Mennonite Weekly Review

“I don’t understand why Mennonites are always against Israel when the Bible tells us we are to be their friends,” one constituent wrote in response to a recent letter-writing campaign sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee’s Washington Office.

The campaign asked Mennonites to write President Bush and members of Congress, urging them to support “Bridges Not Walls” as the way to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The impetus for the letters was a 430-mile barrier Israel is constructing — much of it on Palestinian land — in the West Bank.

Mennonites responded generously, writing nearly 2,000 letters. But other Mennonites expressed anger and confusion.

“Do you really know what you are doing with this … campaign?” asked one. “You are going against God’s people… . I suggest you stop this campaign before God brings judgment on us Mennonites.”

The recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah evoked similar feelings. While some Mennonites felt free to criticize Israel’s massive military response to Hez­bollah’s provocation, others felt challenging Israeli policies is tantamount to cursing God’s chosen.

The difference of perspective seems to boil down to what we believe about the modern-day state of Israel.

Is today’s Israeli state part of what God had in mind when God promised Abraham he would become a great nation and that God would “bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse” (Gen. 12:2-3)?

Is the creation of a Jewish state some 60 years ago the fulfillment of biblical prophecy?

In The Way of Torah, prominent Jewish scholar Jacob Neus­ner writes: “In Judaism, ‘Israel’ refers to the holy people, the family of Abraham and Sarah, of whom Scripture speaks from Genesis 12 forward, who assembled at Sinai and accepted God’s Torah, or teaching, as the foundation of their life. This holy people forms a religious construct, not a fact of secular history and sociology: ‘Holy Israel’ is not to be confused with the state of Israel, the Jewish state, founded in 1948.”

While Neusner acknowledges the religious importance that the secular Jewish state has for modern Judaism, he sees the complexity of this question — and Christians need to as well.