People of the greatest goodwill find the Middle East

problem perplexing.

The Latin adjective plexus means entangled, involved, confused. The English word plague is derived from the same source. When both Arabs and Israelis attack one another with murderous intent the words of Mercutio come to mind, "a plague o' both your houses". He was speaking of the warring families of Montague and Capulet in Romeo and Juliet. The problem of Palestine and Israel plagues and perplexes us all.

Two questions are being asked more frequently. One is, "How much more violence and destruction can Israel take, even when heavily subsidized by the United States, before even the most zealous Zionists will no longer wish to live there?" The second is, "How much more instability and exportable hatred from the Middle East can the world tolerate?". The problem has, admittedly, been marinated in racial, sectarian and political juices for centuries and particularly so since the late19th Century birth of Zionism.

The British Government's 1917 Balfour Declaration said that "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities". [Italics added]

The sympathy of German Jews and the growing political and financial support of those in the U.S.A. were crucial at that critical stage of the 1914-18 war. Later, under its mandate in Palestine, Britain tried to limit the Zionist aliyah ("return") schemes to an unstable Middle East. Albert Einstein said in a 1950 book, Out of My Later Years, "I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish State". The State of Israel, however,was created in 1948. Hostilities broke out immediately against the foreign insurgents who with Torahinspired zeal (although they were mostly secular, not religious, Jews) drove long-time Arab residents into concentration camps that still remain.

The post-1948 treatment of the Palestinians by the new State of Israel, itself the imposition of the victors in the Second War, has been seen in two ways. Zionists and some fundamentalist Christians pictured it as the fulfilment of ancient Hebrew prophecy, as though that applied to the 20th Century C.E. rather than to the 6th B.C.E. Others saw it as the cornerstone of Anglo-American policy, spurred by the influential Jewish vote in both countries, to plant a Western outpost in the Middle East. When the formerly Liberal Schwartz-Reisman money and, now Liberal Senator Grafstein's support moves toward the minority Conservative government on the single issue of its concurrence in Washington's perennial pro-Israel policy, the problem is highlighted. A switch is being made in Canadian foreign policy without sufficient debate in Parliament and, arguably, against public opinion. What is good for the current State of Israel is not necessarily good for the world. The interests of no one country should dominate Canada's foreign policy.

I think of Michael Marmoura, once a colleague at the University of Toronto. He was an immigrant from Palestine. When he revisited his family's old property, then in Israeli hands, a guide told his tourist group, "This was a desert before 1948". In non-irrigated areas olive trees only bear fruit after 40-50 years of growth. They had been cultivated by the Marmoura family for a century or more before it fled the Israeli occupation. Would either Canada or the U.S. accept a United Nations decision to create within them an aboriginal state that would build walls around itself and accept, say Iranian, aid and armaments to consolidate its ancestral claim to land where Calgary or Chicago stand today? Would that not create an intractable problem? Might not ongoing violence be the result?

That is what makes the Palestine problem so perplexing. No reasonable person can deny the contribution Jews have made and are making to the world. They have contributed greatly to Canada. The Talmud, a book of Jewish legend and commentary, says that "God did 'tzadakah' (good, justice) to Israel by dispersing them among the nations'. Contrary to the opinion of David Ben Gurion, first Prime Minister of Israel, most of the world's Jews prove that it is possible to live "a full Jewish life" outside of Israel. That country's current disregard of U.N. resolutions may not be the finest chapter in Jewish history, though it is not difficult to understand the emotions it arouses. But can Zionists and Protestant fundamentalists ever hope to rebuild the Temple on Mount Zion, replacing the mosque there? Jerusalem should be an international city, neither Israeli nor Arab. Their respective capitals should be elsewhere.

In passing, there is the question of relations between the synagogue and the church. Christianity is not the outgrowth of Judaism as we now know it. Rabbinic Judaism and both Catholic and Evangelical Christianity are outgrowths of the older Judaism that ended when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. (C.E.). In that sense, Christianity and Judaism have always experienced conflict. Some see a better hope of agreement between Christianity and Islam, even though Mohammed probably never met an orthodox Christian. He knew only members of early Jewish-Christian sects that were distinct from the developing Universal Church.

Pope Pius XI reminded the world that, spiritually speaking, all Christians are Semites. So, both racially and religiously, are Muslim Arabs. That becomes a complex issue when all criticism of Zionism is called antiSemitism. It certainly complicates the Jewish-Christian dialogue. It opens the door to fantastic "end-time", "chiliastic" and Battle of Armageddon expectations in the Christian fringe that is obsessed with Old Testament prophecy and Palestinian/Israeli geography.

Moshe Menuhin, the late Jewish author of The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time, wrote in the final paragraph of that 1950 publication, "I hope that this book will contribute to a healthier and more independent thinking by American and English Jews - an emancipation from their benighted fellow 'Jewish' nationalists who have perverted the noble heritage of universal Judaism". The book is not available in the Chapters chain, so 'google' it.

The perplexity continues.