generalspeaking

Thursday, May 03, 2012

The Sanctimony of the United Church of Canada

Perhaps less a religious institution than thinking of itself as a consciously-tender conscience of a nation, the United Church of Canada is at it again. Somewhat damping down the hostile rigour of its attitude toward the State of Israel, but nonetheless, carrying through on its condemnation, however muted in a soft background of love for the Jewish people and distaste for their state.

There are those in the United Church who have little patience with the element that chafes at the bit to publicly and vociferously voice their concern over Israel's wayward ways. Apartheid may be too strenuous a denunciation, but it lingers there as an unvoiced accusation. Boycott and divestment are the weapons of choice. And even those have been tampered with to take the sting, as it were, out of wholesale blame.

Henceforth, until and unless hotter heads manage to prevail, it will only be the products of Jewish West Bank settlements that will be actively boycotted. Including part of East Jerusalem. The ancient city of the Jewish patriarchs deeded by history and posterity to their offspring as their eternal capital, but by the world unrecognized and prepared to be divided to satisfy the demands of the Palestinians and the Arab Middle East.

The church will be voting on upholding the 'illegal' Israeli settlements-produced goods, included in a recently released report by the United Church. The boycott proposal represents the latest in a series of four such sanctions produced in the past six years. The United Church general council still has not yet voted on the 2006 proposal to cut financial investments in Israeli companies.

It was followed in 2009 by another proposal to mount a broad boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions at international and national levels. The United Church decided, on sober second thought, that this proposal was somewhat draconian, and it was ultimately rejected. The generalized pattern of finding fault with the State of Israel, and fielding fond support for the Palestinian cause suffuses the United Church.

"We wanted this report to be conscious of the Jewish perspective in Canada and Israel", one of the United Church former heads, and one of the report's authors explained. It has taken two years to produce the report which feelingly explains how, though many other international groups have criticized Israel as a backdrop facade to anti-Semitism, the United Church isn't like that at all.

Their aim is to create an aura of open debate, to bring Jews and Palestinians together in useful dialogue. Obviously feeling that they are capable of persuading both Jews and Arabs to surrender enmity and embrace brotherhood because the United Church deems it far more socially progressive and profitable. Why they feel that they have the solution to offer where other bodies have failed perhaps speaks to their collective hubris.

Israel remains the only country in the world, apart from the apartheid regime in South Africa that the United Church has ever boycotted. "The [authors] believe that Israel can and should be held to a higher standard than surrounding non-democratic countries or authoritarian regimes. It's precisely because of Israel's close identification with democratic ideals that it needs to be challenged on its policies", according to the report.

Israel needs to be challenged, and the United Church is the correct entity to bring it politely to that country's attention that this is what is occurring. Little concern appears to emanate from the United Church that gross human rights abuses are occurring within the other countries of the Middle East and to which they have not bothered to direct their attention through proposed boycotts. Lost in the shuffle is the haven given Christians within Israel, while Christians flee persecution throughout the Middle East.

The report expressed its opinion that while the State of Israel has the right to exist, its status as a "Jewish state" is unclear. In the express opinion of the report, there is doubt whether the Palestinians should be under pressure to "accept Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition of continuing negotiations." And thus is it that the United Church proclaims that the creation of Israel as a distinctly, unequivocally Jewish state should be questioned.

Israel is a Jewish state. This, most emphatically and deliberately, was the purpose of its creation; to become a haven for Jews world wide. But the United Church looks askance at that historical creation. It questions the authority of Jews to have deemed it a necessity that they have a country of their own, at long last.

The United Church declares itself unequivocally alert to anti-Semitism in any mode of expression. "The deepest meaning of the Holocaust was the denial of human dignity to Jews", states the report. Human dignity, an assault on Jewish dignity? That, perhaps, took place in the early 1930s when Jews began to lose their equality in Germany, when children were thrown out of school, their parents lost their jobs, and anti-Semitism was given full throttle in Nazi Germany.

The Holocaust, however, was the deliberate, planned and executed mass annihilation of Europe's Jews for starters. Jews living elsewhere in the world would be attended to adequately enough once the Third Reich was finally established and took over the world order. The United Church's polite analogy of Jewish travail during the lead-up to the Second World War, with 'loss of dignity' seems to overlook their mass destruction.

It is precisely the very civil and polite interpretation of the disaster that overtook European Jewry with the world looking on and tut-tutting about the 'loss of human dignity' that led inevitably to the creation of the State of Israel, a plan that had long been anticipated and longed for, and brought to fulfillment in 1948.

Without the express permission of the United Church of Canada.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, Canada, Heritage, Israel, Judaism, Political Realities, Political Realities Peace Middle East