Ecumenical & Interfaith
News Network - PCUSA

Middle East Peace

Middle East peace: Israel and Palestine

A year ago Allan Brownfeld wrote that "delegitimization" had become the new buzzword in pro-Israeli activism. Indeed, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Reut Institute, based in Tel Aviv, have sponsored a conference on the growing assaults on Israel's legitimacy (i.e., "delegitimization"). A post-conference commentary particularly points to two current movements that undermine the Jewish state—the boycott, divestment, and sanctions efforts and the one-state-solution proposal. According to a June 2011 Ha'aretz article, Israeli diplomats have been asked to indicate that UN recognition of a Palestinian state in September would delegitimize Israel and foil any chance for future peace talks. Tony Blair has pointed out that an insidious form of dilegitimization “is a conscious or often unconscious resistance, sometimes bordering on refusal, to accept Israel has a legitimate point of view.”

Byron Bland, a Presbyterian minister at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation, has written, "Churches should stop making pronouncements [about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] and start engaging in the dialogues that could help the parties give shape to peaceful relationships." They should also do two non-relational things: (1) speak out about cruel and humiliating treatment of Palestinians and (2) divest from Caterpillar (because the church should not profit from the destructive activity related to its product, though divesting will not bring peace through forcing concessions, he says).

Scholars at the University of Tel Aviv say in a study on anti-Semitism worldwide, “Since Jews and Israelis are often conflated into a single collective, events in the Middle East often provoke anti- Jewish groups and individuals into perpetrating hostile activities against local Jews.” Incidents were down significantly in 2010 from what they had been the previous year, when Israeli forces carried out the Cast Lead offensive against Hamas.

Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) reflected on the current possibilities for peace since President Obama's speech of May 19, after which Netanyahu spoke to the U.S. Congress. Reactions of Jewish organizations to the Obama speech were collected by JTA, the Jewish news agency. The strongest negative response came from the Zionist Organization of America while other groups such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found reason to commend the president. A Huffpost religion page quotes reactions of assorted individual religious leaders while Religious News Service quotes individual Muslim leaders.

When the Simon Wiesenthal Center charged that the PC(USA) was "ready to declare war against Israel" in a headline to its statement against proposals then before the 219th General Assembly (2010), a sticking point was the proposed endorsement of the Kairos Palestine document which, among other things, calls for boycott and sanctions. The author of a Jerusalem Post article had written that "the Presbyterian Church [U.S.A.] in 2006 turned out to have been a linchpin which, once removed, led to an unraveling of church-based divestment in both the US . . . and beyond." James Rudin, in his list of the top 10 religion stories of 2010, said that the "Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) moved away from a divestment policy toward Israel, but in Europe a public anti-Israel program was frequently fueled by the growing Muslim population."

• For an extended statement on boycott, divestment, and sanctions, see "The Ideological Foundations for the Boycott Campaign Against Israel" by Ben Cohen of the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

• For an argument that identifies Israel itself as a practitioner of boycotting, see a Ha'aretz article by the controversial journalist, Gideon Levy.

• For a detailed guide for local churches who want to undertake boycott activity, see Boycott 101 posted by the Israel/Palestine Mission Network (IPMN). IPMN itself has voted to target three products produced in Israeli settlements: Ahava Cosmetics, King Solomon Dates, and Jordan River Dates.

x

The Pluralism Project at Harvard University has a case study, "A Sign of Division," good for educational use on ways the Middle East conflict emerges as a challenge to interfaith relations. Part A of the case goes to the point of a proposed solution and Part B is on outcomes and resolution.

TO TOP

Middle East peace: Arab lands

European Union leaders have told key religious figures—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist—that they will defend freedom of belief in the Middle East as part of their support for the spread of democracy throughout the Arab world. The European Commission president said he did not believe that the challenges of current historic changes could be met without the active contribution of religious communities.

In Egypt, CEOSS (the Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services) issued a statement immediately after Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February. It expressed its support for the revolution and went on to call to the attention of both government and the civil community the conditions in Egypt that need improvement.

Key Iraqi church leaders spoke at a public hearing at the World Council of Churches in February. They encouraged churches to advocate with their governments to "work to empower the role of the [Iraqi] state to secure rights for all [Iraqis] no matter their religious and ethnic background." The leader of the Assyrian Church of the East said, "The only hope is to bring back hope." An Open Doors worker has said that if the exodus of Christians from Iraq is not stopped, they will be gone from the country within three years.

TO TOP

Middle East peace and American interfaith relationships

  x     

The State Department office to monitor and combat anti-Semitism has a fact sheet defining anti-Semitism that gives examples of how it is manifested with regard to the state of Israel, using three categories: demonizing Israel, imposing a double standard on Israel, and delegitimizing Israel.

A former speaker of the Knesset and former chairman of the Jewish Agency, Avraham Burg, has written an essay (published by Ha'aretz) that is good reading for Western Christians. In it, he challenges Jews by saying that anti-Semitism is no longer the primary focus of Western hatred. Jews are obligated to prepare for the "post-anti-Semitic era in our lives," he writes.

The American Jewish Committee has asked the UN secretary general to ensure that a September 2011 conference will not repeat “the debacles of the 2001 and 2009 Durban conferences." The U.S. and Israel walked out of the 2001 conference over a draft resolution that likened Zionism to racism.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has sponsored the first Catholic-Jewish dialogue to discuss the relationship of Eastern Catholic churches (e.g., the Melkite, Maronite, Ethiopian Catholics) to Judaism, Israel, and the Roman Catholic Church. The ADL director of interfaith affairs said this was a first step to better understand the issues.

TO TOP

Middle East peace: Iran and other non-Arab lands

The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) has used an interfaith, people approach in two-week peacemaking trips to Iran open to general applicants. Apply by August 1 for the November 5-20 group.

TO TOP

Middle East realities and the churches’ responses

The PC(USA)'s 219th General Assembly (2010) endorsed "the emphases on hope, love, nonviolence, and reconciliation" found in the Kairos statement issued by Palestinian Christian leaders. The document declares that "the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is a sin against God and humanity." It condemns both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. And it calls "individuals, companies and states to engage in divestment and in an economic and commercial boycott of everything produced by the occupation." See a full list of the original document's signatories.

Remembering the original Kairos document written by South African theologians in 1985 in the midst of apartheid, Kairos Southern Africa met in April near Johannesburg. The group made a statement of response to the Palestinian Kairos document, saying it considers "the Christian theological justification of this [Israeli] occupation based on Zionism as a heresy." It supports boycotts, divestments, and sanctions.

As a follow-up on the World Council of Churches' Minute on the Presence and Witness of Christians in the Middle East, the WCC and a Greek theological academy gathered a group on June 19-23. A report summarizes the substance of the presentations / discussions. The WCC, in the Minute, had said that the extinction of the Christian community in the region would "be a sign of failure of the ecumenical family to express the Gospel imperative for costly solidarity" and that the WCC "seeks to reinforce a positive engagement for churches in the life of the nations to which they belong." A lineamenta written in advance of an October 2010 Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of [Catholic] Bishops deals with the place of Christians in the Middle East region and their relations with Jews and Muslims. It assumes a meaningful role for Christians as a minority in the region.

Jerusalem church leaders adopted a Declaration on Christian Zionism in 2006. The National Council of Churches' interfaith relations commission has a brochure, "Why We Should Be Concerned About Christian Zionism." Tony Campolo, an Evangelical, finds Christian Zionism problematic and sees its origin in 19th century dispensational Darbyism. PC(USA) minister Donald Wagner has said that Christian Zionism has been around since the 1600s but has now converged with trends in the U.S. fueled by 9/11 fears, end times prophecy, and political conservatism.

TO TOP

On this web site:

Specific Resources: general Christian-Jewish resources and Christian-Muslim resources

General Assembly: business at the PC(USA)'s 219th General Assembly (2010); also archived actions of the 217th General Assembly (2006) related to the Middle East and to Christian-Jewish relations

Middle East Churches: an archived resource

International Religious Freedom: news public issues and U.S. government concerns

Presbyterian constituency groupings' web sites:

Israel/Palestine Mission Network (see their partnerships information)

Presbyterians Concerned for Jewish-Christian Relations (see their list of other web sites)

Items marked with are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. For best results, right-click the link (or click and hold for Macintosh), select "save target as" and save the document to your desktop for viewing and printing. Click on the image in the right column for free download of the Adobe Acrobat Reader.