The Presbytery of Detroit's Overture to Suspend Military Aid to Israel

On February 26, Detroit Presbytery approved an overture which asks the Presbyterian Church USA 's General Assembly to ask the United States government to suspend military aid to Israel. I have two guests on this blog today writing about this. Gary Green who serves on the Steering Committee for Presbyterian Action for Faith and Freedom, a branch of the Institute of Religion and Democracy is introducing Dr. Earl Tilford. Hans Cornelder placed Dr. Tilford's essay about the overture on Presbyweb on Thursday. I thought it should have another hearing/reading.


Gary Green: "My friend, Earl Tilford has written a powerful essay entitled "Unjust Condemnation". In his essay, he comments upon and criticizes those mainline Christian leaders who are attempting to delegitimize Israel and support actions which would weaken Israel's ability to defend itself from its primary enemies, the radical Islamist forces that continue to send rockets into Israel where the intended targets are innocent civilians. Here is what he has to say."

Unjust Condemnation

Earl Tilford

"On February 26, the Presbytery of Detroit approved an overture for consideration by the upcoming General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) calling for temporary suspension of US military aid to Israel based on specious and unfair generalizations. The overture, if accepted when the denomination’s representatives meet in San Jose, California in June, requires church leaders to call on congress, the state department and the administration to suspend military aid to Israel. Additionally, the United Methodist Church (UMC), during its Quadrennial General Conference in Fort Worth, Texas in April, will consider a resolution requiring divestment of denominational investments in Caterpillar Inc. for profiting “from illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land …by supplying the Israeli Defense Forces with heavy equipment.”

Amidst a desert wasteland of oppressive Muslim dictatorships and theocratic Arab oligarchies Israel remains a verdant garden of democratic civility and human rights. Why then do PCUSA and UMC leaders single out Israel for condemnation? How do they conclude that Israel alone deserves condemnation for the continuing violence between the Palestinians, governed by Hamas/Fattah (two terrorist groups) and the region’s only democracy?

The UMC’s General Board on Global Mission Women recently produced a study for the Methodist Church which refers to the 1948 United Nations’ creation of Israel as an “original sin,” and likens the birth of the Jewish state to the Holocaust. This anti-Semitic venom is reminiscent of the pre-Holocaust “replacement theology” that rejected the covenant relationship between God and the Jewish people replacing the Jews with the Christian church. In a further demonstration of anti-Semitism, Canon Naim Ateek of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, a Palestinian Christian group, in his Lenten sermon of 2005 stated, “It seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him…The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily.” Such rhetorical flourishes smack of deicide, the charge with which, prior to the Holocaust, many Christians smeared Jews as “Christ killers.”

Theological arguments aside, assertions like the one in the Presbytery of Detroit overture accusing Israel of “driving Palestinians from their homes, lands and towns” and “confining them to life in refugee camps” simply are a-historical. First, no sovereign Palestinian state ever existed. Before the British liberated the region in 1917, Palestine was a dominion within the Ottoman Empire peopled by a variety of Arabs as well as Jews. In 1937, the Peel Commission proposal for Palestinian self-determination was rejected by the Arab population. In 1948, after United Nations Resolution 181 called for partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Palestinian states, a plan Israel accepted, local Muslim inhabitants joined six Arab armies attempting to annihilate the Jewish state. From 1948 to 1967, Egypt and Jordan governed Gaza and the West Bank respectively. In 1964, Egypt dispatched Yasir Arafat, an Egyptian agent, to Gaza to organize guerrilla attacks against Israel. This marked the beginning of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, from which the current Palestinian Authority derives its linage.

Among the reasons supporting the Presbytery of Detroit’s overture is an accusation that Israel is “destroying their (the Palestinian’s) commerce and economy with blockades and checkpoints.” Israel blockades Gaza because Hamas, a terrorist group determined to annihilate Israel, controls and uses it as a staging base. Furthermore, checkpoints at Gaza and along the anti-infiltration barrier would be unnecessary had Arafat not unleashed the Second Intifada in June 2000 causing the deaths of 1,031 Israelis, including 119 children. Before the onslaught of Palestinian suicide bombers, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel making the Palestinians the most prosperous Arabs in the Middle East, the Gulf States and Saudi sheiks notwithstanding.

Why do these denominations single out Israel for divestment and cessation of military aid? Why do they not demand divestments from companies doing business in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Iran? Do denominational leaders not know that Egypt, which annually receives as much military aid as Israel, consistently persecutes Christians, especially the Copts who comprise 10-percent of the Egyptian population? As for Syria, the Assad regime currently engages in ethnic cleansing of the Kurds in the oil-rich Hasakeh region of northeast Syria. Where is the Presbyterian outrage over the more than 500,000 Kurds displaced by Arabs in that region or the Methodist calls for divestment from companies doing business with Syria? Although the Iranian mullahs persist in hanging homosexuals and persecuting Arabs, Azeris, Baha’i, Baluchis, Kurds, Christians and Jews while Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continuously threatens genocide against Israel, the website of the PCUSA’s radically liberal Witherspoon Society posts warnings of a pending US/Israeli “War on Iran.”

It is hypocritical of Christians within both denominations to overlook Palestinian oppression of Christians in Gaza and the West Bank while accusing Israel of “apartheid” policies. Nowhere in the world is apartheid practiced more intensely than in the Arab-Muslim world against non-Muslims and non-Arabs. In many parts of the Muslim world slavery and female genital mutilation remain facts of life. Conversely, Israeli Arabs enjoy full religious freedom, representation in the Knesset and equality under the law.

While Islamists in mosques and Islamic schools throughout the Middle East incite hatred and call for Jihad against Jews and Christians alike and Iran’s theocratic regime threatens Israel and the Judeo-Christian West with annihilation, Christians who consistently attack Israel betray what can only be explained as latent anti-Semitism."

Dr. Earl Tilford, Professor of History at Grove City College and elder in the Presbyterian Church USA, served for over thirty years with the Air Force and Army as an intelligence officer and director of research respectively. He earned his PhD in military history at George Washington University.