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TechnoratiIt's time for people living 41 years under occupation to feel new solidarity from a watching world.
It's time to name the shame of collective punishment and to end it in all its forms.
Very moving. Of course, none of the litany really addresses any of the suffering by Israelis over 60 years except for a vague reference: “It's time to be revolted by violence against civilians and for civilians on both sides to be safe.” And, even more needless to observe, the litany omits any reference to ways that Arab governments and Palestinian chieftains have themselves exploited the Palestinians for their own geopolitical goals.
The litany might have a little more punch if it had included an “It’s time” for Palestinians to accept Israel’s existence while disavowing both the incendiary anti-Israel propaganda of the moderate “Fatah” party and the overt terrorism of Hamas. The WCC stands against all “violence,” of course. But it’s not clear where it stands on acidic anti-Israel Palestinian propaganda. And given the WCC’s emphasis on an unlimited “right of return” for the descendants of Palestinians who fled in 1947, it’s not even clear that the WCC fully affirms Israel as a refuge for Jews.
A blog on the WCC website constructed by the WCC’s “ecumenical accompaniers” provides some further provocative insights into the WCC perspective on Middle-East “peace.” The ecumenical accompaniers, who are Western church activists on the West Bank on the hunt for Israeli transgressions, gleefully chronicle the protests of angry Palestinians. At a refugee camp outside Bethlehem, Palestinian artisans have constructed the “world's biggest 10 meter long iron key” that is accompanied by a giant keyhole. The key is inscribed: "This is not for sale,” which signifies that “Palestinians should not give up the fight to return to their homes one day.”
Even more creatively, another WCC blogger describes a Palestinian artist who has illustrated the Palestinian “catastrophe” of 60 years ago with silk-screened chocolate illustrations of Palestinian suffering on sixty sheets of glass, “one for each year of since the people's displacement.” The chocolate extravaganza shows a “grieving women, a toddler looking up at the barrel of a gun, an Israeli soldier weeping as he holds a dead child, a youth with a catapult, naked Palestinian youths held at gunpoint, a child standing in the ruins of her home.” Who knew that chocolate could evoke such pathos?
In preparing for “It’s Time for Palestine” during June 4-10, the WCC seems torn about focusing on 1967, or 1947. It’s politically more practical to focus on 1967, so as to purportedly insist only on Israel’s full withdrawal to pre-1967 borders. But clearly the WCC would like also to mourn Israel’s birth in 1947 without specifically declaring the WCC’s opposition to Israel’s existence.
Fortunately, most of global Christianity will ignore the WCC during the “It’s time for Palestine’ commemoration, just as most Christians, even within WCC member denominations, ignore the WCC almost all the time any way.
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Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C.
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