Anti-Israel campaign targets grassroots
By Parker T. Williamson, The Layman, November 8, 2010
BURLINGTON, N.C. – Waving a copy of “Kairos Palestine,” an anti-Israel manifesto that accuses the Jewish state of “apartheid,” the Rev. Naim Ateek urged a gathering of North Carolina Presbyterians and Episcopalians to boycott Caterpillar, Inc. and refuse to purchase Israeli goods and services.
Ateek’s Nov. 3 presentation in Calvin Hall at Burlington’s First Presbyterian Church was hosted by the church’s minister, the Rev. Ron Shive, a member the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Middle East Monitoring Group.
Ateek’s visit to Shive’s church was a whistle stop in a cross-country itinerary, a trip planned by “Friends of Sabeel” to promote the Palestinian cause among grassroots Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Lamenting the fact that neither denomination’s highest governing body has agreed to divest its portfolios of companies that help “the Zionists,” Ateek said, “We now take this to the grassroots.
“Go to the store and ask ‘where is that produced?’ If it is from [Jewish] settlements, don’t buy it … Some of us are boycotting everything from Israel, so you have options.”
Ateek said the subject of most of his speeches is liberation theology. But his traveling companions suggested, “Why don’t you dispense with theology and just tell your story?”
Storytelling trumps theology
Ateek’s story was one of eviction. He recalled his life as a young boy, living in a Palestinian village south of the Sea of Galilee. “Then the Zionists came,” he said. Ateek and his family were ordered to leave their home and flee to Nazareth where they joined a host of refugees. “We heard that the Zionists massacred a whole village of women and children,” he said.
The Revs. Ron Shive and Naim Ateek share the stage at First Presbyterian Church in Burlington, N.C.
“When I tell my story,” some Zionist Jews say ‘you are lying,’ but now researchers, including some Jewish historians, are saying this is true.”
Ateek’s tale, similar to accounts recited by former PCUSA Moderator Fahed Abu Akel, was heart rending, and it evoked a sympathetic response from members of his North Carolina audience. Building on that sympathy, Ateek quickly called forth the Palestinian’s public policy agenda: force Israel to abandon its settlements, tear down the wall that Israel built to protect itself from suicide bombers and retreat from “occupied territory” to its 1947 borders.
Only one person in the audience voiced skepticism regarding Ateek’s instant transition from tragic personal experience to the proposed re-drawing of territorial borders. “Native Americans tell a similar story,” he said, a tacit suggestion that Ateek’s logic would require white North Carolinians to abandon their homes because their ancestors corralled the Cherokees who once lived there and forced them into reservations.
Telling passionate stories of personal experience is a sympathy building tactic frequently employed by advocacy groups of all stripes.
Missing from Ateek’s presentation – and from Shive’s introductory and concluding remarks – was any recognition that Israel occupied perimeter territory and engaged in wall building as an act of self defense. Nor was there any acknowledgement of the fact that Israel’s neighbors have repeatedly declared their intention to destroy the Jewish state. Instead, Ateek repeated the Palestinian position that there can be no negotiation and no reconciliation with Israel until Israel abandons the buffers that it created for its protection.
An ordinary guy
Primary among Ateek’s campaign objectives is to convince Christians in the United States that Palestinian Christians are just like them, peace loving people who grind their axe against Israel in non-violent ways. Wearing a clerical collar and sporting a friendly smile, he said “when Americans hear that I am a Palestinian, they think I’m a terrorist because, aren’t all Palestinians terrorists? It is amazing. People don’t realize that Palestinians are people, people who cry out for justice.”
Ateek delivered his message with a sense of urgency, pointing to a major migration of Palestinian Christians out of the Middle East. “The Palestinian Christian community is dwindling fast,” he said, suggesting that his people’s exit from the territory is the result of “Zionist” persecution. No mention was made of any other reason that Christians exit the region, including attacks on Christian communities by Muslims. That omission was particularly notable in light of the Al-Qaida-linked massacre in Baghdad that reportedly killed 58 people, 41 of which were Our Lady of Salvation Christian church goers, 12 government security force personnel and 5 bystanders during the very week in which Ateek was speaking.
Speaking of his childhood eviction, Ateek said, “We Palestinians were there before the British mandate [that carved out a homeland for the Jews]. Ateek’s unqualified statement gave the impression Jews were outsiders, imported to the region in 1947. But in response to a question from the audience, he admitted that “Jews were there before, but not during my childhood.”
The Rev. Naim Ateek waves a copy of the Kairos Palestine document during his Nov. 3 talk.
Anyone who has read the Old Testament knows that Jewish people lived in that land many centuries ago. But references to the Old Testament triggered Ateek’s harshest words against “Christian Zionists,” identified by Ateek as people who “take the Bible literally.
“They read every part of the Bible as authoritative. We don’t see the Bible that way,” he said.
Not once during Ateek’s speech did he condemn fellow Palestinians who have fired rockets and dispatched suicide bombers into Israeli communities. But he did affirm for himself and his Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center a commitment to non-violent “boycotts, sanctions and civil disobedience” on behalf of the Palestinian cause.
Ateek said that his group finds its inspiration in Jesus, “who was born and lived under Roman occupation … How can He help us live under occupation? What does it mean to resist evil like Jesus?” Ateek said these are the questions that have helped his people think theologically about their life under Israeli occupation.
At the conclusion of the program, Shive encouraged the audience to pick up copies of “Kairos Palestine,” saying that the PCUSA General Assembly had approved the document for study. What Shive didn’t say was that the General Assembly was asked by a committee that Shive chaired to “endorse” the document, but it declined to do so, choosing instead to “commend” the document “for study,” among other materials representing various points of view, making it clear that this was the “voice of Palestinian Christians,” and not necessarily the voice of the PCUSA.
As part of its actions on the “Breaking Down the Walls” report drafted by the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Middle East Study Committee, the 219th General Assembly created a 7-person monitoring group be appointed that includes “at least one but no more than two” members of the current study committee.