Dignity For All - Declares United Church of Canada

"Dignity", assures the Very Rev. David Giuliano, immediate past moderator of the United Church of Canada, "is the cornerstone of the United Church's continued affirmation of Israel as a Jewish state, which the report recently issued as the United Church Working Group's report on Israel/Palestine policy, as "a homeland for Jewish people, and a democratic state that ensures complete equality of social and political rights to all of its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or gender".

Dignity is not to be had in the Palestinian geographic enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank, however, if we are to take the above a little further and assume that what is sauce for the goose is likewise for the gander.  In Israel, dedicated as a Jewish State for the preservation of international Jewry and a safe haven, it is anticipated and lauded that democracy prevails of a type that ensures equality to all irrespective of religion, race or gender.

The same cannot be said for the Palestinian territories, where Jews are not welcome to live and given safe passage and haven.  The kind of democracy that prevails there is exclusive to Arab Muslims.  Palestinian Arab Christians are harassed and threatened as well as their religion and rights violently violated.  But such inconveniences are not spoken of in polite company and the United Church of Canada is decidedly polite by intention.

The Very Rev. Giuliano goes on to speak of "The call to respect the dignity of both peoples is also found in the section of the report that upholds the Palestinian Right of Return as an internationally recognized human right that needs to be resolved through negotiation in such a way that protects the demographic integrity of Israel."  The Very Rev. Giuliano ties himself into moral knots on this one.

Upholding the Right of Return ipso facto denies the demographic integrity of Israel by default.  The 'right of return' is inclusive of millions of Palestinians, descendants of the original 750,000 who departed when the Palestinians rejected Partition ordained by the United Nations, and when Israel declared itself a state, in 1948.  The 'right of return' would accomplish what attacks on Israel since then could not.

The like number of Jews who were ejected summarily from Arab countries in the Middle East on the creation of the State of Israel, never received compensation let alone acknowledgement of their travails and loss of place and property, confiscated by the Arab states, as refugees.  They were all absorbed by Israel, welcoming the Jewish refugees to become part of Israel.  What worked for Israel is not reflected in the Arab world.

"The report takes seriously the threats that have been part of Israel's reality from the beginning; the history of war, suicide bombings, the present acts of violence such as rockets fired from Gaza, the loss of Israeli life, and the stated desire of a number of near-by regimes to eliminate the State of Israel altogether."  Which quasi-recognition of reality is most certainly gracious of the United Church of Canada.  The conclusion being that Israel must, as a democracy and a light unto the world, turn the other cheek.

There is no acknowledgement and purposefully so, that the Palestinians represent the longest-reigning refugee group in the world, deliberately maintained in that querulously-needy condition by design of the neighbouring Arab states refusing to absorb the 'refugees' and offer them citizenship, with the exception of Jordan, which is comprised in its majority of Palestinians.  And the complicity of the United Nations, through UNRWA.

No other refugees, fleeing civil war, oppression, famine, invasion, or natural catastrophes, have been encouraged to remain as refugees.  All other refugee groups have been assimilated, granted refugee status and absorbed by other countries, as well as eventually returning to their places of origin.  The Palestinians - the Arab, not the Jewish Palestinians - feel they are exceptionally entitled to wait out the destruction of Israel to enable re-occupation of what they continue to feel is theirs and theirs alone.

And their attachment to this undying belief is aided and abetted by those, like the United Church of Canada, who forgive the Palestinians every commission of bad faith bargaining, atrocities through suicide bombing and missile lobbing and intifadas and threats carried out to destroy the lives of Jews, because they are Palestinians of whom not much is expected, and the Jews are, after all, Jews.