A Surprising Compromise:
General Assembly Finds Middle Way on Mideast
Alan Wisdom
July 26, 2010

It looked as if the 2010 Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly in Minneapolis might come to blows over the Middle East. Pro-Palestinian activists were championing a 172-page Middle East Study Committee (MESC) report that condemned Israeli policies as “a sin against God and other fellow human beings.” Pro-Israel activists decried the proposed report as “a full-scale attack on the Jewish state.” The atmosphere in the assembly’s Middle East Peacemaking Committee was, if anything, more confrontational than in other committees dealing with hot-button sexuality issues.

But commissioners on the Middle East committee surprised everyone and forged a compromise that won broad approval. They talked with leaders on both sides of the issue and devised a package of amendments to the MESC report, removing many of the aspects most offensive to Israel and its Presbyterian friends.

Leaders on both sides endorsed the amended report. “Today, we still have disagreements on items in the report, on methods we should pursue, on arguments we should make,” declared MESC chair Ron Shive, Carol Hylkema of the pro-Palestinian Israel/Palestine Mission Network, Bill Harter of the more pro-Israel Presbyterians for Middle East Peace, and MESC critic Katharine Henderson of Auburn Seminary. “But today, by God’s grace, we have discovered that together, we may actually be more faithful and effective in seeking peace with justice for both Palestinians and Israelis than separately. To that end, we stand together in support of the report as amended by the Middle East Issues Committee as witness to a new way of approaching this intractable problem and, indeed, a new way of being the Church.”

With that kind of broad support, the MESC report passed unanimously in the Middle East Peacemaking Committee. In the plenary session of the assembly, the report received 82 percent of the vote. In related action, the commissioners turned aside overtures asking the denomination to divest from Caterpillar because of that corporation’s sales of construction equipment to the Israeli military. But they approved a PCUSA agency recommendation to “strongly denounce Caterpillar’s continued profit-making from non-peaceful uses of a number of its products.”

The original MESC report singled out the Israeli presence in Palestinian territories as “the major issue for a just peace” in the Middle East. It levied a long list of demands against Israel and urged the U.S. government to consider “the possible withholding of military aid as a means of bringing Israel to compliance.” There were no threats of withholding U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority or any other named Arab government. The original report compared Israel to “a spoiled child,” “a Nazi state,” the former Soviet Union, and apartheid South Africa. It endorsed a radical Palestinian Christian manifesto that rejected the identity of Israel as a Jewish state.

The amendments made in the Middle East Peacemaking Committee took significant steps to remedy the anti-Israel bias of the original report:

• They inserted a strong “reaffirmation of Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign nation within secure and internationally recognized borders.”
• They “commend[ed] for study” rather than endorsed the radical Palestinian manifesto. Their approval was limited to the manifesto’s “emphases on hope for liberation, nonviolence, love of enemy, and reconciliation.”
• They recognized that it was not just Israel, but also Egypt, that imposes a “blockade” on Gaza. They clarified that those two nations do have a right to prevent the entry of military materiel destined to fuel the Islamist Hamas movement’s attacks on Israel. They requested only that Israel and Egypt allow “free commercial exchange” of civilian goods with Gaza.
• They downgraded to non-binding “rationale” status the part of the MESC report that contains the most offensive language against Israel.
• They deleted from the report another section that offered a tendentious retelling of history with a strong slant against Israel. Instead they mandated that this section be replaced with “a series of eight narratives of comparable length, four arising from the range of authentically Palestinian perspectives (including both Christians and Muslims), and four arising from the range of authentically Israeli perspectives.”
• They took the task of following up on the report out of the hands of the MESC and put it into the hands of a new Monitoring Group on the Middle East. MESC members could comprise no more than two of the seven members of the new Monitoring Group, which is supposed to reflect “an authentic balance representing the fullness of the spectrum of commitments within the PC(USA) toward the people and issues of the region.”

All of these changes moved the MESC report in the direction of balance. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that no limited set of amendments could undo the systematic slant of a 172-page document. The final amended report still imposes far more demands on Israel than on any other actor in the region. And it still recommends using U.S. aid as leverage against Israel—and only Israel. It pays little attention to any of the other governments and movements in the region that violate human rights and threaten the peace.

Despite the fond hopes of those who hailed the Mideast compromise at the 2010 General Assembly, this is unlikely to be the last episode in the PCUSA debate over the issue. Key positions in the PCUSA structure are still held by pro-Palestinian activists who see Israel as the main problem in the Middle East.

This circle of activists first pushed the 2004 General Assembly mandate for “phased selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel.” When that mandate provoked controversy among Presbyterians and with the Jewish community, the 2006 assembly voted to step back and substitute a broader instruction that PCUSA funds should “be invested only in peaceful pursuits.” The 2008 assembly pledged that “we will not over-identify with the realities of the Israelis or the Palestinians” and warned against “taking broad stands that simplify a very complex situation into a caricature of reality, where one side clearly is at a fault and the other side is clearly the victim.”

Yet the pro-Palestinian activists found a new opening when the 2008 assembly ordered the formation of the MESC to develop a new policy toward the region. Left-leaning PCUSA moderators filled the committee with like-minded activists. Seven of its nine members were on record in support of the Palestinian cause; only one was known as a friend of Israel. Not surprisingly, the committee produced a proposed report that fell into the very vices against which the 2008 assembly had warned. It simplified a very complex situation into a caricature of reality, with one side (Israel) cast as the villain and the other side (the Palestinians) cast as the victim.

In the 2010 Minneapolis assembly, as their report came under fire, the MESC and pro-Palestinian activists embraced a compromise that enabled it to pass. But will this spirit of fairness and balance endure? The new Monitoring Group on the Middle East and other PCUSA will bear close watching in the coming months.