Last week I posted an article, "A Curious Silence", about a peculiar form of activism among some professing Christians that leaves behind anything pro-Palestinian and embraces anti-Israel bias and anti-Jewish animus. Two telling features of this hypocritical, harmful, and decidedly unchristian activism are the application of a double standard to Israel and the rejection of a Jewish state. Interestingly, there is a Christian Century article, "Peace Brokers", dated December 25, 2007 (Merry Christmas …), that indulges in both of these practices. In it, Christian Century editor James Wall compares the recent Annapolis Peace Conference with a scene from Lawrence of Arabia. His primary concern is equating the role of the United States at Annapolis with the British in 1918 – both being, in his estimation, "empire-building colonialist power[s]" pretending to be honest brokers. He offers iron-clad evidence for this assertion in a very revealing paragraph:

Nor can Bush hide the fact that he is not an honest broker. At Annapolis this became obvious when he declared that Israel has to be a Jewish state, a position that Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat immediately rejected. Erekat knows that officially declaring Israel a Jewish state when 1.5 million Arab Israelis are within its borders is a contradiction in terms. He also knows that by defining the future state as Jewish, Bush signals that he favors the Israeli position in future negotiations on the right of return for Palestinian refugees.