Further Insights from My Recent Middle East Trip
By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, St. Stephen Presbyterian Church, Fort Worth, TX
This June, I will be attending the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly meeting in Detroit, MI. I’m not going as a delegate, but rather as an advocate. I will be trying to convince commissioners to vote “no” to the several motions that will be before the assembly this year to use economic sanctions and other tools to punish Israel for its occupation of the West Bank. I will be there in cooperation with an organization called “Presbyterians for Middle East Peace” (PFMEP), whose stated mission is to promote investment in peace rather than divestment in Israel. They sponsored my trip this past February to Israel and the PalestinianTerritories. It was an eye-opening trip that confirmed my opinion that boycotting, divesting, or sanctioning Israel is a bad idea for Jewish-Christian relations, Palestinians and Israelis, and peace in the Middle East.
Let me be clear: I don’t think the occupation of the West Bank is tolerable or can long stand. It supports Israel’s short-term security interests but does little to promote the long-term goal of peace; it only continues to foster resentment. But the emergence of the BDS Movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) against Israel is not a tool that furthers peace, either; and for Presbyterians to get on its band-wagon puts us in a position of choosing sides in an intractable and difficult situation. We should defend and support Palestinians under the occupation; but let’s not paint Israel as the bad guy, simply because they have the upper hand. As a friend of mine, a retired diplomat, once told me about the Israel/Palestinian situation, “We diplomats like to say that situations like the Middle East aren’t problems, but dilemmas. Problems have solutions; but dilemmas have horns.”
When my group was in the Palestinian territories, we heard several stories that indicated the complexities of the dilemma. We visited an amazing city called Rawabi, “the first Palestinian planned city,” according to its website (http://www.rawabi.ps/about.php). Rawabi is literally being built from the ground up, with affordable, state-of-the-art housing for up to 40,000 residents and the goal of providing employment for tens of thousands of Palestinians and becoming an international economic center. It is financed by the nation of Qatar and is the brainchild of a Palestinian businessman named Mosri, with whom our group was privileged to meet. Mosri made it quickly clear he despises the occupation. Israeli soldiers “making you wait eight hours at a checkpoint isn’t security anymore, it’s cruelty,” he said angrily. He also complained about “our closest, unfriendly neighbors,” an Orthodox Jewish settlement on the next hill, with whom they are in constant conflict about water usage. But when we asked Mosri about the BDS movement, he was equally disdainful. “People advocating divestment don’t understand the economy of the Middle East,” he said. “Israel’s and Palestine’s economies are linked. You can’t hurt one without hurting the other.”
We heard a similar message at the infamous Sodastream Plant. You probably heard about Sodastream in the news in January: Actress Scarlett Johansson starred in a Super Bowl ad for the company and was promptly vilified by many who believe Sodastream exploits its workers. But a visit to the site itself quickly illustrates that this is not the case. Sodastream is an Israeli company that has chosen to operate in the West Bank because it believes, as Mosri stated, that Israel’s and the West Bank’s economy are inextricably linked. “There are a lot cheaper places where we could have established our business,” one of the company’s owners told us. “We could be in China. But we wanted to give jobs to Israelis and Palestinians.” Sodastream hires over 1/3rd of its workers from the West Bank, and the waiting list for hires is huge, because the company pays four times what the average Palestinian makes, and the working conditions are very good.
My group visited many such businesses in both Israel and the West Bank, because Presbyterians for Middle East Peace believes that it is smarter policy toward peace if the PC(USA) would invest in businesses that promote Palestinian/Israeli cooperation rather than divesting in Israeli businesses, which damages the whole economy to no good purpose.
Again, this is not to say that Israeli policy is without flaw. But some of the extreme rhetoric we hear misrepresents the seriousness and complexity of the situation. For instance, a common claim of BDS supporters is that Israel is an apartheid state. Israeli Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, an award-winning columnist for the Jerusalem Post, disputes this. “It’s not apartheid,” Khaled says. “If it was apartheid I couldn’t live in a Jerusalem neighborhood or go to school here or work at a Jerusalem newspaper. It’s not apartheid just because we have a wall,” he said, referring to the controversial “Green Line” wall that separates the Palestinian territories from Israel. “It was suicide bombers that caused the wall,” he says.
Still, Arabs living in Israel have a lot to complain about. “Arab Israelis have been loyal,” he said, “but it’s not been reciprocated. It’s not apartheid, but discrimination in three areas: employment, infrastructure, and distribution of funds.” But he doesn’t see the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as “a conflict between good guys and bad guys.” Both sides have contributed to the problem, and both sides need to make concessions to solve it. (Comments welcome on St. Stephen Presbyterian Church’s FB page)