THE PROBLEM OF BLAMING PRESBYTERIANS (or anyone else for that matter) WHEN THE MORAL BLINDSPOT IS YOUR OWN

Jesus once said: “Take the log out of your own eye then you can remove the splinter in your neighbor’s.”

By 1822 Presbyterian minister, the Rev. John Rankin, was known throughout his native Ohio to be a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, helping slaves find freedom. Harriet Beecher Stowe once said of him: “Who abolished slavery? Reverend John Rankin and his sons did.”

The late Rev. Dr. Neal Kuyper, Presbyterian minister, and founder and director of the Presbyterian Counseling Service for 35 years in Seattle, Washington died at the age of 91 on Veteran’s Day two years ago. During World War II he was an Army medic and chaplain’s assistant, and by virtue of those roles, was permitted to go inside the concentration camp at Buchenwald immediately following its liberation, where he did his best to help holocaust prisoners as they lay dying of malnutrition and disease all around him.   In his retirement, he spoke in Minnesota high school history classes and told the students what he saw with his own eyes. It was his commitment, in so doing, to make sure the next generation would never forget.

In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Plowshares, the student peace and justice organization at Princeton Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian institution, had raised enough concern in calling for the seminary to disinvest from companies doing business in South Africa that the President of the seminary and members of its Board of Trustees finally gave in and granted an audience to the group. Although it made for a lively discussion, Princeton Seminary never did divest from such holdings, but many of those students soon became ordained Presbyterian ministers. In a movement that was, for its day, as controversial as is the BDS movement of today, they became instrumental in getting the Presbyterian Church to divest from companies doing business in South Africa, and thus supporting the underpinnings of apartheid.

Upon their return from a typical church tour to Israel in 2003, the Rev. Dr. Glenn Dickson and members of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Gainesville, Florida where he served as pastor were so shocked at the demolition of Palestinian homes they witnessed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, they went right to work to submit an overture calling for divestment from Caterpillar, Inc. to the 216^th General Assembly meeting of the Presbyterian Church (USA). This overture blew the lid off American Christian ignorance about occupation and made the denomination one of the global leaders in calling attention to the injustices committed against Palestinians by the Israeli government.

When Giulio Meotti accuses the Presbyterian Church (USA) of ugly slander (“US Church versus Israel” in Israel's Ynet News), he either knowingly or unknowingly mouths the propaganda of greater political powers than himself.   As can be seen from the everyday, real-life witness of rank and file Presbyterians throughout the decades and even centuries, the Presbyterian witness for justice has been long and indisputable in the march of history. The fact that his (among that of others) sacred cow is being gored now suddenly, for him, makes the Presbyterian legacy of striving for human justice at all times and in all places as being something suspect.

Meotti cannot bring himself to speak truthfully about the present facts on the ground in Palestine while criticizing the Presbyterians for holding a symposium on land theology. His hysterical language regarding the Kairos Palestine Document (KPD) borders on incoherence. KPD deals with a harsh reality and does so with the voice of the leadership of the whole Body of Christ in Palestine. The document calls for non-violent resistance to occupation. Meotti ignores the fact that the alternative to non-violent resistance towards illegal occupation would be violent resistance, and yet this Christian document rejects violence in all its forms. Boycott, divestment and sanctions are time-honored tools for overcoming oppression in many places and situations throughout the world. Although, tragically, there was a time in history when the Nazis in Germany engaged in the racism of requiring wholesale boycott of the Jewish people, BDS is not that, not by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it serves to accomplish the very opposite of that.   Kairos Palestine’s call for BDS today is as if the Jews in 1930’s Germany had been able to rise up and boycott everything German in an effort to wake the world up regarding Nazi oppression and genocide. BDS is about resisting the oppressor, not the oppressed.   Meotti’s argument essentially tells Palestinians that they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t because Israel will not stop occupying the land and oppressing its people; that it will continue its illegal non-stop building of settlements on Palestinian land and there is nothing they can do about it.

The “security fence” to which Meotti refers is not a fence like neighbors have in their backyards. It is a system of concrete walls (with guard towers) and razor-wire fences hundreds of miles in length that run deep into Palestinian territory for the purpose of separating illegal Israeli settlements in apartheid manner, cutting off natural resources for Palestinian use, and dividing Palestinian communities in half. As Israeli Jeff Halper, Executive Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions points out: “You can’t explain security with the wall.” That’s because the wall is all about dividing the occupied territories into a system of isolated cantons or bantustans that make it impossible to ever say Palestine is or could be a nation unto itself.

One of the great slanders committed against Christians, in Palestine and those in the west committed to working towards a just peace in Israel Palestine, is the ongoing charge that by engaging in the very justice reflected in the words of the Hebrew Prophets, that they are engaged in anti-Jewish, and even anti-Semitic behavior.   It needs to be stated clearly again and again and again that opposition to the oppressive policies of the Israeli government is just that: opposition to the behavior of a national entity and not racial hatred or the persecution of a religious people. This rhetoric is nothing more than a smoke screen to divert attention away from the blatant violation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. As the real truth of anti-Semitism in the world became the excuse for bringing Nakba to Palestinian homes and villages in 1948, the charge of anti-Semitism leveled at those who oppose unjust policies in Palestine today continues to fuel and justify Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the land. Christians throughout the world who work for justice in Palestine have, working with them shoulder to shoulder, many Jewish peacemakers who are good friends and colleagues committed to this struggle.

The Presbyterian Church (USA) understands that security for Israel can only be accomplished by achieving a just peace in Palestine.   Meotti’s charge that “Presbyterians have left behind the commitment ‘never again’ to ‘participate in, contribute to, or allow the persecution or the denigration of Jews’” is a calculated and disingenuous falsehood. What Presbyterians have and always will stand for is justice for all of God’s people wherever injustice reigns supreme. The fact that Meotti, the Israeli government and supporters of Israeli policy don’t see that means that who they call “friends” are only those who willingly turn a blind eye to the very kinds of oppression of which the Jewish people were once victims themselves. To not stand for the occupied in favor of the occupiers is indeed to be in league with Pharaoh and his henchman in any era of human history.

Share Link: