Dr. Daniel C. Juster, Director

A few weeks ago I walked into an airport bookstore and saw Jimmy Carter's new book on Israel and the Palestinians. There has been quite a commotion over this book. Carter used the word 'apartheid' to describe the potential of Israeli policies - I feared the worst. What I found was a rehashing of the same ideas as the "peace now" groups in Israel: Israel should pull back from the "West Bank" and return to the 1967 U.N. accepted borders. Minor adjustments could be made for security including keeping some settlements. This would entail trading some land on the Israel side of the old border (the green line). Really, this is not much different than the Barak negotiated plan offered to Arafat in 2000. Carter's book sadly has a tone of blaming Israel for the present stalemate. I found it to be much over the top. Many factual errors were documented by reviewers such as Harvard University's Alan Dershowitz.

For the sake of our readers, I think it is important to have a short and solid statement of response. Messianic Jews are Biblical Zionists. Zionism is the view that it is important for Jews to return to the Land of Israel and that this is a just and right cause. Biblical Zionists add that this land has been given to the Jewish people as their homeland, which is a Scriptural teaching. There is a clear promise of a returning to the Land repeated again and again throughout scriptures. The question remains, where should followers of Yeshua stand, both Jew and Gentile?

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