Watch: Interview with Israeli Jewish Catholic priest

Fr David Neuhaus SJ

Source: Common Home TV

Father David Neuhaus SJ, is an Israeli citizen and a Jesuit priest. He was raised Jewish in South Africa, carries a German Jewish family history marked by the Nazi catastrophe, and says he first encountered Jesus after moving to Israel.

In this last episode of the Common Home TV's series: In the Shadows of the Holy Land. Neuhaus describes his life as a kind of apprenticeship in the margins, and argues that the political theology surrounding Israel and Palestine has become, in his view, a generator of violence.

"Everything is a little autobiographical," he says, explaining why identity is not incidental to analysis but its precondition. His family were refugees from Nazi Germany. In South Africa, he grew up part of a privileged white minority in a system structured by racial domination, but his education, he says, trained him to question that privilege. In Israel, he came to recognise a new pattern of ethnocentric power, one that pushed others out of view. The thread running through it all, he said, is an instinct to look from the edges rather than the centre. "I think that I'm always tending to look at things from the margins."

Watch: www.commonhome.tv/feature/fr-david-neuhaus-holy-land

Listen: www.commonhome.tv/podcasts