At the 41st General Council of the United Church in Ottawa (Aug 2012), the Working Group on Israel Palestine presented a report.  The recommendations of the Working Group on Israel Palestine were approved with some amendments and modifications.  UNJPPI wrote an analysis of the Working Group’s report prior to the General Conference being held.

Excerpt:

…What follows is a brief analysis of the Report of the Working Group on Israel/Palestine Policy. It was released on May 1st of this year and is contained in all General Council information packets.

In general we affirm the direction and recommendations of the Report, particularly the upholding of dignity, justice and peace as the gospel values that underlie and provide its foundation. We are also heartened that the United Church has taken seriously the call of the Kairos Palestine document A Moment of Truth, which was produced in late 2009 by an ecumenical group of Palestinian Christian leaders.[]

This Report clearly calls for “the rejection of all forms of violence by all parties in the conflict,” and we would simply add, of course, that the first and foundational form of violence has been the structural and entrenched violence of 45 years of occupation since 1967, and the original violence of the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from their traditional lands in the wake of the creation of Israel by UN resolution in 1948.[]

Perhaps the most important recommendations of the Report, however, concentrate on calling “United Church members to take concrete actions to support the end of the occupation,” []

While there are a few troubling inadequacies in the Report, including its upholding of a unique form of “democracy” in Israel as privileging Jews over other citizens, its rejection of the internationally recognized naming of the occupation and its accompanying house demolitions and annexation wall as “apartheid,” and its failure to strongly address the privileging of Israel in the international community by the attempt to create a cone of immunity to legitimate criticism under the umbrella that such  criticism is anti-semitic, it nonetheless moves the United Church forward…