[HLS 7.1 (2008) 103–110] DOI: 10.3366/E1474947508000097 REVIEW ESSAY: THE CROSS AND THE STAR OF DAVID Samuel J. Kuruvilla Ph.D. Candidate Departments of Theology and Politics University of Exeter Amory Building Rennes Drive Exeter EX4 4RJ, UK Email: sjk201@gmail.com Uri Bialer, Cross on the Star of David: The Christian World in Israel’s Foreign Policy, 1948–1967 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Pp. 240. Hardcover. ISBN 0-253-34647-9. The author, Professor Uri Bialer, holds the Maurice B. Hexter Chair in International Relations-Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of International Relations, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a veteran diplomatic studies analyst and an academic associated with the Israeli foreign ministry, who has produced a book calculated to fill a lacuna in the study of the way Israel perceives her Christian ‘allies’ and external (and internal) Christian interlocutors. The book is also, in the author’s view, the result of heart-felt searching by an Israeli Ashkenazi Jew for understanding and reconciliation with the ‘Western Christian world’, so different and yet so similar (and necessary for the survival of the Jewish state) to the secular (and increasingly Orthodox and religious) Jewish world of Israel. While the chapter titles in this work make very interesting reading and give the cursory reader an impression of impartiality, the author is frank enough to state in the beginning that his perspective on the issue is unashamedly Israel-biased. He does acknowledge that his main purpose in dealing with such an issue as Jewish-Christian relations in Israel is due to the profound lack of knowledge of the personality of Jesus Christ among the Israeli public, ignorance almost to the point of alarm. He records how