The Weight of Three Thousand Years

Foreword

Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. 'That's why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.' As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather) we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics.

Unfortunately, the hurried recognition of Israel as a state has resulted in forty-five years of murderous confusion, and the destruction of what Zionist fellow travellers thought would be a pluralistic state - home to its native population of Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a future home to peaceful European and American Jewish immigrants, even the ones who affected to believe that the great realtor in the sky had given them, in perpetuity, the lands of Judea and Sameria. Since many of the immigrants were good socialists in Europe, we assumed that they would not allow the new state to become a theocracy, and that the native Palestinians could live with them as equals. This was not meant to be. I shall not rehearse the wars and alarms of that unhappy region. But I will say that the hasty invention of Israel has poisoned the political and intellectual life of the USA, Israel's unlikely patron.

From the earliest times that I can remember, I have been a believing Christian. My father is a devout Christian who taught me about the salvation that Jesus Christ offers and about His lessons for living. Father was never dogmatic about his faith, and over the years he led my family to different churches without worrying about the denomination. At one time or another, we were members of Presbyterian, Methodist, and Church of Christ congregations. The only important consideration for Father was the quality of the minister and the congregation. When I was in grade school, my family joined the Elysian Fields Methodist Church where Father taught Sunday school. When we traveled we would almost always try to attend Sunday school and church in whatever city we happened to be in. The new perspectives we received from the different Sunday school teachers and preachers were like shots of adrenaline for our Christian faith.