Review Essay: The Cross And The Star Of David

The author, Professor Uri Bialer, holds the Maurice B. Hexter Chair in International Relations-Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of International Relations, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a veteran diplomatic studies analyst and an academic associated with the Israeli foreign ministry, who has produced a book calculated to fill a lacuna in the study of the way Israel perceives her Christian 'allies' and external (and internal) Christian interlocutors. The book is also, in the author's view, the result of heart-felt searching by an Israeli Ashkenazi Jew for understanding and reconciliation with the 'Western Christian world', so different and yet so similar (and necessary for the survival of the Jewish state) to the secular (and increasingly Orthodox and religious) Jewish world of Israel.

While the chapter titles in this work make very interesting reading and give the cursory reader an impression of impartiality, the author is frank enough to state in the beginning that his perspective on the issue is unashamedly Israel-biased. He does acknowledge that his main purpose in dealing with such an issue as Jewish-Christian relations in Israel is due to the profound lack of knowledge of the personality of Jesus Christ among the Israeli public, ignorance almost to the point of alarm. He records how this kind of attitude was inculcated in the Israeli Jewish people as a result of the historical animosity ingrained in the older generation of Israelis, on account of Christian anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish racism manifested on the continent of Europe over the ages.

However, in the modern era, where two generations of Israelis have already grown up in the relative Western-sponsored economic and political 'security' of the Jewish state, there is a great need for Jews to have a responsible and sensible dialogue with Christians, overcoming the vitriol and hate-mongering of the past. Uri Bialer seeks to place his review of Christian-Israeli diplomatic relations within the context of the wave of 'Israel new historiography' writings. He positions himself within the 'Benny Morris-led' pro-Zionist conservative trend in new Israeli historiography. Bialer's purpose is to highlight the 'new' field of action, sponsored by the growing importance of non-state actors as well as cross-national actors such as the Vatican, etc, in inter-state politics and international relations.

Bialer significantly states in his intellectually stimulating introduction to the book (pp. 12 13) that initial Western Christian and in particular Vatican-Catholic hostility towards the newly formed state of Israel was largely due to the perceived 'abandonment' of the historic principles of the Jewish nation by the Zionists. There was a general assumption that the socialist nature of the new state masked Communist sympathies. The peculiarly deprived and desperate situation that the Christian Arab populations of mandatory Palestine were exposed to as a result of the assumption of power by the 'new' Israelis was also a cause of particular alarm and concern among western Christian groups and nations. The author seeks to take on himself the role of discussant as regards the, as yet, largely undocumented Israeli side of the story on the diplomacy of Jewish Christian relations.

The author does advance a significant number of questions-theses in his introduction and claims that his book is meant to provide an answer to all these questions. This claim is highly debatable and the book does not provide a satisfactory answer to many of the questions raised, many of which cannot be answered from an Israel-centric point of view. The author is understandably proud of the fact that his work is one of the first to use the slowly opening up world of Israeli diplomatic archives housed under different ministries as well as at the Israel State Archives. In such a major archival work, the author does acknowledge the lack of Vatican sources, generally opened up for research only a full three-quarters of a century...