It has been 25 years since Jewish historian, and Israeli critic, Simha Flapan, described the dominant narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his 1987 book, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities.

Even though Israel has the most sophisticated army in the region and possesses an advanced atomic capability, it continues to regard itself in terms of the Holocaust, as the victim of an unconquerable, bloodthirsty enemy. Thus whatever Israelis do, whatever means we employ to guard our gains or to increase them, we justify as last-ditch self-defense. We can, therefore, do no wrong. The myths of Israel forged during the formation of the state have hardened into this impenetrable, and dangerous, ideological shield.

At the time of its publication, Flapan’s book was exhilarating to anyone who by the mid-1980s, was running up against what Flapan termed, Israel’s ” impenetrable, and dangerous, ideological shield”

This summer, that impenetrable wall has begun to show cracks of possible penetrability. Elections are currently moving forward in Egypt and Palestine, two voting publics Israel does not want to see emerge as unpredictable democratic neighbors.

Egypt, a country which borders Israel from the south, has long been a key Israeli ally. President Hosni Mubarak, the last military strongman to run Egypt, was just the partner Israel needed as a close neighbor.

Palestine? Well, elections were most certainly not in Israel’s plans for the population which has refused to accept Israel’s occupation.

Egyptians began voting for a new president this past week to replace the military committee which succeeded the ousted Mubarak. Results are not yet official, but it appears that the runoff in June between the two leading candidates, will involve Mohammed Mursi, the Muslim Brotherhood-backed candidate and Ahmad Shafiq, Mubarak’s last Prime Minister.

Egyptian scholar and greatly respected blogger, Juan Cole, describes Shafiq (shown at right here) as a former Air Force general and aeronautical engineer who wrote a dissertation on the military uses of Outer Space.

Shafiq is also a former Egyptian minister of aviation. He brags, with justification it appears, about “the good job he did with Cairo’s international airport”.

Cole adds that “Shafiq is considered by many Egyptians, especially in the countryside, as the law and order candidate. Many voters dislike him because of his close association with the overthrown Mubarak regime.”

Shafiq’s presumed opponent in the next round of voting, Mohammed Mursi, (at left) is described by the Guardian as the candidate selected by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party. Morsi is seen, according to the Guardian, as an uninspiring figure. He is backed, however, “by the best-organized political force in the country.”

Mursi, 60, is an engineer who has taught in the US as well as at Egyptian universities. An expert on precision metal surfaces, he worked at the US agency, NASA, on the development of space shuttle engines in the early 1980s.

This will be Egypt’s first democratic election. Palestinian elections are scheduled at some point later this year. That election will be the second exercise of democracy by Palestinians in the past decade.

The first was in 2006. (The picture above from Ma’an, is a ballot box from the 2006 election). When the outcome did not suit either Israel or the US, many elected Hamas legislators were promptly jailed by Israel. This was followed by a military conflict, encouraged by the US and Israel. As a result of that conflict, Hamas seized control of Gaza, while the Palestinian Authority became the ruling force in the West Bank.

Six years later, the governments of Gaza and the West Bank are prepared to hold their second legislative and presidential elections, under the watchful eye of the Palestinian Election Commission, which is chaired by retired Bir Zeit University president Hanna Nasser. The process of voter registration began Monday when Nasser met with Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

Ma’an, the Palestinian News Agency, reported Monday that Nasser met with Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to discuss final plans for the election.

In an earlier Saturday story, Ma’an provided this background on election plans:

The [Palestinian] Central Elections Commission will begin operating in the Gaza Strip on Monday [May 28], officials said. Yasser al-Wadia, the general coordinator for independent political figures, told Ma’an on Saturday that a delegation from the CEC will add between 250,000-300,000 new Gazan voters to the electoral register. The CEC would undertake its work with impartiality, al-Wadia added.

Hanna Nasser, the head of the Central Elections Committee, told Voice of Palestine radio this week that the CEC would prepare offices and train employees ahead of necessary preparations to register voters.

After the commission starts work in the Gaza Strip, President Mahmoud Abbas will begin consultations on a consensus government as previously agreed.

Members of the new cabinet will be agreed upon within 10 days from the start of consultations. Then the unity government will operate for six months, during which time it will set a date for general elections.

Nasser, it should be noted, held the same position as chair of the CEC,  in January, 2006, when the elections in Gaza and the West Bank were essentially nullified by the US and Israel.

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who roams the world looking for exciting business developments, paused this past week to offer his report on the current conditions facing Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. He appears either uninterested or, horrors, not even aware, that Palestinian elections are in the final planning stages.

In his column, Friedman stuck to the current Israeli narrative with this overview paragraph:

The Palestinians are divided between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and both populations are tired. Moreover, economic conditions have improved in the West Bank in recent years, and the Palestinian Authority’s security forces are keeping a tight rein on anti-Israeli violence. Aid from the U.S., Europe and the Arabs pays a lot of the authority’s budget. Israel’s security wall keeps Palestinian suicide bombers out. The U.S. election silences any criticism coming from Washington about Israeli settlements.

This is a narrative paragraph which begs for closer analysis:

Yes, the Palestinians are separated in Gaza and the West Bank, with power held by Hamas, in Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. But tired? Well, yes, about as tired as you would expect from prisoners locked up for what threatens to become a permanent incarceration.

Friedman writes that PA forces are keeping tight rein on anti-Israeli violence. He should have said Israeli occupation forces are attempting to maintain their oppressive control over non-violent demonstrations by Palestinians, jailing those who are too effective.

And he actually says, in print, that “Moreover, economic conditions have improved in the West Bank in recent years.”  Economic conditions are better in Cell Block C?  Not likely,

Is this where all that talk in religious circles about “invest, not divest” started? Living conditions for a few Palestinian millionaires have, no doubt, improved. Maybe Friedman has been reading too many Romney speeches where one learns that the rich want the rest of us to benefit from the market economy.

Finally, all you Friedman fans out there in the American peace camp (you know who you are), take careful notice of this casual, but revealing, sentence tossed into the middle of Friedman’s column:

“Israel’s security wall keeps Palestinian suicide bombers out.”

Security wall, suicide bombers? Friedman accepts that old Israeli narrative trope, a “security wall”, which is not for security, but is a land-grab of monstrous proportions, well beyond the original Green Line. He also continues to cling to the belief that the wall prevents “suicide bombers” from entering Israel.

That shows us that Friedman does not understand political tactics of the oppressed.  When something doesn’t work, stop doing it.

For Friedman and Israel, if something “works” it is always due to something Israel has done, an echo of Israeli-born scholar and critic, Simha Flapan’s phrase from 1987, “We [meaning Israel] can, therefore, do no wrong.”

Further into his column Friedman cites an April 23 New York Times op-ed which repeats the “security wall” canard in a discussion of peace, using the familiar “Peace Without Partners” theme. Lest we forget, this one surfaced in the 1980s with the mantra, “there are no partners for peace on the Palestinian side”.

The authors of the piece cited by Friedman are Ami Ayalon, Orni Petruschka and Gilead Sher, who are, respectively, a former commander of the Israeli Navy and head of the Israeli domestic security agency (Ayalon), an Israeli entrepreneur (Petruschka) and a peace negotiator and chief of staff to the Israeli prime minister from 1999 to 2001 (Sher).

Here is the revealing (for those willing to take notice) paragraph by these Israeli would-be peace-makers. Highlighted emphasis added:

Israel should first declare that it is willing to return to negotiations anytime and that it has no claims of sovereignty on areas east of the existing security barrier. It should then end all settlement construction east of the security barrier and in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. And it should create a plan to help 100,000 settlers who live east of the barrier to relocate within Israel’s recognized borders.

The security barrier has become Israel’s latest Big Lie, replacing the “Green Line” because Israel did not draw the “Green Line”. It did draw the “security barrier” by building a concrete wall on and through Palestinian land. This wall is designed to secure Israel’s latest “facts on the ground”. What it does is cut off villagers from farmlands, workers from work sites and medical personnel from hospitals. That is not security for Israelis.

The problem for Thomas Friedman, the New York Times, Israel, and Israel’s friends in the US ruling classes, is that, in Secretary Don Rumsfeld’s memorable phrase, “stuff happens” when you don’t see the stuff coming.

This summer, elections are the stuff which are breaking out all around Israel. Ironically, Israel was planning its own election this fall, but Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu postponed his elections until after November with some cabinet adjustments. In November, US voters will either return President Barack Obama to the White House or replace him with Mitt Romney.

It is hard to measure which candidate will bring Netanyahu the most joy.  But it is a good guess that a second term president would be more stubborn in dealing with the Israel Lobby than a first term president.

What should worry Netanyahu is that election “stuff” could happen in ways not  his liking in the US, Egypt, and in Palestine.

What should worry the rest of the world is if elections that Netanyahu cannot nullify, do not go his way, there is always Israeli’s threat to attack Iran.

The picture above, left, of the two Egyptian candidates, is a Getty photograph by Khaled Desouki/Agence France-Presse.

Neve Gordon, a 47-year-old Israeli-born professor and author, greeted this year’s 64th anniversary of the Nakba with an essay for CounterPunch that included this revealing confession:

I first heard about the Nakba in the late 1980s, while I was an undergraduate student of philosophy at Hebrew University. This, I believe, is a revealing fact, particularly since, as a teenager, I was a member of Peace Now and was raised in a liberal home.

I grew up in the southern [Israeli] city of Be’er-Sheva, which is just a few kilometres from several unrecognised Bedouin villages that, today, are home to thousands of residents who were displaced in 1948.

How is it possible that a left-leaning Israeli teenager who was living in the Negev during the early 1980s (I graduated from high-school in 1983) had never heard the word “Nakba”?

It is an honest question. It is also a question that every one of us must confront if we are ever to grasp what is at the core of the so-called “debate” within American churches about the role Christians must play in ending the agony of the Israeli occupation.

For the religious establishment there can be no such thing as neutrality in dealing with how humans treat one another.  It is immoral under any religious system to remain neutral in the face of evil. “Little children, love one another” is not just a bumper sticker; it is a divine command.

Al-Nakba is the Arabic word for “the catastrophe”.

Hannah Ashrawi, a Palestinian activist and government leader, describes the annual May 15 day of remembering Al-Nakba:

Every year, Palestinians mark Al-Nakba, or the Catastrophe, of 1948, to remember how our vibrant society was physically and politically crushed by violence and forced expulsion.

It was not a natural disaster. Indeed, we have no doubt that it was a detailed plan of systematic destruction carried out with chilling efficiency. It was the biggest assault and threat Palestinian heritage has ever endured and the beginning of a deliberate effort to suppress the Palestinian narrative.

When Israel was created by the United Nations as a modern state in 1948, as later scholarship has revealed, the new state had a fully-developed plan to eradicate a culture and depopulate the land.

Hannah Ashrawi recalls the Palestine that existed before Israel was created:

By 1948, Palestine was one of the most developed Arab societies, boasting one of the healthiest economies under the British mandate and a high school enrolment rate, second only to Lebanon. Commerce, the arts, literature, music, and other cultural aspects of life were thriving in Palestine.

We remember that between 1911 and 1948, Palestine had no less than 161 newspapers, magazines and other regular publications, including the pioneer “Falastin” newspaper, published in Jaffa by Issa al-Issa.

Suppressing the narrative of an occupied people is the strategy of a colonial conquerer

Neve Gordon is an Israeli parent. In 2009, already a well-known writer and teacher in Israel, Gordon called for a boycott of Israel products in an article he wrote for the London Guardian. He wrote with his children in mind:

It is indeed not a simple matter for me as an Israeli citizen to call on foreign governments, regional authorities, international social movements, faith-based organisations, unions and citizens to suspend co-operation with Israel. But today, as I watch my two boys playing in the yard, I am convinced that it is the only way that Israel can be saved from itself.

The picture at top is that of  young children in Palestine on Nakba day, holding large keys to symbolize the actual keys many Palestinian families continue to keep in their homes until the day when they are free to return to their original villages. It is from MIFTA.

Neve Gordon’s essay has also appeared in the Palestine Chronicle and Aljazeera. 

Monday Update:  

Hunger strike agreement reached

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Detainees on Monday signed a deal with the Israeli prison authority to end their mass hunger strike, officials told Ma’an.

Prisoner representatives from each of the factions agreed to the deal in Ashkelon jail, prisoners society chief Qaddura Fares said in a statement.

Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet confirmed the deal, the Israeli news site Ynet reported.

Senior Hamas official Saleh Arouri, who was a member of the negotiations team, said Israel agreed to provide a list of accusations to administrative detainees, or release them at the end of their term.

In comments to the Hamas-affiliated news site Palestine Information Center, he said that under the Egypt-brokered deal Israel agreed to release all detainees from solitary confinement over the next 72 hours.

Israel will also lift a ban on family visits for detainees from the Gaza Strip, and revoke the “Shalit law,” according to the official.

The “Shalit law” restricted prisoners’ access to families and to educational materials as punishment for the five-year captivity of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Shalit was freed in October in a prisoner swap agreement.

Previously, published Saturday

Mass demonstrations in support of 2500 Palestinian hunger strikers swept through the West Bank this weekend.

Marchers moved through the streets of Hebron, Kafr Qaddoum, Nablus, Nabi Saleh, Ni’lin, Ramallah, al-Walaja and outside of Ofer prison. The picture above was taken in Hebron.

It shows an Israeli soldier with his knee firmly planted on a young Palestinian’s neck.

The picture also shows how American tax dollars and church pensions are at work on this Mothers Day weekend, a commercially-driven event in which American teenagers and their families annually  honor mothers with gifts and family meals.

On this particular American Mothers’ Day weekend, a large contingent of  Palestinian teenagers joined their mothers and other family members to offer their support to prisoners on lengthy and dangerous hunger strikes.

Laura Kacere wrote in A Nation of Change, that Mothers Day had a different meaning when it was initially launched.  In fact, the Palestinian mothers who marched this weekend in support of hunger strikers, some of whom may have been their children, are demonstrating in a manner more akin to the original purpose of Mothers Day.

Mother’s Day began in America in 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Written in response to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, her proclamation called on women to use their position as mothers to influence society in fighting for an end to all wars. She called for women to stand up against the unjust violence of war through their roles as wife and mother, to protest the futility of their sons killing other mothers’ sons.

Amira Hass, the Ha’aretz columnist who has watched Israeli duplicity at work for decades, explains how Israel makes use of  ”administrative detention”:

Administrative detainees have been held without trial for years under emergency regulations inspired by the British Mandate. It’s not important. Hundreds of prisoners from the Gaza Strip haven’t seen their families for six or more years. Why should anyone care?

American tax-payers and church members should care. But do they?  The record is not good.

The Methodist General Conference ended its once-every-four-years confab in Tampa last week with a small step toward caring. They will not have this opportunity again for four years in a governance system first established in the early 1800s by John Wesley.

In their 2012 Conference the Methodists voted to call for a boycott of US companies supporting the occupation. They failed, however, to pass a specific divestment resolution removing church pension funds from three US corporations, Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard and Motorola Systems.

Why did the 2012 Methodists only hit .500?  The Methodist Board of Pensions and their allies roamed about the floor of the conference spreading the lie that divestment from these companies would threaten Africa University’s funding. Those prevarications were aimed at Central Conferences (overseas) delegates, who are very protective of their continent’s Methodist University.

There were even reports that some Methodist delegates were told they could be sued if they voted for divestment. Would church leaders act in this manner? Hard to imagine, but then, there have also been reports (a tape recording to be exact) that Mitt Romney cannot recall a teenage incident which his classmates insist involved young Mitt cutting the hair of a classmate suspected of being gay.

Now it is the Presbyterians’ chance to divest from three US corporations that support the Israeli occupation. Will they join the Episcopalians and urge tea and cookies with their local rabbis, or will they look more closely at how the Israelis are spending their pension funds?

Meanwhile, the Palestinian hunger strikes continue.

Why hunger strikes?  How else does a prisoner reach the outside world, at least that part of the outside world willing to look up from its tea and cookies long enough to notice?

There are currently 2,000 Palestinian inmates on a mass hunger strike in the Nafha, Ashkelon, Gilboa and other prisons around Israel. Amira Hass writes that it is “the very fact of their decision to refuse food and their willingness to risk being punished by the authorities [that] stands as a reminder of their humanity”.

The US public remains blissfully ignorant during this Mothers Day weekend that 2000 Palestinians hunger strikers, some near death, are refusing food to protest their treatment and their unfair and unjust incarceration.

The bulk of the Israeli public, safe and secure behind a massive Security Wall, remain largely indifferent to the strikers.

Amira Hass explains:

The Israel Prison Service does not have to make much of an effort to conceal this mass action from Israeli eyes. The great majority of Israelis label all incarcerated Palestinians as conscienceless murderers or common terrorists, at the least. They have little interest in acts of personal or collective courage on the part of Palestinian detainees that serve as reminders that they are human beings.

Richard Falk and Noura Erakat have written about the history of the Israeli use of administrative detention, which in case you have not noticed, is a practice the US Congress is currently planning to add to the American legal arsenal against its own citizens.

Administrative detention has constituted a core of Israel’s 1,500 occupation laws that apply to Palestinians only, and which are not subject to any type of civilian or public review. Derived from British Mandate laws, administrative detention permits Israeli Forces to arrest Palestinians for up to six months without charge or trial, and without any show of incriminating evidence. Such detention orders can be renewed indefinitely, each time for another six-month term.

Ayed Dudeen is one of the longest-serving administrative detainees in Israeli captivity. First arrested in October 2007, Israeli officials renewed his detention thirty times without charge or trial. After languishing in a prison cell for nearly four years without due process, prison authorities released him in August 2011, only to re-arrest him two weeks later. His wife Amal no longer tells their six children that their father is coming home, because, in her words, “I do not want to give them false hope anymore, I just hope that this nightmare will go away.”

Twenty percent of the Palestinian population of the Occupied Palestinian Territories have at one point been held under administrative detention by Israeli forces. Israel argues these policies are necessary to ensure the security of its Jewish citizens, including those unlawfully resident in settlements surrounding Jerusalem, Area C, and the Jordan Valley—in flagrant contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention’s Article 49(6), which explicitly prohibits the transfer of one’s civilian population to the territory it occupies.

And how does the US government view the hunger strikes?

When one persistent journalist (identified as “Said”) demanded, politely, that US State Department spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, answer a question about the Palestinian hunger strikes, this is how Nuland handled his query, according to the transcript from the State Department:

QUESTION: Okay. And one – a couple more. On the Palestinian prisoner issue, I wonder if you are aware of the situation of striking – hunger striking Palestinian prisoners?

MS. NULAND: I don’t have anything for you on that, Said.

QUESTION: Well, do you have a position on the hunger strike of prisoners who have not been charged with anything and they have been held for a long time? They’ve gone today – their 70th day of a hunger strike. Thaer Halahla and many others, five others, are probably – are likely to – they could face – I mean, they could die in the next day or so. Would the United States Government take a position on that?

MS. NULAND: Well, let me take the question, Said, because frankly, I don’t have anything one way or the other. I don’t know if we have a comment on it.

QUESTION: Because, lastly, I mean, it – if something happens to these prisoners, it could be a flashpoint between Israelis and the Palestinians.

MS. NULAND: No, I understand the question. Let me take it, okay?

QUESTION: Thank you.

If, or when, a hunger striker dies in an Israeli prison, the US State Department will have an answer ready to go. It will express regret at the death and urge “all parties involved” to resolve their differences.

One “party” involved is the IDF, shown in action in the pictures above and below. In this picture, smoke makes it difficult to determine if the IDF vehicle is a Caterpillar product. Perhaps not, since it is smaller than the Caterpillar tractors that built the Wall, and continue to demolish Palestinian homes.

But there is no question that the battle between the rock-throwing teen aged Palestinians and their IDF enemy serves as a metaphor for a US and church supported occupation force and a defiant civilian population.

Karl-John N. Stone and Thomas A. Prinz have just written an article for The Christian Century magazine, “Invest, Not Divest” which argues just what the title suggests it would argue, a misguided solution which embraces a market faith rather than a religious faith.

Stone is assistant to the bishop in the Upper Susquehanna Synod (ELCA) in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Prinz is pastor at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Leesburg, Virginia. They ask:

What better way for the church to act as peacemakers than to engage in actual investment, building up Palestinian society and infrastructure, thereby helping to ensure a sound and viable sovereign state when a political solution is found and potentially hastening that political solution?

Stone and Prinz close their argument for “hastening that political solution” with this bit of capitalist stock market cheer leading:

The New York Times reported in February that the Palestinian Stock Exchange has been one of the best-­performing markets in the Arab world in recent years. In 2011, a year marked by great political upheaval in the region, the Palestinian exchange was second only to that of Qatar, falling only 2.58 percent over the course of the year.

The Times quoted Fayez Husseini, manager of Abraaj Capital’s $50 million Pales­tine Growth Capital Fund, as saying: “Strong stock market performance proves that these Palestinian companies are well managed, resilient and adaptive.”

They conclude their market-driven argument:

Investment moves churches beyond a black-and-white concept of justice and a conflict model of advocacy toward a model of empowerment and reconciliation. This move represents the best hope for churches to contribute to long-term peace and justice for Israelis and Palestinians.

Give our Lutheran brothers credit, they do offer us a choice between “a black-and-white concept of justice”, and “a model of empowerment and reconciliation”.

Prinz and Stone may think they are channeling Reinhold Niebuhr with that division. I suspect they are really channeling the Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who is quoted in their piece.

Speaking of quoting, there is no sign that Prinz and Stone discussed this matter with any Palestinians under occupation. They do cite the New York Times‘ quote from Fayez Husseini, manager of Abraaj Capital’s $50 million Pales­tine Growth Capital Fund.  But  that doesn’t count.

Next time Prinz and Stone offer advice to Palestinians, they might want to talk with Palestinian Baptist pastor, Dr. Alex Awad, who told Methodists when they were debating their divestment resolution:

“We are asking for divestment for our freedom, not investment to improve our lives in prison.”

The picture at top is by Mussa Qawasma. It was used in a Mondoweiss article by Allison Deger. The picture of the teen agers confronting IDF fire power is by Jaafar Ashtiyeh. It is from Agence France Presse  (AFP).

By a vote of 558 to 367, a strong majority of lay and clerical delegates to the United Methodist General Conference called this week for a boycott of Israeli companies operating in Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

The resolution denounces the Israeli occupation and the settlements in a sweeping indictment.

It calls for “all nations to prohibit the import of products made by companies in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.”

The resolution was focused specifically on the settlements, not on the state of Israel. It states:

“The United Methodist Church does not support a boycott of products made in Israel. Our opposition is to products made by Israeli companies operating in occupied Palestinian territories.”  

That was not an easy vote. It also was an important victory for anti-occupation forces in Tampa since it calls attention to one of three actions in the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that Palestinians have adopted as a non-violent way to attack the occupation.

The vote on a resolution calling for the UMC to divest its pension funds from three US Corporations, Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard and Motorola Systems, was brought to the floor on Wednesday afternoon.

That resolution was a long shot from the outset. It lost after a series of votes that  ended in a final 685 to 246 decision that the UMC would continue to finance the occupation.

One loss and one victory will prepare the United Methodist Church to take the next step in ending United Methodist support for the occupation. Like the segregated church it was until 1964, the United Methodist church can change.

In 1964, a United Methodist layman, W. Astor Kirk, demonstrated how that change can happen. His life story was distributed by United Methodist News Service after his death eight months ago. The full story may be found at the end of this posting.

Kirk and his fellow activists led Methodism out of the darkness of the “go slow” attitude which Martin Luther King, Jr., deplored.

Kirk suffered setbacks in his struggle against segregation within Methodism. Looking back on 1964, after a church union commission voted to continue the segregated conference for African Americans, Kirk wrote:

On the morning of May 5, 1964, when the Church Union Commission made its report … I was completely dumbfounded. My emotions ranged from deep anger to almost uncontrollable outrage to profound sorrow. I could not believe that as late as 1964 … the Church Union Commission would be so ethnically insensitive to the feelings of United Methodist Blacks that it would offer a repetition of the tragic mistake of 1939 [when the denomination adopted a segregated structure].”

This sense of outrage and anger is currently being felt by a new generation of United Methodists activists like Kirk as they proceed in 2012 to win some battles and lose others. They are planning for a long, and ultimately successful battle.

The United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, which Kirk once directed, and which is now under the direction of Dr. Jim Winkler, came to the 2012 Conference armed with resolutions from six difference annual conferences.  They came prepared.

These UMC anti-occupation leaders coupled a boycott resolution that lacked specificity, with a divestment resolution that named names. They hoped to win on both resolutions, but they knew they could lose one or both.

The boycott resolution passed, while the divestment resolution lost. But the open discussion that followed the introduction of both resolutions exposed the issue to the wider church and to the secular public in ways that Israel does not appreciate.

None of this is really a political debate over money. It is a media war with a moral bite, a public image struggle which Israel is desperate to win and which they most certainly lost in Tampa, in spite of all the spinning by Israel’s US allies.

A boycott is a recommendation to members and churches and a moral call to the larger public. Divestment, even in the comparatively smaller sums involved in the national church’s investment funds, is the greater danger to Israel’s image. Think apartheid and South Africa.

During the heated debate over the UMC pension divestment from three corporations, speakers defending Israel warned that the Methodist church might be subject to law suits for choosing to move funds from one company to another.

That is patently false, of course, but political speeches in secular and religious circles are the same; they are designed to deceive and distort. And Methodists do like to protect the bottom line.

Then there is the matter of finally voting on a resolution. Delegates arrive at the every-four-years gathering after being elected  to represent their regional conferences; they sit together under the watchful eye of their presiding bishop, men and women with the power to transfer preachers to larger–or smaller–churches once a year.

Lay delegates also arrive after achieving personal standing in church affairs back home. Unofficial racial and age  categories are in play, though unlike the Democratic political conventions, the categories are not mandated.

But these lay delegates do reflect the perspective of the communities where they live. Imagine an attorney from a small Georgia town returning home to tell his clients he just voted to endorse same-sex marriage.  You get the picture.

The divestment vote was always a long shot.  Consider the regions–annual conferences they are called–that sent the original divestment resolutions to the General Conference: California-Pacific, Minnesota, Northern Illinois, West Ohio, New England, and Baltimore-Washington.

None of these are from what became known after the 2008 General Election as “red states”. They are all from the eastern, mid-western and far western, sections of the country, states that were called “blue states” after the election of Barack Obama.

The United Methodist Church is not a monolithic body. It is a collection of small units of churches, organized by states or sections of states, ruled over by a bishop.

The rest of the assembled 600-plus representatives backed down from supporting a strong resolution that would have divested the church’s pension funds from three US corporations, Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard and Motorola Systems, each of which is deeply involved in supporting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem.

That resolution failed after an afternoon of heated passionate speeches, and a set of parliamentary maneuvers that never gained more than 372 votes from the almost 1,000 delegates present.

By a resounding victory of 685 to 286, the Conference endorsed the UMC’s financial committee resolution which was the final shameful expression by the heirs of John Wesley that wanted to continue to embrace Israel’s theft of the land promised them back in the dim days of biblical history.

I checked with several attorneys. They assured me that there is not a court of law in the United States that would honor a biblical promise as a legal claim.  But there they were, the occasional UMC delegate, embracing that concept and voting against divestment.

Of course, not every vote against divestment came from biblical literalists. But at least one literalist got on to the floor during the debate and embraced the promise as a reason to support the occupation.

Wednesday would have been a dark day for Methodism, except for the smart move by anti-occupation delegates to add a boycott resolution to the Conference docket. The side favoring the end of occupation won one, a step forward in what is still a long journey.

Organized religion is, by definition, cautious and distressingly slow. Consider the Catholic Church, still ruled by a Pope in Rome, with rules that bar female clergy and beliefs that are far behind progressive views of human sexuality.

But as this General Conference proved, progress is possible, even in slow-moving established church bodies. Eight years ago the occupation would not have been part of the floor debate. And eight years ago, resolutions counter to the conventional and cautious attitude toward Israel would have been relegated to the final hours of the Conference where time demands would have rushed through meaningless substitute resolutions.

In 2012, a boycott resolution prevailed. A small number of church leaders and conference lay and clerical delegates found a far more receptive gathering of 1000 delegates than has ever been the case in previous General Conferences.

This slowly moving decision-making body has begun to listen to those willing to defy the majority.

All of which calls to mind an earlier United Methodist layman, and a friend of mine, W. Astor, “Bill”, Kirk, an African American church leader who made himself a courageous agitator until the Methodists finally broke the shackles of institutional racial segregation.

His story is that of a Methodist hero who saw evil for what it was and would not give up until his church agreed with him.

Bill Kirk was 89 when he died on August 13, 2011. He had served as a director of the public affairs department of the Board of Church and Society of The United Methodist Church from 1961 to 1966 and as the board’s interim top executive in 1987 and 1988.

It is this board, now directed by Jim Winkler, which was a sponsor of the divestment resolution that was presented to the 2012 General Conference just eight months after Kirk died.

In a story prepared for United Methodist News after Kirk’s death , the Rev. Dean Snyder wrote,”Bill Kirk played an historic role in ending institutional segregation in The United Methodist Church.”

Kirk’s story is that of an African-American layman determined to teach and lead his fellow Methodists to understand the evil of racial segregation.

His story, as it is told by Snyder, needs to be read in full as the 2012 United Methodist General Conference adjourns. Keep in mind that the US Supreme Court unanimously declared segregation illegal on May 15, 1954, in Brown vs. the United States.

In 1960, while serving as a professor at Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas, [Kirk] was elected secretary of the Committee of Five, a group established by the Central Jurisdiction of the Methodist Church with a mandate to end racial segregation within the denomination. The Central Jurisdiction was a structure created in 1939 to segregate African-Americans within the Methodist Church.

Overcoming discrimination was a fight he knew well. He had earned a doctorate in political science at The University of Texas at Austin — the university’s first Ph.D. awarded to an African-American.

Kirk wrote numerous papers and studies for the committee analyzing the history of segregation within the denomination and recommending strategies for ending it.

He took a decisive step against institutional racism during a discussion concerning the merger of the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren denominations at the 1964 General Conference of the Methodist Church.

Kirk, serving as an alternate delegate, moved an amendment to the proposed plan of merger, which included the continuation of the segregated church. Kirk’s amendment asked that “the Central Jurisdiction structure of the Methodist Church not be made a part of the Plan of Merger.”

In his autobiography, Kirk wrote: “On the morning of May 5, 1964, when the Church Union Commission made its report … I was completely dumbfounded. My emotions ranged from deep anger to almost uncontrollable outrage to profound sorrow. I could not believe that as late as 1964 … the Church Union Commission would be so ethnically insensitive to the feelings of United Methodist Blacks that it would offer a repetition of the tragic mistake of 1939.”

After lengthy debate, the motion, known as “The Kirk Amendment,” passed 464 to 362, establishing the denomination’s commitment to end institutional segregation.

After the 1964 General Conference, when the chair of the Committee of Five, the Rev. James S. Thomas, was elected a bishop, Kirk was elected its new chair. As chair of the Committee of Five, he helped negotiate the mergers of the Delaware and North Carolina-Virginia annual conferences of the Central Jurisdiction with overlapping annual conferences.

In 1965 when southern church leaders argued before the denomination’s Judicial Council that Jurisdictional Conferences had the right to preserve segregated conferences within their boundaries, Kirk took a three-month leave of absence from the Board of Church and Society to prepare a brief arguing that the denomination did have the authority to end segregated conferences. In his brief and oral argument, Kirk argued that the issue of segregation had become a “distinctively connectional matter.”

The Council’s 1965 Judicial Decision No. 232 states: “We have no doubt that the creation of a racially inclusive church is now a matter ‘distinctively connectional’.

In due course, a future Judicial Council (the church’s “Supreme Court”) will rule that the “issue of funding the occupation is a distinctively connectional matter.”

Bill Kirk would be pleased.

The picture of W. Astor Kirk, above, is from United Methodist News Service. The picture of the UMC General Conference was taken by Edward Linsmier for the New York Times.

The United Methodist Church has delayed a vote on a resolution on divestment from three US companies which “aid and abet”* Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

The vote was initially set for Tuesday, but has been delayed until later this week.  There is speculation among General Conference delegates in Tampa, that a move will be made to limit debate on the final resolution to two short speeches on each side.

Supporters of divestment are hopeful they will prevail. Prominent Palestinian visitors have made convincing speeches in meetings around the Conference. The outcome, however, remains uncertain.

Meanwhile, while we wait, let us use our time creatively by pondering another vote scheduled in the US in November.

That would be the election between the incumbent US President, Barack Obama, and the presumed Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.  That election offers an ominous connection to the resolution process currently facing  United Methodist delegates in Tampa.

The November election campaign has begun. President Obama made a surprise trip to Afghanistan overnight Tuesday where he was greeted by US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Lt. General Mike Scaparrotti, Deputy Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan. (picture above.)

The President addressed an American television audience from an American air base in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday night. He said that he had “traveled here to herald a new era in the relationship between the United States and Afghanistan, “a future in which war ends, and a new chapter begins.”

In Kabul, Obama signed a ten-year strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan. That agreement has been the subject of extended discussions over the past several months.

No doubt, the trip was also designed to bring attention  to the one year anniversary of the successful US removal of Osama bin Laden from the political scene.

Monday, presumptive candidate Romney, eager to downplay the one-year anniversary, exposed his gross ignorance of the politics of the Middle East in an off the cuff response to a journalist’s question about  bin Laden.

His quick response, while shaking hands with supporters, was a flippant remark about former President Jimmy Carter.

His comment was too much for one of America’s leading Muslim authorities, Juan Cole, who blogs at Informed Comment. Cole, author of  Engaging the Muslim World,  is a Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

Professor Cole wrote on his blog:

“Mitt Romney said Monday that of course, he would have taken out Bin Laden and that “even Jimmy Carter would have made that call.’

Since Jimmy Carter ordered a brave and risky but failed military mission into Iran, that was a cheap shot on the part of someone who has never had anything to do with the military.

Moreover, Jimmy Carter made peace between Egypt and Israel and played a major role in reducing the number of Africans stricken by the Guinea worm from 3.5 million to 1,100. So Romney, who has mainly been sending our jobs overseas, isn’t good enough to shine Carter’s shoes.”

Cole is not a partisan politician. He is a careful, passionate scholar. But he is obviously worried about the 2012 presidential campaign, which could lead to a President Mitt Romney. In his blog, Cole offered this Romney gem from a Republican primary debate in 2007:

Romney: We’ll move everything to get him. But I don’t want to buy into the Democratic pitch that this is all about one person — Osama bin Laden — because after we get him, there’s going to be another and another.

This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and Al Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate.

They ultimately want to bring down the United States of America.

Mull over the political ignorance and simplicity exposed in that comment. To Romney, Muslims are all alike, “Shia and Sunni, Hezbollah and Hamas and Al Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood.’

There is more from Tuesday ‘s blog posting from a clearly agitated Professor Cole as  he considers the presence of  a President Romney in the White House:

The real problem with Romney is not that he would not have taken out Bin Laden. It is that he sees the Muslim world as in the grip of a congeries of pan-Islamic Caliphate movements against which he wants to wage a Mormon jihad with trillions of dollars of taxpayer money.

But in fact almost none of the movements he mentions has anything to do with al-Qaeda or a Caliphate. Romney supported Hosni Mubarak to the hilt and opposed the Arab Spring. He doesn’t understand the youth movements sweeping the Arab world. He lumps all kinds of unrelated, and changing, Muslim movements together with al-Qaeda.

He doesn’t even seem to understand that if he works to get rid of the al-Assad regime in Syria, he likely will be bringing the Muslim Brotherhood to power there, one of the groups he is sworn to fight as fiercely as he would Bin Laden.

The problem with Romney is that when it comes to the Muslim world, he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he is talking about, and seems intent on alienating 1.5 billion Muslims, a fifth of the world. He wanted to substitute a crazy conspiracy theory for a tactical approach to getting Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership.

In this regard, the Obama campaign has correctly nailed him, but they haven’t gone far enough in emphasizing the truly creepy character of his [Romney's] obsession with Muslims in general, far beyond the fringe al-Qaeda element.

How does this political campaign resonate with the United Methodist General Conference?

As a start, the two issues are joined with strong feelings on each side.

Delegates to the General Conference prepared a divestment resolution to submit to the committee responsible for considering financial matters. The resolution had been developed from resolutions from several national agencies and seven regional conferences.

The divestment resolution offered a small step toward supporting Palestinian freedom from Israel’s occupation. The resolution was narrowly focused to avoid entering a complex political issue with a simplistic solution.

As submitted, the resolution says:

The 2012 General Conference calls on The United Methodist Church to end its financial involvement in Israel’s occupation by divesting from companies that sustain the occupation.  The 2012 General Conference:

*calls for all United Methodist general boards and agencies to divest promptly from Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions, and Hewlett Packard until they end their involvement in the Israeli occupation. These companies have been engaged repeatedly by the United Methodist general agencies, boards and annual conferences on this issue.”

Unlike Candidate Romney, there was no off-handed display of ignorance. Instead, the resolution was a forthright request that United Methodist pension funds be withdrawn from three US companies which had refused to cease participating in the occupation.

The response from the financial committee–I kid you not, gentle readers–was to gut the original and deliver to the General Conference a resolution that sounds familiar from previous Protestant “go slow” resolutions:

The 2012 General Conference calls on the General Board of Pensions and Health Benefits to explore serious peacemaking strategies in Israel and Palestine, including positive economic and financial investment in Palestine.

Delegates who shaped the original divestment resolution promptly brought back their original resolution as a minority report. The conflicting resolutions, the Financial Committee solution–invest in Palestine, not divest from Israel’s occupation–and he original divest resolution, will do battle later this week.

President Jimmy Carter, by the way, has expressed his support for the original divestment approach. He is a Southern Baptist, which means he is not in attendance at the United Methodist General Conference. But his spirit remains with the divestment delegates.

Back on the political campaign trail, Mitt Romney continues with his personal attacks on President Obama, while the President uses Air Force One and his bully White House pulpit to strike back.

We can look forward to a long and  hot summer of shallow charges and counter charges designed to play on the emotions of competing factions.

And, oh yes, don’t forget to prepare for the next national religious gathering where another divestment resolution (citing the same three US companies) will be considered by the Presbyterian Church in the US.

The Episcopal Church will meet later this summer in its national gathering. Thus far, there is no sign that a resolution on divestments will trouble the Episcopal Church’s sedate waters.

The photograph above of President Obama arriving in Afghanistan, is from the AOL home page.

*–The term “aid and abet”, used in the opening paragraph above, is defined by West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, as

“To assist another in the commission of a crime by words or conduct. The person who aids and abets participates in the commission of a crime by performing some Overt Act or by giving advice or encouragement. He or she must share the criminal intent of the person who actually commits the crime, but it is not necessary for the aider and abettor to be physically present at the scene of the crime. An aider and abettor is a party to a crime and may be criminally liable as a principal, an Accessory before the fact, or an accessory after the fact.”

The mainstream media does not know it, and far too many high steeple church folk do not want to know it.

But in Tampa, Florida, this week, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church will make a decision.

They will spend the week writing and rewriting. Some, like  Alissa Bertsch Johnson, a campus minister at Washington State University (at right), will passionately state their case.

Before the gavel falls on the last session of the 2012 General Conference, the people called Methodists will have responded, one way or another, to the call from Palestinian Christians that they take one small step toward ending the Israeli Occupation.

They may vote to endorse a targeted divestment resolution.

Or, they may declare that such action is not needed, forgetting that in doing so, they follow the path of those segregation-tolerating Birmingham church leaders who wrote to Martin Luther King, Jr., in words to this effect, “it is too soon to attack this evil. We must wait until our people are with us.”

A half century since King died in his battle with the evil of racism, we are still waiting for the end of  yet another manifestation of racism, one which continues to be tolerated, and even worse, financially sponsored, by the spiritual heirs of those earlier Birmingham church divines to whom King wrote his historic letter from a Birmingham jail.

In Martin Luther King, Jr’s, time, the “go slow” church leaders tolerated the evil that was in Selma, Alabama, the suburbs of Chicago, and the dark, frightening country roads of Mississippi.

In our time, “go slow” religious leaders refuse to see the evil of a so-called security barrier, a wall built not for Israel’s security, but as a land-stealing, prison enclosure, of the Palestinian people.

The “go slow” church leaders, and the parishioners they lead, choose not to acknowledge that the evil of Selma, Alabama, the South Side of Chicago, or the country roads of Mississippi, are still with us in Palestine where US church funds are used to build and maintain an Occupation.

The final United Methodist divestment vote will involve a resolution that instructs the church’s financial managers to divest from three American corporations that have refused to cease from profiting from the Occupation.

Israel’s supporters who have infiltrated the United Methodist legislative body, both as delegates and observers, are waging the divestment effort with half truths and outright lies, the same tactic used by secular politicians for whom  truth-speaking is an unknown language.

During the first week of the General Conference, delegates met in committees and sub committees to hassle over the wording of the final resolution. Occupation supporters want language in the resolution they can spin in their favor.

Above all, they want to remove the term “divestment”, which evokes the image of Israel as a modern day South Africa. In the past, one way to avoid this image is to employ evasive language like “constructive engagement”.

The winner of the resolution game will be the side that can spin the final action with its own special twist that produces a victory headline.

No matter how you spin it, as James Carville once said in an earlier political conflict, “its the Occupation, stupid”.

Opponents of the divestment resolution claim the church is endorsing a “boycott” of Israel. On the contrary, this resolution has nothing to do with boycotting. It is a divestment resolution that controls how the church invests its own funds, period.

Remember well the names of the three corporations which refused to listen to those for whom “going slow” has meant a continuation of humiliation and suffering.

They refused to listen to the case delegations of United Methodists have made to them to stop supporting the Occupation. Call this step, the failure of “constructive engagement”.

After several of these failed efforts to persuade the three corporations to cease and desist from  causing the suffering of others, activist United Methodists decided  to write specific divestment resolutions.

These resolutions were debated in local churches, then taken before regional conferences, and finally, this week, presented  to the United Methodists’ highest legislative body, the General Conference.

The three US corporations targeted by this resolution are Caterpillar, Hewlitt Packard and Motorola, each of whom heard the pleas for support from Palestine, and hearing, passed by on the other side of the road.

United Methodists cannot halt the brutalization of the Palestinian people carried out by the Occupation.

Nor can they end the downfall of the state of Israel, a downfall most certain to take place unless this illegal and inhumane Occupation ends. No one knows this better than Jews who love Israel and hate what the Occupation does to both the Israelis and Palestinians.

Look not to the mainstream media for news of the internal conflict within world Judaism over this issue. Go instead to the internet and foreign media, and there you will find that the conflict is joined.

A respected Jewish writer and former New Republic editor, Peter Bienart, wrote a book he called The Crisis of Zionism, a plea for Israel to wake up from its nightmare of Palestinian oppression. He was viciously attacked by  neo-conservatives and right-wing Jews.

Ha’aretz knows that New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman steers clear of  this topic. His speciality is economics, not politics. But Ha’aretz reported a blog comment from Krugman which revealed his support for Beinart.

Paul Krugman believes that the policies of the current “narrow minded” Israeli government “are basically a gradual long-run form of national suicide.”

Writing in his New York Times blog “Conscience of a Liberal” about Peter Beinart’s controversial book The Crisis of Zionism, Krugman writes, “Like many liberal American Jews I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going.

It seems obvious from here that the narrow-minded policies of the current government are basically a gradual, long-run form of national suicide – and that’s bad for Jews everywhere, not to mention the world.”

The battle also rages within the highest Israeli political circles.

Ha’aretz reports that former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin harshly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Friday during a meeting with residents of the city of Kfar Sava, Israel.

Diskin said the pair “is not worthy of leading the country”.

“My major problem is that I have no faith in the current leadership, which must lead us in an event on the scale of war with Iran or a regional war,” Diskin told the “Majdi Forum,” a group of local residents that meets to discuss political issues.

He also addressed the issue of racism in Israel.

“Over the past 10-15 years Israel has become more and more racist. All of the studies point to this. This is racism toward Arabs and toward foreigners, and we are also become a more belligerent society.”

Why do United Methodist delegates have to ponder more than a few seconds to realize that for the UMC to continue to support Israel’s Occupation with church funds, places the denomination on the wrong side of  the battle for Israel’s soul.

Israeli blogger Larry Derfner writes a post this week, “Israelis are living in a fear society, not a free society”, which is another reminder that the Occupation is not in the best interest of either Israelis or Palestinians.

Enabling a “fear society” is not the way American religious communities can best serve the cause of either peace or justice.

British Parliamentarian William Wilberforce, whose political activism had been influenced by John Wesley, did not end slavery, but he did finally persuade  the British Parliament to end the slave trade from British seaports.

It took him several decades to end the trade. During those decades, many slaves were transported to America from Africa as the British Parliament followed the political “go slow” policy in which evil flourishes.

American politicians, bought and paid for by forces that reward them for their absolute loyalty to the current right-wing Israeli government, have closed their minds, and most certainly, their hearts, to the injustices of the Occupation.

One day, when these politicians look back on their period of political service, they may recognize the evil they sponsored.  And one day, when United Methodist delegates to the 2012 General Conference look back on how they voted on the divestment resolution, they will realize how their vote will follow them into the Hereafter.

And there, I truly do hope they will be invited to one of Brother John Wesley’s heavenly society meetings where they will be confronted by the reality of the evil Occupation they tolerated for the sake of what they liked to call, “the delicate fabric of interfaith relations”.

What Wesley will say to them about that delicate fabric is chilling to contemplate.

A good preparation for watching how the United Methodist General Conference delegates will conduct themselves in the week ahead, is to spend some time attending to a 25 minute newscast discussion produced by Al Jazeera.

You will find appearances by former President Jimmy Carter, two Jewish panelists, Max Blumenthal and MJ Rosenberg, and Walt Davis, a major leader in the Presbyterian Church, the second Protestant denomination to vote on a divestment resolution during their national meeting this summer.

In his brief appearance at the start of the newscast, President Carter corrected the Al Jazeera host who surprisingly used the lie that Israel wants the world to hear, “boycott”, in describing the United Methodist and Presbyterian resolutions, neither of which use the term.

Carter points out, in his careful manner, that the two denominations are calling on their own leaders to divest from three US corporations. He quietly notes that they are not calling for a boycott of the Israeli economy. It is obvious that Carter follows this issue closely.

Click on the screens below to view two videos. Watch them in segments, if you prefer. But watch them.

The picture at the top of this posting of Alissa Bertsch Johnson, a campus minister at Washington State University, is from the United Methodist News Service.

“Throw Their Dirty, Filthy Ships Out of the Water!”

In the 2006 movie, Amazing Grace, John Newton shouts these words at William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament who was the leader of  a 19th century fight to  force the British government to bar British ships and ports from participating in the slave trade.

The “dirty, filthy ships” to which Newton refers are slave ships which sailed from England to Africa and then to the New World.

Newton (Albert Finney) delivers his demand to his younger friend Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) at a time when the younger man was faltering in his struggle against pro-slavery members of  Parliament

This conflict is captured in precise and dramatic detail in the film, as Wilberforce and his allies in the Parliament, and from anti-slavery groups, visit slave ships and meet with former slaves.

John Newton had been the owner and captain of one of those ships. Following a major storm in the Atlantic that almost sank his ship, Newton repented of what he knew was a great sin, the mistreatment of fellow human beings.

Newton returned to England to become what he later termed, “an old preacher”.  He also wrote hymns, the most famous of which was Amazing Grace, which contains the line, “I once was lost but now I am found, was blind, but now I see”.

Newton had known Wilberforce for many years, constantly encouraging him to continue his long struggle to bar all slave ships from English ports.

Pro-slavery members of Parliament resisted Wilberforce’s demand to end the slave shipping trade. Their reasons? The practice provided economic benefit to England, while other   members maintained that slaves were content with their lot. The more extreme opponents with whom Wilberforce had to contend, made the argument that slaves were sub-human.

Britain had never permitted slavery within its borders.  Any slave who landed in Britain was immediately set free.

Slavery was permitted  in overseas British territories until Parliament passed the Act of Abolition in 1833, abolishing slavery in all British territories.

There was little demand for slaves in England. There was, however, considerable demand for slaves to work on Britain’s large farming plantations in the territories.

Amazing Grace, directed by Michael Apted, traces the friendship of Wilberforce and Newton.  It also examines Wilberforce’s growth as a political leader, and not so incidentally, as a friend of William Pitt, his friend who became Prime Minister at the age of 24.

Pitt was a cautious politician. He was also a supporter of Wilberforce’s idealism. Another important historical figure who is not portrayed in the film, is John Wesley

When I revisited the film this week, less than a week before the United Methodist Conference opens, I was struck by a historical parallel, and most especially, I was moved by Newton’s violent outburst to Wilberforce. (Click on the video at top to see a trailer for the film, Amazing Grace. The full length film is available on DVD.)

I found myself thinking, we are well past time to “throw this dirty, filthy Occupation out of United Methodist waters”.

Of course, historical parallels are never exact. But it is not unusual for us to see moments from the past resonating with moments of the present.

The current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is never reluctant to link the Holocaust as a moment in time which constantly threatens to reappear whenever a political action fails to go to his liking.

The matter of Iran’s alleged development of nuclear arms, is a case in point.

I find sufficient evil in Israel’s Occupation to justify a connection between Britain’s 19th century approval of slavery, on economic grounds, and the American support of an Israeli Occupation which continues to imprison the Palestinian population.

On Tuesday of this upcoming week, April 24, the United Methodist Church (UMC) begins its ten-day Quadrennial General Conference (GC) in Tampa, Florida.

High on the legislative agenda of GC is a resolution, Aligning United Methodist Investments with Resolutions on Israel/Palestine.

Contrary to the many deliberately misleading descriptions of this resolution, it is designed to do exactly what it says in its title, “align its church investments with previous resolutions on Israel/Palestine”.

The divestment resolution does not call for a boycott of the state of Israel. It is narrowly focused,  an internal church document which mandates that the church’s financial managers (the General Board of Pensions) divest all church fund investments in three American companies that directly support Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian West Bank.

The three companies are Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard and Motorola, a specificity that emerges from more than eight years of study, dialogue with these companies and considerable debate in local “annual conferences”, many of which sent their own versions of the divestment resolution to the GC.

The process is quite methodical, appropriately enough, for a denomination that mirrors the practices of the 18th century Methodist societies which were derisively labeled “methodists” by the Anglican hierarchy, which branded “methodists” as outliers to the established Church of England.

It was this Church that, among other things, banned John Wesley from pulpits of the Church of England, the body in which John and his brother Charles Wesley (author of many hymns) were ordained.

This led the Wesleys to take to fields and tree stumps to proclaim a fresh, new message of salvation and methodical practices that emphasized discipline,  personal spiritual growth and social action against sin.

The Wesley brothers instructed their followers to see the Christian faith as an instruction manual for social justice, including Wesley’s strong opposition to the immoral practice of slavery.

Wesley despised slavery. He also knew the work of Wilbur Wilberforce and had followed his career as a politician fighting an uphill battle against the evils of slavery.

The last letter that John Wesley wrote before his death in 1791, was to William Wilberforce, who earlier had been converted under Wesley’s ministry.

Wesley wrote to Wilberforce on February 24, 1791, eight days before Wesley’s death on March 2, 1791. The letter encourages Wilberforce to continue his fight against slavery.

The letter begins with a Latin phrase, Athanasius contra mundum, which translates as “Athanasius against the world”.

Wesley was a theologian to the end. Even in his final letter, he could not resist recalling one of his favorite themes.

Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296-373 AD) was a early church father who was a vigorous opponent of Arianism (an early Church heresy that taught that Jesus was a subservient and created being).

Here, in its entirety, is Wesley’s final written words, addressed to William Wilberforce:

Dear Sir:

Unless the divine power has raised you us [sic] to be as Athanasius contra mundum, [emphasis added] I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature.

Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be fore you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.

Reading this morning a tract wrote [sic] by a poor African, I was particularly struck by that circumstance that a man who has a black skin, being wronged or outraged by a white man, can have no redress; it being a “law” in our colonies that the oath of a black against a white goes for nothing. What villainy is this?

That he who has guided you from youth up may continue to strengthen you in this and all things, is the prayer of, dear sir,

Your affectionate servant,
John Wesley

I propose no firm historical linkage between slavery and Occupation, but I do propose a linkage between the demand for action called for by John Newton against slavery, and the passage of a divestment resolution by United Methodist General Conference delegates as a 21st century demand for the UMC to halt its financial support of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people.

It is well past time to “throw this dirty, filthy Occupation out of United Methodist waters”.

The clip from the film Amazing Grace, may be found at http://www.amazinggracemovie.com/ .

Israel’s ambassador to the US, former American citizen Michael Oren, (at right) trotted out a classic Zionist strategy when he sent a letter to the New York Times  denying that Israel is “interfering” in the American presidential campaign.

Oren’s letter was reported in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on April 12, under the headline:

“Israeli ambassador to New York Times: Netanyahu does not interfere in U.S. elections”

This Ha’aretz headline was followed by a sub headline, stating:

Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, submits letter to the editor to NYT, complaining about  an article detailing the close relationship between Netanyahu and likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

The problem with Oren’s attack is that the Times story did not use the term “interfering”. The ambassador denies something the story does not claim.

Oren’s letter skillfully ignores the facts of the story under a theoretical cloud of his own making. He also manages to bring attention to his Israeli public to a story which promises good things ahead if Romney is elected.

The facts of the Times story which Oren distorts are that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Republican presumptive presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, have a long-standing personal relationship.

The implication of the Times story is that if Romney is elected US president, the Israeli Prime Minister will have a pal in the White House. To Israelis and to Israeli loyalists in the US, this is good news.

By calling attention to the story with his faux outrage, the Ambassador is playing the role of police official Captain Renault (Claude Rains) who confronts his friend, nightclub owner, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) in the 1942 World War era film, Casablanca.

Captain Renault tells Rick he will close his club.

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
[aloud]
Captain Renault: Everybody out at once!

Of course the Israeli government interferes in US politics and the presidential race is the big kahuna. Israel’s domestic US warriors, led by the heavy-hitters from AIPAC, are deeply embedded in the 2012 elections.

Ambassador Oren knows it; everyone who pays attention knows it. But like the nuclear arsenal Israel has built in the Israeli desert, the media and politicians do not speak of it. They do not want to be branded as anti-Israel.

Who better than an American-Israeli academic turned government official than Michael Oren, to carry Israel’s cause into US domestic politics even as he does not speak openly of the patently obvious.

Why is Michael Oren a natural for his job as ambassador?

A flattering Times profile of the new Ambassador described his background when he was appointed in September, 2009.

Born in upstate New York, raised in suburban New Jersey and educated at Columbia and Princeton Universities, Mr. Oren considers himself genuinely American.

But having lived most of his adult life in Israel — serving multiple tours in the Israeli Army, once as a paratrooper during the 1982 Lebanon war — he also considers himself genuinely Israeli.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, who also spent parts of his youth in the US, chose Oren for his new position for moments like this one, as the presidential race is finally narrowed down to Obama versus Romney. 

Oren’s training for this post began in childhood.

The Times profile looks back to those early formative years:

Mr. Oren’s fervent Zionism dates from his childhood, though it was hardly inevitable. He grew up as Michael Bornstein in a conservative, but not politically active, family in West Orange, N.J. His father was the director of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

At 15, Mr. Oren told his parents he wanted to move to Israel to work on a kibbutz. His parents were aghast, but they did not stop him when he talked his way into a job on an alfalfa farm, even though he was two years shy of the minimum age.

A job as a cowboy on the Golan Heights followed, as well as athletic glory as an oarsman in the Maccabiah Games, where thousands of Jewish athletes from around the world compete every four years.

Steeped in the double speak of US politics, the Ambassador is skilled at the classic political tactic, which Zionist operatives have long utilized, of denying facts that do not exist, and then diverting attention from those manufactured facts to a different topic.

I once worked for a charming editorial director who had his own unique style in pursuing the same tactic.

Faced with unpleasant facts he would say, “What else do you want to talk about?” As the boss, he set the agenda, especially when he spoke with younger underlings.

Ambassador Oren had to renounce his American citizenship to accept his appointment as Israel’s man in Washington. Was that difficult?  You be the judge.

This is how Oren explained his decision in the 2009 Times profile by Mark Landler:

For Michael B. Oren, the hardest thing about becoming Israel’s ambassador to the United States was giving up his American citizenship, a solemn ritual that involves signing an oath of renunciation.

He said he got through it with the help of friends from the American Embassy in Tel Aviv who “stayed with me, and hugged me when it was over.”

After those reassuring hugs in Tel Aviv, newly recruited Israeli citizen Oren has dutifully adhered to whatever script his Tel Aviv bosses dictate, which is what an ambassador is supposed to do.

Oren’s background and his intense loyalty to his new country, provide the right mix of Zionism and American savvy which Israel needs as pressure builds on Israel to finally embrace the democratic ideals it claims to possess.

Ambassador Oren has yet to weigh in on the German Nobel prize winning author Gunter Grass episode.

But rest assured, if Time and Newsweek had not adhered to the Zionist script when reporting on the “furor” over the Grass poem, This Must be Said, Oren would have been all over the editors of those leading national weeklies.

Those two publications already knew how to respond. They joined with the international media mob that presented the Grass story as a battle between the righteous Israeli government and a “Nazi-tainted” Grass.

To Israel and the media mob that covered the story, the fact that Grass, as a 17-year-old soldier entered the SS, rules him ineligible to criticize Israel.

The Time and Newsweek stories followed the script by omitting the central point of  This Must Be Said, the fact that a prominent German author chose to risk his public reputation by writing and publishing a poem that reveals in public, that which is not to be said.

Israel has built a nuclear arsenal that contains between 200 and 400 deliverable nuclear bombs.

This arsenal was developed in secret with no outside inspection, exactly the same inspection the West is demanding Iran allow as it develops its own power-oriented nuclear program.

That was obviously the big news out of the Grass poem. Instead the media mob focused on whether or not Grass had written a “good poem” (over night, journalists have become art critics?), or whether Grass had, like many young men of his generation, served in an SS unit.

The lead to the Grass story is the fact, which news reports and analysis still refused to acknowledge, namely, the revelation by a prominent German artist, that Israel has conspired with the rest of the world to hide the fact that it is a major nuclear threat to world peace.

At the moment, US public opinion is still far behind  the rest of the western world, though elites–those who run and shape media, politics, and religion– in the US and elsewhere, remain largely under the spell of Zionism.

Ambassador Oren’s job in Washington is not as difficult as the task facing Israel’s European ambassadors who must explain Israel’s conduct to a growing dubious public.

Nicholas Kulish began his New York Times analysis with this description of the growing division between elites and the general German public.

To judge by the outpouring of comments from politicians and writers and from the newspaper and magazine articles in response to the Nobel laureate Günter Grass’s poem criticizing Israel’s aggressive posture toward Iran, it would appear that the public had resoundingly rejected his work.

But even a quick dip into the comments left by readers on various Web sites reveals quite another reality.

Mr. Grass has struck a nerve with the broader public, articulating frustrations with Israel here in Germany that are frequently expressed in private but rarely in public, where the discourse is checked by the lingering presence of the past.

What might have remained at the family dinner table or the local bar a generation ago is today on full display, not only in Mr. Grass’s poem, but on Web forums and in Facebook groups.

The US public is stirring, but remains largely indifferent to the conduct of Israel.  That inattention makes it easier for Prime Minister Netanyahu to take advantage of the fact that US public attention is currently diverted to the presidential campaign.

Taking advantage of the diversion, Netanyahu is doing what he always does. He steps up his settlement program in the West Bank.

The Christian Science Monitor reported this week:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is moving to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank at a time when international attention is focused elsewhere, with President Obama gearing up for reelection and the West targeting Iran’s nuclear program.

Last week, the Netanyahu government took a variety of steps that, taken together, amount to a significant strengthening of Israel’s hold in the West Bank, the biblically resonant territory occupied in 1967, which Palestinians claim as the heartland for their future state.

For Netanyahu, who heads a right-wing coalition with a strong pro-settler contingent, it was a delicate dance of one small step back and six larger steps forward for settlements.

Facts on the ground are always easier to establish as permanent realities while the media and its constituents are looking the other way.

The  picture of Ambassador Oren is by Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times.

The picture from Berlin shows a German citizen announcing his belief that ”Grass hat recht (Grass is right)” It is by Boris Roessler/DPA, via Agence France-Presse – Getty Image.

The still picture of Bogart and Rains is from the film, Casablanca.

A stunning new poem by German novelist Gunter Grass, has “broken the silence” on Israel as a nuclear power.

Western journalists and politicians have long enforced that silence by unspoken and unwritten common agreement.

The silence was successfully imposed for two reasons: The Holocaust and the fear of being called anti-Semitic.

Gunter Grass (pictured above) has broken that silence with his poem, Was gesagt werden muss (What must be said).

Grass is a major figure in German literature. He speaks with considerable authority through his extensive and innovative writing. He is considered one of Germany’s major novelists.

The press release announcing his 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature begins:

When Günter Grass published The Tin Drum in 1959 it was as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction.

Within the pages of this, his first novel, Grass recreated the lost world from which his creativity sprang, Danzig, his home town, as he remembered it from the years of his infancy before the catastrophe of war.

Here he comes to grips with the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them.

In 1979, The Tin Drum reached a world audience through a film of the same title, by German Director Volker Schlöndorff. The novel, which was brilliantly reproduced in the film, was praised by the Nobel Committee because  of the way in which it:

Breaks the bounds of realism by having as its protagonist and narrator an infernal intelligence in the body of a three-year-old, a monster who overpowers the fellow human beings he approaches with the help of a toy drum.

The unforgettable Oskar Matzerath is an intellectual whose critical approach is childishness, a one-man carnival, dadaism in action in everyday German provincial life just when this small world becomes involved in the insanity of the great world surrounding it.

It is not too audacious to assume that The Tin Drum will become one of the enduring literary works of the 20th century.

Now, over a decade into the 21st century, Gunter Grass decides that Israel must be stopped from self-destruction before it is too late.

Through this deep concern, Grass wrote his poem, This Must Be Said,  breaking decades of silence. Grass, now 84, says in the poem that he wrote with his “last ink”.

The entire poem may be read, and should be read, in its entirety. Click here for an English translation, or scroll down to the Comment section for the full text of the poem.

Here, as an introduction, are the first three sections of the poem:

Why have I kept silent, silent for too long
over what is openly played out
in war games at the end of which we
the survivors are at best footnotes.

It’s that claim of a right to first strike
against those who under a loudmouth’s thumb
are pushed into organized cheering—
a strike to snuff out the Iranian people
on suspicion that under his influence
an atom bomb’s being built.

But why do I forbid myself
to name that other land in which
for years—although kept secret—
a usable nuclear capability has grown
beyond all control, because
no scrutiny is allowed.  .  .  . 

Later in the poem, Grass writes that the country with a nuclear arsenal that “has grown beyond all control, because no scrutiny is allowed”, is the modern state of Israel.

That lack of scrutiny of Israel’s nuclear arsenal has provided Israel with carte blanc to occupy Palestinian land, and to literally imprison the Palestinian people, all under the pretense of a need for the “security” of a nuclear armed Israel.

This same lack of scrutiny has also given Israel the freedom to function “behind the scenes” to shape the foreign policy of the West, a policy implemented by successive American governments trapped in the vise-like control of Israel’s two sacrosanct iron fists: The Holocaust and anti-Semitism.

How has Israel responded to Grass’ poem? It has followed their usual pattern, reacting with classic Israeli paranoid rhetoric.

First out of the box was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said Israel will not tolerate anyone with credibility and a public platform, who exposes the truth of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

Only he does not say it that way, for that would be an admission of the unsayable, that Israel does indeed have such an arsenal.

In a statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned German Nobel laureate Gunter Grass for his “shameful moral equivalence”.

“Gunter Grass’s shameful moral equivalence between Israel and Iran, a regime that denies the Holocaust and threatens to annihilate Israel, says little about Israel and much about Mr. Grass,” Netanyahu said.

This reaction is the classic Israeli response when a cover story is exposed as false: Never deny, always attack and divert.

Netanyahu cannot deny the truth of  Grass’ poem, so he attacks the messenger, first by condemning him, and then declaring him persona non grata in Israel, a country which Grass says in his poem, is a country “to which I am and will remain attached”.

Grass also has his supporters. Jakob Augstein, a columnist for the leading German newspaper, Der Spiegel  writes:

The brief lines that Günter Grass has published under the title “What Must Be Said” will one day be seen as some of his most influential words. They mark a rupture.

It is this one sentence that we will not be able to ignore in the future: “The nuclear power Israel is endangering a world peace that is already fragile.”

It is a sentence that has triggered an outcry. Because it is true. Because it is a German, an author, a Nobel laureate who said it. Because it is Günter Grass who said it.

And therein lies the breach. And, for that, one should thank Grass. He has taken it upon himself to utter this sentence for all of us.

The New York Times reported the story entirely from Israel’s perspective. In the story on the poem, the Times ignored the truthfulness of the poem and focused instead on the “controversy” it stirred up.

Why should we expect anything different? It is the Times, after all, that has been a major player in the “protect Israel’s narrative” campaign.

We have seen before how Israel manipulates any story it deems a threat.

In 2009, the Goldstone Report revealed the details of Israel’s massive slaughter of citizens in Gaza, a three week assault carried out in the name of Israeli security.

In the initial report from a UN panel chaired by Judge Richard Goldstone an eminent South African jurist experienced in tackling war crimes cases and himself an avid Jewish Zionist, concluded “that Israel had committed multiple war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during its 2008-09 invasion.”

Did Israel deny the Goldstone Report? Of course not. The evidence was too overwhelming. Rather than confront the truth of Goldstone’s findings, Judge Goldstone was hauled off to South Africa, his native land, where he held personal meetings with rabbis there.

Soon, Judge Goldstone had second thoughts. He wrote a Washington Post op ed in which he famously said

“If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

The Palestine Chronicle examines further the aftermath:

Goldstone does not with any clarity explain what he means by this sentence. Paradoxically and shamefully for the judge, the more we know about the Gaza massacre, the more accurate the Goldstone Report appears – not less.

We may never know why Goldstone changed his position – it is certainly not the result of new revelations refuting the report’s validity, irrespective of what he implied in his article.

We know that he had been the subject of an international smear campaign of unprecedented dimensions and nastiness. Maybe the pressure was simply too much for him.

But even in this case, it is hard to understand why he caved in now. In fact, attempts to discredit the Goldstone Report themselves been been discredited over the past year.

Did Goldstone succumb to pressure or threats? No one knows.

What we do know for sure is that a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks has Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, saying that Israel was facing “three principal threats: Iran’s nuclear [programme], missile proliferation and the Goldstone Report.”

The Goldstone Report was the 2009-10 du jour “threat to Israel”.

Today the du jour “threat to Israel” is Gunter Grass and his poem, What Must be Said.

The threat is always there to Israel.  The threat changes as Netanyahu, or whoever governs Israel at the time, sees a new threat to Israel’s long-protected narrative of why Israel is never wrong.

Any sign that anyone is breaking ranks on the silence surrounding that  narrative, which has long included  development of a nuclear arsenal in Dimona, Israel, must suffer personal attacks.

Israel is all that matters to Israel, regardless of the consequences to others. Unfortunately, thanks to AIPAC and its army of strong-armed warriors assigned to control US government officials and church leaders, the silence is rarely broken in US domestic politics.

Three US Protestant denominations, the United Methodists, Presbyterian Church, and the Episcopal Church, in that order, will hold national decision-making conferences between April 24 and mid-July.

These denominational leaders will attend to church business, budgets, reports, and honoring their retirees, that sort of thing. This year each body will also take up the matter of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. 

The United Methodists and Presbyterians will consider resolutions which are both the result of many years of conversation and study, and will then ask officials to agree to divesting church funds from three corporations which have refused church requests to stop providing products that enable the Occupation to continue.

The Episcopal Church is about five to eight years behind the United Methodists and Presbyterians.  All they are asking this time around is for Episcopalians to consider how Palestinians are suffering under Occupation. And of course, to celebrate the importance of Jewish/Christian relations.

Even that is too much for the Episcopalians, which seem thus far to be following the leadership of their Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who has encouraged her constituents to have conversations and break bread with their local Jewish neighbors.

What has rankled Episcopalians, however, is that in their mild resolution on Israel/Palestine, a special Episcopal version of a study book entitled Steadfast Hope, is recommended for local church study.

Steadfast Hope has something positive to say about the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) strategy. It does not call for adopting that strategy.  It simply suggests BDS  be studied.

For more on this discussion, see this recent posting from Wall Writings. I especially urge readers to scroll down for the follow-up comments.

I believe Gunter Grass, without knowing it, was speaking to all those gullible Protestants who still believe that the tactic of a nonviolent protest of divesting church funds from corporations that support the Occupation, is not good for Israel.

BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is also not a threat to the “fragile interfaith” relationship between Protestants and Jews.

Delegates to the upcoming church decision-making conferences should read Gunter Grass’ poem. He is speaking truth to you,  just as he is speaking truth to Israel. 

Like Sampson of old, Israel is agitating to have the US join with it to pull down those pillars and destroy huge sections of this planet in a nuclear holocaust.

Grass chose to break his own self-imposed silence because he believes Israel needs an “intervention”, a process whereby people who truly love their spiritual homeland, will persuade Israel that it is currently embarked on a suicidal course of action, harmful to itself and to others.

An “intervention” is designed to save that which we love.  At the moment, Israel is veering dangerously close to the Sampson Option.(See Seymour Hersh’s 1991 book of that name.

Grass does not want to see a nuclear-armed Israel destroy itself and threaten  further the already “fragile” world peace. 

Neither should we. A nonviolent step like BDS is the least we can do to play a role in Israel’s “intervention”.

Correction: Earlier versions of this posting described Grass as Jewish.  He is not. This error has been corrected in the version above.  I regret this error. JMW

(New Comments Posted Below)

An appalling shallowness has descended over Mainline Protestantism.

Episcopalians, United Methodists and Presbyterians are actually debating how they should deal with the Israeli Occupation

Martin Luther King, sitting in that Birmingham city jail, would most certainly inform these prelates that there is no debating evil. A brutal military occupation is not open to debate.

It is a disturbing spectacle. The collective ignorance displayed by many of the men and women—though, thank God, not all—who govern these denominations, boggles the mind.

The issue, my dear Christian friends, is justice, pure and simple. And yet, there they are, these robed religiosos, dripping with interfaith piety, proclaiming that the simple act of divestment of church funds is too harsh a tactic to use against Israel’s settlement obsessed, right-wing government.

What do they teach in seminary these days? Have those Old Testament professors who lead their Israeli-sanctioned “study groups” to the Holy Land removed the prophets from their syllabi?

Here is the Episcopal News Service report on the current presiding Episcopal bishop explaining why she, and the church that elevated her to denominational leadership, oppose the simple, non-violent tactic of targeting divestment of church funds from US corporations that profit from Israel’s military occupation:

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori urged Episcopalians to “invest in legitimate development in Palestine’s West Bank and in Gaza” rather than focusing on divestment or boycotts of Israel, during a March 25 “Middle East Peacemakers” luncheon in Los Angeles.

“The Episcopal Church does not endorse divestment or boycott,” the presiding bishop told more than 200 people gathered at the California Club in downtown Los Angeles. “It’s not going to be helpful to endorse divestment or boycotts of Israel. It will only end in punishing Palestinians economically.”

She also called for “a two-state solution with a dignified home for Palestinians and for Israelis” and for “deeper engagement, people of different traditions eating together, listening to each other’s stories,” she said, adding that the interreligious, multi-ethnic gathering hosted by Bishop J. Jon Bruno of the Diocese of Los Angeles was an example of what is possible.

Punishing Palestinians economically? That statement is an incredible display of ignorance of the political realities of a brutal military occupation.

Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori wants investment in Palestine, not divestment from Israel’s occupation. Who proposed that approach?

Sounds very much like the warden of the world’s largest outdoor prison inviting church members to come inside the prison and do their good works.

Cottage industries in cell block six?

Starting April 24, delegates to the United Methodist Church General Conference will debate the issue of using targeted divestment as a legislative tactic against injustice.

The United Methodist and the Presbyterian national churches have labored for many years to develop resolutions that focus tightly on US corporations that profit from the Occupation.

One of these corporations, Caterpillar, produces heavy equipment that Israel uses to build its apartheid wall, a wall that has nothing to do with security and everything to do with stealing even more Palestinian land.

Caterpillar also produces those monstrous bulldozers that tear down Palestinian homes, another “security” measure that is really designed to tighten the Occupation noose.

An Israeli soldier drove one of those American-built bulldozers over an American citizen, peace activist Rachel Corrie, on March 16, 2003, as she tried to stop an attack on a Palestinian home. In death, this young woman has become a symbol of non-violent courage to Palestinians.

Not so in the US, where neither action nor formal government protest was taken against the army that killed her.

And yet, here is an Episcopal bishop, standing before 200 of her fellow Episcopalians actually calling for Palestinians and Israelis to “eat together and listen to one another’s stories”.

This is blatant Israeli propaganda. These words were not uttered in the spirit of Amos; they sound more like an American politician scrambling for Israel Lobby money than they do of a Christian leader who must at some point in her career reflected upon, and perhaps even preached on, the call from Amos 5:4 to “let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never failing stream!” (NIV).

The saddest thing about this failure of a church leader to grasp the reality of injustice is that she offers palliative words that sound more like a Southern bishop of the 1950s begging the segregated and segregator to live together peacefully.

Bless you bishop, but there are people in Palestine on protest hunger strikes. Others are dying under the boot of a brutal occupying army. This is not a problem that will be addressed by our “eating together and talking to one another”.

For an example of the pepper spray at work, see the Ammar Awad Reuters photo above of Israeli soldiers spraying a Palestinian protestor at Damascus Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem.

This attack on the protestor took place on Land Day, when Palestinians remember their land losses.

Richard Silverstein, who writes the Tikun Olam web site, posted this photo from the New York Times and adds:

The Times headline for the slideshow presentation of Land Day images that includes this one was: Protesters Scuffle With Forces.  

I don’t see protesters scuffling with Israeli forces.  I see Israeli border police mauling unarmed Palestinian demonstrators.  I see them pepper-spraying one at point-blank range.

That headline confirms once again that the New York Times is not just biased on this issue on behalf of Israel. It is simply an Israeli hometown paper. Its perspective is always that of the home team, that is, Israel.

Silverstein is Jewish, one of many Jews who knows the damage that the Occupation does to Israelis as well as to Palestinians. Fortunately, Silverstein is also a blogger with a large following.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori knows better than to speak of the Palestinian issue in the language she used.   One of my sources who follows this issue with diligence, wrote to say:

It was she who, perhaps three years ago, visited Gaza, was duly appalled, and vowed to press with all of her and her church’s authority, to end the sadistic blockade and occupation of all of Palestine.

It mystifies me that she can ignore the precedent of, and successful use of BDS, in the closest parallel, South Africa. Schori has succumbed to expedience or the copout of “interfaith” wishy-washiness-cum-cowardice.

How can one have any hope for justice and a viable existence for the Palestinians in the face of such cavalier disregard for the well-known and often courageously expressed recitations of the “facts on the ground” created by the Zionist enterprise?.

Well stated, and true. Trips by church leaders, who finally see first -hand the ugliness of Occupation, are the best way to break through Israeli propaganda.

But, based on Bishop Schori’s public display of hasbara (propaganda) in Los Angeles, the power of the Israel Lobby trumps the truth.

All is not lost. Another source, who attended the bishop’s presentation, did not find the audience very receptive to her call for kum ba yah.

Two denominations will debate divestment resolutions over the next few months, first, the United Methodists and then, the Presbyterians.

The United Methodist supporters of targeted divestments are encouraged at the feedback they are hearing from the grassroots.

Blocking their way to the passage of a divestment resolution is the denomination’s General Board of Pensions, which objects to non-financial types interfering in their decisions to maximize pension profits.

This body has determined over the years that it will not invest in corporations that profit from, for example, South African apartheid, and that old reliable United Methodist staple, alcohol.

Faced with requests that it extend its no-no list  to include three companies supporting the Occupation,  the General Board of Pensions has adopted the Episcopal mantra of “eating together and sharing stories”.

Of course, the General Conference has the final say in this matter. Starting April 24, in their Tampa, Florida, meeting, the Methodists will have their chance to remember that its founding parent,  John Wesley was not a “get along” guy; he was a justice guy.

This is the same denomination, by the way, that moved its 2012 meeting from Richmond, Virginia, to Tampa, Florida, because Richmond has a baseball team named, “The Braves”, a no-no among United Methodists who have agreed not to patronize locations with sports teams the Methodists believe denigrate Native Americans.

Good for them. Now let us see what can be done about the denigration of Palestinians.