As for the Presbyterian Church, please refer to my previous posting (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20140630). As for UNRWA, please refer to my other postings (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/archive?word=UNRWA). (Lily)
1. Algemeiner (http://www.algemeiner.com)
(1) Israeli Legal Advocacy Group Urges IRS to Strip Presbyterian Church of Non-Profit Status,4 December 2014
by Ben Cohen
A prominent Israeli legal advocacy group is urging the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to investigate the Presbyterian Church USA for engaging in what it describes as “a range of prohibited activities under U.S. tax law” that are focused on the vilification of the State of Israel.
Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center,) a group which combats anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activities through legal action, is seeking the revocation of PCUSA’s tax-exempt status.
“It’s high time that the IRS investigated the PCUSA,” Nitsana Darshan- Leitner, Director of the Israel Law Center, told The Algemeiner. “They present themselves as a religious body, but they act as a political organization, working against Israel by, for example, meeting with the terrorists of Hezbollah and promoting the anti-Semitic BDS movement.”
Tension between the PCUSA and Jewish groups has been rising since the church voted at its July 2013 General Assembly to divest approximately $21 million of its shares in Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola on the grounds that these companies conduct business in the Israeli-controlled West Bank.
In its 38 page complaint to the IRS, Shurat HaDin has provided what it says is documentary and video evidence showing PCUSA delegates meeting with the Lebanese Islamist group Hezbollah, which is designated as a terrorist organization in the United States. The complaint also highlights the PCUSA “publishing anti-Semitic materials, enacting a racist policy to divest from American companies doing business with Israel, lobbying the U.S. Congress, and distributing political advocacy materials in violation of its tax-exempt status as a religious organization.”
Such actions, Shura HaDin contends, violate the non-profit tax-exempt status granted to the PCUSA by the IRS in 1964. At the time, the group says, the PCUSA presented itself to the IRS as a religious body, “engaging in peaceful relationships with individuals of all faiths and wholly unengaged in political activities.”
Fifty years later, according to Shura HaDin, that original mission has been completely distorted by the church’s continual involvement in anti-Israel activity. “There is no mention of political advocacy, taking positions on the geopolitical dispute between Palestinian Arabs and Israelis, or PCUSA’s political campaign against Zionism,” Shurat HaDin argued in its submission to the IRS. “There is no mention in PCUSA organizing documents that it perceives fulfilling Christ’s work by meeting with and endorsing statements of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization found to be responsible for the death of United States civilians and marines. In fact, PCUSA has taken numerous, extensive, and costly efforts to engage in political anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic acts.”
“The PCUSA should not enjoy the benefits of charitable status,” Darshan-Leitner said. “If you want to become an advocacy organziation, you have to change your status with the IRS. You can’t be both a church and a political organization, because the IRS treats these types of organization differently.”
(2) Palestinian Human Rights Activist Calls for Major Overhaul of UNRWA (INTERVIEW) , 4 December 2014
by Ben Cohen
Bassam Eid, a prominent Palestinian human rights activist, has issued an urgent plea for a serious overhaul of UNRWA, the UN agency tasked with caring for the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war in which Arab armies failed to prevent the creation of the State of Israel.
Eid, the Director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, is currently visiting London, where he addressed a meeting at the British parliament organized by the Henry Jackson Society, an international relations think-tank, entitled “Perpetuating Statelessness? UNRWA, Its Activities and Funding.” In that presentation, Eid, who was raised in the UNRWA refugee camp in Shu’afat, east of Jerusalem, harshly criticized the agency for perpetuating the plight of the refugees as well as for its political relationship with Hamas.
“Sixty-six years after it was created, UNRWA is still promising Palestinians that they will return to their homeland,” Eid told The Algemeiner by telephone. “In my opinion, causing five million Palestinian refugees to suffer more and more under the umbrella of the ‘right of return’ is a war crime. They are being used as pawns in a war strategy.”
Eid, however, does not advocate the dissolution of UNRWA, which operates on a budget of $1.2 billion provided by donor nations led by the United States, which donated nearly $300 million in 2013. Doing so, he argues, would create a vacuum that would inevitably be exploited by wealthy Arab states like Qatar, the principal funder of Hamas. Instead, he is urging a reform program ambitious enough to transform the agency’s core mission.
“As a refugee, I want to see UNRWA submitting audited reports to donor countries,” Eid said. “I want UNRWA to present to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees a plan for the permanent resettlement of the Palestinian refugees. And I want UNRWA to abolish the curriculum they teach in their schools, which promotes war and terror and jihad.”
Eid is particularly concerned by UNRWA’s relationship with Hamas, advocating that all UNRWA employees with Hamas ties be dismissed from their posts. “During the war in Gaza over the summer, it was well known that Hamas was hiding rockets in UNRWA schools,” Eid said. “So what did UNRWA do? They called Hamas on the phone and said, ‘please come and collect your rockets.’ This by itself shows the degree of cooperation between them.”
Donor countries also need to exercise greater scrutiny over UNRWA’s financing and operations. “The donor countries are keeping a blind eye on UNRWA’s activities,” Eid asserted. “This gives the impression that UNRWA is running its own state with its own foreign policy. UNRWA needs to understand that it is just a small agency that belongs to the UN.”
Eid said that it is unclear exactly how many Palestinian refugees there are in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as neighboring countries, because UNWRA has not carried out a census in the camps for more than two decades. “While one source says there are 2.5 million refugees, the Palestinian Authority claims that the number is higher than 6 million,” he wrote in a Jerusalem Post oped that provoked a furious response from UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness, who took to Twitter to denounce “Jewish terror supporting staff accusing UNRWA of Jihadism.”
Eid continued: “UNRWA, which should be the authoritative source, is silent. So on what figures is UNRWA basing its requests for funds? Do the contributing countries have any idea of what they are contributing to?”
As a first step to focusing UNRWA’s mission away from the ‘right of return’ – a demand that is incompatible with the international commitment to a two-state solution, since an influx of the descendants of the original Palestinian refugees would end Israel’s existence as a sovereign Jewish state – Eid believes that donor countries should convene a major international conference with two purposes.
“First, UNRWA needs to apologize for six decades of false promises,” Eid said. “Then it needs to concentrate on building permanent neighborhoods for the refugees, to remove them from the miserable situation that prevails in the refugee camps.”
2.Tablet(http://tabletmag.com)
The Problem With Israel’s Nationality Law Is How Profoundly Un-Jewish It Is Judaism is all about complexity and ambiguity, but the Knesset’s proposed legislation is a sad display of simplistic thinking, 5 December 2014
by Liel Leibovitz
Israel’s greatest natural resource, an old friend of mine is fond of saying, is irony, and so it’s funny, given the latest bellowing about the country’s proposed nationality law, how many critics missed the controversy’s main point: The pending legislation is offensive not because it’s undemocratic but because it’s profoundly un-Jewish.
No matter what you think of the proposed law, there’s no arguing that what it’s about, ultimately, is certainty: Israel, it declares, is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and theirs alone. Caveats about protecting the rights of minorities, built into every proposed version of the legislation, are meaningful, but they do not dull the statement’s glaring simplicity.
It’s true, of course, that laws are at their best when they’re straightforward and easy to follow, but that logic applies primarily when a piece of legislation is designed to help the state go about its business: collect taxes, establish traffic rules, set up campaign finance regulations. Such laws can be complex and open to debate, but all complications and interpretations are always in the service of clear and actionable goals.
And there’s nothing clear and very little that’s actionable about nationality. As many in Israel and the United States, nations thick with immigrants in search of rebirth, know intimately well, national identity is constructed by more than the set of obligations and privileges conferred upon you when you become the citizen of a nation. Citizenship is a much more fraught—and deeply emotional—construct, one that is constantly evolving and often best understood not by the stark answers it provides but by the questions it raises. The abolitionists who came out in full force against slavery, for example, were asking themselves not only what kind of moral human beings they wanted to be but also what kind of Americans they were, what being an American meant to them, and what the best way forward would be in continuing to shape their nation.
These are the struggles that make nationality a particularly volatile idea. It’s even more volatile for the Jewish state. Any attempt at constructing a Jewish sense of nationality is a particularly intricate business, as Moses himself had learned the hard way. After the spies he sent to peek at Canaan returned and reported, almost uniformly, that the land is crawling with hostile tribes and is far from the promised den of milk and honey, Moses had the spies slaughtered. The Jewish national project, he understood, is predicated not on what is, but on what might one day be. Rather than disperse his chosen sons and daughters to all corners of the globe, the Lord, Moses realized, bequeathed to them one small and concrete nation state, so that they may do more than just preach pretty words in the all the world’s capitals. The point of the covenant is the establishment of a concrete, just, and luminous nation here on earth, a real country that would serve as a real example, which can only happen if the Jewish national project is in turn understood as a messianic pursuit, a never-ending quest for peace and compassion. Without these yearnings, and without the hard work required to make them a reality, the Promised Land, as one of our wiser thinkers once put it, is just another Egypt.
Anyone who truly wishes to engage in a serious debate about Jewish nationality should begin there, and anyone who begins there will soon find only complications that lead to further complications. Which is not a bad working definition of Judaism itself: Ours is a tradition that sanctifies doubt, a theology crafted in the service of ambiguity. We’re the ones who are never quite sure. Even Abraham, our ancient ancestor and the first to be chosen by God, requires five separate conversations with his Creator before he can begin to fathom the obligations of divine election. To reduce all this incredibly intricate history, all those spiritual and ethical and emotional nuances, into one chest-thumping statement may be an act that signifies many things, but it isn’t Jewish in the least.
As they were debating the merits of the nationality law, a number of the Jewish state’s leading legislators presented competing versions. One proposal insisted that while the regime is democratic, the values that inspire and inform it are Jewish. Another countered that democracy and Judaism are both virtues, and that the law’s wording must give both equal footing. Words were parsed, meanings were debated, texts were pored over and interpreted with Talmudic intensity. Even when passing the least Jewish of laws, the Knesset went about it in the most Jewish of ways, proving, perhaps, that not all hope is lost in Jerusalem.
・Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine.
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