PITTSBURGH, July 3, 2012 – Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein says that, by pressing ahead with divestment from companies that do business with Israel, Presbyterians are flirting dangerously with the law of unintended consequences.
Adlerstein, director of interfaith affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, says Presbyterians may unwittingly inflame tendencies of both Israelis and Palestinians that make peace in the Middle East harder to achieve.
Adlerstein is a tall, scholarly-looking man who speaks sadly of the way Jewish-Presbyterian relations have worsened since 1987. In that year, he said, Presbyterians helped establish a covenant of theological understanding that spoke of the continuity between Judaism and Christianity.
The Jewish ecumenist said he can’t teach Presbyterians to think like Jews, but he can assure them of “the anguish and the pain” that Jews feel when Presbyterians consider measures that might undermine the security of Israel. And he can assure them that Israel’s security is “one of the core understandings of Jews of who they are.”
The Presbyterians’ divestment proposal focuses on the considerable suffering on the Palestinian side, while “forgetting the kind of sustained suffering that Israelis seeking peace have been submitting to since decades before the founding of the (Israeli) state,” Adlerstein said.
To have Presbyterians aim what many Jews consider discriminatory economic sanctions at Israel causes particular pain because, historically, “there is a greater group of energetic workers for Israel in this church than any other mainline denomination that I can point to,” he said.
But recently, every two years “we go through what seems to be this same charade, with a church that … can’t bring itself to speak of Israel as the Jewish state,” he said. If the General Assembly takes the next step with divestment from three companies selling security equipment to Israel, he said, “I think that some Jewish organizations will pull out of any formal relationship with PC(USA).”
Adlerstein said he’s no expert on the attitudes of the Israeli “man in the street.” But he said that, when Americans look for a quick fix on something as complex as the Middle East, “it hardens the worst, the most regressive elements of Israeli society that say: ‘See? You can’t trust the world community. You can’t even trust the good churchgoers in the United States.’ This will certainly be not a move towards peace.”
Divestment aimed at Israel “also builds up the case for those elements in Palestinian society who say, ‘If we wait a little longer, we can have it all,'” Adlerstein said. He said Presbyterians risk “playing into the hands” of Palestinian leaders who prefer to scrap a two-state solution and pursue an alternative “totally inconsistent to the policy of this church.”
