|
Presbyterians push to demonize Israel
By D. BLOOMFIELD
06/16/2010 21:45
You probably don’t remember but before June 1967 there was peace
in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. There were
no fedayeen, no terror attacks, no PLO. Only after it was
“colonized in the 20th century” by Jewish immigrants from Europe
who took “the land of Palestine from a majority of its
inhabitants at gunpoint” did things go sour.
First came the Nakba, the catastrophe that was the creation of
the State of Israel in 1948, followed 19 years later by the
“illegal” occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
That’s the view the Presbyterian Church
USA (PCUSA) will be asked to endorse next month when it meets in
Minneapolis to consider a report by its Middle East study
committee.
Peace could again prevail over the land if the Israelis would
only withdraw from all the lands occupied in 1967. To that end,
the report calls for the US to halt all military and economic
assistance for Israel.
“If there were no occupation, there would be no Palestinian
resistance,” says the report.
The Israeli occupation is “the major obstacle to regional
stability” and is “an evil that must be resisted and removed.”
The authors show they understand “resistance” is a euphemism for
terrorism, but say it is the Israelis’ own fault for inflicting
so much suffering on the Palestinians.
“Resistance is a right and a duty for the Christian.”
IT WOULD be too easy to dismiss such unreality as terminal
naïveté, but there is something much more poisonous here.
The 172-page PCUSA report says the “primary” cause of the Middle
East conflict is “the ongoing Israeli occupation...
and American complicity in this unjust enterprise.”
You can read it at
http://www.pcusa.org/middleeastpeace/
pdf/middleeastpeace- fullreport.pdf. It also includes a lengthy
Kairos Palestine document, by an affiliated group of Christian
Palestinians, that further pushes the demonization and
delegitimization of Israel.
Taken together, the contempt for Israel is so blinding that it
not only justifies Palestinian terror against the Jewish state
but is little bothered by the avowed goal of Hamas and Hizbullah,
like their Iranian mentors, to wipe Israel off the map.
But that may be because the authors question whether Israel
should be on the map in the first place. The report insists “we
support the existence of Israel,” but that is unconvincing in
the context of the entire document.
This document ignores Arab refusal to recognize the Jewish
state, the attempts to destroy it at birth and the threats to
drive it into the sea. It was the Jews’ own fault for being
there in the first place. The report reaches back to biblical
times to delegitimize Jewish claims to the land. Jacob, aka
Israel, stole the birthright from his brother Esau and refused
later entreaties to combine their interests and dwell in the
land together.
(Proof those Jews can’t get along with anyone.) It denies that
the Jews have “rights” to the land as Abraham’s descendants,
only “responsibilities... for what is being done in and with
it.”
Abraham’s covenant applies equally to Jews and Christians.
The ancient Hebrews under Joshua took the land illegally from
the Canaanites by “holy war.” In a very revealing footnote (p.
21), it says: “The phrase ‘the right of Israel to exist’ is a
source of pain” for authors of the report, “who are in
solidarity with Palestinians who feel that the State of Israel
has denied them their inalienable human rights.”
While questioning Israel’s Law of Return for Jews, it insists
there must be a “right of return or compensation” for
Palestinians “to Palestine- Israel.”
National Jewish organizations, which the report accuses of
“complicity in the excesses of Israeli policy,” have unders t a
n d a b l y denounced the document.
The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism has said it is
“distinctly onesided, traffics in troubling theology, misr e p r
e s e n t s Jewish history.”
ADL has called it a “toxic mix of bad history, p o l i t i c a l
l y motivated distortions and o f f e n s i v e attacks on
Judaism and Israel.” The Jewish Council of Public Affairs has
called it “blatantly anti-Israel and reduces the Arab-Israeli-
Palestinian conflict to a caricature of right and wrong.”
“It’s a highly-selective use of text, history and circumstances
to form an anti-Israel narrative,” said JCPA’s Ethan Felson.
“They give significant voice to anti-Zionists, condemn companies
that sell to Israel and allow for the demonization of Israel.
That’s several red lines.”
AT ITS 2004 meeting PCUSA voted for divestment from Israel but
was forced to back down two years later when many members
objected, but this latest report leaves little doubt its authors
endorse the policy. The group promised to take a more balanced
approach but so far there the evidence points in the opposite
direction.
Next month’s PCUSA meeting in Minneapolis has an opportunity to
reject the anti- Israel, anti-Jewish excesses of its study
committee or to inflict further damage on the church’s relations
with the Jewish community.
“The church has a choice to make,” Felson added. “There is much
valid witness for Palestinians that does not call into question
the church’s integrity or endanger its relationship with Jews,
or they can choose this brand of witness with all its toxicity.”
The Presbyterians say their goal is peace, but their heavily
biased assessment can only make peace harder to attain by
reinforcing the growing skepticism by an Israeli public that
sees delegitimization, not a twostate agreement, as the goal of
the Palestinians and their supporters – and give fuel to those
Palestinians who believe the time is coming when the world will
force Israel to, in the immortal words of Helen Thomas, “get the
hell out of Palestine.”
|
