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Adopting the “Kairos Palestine” document, Methodists Elevate Palestinian Rights and Israel Divestment to Mainstream Prominence

“Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph; a beginning, a struggle and a victory.” –Gandhi

Occupied Palestine, 3 May 2012 – The General Conference of the United Methodist Church decided yesterday to call for an explicit boycott of all Israeli companies “operating in the occupied Palestinian territories,” knowing that this constitutes the absolute majority of Israeli corporations. This and the overwhelming support for the “Kairos Palestine” document and its call “for an end to military occupation and human rights violations through nonviolent actions,” which include boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), will pave the way forward for further action by the Church to hold Israel accountable for its colonial and apartheid regime.

Although the General Conference of the United Methodist Church (UMC) fell short of voting for divestment from three U.S. corporations that are actively complicit in Israel’s protracted occupation and serious violations of international law, the inspiring awareness raising and advocacy campaign waged by human rights activists within the Church and in many communities outside it has succeeded in elevating Israel divestment and the struggle for Palestinian rights to mainstream prominence. Notwithstanding this decision, four annual (regional) conferences within the UMC have already adopted Israel divestment resolutions.

The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC), the broadest coalition of Palestinian political parties, trade unions, NGOs and networks, whose BDS Call is supported by Palestinian church groups from all major Christian denominations, salutes all the people of conscience, especially within the UMC, who relentlessly, meticulously and with immense selflessness labored to convince the Church to align its investment policy with its ethical principles that reject injustice and oppression. Caterpillar, Motorola and Hewlett Packard should not take too much comfort in this temporary setback; while they are off the hook for now, many more people today know exactly what these companies are doing in violation of international law and will soon hold them accountable.

As a result of repeated disinformation and fear mongering by some Church officials responsible for its investment branch, a majority of UMC delegates still feel that divesting from companies profiting from human rights violations is a considerable and unnecessary sacrifice. The widely expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people, and with Palestinian Christians in particular, who overwhelmingly called on the Church to divest, was thus not translated into action that heeds the moral obligation to do no harm. By continuing to invest in companies that profit from the Israeli occupation and human rights violations, and despite all intentions, the UMC is still doing harm to the Palestinian people through its financial complicity in maintaining the occupation.

Efforts by BDS activists from around the world are sending a strong message to corporations that their collusion in Israel’s unlawful occupation and serious violations of international law is under scrutiny and will not be tolerated. A recent research report exposed Hewlett Packard’s role in sustaining the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people, with its supply of biometric monitoring systems to Israeli military checkpoints inside the occupied West Bank and technological solutions to Israel’s army and illegal colonial settlements, contributing to the caging of Palestinians in fragmented ghettos[1]. Motorola provides surveillance systems for Israeli settlements, military bases and the apartheid wall, and communications equipment to the Israeli occupation army.[2]

The General Conference, taking place this year in Tampa, FL, meets every four years and is the only entity that speaks for The United Methodist Church.[3] The process and international debates leading to the vote on this divestment resolution mark a milestone in the persistent efforts of Christians around the world and Methodists in particular to bring concrete meaning to a long-standing ethical Church position in support of ending Israel’s occupation and human rights violations. The setback notwithstanding, this debate over how best to hold Israel accountable for human rights violations is largely viewed as ushering in a new phase in faith groups’ activism for Palestinian rights reminiscent of similar measures that eventually contributed to dismantling South African apartheid.

The impressive mobilization in support of this divestment resolution united people from diverse backgrounds, including scores of Jewish human rights activists, mostly associated with Jewish Voice for Peace, who proudly spoke out for an end to church material support to Israel’s occupation.[4] It constitutes a distinguished contribution to the Palestinian people’s struggle to achieve its full set of human rights, which includes also full equality for Palestinians citizens of Israel, and the right of return of Palestinian refugees as guaranteed by international law. UMC activists, who led this effort with diligence and utmost attention to accuracy, moral consistency and effective advocacy, deserve warm praise and gratitude from all of us struggling for a just peace in Palestine and the region. The supportive role of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation in this mobilization must also be acknowledged and commended. While the profound obligation to “do no harm” was not honored by many in the General Conference, it has become a rallying cry for human rights activists everywhere, including within the Church. This setback notwithstanding, we are confident that campaigns of misinformation and vilification by well-oiled pro-Israel lobbies and putting profit ahead of principle by some will not for long drown the voices of the many Methodists who stand, in word and in deed, behind Palestinian freedom, justice and equality.

In 2009, prominent Palestinian Christians issued the “Kairos Palestine” document[5], a historic theological manifesto that seeks inspiration from a similar document issued in 1985 by South African theologians, detailing their vision for justice and the obligation to resist injustice. Kairos Palestine explicitly advocates BDS against Israel until it meets its obligations under international law.[6] The following year, United Methodist clergy and laity from the US responded to the “Kairos Palestine” document with grassroots educational and research efforts to understand the full extent of the impact of UMC investments that directly result in the oppression of Palestinians. These efforts culminated in the resolution[7] presented at this year’s General Conference and voted upon by the 988 delegates present from around the world.

A recent report by the Presbyterian Church (USA), whose divestment resolution will come to a vote at the general assembly scheduled for July, shows that years of engagement — 8 years, to be exact — with Caterpillar, which supplies Israel with bulldozers used to wantonly destroy Palestinian property and build apartheid infrastructure, have failed to convince the company to change its behavior thus making divestment an imperative.[8] Targeted divestment is, therefore, the minimum required to express effective solidarity with Palestinians languishing under and resisting Israel’s occupation, colonization and apartheid.

The BDS movement has opened space for much needed debate in the U.S. public sphere about Israel’s three-tiered system of oppression against Palestinians and is now becoming a household name. The road to ultimate victory over oppression, as Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. teach us, is never straight or paved with flowers; every turn and decline are opportunities to learn how to persevere and to rise stronger against the challenges ahead.

We salute the genuine moral voices in the United Methodist Church for their sincere efforts to put truth to action, to bring justice and freedom for all in the land that is the birthplace of Christianity.

[1] http://www.whoprofits.org/HP

[2] http://www.endtheoccupation.org/section.php?id=209

[3] http://www.umc.org/site/c.lwL4KnN1LtH/b.8038525/k.D58F/How_General_Conference_Works.htm

[4] http://www.rabbisletter.org/

[5] http://www.kairospalestine.ps/

[6] http://www.bdsmovement.net/call#.T5pJwMR-urI

[7] https://www.kairosresponse.org/The_Resolution.html

[8] http://www.pcusa.org/news/2012/4/25/mrti-holds-long-sought-meeting-caterpillar/

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Methodist Church BDS-Victory-BNC-Statement-3-May- (152.6 KiB

‘Israel’s gone way beyond apartheid’

Could you give us an update on the demolition of Palestinian homes and of what people now often refer to as the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Jerusalem.

I think what’s coming down the pipeline is that Israel today has basically finished this. We’ve gone beyond the occupation. The Palestinians have been pacified and from Israel’s point of view the whole situation has been normalized. Netanyahu went to Washington to meet with Obama last month. When he came back his adviser was asked what was new about this meeting and said ‘this is the first time in memory that an Israeli Prime Minister met with a US president and that the Palestinian issue was not even mentioned, it never came out.’

So, in this situation where the USA is really paralysed because Netanyahu has [influence over] both parties in congress and Obama does not want to do anything, Netanyahu is going to make the last move in nailing this whole thing down. Israel could well annex area C, which is 60 per cent of the West Bank. Now, a couple of months ago the European Council diplomats in Jerusalem and Ramallah sent a report to the EU saying that Israel has forcibly expelled the Palestinians from area C. Forcible expulsion is hard language for European diplomats to use.

‘We're finished. Israel is now from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, the Palestinians are confined in areas A and B or in small enclaves in East Jerusalem, and that's it’

So area C contains less than 5 per cent of the Palestinian population. In 1967 the Jordan valley contained about 250,000 people. Today it’s less than 50,000. So the Palestinians have either been driven out of the country, especially the middle class, or they have been driven to areas A and B. That’s where 96 or 97 per cent of them are. The Palestinian population has been brought down low enough, there is probably somewhere around 125,000 Palestinians in area C, so Israel could annex area C and give them full citizenship.

Basically, Israel can absorb 125,000 Palestinians without upsetting the demographic balance. And then, what is the world going to say? It’s not apartheid, Israel has given them full citizenship. So I think Israel feels it could get away with that. No one cares about what’s happening in areas A and B. If they want to declare a state, they can, Israel has no interest in Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron.

In other words, we’re finished. Israel is now from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, the Palestinians have been confined in areas A and B or in small enclaves in East Jerusalem, and that’s it.

So when people talk about a Palestinian state on 22 per cent of historical Palestine, it’s not even that, right? The number is much smaller.

Yes, what [Salam] Fayyad (Palestinian National Authority prime minister) is saying is our state does not have to be on any particular amount of territory, our state is an economic state and we can work around you annexing this and that because we can make our cities. The idea is that Israel will give them a bit of area C, to put the enclaves a little bit more together. So the north, the south and Gaza will still be cantonized, but what Fayyad is saying is we can make a go of that. Both Netanyahu and Fayyad have moved from a territorial conception of two states to an economic conception of two states, which is a whole different thing. The problem that the bosses have is how to sell that to the Palestinian people. But it seems to me that this is what is coming down the pipeline.

‘The Zionists have always said that once the Arabs despair that was the end, victory for them. Israel feels that's what we have got now. If you go today to the West Bank you'll hear the people say that they don't care anymore’

Israel feels that the Palestinians have been defeated. It’s over. Resistance is impossible because of the Israeli army, the Palestinian proxy army, the wall, I mean, you can’t mount a Third Intifada. Israel policy since the Iron Wall of 1923, has been despair. I wrote an article about this once ‘The mounting despair in Palestine‘.

The Zionists have always, always said that once the Arabs despair – [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky once put it interestingly ‘despair of the land of Israel ever becoming Palestine’ – that was the end, victory for them. Israel feels that’s what we have got now. If you go today to the West Bank, Gaza might be different, you’ll hear the people say that they don’t care anymore, let me have a job, let me live my life and I’ll be happy. In a sense, Fayyad feels he can respond to that.

Some pogroms took place recently when a group of Beitar soccer fans attacked Palestinian workers in a shopping mall. Were those people a few bad apples, or do these types of events indeed say something about Israeli society?

They are more than bad apples. They are not completely Israeli society either. This football team in Jerusalem is connected to the Likud. In Israel many football clubs are associated with political parties. There is a very close relation between the ideology of Likud and Begin and the Beitar football team. They see the Arabs as the enemy. So it reflects about a third of the Israeli public that is very committed to expansion, settlements, that see the Arabs as enemies. In Beitar, their chants, it’s not just the pogroms, they chant every time their team scores a goal, ‘death to the Arabs’. That’s what 20,000 people chant. Beitar for example has never had an Arab player.

The Arabs are beginning to be more prominent in Israeli football teams. Not in Beitar Jerusalem. This pogrom is kind of an extension of this. It’s all in the context of kids, for the most part its kids that have seen Israel changed into a neoliberal economy, become more and more Thatcherite, and you have tremendous income disparity in Israel. Israel is now in the OECD, but it has one of the highest income disparities.

‘I think occupation is an old word. We are way beyond occupation. I think we are also way beyond apartheid’

Kids have got no real future, that’s part of the context too. Those kids come from the housing projects, very much like those who follow the National Front in France or the EDL in England, people that only have this racist emotional outlet for their frustrations, and football is great for that. It channels anger away from the government. That’s why they sponsor football teams!

How important are the words we use, in your opinion, when it comes to Palestine/Israel. Ilan Pappe recently told me that we should rethink our vocabulary. Can we objectively still talk about ‘peace/occupation’? Shouldn’t we talk about ‘right to resist’ and ‘apartheid’ instead?

For sure. We deal a lot with words in our analysis. There are two words, because I think occupation is an old word. We are way beyond occupation. I think we are also way beyond apartheid. There are two words that capture the political reality but don’t have any legal substance today. One of them is Judaization. The entire country is being Judaized. It’s a word that the government uses, to Judaize Jerusalem, the Galilee, so the Judaization process is really at the heart of what’s going on. But it has no legal reference. So one of our projects we’re working on with Michael Sfard and some other lawyers is to try to introduce those terms into the discourse with the idea of trying to give them some legal frame. We have to try to match the political process, the political reality, because it is unprecedented in the world.

‘In a sense Israel has succeeded with the international community, and the US especially, in taking out of this situation the political. It's now solely an issue of security, just like in prisons’

Another term is ‘warehousing’ because I think that captures what’s going on better than apartheid. Warehousing is permanent. Apartheid recognizes that there is another side. With warehousing it’s like prison. There is no other side. There is us, and then there are these people that we control, they have no rights, they have no identity, they’re inmates. It’s not political, it’s permanent, static. Apartheid you can resist. The whole brilliance of warehousing is that you can’t resist because you’re a prisoner.

Prisoners can rise up in the prison yards but prison guards have all the rights in the world to put them down. That’s what Israel has come to. They are terrorists and we have the right to put them down. In a sense Israel has succeeded with the international community, and the US especially, in taking out of this situation the political. It’s now solely an issue of security, just like in prisons. It’s another concept that does not have any legal reference today but we’d like to put that in because warehousing is not only in Israel. Warehousing exists all over the capitalist world. Two-thirds of the people have been warehoused. That’s why I’m writing about Global Palestine. I’m saying that Palestine is a microcosm of what’s happening around the world.

Frank Barat is a human rights activist based in London. He is the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. He has edited two books, Gaza in Crisis, with Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, and Corporate Complicity in Israel’s Occupation with Asa Winstanley. He has also contributed to Is there a court for Gaza? with Daniel Machover. He can be found on Twitter @frankbarat22.

United Methodists Call for Boycott of “products made by Israeli companies operating in occupied Palestinian territories”

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‘Israel’s gone way beyond apartheid’