. . . "the Presbyterians have taken themselves out of the game of those of us who are looking for peace," said David Elcott, director of interfaith relations for the American Jewish Committee and until now one of the more outspoken advocates of quiet diplomacy in the anti-divestment effort. "I'm just not as interested in even responding," he said. "They're a denomination that doesn�t even speak for its own constituency."

. . . A document written by Jewish groups explaining the community�s across-the-board opposition to divestment, which has been distributed by other churches considering divestment, was rejected. �The only way we even heard about it was from outraged Presbyterians who were upset by the one-sidedness of [the training session],� Elcott said. The church leadership�s indifference, he said, is not matched by Presbyterian churches around the country. Many have expressed opposition to the divestment push and continue to work with local Jewish synagogues and community groups. Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, interfaith director for the Anti-Defamation League, said that �more and more, we�re hearing about Presbyterians on the ground complaining about divestment. But there seems to be very little movement on the national level.�

The Jewish and Christian groups have accused each other of reaching out to members of the other group who are "not representative." The church groups claim that Jewish congregations have made alliances with individual churches which dissent from the party line, but it seems the "dissenters" outnumber the officials.

According to the survey by the Presbyterian Church Research Services office, more lay members of the church oppose divestment than support it. Twenty-eight percent of church members and 30 percent of "elders" support the Presbyterian move toward "phased, selective divestment" of companies that benefit from Israel�s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

The survey, taken in November, also revealed that 61 percent of the church's lay members did not know about the divestment action pushed by some church leaders. And relatively few Presbyterians were aware that the Assembly declared "Christian Zionism inconsistent with the basic values" of Presbyterian theology.

In every case I have heard of Jews allying with supposedly "fringe" groups, the allied congregations already had a relationship, or a church leader spoke out on his own initiative. For example, read This Protestant Stands with Israel, A Personal Reflection on General Assemblv Actions on Israel and the Practice of Conversion, and this critique of the Presbyterian initiative.

On the other hand, the churches have repeatedly invited speakers from the far left of the Jewish community but refused requests to include speakers from the mainstream.

[Elcott] cited a recent �training session� on divestment at the church headquarters in Louisville, Ky. Despite pleas from Jewish groups, �there was no representative from the mainstream Jewish point of view � period,� Elcott said. The session, however, did feature a video by Rabbis for Human Rights, a far-left group that is highly critical of Israeli government policies.

The ADL said in reponse to one initiative,

�Mainstream Jewish opinion is forthrightly opposed to divestment from Israel . . . a certain level of diversity of opinion in the Jewish community does exist, though, primarily represented by some Jewish grassroots organizations,� citing Rabbi Michael Lerner and Jewish Voice for Peace. �These are authentic voices and cannot be excluded, but we must emphasize that such viewpoints are not representative of the mainstream or of the institutions of organized American Judaism.�

In their response, the ADL leaders charged that the United Church of Christ document gives �almost equal weight� to these organizations, but ignores �the diversity within your own community � acknowledging the many from your own community who have expressed concern and distress with the actions of your friends in other mainstream Protestant denominations.�

Some church activists have demonstrated appalling cluelessness and ignorance about Jewish norms, indicating that their goal is not dialogue and understanding, but self-righteous preaching.

There are many reasons for the stubborn anti-Israelism of these huge international church bodies. For one thing, the divestment campaign can be seen as a payback for evangelical support of Israel, making Israel a pawn in a power play between liberal churches and evangelicals.

Also, as an expert on the World Council of Churches describes, their governing mechanisms are so sluggish that they cannot respond to events, and more importantly, they have a long history of siding with totalitarianism under the illusion that they are thereby promoting "social justice."

On the face of it, the WCC�s pronouncement is behind the curve of recent events. It comes at the very moment when, after four years of intifada and discontinued diplomacy, Israel and the Palestinian Authority have resumed serious negotiations, having now the encouragement of virtually the entire world - except the terrorists and their sponsors. Instead of applauding this long-hoped-for initiative, the WCC chooses now to cast doubt on the viability of diplomacy by clinging to the one-sided anti-Israel invective that has hitherto subverted hopes for diplomacy.

I see three possible explanations for this:

1. The WCC takes a long time to write its documents. It is possible that their in-house journalists simply haven't got the energy to re-write the text which has been moving up within its massive bureaucracy for so many months.

2. WCC thinking has become so adamantine that change is no longer possible. . . . It is typical of the WCC that it joins in on left-wing habits of thinking only after everyone identifying as a progressive has picked up on them - by which time, the wave has begun to recede and the rhetoric shifts. We find an earlier example of this in the late 1930s, when these same "mainstream" Churches (then clustered in the Federal Council of Churches, in the days before the inauguration of the WCC) were still making Common Front noises about the Peace-loving Soviet Union while simultaneously preaching pacifism and the need for understanding towards the diplomacy being pursued by Adolf Hitler.

. . . [During the Cold War] WCC dignitaries were taking Communist-government-funded tours of the Communist world, and returning to denounce rumour-mongers in our midst who pretended that there were restrictions of freedom, including the freedom of worship, in the Communist world. To my knowledge, we have never received from the WCC any public and formal recantation of their sinful assistance to Communist tyranny. Nor should we expect to live to see similar recantation of their present celebration of the alleged record of religious tolerance in Muslim empires of the past or present. People who are confident of their total righteousness cannot be changed by arguments deriving from fact.

3. The most sinister explanation - and I fear the most likely - is that the WCC is now panicking in face of the real prospect of a diplomatic solution of the Israel-Palestine dispute, which could result in the Palestinian side settling with the State of Israel. The WCC leadership has been drinking disinformation for decades from the well of the Middle East Council of Churches, and is committed to Israel's illegitimacy. In its statement of February 21, the WCC implies that the real boundaries of Israel - the boundaries that now need to be re-negotiated, are not those of 1967 but those of 1948. WCC supports the unlimited right of return of "Palestinian refugees", fully cognizant of the fact that if any substantial part of that multi-million population is canted back inside the 1948 boundaries, then the Jewish state will not be able to contain them. It is my considered belief, reached through careful study of dozens and dozens of WCC statements on this issue, that the WCC will not let up on Israel until it is no more.

Read the whole thing - it's eye-opening.