 action & events Letter sent to the Presbyterian Church to negate the Simon Wiesenthal Center's anti-BDS spam campaign
Rev. Dr. Gradye Parsons Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow Elder Linda Bryant Valentine The Simon Weisenthal Center has set up a spam tool—of which not one single letter of their text can be changed—to pressure the Presbyterian Church not to approve a BDS campaign against Israel. Their spam interface can be found here: http://www.wiesenthal.com/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=5812479 The text they are insisting that their supporters send, without even giving them the option of rephrasing, is below:
I lived in Israel/Palestine from 1994-1998, working in the administration of Birzeit University, during the "peace process" years that clearly were nothing but—years in which Israel missed an historic opportunity to make peace by doubling the number of settlers in the Occupied Territories from 200,000 to 400,000—in this conflict over land. The entire land area of Israel/Palestine is around 8,000 sq miles, the size of New Jersey, one fifth of the size of the state of Pennsylvania where I now live, and one 14th the size of Minnesota where I lived for the decade before moving here. The obvious facts that this spam letter seeks to obfuscate are quite simple. Let me go through it, paragraph by paragraph: Paragraph 1: "I am deeply disturbed by the dangerous campaign to delegitimize the Jewish State and her supporters launched by a committee that is dominated by activists openly hostile to Israel. They are poised to place the policy of PCUSA on a collision course with Israel’s survival." Israel is delegitimizing itself, by doing nothing to curb its violence towards the Palestinians, by its defiance of the legal structures of the international community, and by its continued settlement of Palestinian land. Israel is its own worst enemy. Read the Goldstone Report, written by a team of international legal investigators headed by a lifelong Zionist Jew. It is clear long before you get to the last of 575 pages that there remains not even a semblance of Israel attempting to treat Palestinians like human beings. Israel's behavior is disgusting, utterly brutish, and immoral. Paragraph 2: "The adoption of the findings proposed by the committee charged to reexamine PCUSA's Middle East policy will be nothing short of a declaration of war on the Jewish State. It will encourage extremists in the Middle East, demonize supporters of Israel in America, and destroy the era of good will that has been fostered with the Jewish community over decades." Israel is already carrying out a war on the Palestinian people. Israel doesn't listen to anyone, any more, about anything. Choosing to adopt a policy of boycott, divestment, and sanctions is the only option left to civilized clusters of people around the world. That isn't an "act of war", it's a nudge, a tap on the shoulder, a wake up alarm to do the right thing. Killing 1,400 Palestinians, only 16.7% of whom were combatants, injuring another 5,000, displacing 100,000 people, destroying 50,000 homes—those are all acts of war—a war against a people living under siege with nowhere to run. And that's just Gaza. Taking nonviolent action to end this is an act of peace. Paragraph 3: "I urge PCUSA to live up to its 2008 General Assembly commitment to listen to many voices on the Middle East and adopt policies fair to both Israelis and Palestinians." The only voices that matter to listen to at this point, where Israel and all of her accomplices stand knee-deep in blood, are the voices of 1.5 million Gazans, trapped without sufficient food and denied building materials to even repair what was turned into rubble one year ago. Israel's excuse is that "HAMAS will build concrete bunkers if they let building materials in." Apparently, that makes it okay to deprive 750,000 children of food and medical supplies, turning a border that Israel controls into a desperation-increasing trickle of scraps of life. "HAMAS" is the latest Israeli excuse for its repression of the Palestinian people. Before HAMAS it was Arafat. Before Arafat, it was the PLO. It's an excuse and it is the pathetic excuse of the abuser claiming victimhood. The only fair policy that PCUSA can adopt is to stop enabling Israel by not purchasing its goods made in settlements, its goods made from the resources of stolen land at the expense of the Palestinians. The only fair policy that PCUSA can adopt is to stop investing in Israel, which is thereby enabled by this investment to continue a brutal 63-year-long military occupation. And the only fair policy that PCUSA can adopt is to pressurize the political leaders in this country, who clearly do not care that Palestinians are being slaughtered with weapons we give Israel for free, to stop lining up to shower Israel with these tools of death. The M825-A1 White Phosphorus shells used widely on civilian areas in Gaza last year would seem an obvious, immediate demand to cease handing out. As a Christian and an individual who has had much dealings with the real Palestinian people who exist beyond their shallow demonization by Israel, beyond the shallow coverage we see of Palestinians in the U.S. media, and beyond the shallow "commitment" by successive, weapons-gifting, political cover-providing U.S. administrations to any real role that deserves the title "honest broker", I urge you to do the right thing. Please choose the only nonviolent option left to us, as was the case with South Africa a quarter of a century ago: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Sincerely, Nigel Parry [contact details redacted] 
more from this section  • Action Alert: Stop the Wall offices raided by Israeli military (Tuesday, May 8th, 2012)  • Musicians' Declaration of Support for #OccupyWallStreet (Monday, October 17th, 2011) • Support Independent Reporting: #OccupyWallStreet (Thursday, October 13th, 2011) • Coleen Rowley: We're conflating proper dissent and terrorism (Sunday, January 16th, 2011) • FBI raids of pro-Palestine activist homes in four US states (Friday, September 24th, 2010) • Summer 2010 Appeal (Monday, June 21st, 2010) |
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