By Leslie Scanlon, The Presbyterian Outlook.
While the door to a viable Palestinian state is “closing rapidly, if it is still open at all,” the Presbyterian Church (USA) should support efforts for a political arrangement that accords with its values, including but not limited to a two-state solution and a Jerusalem where Jews, Muslims and Christians have access to sites considered holy in their faiths.
That’s part of the findings in a 56-page report just released by the Study Team on Prospects for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine. The team’s report and recommendations will go before the 2016 General Assembly, which will meet in Portland in June.
The 2014 General Assembly instructed the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy to review the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s support for the “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The new report fulfills that mandate.
The new report, “Israel-Palestine: For Human Values in the Absence of a Just Peace,” says the PCUSA has clung for years to the international consensus favoring separate states for Israelis and Palestinians, with a shared Jerusalem. During that time, it says, Israel’s “trajectory of continued settlements and brutal occupation” has made that goal “difficult if not impossible” to achieve.
“De facto annexation, land confiscation, and government subsidized settlement growth have increased” since the signing in 1993 of the first Oslo Accord, which was supposed to chart the path to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the report says. It says the “systematic violation of Palestinian rights and democratic values” has eroded Israel’s moral legitimacy.
Read the report — Israel-Palestine: For Human Values in the Absence of a Just Peace
9 Comments. Leave new
The pcusa needs to stay out of this situation and let people who know what the hell they’re talking about take this on.
Don’t worry. This is a pointless exercise. No one in Washington cares what the PCUSA thinks anymore.
Having traveled to Israel a number of times, 15 in 20 years, in various capacities and missions I remain of the following opinion. The nation-state of Israel is everything the PCUSA is not. Vibrant, young, dynamic, optimistic, resilient in spite of the existential threat they daily face from Islamic terror. The nation state of Israel will be around and thrive long after the sad dying sect called the Presbyterian Church USA collapses under its own bulk and institutional rot.
In the contemporary PUCSA there are, and a growing list of types of folks no longer welcome in their mists. Or demonized by the denomination due to a number of political or ideological factors.
-Police, public safety, first responders.
-Military, by and large
-Working class folks-especially those who work in the energy, gas, coal, oil complex
– Jews in general who support Israel, Christians in general who support Israel.
-Corporations or representatives of such, Walmart, HP, CAT, anybody on their boycott list.
As I have said, it is any wonder they are running out of people, they show more the door, than welcome in anybody who does not accept without question their new orthodoxy.
Fact is, Leigh, no one anywhere cares what the PCUSA thinks anymore, on this or any other subject. The meaning of the PCUSA’s political and ideological posturing is to be found wholly and completely within its own internal psychological dynamic, as is always the case with self-absorbed and self-obsessed individuals and groups.
Well said…well said.
I have always held turning a negative into a positive, make lemon aid from lemons. We have withheld per capita based on the organizational antisemitic bias, as well as matters of general organizational incompetence.
Rather than just return that to the general treasury or hold for other church related purposes, or our own personal use, we intentionally have redirected those funds in support of organization and purposes that support Israel and the Jewish people. Most recently, care and support packages to the IDF who daily carry the fight to global terror.
God be praised.
Only the PCUSA, Episcopalians and the democrat party could come up with shallow secular stuff like this.
Amen. An excellent use of your benevolent dollars. I myself have personally redirected a portion of my giving to an organization called the “One Family Fund” which is a Jewish charity that seeks to provide direct assistance to Israelis who have been the victims of Arab terrorism. I agree that it is important not only to oppose the antisemitism of the PCUSA, but also to do what one can to materially help those Jews who have suffered at the bloody hands of the PCUSA’s Arab friends.
The mission that Jesus gave us was:
“19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:”
Settling disputes between Palestine and Israel has nothing whatsoever to do with carrying out that divine mission.