c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Remember “Thelma and Louise,” the 1991 film starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis? In the movie’s final scene, the two women commit suicide by driving their car over a cliff.

In a case of life imitating art, leaders of several mainline Protestant churches and the Geneva-based World Council of Churches seem intent on similar destructive behavior for their organizations. They are calling for divestment from Israel, the world’s only Jewish state and a 57-year-old functioning democracy currently engaged in a peace process with new Palestinian leadership.

It began last summer when the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA (PCUSA) voted to “selectively” divest church funds from certain companies doing business in Israel.

Since then, Episcopal Church officials have explored divestment, and recently two other denominations, the United Church of Christ (UCC) and the Disciples of Christ, have begun considering divestment.

Divestment is viewed as a means of bringing Israel to heel by damaging its economic well-being and forcing a weakened Israel to make major one-sided concessions to the Palestinians. Because divestment by church bodies was used against the former South African government, today’s campaign is an attempt to link Israel to that apartheid regime.

But as church leaders lurch forward with divestment, it’s clear they are out of touch with their constituencies, the men and women in the pews who ultimately pay the bills.

In a survey conducted last November by the Presbyterian Church Research Services, only 28 percent of church members and 30 percent of “elders” back divestment. And just over 60 percent are unaware of the plan adopted four months earlier.

Clearly, the Christian generals in the United States and Switzerland are riding in command cars headed for an organizational catastrophe without their troops following them and without most of the foot soldiers in the congregation even being aware of what’s happening.

In love and politics, timing is everything. And divestment talk comes at a strange time for Christian leaders to punish Israel.

In recent weeks Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has met with Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian president. Abbas publicly declared, “The war with Israel is over.” An Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire was announced at a summit meeting in Sharm el-Sheik that included Sharon, Abbas, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian King Abdullah.

After the summit, the Egyptian ambassador returned to Israel after a long absence that was Cairo’s way of expressing displeasure with Israeli policy toward the Palestinians.

The Israeli cabinet voted 17-5 (“a super majority” by anyone’s standard) to unilaterally withdraw Jewish civilians from Gaza and abandon the Israeli communities there. In addition, the Israeli security barrier currently under construction was reconfigured to include less West Bank land than originally planned.

Israel released 500 Palestinian prisoners and returned them to their families. The Sharon government has ended the policy of destroying houses of Palestinian terrorists who killed Israeli civilians.

But despite these constructive public moves toward peace and other hopeful actions discussed privately among the region’s leaders, the American Protestant/WCC push for divestment presses forward seemingly untouched and unmoved by the new facts on the ground.

Instead of aiding and encouraging peacemakers inside Israel, and there are many both in and out of government, the mindless divestment scheme creates an unnecessary diversion that is a setback to the peace process. It is also a stain on the good name of the Christian church bodies whose leaders are pushing so hard for divestment.

Divestment proposals come at a time of a continuing drop in church membership within the PCUSA, the Episcopal Church, the UCC and the Disciples. Mainline denominations, once the powerhouses of American Christianity, occupy only three places among the 10 top church bodies: the United Methodist Church (No. 3), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (No. 7) and the PCUSA (No. 9).

I have a suggestion for those Christian leaders who always tell me how eager they are “to make a difference” in the Middle East.

Why not channel your energy to address two major problems that threaten regional stability and world peace _ the longtime illegal Syrian occupation of a sovereign nation called Lebanon and the ominous military buildup in a religiously intolerant Islamic state called Iran.

But that would require prophetic courage from those Christian leaders out of touch with their church members and apparently oblivious to recent positive actions by Israel. That would mean confronting a ruthless dictator in Damascus and religious extremists in Tehran.

And anyway, divestment is so much easier.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

DH/PH END RUDIN