On June 30, the biennial General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will consider the church's divestment from three American companies because of their sales to Israel. This misguided, ineffectual proposal would have only one meaningful ramification -- It would seriously deepen a growing chasm between the church and some of its strongest allies on nearly every principle of social justice: the Jewish people.
Although I am a devout Jew, I've had an unusual bond to the Presbyterian Church. My paternal cousins, though intermarriage, are active Presbyterians, and I've been proud to celebrate a lifetime of life cycle events at their church. As a child, when my small synagogue in Lexington, Kentucky could not field a basketball team, I played point guard for First Presbyterian -- while not liturgically significant, I was required to attend church precisely once a year, a honorary Presbyterian for that day. And with Presbyterian Church (USA)'s headquarters in nearby Louisville, I've had the opportunity to meet and work with several of its national leaders in my former roles as Kentucky's State Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer.
While I'm no expert on the denomination, I've certainly learned about the wide spectrum of values shared by our two faiths. First and foremost is a passion for social justice -- whether our inspiration comes from the Hebrew Prophets or the Gospels of Jesus, some of our most sacred, shared missions are to serve the poor, promote the rights of the disenfranchised and to love our neighbors as ourselves. It's no wonder that over the past several decades, Jews and Presbyterians have walked arm in arm in campaigns to establish equal rights for women, African-Americans, and gays and lesbians; to battle callous government policies that exacerbate income inequality and to promote peace throughout the world.
A serious cleavage in the interfaith relationship emerged, however, upon passage of a policy by the 2004 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) for a "phased, selective" divestment of Israel. After strong protest by Jewish groups -- as well as by many Presbyterian parishioners -- the 2006 General Assembly reversed course, calling for "corporate engagement" to promote peaceful solutions in the Middle East.
This February, however, citing the failure of corporate engagement to produce results, the church's General Assembly Mission Council recommended that the church divest its stock from Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions, and Hewlett-Packard "until they have ceased profiting from non-peaceful activities in Israel-Palestine." The church will consider this resolution at its 220th General Assembly meeting that begins June 30 in Pittsburgh.
Unfortunately, the church's proposed actions have little grounding in reality. Caterpillar, for example, does not actually sell equipment to Israel; it sells tractors and bulldozers to the U.S. government as part of a broad-based international program that transfers them to about 150 countries around the globe, including Israel. To address the church's objectives, Caterpillar would have to boycott its own government, a move that would level a devastating, if not existential blow to the company, its shareholders and its thousands of U.S. employees.
Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard is charged with selling "hardware to the Israeli Navy that is used for its operational communications, logistics and planning including the ongoing naval blockade of the Gaza Strip." Yet, as an official report of the notoriously anti-Israel-leaning United Nations declared in 2011, the blockade was manifestly legal, and it was instituted for the very purposes of upholding the peace. Wrote the Palmer Commission: "Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza...The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law."
Far worse than the misguided and misinformed resolution's practical implications is its potential to seriously disrupt the long term Jewish-Presbyterian alliance on behalf of social justice. As I detail in my new book, The Liberal Case for Israel, the language of "boycott" and "divestment" is particularly painful for Jews who have suffered from more than six decades of boycotts against Israel, led most often by those who seek to de-legitimize or even destroy the Jewish State. While many Jews, including myself, disagree with some of the Israeli government's policies regarding the West Bank, we are infuriated by boycott actions that blame the Jewish State entirely for the failure to reach peace, and those that single out the only liberal democracy in an exceedingly hostile and autocratic region. Where's the fury about the more than 150 rocket attacks targeting Israeli civilians that have been fired by Gaza-based, Hamas-supported terrorists in just the past week alone? Where's the outrage against the Syrian government's policy of mass murder? Where's the protest against government persecution of gays and subjugation of women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle East nations?
Presbyterian church leaders, reacting to internal criticism of the recommendations, have tried to assure their parishioners that the action is not a statement against Jews or even Israelis, but instead about the misbehavior of the named companies. Rev. John Hougen, a member of the church's Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee declared "I'm voting to divest because it's the right idea -- absolutely not -- because of the people involved."
However, a recent church forum in Louisville about the divestment proposal -- one of a series that were held across the country prior to the General Assembly -- belied the notion that Zionists shouldn't take offense. Neither Jewish nor pro-Israel leaders were permitted to deliver a presentation. Meanwhile, one speaker compared Israeli policy to South African apartheid, a malicious libel of a nation that provides full and equal rights to its 1.6 million Arab citizens; a nation that rescued tens of thousands of black men, women and children out of abject poverty, famine, and slavery in Ethiopia, and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars toward their full integration into Israeli society. Another forum speaker cited favorably the infamous 2009 Kairos Palestine Document that aims to de-legitimize Israel as a Jewish state and seeks to deny any Jewish connection to the land, ignoring irrefutable historical and archaeological evidence that proves there's been a sustained and vibrant Jewish presence in the land of Israel for more than 4000 years.
Recognizing the unfairness and hypocrisy of an effort to single out and punish the only Middle East state that struggles every day to better reflect liberal values, the United Methodist Church in May rejected a similar divestment proposal by a more than two to one margin. I urge my Presbyterian friends to do the same: Please urge your church leaders to act in the interests of peace and justice and defeat a resolution that would foster just the opposite. United, Jews and Presbyterians can once again work together -- in the words of the prophet Micah -- to "do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God."
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Highlights are:
"The Huffington Post article misrepresented what happened at the Louisville church forum and used it as the basis for a false accusation of anti-Semitism. Huffington Post owes the Presbyterian Church an apology."
"[this article] is a misrepresentation of what happened at the Louisville church forum (which I attended.)"
"Jewish leaders have had many opportunities to meet with Presbyterian Church leaders and to make presentations at Presbyterian gatherings to argue against divestment. But the Louisville church forum described in the Huffington Post was an internal Presbyterian event .... Only Presbyterian ministers and church officials were invited as panelists.
A Presbyterian leader who is opposed to divestment was invited as a panelist, so all sides would have a fair hearing. Fair, honest, and open discussion is a time-honored tradition in the Presbyterian Church."
"Jewish leaders from the extremely pro-Israel Louisville Jewish Community Federation (JCL) found out about it, talked with the event organizers, and asked to come, or somehow managed to get invited. Even though it would change the character of the event, the Presbyterians kindly and graciously said Federation folks were welcome to attend."
"The Jewish Community Federation leaders then traversed the bounds of propriety and asked to be put on the panel to make a presentation."
fanned and faved!
What would Jesus do? Would he support demolition of homes because of ethnicity? Would he support suppression of human rights?
"Members of the team that visited Israel and Palestine, 7-14 March, were:
Metropolitan of Transylvania Prof. Dr Laurentiu Streza, Romanian Orthodox Church
Fr Dr Emanuel Clapsis, Ecumenical Patriarchate, USA
Prof. Dr Nancy Cardoso, Igreja Metodista do Brazil
Mrs Nancy Adams, Scottish Episcopal Church"
Nassar farm is already surrounded by Israeli settlements, and like many Palestinians, the Nassars have endured harassment, threats and attacks from nearby settlers. In one such attack, Daoud Nassar’s mother was threatened with a gun. In another, settlers uprooted 250 olive trees from the property.
... So they established on their land a project called the Tent of Nations. Its overarching aims are to build bridges between people of different backgrounds, and between people and land.
“We wanted to move away from a circle of blame, and channel our frustration into something positive,” Daoud Nassar told the Living Letters team.
http://www.tentofnations.org/world-council-of-churches-report/
The Israeli authorities have forbidden any permanent infrastructure development on the site, as well as access to the electricity grid and public water..."
Not at all. But trust you to hide ISrael's crimes behind the identity fo Judaism.
I hope do, because right now, Jews in Israel are at far greater risk than those living outside of Israel.
In fact, many more Jews have been killed in Israel than in the diaspora, so it certainly hasn't been a safe place for Jews.
TIAA Cref removed $72 million in Caterpillar stock from its socially responsible portfolio. MSCI removed Caterpillar from its socially responsible indexes.
The ocupation is illegal and a vioaltion iof the Geneva Conventions. Anyone seeking peace will start by calling for an end to it.
TIAA and MSCI headquarters are not located in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Instead their members occasionally pay tennis on courts of Aruba.
It's always so hypocritical.
Leaving aside the fallacies about it Israel it is based on--do they *divest* on humanitarian grounds from other US companies that do business with countries at the top of the list of human rights offenders?
Do they divest from companies doing business with China?...virtually all the arab nations?...Russia?...Turkey?
Of course not--only Israel.
It's all meaningless anyway. They sell their stock in Caterpillar ( about one hour's worth of Caterpillar trading)...and others buy it.
Nearly all these initiatives are started by some few who buy the arab propaganda and end up being voted down by the larger membership
Of the nations I listed who are *occupiers* and gross human rights abusers...only Israel is under threat of attacks from those who profess a desire to exterminate that nation and its people.
The palestinians do not "get robbed"...they prevented from robbing, which is specifically what they state their goals are in their political charters.
Do you call activits who champion human rights abuses in Tibet hypocrites for ignoring human rights issues elsewhere? Are you sugegsting that those who do not direct their attentino to every human rights conflict in the worl simultaneously are hypocrites and should be silenced?
Should we stop treating cancer because we haven't fiound a cure for the common cold?
>> Nearly all these initiatives are started by some few who buy the arab propaganda and end up being voted down by the larger membership
So what are you so worried about then?
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/06/201262711732387905.html
Many Jews around the world actively oppose the discrimination and violent behavior of the state of israel towards Palestinians and refuse to support it.
Does the phrase "Not in my name" not mean ANYTHING to you?
Within the occupied West Bank there are separate roads, schools, and housing areas. Water supplies are based on whether or not the water drinker is living in a settlement (5 times more water supplied, some settlements with swimming pools) or is in a Palestinians village where water must be trucked in and stored in tanks on the roof.
Palestinians cannot leave without a permit. If you are a young man you can't get a permit. If you have a hospital emergency, please plan ahead. Hundreds of checkpoints stop you and demand your papers. Often, Palestinian children must confront Israeli guns pointing at them on their way to school. Getting to agricultural fields requires the permission of a soldier at a gate which he may or may not open.
"Aziz Pahad, the South African Deputy Foreign Minister, and Kgalema Motlanthe, the Deputy President of the African National Congress, met with Palestinian human rights activists on June 6, 2008 in South Africa. The South Africans officials had recently returned from a visit to the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territory... Pahad and Motlanthe stressed the South African government's support for the Palestinian people. Motlanthe stated that in his view "the current situation for Palestinians in the OPT is worse than conditions were for Blacks under the Apartheid regime."
http://rabble.ca/news/2010/03/israel-and-apartheid-fair-comparison
They ALL admit it.
They just seek different FORMS of destruction.
Some are antisemites who feel that Jews have no right to a homeland -- but Arabs and Muslims do.
Some feel that the entire Middle East is "Arab land" -- and therefore no Jews have the right to control anything.
Some are insane anarchists who are against all borders everywhere, but for whatever reason have decided to target the world's only tiny Jewish state as their main item to hate.
Etc.
Mind you, the last time Israel faced a blockade, it did a lot more than fire rockets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol8xhTySKfM
Im glad youre quoting him. At least you people are starting to listen.