The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) vote accusing Israel of genocide is the culmination of a 20-year anti-Israel campaign—and a warning to American Jewish organizations that statements of disappointment are no substitute for sustained action.
By a vote of 454-15, the denomination’s General Assembly declared Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza to be a genocide. It urged Presbyterians to boycott Israeli products and lobby Congress for an arms embargo against Israel. The assembly also voted unanimously to divest from Palantir Technologies and GE Aerospace because of their ties to Israel’s military and intelligence services.
One could read those votes and conclude that the Presbyterians have simply been swept up in the anti-Israel passions that followed Oct. 7.
That would be a mistake.
The Presbyterian Church’s campaign against Israel did not begin with the Gaza war. It did not begin with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It did not even begin with the current Israeli government.
It has been building for more than two decades.
In 2004, the Presbyterian General Assembly approved “phased, selective divestment” from companies doing business with Israel. The vote was 431-62. That same General Assembly set in motion the creation of what became the Israel/Palestine Mission Network, an advocacy structure within the denomination devoted to the conflict.
That was the turning point.
The significance of 2004 was not merely that Presbyterians passed another Middle East resolution. Churches, unions and civic organizations pass resolutions all the time. Most are forgotten before the delegates get home.
The Presbyterians built an institution.
The network developed educational materials, cultivated activists and kept Israel before the church. Every General Assembly became another opportunity to move the ball down the field.
There were occasional moments when the church seemed to recognize where it was heading. In 2006, the General Assembly stepped back from its Israel-specific divestment language and acknowledged the “hurt and misunderstanding” its actions had caused Jews and Presbyterians.
But the machinery remained in place.
In 2014, the church-affiliated Israel/Palestine Mission Network produced “Zionism Unsettled,” a study guide that challenged not simply Israeli policies but Zionism itself. Jewish organizations protested that the publication distorted Jewish history and denied the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination.
The church eventually stopped selling the publication on its website and declared that it did not represent the denomination’s official position.
But, once again, the institution that produced it remained.
That same year, the General Assembly approved divestment from Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions and Hewlett-Packard because of their connections to Israeli activities.
The vocabulary then grew steadily more extreme.
In 2022, the Presbyterian General Assembly declared that Israeli policies toward Palestinians constituted “apartheid.”
In 2024, it voted to divest from Israel bonds.
The Israel/Palestine Mission Network changed its name to the Palestine Justice Network.
And now, in 2026, we have arrived at “genocide.”
Occupation. Apartheid. Genocide.
There is a progression here that is difficult to ignore.
I am reluctant to label an entire Christian denomination antisemitic. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has more than one million active members, and I doubt that most Presbyterians spend their days thinking about Israel, much less plotting against it.
But that raises an even more troubling question.
Why has Israel become such an institutional obsession for their church?
There are brutal wars taking place around the world. Christians are persecuted and murdered because of their faith. Authoritarian regimes imprison dissidents and crush religious freedom. Governments deny women basic rights and execute political opponents.
Where is the Presbyterian divestment machinery for them?
Where are the study guides?
Where are the networks?
Where are the decades of General Assembly resolutions?
Israel, alone among the nations, seems to merit a permanent church infrastructure dedicated to examining its sins.
The usual explanation is that the church is committed to social justice and has increasingly viewed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the simple lens of oppressor and oppressed. Once Israel was assigned the role of oppressor, the rest followed almost automatically.
Facts became secondary to categories.
The murder of 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7 did not change the category. The taking of hostages did not change the category. Hamas’s deliberate embedding of its military infrastructure among civilians did not change the category.
Israel was the oppressor. Palestinians were the oppressed.
The verdict had effectively been written before the evidence was heard.
There is also a lesson here for American Jewry.
For years, Jewish organizations treated each Presbyterian vote as a new crisis. There would be meetings, statements of disappointment and renewed calls for interfaith dialogue. Then attention would move elsewhere until the next General Assembly.
The anti-Israel activists did not move on.
They built networks. They mastered church procedure. They wrote study materials. They cultivated delegates. And they returned year after year.
In 2004, the vote for selective divestment was 431-62.
Twenty-two years later, the genocide resolution passed 454-15.
That is not a sudden reaction to Gaza. It is what institutional success looks like.
So what should American Jewry do now?
First, we should stop pretending that another carefully worded expression of “deep disappointment” will reverse a campaign that has been building for two decades. Dialogue has value when both sides are listening. But dialogue cannot become a substitute for recognizing what is taking place before our eyes.
Jewish organizations should document and publicize the Presbyterian Church’s record on Israel—not merely its latest resolution, but the entire progression from divestment to attacks on Zionism, to apartheid accusations and now genocide. Church members, elected officials and the public should understand that this is not an isolated response to the Gaza war. It is a sustained institutional campaign.
Second, we need to invest in institutions of our own.
As president of the Religious Zionists of America, I see how difficult it is to compete with organizations that employ advocates, develop educational materials and maintain networks that operate year after year. Pro-Israel organizations cannot simply mobilize when the next General Assembly, campus resolution or boycott campaign appears on the calendar.
We need sustained education about Zionism. We need to prepare young Jews to answer the accusation that Jewish national self-determination is inherently racist or colonialist. We need relationships with Christian leaders who are prepared not merely to attend an Israel solidarity dinner but to challenge anti-Israel campaigns within their own denominations.
And we need to show up.
That may be the simplest lesson of the Presbyterian story.
The activists who transformed their church’s policy toward Israel did not win because every Presbyterian in America became hostile to the Jewish state. They won because they organized, persisted and remained in the room.
American Jewry should learn from them.
Not their hostility to Israel.
Their persistence.
The Presbyterian Church once worried that its actions had caused “hurt and misunderstanding” in the Jewish community. Today, it applies the gravest accusation imaginable to the Jewish state while demanding that the United States deny Israel the weapons it needs to defend itself.
Perhaps the Presbyterians should ask themselves how they traveled so far.
American Jewry should ask an equally uncomfortable question.
Why did we fail to stop them?