Posted on: 2004

By Rima Merriman

The news last week that the Presbyterian Church, with three million American members, not only condemned Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory but also acting, by halting investments in Israel as well as with companies that do business in Israel has been heartening to Palestinians, especially the Christians among them, who have strong feelings of abandonment by their co-religionists in the US when it comes to exerting political or economic pressure on Israel.
Despite the moral significance of this move, it’s not likely that this divestment decision will hold Israel in check unless other churches and other organisations worldwide follow suit.

The divestment campaign against apartheid South Africa, for example, pinched to the tune of $7 billion between 1986-1990 before it had some effect. The Presbyterian divestment decision means that the church will withdraw its funds from any company which earns more than $1 million annually in Israeli investments, or which invests more than $1 million a year in Israel.

Nevertheless, for Palestinian Christians, this brave decision on the part of the Presbyterian Church is a much needed moral boost. There are many programmes in Palestine run by Lutheran and Calvinist churches, which provide aid to Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, but they work strictly within a religious framework and don’t have much political clout in the US.

Palestinian Christians have had to contend with the fact that, for some time now, 70 million Evangelists in the United States, counting among them Congressional House Majority leader, Tom DeLay, have huge political and economic clout and are allied with the pro-Israeli lobby and the neoconservatives. Christian Zionists, as they are called, base their support for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and Israel’s aggressive expansion on the religious belief that the Jews must rule over all of Palestine before the proper conditions for the second coming of the Messiah are met, at which point the Jews will believe in Jesus as the Messiah of Israel and the redeemer of the world.

Orthodox Jews and others may not exactly like the ending of this story, but Israel welcomes the substantial donations lavished on it by the Christian Zionists and their strong political championship in the United States.

That the Evangelists’ fellow Christians in Palestine, the first Christians whose ancestors had listened to St. Peter’s sermons at the first Pentecost in Jerusalem, are in the meantime suffering under Israeli occupation and the Judaisation of Palestine, or in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, and are leaving Palestine in droves seems to make no difference to Evangelists whose literature demonises the Palestinian side of the conflict, echoing Israeli propaganda. To them, the Palestinians are made up of crazy Islamist terrorists.

In 1948, when the state of Israel was created, about 20 per cent of the total population in Palestine was Christian, 35 per cent of whom were driven out and became refugees. Now, entirely due to the Israeli occupation and the hardships that occupation have inflicted on the Palestinians, the Christian population is down to 1.8 per cent. At this rate, it is almost certain that the Holy Land will soon be devoid of living, breathing Christians. At least, that’s the spectre that father Labib Kobti, a Catholic priest in San Francisco, sees as he ministers to the hoards of Palestinian Christian immigrants from Ramallah, Birzeit, Gifna, Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Taybeh.

At the Presbyterian Church’s 216th General Assembly, when the divestment decision was made, Rev. Mitri Raheb of Bethlehem spoke in strong favour of the resolution. Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League’s interfaith director, is now feeling hurt because he says the Presbyterian Church made its decision “without trying to balance or consult with the other side”.

As it happens, that’s exactly how Palestinians, Christian and Muslim, feel about American policy towards Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory — no balance except the balance of power, which the US and Israel use to force agreements on the Palestinians. The courageous Presbyterian decision has come to give a much needed moral balance to this unbalanced equation.

Source:

www.miftha.org