An open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury: do not sort us according to our relationship to Zionism

Endurance turns out to be admissible for exactly one of the two peoples in the room. For the other, the same claim about the same soil is racism codified in law.

You might care to know that every Saturday morning I pray for the King, who is your Supreme Governor, and it has never struck me or anyone else in my synagogue as worth a remark. That is the settlement I've kept my whole life and that my family kept before me, and I am writing to defend it. I believe bishops should have a place in the Lords. Synod has made that difficult.

What Synod did in York was to resolve to hear four documents produced by Palestinian Christians, the most recent being Kairos II; to encourage the Church of England at all levels to engage with them; to instruct Church investors to review their policies against the ICJ advisory opinion and report back every three years; and to ask His Majesty's Government to act. Among the bishops, 25 voted in favour and none against.

Your College of Bishops adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism in 2018, including all of its examples, without qualification or exemption. Those were the words they chose. One of the examples of modern antisemitism that IHRA cites is claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavour. That is not a clever catch or a strained reading. Kairos II makes exactly that proposition, in nearly the same words, and not one of your bishops voted against hearing it.

But it wasn't 3.3 that made me put the document down.

At 3.12, the authors of Kairos II "call on the churches of the world to distinguish between dialogue with Jews and dialogue with Zionism – indeed, to boycott dialogue with Zionist voices that have supported and continue to support occupation, apartheid and the genocide of the Palestinian people. Instead, we call upon the churches to stand with and amplify prophetic Jewish voices that call for justice and truth."

Genocide is a terrible, revolting, accusation, against the people whose experience defined the term. It deserves being used as a finding, not as an adjective, and the court investigating that question has said expressly that it has not made any finding at all. In May it set a timetable under which the written pleadings do not close until 2029, three years after your Synod settled the matter in an afternoon. What might be called arrogance in one setting requires a new vocabulary in connection with a people whose population is yet to recover after the Holocaust.

Nevertheless, boycotting only those Zionists who have been sentenced by Kairos and the Synod as supportive of occupation, genocide and apartheid reads like a limit. Read against the rest of the document, it isn't one. Kairos II dates the injustice to the Balfour Declaration; it calls Israel a settler-colonial entity; it treats apartheid not as something Israel supposedly does but as something Israel is; and it rejects the idea that there is a conflict at all. On those definitions, a Jew who simply thinks the country should exist inevitably becomes a Zionist who supports "occupation, apartheid and the genocide of the Palestinian people". The clause has the grammar of a limit and the reach of a description, and what it describes, or, to be more precise, mischaracterises, is nearly everyone in my synagogue.

So it is an instruction to your church about my community, and I won't put it higher than the text does. It does not say the Jews it would have you boycott are not real Jews. It says the Church of England should sort us according to our tribal kinship and relationship to Zionism, defamed as it is in the text, amplify the ones who pass, and decline dialogue with the rest. It makes the qualification for a Jew to be heard by the established church of this country a test that the church did not set and cannot audit, administered by people who are not Jews and answerable to nobody who is.

I am not going to tell you Synod adopted that paragraph, because it didn't, and the distinction matters. What Synod did was institutionalise engagement with the document and act on part of its programme. What it declined to do was draw a boundary. The clause was read aloud in the chamber – a member of the laity quoted it and observed that, read plainly, it covers the vast majority of Jews in the world. Nobody answered him.

Your church has done the sorting itself, for something like a thousand years, and the memory has not faded. For most of that history the test was baptism; the Jews who passed were welcome and the ones who didn't were quarry. Your own teaching document says as much. God's Unfailing Word admitted in 2019 that Christian teaching had been a fertile seed-bed for murderous antisemitism, and when the Chief Rabbi wrote its afterword he told you, courteously, that even now Jews are seen by some as quarry to be pursued and converted. Your predecessor said he would take that challenge with immense seriousness. It is the sorting that is the offence, and the criterion has always been a detail. Once the test was baptism. A different one has now been put in front of your Synod, and your Synod has not said no to it.

The document applies the same method to Muslims, which seems to have gone unremarked. At 1.21 it turns to the Abraham Accords, in which four sovereign Arab states made decisions about their own interests. On the account given here, they were duped by a name and bought by an agenda; nowhere is there room for an Arab government to have weighed the matter and concluded that relations with Israel served its people. To describe the Muslims who accept normalisation, the authors coin a category, "Zionist Islam", which is the identical move performed on a different community. There are the authentic ones and the other sort, and the document will tell you which are which. Whatever else that is, it is not a document that credits anybody but itself with moral or political autonomy.

Archdeacon Fyfe, opening the debate, conceded that some of the language was challenging and asked whether we would say to survivors of trauma: you can't use that language, you are wrong, this is not true. About their own suffering, no, never. About their neighbours, yes.

The comparison I am making is not between Palestinian testimony and fabrication. It is between methods of institutional belief. Suffering gives a person authority about what happened to them. It gives them no infallibility about another people. Your church knows this better than any institution in Europe: the blood libel began at Norwich with a dead child, a grieving community, and an account of the Jews accepted because the people telling it were sincerely distressed. It spread because compassion was treated as verification.

That was the discipline required in York, and Synod did not exercise it.

It changed "receive" to "hear", the room relaxed, and the motion passed. But "hear" is not a smaller commitment than "receive" when the motion then instructs the Church at every level to engage with the documents, twice, in two separate sub-clauses, and directs its investors to act. It is the same commitment at a lower price.

The bishops failed on it. Twenty-five for, none against, five abstentions – and some of them sit in the House of Lords by right, on the theory that they bring to the legislature of this country a voice no party can supply. Not one stood up and said the sentence that required no expertise in the Levant: whatever else is true, this church will not be told which Jews it may speak to.

And then there is you, though the vote is the least of it.

You went to the Nova exhibition and told Synod that the pain of October 7 has not receded and remains a daily reality for Jewish people here and everywhere, and I believed you, and I still do. You also said that hearing these documents does not mean agreeing with everything in them. That is the part I can't make work, because of what happened in June.

Three weeks before Synod met, you and Archbishop Hosam concluded your pilgrimage by urging Anglicans everywhere to press their politicians in the light of the ICJ advisory opinion of 2024 – the identical instrument the motion then placed in the hands of your investors. You are no wholesale convert to Kairos II; your letter called for a negotiated two-state solution, which is not what that document proposes. But you had already aligned yourself with the demand the motion went on to make, and three weeks later you described the exercise as the hearing of testimony. A person who has already taken a position is not merely listening, and saying so would have cost you nothing.

And then there was the olive tree. You planted one with a family outside Bethlehem and said that olive trees symbolise their deep roots in that land – that when Palestinian Christians are leaving, the roots are the answer. That was a lovely thing to do and I don't grudge a second of it. It is also, precisely, the argument at 2.10, and the argument I made about Room 10b in the British Museum, and the oldest argument there is about lasting. You went to that soil and planted a tree to say that a people cannot be pulled out of it. Three weeks later, when discussing another people who made the same claim about the same soil, you did not reject a text that called their claim an ideology of racial supremacy.

Which brings me to the only part of this that is properly my business, since the Middle East is neither mine nor yours. Let us consider your leadership of the established Church.

There are several arguments for 26 bishops in the House of Lords – history, the parishes, the reach into places nothing else reaches – and I am not competent to judge most of them. There is one I can defend: the established church carries a responsibility to the whole nation, including the large part of it that doesn't believe a word, and must answer to it in a register no party and no campaign can occupy. That is why establishment has been good for us. England's answer to the question of what religion is for in public life has been unusually generous for a very long time, and the Jews of England have flourished under it. I would rather keep it than lose it.

On March 23, 1943, William Temple rose in that House and moved that the government provide help and temporary asylum to persons in danger of massacre. He had been Archbishop of Canterbury for eleven months. He had co-founded the Council of Christians and Jews the year before, when there was nothing whatever to be gained by it. Lord Cranborne replied that the government sympathised but had its own citizens to think of. Temple went on anyway; the Victor Gollancz publishing house had the speech out as a pamphlet within weeks; he was dead 19 months later.

What Temple did was political to its fingertips. He lobbied his own government, about a foreign war, and told ministers to their faces they were failing. The bench is there to be used and he used it. I am not asking you to be quieter than he was. I am not even asking you to be on my side of the Middle East.

The difference is in what he required. Temple imposed no test on any other community in this country. No Englishman had to qualify before Temple would speak for him.

Synod took one community's account of a war, made it the Church's institutional business, instructed its investors on the strength of it and asked its government to act – and did all of that without removing from the account its proposal to discriminate between the Jews of this country. The clause was read aloud. Synod changed a verb instead.

That is not carrying a responsibility to the whole nation. It is a campaigning organisation with a mitre and a research department, and campaigning organisations do not get 26 seats in the upper house of a legislature. If that is now the Church's work, the honest conclusion is disestablishment, and the bench should go. You cannot hold a privilege granted for the whole nation and spend it on a part.

So I'll ask for one thing. You might start by taking the IHRA definition your bishops adopted without qualification or exemption, and naming the paragraphs of this document that fail it – and you have already done part of that in public, because you called in June for two states and Kairos II does not want two states. You disagree with it. But the thing I actually need is shorter than a list. Say, in your own voice rather than a committee's, that the Church of England does not accept the invitation at 3.12, and will speak to the Jews of this country as it finds them.

I am not asking you to defend the Jews. I am asking you to defend the establishment, and the un-radical proposition that the church of the whole nation cannot pick which of the nation's minorities it will hear.

Temple's line about his own church was that it is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members. I am not one of your members. I pray for your Supreme Governor every Saturday of my life, and I have spent this letter arguing that you should keep your seats. At the moment I am arguing in your favour, about a church that has been handed a proposal to sort the Jews of England and has not said no. That is not an argument I can win. It is not one I should be having.

Say the sentence, and I need never make the case for disestablishment.

Yours, in the English settlement we both hold,

Ashley Hirst

Ashley Hirst lives in Hendon with his wife, four children, two cats and a dog. A former UJS Chair, he is the co-founder of the Alei Tzion community