Bishop warns that Synod vote will stoke antisemitism

The Bishop of Blackburn has warned that the Church of England Synod’s vote on the controversial Kairos II document risks fuelling antisemitism in the UK.

He told the Daily Telegraph: “We’ve been forced to take a binary position, and whatever binary position we take, one side celebrates and the other feels bitterly betrayed. The situation we’ve seen is there’s a Palestinian Muslim and Christian side celebrating, and I fear what this vote has done is add to a growing tide of antisemitism in our country.”

The Bishop, the Rt Rev Philip North, abstained in the Synod’s vote last week.

The Synod voted to “hear’ the Kairos II document, produced by a group of Palestinian Christians, which describes Israel as a “colonial enterprise” that unleashed a “genocidal war on Gaza”. The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis and the Board of Deputies had asked the Synod to reject the motion.
Bishop North told the Telegraph: “This is, locally, on the streets, an unbelievably visceral, complex, nuanced argument, which is incredibly intense, including in Lancashire.

He said that in Lancashire there was “an enormous, very complex, overlapping set of Muslim communities. What unites them is Gaza and a really visceral, intense antipathy towards the state of Israel.”

He contrasted that with the “tiny, beleaguered” local Jewish community. “Part of my job is to listen to the leaders of both sides, and that Jewish community is close to no longer feeling welcome in the UK,” he said.

The archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, speaking at the Synod debate on Kairos II (Church of England/Sam Atkin)[Missing Credit]

He said that anti-Israel sentiment had intensified after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 2023, and during the subsequent war. He condemned what he called “unacceptable levels of bloodshed and violence shown by the state of Israel in Gaza” and said that it “undermines local social cohesion” in his area.

During the debate in the Synod he spoke of how “terrified” Jewish people are in Lancashire and how they had “existential fears for their future in this nation”.

The document, the Chief Rabbi warned last week, used “extreme rhetoric to challenge the very concept of a Jewish state”. It calls for a boycott of “dialogue with Zionist voices”, which, he warned, risked undermining “decades of careful relationship-building between Christians and Jews”.

Bishop North told the Telegraph: “The big mistake was to reference particularly the Kairos II document, which is, a number of speakers said, antisemitic according to a definition of antisemitism [we have] adopted. It’s certainly perceived to be antisemitic by the Jewish community. It’s an inflammatory document.” He was referring to the IHRA definition which the Church adopted in 2018.

The motion, he feels, will make it “significantly harder” to create a forum locally where people with different views on the Middle East conflict can come together and share a dialogue.

“Is someone going to read a Synod motion and attack a synagogue? No, I don’t think that,” he says. “But I do think the tide of antisemitism is rising, and we should be condemning that, yet we’ve done something that will add to it. That is deeply unwise, particularly with the long Christian history of antisemitism.”

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Bishop warns that Synod vote will stoke antisemitism

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