United Methodist Leaders: Long Soft on Hamas, Increasingly Anti-Israel

Morally muddled hot takes from the United Methodist Church on the recent massacres and war launched by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas are simply the latest chapter in a long history of United Methodist leaders’ obsessive animosity against Israel while these same United Methodist leaders have been extraordinarily soft on Hamas.

Differing United Methodists’ views on the Arab-Israeli conflict do not always neatly follow our normal theological divides. There are some examples of otherwise liberal United Methodists opposing anti-Israel divestment. Leaders of the Global Methodist Church prize unity on core doctrine while welcoming diverse views on political issues (precisely the opposite of the ethos in today’s UMC).

Nevertheless, the facts remain that in recent General Conferences, anti-Israel petitions have been pushed by the liberal caucuses who now dominate the United Methodist Church (see page 10), and opposed by the evangelical renewal groups out of whom the Global Methodist Church emerged.

The main unofficial caucus focused on promoting anti-Israel activism in the denomination has been United Methodists for Kairos Response (UMKR). When UMKR chose to join the “Love Your Neighbor” liberal caucus coalition, and thus support its agendas of LGBTQ liberation ideology and making elective abortions more widespread, this indicated that UMKR’s leaders calculated that only a minimal number of United Methodists may be potentially open to UMKR’s stances on Israel but turned off by its liberal stances on these other issues.

Liberals have consistently failed to persuade recent General Conferences to divest from particular companies with ties to the Israeli government. But UMKR has celebrated successes in numerous annual conferences supporting such anti-Israel divestment: the California-Nevada, California-Pacific, Minnesota, New England, New York, Northern Illinois, Pacific-Northwest, Upper New York, and West Ohio Conferences by 2013, joined by Desert-Southwest, Oregon-Idaho, Susquehanna, and West Michigan in 2014, and joined by Baltimore-Washington in 2017.

The mass exodus of conservatives as well as moderates is shifting the political balances in the UMC on a range of issues, so that such divest-from-Israel campaigns can expect to see greater successes in additional annual conferences and future General Conferences.

We at IRD have extensively documented and protested United Methodist leaders’ obsession with singling out the world’s lone Jewish state for a special level of hostility. What follows are a few non-comprehensive highlights from the last two decades.

Outside of the evangelical renewal movement (whose sympathizers are now being driven out of the UMC) and the narrow exceptions noted, I do not recall a single United Methodist leader publicly disagreeing with any of the examples of anti-Israel extremism and imbalance below.

In 2004, IRD released a carefully researched report on Human Rights Advocacy in the Mainline

Protestant Churches. Among other things, we documented how the UMC’s apportionment-funded Capitol Hill political lobby office, the General Board of Church and Society (GBCS), followed the pattern of other mainline Protestant bodies in an obsessive, disproportionate focus on critiquing Israel. In the first four years of the 21^st century, the GBCS limited its human-rights-based criticisms of national governments to just three countries: Iraq, Israel, and the United States. The report noted that “all criticisms of Iraqi human rights violations were contained within resolutions mainly devoted to criticizing U.S. policies applying pressure (and ultimately using military force) against Iraq,” and so “[i]t seems unlikely that these brief and general criticisms of the Iraqi government would have been issued at all, except as an effort to provide some semblance of rhetorical balance to far harsher and more specific condemnations of the U.S. government.”

That same year, as part of the broader ideological radicalism of the agency, GBCS CEO Jim Winkler suggested that the Iraq war was some sort of Zionist conspiracy, “by a far right band of Washington insiders” who allegedly were not really interested in spreading democracy but rather wanted “to ensure Israel could continue to act with impunity against the Palestinian people.”

At the UMC’s 2004 General Conference, Mark Tooley (IRD’s UMAction Director at that time) sought to balance United Methodist leaders’ criticisms of Israel by proposing numerous resolutions that would have also expressed concern about human-rights abuses by Muslim regimes like Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria as well as Communist regimes like China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. IRD’s human rights report had found that of these eleven nations, all but two, Pakistan and Sudan, had escaped criticism at the previous two General Conferences (while the 1996 General Conference had adopted three Israel-criticizing resolutions, which by default remained active for eight years). But all eleven resolutions were overwhelmingly defeated in committee.

Apparently, whatever human rights abuses may have been committed by such authoritarian regimes, they are not nearly as noteworthily bad as democratic Israel, in the eyes of some top United Methodist leaders.

Then after Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanese Islamist group Hezbollah, and after Hamas gained a measure of governing authority over Gaza in 2007, I thought surely my denomination could balance its ongoing critiques of Israel with at least finding something disagreeable in Israel’s militant adversaries.

So I submitted an admittedly lengthy resolution to the 2008 General Conference, which among other things would have declared firm United Methodist opposition to anti-Israel divestment campaigns, “affirm[ed] Israel’s right to exist within secure borders” and to appropriately defend its people, while “decr[ying] the terrorist violence of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other extremist groups in the region.” My resolution also included important balancing statements, supporting justice for ALL people in the region, “decry[ing] accusations of anti-Semitism being used to stifle legitimate criticisms of the Israeli government” while also acknowledging the unfairness of singling out the world’s lone Jewish state, and noting then-recent opposition to anti-Israel divestment among many leftists.

I also submitted a separate, shorter resolution to have the United Methodist Church officially affirm Israel’s basic right to appropriate self-defense, acknowledge basic problematic facts about Hamas, and “call[ed] on the leaders of Hamas to immediately recognize Israel’s right to exist, renounce violence,” and reform the explicit anti-Semitism in Hamas’s charter.

But an overwhelming 83 percent of committee delegates voted against both resolutions (see here and here).

Another proposed resolution, submitted by someone else, would have among other things said that the United Methodist Church “[c]ondemns violence by Hamas against Israeli civilians and Palestinian political opponents.” This resolution was also rejected, albeit more narrowly.

Thus, in 2008 United Methodists adopted a resolution strongly criticizing Israel by a nearly-two-thirds supermajority, while rejecting multiple resolutions that would have also criticized Hamas.

In 2012, I tried again, submitting a similar resolution briefly acknowledging problems with Hamas and calling on the terror group to moderate. This time, United Methodist committee delegates gutted the resolution to remove all specific references to Hamas, because apparently only the Israeli government is worthy of direct criticism. However, the final result was an okay, albeit weak statement, which would “call on all peoples to immediately recognize Israel’s right to exist, and renounce violence” and “affirm Israel’s non-negotiable right to exist, equally as the right of the Palestinian people to a state of their own, within secure borders.” But even that was too Israel-friendly for some United Methodist officials, with more than 26 percent of committee delegates voting no. (This petition was one of many that died due to never being brought to the plenary floor.)

Then in 2014, the UMC’s missions agency, the General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM) sponsored, and GBCS officials also promoted and participated in, a two-day anti-Israel conference at “centrist” liberal leader Mike Slaughter’s megachurch. As I reported firsthand, this apportionment-supported event crassly demonized Israel and categorically dismissed Israeli security concerns, with one speaker (a World Methodist Council official) even likening support for Israel to “apostasy,” and another speaker making the outrageously false claim that “the Palestinian media are not demonizing the Israelis.” Speakers at this official United Methodist event went to awkward extremes to avoid any criticism of Israel’s adversaries, especially Hamas. In the words of one speaker, GBGM-supported “missionary” Alex Awad, “it is not Hamas’s rockets,” and “it is not Hamas’s underground tunnels” that were responsible for “why we don’t have peace right now.” At times, this United Methodist conference stooped to outright anti-Semitism, echoing stereotypes about Jewish greed and a Jewish conspiracy controlling the U.S. government, while portraying all Israelis as deserving collective punishment! (Over the next nine years, I do not recall anyone who was present at the conference, from which plenary session videos remain online, disputing the accuracy of my on-site reporting.)

Representatives of the UMC pensions agency, Wespath, attended and expressed broad sympathy for social justice but were treated rudely for declining to specifically support anti-Israel divestment.

United Methodists pushing anti-Israel divestment, including at this conference, have generally been extremely unclear about what they are ultimately trying to accomplish, other than vague rhetoric about “ending the occupation” (which some suggest means ending any survival of the Jewish state) and these activists’ demonizing security measures protecting the Israeli people from Hamas.

So if the United Methodist leaders organizing this 2014 conference had had their way, then Israel would have been even more vulnerable to Hamas’s genocidally anti-Jewish atrocities of October 7.

At this event, GBGM’s then-CEO bragged that the UMC’s official missions agency was involved in starting the activist group, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (later renamed the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights) in 2001. The alleged extremist ties this coalition developed over the years did not stop the GBCS from also becoming a member group in 2011.

This organization has admitted that campaigns to selectively divest from the Caterpillar company in protest of its business with Israel is “part and parcel of this international BDS campaign.” BDS stands for campaigns to single out the world’s lone Jewish state for Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions. Amidst that 2014 conference heavily promoting BDS, one speaker there summarized BDS as “boycotting all things Israeli,” while explaining that the more targeted divestment campaigns against specific companies connected to Israel were ultimately similar to and ideologically aligned with BDS.

Then at the 2016 General Conference, Bishop Minerva Carcaño abused her authority as presider to forcibly silence a delegate mid-speech and California-Pacific clergy delegate Sandra Olewine (who was later promoted to district superintendent) blatantly lied to the entire General Conference, to successfully kill a resolution that would have balanced statements in the UMC Book of Resolutions decrying Islamophobia and anti-Arab discrimination with a resolution to also oppose anti-Semitism. Although this proposed resolution explicitly “reject[ed] over-simplifying rhetoric that calls all criticisms of actions of the Israeli government anti-Semitic,” what apparently sparked such any-means-necessary liberal opposition was the resolution acknowledging that criticisms of Israel could sometimes cross the line into anti-Semitism.

Other actions were more positive. That General Conference adopted a reasonable resolution that urged United Methodists “to develop a balanced understanding of the concerns and perspectives of both Palestinians and Israelis, being careful to lift up the voices of those victims of violence and injustice across the region, and rejecting oversimplified efforts to simply ‘blame’ one side or the other.” With the support of some otherwise liberal delegates, this United Methodist conference not only rejected anti-Israel divestment, but even adopted a petition calling on part of the UMC bureaucracy to end its support for the aforementioned U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. That petition cited how, in its own words, this Campaign promoted “comprehensive divestment” against Israel and through BDS sought to “to isolate Israel economically, socially, and culturally.” Similar petitions went nowhere in 2008 and 2012.

However, these 2016 actions brought little discernible shift in the UMC bureaucracy. Admittedly, that last petition could have been better worded than “encourag[ing] the General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM) to withdraw its current membership in the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation through the General Board of Church and Society and to end any financial contributions, including staff participation.” But even the GBGM’s own reporting interpreted this petition’s meaning as that “the General Conference directed Global Ministries to discontinue its membership in the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation,” an interpretation shared by supporters.

Under the leadership of Thomas Kemper, however, the GBGM refused to end its membership in this extremist coalition, citing the debatable semantic argument that the adopted petition said that “General Conference encourages” the denominational agency to do so, while two other petitions (here and here) which narrowly failed in committee would have instead used the verb “instructs.”

Two years later, prominent Bishop Bruce Ough (now the UMC Council of Bishops Executive Secretary) sent a public letter to this U.S. Campaign, “commend[ing]” the activism of both them and UMKR, while declaring that he was “pleased that the United Methodist Church has been supportive of the US Campaign since its inception.”

This Campaign has changed its name to the “US Campaign for Palestinian Rights” and abandoned the structure of having dues-paying “member groups”—though it continues listing United Methodism’s GBGM, GBCS, United Methodist Women, and the UMKR caucus among its network of aligned groups.

These episodes highlight the systemic realities of how moderate and conservative desires of even General Conference majorities are continually thwarted by the UMC’s entrenched liberal bureaucracy.

As part of that entrenched bureaucracy, United Methodist apportionments have long funded professional anti-Israel activists, in addition to grants to outside groups like the U.S. Campaign. The aforementioned Olewine previously served for years as a GBGM missionary in Jerusalem (and remember, the GBGM understanding of “missions” work has often prioritized divisive political activism at the expense of evangelism). We have earlier profiled longtime GBGM staff executive David Wildman and his work to demonize Israel as “colonial.”

In 2015, Janet Lahr Lewis, an official of both the GBCS and GBGM, actually called for boycotting the Holocaust Museum in D.C. for the sake of Palestinians and others, and absurdly likened Hitler’s historically unique genocide of six million Jews to Israel’s treatment of Arabs.

Beyond the extraordinarily limited exceptions noted, the silence of supposedly “centrist” liberal leaders on the above examples has been deafening. While there may be some otherwise liberal United Methodist leaders who are privately horrified by Hamas and silently disagree with anti-Israel extremism, when they have never had the courage to publicly speak up earlier, why should we expect them to step up to be a moderating influence now, when they have much fewer allies on such issues left in the UMC?

Our denominational split has meant a mass exodus from the UMC of the sorts of United Methodists who favor a more reasonable and balanced approach towards Hamas and Israel. Now their restraining influence is removed, while non-liberals remaining in the UMC are being systematically marginalized and silenced.

Many who have been United Methodists for decades are horrified to learn about such anti-Semitic rhetoric, the missed opportunities to stand against anti-Semitism, United Methodist officials absolving Hamas of wrongdoing, the United Methodist Church singling out Israel with harsh double standards, and calls to boycott Holocaust remembrance. But the liberal echo chamber of the UMC bureaucracy is only becoming more insulated and ideologically intolerant.  Thus, in the long run, we should expect the above-documented United Methodist hostilities against Israel and United Methodist refusals to find fault with Hamas to become increasingly common and dominant.