 Kirkpatrick uses Jewish liberationist to justify PCUSA's position on Israel By John H. Adams The Layman Online Tuesday, November 30, 2004 In defending the denomination's policy on Israel and the Palestinians, Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick has been passing out a commentary by Marc H. Ellis, a Jewish liberationist.
While Ellis does not mention the PCUSA's policy of divestment of funds in multinational corporations doing business with Israel, he does cite one of the targets of that policy – the wall separating Palestinian and Israeli residents. Ellis, director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University, strongly disagrees with most Jews about the need to protect Israelis by constructing the wall to reduce Palestinian suicide bombings that have murdered hundreds of innocent people. During a Presbyterian pastors' conference in Nashville, Tenn., Nov. 15-17, Kirkpatrick handed out a copy of a 13-page article that was published in the September/October 2003 edition of Church & Society, a journal of the National Ministries Division of the Presbyterian Church (USA). The article was adapted from a presentation Ellis made to the 2002 Moderator's Conference of the PCUSA. Fahed Abu-Akel, a native Palestinian and an advocate of Palestinian causes, was the moderator of the denomination at that time. Ellis' arguments were presented within the context of liberation theology, which asserts that God is partisan, siding with those who hold the weaker position in a society even if they use violence in an attempt to win concessions. Liberationism and its offshoots – such as radical feminism – are part of a relatively new theology that emerged through the writings of Gustavo Gutíerrez, a Roman Catholic priest and the author of A Theology of Liberation (1971). Ellis has added numerous books – including Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation – to the growing liberationist canon. Many critics, including Pope John II, have denounced the advocates of liberation theology, accusing them of favoring violence and Marxism. The pope set in motion a deliberate strategy to crush liberation theology in Latin America, closing many institutions which had fostered it, including seminaries, schools and some churches. Ellis is a product of the U.S. academic institution – Maryknoll University – that is known as the center for American liberation theology. In the paper distributed to the ministers, Ellis focuses his criticism – as does the PCUSA – on the United States and Israel. "Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the Middle East has largely become an American playing field where difficulties abound but where temporary solutions allow the smooth flow of oil and the backing of governments beholden to American military and economic support," he says. He calls the Sept. 11 attacks that killed thousands of Americans when Arab terrorists crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon one of the "unpredictable" events that arose out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is exacerbated by Israel's alliance with the United States, he said. Ellis has little blame for the Palestinians and their long off-repeated goal of destroying Israel. "The Palestinians are not free of blame," he says. "Their leadership is often lacking in ability and ethics …" But, even then, he suggests that Palestinian violence is no more than quid pro quo. "Like Israeli leaders, especially Ariel Sharon, Palestinian leaders have not shied from using violence as a form of political resistance and engagement." Ellis contends that, "The United States has not been an honest broker." He adds, "The United States has also tilted toward Israel for reasons of domestic policies. This includes Jewish voters and campaign contribution support and the negative view that Americans of non-Jewish background have about Arabs and Islam." Ellis prefers that the U.S. use "aid monies" as bargaining chips in its relationships with the Palestinians and the Arab world – "as a penalty/reward arena and ultimately the decision to either abandon the parties to themselves or introduce American troops along the borders of these states … Unless we are willing to countenance the presence of troops in Jerusalem to create a real Palestinian state, we are not serious about peace with justice in the region. Without the explicit possibility of American military intervention, the honest broker image will be judged by the world, correctly in my view, to be an illusion, a cover for other designs in the Middle East." While Kirkpatrick passed out the Ellis article, he also joined John Detterick, the executive director of the General Assembly Council, in announcing to the pastors that two high-level denominational employees had been fired in the wake of their involvement in a PCUSA "fact-finding" delegation's meeting with the Hezbollah, a Lebanese group blamed for two bombings that killed 270 Americans. Those employees, Kathy Leuckert, Detterick's chief deputy, and Peter Sulyok of the Advisory Commission on Social Witness Policy, were part of the 24-member Presbyterian delegation. But it was two others in the group – Advisory Commission members Ron Stone and Nile Harper – who caused the controversy by applauding Hezbollah and taking sides against Israel's policies. |
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