(Cox News Service/Minneapolis Star Tribune) Tom Teepen - The Presbyterian Church USA and other churches have adopted get-tough policies toward Israel ostensibly designed to force peace with the Palestinians, but they are more likely to sabotage peace than to advance it. The policy will worsen Israel's already ingrained security anxieties, which make the Jewish state deeply chary of deals that might increase its vulnerability. And the policy will feed Palestinian delusions that others will produce a state for them without the Palestinians themselves ever having to accept the permanence of Israel as part of the deal. The churches' misplaced do-gooderism, blind to history and morally obtuse, will strengthen Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other rejectionist/terrorist elements among the Palestinians and undermine the post-Arafat leadership's efforts to regularize Palestinian governance as a precursor to the negotiated statehood that Israeli policy supports.
2005-08-12 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive