Having rejected anti-Israel divestment of its pension funds last year, the 7.9 million United Methodist Church is courting new controversy involving anti-Israel bias again this year. Starting February 3, the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, from which the denomination conducts its political lobbying, will commemorate the nakba, as Palestinians refer to the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation.
The opening reception on Tuesday, February 3, will kick-off a three-week exhibition in the Methodist Building lobby called “Our Story: A Photo Exhibit Commemorating 60 Years of Dispossession.” Friends of Sabeel Canada, an advocate of Palestinian Liberation Theology among left-leaning Christians, has produced the latest version of the traveling photo show. The reception is hosted by the Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace, a small group of various religious adherents that advocates “divesting from or boycotting those companies” that “profit from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.”
According to an announcement from the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society (GBCS), which owns and occupies the Methodist Building, the exhibit “marks the annual observance of the nakba, the 1948 mass deportation of Palestinians, massacres of civilians and the razing to the ground of hundreds of Palestinian villages following the creation of Israel.”
Congressman Dennis Kucinich is advertised as an invited speaker at the February 3 reception. Others speakers are chief United Methodist lobbyist Jim Winkler, who heads GBCS, nakba “survivor” Afaf Ayish, and Laila Al-Arian, who co-authored Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians. That last speaker will discuss the current Gaza situation. Included in the reception will be a “meditation and prayer for the victims of the 1948 Nakba and the current suffering in Gaza.” Last year, when the nakba photo show was on the national Mall in Washington, D.C., Ayish told the crowd: “A Jew from Russia has more right to live in Jerusalem than I do.” According to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, she complained: “We welcomed them [Jews] when they came and then they chased everybody out.”
The Nakba photo exhibit was originally organized by the Sabeel Ecumenical Theology Centre in Jerusalem, which is an advocacy think-tank for church activists opposing the Israeli “occupation.” As to what exactly Israel is occupying is often left vague. U.S. mainline Protestant church groups that are sharply critical of Israel always insist they support Israel’s existence. But with Sabeel’s encouragement, they also imply support for an unlimited right of return for all descendants of Arabs who lived before 1948 in what is now Israel. Essentially they are advocating the demographic eradication of Israel as a Jewish nation in place of an Arab and predominantly Muslim country. Commemorating the founding of Israel as a nakba, or catastrophe, obviously fits well within this theme of delegitimizing Israel.
The black and white photos in the nakba exhibit (available here) stretch across six decades and illustrate the tragedy of Palestinian displacement by constantly encroaching Israelis. “The new rulers have moved into our lands, into our homes, claiming them as their own,” reads the description of the 1948 war. “The great promises of our brother nations and of the world are forgotten. We flee or are driven out of our homes and families.” This remembrance, of course, is incomplete, repeating the nakba mythology that Jews willfully rousted thousands of innocent Arabs from their homes because of their own greed and imperialism.
None of the narrations for the nakba photo exhibit mention that the former British Mandate of Palestine was divided by the United Nations between a newly founded Israel and an Arab territory. The neighboring Arab nations responded by attacking Israel, with support from Arabs within the Palestinian Mandate. Many Palestinians left at the conflict’s advent, hoping for Arab victory. Others left during the defeat of Arab forces. But according to the nakba photo show, Israel “destroyed, sealed or expropriated” more than 420 Palestinian villages in 1948, all seemingly without provocation.
A caption for the Six Day War reads with similar historical veracity: “Another war, and again we must bear the loss of our lives, our land, our families, our businesses. We are pushed into smaller cages. We are separated from our families from our culture, from our identity.” Of course, unmentioned is that the war was precipitated by the plans of surrounding Arab nations to attack Israel yet who were themselves preemptively defeated.
Sixty-one photos illustrate Palestinian suffering at the callous hands of Israel, showing stolen homes, destroyed villages, permanent refugees camps, the rubble of a demolished church, Israeli armed forces pointing their guns and aiming their bulldozers, the separation barrier devastating the landscape; Palestinians picking through garbage dumps, and children playing amid the ruins. “We are still a nation of refugees,” exclaims one caption. A caption for the Intifada warns: “Our children will be children of the stones. The very rocks of the earth will help us to resist the oppression we suffer, the guns we face.” Another caption complains of increasing Israeli “colonialism and apartheid.” A caption about Palestinians living “in what became Israel” expresses hope that relatives who “fled for their lives beyond the arbitrary cease fire lines that became the borders of Israel” will “soon, very soon, come home.”
Across recent decades, the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill has hosted rallies and lobby events for groups supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Marxist guerillas in El Salvador, for front groups of the North Korean regime, for advocates of Fidel Castro’s misrule, for apologists of the Soviet empire, and for countless other tyrannies that have plagued the modern era. By portraying Israel’s founding as a “catastrophe” that can only be redeemed through the gradual eradication of the Middle East’s only longstanding democracy, the Methodist lobbyists are at least faithful to a decades-long tradition.
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
