We too long for a just peace in the Middle East. But when we consider the vast territories occupied by Arab nations, it seems totally unjust that the Arabs wish to deny the Jews such a small territory as Israel for their homeland. It also seems unjust that Christians should seek to support the Arabs in denying the Jews their ancient homeland, when our Lord and Saviour was born a Jew and conducted most of his ministry in the land of Israel, repeatedly referring to it as ‘Israel’.

Your statement appears to attribute the suffering of the Arab Christians solely to the presence of the Jews, rather than acknowledging the oppression by their own leaders in Fatah and Hamas. Your statement makes no mention of the wicked incitement to acts of terrorism by those Arab leaders, nor of the despicable teaching of very young Arab children to hate Jews and kill them. Nor does it mention the diversion of building materials to construct terror tunnels rather than rebuild the homes of ordinary people in the Gaza Strip. We appeal to you to adopt a more balanced perspective.

Read here

Editor’s note: We are posting this open letter not because we support the views of Christian Friends of Israel in their entirety, but because this voice needs to be heard in the light of other Christian voices which object to the very basis of a Jewish state, while saying nothing about the blatant violations of human rights in some Muslim-majority countries. Hopefully as we read the original letter from the Iona Community and the response from CFI, our own views will be clarified and we can be more intentional in prayer for Israel.

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