ANGLICANS AND UCC AGAINST ISRAEL

Wiesenthal Center Letter to United Church of Christ on Divestment.
Dear Rev. Thomas,

In the name of more than 400,000 member families of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, we express our deep concern and dismay regarding resolutions to be considered at the General Synod that call for the dismantling of Israel’s security barrier, and divestment from companies doing business with Israel.

One of us is writing from Israel, where earlier today a young woman from Gaza, Faha Samir, had permission on a humanitarian medical request to cross into Israel to seek medical treatment. By the grace of G-d, and through a combination of an anti-terror security fence and other protective Israeli measures, she was foiled from what she admitted was her plan – to blow up Soroka Hospital, which offers medical services to Jews and Palestinians alike. Ten kilograms of explosives were wrapped around her body.

Resolution #16 is entitled “Tear Down the Wall.” It boggles the mind that a major denomination could even think of endorsing such a slogan. We cannot fathom what mixture of naivete, lack of a real grasp of the facts on the ground, and wholesale embrace of the Palestinian narrative produced such folly. Temporary walls and strong preventive security measures are saving innocent Israeli lives – Jewish and Arab– every day. Such defenses should be supported and endorsed by those who care about saving lives, and obtaining the peace that will eventually obviate the need for such measures.

The Moral Disinvestment of the Church of England (Melanie Phillips)
Tomorrow, a report is to be debated by the Anglican Consultative Council calling on the Church of England to disinvest from companies which support Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the disputed territories. Virtually to a man (and woman) the CofE’s hierarchy have completely swallowed the lies and libels of Palestinian propaganda. The visceral hatred of Israel felt by these churchmen is matched only by their stupendous ignorance of Israel’s history and present circumstances.

The astounding moral inversion of right and wrong, truth and lies, murderer and victim in their thinking about Israel has been fed by three principal factors: the systematic and malevolent distortion of Israel’s history pumped out by Christian aid agencies; pilgrimages to the Christian holy places which are almost all in Arab areas, so that British pilgrims who know nothing about Israel or the Jews spend the whole trip in the company of Palestinian tour guides, hotel staff and so forth and scarcely speak to any Israelis and thus return to Britain full of hatred for Israel and the Jews; and the very close friendship between many in the CofE hierarchy and radical Palestinian Christian clerics such as Bishop Riah of Jerusalem, who have spent years attempting to provide a theological justification for writing Jews out of Israel’s historical script altogether.

As a result, as I reported in the Spectator three years ago, the Cof E’s astonishing ignorance of the history of Jewish nationhood in Judea, Samaria and Galilee gives off a strong whiff of supercessionist replacement theology, the doctrine going back to the early church fathers which stated that all God’s promises to the Jews — including the land of Israel -– were forfeit because the Jews had denied the divinity of Christ, a doctrine which lay behind centuries of Christian anti-Jewish hatred until the Holocaust drove it underground.

This is the disgusting context in which tomorrow’s debate must be set.