Cleric Says Jewish-christian Discussions Cannot Avoid Touching Centrally on Israel

Stating that “no serious Jewish-Christian discussion today can avoid touching centrally on Israel, ” the Rev. Allan Brockway of the world Council of Churches (WCC) today reviewed o range of Christian attitudes regarding Israel, and explored the question of “why it is that the question of Israel’s very existence remains unresolved in the minds of Christians.”

The WCC official addressed the National Interreligious Affairs Commission meeting in connection with the American Jewish Committee’s four-day National Executive Council meeting which began here today. Robert Jacobs of Chicago, Interreligious Affairs Commission chairman, presided.

Rabbi Marc Tanenboum, the AJ Committee’s interreligious affairs director, reported on a recent meeting between Jewish groups and the WCC, and urged that “Jewish groups intensify their relationship with the World Council which is constantly subjected to anti-Jewish and anti-Israel pressures from the PLO and the Arab world.”

Brockway, who is associate director for Christian-Jewish Relations of the WCC in Geneva, Switzerland, noted that “there is a great perplexity in the Christian mind as to what Israelis and what it represents, a perplexity that arises out of the abysmal ignorance of Christians about the Jewish people, and about their national identity that has persisted through persecutions, the like of which obliterated other peoples and nations.”

REASONS FOR AMBIVALENT, NEGATIVE ATTITUDES

Among the reasons for ambivalent or negative attitudes about Israel among Christians, Brockway noted the following:

Since Israel was brought into being by people who were persecuted in Europe — although “the extent of that persecution has been largely blurred and forgotten … ” — some Christians “have been taught that Jews took over a land that did not belong to them, displacing the indigenous population, the Palestinian Arabs.” ‘identifying the Palestinians as “the poor and oppressed, ” they will choose the Palestinians over Israel in the international policies they encourage.

While this is “an operating principle for many Christian bodies, ” Brockway said, its fallacy lies in the “absence of historical memory and in a misreading of the complexities of contemporary political reality. When this fallacy is coupled with an understanding of Judaism that allows Christians to separate Judaism as a ‘world religion’ from the lived life of the Jewish people a formidable ideological foundation is laid for an insidious form of anti-Semitism, disguised as anti-Zionism.”

Another source of negative attitudes toward Israel, Brockway stated, comes from representatives of Third World churches who tend to view Israel as a Western nation and link it with the United States and Western Europe as a “colonial” power, the dominance of which must be rejected and overcome.

“In the context of current international political rhetoric, it is all but impossible for Third World church representatives to comprehend Israel as a nation of refugees from all three worlds, ” Brockway said. The situation is complicated by the fact that these Third World churches are influenced by the Christian theology of 19th and 20th Century missionaries, he added, “so that a theological anti-Semitism works even farther beneath the conscious surface than is the case in Europe and North America.”

WCC DRAFTING GUIDELINES

Brockway noted that the WCC’s Consultation on the Church and the Jewish People was currently drafting a set of “Guidelines for Jewish-Christian Dialogue, ” which focuses attention on the “indissoluble bond between the Jewish people and the land of Israel, ” and that the significance of these words from the proposed “Guidelines” indicated growing attention to Jewish sensibilities which may become “a base for widening the constructive dialogue between the churches and the Jewish people … “

Contrasting this approach with a 1948 statement of the WCC that was essentially missionary in its approach to the Jewish people, Brockway stated that “a vast amount of new thinking, new education, new preaching is required to remove the sting from almost 2000 years of Christian hatred toward Jews. “

Emphasizing that he was speaking for himself, Brockway concluded:

“I am deeply concerned that Christians support Israel and the Jewish people, not so much because I believe such support will enhance Judaism but because I believe that the vitality and validity of Christianity is at stake. The real test for Christianity lies, not in its specific answers to the question, ‘What do you say Israel is?’ — though that question will continue to be addressed — as it does in whether it is willing and able to transcend that essential question to struggle faithfully with the existential question, ‘How may we support Israel — people, land and state — in assuming its God-given role in the lives of people and nations?’ That is a goal in which Christians and Jews may join, though perhaps for different reasons.”