The governing board of the National Council of Churches (NCC) will consider a resolution on the Middle East when it meets in Indianapolis May 7 which calls for Arab states and Palestinian Arabs to accept Israel “as a Jewish State” and urges Israel to recognize the right of “national self-determination for the Palestinian Arabs” including their right to “a sovereign state.”
The draft resolution also endorses United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, as well as the UN Declaration of Human Rights, as the basis of an overall Mideast peace settlement.
Any of the 266 board members may offer changes to the 26-page resolution at the May meeting which will be considered by the drafting committee before it is presented for final adoption in November.
The NCC’s human rights committee met Sunday night and all day yesterday with the 12 national Jewish organizations that belong to the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NCRAC) to discuss the proposed resolution as well as the recent two-week fact-finding tour of Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan by the NCC’s Middle East Panel. The Human Rights Committee is also scheduled to meet with Arab Americans before the May board meeting.
HOPES EXTREMIST VIEWS WILL BE REJECTED
Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, director of the American Jewish Committee’s interreligious affairs department, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency today that he “hopes” and expects the NCC governing board to adopt a resolution in May that will reject the extreme viewpoints of both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
He said if the NCC can adopt a “comprehensive policy statement” it may “preclude” the repeated attempts by the Antiochian Christian Archdiocese of New York and All North America “and their allies” to get the organization which represents 32 Protestant and Orthodox church groups to adopt anti-Israel resolutions.
The present resolution comes after the Antiochian Church group tried to get a resolution adopted last November which accused Israel of violating human rights. Tanenbaum noted that the November resolution was full of “sheer lies” and defamation of Israel and singled out the Jewish State as “the lone violator of human rights in the Middle East, if not the world.”
The NCC last November, decided, instead of voting on the Antiochian resolution to develop a comprehensive policy statement on the Mideast. It also decided to send a fact finding mission to the Mideast earlier this year. Prior to its trip, the committee held hearings in New York and Washington which was boycotted by Jewish organizations because they considered that the NCC had demonstrated a pro-Arab bias.
NEW INSIGHTS AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Tanenbaum said the meeting this week helped restore the relations between the NCC and the Jewish groups. He said he hoped the NCC leaders who met with Christians, Moslems and Jews in both Israel and the Arab countries “developed new insights and new consciousness” which “I hope will serve as important correctives to some of the images and distorted views they have had about the human rights situation.”
He said he hoped the experiences of the visit will result in changes in the proposed resolution which was drafted before the Mideast trip. Tanenbaum said the Jewish groups and the NCC unit agreed they would not now discuss publicly what was said at this week’s meetings. He said he and Rabbi A. James Rudin, assistant interreligious director for the AJ Committee, will be at the Indianapolis meeting as observers.
The draft resolution that the NCC board will consider calls for: “cessation of all acts of violence by all parties; recognition by the Arab states and by the Palestinian Arabs of Israel as a Jewish State with secure, defined and recognized borders; recognition by Israel of the right of national self-determination for the Palestinian Arabs and of their right to select their own representatives and to establish a Palestinian entity, including a sovereign state; agreement on and creation of a made of enforcement of international guarantees for the sovereign and secure borders of Israel and of any Palestinian entity established as part of the peace process; constructive solutions to the problems of refugees and persons displaced as a result of the Israel-Palestine and related conflicts dating from 1948, including questions of compensations and return.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
