Ilan Pape was a Senior Lecturer at the Middle Eastern History Department and Political Science Department of the University of Haifa, Israel, from 1984 to 2006. Following his endorsement of the boycott of Israeli universities, he left Israel in 2007/8 to work as a Professor at the University of Exeter. His major 2006 work “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” describes the “settler colonialism” of Zionist Israel, in many ways identical to earlier European settler colonialism in America, southern Africa and Australia, which regarded the indigenous communities as people to be subjugated or eliminated. Early Zionists bought land from Ottoman landlords and then evicted Palestinian/Arab peasant farmers, to replace them with Jewish settlers, “making the desert bloom” as the Zionist myth claimed. Although some hoped the land could be shared, they saw themselves as bringing a superior European culture to less “developed” people.
The Likud Party (led by Netanyahu) denies any possibility of a Palestinian State- Ze’ev Jabotinsky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze%27ev_Jabotinsky) had been advisor to Netanyahu’s father at a time when ideas of nationalism were developing in Europe. Each “nation” must have its own clear identity, state and territory, a repudiation of the older notions of multi-ethnic “empires” blending many different communities and language groups. Those who are not clearly “one of us” must be expelled, and Jews suffering from this in Tsarist Russia and the Nazi Holocaust looked for their homeland and security in Palestine.
Sabeel, the Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre in Jerusalem, argues that in the Hebrew Scriptures there are two distinct strands: one that asserts Palestine as the “Promised Land” given by God exclusively to the Jewish people; the other that says the land is to be shared, with all peoples welcome (see Sabeel Palestine Lib Theol (56).pdf pages 21 to 27).
Our reading was the story of the Call of Levi from his tax (or “toll”) booth, and the banquet he then gave for Jesus and his fellow collectors (Luke 5, verses 27 to 39). This leads to a heated discussion with the Pharisees and the Scribes about sewing new cloth onto old garments and putting new wine into old bottles- often wrongly interpreted as a rejection of the faith of the Hebrew Scriptures (the so-called “Old” Testament) and its total replacement by a “new” faith- Christianity. But this is a misunderstanding. What Jesus criticised is the distortion of the Jewish faith by the religious leaders of that day, who reject “new wine”, and say “the old is good” (verse 30). The “new wine” is what John the Baptist promised (“He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit”- Luke 3, verse 16). That was a fulfilment of the hopes of the “old” Scriptures: Joel 2, verses 28 and 29; Ezekiel 36, verses 22 to 30, and 37, verses 1 to 14, for example. And in that renewed community land is to be shared with all the people, including “the aliens who live among you” (Ezekiel 47, verses 21 to 23).
A recent (April 28th this year) CNN survey in the US revealed that 81 percent of voters under the age of 35 disagree with Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war: https://newrepublic.com/article/181107/college-protests-israel-gaza-media-coverage-shameful And David Hearst, in “Middle East Eye”, asks if this is “the moment when Israel loses the West”, likening it to the Vietnam protests in the 1960s: https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/campus-protests-moment-israel-loses-west-could Perhaps the difference is that there are no body-bags coming to the USA from Gaza. Despite that, he might be right that there is a decisive (and permanent?) shift. But for how many more Gazans will that come too late?