The Israel-Boycott Charade of the United Church of Christ

In 2015, the general synod of the United Church of Christ (UCC)—one of America’s major mainline Protestant denominations—voted overwhelmingly in favor of divestment of church funds from corporations doing business with Israel, deeming the Jewish state the sole nation whose violations of human rights justified such a measure. Dexter Van Zile notes that this resolution was purely an exercise in moral posturing:

The vote generated a lot of publicity for the denomination, but it didn’t have the impact its supporters said it was going to have. The denomination’s $3.2-billion retirement fund is still invested in three of the companies named by the resolution—Caterpillar ($1.7 million), Hewlett-Packard ($437,000), and Motorola ($342,000). The numbers aren’t huge, but the fact is UCC’s pension boards own stock that the denomination’s general synod explicitly blacklisted for profiting from Israel’s purported misdeeds in the West Bank.

If we are to believe the propaganda broadcast at the general synod in 2015, UCC retirees are profiting from human suffering in the Holy Land. The [synod] told the denomination’s local churches, parishioners, and, by way of implication, the rest of American society that they shouldn’t profit from companies that do business with Israel. But the denomination’s retirement fund does just that.

It was all a farce — a hypocritical, dishonest farce. . . . And that was how it was going to be from the very beginning, [since] UCC pension boards are not bound by the general synod’s resolutions. In other words, the UCC pension fund was free to do whatever it needed to do to achieve the 4-percent return on investment that it has promised to retirees. . .

It just goes to confirm what most people have concluded all along: anti-Israel divestment resolutions are just a charade, a put-on used to generate hostility toward the Jewish state and its supporters in the U.S. The whole point of the divestment resolutions was not to get church institutions to sell stock, but to use divestment motions to turn the floor of church-wide assemblies into venues for anti-Israel witch trials.

Read more at Algemeiner

More about: Anti-Zionism, BDS, Israel & Zionism, Jewish-Christian relations

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society