Last month I noted that the Methodist Church was issuing a survey asking for people's opinions about boycotting Israel. Even though the questions indicated that the decision had already been made, I felt it was a good idea to encourage people to respond anyway.
(One particularly good response was written by Maurice Ostroff, and NGO Monitor wrote a comprehensive paper in response, and Dexter Van Zile also had a nice one [h/t WATAL]. )
I received a different kind of response from Avi Bell. Instead of answering the questions, he suggests that Methodists should answer some additional questions:
What do you understand to be the motivation/inspiration behind the UK Methodist Church's call for boycotting, divesting from and imposing sanctions upon the world's only Jewish state?
What do you understand to be the motivation/inspiration behind the UK Methodist Church's silence regarding terrorist groups that have murdered thousands of Jews in Israel in service of an explicitly anti-Semitic agenda including the denial of a Jewish right of self-determination in the historic Jewish homeland?
Do you consider it odd that the Methodist Church frets about the imperfections in the world's only Jewish state while ignoring the much more troubling imperfections in all the world's non-Jewish states? Do you consider it troubling that the Methodist Church has adopted a harsh moral standard for judging the world's only Jewish state, and a forgiving one for all the other states in the world, including those seeking to destroy the Jewish state?
In your view, how can the Methodist Church credibly contribute to Arab-Israeli peace efforts when it has spent recent years promoting conflict by supporting the delegitimization of the Jewish state, while maintaining silence about moral outrages committed against the Jewish population of Israel?
In your view, how can the Methodist Church be viewed as engaged in sincere reflection about its anti-Israel views when the Church publicly solicits only further anti-Israel opinions?
Do you support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from part of their homeland? Do you support the ethnic cleansing of Jews from part of their homeland? Do you support boycotts in order to promote such ethnic cleansing? What message do you think the Methodist Church sends by promoting the ethnic cleansing of Jews from part of their homeland?
What message do you think the Methodist Church sends by flirting with mass boycotts of the world's largest Jewish population? Does historical Church-promoted anti-Semitism affect this perception? How do you feel the Church's moral authority will be impacted if it promotes boycotts against Jewish Israeli thinkers and artists?
What do you think is the impact of the Methodist Church's public assumption that its campaign against the Jewish state and the world's largest Jewish population center is moral? How do you think the Church's moral authority is impacted by its request for public and political support of its campaign against the Jewish state?
