Rael Jean Isaac

Jewish organizations have professed shock and dismay as the three million member Presbyterian Church (USA) at its annual General Assembly meeting overwhelmingly (431-62) approved a resolution that henceforth none of the Church’s $7 billion investment fund go to companies that do business in Israel, i.e. voted to strangle the Jewish state economically. Ironically, in the same week the Catholic Church signed a document equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
While “divestment campaigns” directed against Israel have been reported on a number of our increasingly radicalized elite campuses, each thus far has been nipped in the bud by college trustees fearful of alienating Jewish alumni donors. This is the first significant “success” of the anti-Israel divestment movement, but surely not the last. Already Sister Patricia Wolfe, executive director of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, a coalition of 275 Christian denominations, has declared “This now raises the issue and will cause ICCR to have a discussion.” Since the Interfaith Center is a far left outfit enamored of attacking corporations (it would be better-named the Anti-Corporate Center) and there is no difference in attitude toward Israel between the Presbyterians and most of the ICCR’s other member churches, there can be little doubt that more denominations will fall in line. And, of course, the campus movement will certainly be reenergized.
The Forward reports the reaction of a variety of Jewish notables. From Rabbi Gil Rosenthal, executive director of the National Council of Synagogues: “The national policy is very, very troublesome.” From Rabbi Lennard Thal, senior vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism an expression of “disappointment.” James Rudin, long time inter-religious adviser to the American Jewish Committee, called the resolution “a catastrophic disaster.” Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League declared “To assert that there is a moral equivalency between the racist policy of apartheid and the efforts to protect the citizenry of Israel is unconscionable.”
Jay Rock, Director for Interfaith Relations at the National Council of Churches responded blithely that Jewish-Presbyterian relations “are very good”— the only problem is a “wildly different opinion on how to go about resolving the Israeli-Palestinian situation.” And there is the real scandal, that Israel’s survival registers so low on the priorities of the major Jewish organizations that despite the fact hostility to Israel on the part of the Presbyterian Church USA (the largest Presbyterian denomination) and the other mainline churches within the National Council of Churches goes back decades, Jewish organizations have chosen to overlook it. The Union for Reform Judaism recently launched a national inter-religious dialogue with Presbyterians along with other mainline churches. Foxman said the resolution threw into question the ADL’s own efforts in “interfaith dialogue between Presbyterians and Jews.” This is the same Foxman who only a few years ago launched an unseemly tirade against the evangelical Christians who are Israel’s staunch supporters.
In October 1981 this writer wrote an article in Midstream entitled “Liberal Protestants versus Israel.” Here is the first paragraph: “The hostility of liberal Protestantism toward Israel has been something liberal Jews have found difficult to accept. As a result they have largely ignored it. Yet the National Council of Churches, including the major denominations that set its policy—the United Methodists, the United Presbyterians, the Disciples of Christ, the Episcopalians, the United Church of Christ—have become centers of activity directed toward eliminating the Jewish state.” Almost twenty-five years later Jewish organizations have continued to turn a blind eye-- now professing “shock” at what is only the current wholly predictable manifestation of hostility by those who lead these church bodies.
The warning signs of liberal Protestant hostility were clear as far back as 1967. As the noose slowly tightened around Israel, as the straits of Tiran were closed, the UN forces withdrawn from the Sinai, the Egyptian forces massed there, and threats of destruction poured from Arab capitals, American Jewish organizations and rabbis who had been active in interfaith programs (yes, they were in full swing, then as in 2004) turned to the churches for expressions of support for Israel. Liberal Protestant churches shrugged off the pleas. But in the wake of Israel’s then stunning victory, they were quick to find their voice. Less than a month after Israel’s battlefield triumph the Executive Committee of the National Council announced that it “cannot condone by silence territorial expansion by armed force.” There was no indication that the National Council was aware the Arabs had precipitated the war; in the resolution’s antiseptic phrase violence had “erupted” in the Middle East.
When the Yom Kippur War “erupted” in 1973, the response was worse. The Arab surprise assault on Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish year, with most of the population at prayer, might have been expected to provoke special indignation in a religious body. On the contrary, the National Council’s Governing Board (which happened to be holding its annual meeting at the time) promptly called for an arms embargo, this as Israel was desperately pleading for a U.S. airlift to secure her survival. A proposed amendment “supporting the need for Israel to defend its right to exist” (although what good that right would do in the absence of arms to exercise it is debatable) was voted down. Gerald Strober, then on the staff of the American Jewish Committee, who was present at the meeting as an invited observer, recalls that David Stowe, an official of the United Church of Christ, said to him “Israel might have to die for the cause of world peace.”
Two years later, when the UN passed its notorious resolution equating Zionism with racism, while individual church leaders spoke out, the National Council as an organization representing, as its leaders are fond of saying, 41 million Christians, was silent. If anything its actions could be construed as indirect support for the resolution, for in March 1976, at its first meeting after the UN had declared Zionism was racism, the Governing Board passed a resolution to “strongly reaffirm” support for the United Nations.
Since 1974, when the National Council of Churches (NCC) first called on the U.S. to open contacts with the PLO, both the NCC, as the umbrella for the mainline denominations, and the individual denominations in their own annual assemblies have consistently promoted the PLO. In 1977 Methodist churchgoer David Jessup did a study of his denomination’s funding and found that among a variety of groups fomenting Marxist revolution worldwide there were several PLO support groups, including the viciously anti-Israel Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), which put out a flyer following the murder of Israeli athletes at the Olympic games declaring “we should comprehend the achievement of the Munich action” (Joe Stork, current Human Rights Watch official, cut his teeth in MERIP) and the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, which likewise called for Israel’s destruction.
Over the years a spate of Middle East resolutions followed, the pattern identical to that of the United Nations: Arab atrocities were ignored, Israeli attempts at self-defense excoriated. To take just one example, in May 1978, when Israel retaliated after a particularly gruesome PLO incursion, which began with the murder of a young American photographer on an Israeli beach and culminated with the massacre of 36 other civilians, the National Council sharply attacked Israel. The Council rejected an amendment referring to persons “wantonly killed or maimed” in terrorist actions that occasioned the reprisal. After the Israeli raid that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor, the Reverend William Howard, President of the National Council, seized the occasion to write a letter to President Reagan saying the U.S. would lose all “moral credibility” if it did not impose a unilateral arms embargo on the Middle East. The United Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church and the Church of the Brethren, all National Council members, underscored their agreement by sending similar individual letters.
The Camp David Accords temporarily embarrassed the National Council. Its entire emphasis was on satisfying the aspirations of the “Palestinian people” via the PLO and the PLO opposed the Israeli-Egyptian agreement. On the other hand, it could not denounce an apparent breakthrough in the Middle East. The Council’s solution was to pass two resolutions, in 1978 and 1979, praising the accords but complaining they omitted the PLO. By 1980 the National Council was comfortably describing the Camp David agreement as “fundamentally flawed.”
In 1980, the National Council replaced its 1969 policy statement on the Middle East, which had failed to mention a state for the Palestinian Arabs, with a new statement affirming the moral imperative of giving the PLO a state. (While there was no difficulty on this issue, there was heated discussion as to whether Israel should continue to exist.) And while the policy statement asserted it was “giving voice to the voiceless and providing support for the powerless” and professed “a special concern for relations with Middle Eastern Christians” there was no mention of the Christians of Lebanon, then in a critical plight. Ironically, a delegation of Copts was at the November 1979 Governing Board meeting, passing out a report called “Christian Egyptians Call for International Help” on draconian legislation against Copts in Egypt. The group pleaded with the National Council Governing Board for a hearing; the Council refused to let them speak. So much for this particular group of the “voiceless.” The Christians of the Sudan, massacred by the hundreds of thousands by the Muslims of the north, were also absent from the policy statement.
Nothing has changed. As Richard Baehr notes in a recent FrontPageMagazine.com article (July 19), this year again the Presbyterian Church passed no resolution on “the slaughter of black Muslims in the Sudan by Arabs, and they never passed any resolutions in prior years, when the Sudanese Arabs chose to slaughter black Christians. They were silent when the Rwanda genocide occurred, as well. But hey, what’re a few million black African lives when Muslim olive trees are being cut down near the ‘green line’?” Baehr also notes that the hatred of Israel has grown so strong in most of the mainline churches “that advocates for Israel are not permitted to make presentations to these congregations anymore. If Jews want to speak about Israel, they have to be from the far-Left, and they must come to trash Israel (and help bury it).”
What explains the hostility of the mainline churches toward Israel? The most important factor has been the influence of so-called liberation theology. As historian Guenter Levy has pointed out, liberation theology transforms key symbols like Incarnation, Revelation and Resurrection so that they do not refer to a divine event in the past but to political liberation in the present. According to Presbyterian theologian Richard Shaull, only at the center of the revolution can man “perceive what God is doing.” Not surprisingly this perspective drove some ministers and priests into the hills to join guerilla bands, especially in Latin America. In the United States, identification of Christianity with the struggle for liberation led to uncritical identification with Third World “liberation movements.” (In 1977 the FBI actually uncovered a Puerto Rican FALN cell—the FALN had taken responsibility for 120 bombings including the bombing of historical Fraunces Tavern in New York City, which killed four and injured dozens more—operating out of the Episcopal Church’s National Commission on Hispanic Affairs.) The distinctively Christian task becomes to identify with the oppressed of the Third World. As Robert Turnipseed, speaking for the National Council, told an American Jewish Committee annual meeting: “The Palestinians have been seen as an oppressed people. Israel has been seen as part of the oppressing forces.”
Indeed, if one looks over the last decades at the resolutions of the National Council of Churches, the national assemblies of its constituent churches, and the groups the churches fund, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the view of those who control the bureaucracies of these churches is close to that of Osama bin Laden: the U.S. is the big Satan and Israel the little Satan. For while we have focused here on hostility to Israel, the U.S. government is cast in the role of chief oppressor of the Third World (which takes on a metaphorical meaning to include U.S. blacks, Hispanic Americans and American Indians). Most recently the churches have focused on attacking the Iraq war. Clifton Kirkpatrick, who for eight years has been the stated clerk (i.e. head) of the Presbyterian Church (USA), has even signed a World Council of Churches statement that seeks to bring President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to trial for war crimes for their “illegal resort to war” on Iraq.
Most Christians who belong to denominations that are members of the National Council do not agree with the perspective of the bureaucratic leadership (it is a rare resolution that could pass in a referendum of ordinary church members). But the efforts of groups within the denominations to effect change have been unavailing. Within the Presbyterian Church alone there are five such groups: the Presbyterian Lay Committee, Presbyterians for Renewal, Presbyterians Pro-Life, the Presbyterian Coalition and the Presbyterian Forum. They are thorns in the side of the bureaucracy, but no more.
The Jewish organizational representatives that busily run around to inter-religious meetings and task forces with various mainline churches know all this, which is why their professions of shock and dismay ring so hollow. They are comfortable pursuing “social justice” (as defined by the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party) with their mainline confreres. Mainline church leaders are confident their Jewish counterparts will soon “recover” and agree to put Israel aside as they embark on a common social agenda. And church leaders will be happy to issue statements condemning “anti-Semitism” even as they pursue their effort to destroy the Jewish state. Even now the Rev. William Harter, speaking on behalf of the Presbyterians, notes that a motion has been approved calling for study and reexamination of the relationship between Presbyterians and Jews over the next two years, which meant the Church “recognizes we need to do more in-depth conversation, dialogue and study of our relationship with the Jewish people.”
Will the Jewish organizations be busy engaging in empty dialogue over good lunches? Don’t bet against it.