With his recent visit to the Holy Land, Francis went to the Palestinian regions first, kissed on the Palestinian side of the security barrier that has helped cut down terrorism in Israel, then interrupted Prime Minister Netanyahu who was stating the Jewish Jesus spoke Hebrew in the Hebrew nation to say that he didn’t and that he spoke Aramaic, and stood silently next to Abbas when he called for Israel to release all Palestinian terrorist prisoners.
So what is the root cause of this anti-Semitic activity in churches? Some, if not most, do not believe the promise in the Bible that says the land belongs to the Jewish people and they believe Israel is occupying Arab land.
Since Israel and Jewish people are the victim of these attacks, we wanted to offer a Jewish opinion on the latest activity in the church against Israel.
We had a chance to secure comments from David Zeit the Executive Director of United with Israel, a grassroots non-profit that is garnering global support for Israel with over two million supporters.
“The BDS movement isn’t just an anti-Israel movement, to me being anti-Israel is being anti-Semitic, they go hand in hand,” said Zeit.
“Israel is the home of the Jewish people and we are sovereign over the land for the first time in about 2,000 years. In those 2,000 years despite our contributions to our host countries, we’ve been told that we cannot stay there, mostly due to anti-Semitism and persecution. Israel has been nothing but a blessing to the world for the past 66 years.”
He added, “The BDS movement seeks to disqualify the Jewish people in its own homeland, and the movement has been successful in their efforts to marginalize and demonize the Jewish state.”
Part of the mission of United with Israel is to counter anti-Semitic movements like BDS by helping people to be more educated about the rhetoric that this movement puts out.
When asked his thoughts about Christians boycotting and divesting Israel, Zeit commented,
“I’m a little surprised to see this type of activity coming out of Christian churches. Over the last few decades Christian-Jewish relations has been at an all-time high, we still have the very large Evangelical community in the U.S. that stands behind Israel.”
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