EAPPI’s Narcissistic Grandstanding

The WCC’s Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine Israel (EAPPI) provides its activists with attractive vests that are sure to impress the folks back home.

Last week, the Presbyterian Church (USA) published an article about the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine Israel. CAMERA responded to the article, originally produced by Ecumenical News International, with a letter to The Layman, published by the Presbyterian Lay Committee.

The letter is republished below the jump.

EAPPI assails and demonizes the Jewish state
Posted Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Last week, the Presbyterian Church (USA) published an article produced by Ecumenical News International (ENI) about the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine Israel (EAPPI). The article misinforms Presbyterians about the nature of the EAPPI. The organization, founded by the World Council of Churches in 2002, does not qualify as a peacemaking organization, but is in fact a centerpiece of the WCC’s decades-long campaign to assail and demonize the Jewish state at the behest of the Middle East Council of Churches and church leaders in Jerusalem.

EAPPI materials do not provide an accurate map of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but excite the imaginations of its supporters and activists with a mythology that portrays innocent Palestinians suffering under the lash of the uniquely evil Jewish state.

The EAPPI is quite selective about whose violence it confronts. The organization does not confront all violence in the Arab-Israeli conflict, but merely confronts Israeli settlers and soldiers – without drawing attention to or confronting Palestinian terrorism.

Look at EAPPI materials for yourself (they are readily available at the WCC’s website) and you will see hardly any reference to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah. Like most other peacemaking organizations, Islamist violence and the theology used to justify this violence is a taboo subject for the EAPPI. It is simply not talked about. For the EAPPI, the cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is rooted solely in the occupation, which itself is rooted in the evils of Zionism.

The security barrier – which has undeniable impacts on Palestinians – is depicted in EAPPI materials as a bit of Mordor straight out of Tolkein’s trilogy. Nowhere does the EAPPI acknowledge the terrorism that preceded its construction. After reading EAPPI materials about the barrier, one is left with the impression that the Israeli people and their leaders are monsters who decided to build a barrier out of a desire to make Palestinians suffer, not to protect themselves for acts of terror.

There is a troubling narcissism about the manner in which the EAPPI has approached its so-called peacemaking work. The EAPPI has turned the tragic geography of the Arab-Israeli conflict into a theme park where wealthy Westerners can act out heroic, self-aggrandizing fantasies and post the videos on the Internet for [their] friends to see when they return home.

The group’s website pictures EAPPI activists standing heroically with rustic and beleaguered Palestinians who are waiting in line at checkpoints, watching forlornly as their homes are being demolished or recovering from the effects of tear gas launched by Israeli soldiers at peaceful protests. For some reason, Israeli suffering has not found its way into the EAPPI narrative about the Arab-Israeli conflict, possibly because such suffering would upstage the heroism of the group’s activists.

Ultimately, the EAPPI’s focus is not on the underlying realities of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but on the putative moral and intellectual superiority of EAPPI activists.

This is not peacemaking, but grandstanding.

Dexter Van Zile, Christian media analyst
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America