NEWS STORY: Lutherans Lambaste Israel on Separation Wall, Sidestep Divestment Issue

c. 2005 Religion News Service ORLANDO, Fla. _ The nation’s largest Lutheran denomination on Saturday (Aug. 13) voted to increase advocacy on behalf of Palestinians, but sidestepped a growing movement to divest in Israel that has angered many Jewish groups. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which has deep ties with the dwindling Palestinian Christian […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

ORLANDO, Fla. _ The nation’s largest Lutheran denomination on Saturday (Aug. 13) voted to increase advocacy on behalf of Palestinians, but sidestepped a growing movement to divest in Israel that has angered many Jewish groups.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which has deep ties with the dwindling Palestinian Christian community, said it would push Israel to dismantle its controversial separation barrier that critics say runs roughshod over Palestinian lands.


But the 5 million-member church declined to follow Presbyterians and Anglicans who want to pull investments from companies doing business with Israel to protest the plight of the Palestinians.

Instead, the Lutherans voted 668-269 to pursue “positive economic development” in the region as part of an eight-page “Churchwide Strategy for Engagement in Israel and Palestine.”

Part of that plan calls for “managing collective or personal investments” in order to pursue peace, but does not mention divestment. The church said U.S. government aid should be distributed equally between both sides.

Lutherans said they were particularly upset with Israel’s separation wall in and around the West Bank, which they said separate Palestinians from work, schools and churches. The church said the wall “may undermine efforts toward a credible two-state solution.”

While Jewish leaders bristle at criticism of the separation wall, one official said he was grateful that Lutherans had declined to endorse divestment.

“The most important message is that they stayed off the path to divestment, because that’s not the path to peace,” said Ethan Felson, assistant director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “It just poisons the well of interfaith relations in America.”

Lutherans are particularly concerned about the future of Augusta Victoria Hospital, a facility operated by the Lutheran World Federation that primarily serves Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Lutherans say Palestinian access has been cut off by Israel.


“Our church believes in bridges, not walls; trust, not fear,” Bishop Munib Younan of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land told delegates by phone from Jerusalem.

“The wall does not create peace; it breeds despair.”

Jewish groups say the wall is needed to protect Israelis from suicide bombers, and have criticized a similar call to dismantle the wall recently issued by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the leader of the Union for Reform Judaism, urged delegates not to “demonize or isolate Israel” in remarks to delegates earlier in the week.

“In our support for Palestinian people, we must never let this blend into anti-Semitism,” said Paul Erickson, a delegate from South Dakota.

Some delegates supported the barrier.

“The wall was not built to separate families, but to keep families alive,” said Larry Shull of South Carolina. “If we were to go and remove the wall, the killing would begin immediately again. That’s a fact of life in that region.”

A proposed resolution from the church’s Caribbean Synod that called for divestment to help end the “tyranny of the Israeli occupation” died at the assembly and was replaced by the broader Middle East strategy.


DEA END ECKSTROM

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