UK Church to boycott Israeli goods

[TruthSeeker]

UK Church to boycott Israeli goods

By JONNY PAUL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
07/01/2010 04:21

LONDON – The Methodist Church of Britain voted on Wednesday to boycott Israeli-produced goods and services from the West Bank because of Israel’s “illegal occupation of Palestinian lands.”

“A majority of governments recognize the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories as illegitimate under international law,” the church body said at its annual conference in Portsmouth.

The church body will now encourage Methodists across the UK to follow suit.

The motion stated that the boycott of goods “from illegal Israeli settlements” was in response to a call by the World Council of Churches – which advocates divestment from Israel – and by Palestinian civil society and “a growing number of Jewish organizations in Israel and worldwide.”

“The Methodist Conference notes the call of the World Council of Churches in 2009 for an international boycott of settlement produce and services and the support given for such a boycott by Christian leaders in Palestine in the Kairos document, Palestinian civil society and a growing number of Jewish organizations both inside Israel and worldwide and calls on the Methodist people to support and engage with this boycott of Israeli goods emanating from illegal settlements,” the church said.

Last year, the Methodist Church set up a working group to “work for an end to the Occupation, an end to the blockade of Gaza, adherence to international law by all sides and a just peace for all in the region.”

The resulting 54-page report produced by the church body, titled “Justice for Palestine and Israel,” met with a fierce condemnation by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Council of Christians and Jews and British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

In a statement released after Wednesday’s vote, the church body said the decision, which carried unanimously, had the goal of ending “the existing injustice.”

“This decision has not been taken lightly, but after months of research, careful consideration and finally, today’s debate at the conference,” said Christine Elliott, secretary for external relationships. “The goal of the boycott is to put an end to the existing injustice. It reflects the challenge that settlements present to a lasting peace in the region.”

Jewish community leadership organizations reacted with dismay. In a joint statement, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council said it was, “This is a very sad day, both for Jewish-Methodist relations and for everyone who wants to see positive engagement with the complex issues of Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Methodist Conference has swallowed hook, line and sinker a report full of basic historical inaccuracies, deliberate misrepresentations and distortions of Jewish theology and Israeli policy.

“The deeply flawed report is symptomatic of a biased process: The working group which wrote the report had already formed its conclusions at the outset. External readers were brought in to give the process a veneer of impartiality, but their criticisms were rejected. The report’s authors have abused the trust of ordinary members of the Methodist Church, who assumed that they were reading and voting on an impartial and comprehensive paper, and they have abused the goodwill of the Jewish community, which tried to engage with this issue, only to find that our efforts were treated as an unwelcome distraction,” the statement said.

David Gifford, the chief executive of the Council of Christians and Jews, said he was disappointed that the Israeli narrative was not heard during the debate.

“I was very disappointed at the emotive nature of the debate which again did not hear fairly also the pain and cry of the Israeli,” Gifford said. “It was right to hear the pain of the Palestinian but in the end the vote of the Methodist Conference was to boycott goods and services that originate from the West Bank. We shall have to see how this will affect future relationships of the Methodist Church with other churches, the CCJ [Council of Christians and Jews] and with the British Jewish community.”

The Board of Deputies said the conference should “hang its head in shame.”

“This outcome is extremely serious and damaging, as we and others have explained repeatedly over recent weeks. Israel is at the root of the identity of Jews and of Judaism, and as an expression of Jewish spiritual, national and emotional aspirations. Zionism cannot simply be ruled as illegitimate in the way that the conference has purported to do. This smacks of breathtaking insensitivity, as crass as it is misinformed. That this position should now form the basis of Methodist Church policy should cause the conference to hang its head in shame, just as surely as it will cause the enemies of peace and reconciliation to cheer from the sidelines.”

Anti-Zionist and anti-Israel activists who support a blanket boycott of Israel were the main sources of the document. They included Israeli-born academics Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim; Jeff Halper from the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions; Anglican vicar Stephen Sizer; and Beirut-based journalist Robert Fisk.

UK Church to boycott Israeli goods

 

[Hyde]

i can't believe what i am read in this thread well well well better late than never

I personally do not boycott any product be it from Israel or Denmark or any other country but i am always in favour of pressurizing government to take action against the evil doings

Americans thought Talibans are danger to them = Fair enough = Attack
Israel? = majority of the world thinks they are danger to them = ask them to stop their evil actions or = ?

 

[Ahmad]

i can't believe what i am read in this thread well well well better late than never

I personally do not boycott any product be it from Israel or Denmark or any other country but i am always in favour of pressurizing government to take action against the evil doings

Americans thought Talibans are danger to them = Fair enough = Attack
Israel? = majority of the world thinks they are danger to them = ask them to stop their evil actions or = ?

I think some measures are already in place against the products from the occupied west bank from the extremest settlers, it is in all the stores including the big supermarkets.

 

[TruthSeeker]

The banality of Methodist evil
By ROBIN SHEPHERD
07/04/2010 23:45


The decision last week by the Methodist Church of Britain to launch a boycott against goods emanating from settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem will send a shiver down the spine of anyone with a feel for where the rancid, global campaign against the Jewish state is currently heading.

The boycott will involve transactions of the church itself, and extends to encouraging all affiliated Methodists to follow suit. The Methodists boycott no other country.

The fact that an institution professing allegiance to values of love, truth and justice should have succumbed to an agenda of hatred, hypocrisy and barbarism is sadly emblematic of the degraded spirit of our times, and of the moral inversions which blow through them.

But who, these days, can really be surprised about such happenings in modern Europe? It is only the banality, to appropriate Hannah Arendt, of this particular evil that still has the power to shock us. For, in watching the discussions at the Methodist Conference which approved the boycott, there was little in the way of the visceral hatred of Israel which we have become so accustomed to seeing in academic settings or in the trade unions. Here was a group of almost stereotypically ordinary, middle-class, English Christians calmly reciting every hackneyed anti-Israeli calumny in the book.

“What is happening in Palestine today is what was happening in South Africa in the recent past,” one delegate said. Another spoke of the “66 percent of 9- to 12-month-old babies [that] are anemic in Gaza.”

Yet another described a picture, which she held up in front of her, of a small boy “with large eyes” and “deep pain” in those eyes. “This little boy lives in Gaza,” she said ominously, adding (without irony) that the conference should “speak and act for those whose voices are not heard.”

Later, the point was repeated with one speaker lamenting the position of the Palestinians who have “no one to tell of what they’re going through.”

There was a lecture on the Old Testament, the Jews as “the chosen people,” the children of Abraham, and the revelations of Jesus: “Jesus... never speaks of the land or owning it; he speaks of the kingdom and joining it,” said the delegate joyfully. “...He teaches us God is not a racist God [her emphasis] who has favorites. God loves all his children [her emphasis] and blesses them.”

A student of archeology from the University of Manchester protested against accusations of one-sidedness in a report on the conflict which underpinned the boycott resolution: “No conflict is ever one-sided, “ he said before concluding, literally seconds later, that “perhaps it is not the report that is one-sided, but simply the conflict.”

IF TOTAL illogicality, intimations about the dangers of Jews worshiping a racist God, preposterous assertions about the Palestinian cause not getting an airing in the outside world and depraved and asinine comparisons with apartheid South Africa were the stock in trade of the ordinary delegates, the church’s sophisticates were not to be outdone.

If the Methodist Church is to launch a boycott of Israel, let Israel respond in kind: Ban their officials from entering; deport their missionaries; block their funds; close down their offices; and tax their churches.

If it’s war, it’s war. The aggressor must pay a price.

The writer is director of international affairs at the Henry Jackson Society in London. He is the author of A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel

The banality of Methodist evil