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239 Chapter Twelve Jews and Palestinians: An Unresolved Conflict in the United Church Mind Alan Davies Few issues have generated as much bitter contention in the United Church of Canada as the geopolitical struggle in the Middle East between Jews and Palestinians.1 This is not surprising. Jews and Judaism have posed a problem to Christian theologians since the split between the church and the synagogue in the latter part of the first century, and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 only added a political dimension to a religious question, further complicating Jewish–Christian relations. One complication was the creation of a rival national cause to Zionism, that of the Palestinians, whose cri de coeur as they fled their lands signified the birth of another irredentist passion. As a result, the United Church found itself torn between the competing claims of two sides in a prolonged and furious conflict, each side casting itself in the role of victim and the other in the role of oppressor. It is small wonder that the church and its policy-makers oscillated back and forth, or that, during times of crisis, such as the Six Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973), some of its members fell into acrimonious proIsrael and anti-Israel factions. The marks of these divisions are still evident in the publications and other organs of church opinion. At the heart of the feud lie certain historical and theological features of the United Church itself. Although a waning force when the denomination came into existence in 1925 as a fusion of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, one compelling motive behind church union was the social gospel, a movement with German, British, and American intellectual roots. The great dream of its prophets was that of a Christian social order, which did not mean a church-dominated society (Christendom), but a society suffused with Christian and biblical principles of social justice. As far as Judaism was concerned, if the architects of the 1925 union gave the subject any thought, most probably they assumed that their Jewish fellow citizens would embrace Christian social values as self-evident truths because of their own biblical heritage.No interfaith frictions would mar the moral blueprint. This Christian vision, informed by the “Kingdom of God” theology of Walter Rauschenbusch and others, rose above secular liberalism in its zeal for transforming the economic and political orders of the world. However, like all great theologies, the social gospel suffered from certain blind spots, one of which was an uncritical adoption of the Anglo-Saxon mores of the era, notably the prevailing belief in moral progress, a form of intellectual myopia widespread among liberal internationalists of every political hue. Its treasured ideals were neither as transparent nor as universal as its Protestant apostles convinced themselves. This blind spot, so endemic in the United Church, accounts in large measure for its divided mind on the Middle East and the war of words and guns between Jews and Palestinians. On the one hand, the church had no tolerance for anti-Semites or anti-Semitism, especially after the mass murder of the European Jews memorialized as the Holocaust (or shoah), although its own history has never been entirely free of its traces. The presence of some anti-Semitism in both the church and the nation was not a total anomaly, since early twentieth-century Canada, whether anglo-Protestant or French Catholic, was more homogeneous and therefore more susceptible to racial instincts than in later times. Aliens, especially Jewish aliens, were distrusted, finding themselves viewed as objects of suspicion because of their religious and ethnic “strangeness” as well as their supposed social and political radicalism, a legacy of the notorious “Red scare” stirred by the godless Bolshevik revolution in Russia. A fear existed, no doubt baseless, that during the Depression Canada might succumb to a similar fate. Even in liberal circles this fear and its attendant xenophobia were not unknown.A taste for the European fascist model also manifested itself, causing alarm in the higher echelons of the denomination. Such political flirtations were strongly denounced in the church press and from its many pulpits,as well as by inveterate champions of Anglo-Saxon political democracy, especially in its British form. It is noteworthy that the Eighth General Council (1938) adopted an impassioned resolution in support of persecuted Jews worldwide in the wake of Kristallnacht, the infamous Nazi pogrom of the same year.2 “In your sufferings, we suffer,” declared the delegates...

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