"Methodists to Weigh Divestment as Tool to Shift Israel"
WASHINGTON POST
Saturday, February 16, 2008;
Page B08
On the Web at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021503272.html
The United Methodist Church is poised to become the next U.S. church to consider divestment from a company or companies operating in Israel, a strategy that has embroiled the Presbyterian Church (USA) and other denominations in controversy.
At the church's quadrennial General Conference in April in Fort Worth, the Methodists, with more than 8 million U.S. members, will debate whether to pull church holdings in Caterpillar, which provides the Israel Defense Forces with bulldozers.
The proposal from the Methodists' General Board of Church and Society comes as the church's women's division offers a 224-page study guide on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Jewish groups have slammed as "inflammatory, inaccurate and polemical."
Citing references that compare Israelis to Nazis and characterizing the creation of Israel as "original sin," four U.S. Jewish women's groups told Methodist leaders the guide "would simply take anyone who turns to it . . . on the wrong path."
The guide is "anti-Israel and anti-Jewish from cover to cover," said Ethan Felson, assistant executive director for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
The author of the report, the Rev. Stephen Goldstein, who works for the church's General Board of Global Ministries, was unable to be reached for comment.
James Winkler, general secretary of the General Board of Church and Society, said he had just received the study report and had not read the "troubling quotes." However, he explained the rationale for divestment.
"The board felt that after 40 years of statements and resolutions from our denomination, as well as from many other churches and other organizations, urging Israel's withdrawal from occupied lands in the West Bank, that something more needed to be done," he said.
"The feeling was that economic pressure was needed." Winkler said.
Caterpillar was chosen because Israel uses its products to "destroy Palestinian homes, build bypass roads and build the wall of separation."
About $5 million of the United Methodist Church's $17 billion portfolio is invested in Caterpillar.
In a statement, Caterpillar said it complies with foreign and domestic laws, stating that "for the past four years, activists have wrongly included Caterpillar in a publicity campaign aimed at advancing their much larger political agenda" and that protests "neither change the facts nor our position."
Whether the Methodist church's divestment proposal will meet the same as counterparts in other churches remains to be seen.
In June 2006, the Presbyterians replaced a 2004 call for a "phased, selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel" with a plan for more peace-oriented investment in the region. The United Church of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church have all stymied or reversed course on attempts at divestment.
For its part, the United Methodist Church is not of one mind on divestment.
"It seems grossly unfair that the church exclusively target Israel for divestment," said Mark Tooley, director of the Methodist program at the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which takes an conservative approach to public policy.
The church's social policy arm "has always been very, very critical of Israel like other mainline Protestant agencies have been, and will fault Israel almost exclusively for the lack of peace," Tooley said.
The Rev. Timothy Bias, pastor of First United Methodist Church in Peoria, Ill., where Caterpillar chief executive James Owens is a member, said the divestment proposal helps "raise the consciousness of the conflict."
But he regrets that the church did not first broach the issue with Caterpillar. "If we're going to make resolutions, we need to have conversations with all parties involved," Bias said.
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