(RNS) The United Church of Canada General Council adopted a resolution Thursday (Aug. 13) that denies calls for a churchwide boycott of Israel, but encourages church members to consider boycotts to help resolve to the Middle East conflict.

“The United Church has not begun or approved a boycott at the national level,” said the Rev. Bruce Gregersen, the council’s officer for programs, in an announcement by the church.

“However, it has stated its encouragement and recommendation to its member bodies, that they are free to study, discern, and pray, and to undertake their own initiatives, which may include economic boycotts as a means to ending the occupation (of Palestine),” said Gregersen.

The council said peace in the region will require denunciation of human rights abuses committed by Israel and Palestine as well as the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.

Jewish groups in Canada and beyond, such as the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, denounced four proposals that were submitted to the General Council meeting in British Columbia, which ends Saturday (Aug. 15). Two called for a boycott of Israeli institutions, comparing it to past divestment efforts against South African apartheid. Another referred to Israel being built “mainly on land ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian owners.”

Two days before adopting the resolution on the issue, the General Council passed a motion condemning some of the language in those proposals. It said the council “repudiates and regrets language” used in the background material provided for the proposals and called the wording “provocative, unbalanced and hurtful.”

— Adelle M. Banks