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US Presbyterian Church calls Israel ‘apartheid state’

The Protestant movement voted to condemn and boycott Israel for purported human rights abuses.

By: Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The Presbyterian Church (USA) Assembly passed eight resolutions against Israel and called it an “apartheid state.”

The anti-Israel Christian church passed eight resolutions that excoriated the Jewish state at its biennial conference on Friday. In contrast, it had only one against the ongoing carnage in Syria and another on Iran.

The General Assembly (GA) of the leadership of the Presbyterian Church-USA (PCUSA) overwhelmingly approved resolutions that censured Israel, while voting down those deemed not critical enough. According to the Presbyterian Outlet news service, for example, IDF actions on the border with Gaza during the recent Palestinian riots were panned, with no mention of the Hamas instigators of the violence and its attempted infiltrations, firebombings and sabotage of the border fence.

The Church also approved a resolution calling on the real estate company RE/MAX to stop working in Judea and Samaria.

Moreover, the Assembly massively opposed anti-BDS legislation that has been under consideration at the state and federal level over recent years. This was in line with the GA vote in 2014, when it passed resolutions to boycott and divest from companies they decided were “complicit” in Israel’s alleged offenses against Palestinians.

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In an article published last month in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle ahead of the Assembly, the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) director of Interreligious and Intergroup Relations, Rabbi Noam Marans, bemoaned the “small but vocal minority” that has kept up a public demonization of Israel “through eight assemblies spanning 14 years.”

Saying that Presbyterian relations with Jews throughout the United States are “generally superb” on the local level, Marans praised those who were trying to counter the anti-Israelism of the PCUSA. “We pray that they will succeed in taking back their hijacked church,” he stated.

“For many years and in myriad ways, the PCUSA has gone beyond legitimate criticism of Israel and embraced demonization of the Jewish state,” Marans said.

According to an internal church publication, The Layman, the PCUSA has steadily lost membership since 1984 and is now down to about 1.5 million members.