Abstract
Conflict between any two groups typically includes the use of language meant to stigmatize an opponent both for the members of the group that uses the language and for third parties who may be sought out as allies in the conflict. “The rhetoric of the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an arena rife with examples of powerful language deployed to gain advantage in the court of world opinion. Some of it distorts the truth, some of it obscures the truth, and some of it brands the truth as damning evidence of another’s immorality.”1
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Notes
Peter A. Pettit, “Case Study: The Arab-Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” chapter 9 in Covenantal Conversations: Christians in Dialogue with Jews and Judaism (ed. Darrell Jodock; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 167. The current presentation expands my observations in this chapter regarding the careful use of language when discussing and addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our host, Professor Jesper Svartvik, kindly invited me to bring those thoughts and to expand on them for the conference, because stereotyping was one of the language practices I addressed.
Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace NotApartheid (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
See www.adl.org/PresRele/Is1ME_62/5431_62.htm (August 23, 2011), for examples from rallies in the United States following Israel’s invasion of Gaza in December 2008, as well as the analysis of anti-Israel cartoons by Joel Kotek, Cartoons and Extremism: Israel and the Jews in Arab and Western Media (Edgware: Valentine Mitchell, 2008) and the collection assembled by Tom Gross in his Mideast Media Analysis (www.tomgross media.com/index.html, August 23, 2011). An earlier analysis by Commentary magazine editor Gabriel Schoenfeld of anti-Israel protests in 2002 reported, “The language in which these accusations are leveled is extravagantly hateful, drawn from the vocabulary of World War II and the Holocaust but entirely and grotesquely inverted, with the Jews as Nazis and their Arab tormentors in the role of helpless Jews” (www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000581.html, August 23, 2011).
Walter M. Abbott (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II (New York: American Press, 1966), 666.
For a collection of church documents on the topic, see most recently Franklin Sherman (ed.), Bridges: Documents of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue, Volume One, The Road to Reconciliation (1945–1985) (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2011), the earlier volumes by Helga Croner and by Rolf Rendtorff and Hans Hermann Henrix mentioned in Sherman’s preface, as well as the successor to the Rendtorff and Henrix volume,
Hans Hermann Henrix and Wolfgang Kraus (eds.), Die Kirchen und das Judentum. Vol. II: Dokumente von 1986–2000 (Paderborn/Gütersloh: Bonifatius/Gütersloher, 2001).
See Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 19–65.
See Edward H. Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1985), chapter 5, “The Vale of Tears,” 90–121.
Naim Stifan Ateek, A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2008).
John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007).
Ibid. See “Homily IX” in Philip Schaff (ed.), A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890), 14.32–34.
Ibid., 63; Ateek mistakenly claims that “the Torah leaves only two options in dealing with the indigenous people of the land: expulsion or annihilation” (p. 64)—he neglects to notice the many times when the Torah speaks to the place of the “resident alien” who lives in Israel with explicit protections and privileges; see, for example, Dennis R. Bratcher, “Stranger,” Harper’s Bible Dictionary (ed. Paul J. Achtemeier; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 995.
Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 276f., and Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews, 51–53, 90–121, 141.
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (trans. John W. Harvey; London: Oxford University Press, 1923).
Frederick Mathewson Denny, An Introduction to Islam (New York: Macmillan, 2nd cd. 1994), 107.
Ateek, A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation, 10–14; see the document of the Latin American bishops, in which the phrase is set forth as the focal point of their decadelong agenda for the 1980s, in John Eagleson and Philip Scharper (eds.), Puebla and Beyond (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979), 3–27.
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© 2013 Jesper Svartvik and Jakob Wirén
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Pettit, P.A. (2013). Old Whines with New Spins. In: Svartvik, J., Wirén, J. (eds) Religious Stereotyping and Interreligious Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342676_18
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