I'd like to thank everyone for attending this conference. My name is
Dexter Van Zile. I am Christian Outreach Director for the David
Project Center for Jewish Leadership and a member of the executive
committee of Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East. Fair
Witness was founded last year to promote a response to the divestment
campaign in mainline Protestant churches. We have different
temperaments and viewpoints, but all of us are mortified by the lack
of organized response in mainline churches in the U.S. As far as
different temperaments, Peter Pettit, another member of the Executive
Committee subscribes to the New Yorker. I read Drudge.  I'm here to
offer a brief overview of the divestment campaign in mainline
Protestant churches in the U.S.

I grew up in Allin Congregational Church, located in Dedham,
Massachusetts. It's part of the United Church of Christ, a mainline
denomination of about 1.3 million members and 5,700 churches.

Allin Church is one of those old wooden churches they show in movies
when they want to evoke feelings of small town New England. The
building itself was built sometime in the 1820s. Right across the
street is the First Parish Church – the original church building now
controlled by the Unitarians. After a bitter struggle over the
theology which resulted in Unitarians gaining control of the
structure, the defeated majority moved across the street and built
Allin Church.

It was a bitter divorce. The two churches fought over the communion
silver. The conflict was resolved by making two replicas of the
communion ware – one set for each church – and by giving the original
to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It has all the makings of a
Yankee Protestant version of the Da Vinci Code.
As easy as it is to make light of those who came before us in faith,
we owe them. The democratic impulse that manifested itself in
Protestant churches of our forbears laid the groundwork for American
democracy. The Protestant tradition's understanding of God tells us
that we are gifted with certain inalienable rights. The Protestant
tradition's understanding of human nature calls on us to consider how
we must secure those rights. That has been the genius of our
churches. We'll see of that remains our genius.

Faithful Protestants have long struggled with the issues confronting
the American people. Leaders of our churches helped spark the
American Revolution, helped write the constitution and jump started
the Abolitionist movement.

More recently, mainline clergy and lay members have been prominent
supporters of the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s
and 70s. Protestant clergy along with their Catholic counterparts
formed the backbone of the disarmament campaign of the 1980s.
Mainline clergy and lay members have been proponents of the
separation of church and state, fought for the rights of religious
minorities and have promoted the status of women. They have also
fought to promote the safety of gays and lesbians in the U.S.  Sadly,
our churches haven't made these causes as they relate to the Middle
East a high priority. The only people in the Middle East our churches
seem willing to defend are those who blame the Jewish State for their
suffering.

While the membership of the top six mainline denominations has
declined from 28 million in the 1960s to approximately 20 million in
1998, their influence cannot be ignored. In 1998, these top six
mainline denominations had 75,000 local congregations, in which an
estimated 4 million sermons were preached annually. Mainline churches
support approximately 50 seminaries and some support their own
publishing houses.

By virtue of their history, symbolism and theology, mainline churches
have a unique capacity to whisper quietly (and sometimes shout) into
the ear of the American people. Because these churches typically
interpret the bible and the Christian faith through a lens of
experience and rationality, mainline churches serve as a credible
witness to American society writ large, even to those Americans who
don't share the faith these churches confess. For many Americans –
religious and non-religious – mainline churches represent a badly
needed counterbalance to the fundamentalist community that many
people regard with suspicion.

Consequently, mainline churches in the U.S. can give religious
credibility to a variety of political agendas. And this is exactly
that the divestment campaign is about – enlisting the religious
credibility of historic churches in the U.S. to broadcast and
legitimize a dishonest, unfair and hostile narrative about the Arab-
Israeli conflict to the American people. The end game is to convince
the world that Israel is an apartheid state that is not worthy of
normal relations with the West and ultimately a worthy target of a
boycott. Accompanying Palestinian calls for divestment are calls
for "broad boycotts" and embargoes against Israel. One student at the
University of Michigan described the divestment campaign on college
campuses this way: "What we want is not actual economic divestment
from Israel. Everyone knows that the US will never pull investments
out of Israel like that. Instead, we are looking to shift the
dialogue to whether or not to divest from Israel, without extraneous
discussion of the basics. We hope that in 10, 20 years the public
will just take for granted the premises that Israel is an apartheid
state, and then we can move from there." Clearly, the goals of the
divestment campaign have little to do with changing Israeli policy or
promoting peace, but with the economic and political isolation of
Israel.

For the short term, it's not about the money, it's about the podium.
Divestment resolutions afford pro-Palestinian activists the chance to
speak before large audiences that gather at our church-wide
assemblies and talk about checkpoints, home demolitions, and the
security barrier without having to explain why Israel does what it
does. The story offered is one of innocent Palestinian suffering and
Israeli intransigence and savagery.

On this score, divestment is a McGuffin, or plot device used to
capture our attention before it is directed to Israel's uniquely
sinful behavior. After hearing this story, our church-wide assemblies
pass judgment on the behavior and defense policies of a people who
for the last 58 years, have fended off three attempts to destroy
their homeland.

Most of the people who attend these church-wide assemblies know
little if anything about the conflict. Because Jews do not typically
have a seat at the table at Christian gatherings, the only way
Israel's side of the story can be told is if church leaders deign to
let Jewish leaders speak to the gathered assembly.

To its credit the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America did just
this at its Churchwide assembly in Orlando last year. For the most
part, other denominations have allowed pro-Israel Jews speak to
committees where resolutions are vetted, but not the entire assembly.
Palestinian activists, however, are routinely accorded voice without
vote status or its equivalent. Under these circumstances, anti-Israel
activists are able to offer their narrative, without substantive
challenge, to the gathered assemblies, and to the reporters that
cover them.

One of the greatest moral, ethical and intellectual failures
associated with this campaign took place in July of last year when
the General Synod of the United Church of Christ passed a Tear Down
the Wall resolution during its meeting in Atlanta. This resolution
asked Israel to take down the security barrier it is building on the
West Bank without asking the Palestinians to stop the terror attacks
that prompted its construction.

The resolution failed to acknowledge Israel's attempts to negotiate
with the Palestinians in the pursuit of peace. Say what you want
about Ehud Barak's offer in 2000, but one fact is indisputable.
Yassir Arafat walked away from negotiations without making a counter
offer. And yet our churches blame Israel for the Second Intifada that
followed.

It failed to acknowledge the role Palestinian leaders have played in
promoting violence against Israelis. Muslim sheiks routinely call for
the death of Jews on Palestinian TV, but the resolution said nothing
about this incitement.

It also failed to acknowledge Israeli efforts to reduce the impact of
the security barrier on Palestinians, nor did it acknowledge the
reduction in suicide attacks the barrier has caused.

The resolution did not mention, much less condemn, the existence of
an infrastructure of terror in areas under the jurisdiction of the
PA. Suicide bombers are isolated from their families by skilled
handlers, brainwashed, and in some instances shamed into killing
themselves and Israelis. In another resolution, the General Synod
condemned terror attacks, but not with the same level of specificity
with which it condemned the barrier built to prevent them.

The most outrageous aspect of the resolution however, was its clear
implication that the property loss and inconvenience suffered by
Palestinians because of the security barrier are worse than the
carnage caused by suicide bombing. This suggestion is unmistakable
after reading the resolutions' detailed descriptions of Palestinian
suffering without any specific mention, whatsoever, of the more than
1,000 Israelis killed by terror attacks during the Second Intifada,
135 of whom were killed during one month alone – March 2002. Yes,
3,600 Palestinians were killed during the Second Intifada, but the
resolution does not mention these deaths either or the fact that most
of the Palestinians killed were combatants and most of the Israeli
victims were women and children. Yes Israelis do kill Palestinian
civilians, but they do not target them. Palestinian terrorists target
civilians while hiding amongst civilians.

The delegates who supported its passage have a lot to answer for, but
the greatest responsibility, the greatest shame, the greatest portion
of sin, and yes that's what it is, falls directly on the national
leaders of the UCC and the Global Ministries staffers who controlled
the information provided to the delegates and advocated for the
resolution's passage.

Members of the committee that vetted this resolution were chosen at
random from the delegates attending the church's General Synod in
July. Only a very few of them had ever been to Israel and had seen
security guards checking bags at restaurants, supermarkets and hotel
lobbies.

They were shown maps of the barrier itself, but were offered no
images of volunteers picking bits of skin from tree limbs after a
terror attack.

They were told about the inability of farmers to get to their olive
groves during harvest, but were not shown videos of Friday Sermons in
Gaza during which religious leaders call for Jews to be butchered and
killed.

They were shown pictures of ominous stretches of concrete wall,
covered with graffiti, but they were not shown X-Rays of bombing
victims with watch casings, nails and other bits of metal embedded in
their bodies from terror attacks.

It should come as no surprise, the resolution came to the floor of
the entire Synod, it was passed almost unanimously, with very little
opposition.

I need to offer one more detail to anyone who would try to
characterize the resolution as a complaint over the barrier's
location and not its existence. At one point during the debate on the
synod floor, a delegate, God bless his soul, approached the
microphone and offered an amendment that would have asked Israel to
dismantle or move the barrier to "internationally recognized
borders." I know the response to this amendment is that until there
is a final status agreement, there is no such thing as an
internationally agreed upon border between the Israelis and the
Palestinians in the West Bank, but in the context of the debate, it
was this delegate's attempt to say "Look, if you've got to build the
barrier, don't build the barrier on Palestinian land." This
amendment, which was clearly offered as an attempt to acknowledge
Israel's right to defend itself, was voted down – overwhelmingly.
Imagine yourself a Jew. Ask yourself how you would interpret this
fact.

Let me be clear. Detailing the impact of the security fence on
Palestinians and admonishing Israel to do everything in its power to
reduce these impacts is a legitimate part of Christian witness, if it
is coupled with an honest acknowledgement of both the motive and
impact of Palestinian violence against Israel. We have not seen this
acknowledgement.

But portraying Israel as if it has the human rights record of China
and the security concerns of Canada, as our churches have done,
perverts the whole notion of witness.

Resolutions like the one I just described and the publicity they
generate at church-wide assemblies are merely one method used to
legitimize and broadcast the dishonest narrative about the Arab-
Israeli conflict to the American people. Denominational newspapers
publish articles that detail the impact of the West Bank security
barrier on Palestinians while giving short shrift to the impact of
suicide attacks on Israeli civilians. Websites are used to broadcast
Palestinian propaganda, with little if any filtering. For example,
the Common Global Ministries Board of the UCC and Disciples of Christ
displayed a press release written by Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation
Theology Center that described Yasser Arafat as "the father figure of
the Palestinians." The release did not mention Arafat's role in the
death of 11 Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics, his failure
to negotiate in good faith at Camp David, or the billions in foreign
aid that disappeared under his tenure.

We will be judged by the things we do not say.

Denominational publishing houses are culpable as well. In 2004,
Augsburg Fortress Press, owned by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America distributed Bethlehem Besieged by Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran
pastor from Bethlehem who inveighs against checkpoints for making it
difficult for Palestinians to get to the hospital in times of
emergency. Raheb however, fails to mention the instances in which
ambulances have been used in terror attacks against Israel. Fair
witness requires an acknowledgment of why Israel imposed these
checkpoints and why ambulances are delayed.

The overall narrative offered by mainline churches and their leaders
about the Arab-Israeli conflict places a disproportionate amount of
blame on Israel, and denies the religious component of the war
against the Jewish state. Terror attacks against Israel are done
under the cover of religious sanction. The support for Palestinian
terrorists is provided by other countries with the approval of Muslim
scholars and preachers for whom the notion of Jewish sovereignty and
freedom on land previously governed by Muslim rulers is a theological
impossibility. Silence on this issue from mainline churches which
have condemned Christian Zionism for diminishing the prospects of
peace in the Middle East is troubling, to say the least. Let's be
clear, there is a growing number of voices for reform within the
Muslim religion who need our support and encouragement. But when
Protestant leaders meet with Hezbollah, as at least three
Presbyterian groups have done, we are not doing these moderates any
favors.

The narrative offered by mainline churches about the conflict also
fails to honestly address the problems in Palestinian society that
undermine its ability to live in peace with its neighbors and build a
future for its citizens. The press release about Arafat's death is
emblematic of this failure.

The mainline narrative also encourages readers to ignore the
fundamental differences between Israel and its adversaries. At this
point, a few comparisons are in order.

When Baruch Goldstein, and Israeli, killed 29 innocent civilians at a
mosque in Hebron in 1994, his countrymen condemned the act as murder.
Palestinians name soccer tournaments after suicide bombers. Crowds
dance in the streets after successful suicide attacks against Israeli
civilians. So-called militants pass out candy.

In Israel, extremist political parties, such as the one Goldstein
belonged to, are banned as terrorist organizations. In the
Palestinian Authority, Hamas got elected.

Israeli peace and justice activists monitor the behavior of their
soldiers at checkpoints to make sure they do not abuse Palestinians.
When abuse does happen, these activists file complaints and tell the
world. Palestinian peace activists rarely criticize their leaders in
public.

Instead of taking these differences into account, activists in our
churches use Israeli self-criticism to justify their agenda. For
example, Israeli journalists have written extensively about the
terrible mistakes their leaders made during its invasion of Lebanon.
In September 1982, the day after Christian Phalangists supported by
the Israeli government massacred approximately 800 Palestinians at
Sabra and Shatilla, 300,000 Israelis took to the streets to protest
Ariel Sharon's failure to anticipate and prevent the massacre.
To be sure, there are debates over the number of people massacred and
the number of protesters who took to the streets the next day. I've
seen victims numbered as high as 3,000 and protesters numbered
between 200,000 and 400,000. Whatever the numbers let me state
unequivocally, the massacre was an outrage and the Israelis knew it
and they said so.

But our churches use this self-criticism in a discriminatory manner.
Anti-Israel activists in our churches routinely invoke this massacre
to justify their calls for Ariel Sharon to be tried for war crimes.
They have remained virtually silent, however, about atrocities that
cannot be blamed on Israel.

For example how many of you have heard of Hama? It's a city in Syria
where an estimated 10,000 civilians (and that's the low end of the
estimate) were killed by their own government in February 1982, a few
months before the massacre at Sabra and Shatila? How many calls have
there been from activists in our churches calling for an
investigation into this crime?

And in May 1985, Shiite Militia involved in the Lebanese civil war
laid siege to Sabra and Shatilla, the scene of the massacre that took
place three years before. The residents of these camps, subjected to
intermittent bombardment for 18 months, were reduced to eating rats
by the time the siege ended. An estimated 2000 people were killed.
Nabih Berri, the leader of the militia group that laid siege to these
camps, became a protégé of the Syrian government and is currently
speaker of the Lebanese National Assembly.

And while Protestant leaders justified their criticism of Israel's
presence in the West Bank and Gaza as part of an effort to support
Palestinian Christians, how much support did they lend to Christians
in Lebanon who served as the backbone of a non-violent campaign to
rid themselves of the foreign occupiers after their former Prime
Minister Rafik Hariri was killed by a car bomb allegedly planted by
agents of Syria's Bathist regime? How many times did they invoke UN
Resolution 1559, which called for the Syrians to end the occupation
and for Hezbollah to disarm?

At this point, I feel compelled to address the involvement of Jews in
the anti-Israel campaign in our churches. Two in particular, Marc
Ellis and Jeff Halper, two prominent supporters of Sabeel offer a
narrative about the conflict that does not take into account the
threats faced by Israelis on a daily basis. I have heard both Ellis
and Halper speak and have never heard them mention the incitement on
Palestinian Television, or acknowledge the repeated attempts by
Israel's adversaries to destroy the Jewish State. The fact that both
Halper and Ellis are Jewish does not turn their denial of these
realities into a virtue. And their Jewishness does not give
Christians leave to ignore these issues.

As I said just a moment ago, church leaders and activist justify
their behavior as an attempt to lend support to a Christians from
Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem whose leaders come to the
United States, describe the suffering they experience and then
proceed to blame this suffering on Israel. Mitri Raheb is one of
these leaders, but the most prominent in the U.S. is a man by the
name of Naim Ateek, an Anglican priest and founder of Sabeel
Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center.

Sabeel, a pro-Palestinian organization that enjoys the support of
activists in a number of mainline Protestant churches, portrays
itself as a peace-and-justice organization that acknowledges Israel's
right to exist and condemns terror attacks against Israel, but there
are troubling aspects about the group's agenda that disqualify it as
a true partner for peace, as its supporters in the U.S. insist it is.

One problem is the penchant of Sabeel's founder, Anglican priest Naim
Rev. Ateek, to portray Israeli behavior in language that raises
legitimate doubts about his motive. For example, Rev. Ateek has
portrayed Israeli officials as modern-day Herods, written that
Israeli government crucifixion machine operates daily in the disputed
territories and has compared the occupation to the stone blocking
Christ's tomb. This imagery, which surfaced during the Second
Intifada, has undeniable echoes of the deicide charge leveled against
the Jewish people. As documented elsewhere, the notion that the Jews
are collectively responsible for the death of Christ – expunged from
Catholic theology in 1965 – has contributed to unending hostility and
violence against the Jewish people. Ominously enough, the portrayal
of the Jews as Christ-killers is a common motif in Palestinian
political discourse. Rev. Ateek's use of this imagery in reference to
the Jewish state is inexcusable.

Nevertheless, Rev. Ateek and his defenders assert he is merely using
the "Language of the Cross" to describe Palestinian suffering, but in
fact, he is referring to Israeli behavior, not Palestinian suffering
and consequently, its use elicits profound feelings of doubt over
Rev. Ateek's motive as a peacemaker. Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, Judaic
scholar at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, warns
that "no compromise is possible when the crucifixion is invoked."

Sabeel also espouses a one-state agenda, which is made explicit
in "The Jerusalem Sabeel Document, Principles for Just Peace," a
published by Sabeel in 2004. This document states that
Sabeel's "vision for the future" is "One state for two nations and
three religions." Under this scenario, Israel would cease to exist as
a Jewish state.

Even supporters of the Palestinian cause have acknowledged that under
such a solution, the Jews would not be safe. Jeff Halper, coordinator
of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and a frequent
speaker at Sabeel events admits "The history of bi-national states is
not a happy one." And more to the point, Edward Said, who spoke at an
international conference hosted by Sabeel in 1998, admitted in 2000
that he worries what would happen to a Jewish minority in a single
state. "It worries me a great deal," he said. "The question of what
is going to be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I
really don't know. It worries me."

Sabeel also denies the Palestinians moral agency by rooting
Palestinian violence and suffering entirely in Israeli behavior.
Sabeel's prescription for the end of the conflict is "end the
occupation and the violence will end" narrative. This story is
enunciated in the PC(USA)'s divestment resolution passed in 2004,
which asserted that "occupation" had "proven to be at the root of
evil acts committed against innocent people on both sides of the
conflict."

Arab violence against Israel and Jews existed long before the
occupation and long before the creation of the modern State of
Israel. And in at least three instances, Palestinian violence has
increased after Israeli efforts for peace. Israeli deaths increased
after the failure of Camp David in 2000. Israel deaths increased
after the first round of Oslo negotiations in 1993 when Israel agreed
to transfer power in the disputed territories to the Palestinian
Authority. Israeli deaths increased after the second round of Oslo
negotiations 1995 when Israel agreed to let the PA maintain a
security force of 24,000 men to maintain order in areas under its
jurisdiction. And more recently, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was
met with increased weapons flow into the PA from Egypt, an up tick in
rocket attacks against Israel, and in late January, an overwhelming
electoral victory for Hamas – an organization which recently posted a
video of a suicide bomber expressing a desire to drink Jewish blood.
This is the world the Israelis live in. And our churches do not do a
good job of describing it.

Underpinning this narrative is what I call messianic pacifism, or the
notion that embracing the tactics of non-violence in the face of
terror and aggression will somehow bring about  the redemptive
promises offered in Isaiah, in which "the lion, like the ox will eat
straw" and not I presume, thirst for Jewish blood. The irony of the
story offered by Sabeel and its defenders in the U.S. is that it is a
mirror image of pre-millennial dispensationalist narrative that they
abhor – not in the predictive language of biblical prophecy, but in
the prescriptive language of peace and justice. In this schema,
improvements in the Arab world will take place as a consequence of
Jewish change of heart and behavior. But instead of the Jews coming
to Christ, Sabeel would have the Jews of Israel embrace a pacifism
(which no other country in the world would be expected to embrace) in
the face of terror attacks.

What does fair witness require? I'll offer four suggestions.

The first is that we must renounce and distance our churches from the
deicide imagery offered by Rev. Naim Ateek. This is not the language
of peacemaking, but the language of demonization. When mainline
churches turn a blind eye, or worse, apologize for the use of this
imagery, one of the bulwarks of anti-Semitism in American society has
fallen.

Secondly, churches must acknowledge the religious component of the
war against Israel. If Protestant leaders in the U.S., including
those in the UCC, are going to condemn Christian Zionism as a threat
to peace, they have an obligation to acknowledge the religious
motivation of violence against Israel. Religiously-motivated
hostility toward Israel, which Hamas embodies, turns the conflict
from a disagreement over borders and settlements into a fight over
the existence of the Jewish State, an issue over which their can be
no compromise. We can no longer remain silent about this component of
the conflict.

Thirdly, our churches must start speaking honestly about the problems
in Palestinian society that will make it difficult for Palestinians
to live in peace with their neighbors and build a future for
themselves. Calling for the creation of a Palestinian state while
remaining silent about collapse of civil order in Gaza, the
mistreatment of Christians by Muslims areas under the control of the
Palestinian Authority and the failure of Palestinian leaders to stop
terror attacks against Israel encourages the creation of nothing more
than a failed state that oppresses its own people and menaces its
neighbors.

Fourth, our churches have an obligation to acknowledge the support
Palestinian terrorists receive from other countries in the region. If
Protestants in the U.S. are going to invoke America's "special
relationship" with Israel as jusification for the focus on its
misdeeds, they have an obligation to acknowledge the support
terrorists targeting Israel have received from Syria, Iran and up
until recently, Iraq.

I would like to offer one closing comment. Our beloved mainline
churches, for all their quirks, controversies and faults have a
unique capacity to arouse the conscience of the American people. We
have an obligation to make sure that the prophetic voices of our
denominations are directed by an informed conscience, not a hostile
agenda. It's time we started living up to this obligation.