The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will soon vote on its controversial Middle East Study Committee report. The report has raised the ire of some Jewish groups and other supporters of Israel. Questions of anti-Semitism have been raised, though as an American Jew who has actually contacted Committee members and other Presbyterian pastors, such charges are the farthest from the truth. Indeed, the Committee report is based on doing the exceptional, talking to both Israelis and Palestinians and recognizing their common humanity.
The Presbyterian Church is committed to social justice. Having investigated the Israel/Palestine conflict from a neutral vantage point, the Church’s Middle East Committee has come to recognize the grand misconception so pervasive in this conflict, a misperception that one side is evil and the other good. The Committee’s report will help dispel this misconception. On the Palestinian side, there is the misconception that things other than concern for security drive Jewish actions. On the Israeli/American side, there is the misconception that Jewish colonizers came to Palestine in peace and didn’t expel hundreds of thousands of Christian and Muslim Palestinians from their homes and villages, displacements documented by Israeli historians.
The Church’s Committee’s report is a major step forward, calling for us all to live according to our principles. When we do, peace will be achieved. But it will mean calling for an end of the idea that Jews have the right to exclude Christians and Muslims from living in Israel/Palestine. The report clearly recognizes the most basic truth, that people of all three religions can and should live together peacefully.
Presbyterian leaders will doubtless be pressured not to accept the Middle East Study Committee’s report by friends and colleagues, by good people who are either ignorant of or in blatant disregard of the expulsions of Palestinian families, by people who believe that a Jewish State is just and necessary but who don’t realize that a Jewish State created at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Christian and Muslim men, women and children is not consistent with Jewish, Christian, or Muslim values.
The right of Palestinian families to return to the homes and villages from which they were violently expelled is a central issue. Presbyterian leaders will doubtless hear arguments that allowing Palestinian families to return to their homes would be like letting Cherokee Indians return to their former homes in the United States. Such specious arguments may have been used by White South Africans to justify holding on to Apartheid. Palestinian families who still have the deeds to their home and land are not being allowed to return simply because they have the wrong religion. This is not consistent with Jewish, Christian, or Muslim values.
Presbyterian leaders will doubtless hear that Palestinian families can’t be allowed to return because allowing those families to return would mean “the end of Israel.” Allowing Christian and Muslim families to return to their homes would only mean the end of Israeli discrimination against non-Jewish people, not the end of Israel.
Presbyterian leaders will hear from the rabbis in their communities that though Palestinian people can’t be allowed to return to their homes that they will be offered fair compensation. Would it be fair compensation? If it were, perhaps the choice of taking the compensation or the home could be offered to Palestinian families. If the family chose the home, the “fair compensation” could be given to the Jewish family. I doubt that anyone is considering compensation that “fair.” Rabbis may argue that Jews were expelled from Arab countries, as though that somehow justifies the expulsions of Christian and Muslim Palestinian families from their homes and villages. The rabbis should realize that Jews lived largely peacefully in predominately Muslim Arab countries (more peacefully than in European Christian countries) until Jews expelled Christian and Muslim Palestinian families from their homes in Palestine.
Of course, Jewish leaders will tell Presbyterians, “The situation is complicated. We can’t let non-Jewish families come to Israel because they hate Jews.” Of course, this argument was also used by white South Africans and by good Christian preachers in the Southern United States to justify continued segregation. Our principles are not complicated, and the hate that violating those principles has engendered should not be used to continue the violations. The hate will largely end the day the discrimination does. We’ve seen it here at home, and we know that following our principles and ending discrimination is both feasible and empowering, not complicated.
I would be happy with any just and peaceful solution to the conflict. I would be happy to see Israelis draw fair borders for a 2-state solution, then let Palestinians decide which side of those borders they prefer. The idea that anyone could draw up fair borders and distribution of resources seems highly unlikely. The idea that we will solve the conflict in Israel/Palestine by a “separate but equal” solution is not one that we should be promoting.
The Presbyterian Church’s commitment to social justice and to equal treatment of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Israel/Palestine is well placed. The calls by Jewish groups that Presbyterians are anti-Semitic only proves how misguided — albeit good, well-meaning people — some of our Jewish leaders are. The day will come soon when the misconceptions we hold of each other will end, the day when we Jews will ask for forgiveness and will ask our Christian and Muslim Palestinian brothers and sisters to return to rebuild their homes and villages and live in peace with us together. I thank the Presbyterian Church for its call to end violence, for helping us recognize our past errors, and for identifying the path to justice and peace.
STEVEN FELDMAN is professor of dermatology, pathology & public health sciences at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is author of Compartments: How the Brightest, Best Trained, and Most Caring People Can Make Judgments That are Completely and Utterly Wrong. He is also author of A Jewish American’s Evolving View of Israel and A Doctor’s Prescription for Peace with Justice.
