Episcopalians Vote to Deny Israel Equivalent of Settlement Funds

By the Rev. L. Humphrey Walz

President Bush, Secretary of State Baker and Chairman Powell of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all are Episcopalians. Hence there was unusually lively interest in whether their roles in the Gulf crisis would be censured or applauded by bishops and deputies assembled in Phoenix, Arizona in late July for the 11 day Episcopal General Convention. Many bishops had protested the Bush administration's failure to give nonmilitary solutions an adequate chance, and had deplored the loss of civilian lives in and after the bombings of Iraq. Deputies, however, had strongly favored "extending appreciation for the leadership of the president and military during the war."

After intensive hearings and debate the convention, while supporting 15 other resolutions on the Middle East, narrowly defeated the motion. Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning, who had counseled with parishioner Bush against launching the war, declared, "He has asked me to continue to be in dialogue. I have every intention of sharing with him what this debate was like."

The Associated Press gave most prominence to the convention's resolution that the equivalent of "whatever Israel spends on settlements in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be held in escrow from US aid to Israel." One Episcopalian journalist and close observer of the Middle East peace process was moved more by the strong affirmation of a two state Israeli/Palestinian solution. Coverage of the appeals for emergency relief for Kurdish and other war related needs was sympathetic.

Discordant notes were struck, however, by Rabbi Robert Kravitz of the American Jewish Committee, who, in the preliminary hearings on violations of Palestinian human rights, contended for official Israeli Embassy positions and left the conference. After the vote to "support the efforts of the Secretary of State to convene a conference to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict," he returned to rebuke the convention for "the tone, the substance and the timing of the major Middle East resolutions and their unfairness."

Unitarian-Universalist Assembly Scrutinizes Middle East

Supportive of current trends at the UN, three resolutions calling for the "lifting of nonmilitary sanctions against Iraq" were submitted to the Unitarian-Universalist General Assembly in Hollywood, Florida, edited into a single text and approved. According to the July 23 "UUs for Middle East Peace" newsletter, the combined version emphasized allowing Iraqis to receive food, medicines and enough materials and equipment to reopen electric, sewage and water systems for the full functioning of hospitals.

In other Mideast related events at the assembly: Palestinian poet and political scientist Hisham. Ahmed, a visiting professor at Florida International University, spoke on "Peace and Justice in the Middle East; Noam Chomsky's tape on the same theme was a "big seller "; and reprints of last year's resolution to "Keep the Peace Process Alive" were distributed, urging "the Bush administration to resume official dialogue immediately with the PLO and other parties to the Middle East conflict."

Lutherans on Gulf War and Its Aftermath

Church bodies that reacted on every level local, regional, national and global before and during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm continue to try to learn from and about that composite, unfinished drama. Of the studies in print, none has provided more durable, readable inclusiveness than the summer issue of Peace Petitions quarterly. Published by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), it is devoted entirely to the theme, "In the Aftermath of the Gulf War."

Sensitive to the feelings of returned veterans, bereaved families, varied Middle Eastern participants and victims, and internationally frustrated peace activists, it examines and evaluates the factors and policies leading up to what it calls a "unique chapter in the history of warfare one more taxing, we suspect, than most of us know or can admit even today."

Lest that piece of history repeat itself with even deadlier force and fallout, it opens with an extensive, revealing chronology of the exigencies and undercurrents of the crucial diplomatic and military decisions involved. It closes with perceptive analyses from sources as varied as humorist Mark Twain, Nazi Hermann Goering and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles on how, as Dulles phrased it, to "bring a nation to support the burdens of maintaining a great military establishment" and get it "on the path to war."

Most of its pages present, in parallel columns, "Dominant" and "Dissenting" views on the fairness, accuracy and responsibility of media coverage, on "The Nature of the Enemy ... and of Enemy Makers," and on "The New Roles of the US and the UN. " They lead up to the full text of the eleven part ELCA Church Council's comprehensive April 15, 1991 "Resolution on the Middle East," which supports the pursuit of justice and reconciliation via relief, dialogue, education and arms control.

For copies write ELCA Peace Education Department, 8765 West Higgins Road, Chicago, IL 60631, or telephone 1800NETELCA and ask for that department.

World Methodists Protest Israeli Policies

Israeli Prime Minister Shamir's mid August mail included an official protest from the week-long Singapore meeting of the World Methodist Council (WMC) against displacing Palestinians with immigrants in both Israel and the West Bank. Through Joe Hale, their general secretary, the 500 WMC members, from 93 countries claiming 54 million constituents, also reminded Shamir, "Along with many other international organizations and nations, [we do] not accept your government's claim that East Jerusalem is permanently joined to Israel." It further expressed "alarm" at the increased confiscation of land in the West Bank, which "your minister, Ariel Sharon, is quite open in indicating [to be] official Israeli policy."

Jerusalem "Veteran" in Key Ecumenical Post

The National Workshop on Christian Unity regularly brings American church leaders of many denominations together to enhance understanding and cooperation among themselves and with Christian and non Christian neighbors. The newly designated Catholic co-chair (Fr. Robert Coval, an Episcopalian, is the other co-chair) for the 1993 Workshop is Fr. Laurin Wenig of the Milwaukee Archdiocese. Father Wenig assumes the role with a sense of its urgency honed by five stirring years in the heart of Jerusalem.

From 1985 to 1990 with more than half that time overlapping the intifada he lived on Mt. Zion in the Benedictine Monastery of the Dormition, of Mary. Built by German monks a century ago on the traditional site of the New Testament Pentecost (Acts 2:113), the monastery gives high priority to "bringing the people of the land together. " For Father Wenig, it had the added value of proximity to the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum where, with about two dozen other globally selected scholars, he could concentrate on scriptural examples and incentives pertinent to a ministry of bridge building and reconciliation. Also, in practical ways, his contacts in and around the city provided a realistic framework to his learning process.

With Israeli Jews

As cofounder of the Milwaukee Catholic Jewish dialogue in 1975, he had looked forward to similar cordial relations with Israeli Jews. At a recent presentation to the Milwaukee Association for Interfaith Relations, however, he reported that his experience in Israel was sadly not the same. He felt a "tangible sense of merely being tolerated. Some people actually walked away in mid-sentence when they learned that I or others in the group were Catholic priests."

Occasionally young Orthodox Jews from the nearby Diaspora Yeshiva would shout through the monastery windows, "Nazis! Germans! Bastards! Zion is for the Jews! " Official Israeli treatment of the churches, their people and their properties carried other forms of unfriendly overtones. After ending his period of residence in Jerusalem, he returned in December 1990 and in June and July 1991, and each time found governmental hostility more severe. Some of the Israeli anger he attributes to positions taken by the Vatican during the Gulf war.

"One of the most important things I learned was simply the need to see my own culture in a more critical manner," he recalls. "I did come to understand how present issues and historical realities could so blend together as to create a society which loathes, fears, suspects or barely tolerates Christians simply because they are Christians."

With Muslims and Christians

His five-year stay acquainted him, for the first time, with the life of the Palestinian community, both Muslim and Christian. On his earlier visits as a tourist, his guides and hosts had diverted attention away from this segment of society, emphasizing Biblical sites and history. Nor had the Arab historic continuity been stressed in his education, even in seminary studies. Yet, he notes, "it was a world in which I found myself comfortable. It was not just a fascination with Arab culture or history or cuisine. It was upon reflection, a sense of not being rejected I found ... both in the Arab Christian and Arab Muslim world ... the hospitality for a stranger that was so missing from my contacts with the Jewish community."

His meetings with Syriac, Armenian, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Anglican, Coptic and Ethiopian clergy and laity in the "Ecumenical Circle of Friends" deepened his sense of belonging. At the same time these contacts heightened his awareness that Israeli writer Amos Elon's prediction of a Jerusalem with Christian sites but no Christian population could all too possibly be fulfilled. Observable economic and political pressures have shrunk the Holy City's Christian population from 51 percent in 1922 to 10 percent in 1976. Since that number continues to dwindle rapidly, Father Wenig hopes that it is not too late for Christians worldwide to help enable their surviving co-religionists in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Levant to maintain a Christian presence in the geographical cradle of their faith.

Amidst the Intifada

For Wenig, as for everyone there, the spontaneous eruption of the intifada on December 9th, 1987, changed every aspect of daily life. "From that day onward nothing was the same," he tells his audiences. "Where there was fear, there was more fear. Where there had been violence, there was more violence. Where Palestinians' human rights had been violated, they were systematically violated by military order. Where Israelis had to fear terrorism they had to be doubly protected ... Steel helmeted and flak jacketed soldiers on patrol replaced the lively chatter of merchants and tourists."

In response to questions in public assemblies, Wenig gives further details; but, for him, they all add up to a mandate for bridge-building. They cry out for a "justice which is not just a theological exercise, comfortably conducted from afar, " a peace which is not "just a noble ideal called for by prophets and demanded by Jesus, " a morality "which cares for people, all of whom are God's people, whether they have Christian, Jewish or Muslim names and faces, " and a Church that is willing to get into the uncomfortable, awkward, sometimes dangerous position of "assisting both sides as they attempt to talk to one another. "

This recurrent summons in his lectures, panels, writings and media interviews throughout southern Wisconsin will make the National Workshop on Christian Unity doubly credible when it comes to Milwaukee, May 9-13,1993.

The Rev. L. Humphrey Walz, D. D., is a retired associate executive of the Presbyterian Synod of the Northeast.