Israel/Palestine Journal, Day One: Monday, Feb. 10
We arrived in Israel this afternoon at about 4:30 pm local time at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv. My companions are an interesting mix of folks. The organizer is Rev. Bill Harter, pastor emeritus of a church in Pennsylvania, who has led PC(USA) delegations to the Holy Land since 1970. Most of my companions are Presbyterian pastors. They include the exec of Santa Barbara Presbytery and pastors from Virginia, Idaho, Iowa, and California, a college student, an a couple of folks who are slated to be commissioners to the PC(USA)’s General Assembly in Detroit in June, where issues related to Israel and the Palestinian territories are going to be addressed. There are twelve men and two women.
Rev. Harter contacted me and asked me if I would participate in this trip soon after Christmas. John Wimberly, the retired pastor of Western Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, had given him my name. John and I share the view that the PC(USA) has gone astray in its decade-long emphasis on divestment as a strategy to force Israel to treat Palestinians differently. This view is the hallmark of the group I’m with, Presbyterians for Middle East Peace (PFMEP). We agree that the present situation, with the building of the wall along the Green Line and strict military oversight over the Palestinian territories and border, is wrong; but we think that Israel has very real security reasons it has to consider. We think that much PC(USA) criticism of Israel is one-sided and based on an assumption that Israel, as our sister and founding religion, is supposed to maintain some high bar of moral integrity that we would not hold any other nation to.
Most of all, we think that this strategy of blaming one side for all the problems does not further peace, but inhibits it. We believe that strategies the PC(USA) and others suggest do not realistically assess the political realities on the ground and furthermore alienate the PC(USA) both from American Jews and from our own parishioners, who tend, as most Americans, to be supporters and admirers of Israel. The members of PFMEP believe the church should invest in peacemaking strategies rather than divesting from Israel. As a result, a good portion of our trip will be taken up with visiting cooperative business and peace-building efforts between Israelis and Palestinians.
We are staying at the Dan Hotel in downtown Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is a beautiful city on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s blue green waters are clear but low this winter—it’s been a mild winter in the Middle East, which is bad for agriculture, since this is supposed to be the rainy season. The temperatures are in the 60s.
Last night we heard Rabbi Michael Melchior, Founder and Chairman of The Mosaica Center for Religious Conflict Transformation in the Middle East. He works with Christian and Muslim religious leaders specifically on the issue of peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis. Rabbi Melchior looks the way you think a rabbi should look: a kind face, wispy white beard, a youthful 70, with a yarmulke and cardigan under his dark coat. He is a deeply spiritual man, but it’s quickly clear that he is also a hard-headed politician and man of the world. He has served in important posts in the government many times, including as an advisor to Ehud Barack in the ill-fated Camp David talks during the Clinton administration. Rabbi Melchoir told us that everybody knows what peace must look like: it must be the two-state solution. “I don’t understand people who say the two-state solution is no longer tenable,” he told us. “That’s like saying the Palestinians can’t have an independent homeland. Of course they must have an independent homeland. Or like saying that Israel must stop being a Jewish state. Of course it must be a Jewish state. Or that it must go away altogether. Of course it will never go away. A Two-State solution is THE solution, and we all know it. The problem is, what is the path to get there?”
Rabbi Melchior told us that he travelled with Barack to Camp David and he and others tried to convince the prime minister to take religious issues seriously as part of the peace process. But Barack insisted that religion needed to be left out of the discussion—that the conversation needed to focus on politics alone. That strategy went sour virtually as soon as the negotiations started, Rabbi Melchior said. “Barack said that the Israelis wanted a to put a synagogue on the Temple Mount. Arafat said it had never been the Temple Mount, there had never been a temple there. President Clinton said, ‘If there was no Temple there, then how did Jesus turn over the tables of the money changers?’ The whole thing fell apart over exactly the issues we tried to warn him about: religion.”
Rabbi Melchior has engaged in interfaith dialogue for years and believes that religion can be a solution, not part of the problem. “Let’s use our shared religious values and our shared religious tradition as a way of talking about what we have in common, and how we can live together, instead of as a hammer to beat each other over the head,” he said. It’s a mistake to avoid it—so use it positively. “The problem will be the extremists on all sides,” he says. That will have to be solved. But he believes it’s possible—and essential if peace is to come to the Middle East.
It was a very hopeful, upbeat start for what promises to be an extremely interesting and informative trip!