Readers may recall my obsession with the antagonism of the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches towards Israel. These denominations are two of the mainstream denominations in American Protestantism, and they are pillars of the National Council of Churches of Christ, headquartered in New York. The Council has its own foreign policy, and the smaller the membership in its constituent sects has become the more ambitious and reflexive are its criticisms of the United States. Actually, the process may be the reverse. Its positions came first; then came the defections. This is a very old business. The hysteria about Israel came later. I first noticed the phenomenon when three of the bishops in the Episcopal diocese of Massachusetts began a virtually non-stop picket of the Israeli consulate in Boston. I then found out that a rector of the beautiful Christ Church at Zero Garden Street in my home town of Cambridge, where George Washington worshipped on December 31, 1775, had been the one who had--how shall I say this?--motivated his superiors in taking a nasty and uncompromising stand against Israel.

The rest is history. Several churches leapt on to the "divestment" tactic as a way of expressing their disapproval of Israel and their support for the Palestinians. What they supported in the Palestinian polity was never quite clear. The tactic of terror against Israelis which retains, as of mid-June, a 56 percent majority among the Palestinians, up from 52 percent in March, perhaps. The Presbyterians and Episcopalians (along with the United Church of Christ, linear descendants, among others, of the Congregational Church composed of American Zion Puritans, who were Hebraists and in the nineteenth century supported the Jewish restoration to Palestine) were among the first to climb onto this bandwagon, with much righteous self-satisfaction.

But the issue festered among many in the clerisy and, perhaps more important, in the rank-and-file of the churches' congregations...