General Synod’s looming disaster over Kairos II Palestine

General Synod is planning to have a debate about the Kairos II Palestine document on Sunday night. In theory, it is claimed to be a listening to the voice of our Palestinian Christian brethren. But in reality, it proposes a selective and distorted account which is potential going to do irreparable harm to Jewish-Christian relations and likely to contribute to worsening antisemitism.

On Sunday night, 12th July, General Synod is due to discuss a Diocese Synod Motion from Carlisle Diocese headed ‘Kairos Palestine.’ (General Synod is a public assembly, like Parliament, so you can download and read all the papers on the Church of England page here.)

At one level, the motion looks as though it is ‘balanced’ and concerned to listen to all sides. It includes the comment ‘We lament the loss of Israeli and Palestinian lives and the violations of human dignity and rights on both sides, as well as the displacement of population.’ And it includes the welcome comments:

In particular, we:

a) reject antisemitism, anti-Muslim hostility and all forms of prejudice based on religious affiliation and ethnicity;

b) pray for all victims of the current conflicts in Israel and the occupied

But the problem comes not only with other wording in the motion, but in its central call, which is to ‘receive…the Kairos Palestine II’ document, from which the motion gets its name.

The first problem comes in the opening sentence.

That this Synod respond to the call of Palestinian Christians to stand in solidarity with them and their fellow Palestinians in non-violent resistance to the ongoing occupation.

It is less the wording and more the assumption the wording makes which is the problem: that Palestinians are committed to non-violent resistance to ‘occupation.’

Historically, Palestinian Christians as a group have been deeply involved in violent terrorism as their rejection of the State of Israel, and have been deeply involved in the PLO, whose founding charter rejected the right of Israel to exist, and claimed the whole region as an Arab homeland. (We need to be aware, too, that before the mid-1960s, there was no campaign for ‘Palestinians’, since this was a regional term, and mostly used by Jews who lived there. It was created as a political label as part of the Cold-War conflict in which the Arab-Israeli conflict was a proxy for the Soviet Union’s battle with the West.)

Thus the great uncle of Layan Nasir (whom both Sarah Mullally and other bishops visited), Kamal Nasser, was the director of communications for the PLO in the 1960s, and was believed to be the person who organised the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympics.

As I mentioned in my previous article on this, Layan Nasir herself has been a member of Democratic Progressive Student Pole (DPSP), the student wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which took part in the October 7th 2023 massacre of over 1,000 Israelis. You can see here her posting on her Facebook account of her support for both organisations, which I screenshot before she hid the post.

George Habash, another Palestinian Christian, was in fact a radical Marxist and the founder of the PFLP. (This is where we need to remember that, in this region, ‘Palestinian Christian’ often functions as a group label in a way that we are not used to in the UK.)

Another person that Sarah Mullally met on her visit was Zeina Barbar; she is not named explicitly, but you can see a video of the two of them in conversation on Twitter/X. Her father planted a car bomb in the Mea Shearim district of Jerusalem; she has been arrested on terrorism charges; and she has posted online her support for Samer Arbid, who commanded a PFLP terror cell that carried out a bombing against Israeli civilians, murdering 17-year-old Rina Shnerb, and injuring her father and brother.

The motion would have been fine if it either included ‘those…who’, recognising that many Palestinian Christians are not engaged in or supporting ‘non-violent resistance, or if it included a call for them to renounce violence, as well as calling for an end to violence on the part of Israelis.

Without this, the motion either lacks any historical awareness, or is functioning as propaganda for one side of this complex and contested issue.

There are other highly contentious terms used to frame the motion, including ‘Palestine’ itself, used to refer to an ethnic group and a state, despite there having been no such group or nation in previous history. (I should note here that you, dear reader, might well take a different view from me on the use of the term—but here I want to note that it is used in the motion without any indication that it is at all contentious). And the word ‘occupation’ is also used as though it were a factual descriptor. The Palestinians have indeed been occupied—by Egypt in Gaza, and in the West Bank when it was annexed by Jordan, which was in fact the very reason the country changed its name from Transjordan!

But the most contentious element of all is the invitation to ‘receive’ the Kairos II Palestine document. I do hope you will read it for yourself (a copy is on the Synod page I linked above).

The whole document is framed in terms of the ‘genocide’ that is happening in Gaza. To realise how calculating this term is in its offence to Jews, we need to remember that the word itself was coined to describe the unprecedented slaughter of Jews in Europe, when 6 million out of 9 million Jews were gassed and shot. In a period since then when the global population has multiplied fourfold, the global Jewish population has still not returned to what it was before the Holocaust. That is genocide.

When up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed in 1915–16, that is genocide.

What is happening in the war in Gaza is appalling, and might well be judged to be unjustified and disproportionate. But the deaths of 70,000 people out of a population of 2.1 million is not ‘genocide’.

In fact, the population of Palestinians has exploded, both within the state of Israel and beyond its borders. The 150,00 Muslim Arabs who stayed in the state of Israel after the war of 1947–49 have grown to more than 2 million, who have full democratic rights (so to call this, the only democratic state in the region, ‘apartheid’ is astonishing). And the global population of Palestinians now stands at around 15.5 million from the 700,000 who left the territory.

When 6 million out of 9 million are killed, that is genocide. When you grow from 700,000 to 15.5 million, that is not. The term has been deployed here to create maximum offence.

What is truly offensive is that, in the context of Gaza, there is only one mention of Hamas, in para 1.6—and that is to justify what happened on 7th October as ‘the right of a people under occupation to resist their occupier and oppressor’.

There are many, many other issues with Kairos II that I could analyse, though that would be long, complicated, and contested. For reflection on the Church of England and the General Synod debate, we simply need to listen to how the Jewish community in Britain has responded to the proposal to ‘receive’ this document.

The Chief Rabbi, commented:

It is worth noting that, when Carlisle Diocese debate this, passed the motion, and then passed it on to Synod, they consulted not one single Jewish leader to get their response or reaction. I am not sure that there was any such consultation before it was tabled for Synod business either.

The Jewish Board of Deputies also made a separate public statement.

We understand the motivations of Church members to express solidarity with Palestinians and to hear their voices in the current devastating circumstances. We recognise the ties of kinship of Christians in England to Palestinian Christians and to the Holy Land. We also note with profound respect the Anglican Communion’s affirmation of peace-making as a Christian vocation. We condemn extremism and violence whether perpetrated by Israelis or Palestinians, including violence perpetrated by extremist settlers, and we support all efforts to advance peace and security for both peoples.

Unfortunately, dissemination of the Kairos documents will do more to perpetuate conflict than make peace. Specific distortions and falsehoods in Kairos II are too numerous to be detailed here. However, a central libel of this text – that Zionism is a settler-colonial movement built on “Jewish supremacy” and with genocidal intent – is so false and destructive that the only responsible action is to reject it…

Synod Members might reflect on the threat posed to Jewish-Christian relations, which have advanced positively in recent times. They might consider how Jews will view a decision of the Church to engage with a text that so thoroughly eviscerates the faith, personal history, cultural identity, and lived experience of Jewish families here and around the world. They might further consider the impact of disseminating a document that appears to justify the October 7 massacre, and that spreads hateful attitudes towards Israel and Diaspora Jews, at a time when we see such attitudes leading to murderous violence against Jews here and in other countries.

The Kairos II document directly undermines the struggle against antisemitism, as well as Christian-Jewish dialogue. It attempts to restrict the understanding of antisemitism in ways contrary to how it is understood and experienced by most Jews around the world. No less damaging is the call to “to boycott dialogue with Zionist voices,” which jeopardises decades of Christian-Jewish relationship building.

The Jewish Chronicle reported the response of the Council for Christians and Jews, in which the Church of England has been deeply involved:

Responding to the document’s publication, the Council of Christian and Jews (CCJ) warned in guidance to churches that “the unqualified use of the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘settler-colonial’ can be heard as denying the historic and spiritual connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel and denying the legitimate establishment of the State of Israel by the United Nations in 1948”.

It called on churches to “affirm Jewish indigeneity and historical connection to the land” and to “avoid adopting unhelpful language, including that which appears to erase one people’s story in order to affirm another’s”.

The CCJ also warned that statements about Zionism in the document could be “heard as a rejection of Jewish identity or belonging or right to self-determination” and prove “extremely damaging” in the UK when Jews were facing rising antisemitism.

In a statement this week, the CCJ said it had been working to raise Jewish concerns with the Methodist and other churches, urging UK Christians to listen to a broad range of Jewish views.

There was language in the Kairos Palestine document that was “deeply harmful to these aims, including statements which deny the historic and spiritual connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel,” it said.

And the Churches Ministry Amongst the Jews (CMJ) raised major question about the bias inherent in the report, and the lack of consultation with or listening to other voices.