| Uncritical support of Israel may prove costly BY R. BRUCE POYNTER I write this on April 9, months if not years after I should have written it. However, the events of the past two weeks in the Middle East have pushed me beyond the possibility of remaining silent. I deplore the violence that is destroying people, communities, social institutions, both in Palestine and Israel, and poisoning civil relationships in much of the rest of the world, and I lay responsibility for most of this at the door of religious fundamentalism, first of all in Israel, and secondarily in the Muslim world. If one could point to a single cause for the bloodshed currently taking place in the Middle East, I believe that cause would be the conviction on the part of many Israelis that their right to own and occupy the ancient land of Palestine in its entirety is God-given and absolute. God himself presented the Israelite people with this land as their own birthright and ultimately they must occupy and govern it all of it. Such a position admits of no possibility of political negotiation or of sharing. It is probably fruitless to attempt to argue with those who hold this position: it is a visceral, not an intellectual, position. It is an article of faith. I must remember, as I read the Bible, that these are documents that were generated within the Jewish community, reflecting their perspectives on life and the world, their priorities and claims. A revered professor of systematic theology at Drew, Edwin Lewis, used to remind us, Never forget: where you stand determines what you see. That is true today. It was true as Israel slowly achieved nationhood, endured exile, re-configured itself as two nations, all the while producing the literature we know as our Bible. The stories they wrote, the laws they generated, the poetry of their Psalms, all reflect the self-interest of a people aggressively conquering land or determinedly trying to hang on to it. To believe that it was theirs by divine right was an essential component of that determination. That does not mean that it was true. My place is near the head of the line regarding my sympathy for the Jewish people in what they suffered during that horrifying period we now call the Holocaust. If anything deserves to be labeled as evil a term presently being used much too easily in my judgment the treatment of the Jews in much of Europe and Russia during the 1930s to 1950s merits that description. I have no quarrel with the idea that some sort of resolution should have been offered them as that terrible period came to a close. While I claim no expertise regarding the situation in Palestine at that time, I am convinced there may have been possibilities of negotiating the settlement of many Jewish refugees to live alongside people whose families had for generations lived there. I cannot, however, bring myself to believe in the propriety of having forced these thousands of people off their land, violating every standard of justice by simply making this land available to others who claimed ownership by divine right. But that was done, and there exists today little if any chance of reversing that wrong. As an American, I, too, live on land that was forcibly taken from those who for many generations claimed it as theirs. But that does not mean that we should continue to support what are clearly escalating injustices being done in the Middle East. And one of these days, we will begin to see that in supporting Israel as uncritically as we have, we are significantly injuring our own interests as well as those of the Palestinians. A very painful price awaits to be paid, I fear, and what took place on Sept. 11 may have been only the down payment. The Rev. R. Bruce Poynter is a retired clergy member of the Baltimore-Washington Conference. | 
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