{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"George Deek on Israel\u2019s Relationship with the Christian World","description":" In April of this year, Israel\u2019s Foreign Ministry created a position that had never before existed: special envoy to the Christian world. The appointment came after a string of incidents that have strained Israel\u2019s standing with Christian communities: an IDF soldier destroyed a statue of Jesus in Lebanon; during the war with Iran, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pizzaballa, was barred for safety reasons from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; a nun was assaulted in Jerusalem; and videos of Jewish Israelis despicably spitting on Christians have gone viral on social media. There are not very many of these incidents, thankfully, but each and every one does enormous damage to Israel\u2019s standing and contradicts all of the good work that Israel does to keep its Christian minority safe. Aside from the publicity problems that they create, these incidents (with the exception of the protective measures that kept worshippers from Jerusalem\u2019s holy places during a ballistic-missile attack) are in and of themselves wrong. That\u2019s why they\u2019ve been so roundly condemned by the highest levels of Israeli government, including by Prime Minister Netanyahu. In response, the foreign minister Gideon Sa\u2019ar has appointed one person to mediate Israel\u2019s relationship with the Christian world as a full-time charge. That person is George Deek, a veteran Israeli diplomat, an Arab Christian whose family has lived in Jaffa for hundreds of years, and the first Christian in Israel\u2019s history to reach ambassadorial rank, serving in Nigeria, Norway, and finally Azerbaijan before assuming this post. In today\u2019s podcast, Ambassador Deek addresses those incidents directly, distinguishing isolated wrongdoing from patterns that demand real institutional response. He lays out an argument about why Israel\u2019s bond with the Christian world is simultaneously theological and strategic and delineates his strategy in relation to the major cultural crises of our moment: that the Middle East is losing its ancient minorities at the same time the West is losing its confidence, and that both crises stem from the same failure to answer honestly the question of what went wrong\u2014a failure that too easily curdles into blame, and from blame into anti-Semitism. This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Jeffrey Druckman and Erica Goldman in memory of Vicki Frolich. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org\/circle to learn more and join.  ","author_name":"The Tikvah Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/tikvah.libsyn.com\/webpage","html":"