Jewish Groups Refuse to Testify at Ncc Hearings on the Mideast

Jewish organizations have refused invitations to testify at “hearings” on the Middle East being conducted by the National Council of Churches (NCC) because they believe the Protestant organization has demonstrated a pro-Arab bias which will pre-determine the outcome of the hearings.

One of the Jewish organizations, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, said today it will not testify before the NCC because of “the clear and consistent pro-Arab and pro-PLO stand which has marked the NCC attitude for many years.” Another group, the American Jewish Committee, said it decided not to participate in the hearings “in the interest of Jewish unity” after it learned that all other Jewish organizations had refused to take part.

The NCC had invited 17 Jewish organizations to take part in the hearings scheduled in New York today and in Washington next Wednesday as a prelude 16 a three-week fact-finding tour of the Middle East by the NCC’s recently reconstituted Middle East Panel.

CITES PRO-ARAB, PRO-PLO LEANINGS

The ADL statement was made in Palm Beach, Fla., where the agency’s national executive committee is scheduled to meet this weekend. Nathan Perlmutter, ADL’s national director, said the decision was made after “painstaking deliberations” which concluded that the hearings have a “predetermined outcome.”

He said the ADL decision was made “reluctantly and with deep regret” particularly since the ADL has had a long relationship with the NCC. “We have shared barricades on many battlefields for human rights and interreligious and interracial friendship and understanding,” Perlmutter said.

In a report prepared for delivery to the ADL’s executive committee meeting, Nat Kameny, chairman of the national program committee, reviewed the NCC’s “disturbing and troubling record of pro-Arab, pro-PLO leanings.” Among the examples cited are; various programs and seminars “consistently unfriendly to Israel”; “experts” used by the NCC for guidelines who, for the most part, the ADL said, are former missionaries in Arab lands with a conditioned bias; anti-Israel resolutions and a recent NCC press kit which the ADL said seeks “to undermine and reverse Christian support of Israel.”

Kameny noted that while NCC “has always claimed” an even-handed approach in the Mideast “when votes are taken in the NCC governing board on resolutions affecting Israel the views of pro-Arab, pro-PLO spokesmen nearly always prevail.” He said that instead of testifying the ADL will spell out its differences over NCC’s attitude and stance in a memorandum to be distributed to church leaders throughout the United States. “It is our hope to provide the factual background on Israel and the Middle East needed for informed and sensitive Christian dialogue on a grassroots level,” Kameny said.

BASIS FOR AJ COMMITTEE’S REFUSAL

The AJ Committee, however, while not testifying at the hearings has sent the NCC a copy of the statements it would have made to the panel. “The AJ Committee decision was announced by Rabbi A. James Rudin, its assistant national interreligious affairs director, and Inge Lederer Gibel, program specialist in the Interreligious Affairs Department.

“Since its founding in 1906, the AJ Committee has been deeply committed to the democratic process as a means of sharing concerns and as a means of seeking to influence our fellow Americans,” the statement by Rudin and Gibel said.

“Unfortunately, others in the American Jewish community feel strongly in the opposite direction in relation to the NCC Panel. Because of the paramount importance we give to the principle of the unity of the Jewish people, we are not prepared to undermine that unity, especially at a time when hostile elements both here and in the Middle East are attempting to weaken the State of Israel. Thus, we feel obligated to maintain that solidarity at this critical time.”

In transmitting this statement to the NCC, Rudin and Gibel noted that the AJ Committee testimony planned for the hearings makes “plain our strong disagreement with both the substance and the format of the panel’s work up to now.” They said that “the issues as presently formulated by the NCC Panel and the assumptions they represent hardly reflect the actual sentiment and convictions of the majority of American Christians and Jews.”

The AJ Committee also expressed concern “with the format of the hearings that allots an equal amount of time to legitimate and representative Jewish groups which have a large and brood based constituency as well as to those groups and Jewish individuals who represent only themselves, who have been publicly repudiated by the American Jewish community for over 30 years. For the NCC Panel to devote substantial time and attention to such discredited individuals is akin to having Carl Mclntire and Billy James Hargis appear before a Panel as authentic representatives of American Protestantism.”

The NCC Panel was created last November when the NCC general board refused to adopt a proposed resolution which would have charged Israel with violation of human rights and called for suspension of all U.S. aid to the Jewish State. The decision by the NCC to send a fact-finding group was at the time hailed as a “constructive, responsible and statesmanlike approach for dealing with the Middle East issues,” by Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, director of interreligious affairs for the AJ Committee.

In issuing their statement today, Rudin and Gibel stressed that they acted after consulting with AJ Committee executive vice president Bertram Gold, who is currently participating in the AJ Committee’s Board of Governors’ meeting in Egypt and Israel, and with Tanenbaum, who is in Thailand as a member of the International Rescue Committee’s efforts to supply food to starving Cambodian refugees.