It is essential that Christians to keep in mind the sad history of Christian antisemitism when responding to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because, as the course lesson described, the conflict and Zionism itself (which spurred into being at a 1897 conference in Basel, Switzerland) would not have come into existence without centuries of anti-semitic sentiments in Christian Europe. Further, reflection on the past can help Christians avoid the repetition of mistakes — we have born witness to how anti-Jewish persecution (whether manifest through legal barriers on land-owning or more general moral judgements towards an entire ethnoreligious group) can give rise to immense suffering and conflict. As a related note, I find it very important to remember that one need not subscribe to every component of Jewish doctrine to respect the state of Israel’s existence: case in point that many of the early Zionist leaders, as mentioned in the course, were secular including Eliezer Ben Yehuda, David Ben Gurion, and Golda Meir.
