Mick Hartley

As reported in the Jerusalem Post, the World Council of Churches (WCC) is training volunteers to promote boycotts of Israel and engage in antisemitic rhetoric, with funding from several Western governments and the EU, as well as support from the United Nations.

The WCC flagship project – Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) – has sent 1,800 “ecumenical accompaniers” from around the world to serve as observers in the West Bank and Jerusalem over the past 15 years, and aim to have 25 to 30 of these unofficial observers on the ground at all times. This is the only program of this kind run by the WCC. […]

The WCC calls itself the broadest organized group of churches, and says it seeks to represent 350 member churches in 110 countries and 500 million Christians throughout the world. Its website says that the group’s goal is Christian unity.

Yet one of the ways it seems to achieve that is through anti-Israel advocacy, which at times has explicit antisemitic overtones, as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. This definition has been accepted by the EU, which along with some of its member countries, provides funding for the EAPPI.

WCC leadership and EAPPI volunteers have repeatedly made comparisons of Israeli actions to those of Nazi Germany in their advocacy sessions. For example, WCC general secretary Dr. Olav Fyske Tveit said: “I heard about the occupation of my country during the five years of World War II as the story of my parents. Now I see and hear the stories of 50 years of occupation.”

In 2017, an observer Rev. Gordon Timbers of the Presbyterian Church of Canada gave a presentation. When an audience member asked if “Jewish people who go in to see…the model of the gas chambers” see similarities between that and the West Bank, Timbers responded that “there are similarities,” including the use of identification papers.

South African EAPPI activist Itani Rasalanavho said during an “Apartheid Week” event in his home country that “the time has come to say that the victims of the Holocaust have now become the perpetrators.”

In a presentation by Rev. Joan Fisher, an EAPPI activist, she quotes a Palestinian cleric as saying: “We are sympathetic to the suffering of our Jewish brothers and sisters in the Holocaust, but you don’t deal with one injustice by creating another injustice.”

The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism states that “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is an example of antisemitism.

The WCC supports boycotts and divestment from settlements, but EAPPI activists have called for a boycott of all of Israel. […]

In May 2016, EAPPI activist Hannah Griffiths made a presentation in London, in which she blamed the “Jewish lobby” for American Christian Evangelicals supporting Israel, and claimed Israel plants knives in the bodies of Palestinians who were shot after attempting to stab Israelis.

EAPPI activists have also spread falsehoods about Israel, such as one in the UK who said that Israel has a policy to reduce the Arab population by sending Arab citizens to the West Bank or Gaza. Others showed ignorance of the conflict, like an EAPPI volunteer in Canada who said that Israelis aren’t allowed in Area A not because of danger, but “to prevent Israelis from seeing what was going on.”

Local Jewish communities found EAPPI volunteers have inflamed antisemitism.

Here's the original report from NGO Monitor.