Poor people! (Pieper, the Jews, and Palestine)

Your Christian reporter and commentator, Franz Pieper, in 1930 commented on a news item from Palestine in his day (CTM, volume 1, page 72). It will sound quite familiar to our modern ears today:

The plight of the Jewish sham state in Palestine is described in a story from Jerusalem which a St. Louis newspaper has received and published: "The Jewish National Council has called on Jews to bring a relaxation and not to respond to the Arab boycott; but because the Arabs against Jews continue against them and get Christian and Muslim clients out from Jewish shops with violence, of course the Jewish business people and particularly the small merchants and artisans get their wives and friends to not buy from Arabs.  In addition, the bitterness among the Jews has penetrated deeply into the masses and especially in the lower classes. There exists among the Jews an indescribable distrust of everyone and everything: against the administration, against the government in London, against the Arabs, against the Jewish National Council, against the Zionist executive, and even against foreign Christians, of which, however, some during the riots have shown no particular skill. Every word uttered by any official body, is now interpreted in the worst sense as a political ploy or trick. . . . The situation has become so acute that official statements and promises hardly have a calming effect, but instead should be seen as a mockery and thus  thus even exacerbates the effect.  If not follows decisive action to prove clearly that the Government is determined, without regard to threats and propaganda maneuvering, with a firm political line to stop, then the end of the development is not in sight."

After quoting the St. Louis newspaper report, Pieper goes on to comment:

Like the Jews acted under their own program when they still lived in the country assigned by God, so do the Zionist Jews of our time.  When the Jews still lived in their country, they should believe according to God's program promised to them and believe the Messiah who appeared in the fullness of time.  Instead, they rejected their Messiah and wanted to be saved by means of their own works.  Instead the Zionist Jews strive (with the consent of other Jews who have no desire to emigrate to Palestine) after a worldly kingdom in Palestine.  Poor people!  But none of us has cause to rise above the Jews striving for earthly things.  If God's grace would not have mercy on us, we would also act according to our own program.      F.P.

Franz Pieper, like Martin Luther, was spiritually sympathetic for the Jews.  The world is sympathetic with the Jews only in a worldly, earthly manner.