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Methodist Ministers Denounce Their Pro-Israel Jewish Critics
“There are many paradoxes in the propaganda war against Israel,” observed South African writer Steve Apfel earlier this year in a must-read article:
“The most puzzling of them perhaps would be the way many Christian groups and Churches side with the Palestinians. On the evidence one would expect the opposite. Believing Christians have every logical reason to be pro-Israel, where alone in the Middle East Christendom’s holy sites are protected; where Christians may pray openly; and where Christian followers face no pressures to convert.
On the Palestinian side of the fence none of those freedoms exist. How in that case to explain groups like the Presbyterians, the World Council of Churches, Christian Aid and so forth aiming their missiles at the Jewish state? It is the wildest of peculiarities: anti-Israel Christians.
Population movements tell half the story, though not nearly the absorbing half. In 1949 Israel had a Christian population of 34000; today the number is 168000, and growing. From the Palestinian side the arrows point the other way. Christians have poured out; perhaps 70 percent who once lived in the West Bank now live abroad. Bethlehem, Christianity’s cradle, provides stark confirmation.
In 1950 the city was 80 – 90 percent Christian; today that fraction is down to no more than 20 percent. So in Palestine Christians run the gauntlet, while in Israel they practice, while in Israel they practice their faith freely. Yet churchmen aim their missiles where?
…. Christianity under the whip, yet people of the church clamber to help Christian persecutors and punish Christian-protecting Israel. Can men of the cloth, even pooling their faith, justify the perversity? Can they square the circle of anti-Israel activism mixed with indifference to Christendom’s plight hard on Israel’s borders? What if, in good faith and without bad conscience, they cannot? And if goaded to action what would matter most to men of the cloth: attacking Israel or defending Christians?”
Two years ago, influenced by their conference report which cited such Israel-bashers (advocates of a single state for Jews and Palestinians among them) as Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Robert Fisk and Anglican cleric Stephen Sizer while studiously ignoring mainstream Jewish voices, Britain’s Methodists voted to boycott goods from the “Occupied” (i.e. Disputed) Territories, and also voted to review whether Zionism is compatible with their beliefs.
Reflecting mainstream Jewish communal opinion as a whole, the Board of Deputies stated:
“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 is 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.”
