Why Are Protestants So Pro-israel?

[the protector]

[quote]If the palestinains were i think really serious about achieving their rights the way the want there are far better productive ways look to MLK jr and Gandhi altho not the same situation i do not see how the same principles could not work there. If only people would put down the guns. [/quote]
No, they are not serious. They like living in poverty and having missiles lobbed at their homes.

Edited June 21, 2004 by the protector

[Crusader_4]

"The Protector" i am just saying that any serious civil rights movement in the 21st century has not been achieved by violence its counter productive...Why kill people that kill people that killed people that killed people...its something that in my eyes is never justified by either side.

[MorphRC]

[quote name='Archbishop 10-K' date='Jun 21 2004, 02:39 PM'] Same arguement you could use with "Jews." The difference is that one was kicked out in 1948 because of post-WWII Zionist pressures.


The point of the thread, though, is how Zionism is relevant in Catholicism/Christianity. Should we Catholics support it? Or is the real Israel only meant to exist when it's real Messiah and King returns? [/quote]
Oh please. Thats gotta be the poorest arguement Ive heard. Not to mention you contradict ur religion, and history, and apostolicity, and catholicity, and archaeology, and every other 'ogy' there is.

[quote]If the Holy See recognizes the state..then i do! simple as that...should we support it... should we hold back from any nation that needs help? i think support but support caituosly like with anything in regards to nationalism. Its not the same israel as before and i think as long as we recgonize it as that thats the important point. Crusade_4[/quote]

It wouldnt have prior to VII, infact there were numerous missions to 'Israel' by Catholic Bishops, and also it kinda contradicts traditional teaching, and also the lone fact that, IT AINT THERE LAND, OR RIGHT. The jews are taking it all with the Holocaust guilt trip they use, and use, and it disgusts me that modern day jews use the Holocaust to get their political, ecomonic needs.

'We dont wanna see another Holocaust'
'We dont want Pogroms'
'We need a home'

Well they arent the only ones.

Oh and the

'Anti-Semiticism is on the rise'

[Archbishop 10-K]

[quote name='MorphRC' date='Jun 20 2004, 11:41 PM'] Oh please. Thats gotta be the poorest arguement Ive heard. Not to mention you contradict ur religion, and history, and apostolicity, and catholicity, and archaeology, and every other 'ogy' there is. [/quote]
It's simple: all of the Jews that attend my school are absolutely indistinguishable from the white guys.


And how do I contradict my religion?

[MorphRC]

[quote name='Archbishop 10-K' date='Jun 21 2004, 03:22 PM'] It's simple: all of the Jews that attend my school are absolutely indistinguishable from the white guys.


And how do I contradict my religion? [/quote]
Im referring to 6th century BC not 20th AD

[yiannii]

could it be because protestantism is generally more secularised than catholicism?

[CreepyCrawler]

but Israel was formed by kicking off the Palestinians from their land. in playground logic -- that's not fair! maybe they could split it up evenly in half, but then there's always the question of who get jerusalem?...

the state of israel is a political thing, not religious. the most religious, orthodox jews aren't the ones screaming for the state of israel, it's the secular ones.

[Mateo el Feo]

[quote name='Crusader_4' date='Jun 20 2004, 11:26 PM'] To me i am neither for Israel (altho i do think they handle the situation better then Palestine) nor for Palestine i think its a very difficult situation i forget the author who said this but he wrote "the road to Beirut" i think pullitzer prize winner he said: "Peace will only be possible when both the israelis and palestinans love their sons more then they hate each other"...and i think thats true. [/quote]
I think you're talking about Thomas Friedman's "From Beirut to Jerusalem." Good book. Nice quote.

[p0lar_bear]

This issue is a very difficult one and is not likely to be settled soon.

Both sides have done some horrific things, both sides have legitimate arguments for their case. There are reasons to support both sides, but whether one sides with the Israelis, the Palestinians, or neither is a matter of political opinion, not moral necessity. The morality of the situation is the same as it is anywhere: the rights and dignity of all the persons involved should be respected and upheld.

Oh, and a quote from the Church:

[quote]Bishop Giuseppe Bertello, speaking at a UN conference on human rights in
Geneva, left no doubt that the Holy See was criticizing the Israeli
government for its failure to acknowledge the rights of Palestinians. He
deplored "the absence of respect for certain fundamental human rights, such
as the [i]right to have a state and an independent government[/i], as well as the
rights of security and free expression for one's own culture and history" (emphasis added).[/quote]

[MorphRC]

[quote name='CreepyCrawler' date='Jun 22 2004, 12:01 AM'] but Israel was formed by kicking off the Palestinians from their land. in playground logic -- that's not fair! maybe they could split it up evenly in half, but then there's always the question of who get jerusalem?...

the state of israel is a political thing, not religious. the most religious, orthodox jews aren't the ones screaming for the state of israel, it's the secular ones. [/quote]
Two things wrong in your first sentence.

1: No such place as palestine. It was Trans-Jordon, then Jordon.
2: No such people as the Palestinian. Those are Jordanians, not palestinians.

[b]As the following states:[/b]

[b]Fast Facts on the Middle East Conflict - The Palestinian Problem, pg 60 Part 13[/b]

[i][b]From where did the Palestinians Originate?[/b][/i]

The approximately three million modern Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip claim to be the descendants of the ancient natives of Palestine. For example, Tad Szulc, writing in [i]National Geographic [/i]magazine, stated, "The ancestors of today's Palestinians appeared along the southeastern Mediterrranean coast more than five millennia ago and settled down to a life of fishing, farming and herding."8 In like manner, the report [i]The Arab Case for Palestine[/i], which was submitted by the Arab Office, jerusalem, to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in March 1946, says this: "The Arabs of Palestine are the indigenous inhabitants of the country, who have been in occupation of it since the beginning of history."9 Recent Palestinian authors have identified these 'Arab' ancestors of the Palestinians as Canaanites, Jebusties and Philistines.
These claims stand in contract to archaeology and history, which are united in the fact that the Philistines and the Jebusites were [u][b]non-semitic peoples[/b][/u]. Furthermore, the Bible distinguishes the 'Arabs' from the Philistines (2 Chr 17:11). The Jebusties disappeared from history by the end of the tenth century BC. The last historical mention of the Philistines dates to about 600BC., when they were taken into cpativity by the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar.10
Moreover, Arab heritage is traceable in secular history no earlier that references in the Neo-Assyrian annals of the ninth to seventh centuries BC. However, Palestinian historians claim that the present-day Palestinian people are descendants of the Canaanites through Muslim invaders of the seventh century who intermarried with the Canaanite remnant [i]still living[/i] in the Land. Some scholars have traced Canaanite artistic traditions 9through the Phoenicians) in script, pottery, designs and cultic motifs of the Punic culture in Carthage to as laste as 149BC.11 Yet even this preserved influence of Canaanite art still leaves another 1000 years until the coming of the Arabian nomads of Islam to the Land. There is simply no trace in any historical document from this long period that indicates any of the Canaanite peoples continued to exist in the Land. Perhaps it is for this reason that the Qur'an (as well as any Muslim writing after the Muslim conquest) makes no ancestral connection going back to the Canaanites (or to the Philistines or Jeusites)

Continued...

[Norseman82]

1) As said before, the support of Israel deals with the whole interest in how Israel plays into a group's interpretation of 'end-times' prophesies in the Bible. There are some groups that seem more radical than others, and it does seem that some of them give me the impression that there should be a modern-day "Line of Demarcation" in which teh globe is to be divided up between the United States and Israel.

2) Let's also remember that Israel is the only real functioniong democratic republic in the Middle East (Turkey is somewhat, but the military has the authority to take over the government if it does not like the election results or otehrwise meddle in government affairs under the principle of "guardian of secularism").

3) In 1948, the UN resolution to end the British mandate over Palestine called for a division of Palestine into Jewish and Arab territories. The Jewish territory was even smaller than was pre-1967 Israel. As I recall, the Jews accepted this settlement, the Arabs did not and attacked Israel. Israel defeated them. It must be remembered that it was the Arabs who shed first blood here and so they have to accept the consequences of Israel defending itself.

4) Many Arabs just object to the very existence of Israel and believe that if Jews want to be able to live in Palestine, they should so so under an Islamic caliphate.

[MorphRC]

Continued..

The actual origin of the modern Palestinians begins in the closing decades of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine in the last nineteenth century. During that time, most of the agricultural land was owned by large-scale landowners that had existed in a feudal system for hundreds of years. The fertile coastal plain was worked by poor tenant farmers and laborers imported from other countries. While most of the country was desolate, arab villages existed in parts of the land alongside jewish communities that had long existed in cities of religious importance such as Jerusalem, Hebron and Safed. Ottoman bureaucrats resided only in Jerusalem, and Arab bedouin occupied the desert regions, tending their animals. Therefore, while Palestine was not an "empty land," its general desolation was inhospitable to life and it was sparsely populated. Starting about 1878 harsh conditions forced many groups to immigrate into Palestine, where work was available. According to historical surveys, these migrant workers, from which the Palestininas of today are descended came from many nationalities: "Balkans, Greeks, Syrians, Latins, Egyptians, Turks, Armeanians, Italians, Perisans, Kurds, germans, Afghans, Druzes, Turks, Circassians, Bosnians, Sudanese, Samaritans, Algerians, Motawila, Tartars, Hungarians, Scots, Navarese, Bretons, English, Franks, Ruthenians, Bohemians, Bulgarians, Georgians, Persian Nestorians, Indians, Copts, Maronities and many more."12 Of the non-Jewish population surveyedin 1882, at least 25 percent of the people were new-comers (mostly from non-Arab countries),13, the rest being Bedouin nomads and the descendants of previous immigrants (within the previous 70 years). Moreover, according to former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, this group "came to the West Bank just prior to the Six Day War".14 These, then, are the indigenous Palestinian people claimed by the Palestinian Authority to have existed throughout Palestin from antiquity.

[b]Fast Facts on the Middle East Conflict - Randall Price. Harvest House Publishers-Eugene Oregon. Copyright 2003.[/b]

[b]Sources within book:[/b]

[color=purple][b]8:[/b] Tad Szulc, "Who are the Palestinians?" [i]National Geographic [/i](June 1992)
[b]9:[/b]As cited in "The Arab Case of Palestine: Evidence Submitted by the Arab Office, jerusalem, to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, March 1946," in [i]The Israel-Arab Reader[/i], ed. Walter Laqueur (New York: Bantam Books 1969), p.92.
[b]10:[/b]Trude Dothan, "The 'Sea Peoples' and the Philistines of Ancient Palestine," [i]Civilizations of the Ancient Near East[/i], ed. jack M.Sasson (Peabody, MA:Hendrickson Publishers, 2000), 1:1271.
[b]11:[/b]See Jonathan N. Tubb, [i]Canaanites[/i], People of the Past Series (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), pp. 145-46. Tubb sees a Neo-Punic artistic tradition continuing until A.D. 200, but agrees that the Canaanite influence ended at Carthage.
[b]12:[/b]For this list see DeHass, [i]History[/i], p.258, and John of Wurzburg in Reinhold Rohricht edition, pp. 44,69.[/color]

[Mateo el Feo]

[quote name='MorphRC' date='Jun 21 2004, 11:28 AM'] Two things wrong in your first sentence.

1: No such place as palestine. It was Trans-Jordon, then Jordon.
2: No such people as the Palestinian. Those are Jordanians, not palestinians.
[/quote]
This is, by the way, the same logic that Saddam Hussein used to occupy Kuwait in 1990. "There was no such thing as a Kuwaiti--they are Iraqis. Kuwait is just part of the greater Iraq."

And the same goes with Lebanon and Syria. "There was no such thing as Lebanon. It's just part of the greater Syria."

The fact is that up until WWI, the only nationality most Arabs knew was as Ottoman Turks. All of the borders (including the Israeli border) were almost arbitrarily drawn by the European Allies (in the League of Nations).

As for a racial connection between the Palestinians and the ancient Philistines, I suspect their claim is more solid than most Israelis' connection to the ancient Jews/Israelites. Most Israelis I see have the physical characteristics of the inhabitants of their place of origin, whether Europe, Russia, Ethiopia, the rest of the Arab world, or whereever. This would indicate to me a tenuous blood connection to the original semitic tribes.

Ironically, many Palestinian Christians also have racial ties to Europe (some back to the Crusades), though I suspect they never considered themselves Jordanians.

$0.02

[Archangel Raphael]

I also am in agreement with Ironmonk too.

I support Israel cause they are still God's chosen people, period. Yes we are now living in the New Covenant, but we Christians aren't to replace the Jews. You forget, we are GRAPHED INTO the tree of life. Christ came so the Father could adopt us among His people the Jews. So spiritually we are Jews as well. Ya they aren't perfect, but are we?

[MorphRC]

How the heck do you compare my historical statements with Saddam Hussein? If you bothered reading the thread prior, you'd know I dont support Israel or Palestine, and that my statements, were attacking the legit. of the Palestinian claims, which is a shambles in the historical eye.

As for the Jewish claim, a certain percentage can still find their heritage back to OT times, unlike Arabs.

[b]New Advent - ARABIA AND THE OLD TESTAMENT[/b]

The Old Testament references to Arabia are scanty. The term Arab itself, as the name of a particular country and nation, is found only in later Old Testament writings, i.e. [b]not earlier[/b] than Jeremias (sixth century B.C.).

The same chronicler tells us, also, how God punished the wicked Joram by means of the [b]Philistines and the Arabians[/b], who were beside the Ethiopians (II Paral., xxi, 16), and how he helped the pious Ozias (A.V., Uzziah) in the war against the "Arabians that dwelt in Gurbaal" (xxvi, 7).

[color=red][b]Notice the seperation of Philistine and Arab[/b][/color]