Pope Francis, American churches, and Palestinian rights

Pope Francis’ September 2015 visit to the US will doubtless reinforce his reach to the new audiences he has attracted beyond the Catholic Church with his strong positions on such issues as the environment, poverty, migrants – and Palestinian rights to freedom and equality.

Yet the Catholic Church is among a handful of establishment US churches – the Episcopal and Lutheran churches are two others – that has yet to endorse divesting from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestine or boycotting products made in the illegal Israeli settlements.

Pope Francis could have arranged to make the time during his US trip to find out why the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has not responded to the call that Palestinian Christians issued in 2009. Inspired by the Kairos South Africa document issued in 1985, Kairos Palestine called on Christians worldwide to make the Kairos document “a non-violent instrument, striving for peace with security and dignity for every human being in this Holy Land by bringing the occupation to an end.”

Grassroots organizers at mainline American churches responded by redoubling their efforts at the parish, regional and national levels. Decades of organizing were crowned in the past few years, when the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA and the United Church of Christ (UCC) adopted resolutions for divestment or boycott.

And yet, despite significant progress at the diocesan level, the 2015 General Convention of the Episcopal Church failed for the second time to pass any resolutions involving boycott or divestment. In the Catholic Church, meanwhile, there has been little grassroots advocacy even though Pax Christi and the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns have been outspoken on the issue.

There is speculation that churches with active institutions in the Holy Land are reluctant to pass resolutions for boycott or divestment because their sister institutions are vulnerable to Israeli retaliation. The Episcopal bishops who voted down the resolutions pointed to advice from Archbishop Suheil Dawani of the Diocese of Jerusalem, who subsequently claimed the bishops acted independently of him.

Others who have worked with churches for years as they debated and eventually took the decision to respond to Kairos Palestine’s call for action through boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) believe that the church leadership is most worried about the reaction of Jewish religious organizations in their communities, with which they often partner in domestic projects to alleviate poverty and fight racism. But this misplaced emphasis on interfaith dialogue must not prevent churches from speaking up for the rights of a people under occupation.

Indeed, the Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Rev. Elizabeth Eaton, was chastised by members within the church for promoting Jewish-Christian dialogue over the human rights of Muslim as well as Christian Palestinians in Gaza during the 2014 war.

Calling on the bishops to remember their baptismal vow to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being,” Rev. Naim Ateek, founder of the ecumenical Palestinian Liberation Theology Sabeel movement pointed out that the Israeli government was the only entity to benefit from the Episcopal bishops’ vote.

It is important to remember that the PresbyteriansMethodists and UCC also partner with organizations in the Holy Land. Palestinians of all faiths and backgrounds depend on these hospitals, schools, and other ministries for vital services. The fact remains that church institutions in the Holy Land do not exist in a vacuum but are made up of real people living under conditions of oppression and injustice.

It is also vital to remember that there are American Jewish voices on both sides of the issue. For instance, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) with 200,000 members and supporters has taken a clear stand in favor of BDS. The church leadership needs to broaden its perspective to hear the demands of the many other US-based Jewish organizations in support of actions such as boycott and divestment to end a cruel, nearly 50-year occupation and even longer violations of basic rights.

Palestinian Christian voices also need to be heard at this crucial juncture and more Palestinian Christians in the US are coming together to speak up in church forums.

Pope Francis’ voice is sure to shake up establishment churches in the US with a faith that addresses poverty, economic injustice, and the burden of climate change on the poorest of the earth.

As for Israel’s occupation and denial of rights, so far the challenge in the US has come as a response to grassroots pressure within the church. The older and deeper the institutional relationships, the greater the grassroots pressure has had to be. Pope Francis should call on American Christians to make their faith real by responding to Kairos Palestine and following “the logic of peaceful resistance…. sincerely proclaiming that their object is not revenge but rather to put an end to the existing evil, liberating both the perpetrators and the victims of injustice.”

This commentary was first published by Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. The opinion of individual members of Al-Shabaka’s policy network do not necessarily reflect the views of the organization as a whole.

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Been watching and listening to the Pope the last few days on mainstream US TV. All he says raises the question, why is he not supporting the Palestinians, both Christian & Muslim components? Main media is totally silent. This is his chance. He declines. Why? I guess he doesn’t want to face it when Zionists & GOP parrot claim that Catholic Church is guilty of complicity in the Shoah, especially since The Church is trying hard to get beyond covering up priestly homosexuality abuse. I guess the English Church and German (Lutheran) Church have their own self-imposed muzzles–in the case of the latter, not wanting to respond to Luther’s anti-Semitism;as to English Church, what? Any takers?

I wonder what the Pope would say about those “compassionate” chosen ones, who decided to make the Palestinians suffer even during one of their holy days. Oh those sadistic zionists!

“Israel imposes lockdown on East Jerusalem neighborhoods

JERUSALEM (Ma’an) — Israeli authorities closed the main entrances to East Jerusalem neighborhoods with cement blocks on Wednesday, preventing Palestinians from preparing for the Eid al-Adha holiday, locals said.”

http://www.juancole.com/2015/09/lockdown-jerusalem-neighborhoods.html

I also wonder what the Pope would say if he knew that the zionist thugs showed their dishonesty by stealing from those the occupy. The poor occupied people of Palestine, have to take one blow after another from these ruthless zionists. They are vicious, violent, dishonest, and certainly not worthy of any respect or regard.

Israeli Soldiers Investigated for Looting During 2014 Search for Kidnapped Teens
More than ten cases of property damage or theft are being investigated in relation to operation to find Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.677231

RE: “There is speculation that churches with active institutions in the Holy Land are reluctant to pass resolutions for boycott or divestment because their sister institutions are vulnerable to Israeli retaliation.” ~ Grace Said and Joanna Springer

FOR EXAMPLE, SEE: “Christian Schools On Strike in Israel Over ‘Discrimination’ ” | by Lawahaz Jabari and F. Brinley Bruton | nbcnews.com | September 19, 2015

[EXCERPT] JERUSALEM — Christian schools have gone on strike in the Holy Land.

Since Sept. 1, some 33,000 students and teachers at independent Roman Catholic-run schools in Israel have downed pencils and schoolbooks to protest what they say are drastic elementary school budget cuts by Israel’s government. Some of the schools date back hundreds of years, predating the founding of the state of Israel by centuries.

Mom Rula Azar is participating in the strike with her kids — Joyce, 6, and Jirius, 9 — because she believes families should have a choice when it comes to schooling.

“It’s my right to choose which school I want my children to go to, and it’s our right to have those schools… with full budget,” said the 35-year-old teacher in Ramla, Israel. “We are Israeli citizens, respecting the law, we believe in equality and these are the values we teach in these schools.”

Azar added that she shows her children to “love others and that there is great value in the Israeli society, which contains quality, freedom,” but in her heart believes the government’s moves stem from racism.

“I am aware that as an Arab there is a discrimination and racist law against us, which I am trying to hide from my children,” she said. “It happens only to Christian schools. Meanwhile, Jewish Orthodox schools, which are also ‘recognized, non-official schools,’ get the full budget.”

Israel’s education ministry did not respond to repeated questions on how many Jewish schools it funded, and to what level.

Father Abd al Masih, the director of the Christian schools network, said budget cuts had been gradual but relentless, reducing state funding from 75 percent of the total of Christian elementary schools six years ago down to 29 percent this year.

Al Masih and others accuse the government of trying to starve Israel’s 47 Christian schools into oblivion, forcing them to become state schools in exchange of government funding. The schools, which survive on both state and private funding and educate Muslims and Christians, are considered among the best in the country. . .

CONTINUED AT – http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-christian-school-strike-n428306

The Pope did pause beside the Wall but this gesture, if not emphasised nor reinforced nor put in context by some clear statements about the morality of the matter, was bound to come to nothing. It has in the event been reinforced only by the unremarkable garden ceremony and by the rather more significant, though very limited, diplomatic dealings with the PA. Perhaps this isn’t quite ‘coming to nothing’, but is close to it in my view.
It would have been possible for the Pope to let people know that he would approve of at least a modest degree of pressure on Israel and this would have resulted in the letter we discussed here recently, signed by many Christian leaders (though with a degree of ambiguity about whether they were speaking for their organisations), having some Catholic bishops, as well as such usual suspects as the Maryknoll Fathers, among its signatories. In fact the signals must have been to the effect that the question was best not discussed too loudly.
Church property in the Holy Land is part of the story, as has been said, but even more important, I think, is the objective of reinforcing the positive account of the Vatican in WW2, widely accepted but still controversial, by recognising the Pope of that time a saint. This couldn’t be done amid vigorous Jewish objections, which means in effect that Netanyahu must give his permission.
The matter has been discussed through rather extraordinary diplomatic smoke signals, such as Netanyahu’s threatening gift of his dad’s book on the Spanish Inquisition and the recent elevation to sainthood of two little known nineteenth-century Palestinians coupled with or balanced by that act of elaborate respect to the remains of Theodor Herzl. again perhaps balanced by the timing of the American visit, which according to ‘On Faith’, a website spun off from the Washington Post, is noticeably distracting attention from the current Jewish festivals and has none of the customary interfaith aspects. Well, perhaps that view is paranoid, but I do think that there is some rather strange exchange of symbols going on and that the sainthood of Pope Pius is a very significant matter and I don’t think we should expect much of the Vatican while that question is unresolved or for some time after it is.
Just to add that we should expect even less from my org, the Church of England, where the only remotely decisive relevant action of last year was to crush. absolutely Krrush, the (all but only) well-known anti-Zionist among our clergy, Stephen Sizer – alleged by the Jewish Chronicle, I think, to be among the sinister figures flitting around Mr. Corbyn.