Can Jews Believe in the Resurrection of the Christian Messiah?

More often than not, what passes under the name of “interfaith dialogue” is little more than an exchange of platitudes. At times it amounts to an invitation to clergymen to dilute the distinctive principles of their respective faiths in the name of mutual understanding. This conversation, by contrast, between Rabbi Mark Gottlieb and the Catholic writer R.R. Reno, manages to be both high-minded and respectful without involving any compromise. Their subject is Gottlieb’s recent article about the Viennese-Israeli scholar and diplomat Pinchas Lapide, author of some highly idiosyncratic writings about Christian teachings on resurrection. (Audio, 35 minutes.)

Read more at First Things

More about: Christianity, History & Ideas, Jewish-Christian dialogue, Judaism, Theology

Hebron’s Restless Palestinian Clans, and Israel’s Missed Opportunity

Over the weekend, Elliot Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal reported about a formal letter, signed by five prominent sheikhs from the Judean city of Hebron and addressed to the Israeli economy minister Nir Barkat. The letter proposed that Hebron, one of the West Bank’s largest municipalities, “break out of the Palestinian Authority (PA), establish an emirate of its own, and join the Abraham Accords.” Kaufman spoke with some of the sheikhs, who emphasized their resentment at the PA’s corruption and fecklessness, and their desire for peace.

Responding to these unusual events, Seth Mandel looks back to what he describes as his favorite “‘what if’ moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict,” involving

a plan for the West Bank drawn up in the late 1980s by the former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens. The point of the plan was to prioritize local Arab Palestinian leadership instead of facilitating the PLO’s top-down governing approach, which was corrupt and authoritarian from the start.

Mandel, however, is somewhat skeptical about whether such a plan can work in 2025:

Yet, . . . while it is almost surely a better idea than anything the PA has or will come up with, the primary obstacle is not the quality of the plan but its feasibility under current conditions. The Arens plan was a “what if” moment because there was no clear-cut governing structure in the West Bank and the PLO, then led by Yasir Arafat, was trying to direct the Palestinian side of the peace process from abroad (Lebanon, then Tunisia). In fact, Arens’s idea was to hold local elections among the Palestinians in order to build a certain amount of democratic legitimacy into the foundation of the Arab side of the conflict.

Whatever becomes of the Hebron proposal, there is an important lesson for Gaza from the ignored Arens plan: it was a mistake, as one sheikh told Kaufman, to bring in Palestinian leaders who had spent decades in Tunisia and Lebanon to rule the West Bank after Oslo. Likewise, Gaza will do best if led by the people there on the ground, not new leaders imported from the West Bank, Qatar, or anywhere else.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Hebron, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, West Bank