Dora McPhee (VIC) responds to “Seeking common holy ground” The Age 18Aug09 August 18, 2009
The Age: “Seeking common holy ground” 18 August 2009
While interfaith dialogue can certainly play a constructive role in promoting peace it is misleading to paint the Israel/Palestine conflict as one of religion. The fact that this interfaith dialogue does not even seem to be addressing the root cause of the problem shows how religion can and has been used as a red herring in this conflict. The root cause is the Zionist project of establishing an exclusive Jewish state for an outside European Jewish population in what was Palestine to the detriment of the Palestinian people who continue to be dispossessed of their homeland
Dr Deborah Weissman seems to be totally blind to the fact that creating a sovereign state exclusively for the Jewish people in a country that was for centuries home to a majority Arab Palestinian population of mixed faith, Muslim, Christian and Jewish, meant this project could only be achieved through driving out and dispossessing the majority of the non-Jewish Arab Palestinians and obliterating their history. This process of ethnic cleansing is continuing today in the very ugly scenes of Palestinian
families being turfed out on the street and Jewish settlers moving into their homes in East Jerusalem. I see no interfaith dialogue going on here but only victims of ethnic cleansing and the perpetrators defended by the Jewish state that has since 1948 illegally taken possession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians homes and razed many other to the ground. This is not just the Palestinian narrative,which most pro-Zionist Jews refuse to acknowledge and make amends for, but the very real and ongoing injustice that continues to drive the conflict.
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