As the debate on Israel/Palestine began at the General Synod of the Church of England on Sunday evening, the chair of the debate issued some words of advice, given the sensitive nature of the matter at hand: “Can I ask members to consider carefully the language that they use.” They didn’t. And what followed was a disgrace.
The motion being debated was proposed by the Diocese of Carlisle – basically Cumbria – which the 2021 census tells me has some 50-150 Jews living there. With this extensive experience of living amongst Jewish people, the Carlisle Diocese has urged the General Synod to receive a number of documents written by Palestinian Christians that condemn Israel as a “colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity” – yes, they use that horrible word entity – and that “Genocide is a cumulative process – one that began in the minds of the settler-colonial powers of Europe when they denied the image of God in others and legitimised death, domination and slavery. We consider the State of Israel, established in 1948, to be built on racism and the ideology of ethnic or religious superiority.”
It is important to note that this document doesn’t say that the Israeli government response to the massacre of October 7 was so excessive that the word genocide comes into view – they go way further than this and say that Israel was a genocidal project from the very beginning.
Back in 2018, the Bishops gathered in Oxford to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. They fully accepted this definition “including all examples, without qualification or exemption.” Amongst the examples the IHRA uses as instances of antisemitism includes “claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavour”. The document Kairos II that I quoted from above is therefore by any reasonable reading a clear and blatant piece of antisemitism, voted on by the Bishops thus: 25 yes, 0 No, 5 Abstentions.
I have said that language matters, so let me explain one thing, for fairness’ sake. Synod did not formally approve the Kairos II document, or “receive” it; rather it voted to “hear” it. You may not think that matters, and I don’t particularly. As the Bishop of Blackburn rightly noted “such nice distinctions make no difference at all to how we are heard on the ground.” Even so, this little verbal manoeuvring will be the fig leaf that the Church will rely upon to distance themselves from what they have just done.
One of the things I first learnt about Israelis, after getting married to one, is that they appreciate plain speaking and are suspicious of the kind of slippery mannered obfuscation so often employed by the English to say one thing and mean another – the General Synod being a pass master at this kind of hand wringing bullshit. There were, inevitably, various different speeches condemning antisemitism, but it was just so much blah blah in the context of the vote they have just taken. Kairos II advises fellow Christians to “boycott dialogue with Zionist voices”, so that means there won’t even be a discussion about these things with people like me.
Last week we had a family reunion here at the Vicarage. Madeline showed us the yellow star she was forced to wear in Paris as a child with the word Juif in the centre. She brought out a tattered ring binder with a list of family members murdered by the Nazis: Chiam Ettinger, Herman Manheim, Sabina Litvak, Nechuma Sirkis … A few years ago, at the March of the Living I stood in the gas chamber at the Treblinka camp and read out a similar list of names from another branch on the family. I know I do not need to tell the readers of this newspaper what that feels like. But as a Christian, I have to wear this horror with a particular kind of shame. For the church was mostly indifferent, or at worst historically complicit, in these horrors. And the only possible response we should be making as Christians is to stand in solidarity with the most successful project of Jewish safety since the parting of the Red Sea.
I know the government of Israel gets things wrong, and yes, sometimes very badly wrong. I hold no candle for Bibi and his dreadful government. But what the Church of England has done here is going way beyond that kind of criticism.
My old friend Jonathan Sacks, who went to a Church of England school of course, used to say that the value of the Church of England was that it could hold the ring for minority religions in this country. It has now forfeited that right.
What is so depressing is that the Church thinks it has done something brave here. As delegates leave this York Synod to return home some will pass by Clifford’s Tower, where in the Middle Ages 150 Jews were cornered by the mob, facing forced baptism or death. Many chose to take their own lives. I hope the delegates from Synod will hang their heads in shame.
Rev'd Canon Dr Giles Fraser is the Vicar of St Anne's Church in Kew and a broadcaster
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