Lutheran Asks U.S. to Withhold Aid to Israel

The nation’s largest Lutheran church called on the U.S. government this week to withhold all economic and military aid to Israel until it improves conditions for Palestinians.

Meeting here for its biennial Churchwide Assembly, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America passed a strongly worded resolution that called for prayer in the ongoing violence in the Holy Land. Lutherans said they were following the words of Jesus to comfort “the poor, the powerless and the outcast.”

Delegates on Thursday voted to add a provision that called on Palestinians to end a recent spate of suicide bombings, such as the one that ripped through a downtown Jerusalem restaurant earlier the same day, killing several children.

The resolution signals a growing frustration--increasingly aimed at Israel--among the mainline Protestant churches with the ongoing violence.

One of the candidates for the upcoming presiding bishop election, Bishop Donald J. McCoid of Pittsburgh, was part of a Christian delegation that met with Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier this year and delivered a strongly worded rebuke of Israeli policies, angering the American Jewish Committee, which called it “terribly unbalanced” and “rather un-Christian.”