In the end, my Presbyterians produced
a mouse. After years of advocacy, the close decision to divest from H-P,
Motorola Solutions and Caterpillar appears to come several years too late as we
watch the Middle East accelerate into a chaos that includes the potential to
move closer to U. S. shores. Last week’s divestment vote was accompanied, as
usual, by much hand-wringing over the damage it might cause to local
Christian-Jewish relationships. Palestinians were important too, said some
commissioners, but their hearts seemed barely in it.
The very days leading to the
Presbyterian vote the Israeli army was putting on a clinic of just how they
treat the Muslim-believing Palestinians: shooting dead four of them (including
a 15 year-old), arresting 340, conducting 1,350 (according to the NY Times) house-to-house
searches including mid-night raids, imposing curfews on whole cities. Two-thirds
of those arrested were Hamas politicians or operatives. The Israelis administered
collective punishment with impunity.
All this in search for three
kidnapped Israeli teens, said to be inhabitants of illegal Israeli settlements,
who were hitch hiking on Palestinian roads.
While there’s no justifying the kidnapping, the disproportionality of
Israel’ response suggests a darker motive. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has
yet to produce any evidence he claims to have of a Hamas connection to the
kidnapping, is whipping up Israeli sentiments to a white hot heat as his soldiers
storm into innocent Palestinian homes. Many
believe (including this writer) this is because he hopes to provoke a large
scale violent reaction from the Palestinians. Something like a third Intifada
would suit his purposes—and would be a hopeless action by Palestinians—and turned
into a justification for more Israeli expansion
into the West Bank, ultimately accelerating the final forced exodus of the
Palestinians from what many Israelis call their “promised land.”
Divestment, if voted years ago, would
have been politically apposite at a time before Israel’s Cast Lead campaign had
killed 1,000 with impunity and before its large-scale settlement expansion inside
East Jerusalem. More than one Presbyterian career has been enlarged and
institution funded on a foundation of this tolerance for Israeli extreme
measures that are pleasing to many American Jewish leaders. The treatment by
Israel of Palestinians and their hope for a secure, contiguous state was seldom
mentioned by many commissioners at the microphones who seemed willing to look
the other way.
Middle East events have now moved
far beyond the years of Presbyterian ambivalence, but also past Mr. Netanyahu’s
grasp. The Iraq-Syria-Lebanon-Iran
crisis threatens to not only completely negate the ten year U. S. invasion and military
occupation of Iraq, but the growth of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nura forces is catalyzing
a much wider war “reaching from the Iranian frontier to the Mediterranean
coast,” as described by New Yorker reporter, Dexter Filkins.
Filkins, who has reported on Iraq
since 2003, describes (New Yorker June
23, 2014) what amounts to a horrible
lion on the loose; one of terrible portent:
“Among those fighting with ISIS and
Al Nusra are hundreds of Westerners, from Germany, the United Kingdom, France
and the United States. At some point, the survivors will want to come home;
they will be well trained and battle-hardened.”
This seems well foretold by the
bombing in Boston last year by an extremist returned. Also well exhibited is the soft Christianity
commonly practiced coast to coast in the U. S.
Self-obsessed, late modern Christianity prefers to talk of love and relationships
as a substitute for the burden of making judgments about what is unjust. The
relative silence in local churches and at their national gatherings unwittingly
appears to pave the way for a chaos now moving among us.
