New Diocesan Newsletter for Mideast Peace

By the Reverend Humphrey L. Walz

The Committee on Israeli/Palestinian Peace of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington exists to enhance US influence for justice, integrity, and reconciliation in the troubled area of its special concern. To expand its regular program for educating church members and other Americans in that direction, it has commissioned Helena Cobban to produce a timely, candid newsletter, terse but thoroughly researched.

The author of many publications on the Middle East, including The PLO: People, Power and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1984), she has served as Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and Sunday Times. Presently a guest scholar at the Brookings Institute, she is a MacArthur senior fellow in international peace and security studies.

Her first Cobban Letter—which appeared Oct. 25—set the tone for the series with forthright, constructive, critical analyses of sensitive issues and misunderstood situations. It reminded readers, for instance, that professional-level Pentagon officials regard Israel as offering, at best, negligible strategic value to our country's security—whether against the USSR or anyone else. This would remain true even if Israel were to agree (as it never has) to fight on our side. Yet that newsletter further reported some Pentagon officials, wanting congressional support for controversial big-ticket defense items, find ways of tying them in with Israel-serving conditions to insure the requisite backing by AIPAC, the Israeli lobby in Washington. Star Wars budgeting, with major contracts assigned to Israel, is a noteworthy beneficiary of this procedure.

Cobban's newsletter admitted that "many non-Jews are rightly hesitant to take any step that might fan the flames of anti-Semitism." But she argued that this factor should not prevent anyone from approaching the issue on its merits. "The most anguished American debate over Israel's current actions has been that within the Jewish community," she notes,urging readers to read "the deeply troubled writings of Jewish-American intellectuals like Arthur Hertzberg or Albert Vorspan."

She further reminded readers that "many in Israel's own peace camp, such as former military intelligence chief Yehoshafat Harkabi, have pointed out that you do not truly help a friend by remaining silent, for whatever reason, when his or her actions trouble you. Or, as we say in America, "Friends don't let friends drive drunk."

The coming of Christmas prompted Cobban in her second volume to address the question of how the people in Bethlehem and the rest of the occupied territories see the situation. She pointed out that today, as at the time of Christ's birth, Bethlehem is a town under military occupation, and mentioned some of what this means to its people: disenfranchisement, the loss of ancestral lands, the possibility of detention without charge or trial, and "the gravestthreat of all: exile." Most Bethlehemers are Christians, Cobban noted, but "they see their situation under the Israeli occupation as no different from that of their Muslim compatriots."

In this second issue, Cobban warned that the successes of the right wing in Israel's November elections might lead to "an escalation of Israeli repression" in the occupied territories.

The January Cobban Letter promises to explore some of the discussion within the Israeli peace camp, which is an essential participant in any future process of reconciliation between the two peoples.

The sponsoring Committee, chaired by Georgetown University Professor James Reardon-Anderson, is part of the diocesan Commission on Peace, Episcopal Church House, Mount St. Alban, Washington, DC 20016.

The Rev. L. Humphrey Walz., D.D., retired associate executive of the Presbyterian Synod of the Northeast, is active in denominational and ecumenical peacemaking movements.