The Jewish Star reports that filmmaker and investigative journalist Ami Horowitz found little evidence for the claims by Human Rights Watch of “onerous” waiting times at Israel’s security checkpoints, or that the waiting times – according to Amnesty International – amount to “collective punishment”.
All of the Palestinians with whom Horowitz spoke said that it took them 10 minutes or less to get through the checkpoint… The filmmaker also hired a Palestinian driver and traveled “over 300 miles” throughout the disputed territories in an automobile bearing Arab license plates. “We were not stopped even once,” Horowitz said.
The anti-Israel lobby routinely circulates stories of horror and oppression without seeking to present a balanced or realistic picture. Isolated incidents are presented as the norm and facts are stretched to paint Israel as intentionally victimizing Palestinians. Unfortunately, as the report makes plain, many church organizations have fallen for this:
In 2014, the Presbyterian Church USA voted to divest from Motorola on the grounds that the company was assisting “checkpoints that dehumanize Palestinians,” and the United Church of Christ cited the checkpoints in adopting its own pro-BDS resolution in 2015. The Evangelical Lutheran Church has embraced a manifesto known as the “Kairos Document,” which accuses Israel of perpetrating “daily humiliation” of Palestinians at checkpoints. As a result, a number of Lutheran synods around the country have called for boycotting Motorola.
The Church, at least for the most part, has largely abandoned the crude antisemitism that it displayed for much of its history. Unfortunately the attitude of many church leaders towards Israel today helps to feed the antisemitism that the Church thought it had rejected.