As news of the pending ceasefire in the 15-month conflict between Israel and Hamas became public on Friday, January 17, 2025, the Rev. Marietta Macy and Baha Hilo, a Palestinian activist and educator touring the U.S. with the Palestine Justice Network (PJN) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), had just completed talks to overflowing rooms in New York and were driving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for further presentations.
Macy, co-moderator of PJN, says the importance of the nationwide speaking engagements came at the right time as the duo crosses the country, visiting Presbyterian and other churches, secular and civic groups, and receiving support from Jewish Voice for Peace and Muslim partners.
Following the ratification of the ceasefire, and as of this writing, Hamas has released three hostages, and Israel has released 90 Palestinian prisoners. Hamas has promised to free 30 more hostages over the next six weeks. Israel has promised to release 1,900 Palestinians from Israeli prisons in the same period.
While these signs of an end to hostilities encourage Macy, she notes the human toll of the conflict has been immense, with 1,706 Israeli deaths and nearly 46,000 Palestinians killed. Neither she nor Hilo believes the tally of dead and wounded people is accurate as rescue workers and families toil to identify missing persons and match them to remains throughout Gaza.
“I think people want information that’s going to help them cut through the propaganda,” she says. “It’s essential to hear from the people that are living the circumstances we’re trying to teach about. So folks are really jumping at the opportunity to hear that firsthand experience without anybody having an otherwise political agenda or their own kind of self-interest or self-preservation.”
Hilo was born and raised in Bethlehem and graduated from Birzeit University with a sociology degree. Macy says he is uniquely qualified to speak as someone who has lived the “daily experience surviving apartheid.”
“The main thing I try to convey to people is to start looking at the reality in Palestinians is a reality based on birth,” Hilo says. “If you’re born to a Palestinian family, your rights are denied from birth to death. And if you’re born to a Jewish family, your rights are granted from birth to death, and your behavior in between is really irrelevant. And I try to focus much more on the legal realities that the Israeli government is imposing on every single Palestinian on the land of Palestine.”
He notes these legal realities differ between Palestinians born in different areas – separate rules exist for Palestinians born in Nazareth, Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
“It’s promoted as a complicated matter,” he says. “There is nothing complicated about a person being denied, denied their rights for being born and a person being granted the right for being born … Israeli domination takes different form because we need to distract people from recognizing the fact that it’s a matter of birth.”
The PC(USA) has a long history of activism regarding Israel and the states of Palestinians living in Gaza and the Occupied Territories.
Following a decade of focused corporate engagement by the PC(USA)’s Mission Responsibility Through Investment committee (MRTI), its 221st General Assembly, meeting in 2014, voted by a thin margin (310-303) to divest from its holdings in U.S.-based divisions of Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions. The resolution distanced itself from the larger boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement by targeting only companies it said are “contributing to and profiting from the relentless, five-decade-long, military occupation of the Palestinian territories.”
In June 2022, the 225th General Assembly voted in support of Overture (266-116), declaring the Israeli government’s occupation and treatment of the Palestinian people and lands to be named as “apartheid.”
At the denomination’s 226th GA meeting in 2024, the body voted to divest its holdings from government debt “held by countries maintaining a prolonged military occupation” as defined by the United Nations. As defined, Russia, Israel, Morocco and Turkey are included in the PC(USA)’s prohibited securities list. The 226th General Assembly also voted to remove Hewlett-Packard (HP Inc.) from the prohibited securities list as its actions were “no longer in conflict with our church investment policy.”
These, and other pronouncements by the denomination, have been met with condemnation by some Jewish groups along with opposition from those within the PC(USA) who say the actions damage interreligious relations with neighboring Jewish congregations.
Following the declaration of Israel as an apartheid state in 2022, the Rev. Todd Stavrakos, a PC(USA) pastor and member of the Presbyterians for Middle East Peace (PfMEP) steering committee, joined Pathways for Middle East Peace in raising a hot air balloon outside the denominations offices during the assembly that declared “PCUSA: Fight Racism. Not Jews.”
Speaking on the overture at that time, he told the Outlook, “It’s certainly not going to bring about peace. … It’s clearly been received by the Jewish Community as continued antisemitic attacks on the American Jewish Community.” He added he is not supportive of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank but did not believe the government’s actions fall within the legal definition of apartheid.
Hilo called the PC(USA)’s apartheid classification for the State of Israel “inspiring,” and a testimony to “how far the Presbyterian Church has come since 2009” when he began speaking with people in the church.
“All that was needed was for people to understand the reality,” he says of his educational experiences with people of faith. “They’re not manipulating them, not deceiving them, not convincing them. We in Palestine have nothing to hide. Everything about our lives has been exposed: our blood is exposed, our privacy is exposed, the mistreatment of us is exposed.”
In March 2024, the Rev. Bronwen Boswell, then acting stated clerk of the General Assembly, signed a letter by Churches for Middle East Peace along with 140 other faith leaders calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the halt of arms sales to Israel.
The Holy Week letter condemned U.S. military support of arms shipments to the Israeli government and “repent[ed] of the ways we have not stood alongside our Palestinian siblings in faithful witness in the midst of their grief, agony, and sorrow.”
In a statement provided to the Outlook following the ceasefire, the Rev. Jihyun Oh, stated clerk of the General Assembly, said, “We welcome the ceasefire agreement and pray that this is part of a permanent solution that includes immediate access for aid to stop famine, as well as restored access for UNRWA (ed. United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East).
“PC(USA) General Assembly policy is clear that we should continue to call for a sustainable solution to the conflict that addresses root causes, such as occupation, blockade, annexation, settler violence, and apartheid/inequality that leads to continuing cycles of violence. For a just peace to exist for Israelis and Palestinians, it is also imperative that regional de-escalation be achieved in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran through diplomatic engagements and that Israel is held accountable for war crimes that violate both U.S. law and international humanitarian law. We will continue to call for those actions in line with GA policy.”