If you are looking to measure the past year’s dramatic rise in Americans’ awareness and rejection of the Israeli system that oppresses Palestinians, the November 20 vote by the Episcopalians of Chicago offers a metric. The annual convention of their diocese resolved, 72 percent to 28 percent, to call out Israel as meeting the legal definition of apartheid and to condemn that as “antithetical” to their values [text of the resolution below]. Just last year, in contrast, they had declined to pass virtually the same resolution, voting 58-42 against.
The Chicagoans’ big shift is part of a gathering wave of similar statements by so-called mainline, largely liberal, Christian denominations. Thus, only days earlier, Atlanta’s Presbyterians also declared — by a whopping 95 percent — that Israel meets the legal definition of apartheid.
But while the Chicago metric and Atlanta’s breakthrough may show that these denominations — which represent millions of churchgoers — are fed up with waiting for Israel to act like the democracy it claims to be, it’s still unclear whether this means the churches will become a stronger force for change. The question remains open whether their members will so take to heart the Palestinians’ cause that they will push church leaders to overcome their natural reluctance to wade into an acrimonious controversy in a dedicated way against longtime pro-Israel allies in the Jewish mainstream and in the Democratic Party establishment.
Nonetheless, the days of these institutions stubbornly looking away from Israel’s deep structures of apartheid appear to be dwindling. The Chicago Episcopalians’ action followed the path their brethren in Vermont blazed earlier in November in becoming the first diocese to pass a resolution against Israel’s apartheid and send it to the denomination’s General Convention next July in Baltimore.
At least one more Episcopal diocese, that of Washington (DC), which meets in January, may well add to the calls for the national Church to speak against Israel’s apartheid. (Full disclosure, I am actively involved in pressing for the Washington diocese to pass an apartheid resolution.) Likewise, the Atlanta Presbytery’s “overture”— its “Recognition that Israel’s Laws, Policies, and Practices Constitute Apartheid Against the Palestinian People” — joined the identical statement of several other presbyteries, thus putting the issue prominently on the agenda of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA when it meets in June.
Sponsor Newland Smith introduced the resolution with subdued concision, simply listing four things that happened in 2021 that meant the convention should reverse its 2020 rejection of the same basic text:
1) the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem’s apartheid report in January;
2) the April report on Israel’s apartheid by Human Rights Watch;
3) the apartheid – and more – resolution of the United Church of Christ in July; and
4) the Vermont Episcopalians’ apartheid resolution of early November.
To that Smith added a plea by the Kairos coalition of Palestinian Christians, “Cry for Hope: a call for decisive action,” issued in July 2020.
The one person who spoke against the resolution, Dean Dominic Barrington of the Cathedral of St. James, took no notice of the recent developments, essentially repeating his arguments of 2020. Even he, moreover, presented himself not so much as a defender of Israel, but as a friend of the Palestinians who worries that the resolution will expose them to Israeli retaliation.