Christmas celebrates the birth of a Jewish boy to Jewish parents in Bethlehem. With no sence of irony, the Swiss-based World Council of Churches (WCC) convened over two dozen church women in Bethlehem to rally against today’s Israel just in time for Christmas. Having come to “Palestine” to “listen,” the women fulfilled their assigned mission of endorsing Palestinian liberation and urged the WCC’s several hundred denominations around the world to “embed the Palestinian struggle against oppression” throughout the WCC’s global ecumenical mission.
Convened in collaboration with the “Palestine-Israel Ecumenical Forum,” the WCC event for women commemorated the one year anniversary of “Kairos Palestine,” in which senior Palestinian Christian clerics issued their own theological justification for resisting the “occupation.” Christians comprise a tiny percentage of overwhelmingly Muslim Palestinians. There are countless places around the world where Christians and others live under some sort of “occupation.” But these other occupations rarely interest the WCC. The Palestinian struggle uniquely arouses the Religious Left because it mobilizes opinion against Israel. The few remaining Palestinian Christians, who doubtlessly denounce the “occupation” for reasons of both conviction and self-preservation, are convenient props for the international Religious Left’s anti-Israel preoccupation. Absent Israel, groups like the WCC would have as much interest in Palestinian Christians as they do Christian minorities elsewhere in the Middle East.
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