[News] Palestinian Christians challenge the World Council of Churches on Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/07/palestinian-christians-challenge-the-world-council-of-churches-on-gaza/?ml_recipient=127559030141879728&ml_link=127558987458544902&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-07-22&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation>
Palestinian Christians challenge the World Council of Churches on Gaza
Mark Braverman
July 21, 2024
------------------------------

The Palestinian Christians are losing patience. In June, the Executive
Committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC) meeting in Bogota,
Colombia published a “Statement on the Escalating Crisis in Gaza.”
<https://www.oikoumene.org/resources/documents/statement-on-the-escalating-crisis-in-gaza#:~:text=The%20executive%20committee%20of%20the,of%20them%20children%20and%20women%2C>In
response, the Board of Kairos Palestine <https://www.kairospalestine.ps/>,
a Christian Palestinian movement, released an “Open Letter to the World
Council of Church’s Executive Committee.”
<https://files.constantcontact.com/9a33c36c001/de86e908-d645-4cf4-a4b5-c23751e46ca5.pdf>
It begins respectfully: “We trust that the statement was issued with great
concern and with the urgent need to terminate the atrocious crimes in
Gaza.” And on the surface, the WCC statement appears to take full account
of the horrific suffering of Gaza and Israel’s responsibility for its
egregiously disproportionate response to the October 7 attack. It appeals
to international law and stresses the urgency to put an end to the carnage.

But the Palestinians see what is missing. *They feel what is missing. *“As
Palestinians, as Christians and as your partners,” the Open Letter
continues, “we would like to bring to your attention the following points.”
They do not mince words, getting to the heart of the matter in their first
point:

We believe that the title “Escalating Crisis in Gaza” is neither accurate,
nor adequate. The protracted “crisis” is a result of 8 months of Israel’s
incessant large-scale military aggression which amounts to acts of
genocide, prior to which Gaza has been strangled by a 17-year blockade that
forced 2.3 million people to become aid-dependent and extremely vulnerable
to famine and starvation…Not only is the term genocide absent from the
title, it is marginalized in the body of the statement instead of being the
essence of what the statement is condemning. It cannot be acceptable that
crimes of such scale, committed deliberately over 8 months, be narrowed
down to a “crisis.”

The Palestinians then proceed directly to place the October 7 Hamas attack
in context, shifting the framework from “humanitarian crisis” and “human
rights” to Israel’s longstanding, systemic denial of Palestinian peoplehood.

We deplore that the Statement fails to mention Israel’s 7-decades settler
colonial regime, apartheid and prolonged occupation with total impunity as
the root cause and the context that laid the grounds for the events of 7
October and the ensuing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the
grave escalation of Israel’s atrocities in the West Bank, including East
Jerusalem.

It is shocking that it was necessary to call the WCC to account for this
failure. The world church body has decades of direct involvement with
Palestine to its credit, with missions and programs on the ground
addressing the consequences of Israel’s ongoing project of dispossession
and ethnic cleansing. Is it possible that the members of the WCC Executive
Committee do not see the root cause of Palestinian resistance, especially
in the case of the almost two-decades-long siege of Gaza? It is equally
hard to comprehend why it should be necessary for the Palestinians to point
out that “the Statement seems to reserve the use of strong, direct language
to acts committed by Hamas, describing them as ‘the most extreme and
inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors, including sexual
violence.’ No such language is used to describe Israel’s atrocious acts in
Gaza.” Indeed, the letter continues, “[t]he statement continued to
both-side the ‘violence’ and the call for accountability, despite the stark
differences in power dynamics.”

“Both-siding” indeed. Even the *New York Times *and *Washington Post *have
all but abandoned the longstanding practice of “balanced” reporting,
impossible even for the mainstream press to maintain in the face of the
news coming out of Gaza. And yet the letter goes on to call out the WCC for
having “put on equal footing the 37,000 Palestinians killed during Israel’s
genocide in Gaza, and the 1200 Israelis killed on October 7th. .” It is
stunning that, even today, they have had to patiently explain how “the
statement reflexively obscures the massive asymmetry of powers at play on
the one hand, and the 7 decades long colonization of the Palestinian land
and oppression of its people.”
*The church challenged*

What is going on? In recent history world church world bodies have shown
capable of prophetic action when the times required. Where is the WCC that
in response to James Baldwin’s challenge to the World Council’s Fourth
Assembly in Uppsala, Sweden in June 1968 established the Programme to
Combat Racism (PCR)?  Baldwin’s words to the Assembly speak as loudly as
they did almost 60 years ago:  “Christianity still has the power to move
the world if it will. It still has the power to change the structure of
South Africa, to prevent the assassination of another Martin Luther King,
to force my country to stop dropping bombs on southeast Asia.” Launched in
1969, the PCR played a highly visible role in opposing white minority rule
in Southern Africa, supporting resistance among churches there and
providing direct financial support to armed national liberation movements
throughout the African continent. Through the PCR, the WCC was a proponent
of the international campaigns of economic sanctions that ultimately
brought down the apartheid regime. These actions left the WCC open to
accusations by member churches of supporting “terrorism” and violence. But
it did not flinch. Contrast this with the WCC that in its 2022 General
Assembly in Karlsruhe Germany stated in its declaration on “Seeking Justice
and Peace for All in the Middle East” that on the question of Israel as an
apartheid regime, “We are not of one mind on the matter.”
<https://conta.cc/3BorVkO>

Where today is the World Communion of Reformed Churches, the body that in
1982 (then World Alliance of Reformed Churches) meeting in Ottawa Canada
named apartheid a heresy and declared itself in *status confessionis,
*suspending
the membership of the white Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa? These
actions were responsible for bringing world churches into the struggle,
overcoming the resistance of Western governments to the sanctions, and
setting into motion the global actions that within a decade would bring the
apartheid government to the negotiating table. This is the same World
Communion of Reformed Churches that in 2017 passed a resolution in its
General Assembly in Leipzig Germany determining that, in the matter of
Palestine “the integrity of Christian faith and praxis is at stake” and
resolving to bring awareness of the Palestinian liberation struggle to its
230 member denominations in 108 countries. Seven years later, it has yet to
act on this commitment.

It is time for the churches of the world — in every region, denomination
and nation and from every pulpit — *to be of one mind on this* *matter *and
to hold their leaders and their institutions to account. It is time for the
churches to move from words to action. The Open Letter from Kairos
Palestine puts the challenge to the church unambiguously:

We believe that the Christian community of believers has a special
contribution to make. The call for an immediate ceasefire must be merely a
first step to end this harrowing genocide, but not the ultimate
objective…ending the decades-long colonization of the Palestinian lands and
the oppression against the Palestinian people.

*The ultimate objective. *Christianity originated as a grassroots movement
of resistance to Empire. It betrayed that legacy in the church’s overt
complicity with Empire and for furnishing the theological justification for
colonialism throughout history. Today the church is called to speak loudly
and without reservation in condemnation of Israel’s settler colonial
project and, by extension, all ideologies of domination. As argued
convincingly in the Palestinian letter, it must move the discourse on
Palestine from humanitarian assistance and defense of human rights to a
confrontation with the structure of racialized dominance that is the cause
of Palestinian suffering and of Israel’s descent into fascism and
barbarism.

“*The church should not wait for the international community to officially
describe and condemn Israel’s apartheid” *reads the Open Letter*. “No, a
prophetic church should shape and lead the international community.” *(emphasis
in original) This is the church’s special contribution of which the
Palestinians speak. It is its mandate, its proper role. “There was a time
when the church was very powerful” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in *Letter
from Birmingham Jail. *“It was not merely a thermometer that recorded the
ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that
transformed the mores of society.”

The Palestinian letter closes with these words from the 2009 Kairos
Palestine document, reminding the church to be faithful to its mission. In
so doing, as they have done repeatedly over the decades, the Palestinians
call once again not only to the churches, but to the conscience of the
world.

*“The mission of the Church is prophetic, to speak the Word of God
courageously, honestly and lovingly in the local context and in the midst
of daily events. If she does take sides, it is with the oppressed, to stand
alongside them, just as Christ our Lord stood by the side of each poor
person and each sinner, calling them to repentance, life, and the
restoration of the dignity bestowed on them by God and that no one has the
right to strip away.”*
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