We are the...
We are excited to share with you that, on November 9, 2024, our membership voted unanimously to change the name of our organization to the “Palestine Justice Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).” After careful deliberation and discernment over the course of more than two months, the steering committee voted in September to propose the change. Our membership voted on this name change at our November 9th virtual meeting.
In 2004, the 216th General Assembly of the PC(USA) mandated the formation of a “Palestine Mission Network…for the purpose of creating currents of wider and deeper Presbyterian involvement with Palestinian partners, aimed at demonstrating solidarity and changing the conditions that erode the humanity of Palestinians living in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.” Upon taking up this mandate, the mission network’s original members changed the name from “Palestine Mission Network” to “Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).” They added “Israel” for three reasons: (1) there are millions of Palestinians living within the borders of the nation state known as “Israel,” (2) they felt that the mission network’s purpose of “changing the conditions that erode the humanity of Palestinians” would ultimately also benefit Israeli citizens, similar to how ending apartheid liberated white South Africans from their role as oppressors, and (3) they believed that if “Israel” were not added to the mission network’s name, the Zionist opposition would exploit the absence at the expense of the new mission network’s goals.
We believe it is time to change the name to “Palestine Justice Network.” Following the example of Jesus, and in line with our General Assembly mandate, we aspire to privilege the struggles, partnerships, and voices of the oppressed, which in this case, is Palestine and the Palestinian people. This includes all Palestinians living in the occupied Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, and occupied east Jerusalem, as well as those Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and those in exile. “Palestine,” after all, is the word that has been used for more than 2,000 years by its indigenous inhabitants and most of the rest of the world to refer to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Removing “Israel” from our name reflects our desire to emphasize our relationships of solidarity with Palestinians. As we continue to maintain and seek new partnerships with Palestinians, we have become aware that the “Israel” in our name is misleading for a lot of folks and thus serves as an impediment to building trust. Keeping “Israel” in our name falsely suggests that we believe that there is an equal, balanced conflict between Israel and Palestine. It gives the false impression that Israel and Palestine have equally legitimate claims to the land, equal amounts of power, and equal levels of suffering. The use of “Israel” in our name normalizes a nation-state that has engaged in ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies since its founding in 1948. And it normalizes a regime that, in the past year, has accelerated its genocidal project in Gaza and expanded its terror into the surrounding nations of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran. We cannot conceal these crimes against humanity, and we cannot ignore the calls of our Palestinian partners by normalizing such a nation-state.
We are inspired to make this change by following Jesus’s second greatest commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:36-40). We view both Palestinians and Israelis as our neighbors and we root all our education and advocacy in this commandment. Loving Palestinians as our neighbors demands that we join them in their struggle to dismantle the systems erected by the state of Israel, and enabled by the United States, that are responsible for their oppression. Loving Israelis as our neighbors does not preclude us from opposing the state to which they legally belong. In fact, it too, demands it. True liberation for all does not come from the subjugation of others.
Jesus was a Palestinian Jewish refugee, born under Roman occupation and during King Herod’s genocide of all the Palestinian children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under. The commandment to love our neighbor is rooted in a tradition of the oppressed, not that of the white Christian tradition. Jesus loved his neighbor, and still rejected the Roman Empire. Jesus loved his neighbor and was ultimately crucified as a young man by the Roman Empire, experiencing persecution similar to what young and old Palestinians have been enduring since the founding of the modern state of Israel. In short, to think of this commandment as separate from Palestinian Christianity is to think of it as a colonist.
It is for these reasons that we, as faithful Jesus-followers, can no longer center Israel in the Palestinian advocacy work that we do.
We look forward to working together to forge a new path toward a post-colonial partnership with all who support justice and equality, especially our Palestinian siblings, including the many Palestinian Christian and Palestinian Presbyterian communities among us. We will also continue to partner with people of any nationality or faith tradition whose work is aligned with our mission and we are eager to move into this next chapter with you.