There were amendments and amendments to amendments in a debate lasting for more than four hours. There were dueling T-shirts. There was a last-minute appeal for a joint pilgrimage to speak hard truths to Benjamin Netanyahu. And there was a plea to emulate Jesus and speak hard truths to Jews.
After it all there was the Presbyterian General Assembly’s vote, 310-303, to divest from three American companies that do business with Israeli security services in the West Bank.
In the immediate aftermath, Heath Rada, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), appealed to the media present to “affirm” the love Presbyterians have for Jews.
“In no way is this a reflection for our lack of love for our Jewish sisters and brothers,” Rada said following the June 20 vote.
Their Jewish sisters and brothers were, for the most part, not buying.
“It signals a real separation from the Jewish community, which was unfortunate,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who flew in at the last minute to deliver an impassioned appeal to the mainline Protestant denomination to vote against divestment.
In his address, Jacobs said his Reform movement opposed West Bank settlements and was concerned with the “pain and hardship” that the Israeli occupation causes Palestinians.
And he made an offer: If the assembly rejected divestment, Jacobs said, church leaders could join him in presenting their shared concerns about Israeli policies in a joint meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But his appeal ultimately was rebuffed.
“We simply cannot work with the Presbyterian Church on issues related to the Middle East,” Jacobs said in an interview from Israel, where he headed immediately after his June 19 appearance at the assembly.
The resolution divests from Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions and Hewlett-Packard. A similar resolution was defeated narrowly at the last biennial, in 2012.
Netanyahu, addressing a colloquy of Jewish journalists in Jerusalem, criticized the vote.
“The only place where you have freedom, tolerance, protection of minorities, protection of gays, of Christians and all other faiths is Israel,” he said Sunday at the Jewish Media Summit in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu suggested that American Presbyterian leaders “take a plane, come here and let’s arrange a bus tour in the region. Let them go to Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq.”
Jewish communal officials who attended the assembly said the tight vote suggested that the church’s rank and file did not buy into the church leadership’s hypercritical posture on Israel.
“If you take a look at the closeness of the vote and realize how stacked the decks were going in, reading between the lines, this is not a church that in its general membership is strongly anti-Israel,” said Rabbi David Sandmel, the Anti-Defamation League’s director of interfaith affairs.
The resolution, or “overture,” as it is called in Presbyterian parlance, was subject to a barrage of amendments — even amendments to amendments — when it reached the floor of the assembly in Detroit on Friday afternoon.
Many of the modifications sought to make clear that the divestment did not signal a split with Israel. One amendment that passed made explicit that the resolution “is not to be construed or represented by any organization of the PC(USA) as divestment from the State of Israel, or an alignment with or endorsement of the global BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions) movement.”
The language of the divestment resolution as it passed also reaffirmed “Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign nation within secure and internationally recognized borders in accordance with the United Nations resolutions.”
Rachel Lerner, J Street’s senior vice president for community relations, said she was heartened by the amendment. Lerner had delivered a speech at the assembly pleading with the delegates to reject divestment.
“There were a lot of people who backed the divestment resolution who weren’t voting against Israel but Israeli policy,” she said. “There is a way forward to dialogue. I don’t think cutting off discussion helps.”
Other Jewish leaders who for years have engaged in interfaith dialogue with the Presbyterians said the last-minute qualifications could not mitigate a season of bitterness triggered by the publication in January of an anti-Zionist study guide, “Zionism Unsettled,” by the Presbyterian Church’s Israel/Palestine Missionary Network.
Ethan Felson, the vice president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said other mainline Protestant churches had engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy “without trafficking in anti-Jewish tropes as that document did,” referring to the Presbyterian study guide.
“Several other mainline denominations have passionate pro-Palestinian programs that are not informed by the same kind of animus,” he said. “Does anyone believe the Presbyterians are more committed to Palestinians than Episcopalians or Lutherans — or could it be something else?”
The General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that the study guide “does not represent the views of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and directs the staff of the Presbyterian Mission Agency to no longer distribute Zionism Unsettled and have the document removed from the church web store immediately.”
But participants from mainstream Jewish groups also felt offended by what they said was, at the very least, tone deafness to Jewish sensibilities displayed by church leaders.
They cited an incident earlier in the week when Virginia Sheets, the moderator of the assembly’s Middle East committee, opened proceedings to consider divestment with a prayer in which she said that “Jesus had many Jewish friends, and he wasn’t afraid to speak difficult truths to Jews in his time.”
“We thought that this was a conversation of a bygone era in which Christian leaders were not careful in using the age-old tropes that demonized,” said Rabbi Noam Marans, the American Jewish Committee’s director of interreligious Jewish relations. “And now they are back masquerading as anti-Israel sentiment.”
Divestment opponents said they felt the leadership stacked the odds against them, granting greater access to committee hearings to pro-divestment activists such as representatives of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Pro-Israel activists wore T-shirts that read “Divestment leaves me out” and “Love us and don’t leave us,” which at least one speaker during the debate decried as “manipulative.” Jewish Voice for Peace activists wore T-shirts declaring “Another Jew supporting divestment.”
Some were unsettled by the intensity of the lobbying. One woman during the debate remarked, “Even going to the bathroom there was someone lobbying for divestment.”
Pro-Israel activists accused the leadership of allowing Jewish Voice for Peace to create the false impression that it spoke for a substantial portion of the Jewish community.
“The Jewish Voice for Peace people were lobbying people all the time,” said Roberta Seid, the education director for the pro-Israel group StandWithUs. “They were saying, ‘You won’t offend Jews if you pass divestment. We represent a growing segment of the Jewish community. ’ ”
Sydney Levy, the director for advocacy at Jewish Voice for Peace, denied making claims that his group’s views were necessarily representative of the Jewish community. Instead, he said, its activists argued that the Jewish community’s resistance to debating divestment obscured the degree to which the community was divided on the issue.
“We never say we represent all Jews, we say the Jews are divided, that there are red lines because the mainstream Jewish institutions are not interested in finding out,” he said.
The Rev. Katharine Rhodes Henderson, president of the Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, spoke on the floor in favor of accepting the appeal from Jacobs, the Reform movement leader.
She told JTA that it was important for the Jewish community to maintain its partnerships with Presbyterians, and that those Presbyterians who had lobbied against divestment will stay active in espousing their position on the issue within the church.
“The body of Christ needs all voices represented,” Henderson said. “Change will only happen if we can keep people at the table.”
 310-303 vote on June 20 at its biannual convention in Detroit.</p>
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“It doesn’t represent who we are.” Sams said. “To develop policy that would convey the message that we are turning our back on our brothers and sisters in Israel is just very, very disappointing.”</p>
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The vote requires PCUSA to sell the approximately $21 million worth of stock it owns in three companies — Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions — which, many in the church say, assist Israel in its occupation of the West Bank and its alleged mistreatment of Palestinians there. Similar divestment measures previously have failed among Methodists, Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ.</p>
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The Presbyterians, a mainstream Protestant denomination, debated a similar motion two years ago, defeating it by just two votes. And, in 2006, the GA repealed a 2004 resolution that also called for divestment after widespread protest among its membership.</p>
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It is those people — the average Presbyterian churchgoers — whom Sams feels are being misrepresented by PCUSA’s leadership. </p>
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George Douglas, an elder at Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church, is a leader at Presbyterians for Middle East Peace, a group that was formed shortly after PCUSA’s initial endorsement of divestment at its 2004 assembly. The group opposes divestment.</p>
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Douglas said that the recent push by Presbyterian leaders to divest from Israel stems partially from the group’s long history of missionary work in the Middle East. “Those mission workers have tended to take the Palestinian point of view, since 1948,” Douglas said, alleging that at the convention, which he attended, he personally witnessed some clergy, elders and Palestinian Christian partners make inflammatory anti-Israel comments, including claims that Israel subjects Palestinians to “biblical scale enslavement” and tortures children as a matter of policy.</p>
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“The General Assembly acts as a platform for activists,” Douglas said, explaining why divestment, which he estimates has only 15 to 20 percent support in the pews, has majority support among the church’s clergy and lay leaders. </p>
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Rev. Bill Wood has been the pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica for 15 years. He echoed Douglas, pointing to the passion of pro-divestment activists as perhaps the main reason for their success. “When people get up on their horse and they are tilting toward their windmill on a justice issue,” Wood said, “people get swayed.”</p>
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The Presbyterian Church, in contrast to the Catholic Church, is structured from the bottom up, with each church in PCUSA governed by “elders” — lay leaders similar to synagogue board members. Each church belongs to a regional “presbytery,” of which there are 173 in the United States, most of which include between 50 and 150 churches. Those presbyteries are represented by voting members, both lay and clergy, at the church’s biannual General Assembly.</p>
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Sams said that as with any law or government policy, a decision by PCUSA’s voting representatives should not be read as an endorsement by all or even most of the church’s 1.7 million members in this country.</p>
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“When the U.S government brings a policy and it gets turned into law, it’s very easy for people around the world to believe that every U.S. citizen believes the same thing,” he said. “In the same way, the decision of our General Assembly doesn’t represent the views of every Presbyterian.”</p>
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Wood, setting aside a few minutes for an interview, said that, just moments earlier, he had sent an email to one of his friends, a local rabbi, with one word in the subject line — “Embarrassed.”</p>
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“If I’d been there I would have voted ‘No,’ perhaps ‘Hell, no,’ ” Wood said. “GA speaks <em>to</em> the churches and not <em>for</em> the churches. They don’t speak for the rest of us.”</p>
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While it would appear to be a stretch to suggest that the GA’s decision sits comfortably with most Presbyterian congregations, it could not have passed without a formidable coalition of pro-divestment voices.</p>
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Tony de la Rosa is an elder at Immanuel Presbyterian Church, a progressive church in the Koreatown neighborhood. While he chose not to say whether he supports or opposes the divestment vote, he emphasized that the same vote also reaffirmed Israel’s right to exist and explicitly disassociated PCUSA from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which serves as a major tool within the pro-Palestinian movement.</p>
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“[PCUSA] doesn’t purport to speak for everyone,” de la Rosa said. “But they are, if you will, the symbolic expression of the voice of Presbyterianism as we seek to understand how God is speaking to us.”</p>
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He emphasized that the “fundamental” motivations of those crafting the divestment bill is “promoting peace in the Middle East.”</p>
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“People were certainly civil, torn, passionate, desperately trying to discern the mind of Christ in our action,” said de la Rosa, who attended the convention in Detroit and observed the vote.</p>
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This fissure, already manifest at Bel Air Presbyterian — which has chosen to remain in PCUSA so as to keep its voice in the discussion — is just one of many that have developed in recent years as the national group’s liberal-leaning leadership has clashed with more traditional churches over issues like the definition of marriage and the expectation of celibacy among unmarried pastors. </p>
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In just two years, these rifts have contributed to an exodus of nearly 200,000 members and hundreds of congregations nationally.</p>
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While Wood, the Santa Monica pastor, said he hopes that internal opposition and protests by Jewish groups may prompt the leadership to again repeal divestment, he is concerned about how Jews will now feel toward Presbyterians.</p>
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“It’s perceived and experienced — as I understand it — by Jews as being one-sided against Israel, and I’m sad about that,” Wood said. </p>
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“We Presbyterians are not against Israel.”</p>
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