I'm leading discussion groups on the history of Israel/Palestine for an upcoming project, and I've found that when people want to shut down the conversation, they throw vague statements from the bible at me. How do I prevent that from totally sidelining the discussion?
The Bible has nothing to say about anything later than its own authorship. Claims of supernatural prophecy need to be proved before they can be accepted into any argument. From an academic historical standpoint, the only relevance the Bible has to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is how the Bible is used by contemporary polemicists. Those who cite the Bible as actually saying anything about the Modern State of Israel are trying to change the discussion from history to pure religious belief. It's a non-sequitur and outside the purview of academic history.
I am yet to encounter an argument about the infallibility of the Jew. What exactly do you mean?
When I am confronted with arguments from the bible I usually respond I do not recognize the bible for a historical source and that it is not related in any way to the conflict at hand, summarising, usually, what this Zionism thing is actually about. The anti-zionist Islamists do cite the bible a lot because there is a passage in the Qur'an with God promising Israel to the Jews. That it replied to either with biblical passages about the Jews driving out the Canaanites or with attacks on the identification of the biblical and qur'anic Jews with modern ones.
All of this is very silly. To preclude such arguments without insulting anyone's religious feelings summarise Theodore Herzl.