BOSTON — When Episcopal Bishop M. Thomas Shaw stood outside the Israeli Consulate here earlier this month, his protest marked the latest salvo within the liberal Christian denominations in the war over the Middle East.

Bishop Shaw previously made news on the international front less than one month after the September 11th terrorist attacks, when he last caused a furor here by protesting in front of the Israel's consulate. Since then, he has come out against the move to get the Episcopal Church to divest itself from companies doing business with Israel – a position praised by the local Jewish community – shuttled himself back and forth to Israel and the West Bank more than a half dozen times, and attempted, to an extent, to stay out of the headlines.

Until last week. In a case of what may be extraordinarily bad timing, Bishop Shaw chose Wednesday afternoon as the moment to publicly protest Israel's strike on Gaza in the wake of the Hamas kidnapping of Corporal Gilad Shalit. That was after hostilities with Gaza had begun but before Hezbollah's Katyushah rockets began raining down on Israel's North...

...The group is already making some headway. Its members spent two weeks in June at the Episcopalian convention in Columbus, Ohio. The news out of the convention was all around the debate over gay clerics. What didn't get reported was the work of Sister Lautt's group in helping to shelve, for the time being, at least, contentious resolutions on the Middle East. Bishop Shaw, incidentally, chaired the committee overseeing the resolutions.They did not object to another successful resolution encouraging church members to pray for and visit the Holy Land on the grounds that this was benign.

"They were considering bad resolutions," says Dennis Hale, a Medford, Mass.-based Episcopalian who traveled to Columbus with Sister Lautt's group. "We testified against these resolutions, and they were amended."

Even so, Sister Lautt and Mr. Hale, an associate professor in political science at Boston College tell a disturbing story of their treatment while manning a booth for the group at the convention's exhibition hall."We were at first treated like pariahs," says Hale, who began to reconsider his Episcopalian affiliation given the negative reception he received.

Yet along with the criticism and sharp words came quiet expressions of support, and Hale's moment of spiritual doubt passed. Now Mr. Hale and Sister Lautt believe they can reach the middle of the moderate churches, if they can just get their message out...

THE FIGHT IS NOT OVER

A Protestant church-wide assembly can be an unfriendly place for those concerned about accurate portrayals of Israel. I learned this first-hand last month at the Episcopal Church's General Convention in Columbus, Ohio, where I helped man the booth of Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East. Sister Ruth Lautt, O.P., the group's founding National Director, had prepared informational flyers about the Arab-Israeli conflict and written rebuttals to skewed resolutions being presented on the convention's agenda. (For example, the church's so-called peace and justice lobby had submitted a resolution calling on Israel to take down its security barrier without asking the Palestinians to stop the terror attacks that prompted its construction.)

Most people at the convention smiled politely and moved on, but one man wearing the purple shirt of a bishop looked at the leaflets on display and uttered an unprintable oath before striding off -- without explaining his objection to the materials. Dennis Hale, an Episcopalian layman from Massachusetts, and I stood open-mouthed, but Sister Ruth noted that Israel's detractors had been at work for over a decade in the Episcopal Church without any real opposition and this type of hostility was to be expected.

Still, one had to wonder why an Episcopalian bishop felt justified swearing at fellow Christians, one of them a Dominican nun, whose only sin was to dare telling Israel's side of the story to members of a church body about to pass judgement on the Arab-Israeli conflict? Where did this fierce antipathy come from?

The answer could be found at the booth of Friends of Sabeel North America. This group, and its sister organization, Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, headquartered in Jerusalem, have been broadcasting a sharply distorted and incomplete narrative about the Arab-Israeli conflict to churches in the U.S. since the mid-1990s. For example, Sabeel speakers have toured America speaking in churches where they blame Israel for the suffering of Christians in the West Bank and make no mention of the severe mistreatment Christians suffer at the hands of Muslim extremists. Sabeel speakers talk endlessly about olive trees being uprooted by Israel, but make little, if any, mention of innocent Israeli women and children blown up in buses, cafes, food markets and religious celebrations.

Sabeel’s founder, Rev. Naim Ateek, is a Palestinian Christian who has written that "the Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily" and has compared Israeli security measures in the disputed territories to the stone blocking Christ's tomb. In addition to using incendiary religious imagery, Rev. Ateek has expressed support for the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. In 2004, Sabeel, under Rev. Ateek's leadership, published a document that called for "One state for two nations and three religions."

The spread of Sabeel's anti-Israel message in Christian communities creates an environment in which so-called peace activists can ask Israel to take down a security barrier without urging Palestinians to halt terrorism that prompted its construction.

Sabeel's activism -- which includes offering tours in the Holy Land during which Israel’s security measures are compared to the Stations of the Cross -- was also a powerful force behind the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s vote to initiate a campaign of divestment from Israel in 2004. This decision was overturned only after a costly and time-consuming campaign on the part of people within the PC(USA) to repudiate the narrative their leaders had been offering about the Arab-Israeli conflict for over a decade.

The recent progress among Presbyterians is cause for celebration, but the fight -- which is not over -- is a deep, internal one about the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not about the relationship between churches and the American Jewish community. The PC(USA)'s vote in 2004 demonstrated that for Christians who believe Israel is the country Sabeel says it is, amicable relations with the American Jewish community take a distant second to campaigns focused on Palestinian concerns. Consequently, education is crucial. Israel must be rigorously defended on the facts.

Fortunately, as a result of Fair Witness' efforts at the Episcopal Convention, the Israel-related resolutions were amended to include language condemning Palestinian terrorism, calling for Palestinian leaders to accept Israel's right to exist and urging fiscal transparency in the Palestinian Authority. The question that religious leaders -- Jew and Christian -- need to ask is why do "peace and justice" activists have to be reminded by fellow church-goers that peacemaking requires Palestinians to stop killing Israelis?