Bearing Witness 2010

Well the Presbyterian Church’s (PCUSA) 2010 General Assembly is just a month away, so it’s time to turn our attention to the many Middle East related resolutions and reports that will be presented at that meeting.

Given how this week’s Flotilla of Peace/Hate story continues to dominate the news, now might seem a strange time to turn our attention to a church that only seems to make news every two years when votes on divestment or other resolutions hostile to Israel take center stage at their bi-annual conclave.

But the Flotilla/Blockade Runner story only emphasizes one of the key elements in the struggle for Middle East peace: the struggle over definitions.

Who is a “peace activist,” for example? Everyone involved on both sides of the issue at the PCUSA GA would claim this title, but is there some way of determining if someone deserves that honorific vs. simply demanding that it be applied to them? This week, we discovered that the definition of “peace activist” might extend to those who use clubs, knives and guns to attack others. Is there some point where being infinitely elastic about how you define your friends and allies (regardless of their words or deeds) becomes part of the problem?

This is why the PCUSA story is compelling, even if it is not as relevant as it was six years ago when divestment was briefly the official policy of the church. For war consists of more than people killing each other. Its starting point rarely coincides with when the first shot is fired, nor does an end to physical violence mean a war has necessarily terminated.

Just as words (as part of negotiations or compromises) can be tools of peace, so too (in the form of incitement, propaganda, vilification and de-legitimization) they can be weapons of war, or at least tools that make a shooting war more likely or more lethal.

And so I and others will be turning our attention to the PCUSA for the next few weeks, in hopes that the good sense the rank and file members of the church have shown since 2006 (when they rejected divestment 95%-5%) will continue as delegates gather from around the country to vote on various pro- and anti-Israel measures (far more of the latter than the former) in July.

To kick things off, my friend Will Spotts and I have restarted a Web site we created in 2006 that covered that year’s PCUSA General Assembly, a site that can be seen at www.bearingwitness2010.com. In ’06, Will was still a member of the church, and he and I used that previous site to analyze and discuss various aspects of the Presbyterian divestment debate.

Today, both Will and I have our own blogs that allow us to communicate our thoughts on the PCUSA and other matters, so this year’s Bearing Witness site instead presents a case. Those who are pushing anti-Israel overtures and other measures at this year’s GA have not been as good as they should be about presenting both sides of the issues, either in their information gathering or their communication with GA delegates or other church members. Bearing Witness 2010 hopes to rectify that situation with some well-reasoned analysis that puts the entire matter of Presbyterian relations with the Jewish state into context, as well as taking on individual issues related to this year’s GA votes.

Towards this end, we have included materials from some extremely thought-provoking writers alongside our own opinions, including Dexter Van Zile whose work fighting anti-Israel animus within the entire Mainline Protestant movement is second to none.

In a perfect world, this information would be provided to every delegate attending this year’s GA who, one hopes, would take the time to read through it before making decisions regarding the most controversial issues facing the church. Now we have no illusions that this will necessarily happen, but it made sense to present our case as though it were being delivered to such an audience. That said, anyone interested in interfaith relations, or just curious about how anti-Israel animus – best symbolized by BDS campaigns – enters and ruins an organization would be hard pressed to find a better documented example of how this happens than by reviewing the Presbyterian Church’s deteriorating relationships with Israel and its supporters.