As a Jewish observer of the 220th General Assembly of the PC(USA), I was impressed by the level of concern for the feelings of Jews. During the deliberations of the Middle East Peacemaking Issues committee, American and Israeli Jews with a variety of opinions concerning divestment were given the opportunity to speak, demonstrating both the deep divisions that exist within my own community around these issues, and the commitment of Presbyterians to ensuring fairness and equal representation. The committee listened compassionately to these and other perspectives, and voted its conscience, endorsing divestment by a large majority.
I was offended when Rabbi Gil Rosenthal, the only Jew permitted to address the full General Assembly, abused his invitation to deliver an interfaith greeting and instead delivered a five-minute, fear-mongering speech against divestment, an act which Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons later described as being “over the line”. I was disappointed that a guest invited to speak as a friend of the church would behave in so unfriendly a way, but also that the Presbyterian commitment to equal representation that was so evident in committee did not lead the Assembly to permit anyone, Jewish or otherwise, to respond to Rabbi Rosenthal’s unexpected advocacy with a speech of equal length in support of divestment.
Though I am disappointed with this failure of the Assembly’s process, and disappointed that only two commissioners abstained from the critical 333-331-2 vote after twelve of them accepted a free trip to Israel from an anti-divestment lobbying group, I will not turn away from my friends in the PC(USA). I believe with all my heart that the Church will eventually make the right choice on this and all of the other difficult choices with which it grapples. When that day comes, as it already has for the Quakers who divested from Caterpillar earlier this year, myself and countless other Jews will find our relationships with this church, and our commitment to interfaith partnerships, not threatened, but vastly strengthened.
But this is not about the opinions of some Jews. This is about the lives of Palestinians.
Given that this is actually about Palestinians, including but not limited to Palestinian Christians, I humbly ask Presbyterians and others to reflect upon the message sent to those Palestinians by the church’s decision to offer only new investment, and only talk of peace, while continuing to reap the financial rewards of violence and oppression:
We have heard your plea, Christians of the Holy Land. We have heard the roar of the bulldozers, and the cries of the children trapped behind walls and checkpoints. We have heard the deafening silence of the companies which after eight years of engagement still allow their products to be used to perpetuate your suffering.
You have asked us to stop investing in the cameras that line your prison walls. We cannot.
You have asked us to stop benefiting from the machinery of the checkpoints that prevent you from reaching your jobs, your schools, your hospitals, and our holy places. We cannot.
You have asked us to stop profiting from the bulldozers used to raze your olive groves, among which our Lord Jesus Christ once walked. We cannot.
We cannot do this, our Brothers and Sisters in Christ, because of what some of our friends might think.
We have no choice, our fellow Christians.
The barriers will continue to be erected upon your land, and we will continue to profit from them.
The checkpoints will continue to prevent you from walking in the footsteps of Jesus, and we will continue to profit from them.
But there is hope, our brothers and sisters. For though our purses shall continue to grow fat with the spoils of violence and injustice, we remain Christians at heart.
Return now to your battered homes, cleave unto your spouse, and unto your children. Cast aside your fear, for we have heard your plea. And with the help of The Spirit, we have discerned.
Though you may awake to the roar of the bulldozers, to the screams of your children, and to the crumbling of your walls, fear not.
For we shall be there, our Brothers and Sisters in Christ, to offer a fresh coat of paint for the rubble.
Rejoice, and be glad in it.
The satirical reflection offered in the second part of this piece should be read in lieu of scripture at every Presbyterian Church this Sunday.
333 traitors to their God.
How else can one put it.
One of the reasons I shy from organized religion is the number of hypocrites within.
Yea, the other half are upstanding and admirable, but personally I don’t the patience to deal with the coward half.
Good piece by Ben-Israel
Reminds me of Mark Twain’s War Prayer
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/warprayer.html
I watched the Presbyterian proceedings on the live stream; thanks to Mondo for providing that link and other coverage. I also looked at some of the on-line reports.
The commissioners, who took the binding votes, seem to have overruled the broad sentiments of the church. Recall that voting took place in 2 stages, an advisory round, and the commissioner round. Advisory votes came from 4 bodies or groups of delegates to the GA. One was youth; another was from the missions; a third was ecumenical; and I can’t recall the 4th. Three of the advisory groups voted by lopsided majorities not to replace the divestment motion with the substitute “investment” motion. The ecumenical advisors were perhaps heavily Jewish, and did not reject. The three advisory groups also heavily rejected the investment motion, when it came up for a vote as the main motion; the missionaries rejected it by 100%.
The divestment motion itself was recommended by the MRTI, Mission Responsibility Through Investing committee, by 36-11. A motion from that or a related committee describing the occupation as a “form of apartheid” failed by 28-19, not overwhelming; a change of 5 votes would have passed it. The overwhelming plenary vote for boycotting settlement products, and the ” conscience” option for individual divestment, diluted somewhat the Zionist victory.
As “Avraham Ben-Israel” recounted there was great concern for Jewish opinion; a Jewish guest abused his ecumenical privilege with an arrogant harangue, and no one was allowed to speak in rebuttal. In fact the tone of the whole discussion was overwhelmingly deferential to conventional Jewish sensibilities, pleading anxiously that the motion “wasn’t against Israel” etc.
The first lesson in evaluating this should be the urgent need to raise the left’s game, to meet the opposition. The left is dominated by “progressive Jewish” opinion, which is not mainly concerned with Palestine, or with its obligations as US citizens, but with “the Jewish people.” Thus Rececca Vilkomerson of JVP said, “We are trying to create a space in the Jewish world where we can express our criticism as Jews without needing to apologize for ourselves.”
Cecilie Suraksy said, “There are two liberation movements. There is a Palestinian led liberation movement that we support as allies. And there is a Jewish liberation movement that we are leading. We have to liberate our own community from growing bigotry and empty nationalism and Jewish exceptionalism.”
These statements are wrong. American Jews are obligated as US citizens, not as “Jews”, which in political terms is a non-existent, pre-modern category, Zionist essentialism. Our obligations to the Palestinians and others under siege in western Asia, to the world, are to be addressed as US citizens.
The discourse of international law and human rights proferred by JVP is technical and ahistorical; it is necessary, but not remotely adequate. It is like describing World War II and the Judeocide as violations of League of Nations collective security, or the minority clauses of the Versailles Treaty, without naming Nazism.
The law and rights discourse is descended from the Enlightenment, including the chapter of Jewish emancipation, which admitted Jews to full rights as liberal citizens. This is overwhelmingly successful today, the catastrophic failure of Germany 1933-45 notwithstanding.
Zionism must be depicted as pre-modern, reactionary atavism, and the organized Jewish mainstream not as “Israel-firsters”, but as Jewish racialists, for whom the principle of the Jewish Volk has replaced liberalism as the basis of society. Thus they support a herrenvolk democracy for Jews in Palestine, and incremental genocide for the indigenous people, while insisting on liberal conditions everywhere else. The interest of the Jewish Volk resolves the contradiction.
The nascent Christian-Jewish divide should be encouraged and strengthened on principled lines.
The ferocious attacks of the Jewish establishment on the Christian churches over divestment must be seen as a different front in the race war being waged against gentiles in Palestine, a radical, unconscionable Jewish abuse of the rights of liberal citizens in the US.
The Presbyterian discussion about “selective divestment” from three companies whose products are used by Israel built on precedents from the church’s social investment criteria dating from the 1980s and anti-apartheid work. Apart from these limitations, JVP’s “divestment from occupation”, which makes the companies the problem, rather than Israel itself, backfired. Several speakers cited Caterpillar’s alleged good works as “first responders” in disaster situations, and said that it was unfair to blame Caterpillar et al for the uses of their products. These speakers included people who worked at the company.
Targeting Israel itself would eliminate those problems. Israel itself can hardly be exempt from sanctions for policies which resemble Nazi anti-Semitism, even within the Green Line. The Presbyterians should be relieved of pressure to declare that they “don’t oppose Israel”, by not divesting from it.
Nor should the Presbyterians be forced to state, or imply, that they accept Israel as a Jewish state. They didn’t accept a white state in South Africa. The “Jewish people” is Zionist race myth; unsurprisingly, the archaeology and biblical studies and historiography that purport to show it have been totally discredited. The modern, liberal alternative is Israeli Hebrew nationality, secular and open to all, as Boas Evron argued in “Jewish State or Israeli Nation” in 1986, based on “Canaanism” actually, a marginal, ur-Zionist idea.
This principled critique is the universalist legacy of the Enlightenment and emancipation—classical Reform Judaism, the Marxist internationalism in which Jews were prominent, and what the late Israel Shahak called the “modern secular Jewish tradition,” which he dated from Spinoza, the greatest of the 17th c. rationalist philosophers. These outlooks, in their diverse ways, rejected Zionism categorically, as pre-modern, reactionary atavism.
Thus the late, very great Elmer Berger co-drafted, with Fayez Sayegh, the UN resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism. Berger worked with EAFORD, the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, on many projects. See their publications, at
http://www.eaford.org/publications.html
A 1986 book, “Judaism or Zionism: What Difference for the Middle East?” is at
http://www.eaford.org/publications/1/JUDAISM%20OR%20ZOINISM.pdf
For 45 years, these precedents, and an analysis based on them, have been buried. Groups like JVP (and New Jewish Agenda, and other antecedents) see themselves in a special role between mainstream Jewry and the gentiles, enabling criticism, which means being gatekeepers. Their role is to fulfill the obligations of liberal citizens, in the fullest, historical sense, not to haggle down those obligations to identity politics.
Links for Vilkomerson and Surasky
http://forward.com/articles/137016/jvp-harsh-critic-of-israel-seeks-a-seat-at-the-com/#ixzz1evMmyIIu
https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2012/03/there-are-two-liberation-movements.html
For Evron:
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=19692
“Israeli Nation” vs. “Jewish State”
by Jonathan Cook
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/cook060410.html
“the only Jew permitted to address the full General Assembly”
As if the Presbyterians did a great injustice by permitting only one Jew to speak at the Assembly! That one Jew was one more than any Muslims they permitted to address the Assembly, let alone any Palestinians. Nonetheless, this was a Presybterian Church GA, by Presbyterians, for Presybterians–they weren’t obliged to let any non-Presbyterian address the Assembly, be it Jew, Muslim, or Buddhist so this passive-aggressive complaint makes no sense to me.