Property ownership dispute between Palestinian Presbyterians and Israel

Presbyterians are in the midst of church property disputes everywhere, even in the West Bank. 

Today’s headline “Israeli land grab threatens Palestinian church,” caught my attention. The Presbyterian paragraphs raised the intrigue. 

According to Palestinian officials and Christian citizens who spoke to Al-Monitor, there are eight buildings on the 10-acre church grounds, including a hospital providing medical care and services to Palestinians. The compound is owned and supervised by the Presbyterian Church in Palestine, which in turn is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in the United States, they said.

The US Presbyterian Church had control over the Palestinian Presbyterian Church’s endowments from 1940 to 2008, when the US organization sold Beit al-Baraka church to a Swedish shell company without consulting the church’s branch in Palestine. That company then transferred ownership of the church to an association controlled by Jewish tycoon Irving Moskowitz, one of the main funders of Israeli settlements in Jerusalem. Moskowitz then transferred the lands to the settlers, who now claim they bought the compound.

The Presbyterian Church in Palestine condemned the sale in an official statement issued June 17, and denied any involvement in the “suspicious deal that challenges the Presbyterian Church’s fight for the support of the Palestinian people and their national rights,” saying, “The Presbyterian mission in the US does not have the authority to sell this property, and anyone who contributed to secretly selling Beit al-Baraka to settlers should be punished.”

Here we enter the weeds of Presbyterianism in the United States. Unlike the Palestinian Presbyterian Church which has one unified expression, Presbyterianism in the U.S. is a diverse potpourri of more than a dozen denominations. The newest expression just emerged in 2012 and does not even appear on this connectional map (at right).

So when the Palestinian Church says that the Presbyterian Church in the United States sold property out from under them, of whom is it speaking? 

Looking back to a May 2015 article about the same dispute sheds some light on the subject.  It seems that an American is involved, but he’s not Presbyterian. The Presbyterian group that owned the compound is the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions which was organized in 1933 by Greshem Machen. 

The IBPFM disassociated from the Presbyterian Church  in the USA long ago and that version of the PCUSA became the UPCUSA before merging with the PCUS to form the new version of the PCUSA in 1983.  There’s a very good chance the Presbyterians in Palestine don’t know (nor would they care) about all that. 

What the Presbyterians in Palestine know is that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is actively engaged on their behalf. What they likely do not know is the very complicated nature of the internal struggle of the PCUSA related to the issues of Israel and the Palestinian people. They hear that the PCUSA voted to divest of holdings in Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard and Motorola Solutions. But they don’t hear that a full page ad was taken out in the New York Times by theologically progressive Presbyterians who did not support divestment. They hear that the PCUSA, through its Israel Palestine Mission Network, distributed an expressly anti-Israel curriculum entitled Zionism Unsettled. They do not hear that the backlash in response to the document resulted in the denomination distancing itself from the Mission Network and its work product. They hear that the General Assembly called for a reexamination of the denomination’s express support for a two-state solution. But they don’t hear that the majority of Presbyterians are pro-Israel even as they are pro-life in working for liberty and justice for all. 

Church property, who owns it and for whose benefit is an ongoing struggle for many Presbyterians as some Presbyterian denominations assert a trust over all local church property. International holdings are now beginning to feel the effects of the changing landscape of Presbyterianism in the U.S. but this particular story seems, in the end, unrelated to those issues. Parsing all that out for Presbyterian Palestinians whose church has been sold out from under them certainly poses a challenge.