By Bob Allen
Former President Jimmy Carter commended 15 Christian leaders whose recent call for Congress to investigate human-rights violations by Israelis against Palestinians caused tension between Jewish and mainline Protestant denominations in the United States.
The Atlanta-based Carter Center released a statement Oct. 31 sharing the group’s concern about Israel’s disregard for stated U.S. policy, including repeated demands that Israel halt all settlements in occupied Palestinian territories.
“This is precluding the possibility of a two-state solution and endangers a peaceful future for both Israelis and Palestinians,” said Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who started the not-for-profit Carter Center in 1982.
Leaders of denominational groups, including Roy Medley of American Baptist Churches USA, wrote members of Congress Oct. 5 urging an immediate investigation into possible violations by Israel. U.S. foreign policy denies assistance to countries that engage in a consistent pattern of human-rights violations.
“We want to be clear that we recognize that Israel faces real security threats and that it has both a right and a duty to protect both the state and its citizens,” the letter said. “However, the measures that it uses to protect itself and its citizens, as in the case with any other nation, must conform to international humanitarian and human rights law.”
“As Christian leaders in the United States, it is our moral responsibility to question the continuation of unconditional U.S. financial assistance to the government of Israel,” it continued. “Realizing a just and lasting peace will require this accountability, as continued U.S. military assistance to Israel — offered without conditions or accountability — will only serve to sustain the status quo and Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories.”
The faith leaders enumerated concerns, including reported killings of civilians, suppression of legitimate political expression and protest, home demolitions and forced displacement, use of prohibited weaponry in densely populated civilian areas, restricting Palestinian movement through Israeli-only roads, and more than 500 roadblocks and checkpoints that make travel for Palestinians slow or impossible.
Several Jewish groups responded by canceling a previously planned meeting with Protestant leaders, describing the letter as a “betrayal of trust.” Matt Goldberg, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council in Louisville, Ky., said accusations against Israel in the letter “are either taken out of context, severe exaggerations or outright false.”
Carter, who in addition to his human-rights work at the Carter Center is spearheading a New Baptist Covenant movement aimed at uniting Baptists across racial and doctrinal lines in North America around shared concerns like peace, justice and care for the poor, has long been outspoken in his views about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
His 2007 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, was widely criticized for comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians living within its borders to the South African regime that kept that nation racially segregated until the 1980s.
That controversy resurfaced in 2009, when Carter gave a speech calling Israel’s then 2-year-old blockade of Gaza an “atrocity” and saying people there were treated like animals. Carter later apologized for “words or deeds” that might have served to stigmatize Israel.
Churches for Middle East Peace, a coalition of 24 national church denominations and organizations including American Baptist Churches and the Alliance of Baptists, is urging voters to let candidates know of their concerns about peace in the Holy Land in anticipation of next week’s election.