This week, the Archbishop of Canterbury is visiting Israel/Palestine and meeting with Palestinian Christians there, who have made a plea for churches in the West to support them and campaign for peace in the region. For reasons I will explain below, I think this visit, like the earlier one by Rachel Treweek, Graham Usher, and Guli Francis-Dehqani (bishops of Gloucester, Norwich, and Chelmsford) are disastrous for the Church of England, for Jews in Britain, and for our relationship with the Jewish community.
The Archbishop, Sarah Mullally, has been posting daily on Facebook about her meetings in Israel/Palestine. Like the three bishops before her, she went to the home of Layan Nasir, who was detained without trial in the Israeli Government, and appears to have become the representative of such people.
The presentation of this on social media and in articles is that here is someone who is experiencing unjust oppression; we must stand with the unjust; and therefore we must stand with Layan. What very few people ever do in these situations is asked why she was detained.
The reason is that she was in the leadership of a student organisation, Democratic Progressive Student Pole (DPSP), which (it is claimed) was welcoming new students to Birzeit University. This Arabic human rights website argues that the proscribing of DPSP is oppressive, against free expression, and the maintenance of an ‘apartheid’ regime:
The intention of maintaining the apartheid regime is a core element of the definition of the crime of apartheid under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Israel spearheads a protracted campaign of silencing, intimidation, smears, and de-legitimization in pursuit of this goal imposed through various policies including mass arbitrary detention, systematic torture, and other forms of ill-treatment against individuals or groups seeking to challenge its apartheid regime.
This is language designed to appeal to liberals in the West, in order to recruit their support, which it appears to have done very effectively. (There is no mention here, of course, of human rights in Arab countries.)
But what the website won’t tell you is that DPSP is the student arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) at Birzeit University.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP; Arabic: الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين, romanized: al-Jabha ash-Shaʿbiyya li-Taḥrīr Filasṭīn)[4] is a Palestinian Marxist–Leninist[5] organization founded in 1967 by George Habash. It has consistently been the second-largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the largest being Fatah.
A secular organization, the PFLP has generally taken a hard line on Palestinian national aspirations, opposing the more moderate stance of Fatah. It does not recognize Israel and promotes a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The military wing of the PFLP is called the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades.
The PFLP pioneered armed aircraft-hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[6] More recently, the group has participated in the ongoing Gaza war alongside Hamas and other allied Palestinian factions.[7][8][9][10] It has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States,[11] Japan,[12] Canada[13] and the European Union.[14]
In particular, the PFLP was involved in the atrocities of 7th October 2023.
The controversy about Layan Nasir was the lack of due process in relation to her detention. But we need to put it in context, that she was in leadership of the student wing of an organisation in an active terrorist war, involving torturing and slaughtering Israelis. A comparison would be someone who was leading a student wing of the IRA at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland.
In the photos posted on social media, Sarah Mullally is seen in their living room, and prominent on the wall is a painting of a man; when they are standing and praying, Sarah is standing right in front of him.
This man is Layan’s great uncle, the brother of her paternal grandfather, Kamal Nasser. Nasser was born in 1924, and became a celebrated political leader, writer, and poet. In 1967, he joined the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, who has invented the term ‘Palestinian’ to refer to those who wanted to destroy Israel and return to their land (prior to that, ‘Palestinian’ has been a regional term that described modern Israel, Jordan, and Syria). Nasser was also a ‘Palestinian Christian’—and this is the point where we need to recognise that, in this context, the term ‘Christian’ really functions as a tribal and ethnic identifier, more than the sense of someone who has made a personal commitment to Jesus as we might use it.
Nasser had joined the PLO just at the point where it made the Khartoum Resolution, in response to the defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. This was known for its three ‘Nos’: no peace agreement; no negotiation; no recognition of the State of Israel. This led inevitably into more warfare, culminating in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Part of the violence of the PLO, which (with Russian help) developed into the foremost global terror organisation, was the 1972 Munich massacre, when Palestinian terrorists infiltrated the Olympic village, killed two Israeli athletes, took nine more hostage, and eventually killed them during a failed rescue attempt. Nasser was one of the people who masterminded this operation.
For anyone outside the situation, it is hard to understand how ‘Palestinian Christians’ could be involved with anti-Israeli and antisemitic terror. But in fact the links between the two are longstanding and well developed. Nasser’s father was Reverend Butrus Nasir, who was a leader within Palestine’s Arab Protestant community from Bir Zeit. The founder of the PFLP, a radical Marxist terror organisation, was George Habash, a ‘Palestinian Christian’.
And the Greek Orthodox Church has had long links with the PLO going back to the 1960s. Many ordinary Palestinian Orthodox Christians and clergy of Palestinian descent are sympathetic to or actively involved in Palestinian nationalist politics — many Palestinian officials across ministries, the PLC, the PNA, and the PLO are Christians. There’s also a documented history of crossover between Greek leftists and the PLO more broadly: during the late 1960s and early 1970s, many Greeks belonging to the anti-dictatorship socialist movement trained in PLO camps in Lebanon, and when the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon, Greece—under PM Andreas Papandreou, who had close ties with Arafat—became its first destination.
That is why we can see a picture of Yasser Arafat on the wall of the office of Archbishop Benedictus, as he is meeting Sarah Mullally. Our archbishop has managed to be photographed in front of, not one, but two notorious terrorist leaders within the space of a couple of days—quite an achievement! And you can see the intertwining of terrorist resistance with Christian devotion in the painting of Nasser: in the background of the canvas, there is a traditional iconographic depiction of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ.
It is worth reflecting how both Israelis and British Jews will be made to feel by seeing these images.
(For transparency: I raised these questions on Sarah’s FB feed, and I also wrote directly to Lambeth Palace. I have not had a response from either.)
Additional note: my friend Martin Davie has reminded me of the article that Giles Fraser wrote in 2024 on the deeply antisemitic nature of parts of the Palestinian Christian church, which includes details I have already noted here:
Christians in the Holy Land have long been prominent in their opposition to Jewish immigration into Palestine. The Arabic language newspaper Falastin, founded in 1911 by Arab Christians, was one of the earliest and fiercest critics of Zionism. And Palestinian Christians have often been prominent in what they understood as the armed struggle against Zionism. George Habash, for example, was a Palestinian Christian from Lod — near Ben Gurion airport — where he sang in the church choir. He went on to found the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine through which he masterminded the hijackings of Western aircraft. Wadie Haddad, a Palestinian Christian from Safed, led combat operations for that same terrorist organisation. And, to name another, Chris Bandak was born in Bethlehem, named after Christ, and went on to lead the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. He was released from prison in 2011 in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier taken hostage in Gaza.
There are bad eggs in every Church. But there is no doubt that there is a radical anti-Israeli side to Palestinian Christianity, to such an extent that parts of the Church have developed something of a distaste for the Jewish underpinnings of Christianity, including even the very presence of the Hebrew scriptures within the Christian Bible. The Palestinian Anglican priest Father Naim Ateek has written: “Since the creation of the state [of Israel], some Jewish and Christian interpreters have read the Old Testament largely as a Zionist text to such an extent that it has become almost repugnant to Palestinian Christians.” In the second century, the Christian teacher Marcion argued that the Old Testament taught of a violent malevolent God, as opposed to the good God of the New Testament. He was rightly condemned by the early Church as a heretic. Elements of Marcionism continue in the Palestinian Church today.
Some years ago, while still looking for the right church to attend in the Holy Land, I went to an Anglican eucharist in a church in the southern part of Tel Aviv, not far from Jaffa. I was rather amazed that the young priest who took the service was so obviously Jewish and Israeli, which is highly unusual. He had that unmistakable Tel Aviv swagger. So over coffee after church I asked him the story of his conversion, and how he had come to be confirmed as an Anglican. “Where you ordained in the Diocese of Jerusalem?” I asked him. “Oh no”, he replied. “They wouldn’t ordain me; I’m originally Jewish Israeli.” Now, I have not been able to confirm his story. But I believed him. And if it is true, the Diocese of Jerusalem would be the only Diocese in the world that would discriminate in ordaining people on the basis of their ethnicity. I remain shocked by his story.
I have no great animus against the Palestinian Church. And were I to try to hold a congregation together in Gaza or the West Bank under present circumstances, I would inevitably want to be alongside my people in their suffering and feel great anger towards those who were harming them. But for so long as this this anger is misdirected towards those Jews who want to live free from attack in Israel, I will keep going to the extraordinary Levanda Street. I pray for my Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ, but I won’t be joining them.
We then need to ask: why did the archbishop decide to make such a one-sided visit to the region which such a complex and contested situation? Why was not more care taken?
It might be claimed ‘Well, it is obvious that she opposes terrorism, so that does not need to be stated’. But that is clearly not the case. Just this morning on my Facebook feed I see that a once-respected evangelical ethics scholar has posted a Guardian piece containing antisemitic blood-libel lies about ‘Israel targeting children’ in the Gaza conflict, and citing the ‘genocide scholars’—that is, those Arabists who were willing to pay €50 to join the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS—no qualifications required ‘We are inclusive and welcome activists…’)
Why didn’t Sarah Mullally take care to engage with all angles on this visit? If her agenda was dispassionate concern for those who have suffered, why didn’t she visit any of the families of the 1,195 slaughtered on October 7th, or of the 250 abducted? Or of the 1,010 killed and 8,341 Israelis wounded in the second Intifada? In December 2023, a survey showed that 83% of West Bank Palestinians supported the atrocities of October 7th. Did she meet any of these? It is implausible to think that this number does not include ‘Palestinian Christians.’
Additional note: one of the commentators below points out that Justin Welby visited in 2009—but there was one vital difference. He visited both sides:
Justin Welby held separate talks with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in which both spoke positively about the possibility of reviving peace talks in the coming months. Abbas had just returned from meeting Donald Trump in Washington, and the US president is due to visit Jerusalem soon.
When we visited Israel in 2018, on a tour organised by the Anglo-Israel Association, it was carefully planned to do precisely this—to help us understand the complexities and dynamics of the situation, rather then to help us take sides. So we met former PLO negotiators, PLA politicians, settlers, those running the Keren Shalom crossing, the British Ambassador, and many others.
What we encountered was ignorance and a lack of interest in the view of ‘the other’ on all sides. Thus, when we visited settlers in the West Bank, the only comment they could make was ‘Look—the hills are empty—there is plenty of room for us all’ without demonstrating any awareness of the implications of this idea. More seriously, when we met former PLO negotiators, I asked one of them ‘How important do you think the Holocaust was to those with whom you were negotiating?’ ‘Er, it was unfortunate’ came the reply—unsurprising, since the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1940s, Amin Al-Husayni, met with Hitler to offer Arab support to his ‘final solution’ of the eradication of all Jews.
But we also encountered generosity and peace-seeking. Those running the Karen Shalom crossing into Gaza were genuinely desperate to keep aid flowing in—but were hampered by the consistent used of lorries to smuggle in arms and explosives. The children’s hospital that we visited in Tel Aviv treated Gazans for free—despite the hideous experience of treating Wafa Al Bass, who returned to kill those who had treated her.
And the hideous irony for many of the victims of October 7th is that those who lived in the kibbutzim near the border with Gaza did so because they wanted to build bridges and work for peace. They welcomed Gazans to work with them—to provide employment and build understanding. Yet those very people they had welcomed passed their detailed knowledge on to allow the terrorists to find their secure rooms and murder them.
Without engaging with these other views, the archbishop is certain to come away with a partial and a partisan understanding of the situation. I gather that she did visit the Nova exhibition in London, exploring the horrors of October 7th, and met with some of the families—but strikingly this was not reported in her feed on Facebook. I wonder why?
This raises wider questions about why bishops in the Church of England have decided to make the Palestinian cause such a focus, out of all that is happening in the world. Why are they not visiting Nigeria, and meeting Christians there suffering—not because of dispute about land , but actually because of their Christian faith? Why are not other nationalists causes in the region gaining their attention?
Why do some causes command all-consuming attention and allegiance while others are largely ignored or downplayed? Why do those who profess concern for justice, human rights, and self-determination jump in with both feet in some cases, yet remain thunderously silent in others?
The Kurds are the real victims of the Middle East, not the Palestinians. Kurdish people, denied their own state, have experienced genocide. The West doesn’t care because their oppressors aren’t Israeli.
And what about the other examples of oppression in the world? The Uygars in China? The conflict in Myanmar? Any number of other oppressive regimes? What about the violence and oppression happening in the states neighbouring Israel? What about women’s rights in Egypt, where 98% are subject to female genital mutilation?
This is not ‘whataboutism’. It is asking about priorities, and why the bishops have made this situation a key one. This is indeed a reflection of antisemitism, as Baroness Deech make clear in her letter to the Church Times last week:
The basic definition is as follows: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
It is then amplified by examples, of which a very pertinent one is this : “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
Double standards are evident when multiple questions are raised about Israel and no other foreign country. They are evident when the unjustified words “apartheid” and “genocidal” are applied to Israel, when those words could well be used validly of, for example, China and the Uyghurs, India and the Dalits, Myanmar and the Rohingya, and Saudi Arabia and religious minorities.
We do not hear loudly from the Church about the dead children in Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Nigeria, and Iran, or the kidnapped Ukrainian children. We do not hear protests about the checkpoints in Belfast dividing two communities. Only when Jews are involved are there such loud condemnations. The Church’s preoccupation with the Jewish state, as if it were the worst — the Jew among nations — amounts to double standards, because the ethical difference between the attitude to Israel’s conduct, its casus belli, and the conduct of other states at war is clear. Genocide and apartheid are inflammatory words designed to stir up hatred and to re-contextualise the actual genocide of the Jewish population in the Second World War.
A response the following week suggested that the motivation here is our past involvement as a nation, and our continued connections with the region. But we have connections with these other places—and we have deep connections with this conflict which are not being challenged.
The state of Qatar has been a major supporter of Hamas, fuelling (literally) the rocket attacks on Israel for years. Best estimates suggest that from 2018 to 2023, Qatar transferred roughly $30 million per month into Gaza, totalling around $1.8 billion over six years. And Britain has major economic, trade, energy, investment and defence links with Qatar—so why have no bishops spoken up about this? We have been just one small step removed from directly funding terrorism.
And through our contributions to the UN, we have been funding UNWRA, who are perpetuating Palestinian victimhood by declaring that—alone in all the people displaced around the world in the aftermath of WW2—all descendants of anyone who was displaced in 1947–48 is designated a ‘refugee’. They do not keep records of who qualifies; anyone can claim to be, and there is good evidence that UNWRA are providing funding for people across the world, who have moved away from the region, and even those who have died whom they have not removed from their register. They fund education in Gaza which teaches children to want to kill Jews, and UNWRA employees were involved in October 7th.
Where are bishops speaking up about this?
This whole approach is disastrous for the Church of England, for Jews in Britain, and for peace in the region. I do not believe that this is a disaster because of a quasi-magical use of the biblical idea that ‘I will bless those who bless you’, transferring the promise of Abraham to the modern secular state of Israel, since the Bible itself makes the transfer in a quite different direction, as I explore here. But it is a disaster.
For the Church of England, once more we have our leaders taking sides in a complex and contested issue, on the basis of poor research and understanding, and apparently riding on yet another left-liberal social cause. This demonstrates again our bishops’ inability to engage thoughtfully and responsible with complex issues, and undermines confidence in their leadership. And it offers more confirmation of the left-liberal bias of the House of Bishops as a whole:
Shortly before he died in April of this year, my father Lord Robert Skidelsky commissioned a little research into this question. He asked his invaluable assistant, Attila Mestehazy, to run through all 693 speeches delivered by the reverend Lords between 1 January 2024 and 19 September 2025, looking out especially for words and arguments associated with Christianity. The results were dismaying, if not entirely unexpected. ‘Bible’, ‘gospel’ and ‘Christianity’ each appear in somewhat under one per cent of all bishops’ speeches. ‘Jesus’ appears in three per cent. ‘God’ shows up a bit more often, at six per cent, perhaps indicating an attempt at inter-faith solidarity. ‘Sin’ appears not at all…
A deeper dive into the 693 speeches confirms the impression of overwhelming secularity. On most issues, the bishops take a position indistinguishable from the left wing of the Labour party, albeit decked out occasionally in Christian rhetoric.
I think it is extraordinary that, on visiting Bethlehem, Sarah Mullally managed to reduce the incarnation to a social cause:
From the manger, Jesus proclaims, meekly but powerfully, the beginning of a new world where the poor, the sick, the excluded and the marginalised are brought into the very heart of God.
Not a mention of the fact that he came to ‘save his people from their sins’ (that is literally the meaning of his name! Matt 1.21) or to call us to ‘repent and believe’ (Mark 1.15).
For Jews in Britain, they are once more told that the established Christian church is not on their side. Someone commented to me that, every time the General Synod has debated this issue, we have ended up deeply offending the Jewish community here. We look set to repeat this.
And for the peace process, this is a disastrously once-sided and partisan approach. As Bijan Omrani notes in the Telegraph this week:
One wonders whether her pronouncement is made out of the profoundest naïveté. Does she not realise the consequence of repeating a narrative where the Palestinian people are nothing more than the helpless victims of Israeli occupation? Of omitting to condemn the repeated refusals of the Palestinians to accept serious offers of peace over the generations, not to mention declining to excoriate the brutality of Hamas, the demand of their founding charter to eradicate Jews, their hiding behind civilians, and the complicity of ordinary Palestinians in the terror wrought by Hamas?
Mullally’s embrace of this Palestinian victimhood narrative will simply make it more difficult to combat the terrorism and totalitarianism of Hamas, which is the more fundamental cause of the misery of the people and the prolonging of the conflict – not to mention the oppressive treatment of Christians in their territory. This failure of courage, to confront the difficult truth of the situation, is hardly going to advance the cause of justice.
Sarah Mullally, at the time of her enthronement, said that she wanted to be a quiet voice for unity, and that she stood against antisemitism. In undertaking this ill-conceived and ill-advised trip, she is doing neither.
Buy me a Coffee
Another thing these largely secular Bishops choose to ignore is the global – and growing – persecution of Christians. Because to do so would mean having to identify their persecutors who are afforded a privileged status within the liberal / Marxist hierarchy of ‘oppressed’ versus ‘oppressors’.
These church leaders are not leading the nation as their calling requires: they are not calling the nation to repentance (except for historical causes), speaking about the necessity of faith in Jesus, standing up to the multifaith deceit, bothering to turn up to vote in the abortion and assisted suicide debates, and supporting our Jewish cousins. They are the blind leading the blind and I don’t know any Christians (including anglicans) who listen to what they say anymore.
Mullally has led opposition to assisted suicide in the House of Lords debates on that bill actually
Yes—and all of her arguments were secular, none Christian.
Wrong ‘“I believe in a God who’s very being is life, and in that gift we can discover meaning, dignity and innate worth, even if we are dying.
“To speak of God is to speak of one who is never indifferent to human fragility, but who holds it and tends it.
“That is why I believe that there is always hope: hope that what looks like an ending is not the last word.
“Hope that with proper care, support and research, dignity and compassion is still possible. It is this firm belief that compels me to resist this bill.”
https://www.churchofengland.org/media/press-releases/assisted-suicide-law-would-make-country-says-some-lives-are-not-worth-living-bishop-london
Apology Ian?
Tim, no need to apologise.
‘The Catholic bishops were forthright in stating what was wrong with Leadbeater’s bill: ‘The Catholic Church teaches that it is morally wrong to intentionally take the life of another person, including at their request.’ The Coptic Orthodox bishops were similarly frank: ‘The Church does not assess the value or worth of human life as contingent upon abilities, achievements or physical health but on the inherent dignity bestowed upon all as the depiction of God.’ The Anglican bishops’ inability to say anything so definite is a mark of their captivity to a basically heathen state.’
What she said fell well short of a Christian rebuttal—though I was pleased she at least spoke up.
And what is the disctinctly christian element of that? the idea of ‘God’ is hardly ours alone, I can’t see anything here that any monotheist couldn’t affirm.
I think what Ian may have meant is that the God of whom she speaks slots nicely, in terms of selected description, qualities, attributes, into the secular grid.
indeed.
Yes but she spoke differently on abortion.
Always curious to know how a self-declared jewish European population of 15 million both pre and post war can be twisted into providing evidence for a “holocaust.”
Also how a state which specifically targets Palestinian children for murder via its IDF goons can even be considered as worthy of preservation, let alone understanding.
A recent UN report, as mentioned yesterday by RT, specifically affirms that this is what they do, and in addition, they set dogs onto detainees which are trained to rape them.
Tim, you are welcome to offered discussion and opinion here—even differing and challenging opinion.
You are not welcome to repeat antisemitic and anti-Israel lies, even when sent from the UN.
Please read the actual evidence: https://unwatch.org/un-watch-legal-rebuttal-disproving-the-pillay-commissions-charge-that-israel-deliberately-targets-palestinian-children/
Holocaust denial? Really?
To be fair to Mullally she and Welby do and did engage with the Chief Rabbi and British Jews especially and condemned the Hamas attacks. However, her role as leader of the Anglican Communion is to support Palestinian Anglicans and those who have faced Israeli settlements encroaching on their land or vandalism of a statue of Christ by an Israeli soldier. There were also plenty of African Anglicans present at Mullally’s enthronement and Welby also condemned attacks on Nigerian Christians from the likes of Boko Haram. However given the Church of Nigeria has rejected Mullally as Archbishop it is not that surprising she isn’t going to engage too much with them
‘her role as leader of the Anglican Communion is to support Palestinian Anglicans’…
…including those actively involved in antisemitic terrorism? And ask no questions?
None of those she met were terrorists
Layan Niser was a leading in the student wing of PFLP, which took part in 7th October massacre.
So a student not a terrorist, whereas the likes of Martin McGuinness were not only in Sinn Fein’s political wing of the IRA but actually in the IRA council organising terrorist attacks but the late Queen still met him once he had executive power in NI
Recruiting for the student wing of a terrorist organisation.
Martin McGuinness had renounced violence then. This family lauds the memory of the great uncle who organised the murder of Jews.
Curious. But then again, Benjamin Netenyahu has a prominent statuette of Ze’ev Jabotinsky on his office bookshelf for all to see.
(https://www.jns.org/feature/those-figurines-behind-netanyahu-what-do-they-mean)
Jabotinsky was the founder of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi militia which was responsible for the murder of 200 odd British soldiers in Mandatory Palestine and policemen including Sergeant Clifford Martin and Sergeant Mervyn Paice who were kidnapped, tortured and eventually publicy hanged. They also, of course, murdered many more Arabs during their terrorist campaigns which included pioneering indiscriminate ‘Market Place Bombings’ in Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem in 1938.
But the parallels are even closer – Netenyahu’s father Benzion Netanyahu, served as personal secretary to Ze’ev Jabotinsky and his own uncle was active Irgun terrorist. Netenyahu’s own Likud party was formed by Menachem Begin, the former supreme commander of the Irgun who conceived and endorsed a plan to send five Irgun terrorist cells directly into the United Kingdom to assasinate Ernest Bevin in 1946. They also, of course, bombed the King David Hotel. An attack Netenyahu has loudly praised in the Knesset.
Now Archbishop Justin met Netenyahu in that very office in 2017, bneath that statuette of the Irgun founder, alongside the man who now leads the successor party to the Irgun.
(https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/09/justin-welby-moment-of-opportunity-near-in-middle-east-conflict)
But I don’t think we would say that there is any suggestion that the meeting was a vicarious endorsement of Jabotinsky, terrorism or even the modern Geneva-Convention-bound IDF.
I fear that if you scratch below the surface in that unfortunate corner of the world you will find that the distinction between legitimate politics and terrorist violence is rather mroe porous than we would like to think.
To adapt a phrase – Terorrism never prospers, Why, if it prosper, none dare call it terrorism.
Thanks William—but here is the difference, from that article:
He didn’t make the mistake of meeting one side only. That is the disaster.
There might well have been terrorists on both sides—but Sarah’s visit has been portrayed as ‘only meeting people of peace.’ I am sorry, but that is a con and a lie.
(Oh, and btw, Israel is a democracy. The PLA is not.)
She still isn’t a terrorist herself
jews define a terrorist as anybody who opposes their genocidal actions – others define them as jews who deliberately set out to murder Palestinian children and rape their detainees.
Tim, you are welcome to offered discussion and opinion here—even differing and challenging opinion.
You are not welcome to repeat antisemitic slander. Hamas says its goal is to kill all Jews, and it started its work on October 7th.
Have you read the Nova report?
And where does Israel state its policy is to kill all Palestinians? How are there 2.1m living with full democratic rights in the state of Israel?
Ian Paul – well, having read ‘The Iron Wall’ by Avi Shlaim (who describes himself as an Arab Jew), I’m not at all sure that you can dismiss Tim’s post as ‘antisemitic slander’ (although I’d agree that there is much about it which is outrageous and unjustified). I got the impression from the book by Avi Shlaim that there are basically two factions among the Jewish community in Israel, one of which would like to find a settlement with the Palestinians (on that side, very broadly speaking, look at what used to be the Israel Labour party), but there is another faction that may not be far off the picture that Tim is presenting (their version of Nigel Farage); the hard right religious Jews who believe in their divine right to the land – as evidenced by the settlements encroaching further and further into the West Bank and the huge wall that has been put up, making it impossible to see where a viable Palestinian state could actually exist.
The ‘new historians’ (Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris) did have hard evidence of ‘dirty tricks’.
Er, can you offer me some evidence of Israel committing genocide—that is, the deliberate intention to and execution of a plan to kill all members of an ethnic group?
tried posting a reply but it got gobbled. It might be in the spam filter.
There is no ‘spam filter’ on comments.
Are you trying to comment on your phone? Don’t.
OK … second attempt … (no – I’m not using the phone).
No – not genocide – but don’t you think that is rather a low bar? Rather, serious attempts to displace the Palestinian population. It seems (if Ilan Pappe is to be believed) that there was a system (going back even to the 1930’s) of surrounding a village on three sides, leaving one side as escape route and then attacking – forcing them to escape in a certain direction. Also – although not genocide, a scant regard for human life (e.g. declaring a curfew and not telling anybody – then killing the Palestinian peasant farmers who came in late from the fields).
An interesting ‘modern historian’ is Benny Morris:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris
who does not deny the dirty tricks, but since 2000 (time of the second intifada) seems to have come to the conclusion that they were a necessary evil; he is a Zionist who has come to believe that a two-state solution or a bi-national state can possibly work and is critical of Ben Gurion for not having been more pro-active in expelling the Palestinian population much earlier.
Thank you for posting this. I was astonished to see her visit reported with uncritical favour on BBC TV national news and if recalled correctly the purpose of Jesus being opposed to the oppressed.
I can’t really understand how someone in such a position could be so unaware of the ‘optics’.
The article mentions a ‘one-sided’ stance, visit. It is that, and more; ignorance, political and theological maybe, as demonstrated by the article.
But, it is but CS Lewis’s, ‘Inner Ring’ at work, being played out.
Can you say more about the ‘inner ring’?
Better still, here is PDF of his lecture:
https://ia801604.us.archive.org/10/items/1944-the-inner-ring/%281944%29%20The%20Inner%20Ring.pdf
It is applicable, not only to those in high office, but for us all to weigh carefully.
AI Overview C.S. Lewis’s “Inner Ring” refers to the universal, informal hierarchies and cliques that exist in virtually all organisations. In his 1944 essay, Lewis warned that the natural, often subconscious desire to be part of the “in-crowd” can drive people to compromise their morals and betray their true friends.Key Concepts from the Essay The Illusion of Importance: The desire to be on the inside makes us believe that being part of the “inner ring” brings power and prestige. However, Lewis argued that the “Inner Ring” is rarely where the actual, important work gets done.Exclusion as the Goal: Unlike true friendships or professional teams, the “Inner Ring” often relies on an “insider/outsider” dynamic. The value of being inside is fundamentally tied to the fact that others are kept out.The Path to Becoming a Scoundrel: Lewis warned that you do not become corrupt by directly plotting evil. Instead, you become a “scoundrel” through the gradual, trivial compromises you make simply to stay in the good graces of the ring.Rings vs. Circles: Lewis made an important distinction between the Inner Ring (a status structure built on exclusion) and legitimate groups or friendships formed around a shared craft, love, or profession (which are inherently inclusive).The Danger Lewis argued that the longing to be “in” is one of the most powerful and permanent motivators of human action. It is distinct from simple snobbery, as it applies to everyone from schoolchildren to politicians. The danger is that the desire for acceptance becomes more important than integrity.The Antidote According to Lewis, the only defense against the lure of the “Inner Ring” is to focus on doing your actual job, pursuing genuine friendships, and letting the exclusive “rings” form around you naturally if they happen to align with your principles.You can read the full text of the essay in Lewis’s collection of speeches, The Weight of Glory
This Hideous Strength is a clear example of the outworking of the inner ring.
On the other hand
An interesting polemic which for me does not end with any Christianly exhortations or responses.
Rooted primarily in biblical wisdom literature (e.g., Proverbs 24:17-18), it teaches that taking malicious pleasure in someone’s downfall is a sin of pride that displeases God.
: Gloating demonstrates an arrogant attitude. The motif reminds individuals that human beings are fundamentally equal, and that one should extend empathy and grace rather than mockery.
The wisdom text warns that celebrating an enemy’s calamity can cause God to look upon your gloating with displeasure. It implies that vengeance and judgement belong to a higher power, not to individuals.
The Book of Proverbs: Warns that a person who is “glad at calamity will not go unpunished” (Proverbs 17:5). The New Testament further develops this concept in Romans 12, where followers are instructed to bless their persecutors, avoid repaying evil with evil, and leave room for God’s wrath.
Similarly, Jesus famously instructs followers to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”
When you obey Jesus and respond to your enemies with love, prayer, forgiveness, and blessing, you take yourself out of satan’s line of fire and make room for God to handle justice as only He can. You don’t have to worry about your enemies. God says He will handle them on your behalf. [Jehovah Nissi]
Rooted primarily in biblical wisdom literature (e.g., Proverbs 24:17-18), it teaches that taking malicious pleasure in someone’s downfall is a sin of pride that displeases God.
: Gloating demonstrates an arrogant attitude. The motif reminds individuals that human beings are fundamentally equal, and that one should extend empathy and grace rather than mockery.
The wisdom text warns that celebrating an enemy’s calamity can cause God to look upon your gloating with displeasure. It implies that vengeance and judgement belong to a higher power, not to individuals.
Jesus through the cross is Jehovah Jireh, Nissi and Shalom made manifest for our good and blessing to be partakers of the divine nature, Blessed be His Name.
Thank you Ian once again. Your intelligent and balanced approach to these questions , restores some hope in me regarding the CofE. But, only SOME hope…..
Sinn Fein MLAs including the First Minister continue to laud the memories of their fallen ‘comrades’ so I’m not sure there’s much difference. And of course they are in government.
George Gilder wrote an interesting secular book called “The Israel Test” in 2009. You can just about work out what it is about from its title. SDarah Mullally fails it, and it is no coincidence that she is wrong about most other things.
Nasser was also a ‘Palestinian Christian’—and this is the point where we need to recognise that, in this context, the term ‘Christian’ really functions as a tribal and ethnic identifier, more than the sense of someone who has made a personal commitment to Jesus as we might use it.
Who is ‘we’ here? This description matches also the Church of England after the Elizabethan settlement (and the Catholic church in pre-Reformation Europe, and in Spain etc afterwards). Only in the very recent era of aggressive secularism, when you have something to lose by declaring yourself a believer in Jesus Christ (as Tim Farron did), are these churches differentiating themselves from ‘the world’, i.e. from the prevailing culture at a given time and place. No doubt they contained a minority of genuine believers but they made it harder, not easier to be a Christian (by noting for instance whose lips stopped moving when prayers were addressed to Mary before 1517). And they persecuted dissenters even though those dissenters were conspicuous by their holier lives – no drunkenness, no whoring, no cheating. But Luther’s theological emphasis on justification by faith alone, while ignoring the works of faith, caused these telling differences to be set aside. Institutional protestant churches sought to maintain their ecclesiastical monopoly against Lollards, Waldenses, Anabaptists etc just as viciously as Catholicism had done. It is very obvious who the real church was by all scriptural criteria. Mainstream church historians, for all their scholarship, have it completely wrong.
Arab tribal culture is something different.
I do feel you have deflected slightly.
Anyone alighting on planet Earth for the first time might quickly be struck by human propensity for tribal loyalty. And the degree to which objectivity and logic could be readily sidelined in terms of the moral judgements and behaviours involved would be hard not to notice.
It’s long been my observation that the term ‘anti-Semitic’ amounts to ‘shut your mouth’; and few could say with a straight face that there’s anything but fear and extreme chilling applied when comment or discussion about today’s State of Israel happens in public. This tells us something about the kind of tribalism and power dynamics which have not changed since Jesus walked in Palestine: some of what he said (and what I suspect he might say today) would undoubtedly be labelled ‘anti-Semitic’!
Yet many in the Christian church still weigh in on behalf of the State of Israel no matter what. Far from teaching and living out new covenant reality and the attaching values which were radical indeed when Jesus taught them, we Christians still fall in behind a serious proportion of the tribal narratives and attitudes promoted where we live even when they ignore simple truth, let alone critical Christian judgement. The flawed teaching of ‘Christian Zionism’ has plaid a prominent part in the exceptionalism applied to the State of Israel when it comes to judging right and wrong without fear or favour by much of the Western world – and never more so than in the USA and the UK. No wonder there’s massive ill feeling and attempts at retribution.
Perhaps Sarah Mullally’s intentions with her visit to Israel / Palestine were noble; perhaps it was the simple justice which demands that truth as she understood it be heard which motivated her. She would have been naïve indeed not realise that this was going to be an eggshell situation. I’ve not been a fan, but at least I salute her courage!
My view is that we Christians need to be far less trusting and attached to our local news narratives and historical assumptions about the moral superiority of our own nation and the ‘great and good’ who, largely unseen, orchestrate our own national affairs and wield power over what ordinary people are allowed to know and think. If we truly follow Jesus, we must expect to be misfits, fools, and trouble makers for his sake. We will regularly need to be the dissenting voices on the back row. That’s pretty uncomfortable but can be strangely liberating too. When it comes to the eternal realm our ‘tribe’ is not the UK; neither is it the Western world: it’s God’s people – citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. Talk about a radical perspective!
Of course we temporarily belong to and should seek the best interests of our country and the welfare of its people; and that means our mission is the saving of souls on the one hand and the promoting of truth, love, justice and peace here and now on the other. Over the last few years, and to my certain knowledge, the two great issues involving Ukraine and Israel have been crying out for the kind of just and intelligent intervention we would once have taken for granted on behalf of the Western world. Yet it has not been forthcoming. Christian input in both cases has been mostly tribal and offered neither prophetic warning nor serious calls for diplomacy.
Only a few years ago firing Western missiles at Moscow would have been an unthinkably reckless notion; yet here we are, unfazed, led by war mongering fools, heading for disaster. Drone technology and AI guidance systems are spinning out of control, missile delivery is ever more powerful and precise. But wise heads are nowhere to be found. This is exactly where God’s prophets would once have been crying out a warning. It’s the kind of Godless folly where power and money overrule common sense and moral discernment. I’m sure Godly Archbishops would have cause and justification for assuming a prophetic role. Whoever they may be, they need our prayers. I’m not sure the stakes could be much higher.
the term ‘anti-Semitic’ amounts to ‘shut your mouth’; and few could say with a straight face that there’s anything but fear and extreme chilling applied when comment or discussion about today’s State of Israel happens in public.
Yes indeed. Try defending its actions close to any of the Muslim hate marches that have taken place regularly in our big cities in the last two years, and see what reaction you get. Critics of Israel remind me of a poster seen at a zoo: “This animal is dangerous; if attacked, it defends itself.”
Antisemitism isn’t the same as antizionism, I accept, but there is a ready test to distinguish the two: does an antizionist criticise Israel’s Arab and Persian foes for their wrongs as zealously as he or she criticises Israel?
I disagree that Christian Zionism is a flawed viewpoint, but I’m happy to refer anybody interested to this 11-month-old Psephizo thread for that discussion:
https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/does-the-state-of-israel-have-a-divine-right-to-the-land/
I would certainly agree that some Christian Zionists talk more about Zionism than about the living Lord Jesus Christ, and I regret that. But you get cranks of all opinions if you are prepared to look.
Thanks for your thoughts, Anthony. When it comes to ‘Christian Zionism’ my concern would not be to beat Christian Zionists over the head but to warn of its implications. I believe it does a disservice both to Jews and the State of Israel on one hand and also to Christian Zionists on the other. God’s New Covenant came into effect on resurrection day. Its application was no longer to the people of a chosen nation but to every individual, from all the nations, who individually would turn to Christ and receive him as his or her personal Saviour.
Christian Zionism appears to imply there’s still some kind of exceptionalism going on in regards to Jews and the State of Israel. That is a deception which is dangerous for the Jewish people in terms of their need to accept and receive Christ, and dangerous for Christian Zionists who feel good about themselves for promoting an interpretation of scripture while not realising its falsity. Is there special joy in heaven when a Jew turns to Christ? It’s not for me to say; and it’s not for us gentiles to be resentful if that were so. As St Paul makes clear, our own salvation, offered through the blood of Jesus, is so undeserved that it beggars belief that any saved soul should feel resentment concerning another saved soul. We are clay in the potter’s hands! The prodigal son parable also has something to teach us here – in terms of all 3 characters!
Quite right and well said.
It is always worth bearing in mindthat the modern secular, multi-ethnic, unitary parliamentary republic known as ‘Israel’ was originally going to be named ‘Judaea’. Ben Gurion and the Jewish National Council only picked Israel in haste and after a close split vote.
The Israel of the Bible and the Israel of Whitaker’s Almanack are -and this shouldbe obvious – clean different things.
I sometimes wonder quite how much of the more earnest and forthright aspects of Christian Zionism, particularly in its American iteration, arise from a simple, fateful, elision of these two historic entities.
It is above all an exegetical issue. I believe you do not make sufficient distinction in your discussion of covenants. The Letter to the Hebrews is clear that the Mosaic covenant is obsolete. No more sacrifices, because the supreme sacrifice had been made; and Mosaic law stands or falls as one. But the Abrahamic covenant is nowhere abrogated in the New Testament, and Paul actually affirms it in Romans 11. It is widened spiritually to include gentile believers in Jesus, but its original meaning is not terminated – or else God would have been playing sophistry with Abraham. So the land belongs to the Jews except when they are being disciplined by exile. We need to see the 1800-year exile that ended in the Zionist era as an exception, and Jewish occupation as the rule. That was generally understood in regard to the Babylonian exile, but only Zionist Christians understand it in regard to the 1800-year galut, which was clearly for not recognising the time they were visited (Luke 19:44).
Otherwise, you have to regard the utterly unprecedented survival of the Jews without any political hegemony for 1800 years, and their return to the land, as a grotesque coincidence. Really?
But don’t you think that peoples with strong identity markers and strong shared histories are all the more determined (far more than average) to stick together?
The celebration of Passover etc would scarcely have ended, because it was a matter of such very high communal importance.
As for the return to the land, if measures are taken to return an indigenous people to a land, then they will (all too gladly, and in predictably high numbers) return to that land.
prior to [Arafat], ‘Palestinian’ has been a regional term that described modern Israel, Jordan, and Syria
Are you sure of that? Syria was long known as Syria for the word comes from ‘Assyria’ which is of course ancient. The Wikipedia article on “Roman Palestine” is useful.
The Roman term was ‘Syria Palestina’ and did reach up into the southern part of what we now call Lebanon and Syria. But maps vary.
Next week I am going to the Nova exhibition in London. If I engage anybody in conversation, what might I constructively say? Shouting ‘Jesus is Lord’ to a bunch of New Age Jews isn’t going to get anywhere even though it is true. Asking them what did they expect by holding a festival featuring a 40ft statue of buddha in the Holy Land jus a few miles from Hamas’ stronghold won’t help either. Romans 11 tells Christians to get under the skin of Jews by making them jealous. How might I do that in a brief conversation in this context? I welcome all constructive replies.
I went to the Nova exhibition. Thought long and hard about it beforehand, but not sorry that I did. It does maybe over-memorialise events, but ok, not everyone can get to Tel Aviv to see the situation in the flesh. My experiences in Israel-Palestine in the past 3 years have been challenging.
I spent most time listening to the speaker who’d been at the festival. What i found most powerful was the trauma this guy had faced.. a) from events on 7.10 and some of the actions he’d taken to help others and b) the subsequent 8 months fighting in Gaza. I’ve seen expressions like this on faces elsewhere in Israel.
It underlined to me that the fightback by Israel hasn’t helped. The military option as the only option. It is part of the system. It divides, it strengthens division, it fails to accept that maybe just possibly another way is possible, please God. Israelis want peace, they’ll all say (extremists excepted obvs), and Palestinians want it too. They want it far far more than Israelis will let you believe.
The speaker at the Nova event didn’t take questions. I felt so sad for him though. And I feel so sad too for my friends on the land, both sides, and therefore I’m committing to do all I can to get this situation to change, for justice and freedom and equal rights, towards a path of reconciliation and maybe, just maybe, a peace.
It’s easy to take a polarised position. There is no Nakba exhibition for instance. But i believe my Lord can’t take pleasure in what is happening on the land and so we need to go with projects and opportunities to see beyond the hard lines. No solution will be perfect with such opposites but you gotta try.
Those Palestinian Arabs who genuinely want peace aren’t able to leverage their view into any position of political influence. That is a tragedy but it is also realpolitik.
I don’t think it’s easy to solve but it’s not complicated. Personally I’d stop arming Israel just to shock the status quo there into some sort of change, but yes, realpolitik. Hence you and I have to do what we can.
I’m sure the vast vast majority of Palestinians want genuine peace.
Israel is a fundamentally Western culture set in the heartlands of the West’s deadliest and most enduring foe. We would do well to support it.
As that foe says: First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.
Thank you for constructively wondering what you might say to any Jews you might encounter conversationally at the Nova exhibition. My personal feeling, as an Anglican of Jewish descent, is that your best bet, if you want to be a constructive and encouraging presence at the exhibition, is to say nothing about Jesus unless directly and specifically asked. I realise this is a bit counterintuitive and I hope it doesn’t sound harsh or ungracious! I write respectfully!
The thing is, the Jewish community has been hearing Christians talk about Jesus for two thousand years, often with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other. The memories of blood libels and forced conversions in the name of Christ are still vivid after all these years / centuries. I know those events feel long ago and far away in the church but tragically those memories are being revived in the synagogue at the moment by the political and religious climate in this country and they are very sensitive.
What Jews in Britain need at the moment is not more words about Jesus from well-meaning Christians. What they need are Christians being present, being loyal and being kind. By all means wear a (discreet) cross if you want Jews at the exhibition to know that you are Christian. You may be surprised by being approached for conversation about Jesus! Amazing, given the sensitivities of the past and present, I gather that Jews for Jesus are currently reporting an all-time high in interest in Jesus among Jews. In that case, of course, share your faith! But please don’t push it. Just be there.
I do applaud you for going to the Nova exhibition. I’ve read about it – and obviously read about the October 7th attack at length – and I can’t bring myself to go because it’s all too much. But greater awareness of the reality of the attack is vital. If Jews at the exhibition know you are Christian then your respectful presence alone will speak of solidarity with them in suffering. And that, I believe, will speak powerfully about your faith and your Lord.
Obviously this is just my perspective. Others may differ and have wisdom to share about words to say. I hope they do! Personally I guess I’d just also suggest praying ahead of time for those who will be at the exhibition at the same time as you, praying for a meaningful encounter / conversation and praying for words to say which will plant and water seeds of hope, faith and love at this difficult moment in time?
Thank you Judith for these wise and helpful words.
I’ll be praying that, for sure; thank you. I don’t look Jewish and I won’t be wearing anything that indicates my faith. I won’t even be wearing the yellow twist.
I have secular Jewish friends in London, and I know people in Jews for Jesus, so I know how to be sensitive. Pray for me briefly, please.
This sounds like very good sense.
‘As a Christian, I believe every life is sacred. I stand with you in solidarity with your grief and loss and horror.’
Thank you, Ian.
Thank you. As an Anglican of Jewish descent, with friends and family in London and in Israel, I appreciate you acknowledging this issue. Seeing a picture of the Archbishop of Canterbury beside a portrait of Yasser Arafat is disturbing. Watching the waters of antisemitism rise in this country while the Church of England says next to nothing against it – and, indeed, indulges in antisemitism in its own right – is actually slightly traumatic.
I’m probably a little bit unusual in bridging the C of E world AND the Jewish world. From this perspective, however, I can witness to a strong sense of abandonment and threat as the C of E ignores the complexities of the situation, belittles the lived experienced of Jews in Britain and goes out of its way to applaud and promote those who are threatening the existence of the Jewish community, not just in the Middle East, but in this country including those who live, work and even sometimes worship within its dioceses, parishes and churches.
Alongside that, however, there’s a strong sense of fatalism because apparently the wider church hasn’t REALLY changed since the days of blood libels and forced conversions. Again, in the name of Christ, Jews are demonised and left to look to their own defence. I wonder if any of the bishops and archbishops have paused and wondered what Jesus thinks of the Jewish people – who birthed the promise of His coming and the wonder of His incarnation – again being made to fear those who claim to love Him? I find it baffling that the C of E isn’t thinking this through.
Thank you Judith for expressing this so well. You are in an unusual situation, and your voice needs to be heard…
Judith, if you are committed to Anglicanism then have it out with your bishop. Write to him, courteously, asking the hard questions, and persist for an answer.
Alternatively, find a free church with a better attitude. Nearly as many people in England worship in free churches as in the CoE today.
Judith, my longest term friend, from when we were school mates in the same village, is Jewish. I remember meeting his grandmother who had managed to escape from Germany and was clearly scarred for life by the experience. However my mate never mentioned politics of any sort. He was a very bright lad. His first post degree employment was in Saudi Arabia! I’ve never got any impression that he feels under any kind of threat here in the UK. But I would say he was a secular Jew and not given to engaging in tribal identity and debates of any kind. Perhaps that’s common sense if you’re part of a minority group within whatever nation you live?
I don’t claim any other personal knowledge of the Jewish experience here in the UK, but here’s an AI sourced snippet which might be worth pondering:
“Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, was the only Jewish member of David Lloyd George’s cabinet and led the opposition to the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. He fiercely argued against the pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration in 1917, going as far as submitting an official cabinet memorandum titled “The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government”. In it, he asserted that Zionism was a “mischievous political creed” that would brand Jews in Britain and elsewhere as foreigners, warning that it would incite antisemitism globally.”
It was all very well for wealthy comfortable Jews in established democracies to grumble that Zionism would make foreigners of them. Very different was the Jewish experience in eastern Europe in the pogroms of 1881-4 and 1903-6. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, took the view that although Jews were tolerated in many places they were welcomed almost nowhere, and even toleration might change on the whim of a ruler – such as Adolf Hitler. 20 years after Herzl died, Hitler proved him right. The shift from institutional Christianity to secularism was not going to end Jew-hatred.
How far back in history, Biblical history do we go? How do we contend for our Triune God in the face of strident, hostile atheism of Dawkins etc al of 20 years ago which posed questions of genocide in the Old Testament scriptures.
At it’s core, aren’t the present conflicts over religious conflicts, even if religion is marshalled to serve secular purposes: land has a central role, even while it may be camouflage for religious hatred.
Well, here is a article that considers and refute the underpinning atheist argument, which can persist in weighing the conflicts. Under whose Name are they being prosecuted is a pertinent question? Ian’s article indicates how the Name of Christ has been misappropriated to serve malign and mendacious purposes of deadly conflict down the generations
It is written by Dr Andrew Wilson, with Biblical exegesis, and posted on the Keller Center for Christian Apologetics: Did God Command Genocide in Deuteronomy 7?
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/did-god-command-genocide/
There is also a counterpoint to consider: Islam and its God and spread.
Dawkins is a coward and a hypocrite. He ducks debate with people who pose a genuine intellectual threat such as William Lane Craig, and he doesn’t admit as he perceives that secularism isn’t up to holding off Islam but cultural Christianity was, that he has changed his mind about the vluje of the latter. He was a controversialist in genetics before he started loudmouthing about things he knew little about.
As for Deuteronomy 7, God commanded that the Israelites drive out the Canaanites etc from within the boundaries of the Promised Land, and destroy their idols. He did not command that they pursue and kill those trying to flee, or surround rural districts in order to do so. Whether that is genocide is a matter of definition. Dawkins et al might look at Leviticus 18 to see what the Canaanites had been up to that brought this judgement upon them.
If you want full-on genocide in the Old Testament, you can find it commanded divinely in 1 Samuel 15 against the Amalekites – and the reason.
“Sarah Mullally managed to reduce the incarnation to a social cause:”
And hence the value of your repeated annual Christmas posting on themeaningifgthe manger story. I’m considered a bit of a pedant in some parts on this but too many, otherwise biblically literate people, resort to this reduced gospel at Christmas .
Promises in the Old Testament…. I’m afraid that it’s also common to high jack these or unquestioningly apply them to the state of Israel.
Yes, I agree.
In a trip to Toronto a couple of years back, I was a guest of the Jewish community. One old lady, who had numbers tattooed on her arm, leaned over to me and said quietly in my ear, “Christopher, since 1947 we have never started a war, but since 1947 we make sure we finish it” I shall just leave that there. Chris x
I was unaware that Canada had ever started a war?
If the old lady was referring to the State of Israel you could perhaps have humbly reminded her of our shameful joint-venture at Suez in 1956 when Britain, France and Israel conspired to invade Egypt under false pretences.
Nassser nationalised the Suez canal. We tried to reopen it. Eisenhower let us down.
We wanted to take it back, not mereley ‘reopen it’, friend.
The Protocol of Sèvres was made available to historians in 1980. It clearly shows that a clandestine agreement was agreed with France and Israel to invade Egypt and expropriate the canal.
The plan, which very nearly succeeded, was for Israel to invade Egypt thereby creating a surious and dishonest pretext for Britain and France to intervene as “peacemakers”.
Whether that would have been a good or a bad thing is beside the point here.
The ‘old lady’ in the anecdote seems to assert that Israel has not ‘started’ a war since 1947. We must be honest, if only for our own part, and say that is not so. We jointly invaded Egypt in 1956.
That is without ven mentioning the First Lebanon war which is perhaps defensible under a very elastic understanding of the term ‘pre-emptive’.
The Israelis had firm casus belli as the canal had been closed to their ships and Nasser was buying arms from Moscow with the aim of annihilating Israel and thereby becoming leader of the Arabic world.
As for the French, Nasser’s sudden nationalization of the Suez Canal Company threatened their economic and strategic interests in the region; France viewed Nasser’s actions as a direct threat to European energy routes.
Eden got obsessed but I’d have supported London’s actions had I been adult at the time. As Eisenhower should have done (and reportedly admitted years later). I couldn’t care less about the sophistry involved.
“Best estimates suggest that frm 2018 to 2023, Qatar transferred roughly $30 million per month into Gaza, totalling around $1.8 billion over six years. ”
One needs to balance this with something which seems never to be introduced into the discussion: the military aid which the IDF receives from the USA.
From this: https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-aid-israel-four-charts
“Since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas on October 7, 2023, the United States has enacted legislation providing at least $16.3 billion in direct military aid to Israel. The aid was authorized in three pieces of legislation: a supplemental appropriations act in April 2024 which provided $8.7 billion, and appropriations acts in 2024 and 2025 which provided $3.8 billion per year in line with the MOU. Of the total, $6.7 billion is for missile defense.”
How much of that has been spent on the missiles which have destroyed the homes of ordinary people, and killed a number of their occupants?
Hamas has used the money to turn the whole of Gaza into a terror tunnel network *one third larger than the whole London Underground* including using schools, hospitals, and private homes as tunnel entrances.
And they have fired in the region of 20,000 rockets randomly on civilian areas.
Can you offer evidence that Israel has done comparable things?
And please note that, despite the failures and offences committed by any conscript army, the IDF targets known terrorist sites, and consistently warns citizens by leaflet drops and text message where they are about to target.
Do Hamas do this?
War veterans note that, despite the devastation, no Western army has managed to limit civilian casualties in urban warfare to the same degree.
Is the USoA, stoking, funding anti-Semitism through an indirect causative effect?
David, if you are seeking to provide a balance, where is it, and where is the fulcrum, tipping point?
We are both writing from the UK, from a position of relative undisturbed, comfort. But, if we were to be targets to be ‘wiped out’ (and yes it is ac term now being used by both sides) jingoism not only for where we live, but for our Christian beliefs, it is doubtful that we would be, at a distance, so sanguine.
If ‘peace’ without wipe-out between peoples is not a common goal, it is suggested that there can not be a balance of right and wrongs.
Have we not learned any lessons from WW2. How did VE day come about?
And we, who live in a centuries old democracy, not a theocracy, have proscribed organisations.
The difference is that the war in Europe was not essentially religious, though the evil Holocaust may be considered to be religious ‘ethnic cleansing’ through the rise of a number of secular ideologies.
A couple of points relating to the letter of Baroness Deech:
It has been established in English Law that to be anti-Zionist is not to be antisemitic. I think there was a case in the 1970’s when a journalist wrote an anti-Zionist article, which was condemned by a Jewish publication as being antisemitic. He sued for libel and won. There have been more recent cases.
She wrote:
‘It is then amplified by examples, of which a very pertinent one is this : “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”’
I am wondering which democratic nation in recent decades has behaved towards its neighbours in the way that the state of Israel has been behaving over the last three years?
A couple of examples:
Recently, the IDF bombed an apartment building in southern Lebanon, because “there were senior Hezbollah people in it.” Investigation revealed that of the 80 people killed, which included women and children, six were low-level Hezbollah people.
More recently, I read in an Israeli news source an IDF report that one IDF soldier had been killed and one seriously wounded by a drone attack in southern Lebanon when they were destroying homes and infrastructure in a Christian village.
Perhaps someone could point out a country of which it is reasonable to say that it is democratic which has done anything like this recently.
‘Perhaps someone could point out a country of which it is reasonable to say that it is democratic which has done anything like this recently.’
That is very easy: UK and the US. In Afghanistan and Iraq there were much higher levels of civilian casualty than there have been in either Gaza or Lebanon. UK veterans have pointed that out. Yet all the incidents there received less than a hundredth of the scrutiny that is being applied to Israel. People read these incidents as if this is a civilian peacetime operation; it is not, it is war.
That Christian village was a Hezbollah base. And Hezbollah was allowed to reestablish its bases both with the consent of the Lebanese government and with the supervision of the UN. Rockets have been fired by Hezbollah on citizens of Israel from sites right next to UN outposts.
Israel’s actions in Lebvanon ar easily explained. Hezbollah de facto runs southern Lebanon (making it no picnic for the Christians there) and repeatedly launches missiles into Israel. Israel’s attitude vis-a-vis the government of Lebanon is: If you won’t police the insurgents attacking us from your country, we shall do it our way.
There is going to have to be a buffer zone, and Israel is determined that it shall be on Lebanese territory, not Israeli. I regard that as reasonable in view of Israel’s desire to live in peace aznd Hezbollah’s not to.
As we are all well aware here in the UK, the fact of a nation being ‘democratic’ does not mean that its government and policies are supported by a majority of the people; that will depend on the voting system, the honest intention of candidates and the degree to which voters have access to objective facts and can see through propaganda. Moreover there can be no assumption that the majority of voters in a democracy are morally good and wise people!
As a matter of interest, regarding Israel:
There is one single national constituency.
Voters can only vote for a party, not individual candidates.
Each party submits a ranked list of candidates before the election; if a party wins 10 seats, the top 10 names on that list enter parliament.
Voters cannot alter the order of candidates.
Seats in the 120 seat Knesset are distributed proportionally based on the total popular vote a party receives nationwide.
A party must win at least 3.25% of the national vote to enter the Knesset. Any party falling below that threshold receives zero.
Democratic? Hmmm….
Ken Arrow’s theorem provides a list of criteria that just about everybody accepts a democratic voting system should have, and then shows that they are incompatible. Why do you single Israel’s system out?
‘Why do you single Israel’s system out?’
‘As a matter of interest’ in response to David Wilson’s raising of the democratic issue in regard to Israel in his comment.
“towards its neighbours” is an interesting caveat. I’m sure people could, and have, drawn comparisons with our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the US’s recent pounding of Iran, but then they’re not neighbours…
But it rather begs the question: which democratic nation other than Israel has neighbours akin to Hamas and Hezbollah? If we want to make comparisons, who are the appropriate comparators?
Ian – it would help if you could stop using the word ‘antisemitic’ to mean only anti-Jewish prejudice and conduct. While I have soe sympathy with your point of that being established usage, I also see that the world has changed since that usage was established, and it is now unhelpful or worse.
Simple fact – ‘Semitic’ does not mean ‘just Jewish’; pretty much all the coutries around Israel are also populated by Semites, and I’ve seen more than a few FB posts by Gazans and other Palestinians pointing out that they too are Semitic and proud of it, and annoyed by an implication that by opposing Israel they are in effect ‘antisemitic’.
If you mean “Anti-Jewish” say it; and ‘call out’ Jews who won’t recognise the inaccuracy of using the term only about Jews.
There is some history of anti-Semitism in mainstream Christianity in the UK in the Lincoln Cathedral ‘ blood liable’ , a farrago of prejudice.