Resolutions Critical of Israel Introduced at General Convention

on July 13, 2009

Read other IRD articles covering the 76th General Convention of the Episcopal Church here.

 

Groups seeking to influence the Episcopal Church’s Middle East positions are lobbying delegates at the denomination’s triennial General Convention being held this week in Anaheim, California. Most of the pressure was coming from groups hostile to Israel and supportive of the Palestinians.

Two proposed resolutions, A037 and A039, specifically condemn the security barrier constructed by Israeli authorities. Proposed by the Standing Commission on Anglican and International Peace with Justice Concerns, resolutions call for prayer that “the wall come down.” Resolution A039 uses the terms “ghettoization” and “oppression” to describe the results of the Israeli barrier. No mention is made in the resolutions’ text about Israel’s intent to prevent terrorist attacks by Palestinian militants, nor about the steep decline in such attacks since security barrier construction began.

A third resolution, A038, serves to reaffirm a previous resolution already adopted by the Episcopal Church’s 1991 General Convention. That resolution, 1991-A149,calls upon the U.S. government to “render a full accounting of all military assistance and sales of military equipment to all nations in the Middle East, and to develop a plan for reducing the amount of military arms in the entire region.” Despite this language, the resolution focuses exclusively on Israel, not other nations or armed groups in the region. Referring to a “de facto annexation of Palestinian land,” the resolution calls for an immediate curtailment of aid from the United States to Israel.

One of the organizations seeking to impact Episcopal policy on the Middle East has strongly backed a reaffirmation of the 1991 resolution. The Rev. Canon Richard Toll, Chairman of Friends of Sabeel North America, has argued that the original resolution has been forgotten over time, and must be reaffirmed with “resolve.”

A fourth resolution at General Convention, A040, calls for a single, sovereign State of Palestine, “independent of the State of Israel, and created from territory in the West Bank and Gaza, with Jerusalem serving as the capital of both Israel and Palestine.”

Toll argued in a letter to supporters that it was unrealistic to talk about a “two-state solution” in Israel/Palestine “when the viability of two states has been destroyed, actively and consciously, by Israeli settlements in the West Bank, settler highways and, in particular, the Wall which divides the land and separates the Palestinian people into five barely contiguous isolated areas.”

Toll said that the separation barrier, settlement expansion and military support are all assisted indirectly by U.S. taxpayers.

“The United States needs to face as a nation its complicity and support, financially and emotionally, for this [Israeli] occupation,” Toll wrote.

“Occupation is humiliation,” Toll wrote. “From a Christian perspective, funding oppression is unacceptable.” Toll said that the [Israeli] wall “created apartheid for Palestinians.”

Also at General Convention, Friends of Sabeel has brought the Rev. Canon Naim Ateek of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. Ateek spoke at an event promoting his new book, A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation, on Saturday, July 11, at St. Anselm’s Church in nearby Garden Grove. Sabeel’s founder, Ateek is a Palestinian Anglican priest. To read IRD’s coverage of Ateek’s recent booksigning event in Washington, D.C., click here.

 

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