Presbyterian Church USA Wants to Declare Israel an Occupier of “Palestine”
In a very bigoted fit of “stonecasting, the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) is asking its members to approve a statement next month calling for Israel to withdraw from the “illegal occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza, and for the US to halt all military and economic assistance to Israel.
The Church speciously claims that if there were “….no ‘occupation,’ [sic] there would be no Palestinian resistance.” (“Resistance” is their euphemism for Hamas terrorism that includes raining thousands of explosive rockets down on civilian populations!) The PCUSA insists that it is Israelis’ own fault for inflicting so much suffering on the Palestinians. [Yup! Not the corrupt Arab leadership who empbezzled billions of dollars that were supposed to be helping their people! Not the terrorist Hamas that destroyed most of the infrastructure that the Israelis left in Gaza when they withdrew or who uses helpless Muslim civilians as human shields while they fire rockets on Israel, etc. !]
The 172-page PCUSA report says the “primary” cause of the Middle East conflict is “the ongoing Israeli occupation…and American complicity in this unjust enterprise.” The PCUSA report utterly ignores the repeated attacks against Israel by both organized armies and terrorist groups and, as a result, seeks to delegitimize Jewish longstanding claim to the land. In fact, they simply ignore 4000 years of history and their own Bible!
The historically “challenged” Presbyterian Church conveniently ignores the inconvenient fact that the Jewish people have continuously “occupied” that very land for about FOUR THOUSAND YEARS, i.e., ever since Abraham made his covenant with God on top of Mt. Moriah upon which the Temple Mount was later built in Jerusalem about a thousand years later, which was about 3000 years ago. The Jews had been residing there for two thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, and more than 2,600 years before the Muslim prophet Mohammed was born in 632 AD and subsequently founded Islam. In fact, the so-called “Palestine” was a label invented by the Romans after the second Jewish Revolt or Rebellion in 132 AD. The Romans wanted to wipe out any record of the Jewish presence in Israel and did so by attempting to rewrite history. They did so by calling the area “Philistina” after the Philistines, who had, in fact, only occupied a relatively small coastal area, and who had not been even around for hundreds of years. The Presbyterian Church of the USA is guilty of the same historical obfuscation.
In fact, a number of foriegn nations occupied the region or portions of it over the next two millenia and no one created any “Palestinian” state, a truth that is also blatantly ignored by the Presbyterian Church. After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in the First World War, the “Palestine” region was carved up and fully two thirds of it–the Arabs demanded ALL of it– was given to the Arabs in the creation of the nation then called Trans-Jordan, but NOT a country called “Palestine!” One reason was that there was NEVER any “Palestinian” people or nation until it was finally invented by Yassir Arafat about 1970 in an attempt to fabricate a justification for confiscating the land from Israel. In fact, most of the “Palestinians” were decendants of Arabs who had emigrated to the “Palestine” area simply because the standard of living afforded them by Jewish development was so much better than what they received from their Arab “bretheren!” During the Clinton era, Arafat was even offered 98% of what he was demanding but he would not settle because he wanted the whole damn thing.
It took a lot of historical ignorance and hypocrisy for the Presbyterian Church to label the Israelis “occupiers,” when THEY occupied Catholic Ireland and slaughtered a lot of Catholics in the process. Once Presbyterians settled the Carolinas in the New Land, who “occupied” the land that the American Native Indians had been living on for thousands of years as well? Under the specious upside-down irrational reasoning of the Presbyterian Church of the US, it was the Native Americans who were the “occupiers!”
The leaders of the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) need, instead, to be historically and biblically correct, rather than being “politically correct!” That includes learning that one should not go about casting stones, particularly when you don’t know what you’re talking about, and when have a lot of dirty linen in your hamper and skeletons in your own closet!
Mel Morganstein
Charlotte, NC
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