David B. Burrell, in Commonweal 20 (April 2001): 9-10.

An attempt to disentangle the situation in Israel/Palestine, by understanding its origins to be in the two “contradictions” latent in Israeli society: that the homecoming of one people entailed the home-wrecking of another — something obscured by official Israeli mythical history until the archives were recently opened and the “new historians” have exposed the events of 1948. the other being the prolonged occupation, since 1967 — something unbecoming a “Jewish state” according to such notable authorities (at the time) as Yesheyahu Leibowitz. The importance of such “contradictions” can be traced to Rene Girard, who argues that a society will break out in violence to the extent that it is founded on a contradiction; those in American society were explicit, and resulted in our civil war; those in many societies are more implicit, but the results will out.

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