PCUSA - Motivations

"I was thrown out of [college] during my freshman year, for cheating on my metaphysics final. You know, I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me."

-- Woody Allen

There are two often-discussed potential motivations for the kind of mendacious behavior of many PCUSA activists with regard to Israel that I generally avoid.

The first is anti-Semitism. Generally, I avoid accusations of this type, not simply because they tend to immediately get people’s backs up, but because they imply knowledge or understanding of what is truly inside people’s minds and hearts. And while pointing out how some accusations against Israel speak to ancient anti-Jewish tropes is fair game (especially if those using such tropes may not know they are doing so), claiming to be able to read into people’s soul is just the thing that got Woody Allen into trouble all those years ago.

Claims by supporters of divestment and other anti-Israel measures that they are only doing what they are doing in the name of “Christian Witness” is the second motivation I tend to discount, especially since it claims specific understanding of not simply a human soul, but the word of God. If Christian Witness requires dozens of anti-Israel measures to appear before every PCUSA General Assembly, and nothing similar to be said regarding hundreds of far worse human rights abuses on the planet, forgive me for thinking the driver of such decisions is not divine but mortal.

As a doctor friend once told me with regard to diagnosing illness: if you hear hoof beats, assume they come from horses and not zebras. And while the oldest hatred or the spirit of the divine could be the source of anti-Israel animus within PCUSA, I prefer to ignore that potential zebra and look instead to a more likely horse of church and secular politics.

I’ve already discussed some macro-political matters within the church that seems to be motivating divestment and other anti-Israel activity at the last several Presbyterian General Assemblies, notably as a church leadership distant from its members being pushed in various directions by aggressive ecumenical partners (notably Palestinian Christian groups like Sabeel) at the expense of less demanding partners (like the Jewish community).

But one other issue came to mind when I was recently cruising various sites and blogs to gauge reaction to next month’s upcoming GA debate. On more than one occasion, supporters of various Overtures and reports criticizing Israel highlighted what they saw as a worrying alliance between “right-wing Jews” and Evangelical Christians, the latter being seen as supporting the former out of some primitive mis-reading of scripture that required the ingathering of Jews to Israel in order to hasten the coming of Armageddon.

Now no doubt one can find Christian supporters of Israel who believe in such things. But is that what primarily underpins the high level of Evangelical support for Israel? Or might this support be motivated by something simpler and more earthly, such as recognition that Israel is, in fact, a reasonably good place in terms of human rights (including religious freedom), certainly in comparison with its most prominent foes. In other words, what’s weirder, Christians whose co-religionists are being abused across the Muslim world finding common cause with Jews who have suffered and are suffering similar attack and persecution, or a Presbyterian Church which finds common cause with the persecutors in the name of “Christian Witness?”

There’s also the little matter of how much the rank and file of the Presbyterian Church resembles not just Evangelicals but the American public as a whole with regard to general support for Israel (reflected by huge PCUSA majorities rejecting divestment in 2006 and 2008). In other words, might the only major difference between Evangelicals and Mainliners be that it is only in the former where the opinion of leaders and flock are in synch?

American church attendance has stayed steady (actually grown slightly) during the very period when membership in the Presbyterian Church has tumbled into a death spiral, which means those looking for a religious experience seem to be looking to places other than PCUSA for such an experience.

Now it’s possible that Evangelical churches are growing at the expense of the Mainliners by selling snakeoil, a perverted blend of Biblical literalism laced with primitive mythology, in order to draw in people who would otherwise flock to PCUSA’s doors. But Presbyterians should also consider the alternative that, in addition to providing people a more appealing religious experience, these growing churches may also be offering people (including former Presbyterians) a place where their opinions can be heard, not buried in an avalanche of half truths and false accusations that will be the mainline attraction at this year’s Middle East debate at the Presbyterian GA.

BDS Follies

In penning earnest analysis of the comings and goings of an obscure and disappearing religious sect, I seem to have shirked my duties of late regarding other BDS news. And so to remedy that:

Story #1 – Elton John Plays in Israel

Elton (or, should I say, Sir Elton) decided to tell those demanding he boycott the Jewish state to take a long walk on a short flotilla vessel, playing to a crowd of 50,000 Tel Avivians last week. The response of those who failed to get this rocker to do their bidding was muted, with some mumbling about gay solidarity here (is Elton John gay?), some grumbling about John’s recital at Rush Limbaugh’s twelfth wedding there (I thought Limbaugh had gone deaf?)

There was no such below-the-breath muttering from the rock star himself who shouted to the crowd:"Shalom, we are so happy to be back here! Ain't nothing gonna stop us from coming, baby," and "We don't cherry-pick our conscience." before breaking into all the hits I used to enjoy on my eight-track tape player before settling down to an afternoon of watching Creature Double Feature on Channel 56.

While I make it a habit to not take political advice from celebrities whose reputation for wisdom (i.e. Martin Sheen) or toughness (i.e., Bruce Willis) comes from reading lines penned and polished for them by professional writers, I must say that Elton John’s one sentence about “cherry-picking” conscience said a hell of a lot more than the pages of mealy-mouthed HTML that accompanied the allegedly moral decisions by slightly less aging rockers like Elvis Costello and the Pixies.

As a final note regarding Elton John, it’s a little known fact that the signer had a huge impact on Israeli culture, notably with regard to customer service. Back in the day, the country prided itself on its informality and open hostility to manners, with Israel’s socialist origins making them especially proud of treating the rich and famous with contempt.

When they tried pulling this on Elton John during his first visit to play in Israel, making him wait in the regular airport passport line like every other Tom, Dick and Shlomo, the musician was so incensed he walked out of line and immediately flew back to England. It was only after the concert organizers pleaded with the singer, offering him (among other things) a talking parrot in his dressing room that Elton John returned to begin a history of playing to sold out Israeli audiences.

So the next time you’re in Israel and a waiter or security guard tells you to “have a nice day,” that’s one more thing for which you can thank Elton John.

Story #2 – Breaking the BDS Blockade

While the Turkish/IHH mercenaries who attacked Israeli soldiers during last month’s flotilla incident may have failed to break Israel’s of Gaza, they did succeed in breaking another boycott: the one being pushed by the BDS movement.

CitizenWald has the story of how the Gaza solidarity crew equipped themselves with night vision equipment from ITT and communications gear from Motorola, both sets of devices on the BDS proscription list. And so, we’re left with the delicious situation of BDS activists demanding that schools divest from ITT and Motorola in solidarity with a “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” that used ITT and Motorola equipment to support their “peace campaign” that involved beating and stabbing people while talking with each other over walkie-talkies in the dark.

Story #3 – BDS Protestors Defy China on Occupation of Tibet

Can you believe it? Early Sunday morning a group of protestors formally obsessed solely with Israeli villainy showed up at the sea port in Oakland California and prevented a Chinese ship from being unloaded in protest of China’s illegal, decades-long occupation and repression of the people of Tibet.

Okay, okay. As it turns out, the group gathered to do their protest thing on an Israeli ship, not realizing that the ship where they picketed was actually owned by that wondrous bastion of rights and freedom, the People’s Republic of China (not that nefarious rogue Jewish state of Israel).

In another example of the surreal nature of BDS politics, the Internet is aglow with BDSers patting one another on the back for this successful “operation,” even if the actual ship they targeted didn’t arrive in port until hours after they left (where, I believe, it was unloaded without incident).

In other words, this Potemkin protest was not about actually accomplishing anything beyond getting some credulous media to portray events as the divestors wanted, all so they could continue to dwell in their fantasy world where, unlike the real world, the BDSers are relevant to anyone but themselves.

PCUSA - In Whose Name?

Will Spotts highlights the series of negative consequences likely to come out of the passing of any anti-Israel resolutions or support for anti-Israel reports at next month’s Presbyterian General Assembly (PCUSA GA).

As he and others have highlighted in the past, anti-Israel measures are different than other controversial matters that church bodies such as the PCUSA routinely pass at their conclaves in that they are directly harmful to people (many, many people) who have nothing to do with the Presbyterian Church.

Changes to the Book of Order (the Presbyterian’s rules and regulations), debates over the marriage and ordination of gay men and women within the church, choices regarding the language used to refer to the deity within the denomination, these are all heartfelt matters which draw a lot of heat (and often light) when debated within PCUSA forums. But the consequences of those actions (good or ill) fall entirely on members of the church itself.

Not so matters related to the Middle East. In these cases, the result of a legitimization of general attacks on Israel for crimes of Apartheid, murder and land theft (all of which are direct charged or implied in PCUSA resolutions) will be a stepped up attack on the Jewish state by other Mainline denominations and by anti-Israel activists generally, all of whom will spend the next two years brandishing any votes PCUSA passes next month as justification for ever-wilder accusations and assaults.

Given all this, and given that members have already expressed their displeasure at similar activity in previous years, why have measures hostile to Israel only grown this year, in terms of both number and ferocity? And given that the goal of this process is to place these words into the mouth of the Presbyterian Church as a whole, making them in effect the official policy of over two-million church members, who do the people pushing these measures truly represent?

As already noted, church leaders officially sit at the top of the hierarchy of the organization, and they have been fully onboard the divestment/de-legitimization bandwagon for decades. But given the quasi-democratic nature of the institution, their job is supposed to be to enforce choices made by the General Assembly, including votes in 2006 and 2008 that asked the organization to get its act together and begin looking at the Arab-Israeli dispute from more than one side. But in the years since those votes were taken, measures designed to breathe some fresh air into the debate have faced a veto not by organizations within the church, but by “interfaith partners” (read Palestinian Christian organizations) who never hesitate to make one-way demands on the church in the name of “Christian solidarity.”

The Middle East Study Committee was created to study the Middle East, i.e., to bring some needed perspective into a discussion of Middle East politics that had degenerated within the Presbyterian Church to a tale of cartoon villainy and victimhood with you know and who playing their designated roles. Yet this committee became just the latest deck to stack, creating a document whose lack of balance dwarves anything that had come before. So, again, we have to ask just who the people pushing such a report claim to represent?

The Presbytery of San Francisco seems to be a fountainhead for the worst of the worst in terms of anti-Israel Overtures, including calls to have Israel labeled an Apartheid State and attempts to resuscitate divestment actions that have been unquestionably voted down again and again. This group seems to have determined who it represents: the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a political organization behind many of the most irresponsible propaganda and divestment measures taking place in the US and beyond (including the ill-fated flotilla incident that looks likely to trigger more international incidents before long). Now there is nothing wrong with the San Francisco Presbyterians meeting with whomever they like, but given that they are attempting to drag the entire church with them in a direction that will unquestionably discomfort a large number (if not a majority) of church members, it’s again worth asking in whose name this group claims to speak.

Once PCUSA passed its divestment resolution in 2004, late in the day and with very little understanding of its impact (even from those who voted for it), they pretty much announced themselves to be occupied territory. Once on board the anti-Israel bandwagon, understood BDS activists, you can never get off. And thus there are no brakes put on flooding the next GA and the one after that with dozens of resolutions in hope that at least one of them will stick, allowing anti-divestment activists to once again claim the church (all if it, all two million members, all 400+ years of history) as their own, consequences to the full membership, consequences to others (including the Jewish community), consequences to peace in the Middle East be damned.

And now the stage has been set, the deck has been stacked, the witnesses carefully culled, information needed to make informed decisions deliberately denied to those who will be making them, debate curtailed, emotive rhetoric turned up to 11, all to maximize the chances for some kind of “success” at next year’s GA that can fuel anti-Israel activism for another two years.

It’s clear what these activists will get out of things going their way next month in Minneapolis. The question remains, what possible good is it going to do a struggling church like the Presbyterians to turn themselves into the political plaything of people who have no interest in the organization beyond its usefulness.

PCUSA and the Power of Reason

Will Spotts, my partner at the Bearing Witness site dedicated to fighting anti-Israel animus within the Presbyterian Church, have a little contest going to see who can take the longest to get to the point.

There is a philosophical message regarding this little bit of self-deprication at the expense of our somewhat-longish prose. For you see, Will and I are working off the assumption that reason is the best tool in our battle against divestment and other anti-Israel activities.

This doesn’t mean that all we do is create long-winded rebuttals of every accusation thrown against the Jewish state by PCUSA and other critics. But it does mean that our arguments against such activity, whether longer or (occasionally) shorter, make the assumption that those who are fair minded will choose well if presented with accurate information and informed arguments.

The alternative, to be perfectly frank, would be much easier. In fact, it is the option taken by the vast bulk of those who make it their life work to attack Israel. All that would be needed to fight fire with fire in that case would be to skip prose completely and rely on pictures, preferably of bloody infants killed by terrorists, or pregnant mothers fleeing from Hamas rocket fire.

We could extend this to include heart-rending testimony (in text, photos and video) of women, homosexuals and religious minorities persecuted throughout the Muslim world, and demand that any individual or organization (like the Presbyterian Church) which claims to support the rights of these minorities pass our resolutions condemning “Apartheid Islam.” We could endlessly talk about the “illegal Palestinian government” (without explaining what we mean) or talk about Hamas being in breach of 145 international laws (assuming that by including a number in our claim it will ring more true).

In fact, Will could have stayed in the Church and pressured his Presbyterian colleagues to create overtures and reports that focus exclusively on the racism, sexism, homophobia and totalitarianism throughout the Arab world (as I could do with various Jewish organizations – political and civil – that I belong to), all the time insisting that unless these groups do what we say, they are betraying their most deeply professed beliefs.

Now we would obviously be at a disadvantage if we utilized the same tactics used by Israel’s opponents. After all, there are not dozens of Jewish countries who dominate organizations like the OIC or UN who have state power and resources to dedicate to de-legitimizing Israel’s critics while ensuring that the human rights spotlight never gets turned in any other direction. We cannot afford to charter flotillas of ships to sail across the Mediterranean, or fly people to Israel to take part in political tourism, or hold conferences across the country to strategize on how to boycott the Arab world.

But I suspect that if we went down this route we could be somewhat effective, even if it came at the cost of creating mayhem within the organizations we chose to leverage for our own political gain.

And therein lies the difference between one side of this debate and the other. For the major reason Will, I and other activists choose not to simply use our opponents tactics against them is that we are not ready to cause long-term harm to others just to get our way.

At the end of the day, BDS activists don’t give a damn about what their campaign might do to communities like Berkeley, or Somerville or the Presbyterian Church. For them, these institutions are simply props, playthings to be used for their own political drama. No doubt, they’ve convinced themselves (and others) that the importance of their cause allows them to manipulate anyone they like, regardless of the consequences. But since when is it news that some of the most horrible behavior and actions are done by those who are absolutely convinced of their own unquestionable virtue.

It remains to be seen if an appeal to reason which counts on the wisdom and sense of fair play by people such as those attending this year’s PCUSA General Assembly ends up a good bet. I can’t say exactly what it means if the Presbyterian rank and file take Will’s advice and reject most or all of the anti-Israel measures brought before the Assembly this year, except to say that it certainly doesn’t mean nothing.

And if we lose, well that will certainly be sad. Even if just one resolution is passed, anti-Israel activists will immediately blanket the world with the message that the Presbyterians have now returned to the Israel=Apartheid fold, an unappealing situation to be sure. At the same time, any 2010 resolutions will be placed into the mouth of an organization that’s lost 30% of its members in the last 25 years, and it’s a reasonable question whether in 10 or 20 years time there will even be a Presbyterian Church in the US, beyond a few decaying buildings containing 60-70 year olds, including a core of political activists who have succeeded in having their way within the church they have done so much to help destroy.

This and That

Just a few links in today’s update.

First off, I wrote a feature that appeared in today’s Jerusalem Post that updates the BDS story for the last 1-2 years. Most regular readers will be familiar with the themes and stories which this piece gathers into a single location.

Will Spotts, my partner on the Bearing Witness site dedicated to fighting divestment and other anti-Israel activities at next month’s Presbyterian Church General Assembly provides recommendations on all of the Middle East related votes that will be taking place at next month’s meeting. Here’s hoping they take his advice.

Will also put me onto this story from Christian Century on some of the troubling anti-Jewish theological themes that the two authors (one Presbyterian, one Jewish – sound familiar?) found when looking over the Presbyterian’s main document on the current conflict, an troubling piece of work called "Breaking Down the Walls." I think the authors are being a bit too generous in interpreting the problems they find in “Walls” to theological excesses in an otherwise noble endeavor. As noted here, I see too much of the same political mendacity I find in most BDS campaigns to assume that this kind of critique wells up entirely from a passion for justice. That said, the theological problems the church seems to be having with my tribe are serious and worth exploring, which the Century piece does quite well.

TIAA CREF - Just Kidding Last Year

Now this is strange.

According to Divest This! moles buried deep within every BDS organization in the country, Jewish Voice for Peace (an organization I enjoy taking apart in my other blogger/hobby) has decided to make TIAA CREF their target for divestment over the coming months and years.

But didn’t TIAA CREF already divest from Israel last year according to BDS advocates including (if I am not mistaken) the aforementioned Jewish Voice for Peace? So why target the retirement fund again, given that it’s already supposedly following the lead of the boycotters on investment/divestment decisions related to the Middle East?

Oh yes, now I remember! The TIAA CREF divestment story from last year turned out to be a fraud! The company made it clear that its decisions regarding buying and selling shares in Israeli companies (or companies doing business with Israel) had nothing to do with politics including (or should I say, especially) the politics of those hectoring them to join the BDS bandwagon.

So now it seems that JVP is trying to win a genuine victory with CREF, rather than take the easier (but ultimately more ridiculous) route of trying to perpetrate another divestment hoax. Unfortunately, once you send out press releases making false claims about the actions of a third party (such as TIAA-CREF), that third party is not very likely to want to take your phone calls the following year. Which is why CREF has responded to their new campaign with a polite but firm "We are not divesting from holdings in Israel" followed by "We appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts" which to me reads like "don't call us, we won't call you".

Now no one knows what the future may hold with regard to CREF or any other investor in Israel. But as we wait to see what happens, I think it’s more than fair to demand that, given its history, JVP and other divestment supporters can only claim victory when they stand alongside the leaders of the group that is supposedly doing the divesting at a joint press conference where CREF states clearly and unequivocally that the organization is divesting for the political reasons claimed for them by the BDSers. Fair enough?

Until then, I’m happy to take the boycotters at their word that a dollar spent or pulled from the stocks they list represents support or political criticism of the Jewish state. Which means that, at least for now, CREF supports the state of Israel to the tune of $300,000,000.

Let the games begin.

Winners and Losers

My friend CitizenWald sent me a couple of interesting pieces which, between them, debate who is winning and losing in the effort to de-legitimize Israel (a broad campaign, of which BDS is just one component).

In this JTA Op Ed, Gary Wexler is emphatic about who is losing: Israel. In fact, as a marketing professional, he marvels at the PR prowess that has led Israel, a perfectly reasonable if imperfect country, to be transformed into the embodiment of all evil in the modern world.

Wexler attributes this propaganda success to the creative genius of those behind the de-legitimization/Apartheid-Strategy/BDS “movement” whom he sees as having succeeded, after decades of effort, in “branding” Israel is such a dark light. While appalled at their mission and goals, the writer is still highly impressed with their effectiveness in marketing Israel as the black hats and the Arabs the white hats in a morality play that has achieved global acceptance.

Having dabbled a bit in marketing myself, I can understand the author’s point of view, especially with regard to comparing the systematic and consistent efforts of Israel’s opponents vs. the on-again, off-again, sometimes-this, sometimes-that nature of the response by Israel and its supporters.

At the same time, I tend to be skeptical of any thesis that involves organization (including an in-the-shadows organization of marketing geniuses) among Israel’s detractors. I’ve simply been exposed to these groups – with all of their fractiousness and fissures – far too often to believe in the existence of some form of central command.

This is especially true in this day and age when new communication technology minimizes the need for centralized coordination. Via blogs, newsfeeds, social networks, Twitter and a host of other communication tools, Israel’s critics (and its supports) have an endless feedback loop in which new ideas can be tried, failures rejected and successes built upon, providing activists access to a “wisdom of crowds” which at times can be just as effective as a central command.

I also take issue with Wexler’s use of anecdotes to measure success. As I’ve noted here, if anti-Israel branding has been so successful, then why has Israel’s allegedly boycotted economy doubled in size over the last decade? Why do Europeans (who decry Israel in their newspapers) invest more venture capital into the Jewish state than in any country on their own continent? And, most importantly, why has Israel’s popularity among the general US population soared twenty percentage points during the very decade where this de-legitimization campaign has allegedly been so successful?

A significant critique of the “Israel is Losing the Propaganda War” thesis can be found in this article by Barry Rubin. In Rubin’s piece, he broadens the canvas to suggest that the entire de-legitimization project is testament to the fact that it is Israel’s foes, not Israel, that are the losers.

After all, suggests Rubin, trying to defeat Israel on the battlefield requires creating and maintaining trained and skilled armies, and being able to successful deploy them and lead them in the field. And truly isolating Israel economically would require Israel’s Arab foes to create economies that could successfully compete with the Israeli one, something they have not been able to do despite trillions in oil revenue placed cost-free beneath their feet. Without the ability to defeat or compete with Israel on the two stages that really matter (war and economics), Israel’s enemies turn to propaganda as a low-rent way to create the illusion that they are actually achieving something of substance.

As with Wexler, there are parts of Rubin’s argument I find compelling. Taking BDS as one example, all it takes to start a campaign is to sign up for some free petitioning software, get 200-300 friends to sign it, send out a few press releases and – BANG – a new front in the de-legitimization wars is opened up! And given that the BDS “movement” measures it success not in actually achieving anything, but only in the publicity it manages to create (most of it generated by their own press releases), the who can argue with the notion that propaganda is what you resort to when everything else you’ve done has been a failure?

But I think Rubin also misses an important point, as do I when I highlight Israel’s growth in popularity during the BDS decade of the ‘00s. For the de-legitimization campaign is first and foremost targeted at elites: academics, the media, government leaders, etc., and there are not many countries where the popularity of a particular cause (such as Israel in the US) drives foreign policy.

Both arguments also fail to highlight the fact that de-legitimization campaigns are primarily driven not by local activists, but by Israel’s primary political adversaries: neighboring Arab states. These are the entities that fuel (and, yes, fund) anti-Israel (and anti-Western) propaganda worldwide. They provide the bulk of votes at organizations like the UN designed to ensure all human rights eyes are focused on Israel and nowhere else. And while they’ve not been successful in depressing the Israeli economy, they also have the wealth and power to make individuals, companies and nations choose between operating in the larger Arab market or the much smaller Israeli one.

Now most of the BDS activists I have met think I am speaking Klingnon when I inform them that the only reason their faux “human rights” attacks against Israel gets more airplay than all of the other human rights work taking place on the planet put together is that the BDSers are allied with wealthy and powerful states, which includes all of the friends wealth and power can buy. But it’s no news that divestniks can delude themselves into thinking they are Gandhi while they rush to embrace Goliath. Nor does their refusal to believe in their obvious alliance with wealth and power negate this reality.

Both arguments also miss the fact that those with militant goals will always have the advantage when it comes to taking the offensive initiative. As I describe here, the reason Israel’s supporters cannot maintain a counter de-legitimization campaign targeting its opponents is simply because our ultimate goal is to live in peace with those who are waging war against us. That being the case, we must come up with new metaphors to drive our strategies (like the siege), and not simply hope that Israel’s opponents, in their effort to de-legitimize the Jewish state, will continue to do what they’ve done up until now: only de-legitimize themselves.

PCUSA - Stacking the Deck?

In 2004, the Presbyterian Church in the US (PCUSA) voted to begin a process of “phased, selective divestment” in companies doing business with Israel. Putting aside the fact that this vote was taken towards the end of the General Assembly (with even its proponents unaware of the significance it would have in energizing the global BDS “movement” and driving a wedge between Presbyterians and Jews), divestment was built on a worldview pushed by church leaders for many years.

That view, developed in conjunction with some of the PCUSA’s interfaith partners discussed earlier, is built around “The Occupation” (implying Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but never truly defined) as the root cause of problems in the Middle East. Corollaries to this world view (stated quite clearly in Presbyterian communications on the issue) include:

· Palestinian attacks on Israelis represent responses to this root cause (“The Occupation”) and thus the only way to end terrorism is for “The Occupation” to end

· That the Israel-Palestinian issue (by which they mean “The Occupation”) must be solved in order to solve any other issue in the Middle East

Now many people would claim that this worldview puts the cart before the horse. That, unless you have a start date of 1948 for “The Occupation” (which would imply a negation of the state of Israel’s existence – something the Presbyterian leadership vigorously denies), then Israel’s control over territories like the West Bank and Gaza were the result of wars waged against it from neighboring states, and thus could not simultaneously be the cause of those wars.

Also, claiming that totalitarianism, repression of women, inter-Arab warfare, violence directed against religious minorities (including Christians), and – most recently – jihadi civil war are not the responsibility of the Arab states, but somehow can also be traced back to a root cause of “The Occupation” also seems like a refusal to place responsibility where it belongs, similar to the refusal to assign Palestinians responsibility for their own choices and actions.

When in 2006 PCUSA members voted 95%-5% to reject divestment - in the light of day and with a full articulating of the controversy before them - they were clearly expressing discomfort with the worldview of church leaders, not simply rejecting a symptom of that worldview (i.e., divestment).

This discomfort was on display in 2008 when proponents and opponents of anti-Israel measures within the church decided to create a neutral body that would help guide them to better decision making once 2010 rolled around. The language of that decision should be read in full:

"The 218th General Assembly (2008) requests that the Moderators of the 218th, 217th, and 216th General Assemblies (2008), (2006), and (2004) select a nine-member committee from a broad spectrum of viewpoints from PC(USA) members] to prepare a comprehensive study, with recommendations, that is focused on Israel/Palestine within the complex context of the Middle East. The study should include an evaluation of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s mission and relationships, including an assessment of the future for the Christian presence and witness in the Middle East, an overview of the complex interactions among religions, cultures, and peoples that characterize the region, an analysis of U.S. policies that impact the area, and steps to be taken with our partners in the Middle East and the United States to foster justice, improve interfaith relations, and nurture the building of peace toward a secure and viable future for all, and report back to the 219th General Assembly (2010).”

The result of this decision was the creation of a Middle East Study Committee (or MESC) which released its report on the issue earlier this year.

Looking over the wording of the 2008 decision to create the committee, the insistence that the group include “a broad spectrum of viewpoints” was paramount. Indeed, such a request would not have had to be spelled out if church members felt they were getting their information from a “broad spectrum of viewpoints” up to that point.

So how did things go?

Well once again I turn to Will Spotts who has provided a detailed analysis of not just the membership of the MESC, but also the people and organizations the MESC visited to research their recommendations. The nine-person committee included six PCUSA Ministers and three Elders, and all but one of the nine had histories of anti-Israel bias and polemics within the church. (The one dissenting view, Reverend John Wimberly, quit the committee in disgust over its one-sided makeup.)

Four church employees assigned to the group were no less biased in their approach to the subject, and during their two years of research, the group talked with 55 individuals and organizations, 43 of which seemed to have shared the biases of the committee itself.

Needless to say, everything old is new again. The resulting report, entitled “Breaking Down the Walls” contains a reiteration and, indeed, an amplification of the worldview upon which the rejected 2004 divestment decision was based. Once again, Israel and “The Occupation” are the epicenter of all misery in the region. Once again, Israel must take primary responsibility for making things right. And just to be helpful, the report includes dozens of recommendations built on their assignment of responsibility, highlights of which can be found here.

Given that church members rejected divestment and other anti-Israel petitions in both 2006 and 2008 by huge majorities, it may seem strange that (with one exception) the only people found to put on the committee came with like-minded pre-dispositions on all important issues. And while some of us who worked to defeat divestment are not Presbyterians, many are which makes it even more peculiar that nearly no voices rejecting the 2004 worldview could be found to staff the MESC. Unless, of course, a stacked committee was the goal all along, not an unhappy or unlucky blind chance outcome.

Now stacking a committee is no crime if your organization is a political one, dedicated to one particular outcome. After all, political partisans will generally gravitate to the like minded, and even political blogs (like this one), choose issues to discuss based on our interests and pre-conceived opinions.

The thing is, PCUSA is not claiming to be a political institution, but is rather presenting itself as a distinct spiritual voice desperate to gather and present truths that will allow members to make sound moral decision. More than that, if you look through the language of the report, full of stories and statements regarding Christian witness and being guided by the spirit, it’s clear that elements of this report are meant to imply an origin drawn from the deepest well of religious faith.

Which makes the grubby politics behind MESC seem all-the-more appalling. After all, it’s one thing to cut corners, stack the deck, leave out opinions detrimental to your cause, knowingly communicate inaccurate and/or biased data, and limit your opponents from having their say if you’re a secular politician trying to ram through your desired budget or program. But what are we to make of the fact that these same hardball tactics are being used to pressure a decision that will be claimed to carry the moral authority of the 400+year-old Presbyterian Church, if not representing the voice of God himself?

The PCUSA Agenda

Will Spotts, my friend and partner over at Bearing Witness 2010 recently wrote up a list of the issues that will be coming before the PCUSA General Assembly relating to the Middle East. In brief, they include resolutions and reports that ask the church to officially:

"· divest from Caterpillar

"· strongly denounce Caterpillar

"· charge Israel with the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people

"· endorse the Kairos document, ‘A Moment of Truth: A Word of Faith and Hope from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering,’ [This is problematic because of the attitudes of the document rejecting the existence of a Jewish State and casting Palestinian violence solely as a response to the occupation.]

"· cut off military aid to Israel – or tie such aid to Israeli compliance with certain demands

"· call on Israel and Gaza to consent to independent evaluations of their actions in the recent conflict

"· approve a human rights update that alone, out of all the world, finds Israeli Jewish violations of religious freedom worthy of Presbyterian attention, and alone, out of all the world, finds Palestinian Christians and Muslims to be the only victims of religious discrimination worthy of comment

"· endorse the concept of “universal jurisdiction” (currently used as the basis for politically motivated trials of Israeli officials in various European courts)

"· endorse right of return (for Palestinians – though no mention is made of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people also displaced and dispossessed in 1948)

"· make the Middle East Study Committee a permanent monitoring group of PC(USA) policy

"· support the establishment of an international council for Jerusalem

"· approve a paper on Christians and Jews – unique in that it cautions against continuing Christian antisemitism

"· refer the paper on Christians and Jews for a re-write because of complaints from the Israel/Palestine Mission Network contained in a letter that among other things, publicly accused (without offer of proof) American Jewish organizations of bomb threats against Presbyterians and of arson at a Presbyterian church, and that cast the increase in antisemitism as a reaction to Israel’s actions.

"· approve the paper on Christian Muslim Relations

"· acknowledge the inherent complexity of the conflict and defer from taking positions that appear to favor either side in the conflict

"· defer from taking actions or making statements that align the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) with unilateral support for any of the specific parties involved in the struggle.

"· approve part of the MESC report, and receive another portion of it."

The details of all of these resolutions and reports require further dissection, but I think it’s safe to say that the sheer quantity of votes that will be taken on Middle East affairs means this issue is once again the top political priority of the General Assembly. And, as the list above demonstrates, the vast majority of actions being requested are once again variations on condemning the Jewish state.

How is it that the church which officially rejected divestment in 2006 and carefully (and, again, officially) limited the mandate of standing committees within the church regarding actions to be taken on the Arab-Israeli conflict finds itself embroiled this year in their most lopsided debate ever?

Part of this has to do with the quasi-democratic nature of the institution. The church is organized by regions (called Presbyteries) and each Presbytery is allowed to submit resolutions (called Overtures) to be considered by the General Assembly. And if you’ve got Presbyteries (such as the one in San Francisco) that is ready to push its political agenda regardless of what the vast majority of members voted in 2006 and 2008, then divestment, accusations of Apartheid and calls to cut off military aid to Israel can appear on the agenda again and again, the rest of the country be damned.

But this agenda also reflects changes at PCUSA over the decades where the church’s official bureaucracy in Louisville has morphed over time into quasi-executive leadership. Given that PCUSA manages (among other things) vast property holdings and billions in retirement savings for its members, the professionalization of church institutions was inevitable. But it is this non-traditional executive leadership within what was once a de-centralized institution that has been at the forefront of anti-Israel agitation over the last 10-20 years.

As noted previously, this leadership travels in interfaith circles, meaning they tend to be more sensitive to the needs of interfaith partners (like the leaders of other Protestant denominations or Sabeel) than they are to their own members. As such, they more and more resemble the “executive class” of global corporations which are more comfortable dealing with fellow executives on interlocking boards of directors than they are with engaging their own employees and customers.

These two phenomena: semi-democracy from below and concentrated executive authority from above work together. And thus church leaders anxious to get around restrictions placed on them by previous GA votes need to simply throw their support behind Overtures and committees that reflect their (increasingly anti-Israel) opinions, while adopting a “wait-and-see” attitude about resolutions that do not. Thus resources are thrown to committees dedicated to generating official PCUSA reports on the Middle East, while a blind eye is turned to the fact that these committees have ended up stacked against even a semblance of balance and objectivity, leading to an inevitable result.

More on the most egregious example of this gross imbalance, the report from the PCUSA’s Middle East Study Committee (MESC), tomorrow.

PCUSA – Decline and Fall?

The Presbyterian Church represents an interesting case study on the degenerative impact of the embrace of BDS and similar strategies by institutions.

In one respect, the church has clearly not developed the anti-bodies needed to defend against those who want nothing more than to leverage the reputation of the centuries-old church, to get their Israel=Apartheid message stuffed into the organization’s mouth by any means necessary.

Municipalities, colleges and university administrations and (increasingly) food co-ops seem pretty well immunized from or resistant to infection by the divestment virus, but the fact that this year’s Presbyterian General Assembly will feature a dozen anti-Israel resolutions and reports, despite members voting down similar initiatives in both 2006 and 2008, indicates there is still an institutional opening for those who are prepared to relentlessly pursue their political agenda, regardless of the damage it might cause the organization.

At the same time, PCUSA is far from the terminal stage of this particular disease, a stage best exemplified by now irrelevant institutions like the Green Party and Lawyer's Guild which in an exchanges last year I described as looking like little more that rotting corpses with anti-Israel activists working the fleshless skull like a hand-puppet in order to get these once significant but now desiccated institutions to act as the voice for their party line.

Now one could point out the diminishing membership of the Presbyterian Church which lost over a million members in the last 25 years. With an accelerating rate of decline, and an average membership age hovering in the high 50s, PCUSA might find itself at the beginning (or even the middle) of the end, leaving what’s left of the organization vulnerable to the same fate that befell the Greens.

But that ignores the role people play in creating an institution’s future. And while the church may have lost a million members since 1983, that still leaves two million Presbyterians in the US who could reverse some of the excesses within the church that are inexorably intertwined with the institution’s seeming collapse.

Individuals certainly played a role in getting PCUSA (and other Mainline denominations) where they are today. If you read Rabbi Yehiel Poupko’s remarkable treatise Looking at Them Looking at Us, you’ll discover how logical and well-meaning decisions made after World War II to try to bridge the various Mainline Protestant denominations (a reasonable step for fractious institutions facing challenges from both Evangelicalism and Secularism) ended up washing away distinctions that gave each church its own unique character, diminishing each church’s once unique appeal.

Just as significantly, this quest for unity led to a quest for issues to unify around and, as both Poupko and Will Spotts in his 2004 essay Pride and Prejudice point out, this consensus was built around achieving secular political vs. religious or spiritual goals, making the church a weak competitor against purely secular political organizations and movements while simultaneously continuing to diminish the church religious message and identity.

Worse, this new devotion to ecumenicalism and politics created a situation where PCUSA leaders have more affinity with leaders of other Protestant denominations and “ecumenical partners” such as the Sabeel Liberation Theology Center (a Palestinian Christian group behind most church divestment activity over the last 25 years) than they have with their own members.

This is why anti-Israel Overtures and reports continue to flower within the organization, despite the fact that church members are clearly uncomfortable with the positions the church seems to taking in their name vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is why Sabeel and similar international political/religious organizations, organizations far more dedicated to their own political agenda than they are to the needs of their interfaith partners, seem to have been given veto power over church statements on the conflict.

It’s clear that anti-Israel activists within the church, supported by church leaders, will continue to relentlessly pursue their agenda regardless of the rifts this might cause within the church and between PCUSA and Jewish interfaith partners. Israel’s supporters, on the other hand, can only advocate to church members by providing material like this, in hopes that those who still inhabit the pews (voices that only get to be heard once every two years at PCUSA General Assemblies), will have the information they need to make sound and moral decisions.

Seeing Red at Evergreen

As interested parties digest material related to the Presbyterian Church debate coming up in July, word came across the Divest This Communications Command Center (OK, my AOL account – the last in the nation I believe) that students at Evergreen State College in Washington State had voted to demand their institution divest from Israel.

“But you said divestment always loses!” I hear friends and critics cry out. Well actually, I said divestment is a loser, which does not necessarily mean that loses each and every time it’s introduced into an institution. As I’ve noted before, BDS is an ever-mutating virus, one that enters the body politic of institutions via various mechanisms including behind-the-scenes maneuvering with organizational leaders (as with the Mainline Protestant Churches) or defiantly going around such leaders when they refuse to play ball (as with colleges and universities whose leaders have made it clear they have no intention of following the divestnik’s demands). When a vote goes their way, they’re all aboard for democracy. When it’s reversed by the same body they declare “democracy is dead,” blah, blah, blah.

Now remember that student government (like aging rockers) represents a “soft target” in the BDS wars. For unlike the people who actually run a university or manage its money, student government can make decisions on matters over which it has absolutely no control. Much like delegates at the Model United Nations I attended in high school that voted overwhelmingly to call for a UN Space Fleet, student government bodies can take positions on all sorts of matters beyond their mandate, knowing full well they have no responsibilities beyond striking a pose.

And even in this soft-target category, when the BDSers peddle their poison at the large, well-known schools that are their real target (such as University of California campuses targeted this Spring) they still lose. Thus, their only “victories” after a decade of effort are at institutions where they have unique advantages such as Wayne State in Michigan, home of one of the largest populations of Muslim students in the US. And even at Wayne State, their efforts only led to condemnation by the school’s administration announcing that the institution will never divest from Israel.

Which brings us to Evergreen State which apparently put divestment measures to a student vote this week, a vote which they apparently won by large majorities. Now given that they are only reporting percentages, I could get cute and ask if that is a percentage of the 4800+ student body (which means they received over 3000 votes on each measure) or a percentage of those who actually voted (which means these “overwhelming victories” represent the votes of a much smaller percentage of the actual student body). But let’s take it for given that a democratic win is a democratic win which “counts” as long as people play by the rules (a generosity of interpretation I wish would be reciprocated by divestment backers who never seem to take a democratic “No” for an answer when it’s delivered repeatedly at other institutions).

I could also make a crack about Evergreen’s relative obscurity vs. the fame of the many schools where BDS has lost big. But in addition to being snobby, such commentary would miss the real significance of Evergreen as the former campus home of Rachel Corrie.

Corrie, as some of you may know, was an Evergreen undergraduate who fell in with a really bad crowd. But rather than simply taking up cigarettes or grain-alcohol Jello shots, the habit she picked up was radical politics under the “guidance” of the International Solidarity Movement (or ISM).

ISM’s specialty, in addition to infiltrating various pro-Palestinian and anti-war organizations, involves recruiting students who it then sneaks into Israel and puts into harm’s way. At least one other of its recruits has gotten killed taking part in violent protests against Israeli soldiers, after which his corpse was immediately sanctified as that of a peace activist (sound familiar?).

But Corrie was not killed taking part directly in violent activity. Depending on whom you believe, she was killed while trying to block Israeli bulldozers from either (1) destroying homes in the Gaza Strip for the fun of it; or (2) destroying Gaza houses that covered tunnels used for weapons smuggling.

The reason Caterpillar Tractor is on the top of every divestment list (in addition to it being such a widely held company that it allows the BDSers to bring their campaign to virtually any institution in the country) is that it was a Caterpillar tractor that ran over the aforementioned Ms. Corrie. So for the last eight years, Caterpillar shareholder meetings have become sacred sites where anti-Israel activists gather yearly to demand boycott votes against Israel (which they always lose). And this is why students at Evergreen State, former home of Ms. Corrie, are demanding the school divest from Caterpillar, even though it’s not clear if the school holds a single share in the company.

The interesting thing is that Caterpillar Tractor and the Israeli government, both on their own and in response to lawsuits directed against them over the Corrie affair, have performed investigations of what happened in Gaza the day Corrie perished. While ISM activists have not been happy with the outcome of these investigations, no one can say that they never took place.

In contrast, I’m not aware of any similar investigation that took place within the ISM about the role they played in leading Ms. Corrie to her death. After all, it was the ISM that “educated” Corrie and others about the evils of Israel and the immediate need to take direct action to confront this evil. It was the ISM that helped Corrie get into Israel on false pretences. And the ISM all but set out cardboard footprints for her to follow that placed her directly in the path of dangerous machinery in a war zone, a situation that led inevitably to her demise.

Now one would think that an organization committed to its members (not to mention justice) would take part in some measure of soul searching before lashing out to blame others for a situation in which ISM played such a key role. But as far as I know, ISM has never mentioned (much less released) results of such an internal investigation, which leads me to believe that no soul searching was necessary since Corrie’s death was an unexpected, but much desired outcome of their activity.

So before decision-makers at Evergreen or anywhere else are asked to take student opinion into account with regard to the school’s investment and divestment choices, especially since the issue of divestment is so bound up in Caterpillar and Corrie at this particular college, I recommend that all information needed to make such a decision be put on the table. This will include the results of investigations by Caterpillar and Israel on the role they may have played in Corrie’s death. And it will include any similar reports generated by the ISM over the last eight years that analyze that organization’s own role (not someone else’s) in the events leading up to Rachel Corrie losing her life.

Fair enough? And if it turns out ISM never created such a report and never engaged in a single minute of soul searching regarding its own activities before it decided to let Israel’s wash away ISM’s own sins, well that tells us a great deal as well.

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.

Flotilla

On paper, yesterday’s utterly inevitable loss of life off the Gaza coast is not per se a BDS story. But remember that BDS is simply a tactic in service to a wider strategy of de-legitimization of the Jewish state.

And this de-legitimization applies not just to Israel itself (via attempts to subject all aspects of the country – including its products, academics and artists – to disruptive political protests). Rather, it also applies to de-legitimizing Israel’s ability to do what all other countries are allowed to do (and do routinely), namely defend its borders and its people. The corollary of this strategy is that any attempt to attack Israel is lent immediate legitimacy, up to and including describing a known Turkish Jihadi organization (which has coordinated its activities with the illegal, Islamist Hamas government in Gaza) with the innocent term “humanitarian aid group.”

Keep in mind that Israel called the flotilla organizers’ bluff weeks ago when they offered to allow all of the aid the ships were allegedly bringing to meet the needs of the people of Gaza through the same avenues already used by Israel to supply much larger amounts of similar aid. The leaders of the group refused this offer, naturally, because their goal had nothing to do with humanitarian aid and everything to do with breaking a blockade that has succeeded in keeping arms (not food) out of the hands of people living in Gaza.

Those gathering around the country (and around the world) to protest Israel’s actions against a “humanitarian aid convoy” will have their hands full shouting down these unquestionable and verifiable facts, as well as trying to get the public to ignore video of “peaceful protestors” assaulting Israelis with knives, rods and guns, violent activity that made bloodshed on the high seas all but inevitable.

This shouting will also need to be loud enough to drown out self-reflection by any part of the “Israel is always guilty” community which might point out the role they played in ensuring the loss of life off the Gaza coast. After all, not every ship carried known militants primed for battle once the inevitable happened and their provocation led to boarding by the Israeli navy. In fact, I’m sure that many aboard the boats where battles didn’t break out (as well as those that supported the flotilla around the world) have managed to convince themselves that their mission was simply one of humanitarian aid, courage and mercy.

The trouble is, these folks seem to spend so much time thinking well of themselves that they fail to see the true nature of those who are sailing alongside them. Just as the media was willing to characterize the flotilla exactly as they wished to be characterized, refusing to do the 15 minutes of research required to tell them just who was behind the project, so too the convoy’s members and supporters cannot imagine themselves being involved with anything that does not fit their self-image of selfless, heroic, humanitarians. And so more people are killed, and those who bear more responsibility for this tragedy than anyone else immediately put their energies into creating new martyrs and new myths of their own wonderfulness and bravery.

Keep in mind that these are not the first people the anti-Israel “peace movement” has managed to get killed. Just last winter, a similar group of irresponsible activists under incompetent leadership dragged a thousand people over to Egypt for a week, succeeding only in getting an Egyptian cop shot when the “activists” triggered a riot at the Egypt-Gaza border.

And let’s not forget the Joan of Arc of the anti-Israel “movement,” Rachel Corrie, whom the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) managed to sneak into Israel and place directly in harm’s way, after filling the girl’s head with their propaganda storyline consisting solely of Israeli witches and Palestinian virgins. And once they managed to get Corrie killed, their time was spent turning her into a martyr-saint with plays, films and pageantry, all the time demanding that everyone from Caterpillar Tractor to the Israeli government explain how she died, without once pausing to think about how their own choices led directly to her death.

I’ve always alluded to the dark side of fantasy politics. It would be a depressing exercise to list all of the people maimed, injured or killed, all so a group of self-righteous Israel-hating loudmouths can make themselves feel hip, virtuous and relevant. But clearly we can now add ten Turks that this list whose only regret is that they did not manage to take as many Israelis to the grave with them as possible.