As stated in other CAMERA reports, the Presbyterian Church will be voting on a number of issues related to the Arab-Israeli conflict at its upcoming General Assembly scheduled to take place in early July. In addition to an overture accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid, and another calling on the PC(USA) to rebuke Caterpillar for selling products to Israel, delegates at the assembly will also decide whether or not to endorse a report about the Arab-Israeli conflict written by a partisan Middle East Study Committee established by the denomination’s 2008 General Assembly.
The report, issued in early March, has been criticized by a number of groups, including J Street, which stated, among other things, that the report downplays Israel’s legitimate security concerns. This is remarkable in that many Jews in the U.S. regard J Street as being guilty of the same sin.
When J Street says there’s a problem, there’s a problem.
One of the ugliest parts of the document is a “historical analysis” authored by Frederic Bush and Nahida H. Gordon, two members of the committee. The narrative offered in this historical analysis, ironically titled “A Plea For Justice,” is not an attempt to help the average Presbyterian or the American people understand the conflict, but a one-sided recitation of Israel’s alleged misdeeds that serves to nourish and sustain a pre-existing animus toward the Jewish state amongst anti-Israel activists in the PC(USA) and elsewhere in the U.S.
One example of the manner in which Gordon and Nahida demonize Israel is in their discussion of Israel’s assassination of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. The authors describe Kanafani as a non-violent writer despite the fact that he was a high-ranking member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and met with the perpetrators of of the Lod Airport Massacre during which Japanese terrorists hired by the PFLP killed 26 people and injured 80 others.
In 1972 he [Kanafani] paid with his life for his membership in George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In pictures published in Beirut newspapers, Kanafani – who was the PFLP spokesman, editor of the organization’s weekly newsletter Al-Hadaf (The Target) and Habash’s right-hand man – is seen photographed in his office with the participants in the massacre carried out by the Japanese Red Army organization at Lod airport in Israel in May 1972.
The author of an article in Haaretz about Kanafani’s literary career included information about Kanafani that the authors of a Presbyterian “historical analysis” did not.
It reveals that Kanafani was a member of the PFLP, an organization responsible for a number of hijackings and terror attacks in the years before Kanafani’s assassination.
It reveals that Kanafani was the right hand man to PFLP’s leader George Habash.
It reveals that Kanafani met with members of the Japanese Red Army who murdered 26 people and injured 80 others in the Lod Airport Massacre in May 1972.
Gordon and Nahida’s deceptive omission of well known and relevant facts about Kanafani’s ties to the PFLP, and their effort to portray Kanafani as a non-violent writer is a sophisticated and devious act of incitement against Israel that should set off alarm bells within the PC(USA). It serves to portray Israel as a nation that would kill a journalist for his writings, not his involvement with a terrorist organization.
Gordon and Nahida were appointed to serve on a committee charged with providing the PC(USA) and by extension, the American people, a comprehensive report about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The historical analysis they have written demonstrates that they were unable to meet the obligations of this charge.