Martin Peretz in The New Republic on the Anglican Church of England’s divestment decision:
The Anglicans have an analysis backing up their position: “It is the Israeli occupation in its many facets that foments the violence and fuels the conflict.” This ignores so many facts that it boggles the mind. Neither the Arabs of Palestine nor the established Arab states were willing to accept an Israel within very crimped borders; the occupation began in 1967 after the Arabs provoked–but lost–a war to eradicate precisely such a precarious Israel; and the Palestinians rejected out of hand the near-total withdrawals that Israel offered at Camp David in 2000 and Taba in 2001. These peace-mongering Anglican bishops are playing the role of “useful idiots,” this time for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the other irredentist and murderous factions of the Palestinian polity…
Searching in vain for the Church’s rationale, Peretz reaches this sober conclusion:
The obsession here is not positive, for one side, but rather negative, against the other side. The clerics and the lay leaders on this indefensible crusade are so fixated on Palestine because their obsession, which can be buttressed by various Christian sources and traditions, is really with the Jews. A close look at this morbid passion makes one realize that its roots include an ancient hostility for the House of Israel, an ugly survival of a hoary intolerance into some of the allegedly enlightened precincts of modern Christendom.
