United Methodists Recommend Sanctions & Boycotts; Reject Divestment

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May 7, 2012 Palestine-Israel
[A committee chairman speaks in favor of divestment. Image from video below.] [A committee chairman speaks in favor of divestment. Image from video below.]

United Methodists Recommend Sanctions & Boycotts; Reject Divestment

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation was honored to witness and support an historic vote by the world United Methodist Church (UMC)’s 2012 General Conference (GC), the highest decision-making body of the church, to adopt a resolution:

  1. Urging the U.S. government to “end all military aid to the region”;
  2. Calling on “all nations to prohibit… any financial support by individuals or organizations for the construction and maintenance of settlements”; and
  3. Calling on “all nations to prohibit… the import of products made by companies in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.”

At the same time, the US Campaign regrets that the GC subsequently voted against a resolution to divest from Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions, and Hewlett Packard (HP) due to the corporations’ complicity in the Israeli occupation. For more than forty years, the UMC has passed countless resolutions condemning the Israeli occupation and affirming the rights of the Palestinian people to freedom and self-determination. The divestment campaign, led by United Methodist Kairos Response (UMKR), a US Campaign coalition member, sought to align UMC policy with UMC pension fund investments in response to the Kairos Palestine document, a call from Palestinian Christians to move from sympathetic words to tangible action.

The votes followed multiple impassioned speeches on the GC plenary floor, witnessed by 1,000 voting delegates; hundreds of supporters, bishops, and church leaders; and thousands around the world online. Diverse delegates, young and old, who had traveled from as far as South Africa, the Philippines, and Jerusalem, spoke eloquently in favor of the resolutions. [The deliberations can be viewed here (starting minute 17:58) and here.] The US Campaign was proud to be there in support of them.

The passing resolution, entitled “Opposition to Israeli Settlements in Palestinian Land,” [view original and amendments] urges United Methodists to read Kairos Palestine, a document that calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) as tools of love and solidarity to support Palestinian liberation. The document in essence endorses the US Campaign’s flagship End U.S. Military Aid to Israel Campaign, along with numerous member group-led campaigns challenging military aid and the costs of occupation. 

The resolution specifically commends “the 2010 British Methodist Church’s call ‘on the Methodist people to support and engage with [a] boycott of Israeli goods emanating from illegal settlements,’ as well as a call for nonviolent actions issued by several Annual Conferences.”

The New York, Northern Illinois, and West Ohio UMC Annual Conferences have already divested from companies involved in the Israeli occupation, and the California - Nevada Conference has voted to do so as well.

The resolution states: “The United Methodist Church does not support a boycott of products made in Israel. Our opposition is to products made by Israeli companies operating in occupied Palestinian territories.” It bears reminding that the vast majority of Israeli companies, even those with products made in Israel, operate in some way in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, so the distinction is largely a false one. Nonetheless, many BDS campaigns in the United States and around the world do target specifically settlement-produced goods, including the “Stolen Beauty Campaign” spearheaded by US Campaign member group CodePink targeting Ahava beauty products made in the Israeli settlement Mitzpe Shalem. The new Methodist resolution implicitly endorses this among many other BDS campaigns.

The resolution urges United Methodists to “develop recommendations to ensure that tax-exempt funds do not support illegal settlements and other violations of international law,” citing the ongoing settlement funding by tax-exempt organizations today. A list of such organizations would include the Jewish National Fund (funding Jewish-only colonies while actively displacing and dispossessing Palestinians since before 1948), currently targeted by the international “Stop the JNF Campaign” led in part by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a new member of the US Campaign coalition.

The resolution also affirms the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands, and it encourages United Methodists to work with solidarity organizations on the ground such as Christian Peacemaker Teams, a US Campaign member group.

The original divestment resolution was gutted in the GC Finance and Administration Committee, which sanctioned two amendments. The first replaced clear, binding language calling for active divestment with consideration of advocating that companies sign the “Ruggie Principles,” which assert the responsibility of business enterprises to “avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts” and to “seek to prevent or mitigate” any such impacts linked to their business operations or relationships, but provides no enforcement of the principles. The amendment, rather than complementing divestment, cynically sought to replace it, evading the UMC’s responsibility to end its own contributions to “adverse human rights impacts.” 

The second amendment by anti-divestment delegates advocated investment in the Palestinian economy to help ease the suffering of Palestinians. This silencing of widespread Palestinian demands for divestment, masquerading as support for Palestinians, was challenged repeatedly by Palestinian guest speakers who insisted emphatically that charity is not a substitute for freedom and justice. 

The amended resolution, which is also non-binding and open-ended, passed. Despite flowery messaging in support of peace, the UMC refused to end its investments in corporations profiting from Israel’s brutal and illegal military occupation, and thus remains deeply implicated. The US Campaign joins UMKR and others in asserting that actions speak louder than words.

Broad media coverage of and grassroots contributions to UMKR’s divestment campaign, however, have caught the attention of the world and amplified criticism of the Israeli occupation and complicit U.S. corporations -- such as Caterpillar, Motorola, and HP -- to new levels that cannot be ignored. There is more work ahead to hold these companies (among others) fully accountable for their abuses. The Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, the University of California at Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Adalah-NY, Global Exchange, and the American Friends Service Committee, are among the many US Campaign coalition members actively targeting the companies in grassroots BDS campaigns, many of them through the nationwide “We Divest Campaign” calling on financial giant TIAA-CREF to divest from corporations profiting from the Israeli occupation. 

BDS has entered the very highest levels of mainstream U.S. institutions. The Presbyterian Church (USA) also will be debating resolutions this summer at its General Assembly on boycott of Ahava settlement products and divestment from Caterpillar, Motorola, and HP. Presbyteries around the country have already passed local overtures calling for boycotts and divestment. 

Thousands of allies around the world, both individuals and organizations, joined together in support of UMKR on their grassroots Methodist-led campaign. Hundreds of volunteers from dozens of US Campaign member groups contributed in creative and diverse ways, large and small, joined by allies from Serbia to Puerto Rico; South Africa to the Philippines; London to Tel Aviv; and beyond. This truly grassroots, unifying, Methodist-led initiative reminds us of the noble legacy of faith-based organizations leading the way on social justice struggles, one victory at a time.

The highest voting body of the United Methodist Church, which is the largest mainline Protestant denomination in the United States, has recommended boycotts and sanctions -- as well as an end to individual and organizational financial support for settlements -- as tools for ending Israel’s brutal occupation and discriminatory policies. The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation congratulates United Methodist Kairos Response and the thousands of other Methodists and people of conscience who joined together to support this historic move.

 [Deliberations Video Part I (starts at 17:58)]


[Deliberations Video Part II]

[This report was originally published by the US Campaign to End the Occupation.]
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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412