Why Are Protestants So Pro-israel?

[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]

[MorphRC]

[quote name='Archangel Raphael' date='Jun 22 2004, 02:45 AM'] 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? [/quote]
God has two peoples, and two religions also?

"Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, "It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you [Jews:] but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles. For so hath the Lord commanded us, saying, "I hath set thee to be a light to the Gentiles, that thou shouldest be for salvation unto the ends of the earth."" And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed." (Acts 13:46-8)

[b]Saint Cyprian (died A.D. 258):[/b]

""For whereas in the Gospels, and in the epistles of the Apostles, the name of Christ is alleged for the remission of sins; it is not in such a way as that the Son alone, without the Father, or against the Father, can be of advantage to anybody; but that it might be shown to the Jews, who boasted as to their having the Father, that the Father would profit them nothing, unless they believed on the Son whom He had sent. For they who know God the Father the Creator, ought also to know Christ the Son, lest they flatter and applaud themselves about the Father alone, without the acknowledgement of His Son, who also said, "No man cometh to the Father but by me." But He, the same, sets forth that it is the knowledge of the two that saves, when he says, "And this is life eternal, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent." Therefore, from the preaching and the testimony of Christ Himself, the Father who sent must be known first, then afterwards Christ, who was sent, and there cannot be a hope of salvation except by knowing the two together. [...]" [b]Epistle LXXII[/b]

[b]Saint Fulgentius (died A.D. 533):[/b]

"Most firmly hold and never doubt that not only all pagans, but also all Jews, all heretics, and all schismatics who finish this life outside of the Catholic Church, will go into the eternal fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels." (To Peter on the Faith)

[b]Blessed Juliana of Norwich (died A.D. 1423):[/b]

"I knew in my faith that the Jews were accursed and condemned without end, except those who were converted." (Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love)

[b]Pope Eugenius IV, A.D. 1431-1447, at the Council of Florence (seventeenth ecumenical council):[/b]

***INFALLIBLE***: Ex cathedra: "It [the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church] firmly believes, professes, and proclaims that none of those outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but neither Jews, nor heretics and schismatics, can become participants in eternal life, but will depart "into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels" [Matt. 25:41], unless before the end of life they have been added to the Church; and that the unity of the ecclesiastical body is so strong that only to those remaining in it are the sacraments of the Church of benefit for salvation, and do fastings, almsgiving, and other functions of piety and exercises of Christian service produce eternal reward, and that no one, whatever almsgiving he has practised, even if he has shed [his] blood for the name of Christ, can be saved, unless he has remained in the bosom and unity of the Catholic Church." (Cantate Domino, A.D. 1442)

They seem pretty accursed to me, not to mention look at their history. Not exactly a shining example of a easy-going history. Even the arabs didnt have it as bad as the Jews, and you say they arent accursed?

[Mateo el Feo]

[quote name='MorphRC' date='Jun 21 2004, 12:28 PM'] 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. [/quote]
No need to get emotional. I simply said that the argumentation you use to claim there is no such thing as a "Palestinian" is something that was tried by Iraq with the Kuwaitis...and the Syrians with the Lebanese.

My comparison is valid. Further, I never judged whether you support Palestinians or Israelis. If you somehow read this between the lines of my post, I apologize. I didn't intend to do so.

Enjoy.

[Archangel Raphael]

Two religions? Where did I say anything about two religions? And Paul was speaking to the Jews who didn't believe in Christ being the Messiah they been waiting for. I'm talking Messianic Jews, which believe in Christ yet uphold their Jewish traditions as well. Also understand this, Paul was going to the Jews first, but they didn't recieve him. So the Holy Spirit told him to go to the Gentiles.

Jesus' ministry was to the Jews

Paul's ministry was to the Gentiles

God knows what He's doing.

[MorphRC]

1: aint getting emotion
2: dont compare anything I do, to a murderer.

----------

Jesus minstry was to the Jews, just the jews? You sure you wouldnt want to re-evalute that before a Muslim sees it.

[Archangel Raphael]

Sounds like you got some problems with the Jews my friend... I'll pray for ya.

[Hananiah]

[quote name='MorphRC' date='Jun 20 2004, 11:02 PM'] Errrrrrrrrrrrr Arabs werent even known to be around before the 6th century. And even the 'Arabs' mentioned in the Bible arent the same line as todays, but a assimilation of semitic and non-semitic peoples. The Canaanites inhabited 'Israel' they werent arab or semitic. So your wrong. sry [/quote]
Morph, I was talking about what happened in 1948, not in Biblical times.

[Hananiah]

[quote name='Archangel Raphael' date='Jun 21 2004, 11:15 AM'] 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? [/quote]
Have youread Romans 11? The natural branches we torn off, and need to convert to Christ to be grafted back in.

[Mateo el Feo]

[quote name='Hananiah' date='Jun 21 2004, 01:20 PM'] Have youread Romans 11? The natural branches we torn off, and need to convert to Christ to be grafted back in. [/quote]
Good reference!

Although, at this point I think it would be an improvement if the many atheist Israelis would first revert back to monotheism.

[Archangel Raphael]

I'm NOT talking about Judism. Even born Jews must confess that Jesus is Lord, which would make them Messianic Jews (Christian Jews). Just as we believe in the Trinity, and Jesus being the only way to the Father, they too must believe that. And besides the beginning of Romans 11 says God hasn't cast away his people he foreknew. Yes the Jews must embrace the new covenant, but they nonetheless still God's original chosen. And the 'broken branches' don't necessarily represent the Jews only, that is anyone who fails to choose to follow the Lord but be 'lukewarm' or cold in their Walk, or 'Path to Salvation' as some of you may call it. It said to in verse 20 that becuase of their unbelief they were broken off, which means anyone who does not believe in Christ and doesn't do the Will of the Father can be broken off. Then in verse 21 it says "For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He also spare not thee." In other words, if God can even cut off some of His original children from the Tree of Life cause of unbelief or failing to do His Will, don't think He won't do it with us (Gentiles) either.

[Archbishop 10-K]

[quote]"In other words, if God can even cut off some of His original children from the Tree of Life cause of unbelief or failing to do His Will, don't think He won't do it with us (Gentiles) either."[/quote]

What about that part where Christ said "and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it"?

[quote]I support Israel cause they are still God's chosen people, period.[/quote]

So, does this mean we are religiously obligated to support Jews over Arabs? And, Israel simply does not consist of pure Mosaic-era Jews. Most of the denizens there are from New York. Not to mention that they don't even, for the most part, have a strong religious faith.

And, what does the term "chosen people" mean anyway? Does this mean special political treatment? Were the Greeks not a "chosen people" as well for bringing their philosophy to the world? Were the Romans not "chosen people" for spreading Christianity throughout the Empire? Is this title only for a certain race in a certain piece of land that upholds a secular government?