December 2004

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Relations between Jewish leaders and mainline Protestants are seriously strained. In July, the highest legislative body of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), or PC(USA), voted 431-62 to begin a phased, selective divestment in multinational firms said to be contributing to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Two months later, leaders of the Episcopal Church USA announced they would study a similar stock-selling plan to protest the "ongoing occupation, home demolitions, settlement building, and the separation wall."

Some Jewish leaders have denounced the divestment strategy as "an assault on the Jewish people."

This is an "act of medieval Christian economic warfare against the Jewish people," said Yehiel Poupko, the Judaic scholar at the Jewish Federation of Metro Chicago. The church decisions go beyond critique of governmental policies in Israel to the "demonization of the Jewish people," Poupko said.

Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, a group that backs a two-state solution and a rollback of the Israeli occupation, said the denominations' decisions are alarming because of an apparent imbalance. Yoffie said the word "evil appears with some frequency" in PC(USA) documents on the Israeli occupation, but rarely is applied to acts of terrorism.

The Institute on Religion and Democracy, a mainline renewal group, sides with Jewish critics. On September 27 IRD released a study critical of mainline and ecumenical groups. The report found that more than a third of church criticisms of human-rights abuses focused on Israel, but there were no criticisms for countries such as China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia.

"Israel is certainly responsible for some human-rights abuses, as are all nations," IRD president Diane Knippers ...