A Cry and a Curriculum: Reading Kairos II Before Using It

In July of this year, the General Synod voted to ‘hear’ the Kairos II Palestine document as a ‘cry’ of their Palestinian Christian brothers and sisters. This caused serious offence amongst the Jewish community, and was claimed to be deeply antisemitic by some commentators, whilst others welcomed it as a necessary step in listening to those who are being oppressed. 

To make sense of this, Jason Swan Clark offers this analysis and critique of Kairos Palestine II document, and explains why it has divided opinion and presented such a challenge for the Church of England. 

Jason Swan Clark writes: I am not an Anglican. I have no vote in the General Synod, no stake in its standing orders, and no institutional interest in how the Church of England spends a Monday morning in July. So I was surprised by how closely I found myself following a debate in York about whether a body of Christians should ‘receive’ or merely ‘hear’ fourteen pages written by Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Nazareth.

The motion passed, amended, by 253 votes to 47, and carried in all three houses.¹ Members had changed one word. The Church would no longer receive the Kairos declarations; it would hear them, as “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians.” The Bishop of Lichfield, a former chair of the Council of Christians and Jews, said what everyone understood the amendment to mean: “If it is to be more than cosmetic, it must mean while we recognise the Kairos II document as springing from the trauma of the Palestinian people, we are not recognising all its language as language we as a church accept to be used by ourselves.”² The Archbishop of Canterbury put it more simply: to hear does not mean to agree.³

What struck me was not the vote itself. It was what happened around it, in the days before and after, among people I know.

Friends of mine who have long argued for Palestinian rights treated Kairos II as prophetic before it had been read — a word from the Spirit, morally binding, and any hesitation about it a species of complicity. Friends of mine who have long defended Israel treated it as a libel before it had been read — antisemitic in effect if not intent, a document whose acceptance was a scandal. Both groups accepted, broadly, the same categories. Both agreed that the document was a test. They disagreed only about which way you would fail it.

Almost no one seemed to have actually read it.

That is the regular and ordinary fate of documents like this. They become instruments. A church body votes, and thereafter, the vote is now the argument: your own Synod has heard this, so you must accept my position, or your Synod has endorsed a libel, so you have no standing to speak. The fourteen pages themselves become a social media-fueled rumour with a footnote to the vote.

So I read it. Several times. Not to decide whether to be for or against the Palestinians, which is not a coherent thing to be for or against, and not to arbitrate a conflict over which I have no authority. I read it to ask a narrower and more answerable question: how accurate is it? A document commended to congregations for theological study is a document that has entered the order of things that can be verified. That is not hostility. This is the minimum courtesy owed to a text anyone proposes to take seriously.

The following is my reading. It is critical of the document, and I think rightly so. However, I want to be precise about the target of my concerns. My argument is not that Palestinian Christians should be quieter, that their suffering is exaggerated, or that the Church of England was wrong to listen to them. My argument is that Kairos II is a poorer instrument than either of its constituencies believes, and that the reasons for this are visible in its text.

I begin with what is true in it because a great deal is, and because critics of the document often pass over this in a sentence to reach the parts they want to attack.

The suffering described in Part I is real and documented. As of February 2026, the Gaza Ministry of Health recorded more than 72,000 people killed, with independent statistical work suggesting that these administrative records function as a conservative floor rather than an inflation.⁴ The claim in §1.1 that “tens of thousands of children were killed” is, on the available figures, accurate: agencies counting separately arrive at figures above 20,000 children.⁵ Gaza’s health, education, and water infrastructure has been destroyed on a scale that will take a generation to rebuild. The document does not need to exaggerate this and, on the central facts of the last two and a half years, does not.

The West Bank material in §1.9 is likewise not invention. Settler violence against Palestinian villages, crop destruction, water seizure, home demolition, and the army’s protection of and occasional participation in these acts are documented by Israeli, Palestinian, and international monitors. The detention figures in §1.13 — thousands held, roughly a third under administrative detention without charge or trial, children among them, deaths in custody, and documented torture — track UN reporting.⁶ The Jerusalem material in §1.8 is corroborated by an independent Israeli-Palestinian body: the Rossing Centre recorded 155 attacks and incidents against Christians and Christian property in Israel and East Jerusalem during 2025 alone, including 61 physical assaults.⁷ When Palestinian Christians say their presence in the land is under threat, they are not being self-dramatising. They are describing the arithmetic of their own parishes.

More impressive, and almost entirely unremarked in the controversy, is the document’s willingness to turn its criticism inward. Sections 1.14 to 1.17 are unsparing about Palestinian politics: political division, rivalry, and exclusion; a leadership in which the majority of Palestinians have lost confidence; a Palestinian Authority “trapped in serving the interests of the occupier”; the spread of “intimidation, land encroachment, tribalism, favouritism, and corruption”; and “acts of violence, revenge, chaos, and theft” within Gaza itself, adding to the suffering of the people. Section 1.20 condemns “extremist and terrorist religious groups” and those who fund and arm them. Section 2.2 warns explicitly against “giving our national struggle a religious character or turning it into a religious issue that pits religions against one another.” Section 2.8 refuses the reduction of Palestinian women to “women and children,” “faceless victims stripped of agency and will.” Section 3.8 condemns genuine antisemitism, “which still exists in our world,” alongside Islamophobia. Section 4.4 rejects a religious state outright — “for it constricts the state within narrow confines, favors one citizen over another, and excludes and discriminates among its people” — and calls instead for “a civil, democratic state grounded in a culture of pluralism — not numerical dominance.”

These are not the moves of a document indifferent to fairness. Anyone who tells you that Kairos II is simply a propaganda tract has not read past Part I, and §4.4 in particular is a genuine theological achievement, all the more so for being written by a religious minority who might have been expected to seek confessional protection rather than common citizenship.

Despite its importance, I now want to detail the document’s major failings. Here is the simplest way to view its problems, with a counting exercise. And whilst counting is a blunt instrument, I offer it as a first indication rather than complete proof.

In fourteen pages, some variant of “genocide/ethnic cleansing” appears twenty-nine times, three of those in the title and the headings to Parts I and IV.⁸ Some variant of “Zionist” appears twenty-seven times. “Hamas” appears once. “Hostage” appears not at all. “Holocaust” and “Shoah” appear not at all.

The word “terrorism” appears six times, and its distribution is worth tracing precisely. Twice it names false accusations levelled against Palestinians — against UNRWA (§1.11) and against Palestinian human rights organisations (§1.12). Twice it names Israeli settlers: “the terror of settlers” (§1.14) and “settler terrorism” (§2.4). Twice it names extremist religious movements in Syria and Iraq, which the document condemns along with their funders and armers (§1.20).

Therefore, the document possesses the category of religious terrorism. It applies it to ISIS. It applies it to settlers. Yet it declines to apply it to Hamas. 

Word counts do not settle arguments. Absence is not always evasion; a testimony has the right to speak of what it has suffered rather than what others have suffered. But this is a document that has now been commended by a national church for study, in a motion that in the same breath reaffirms that church’s commitment to Christian–Jewish dialogue. At that point, what a text makes present and what it leaves absent stops being a matter of genre and becomes a matter of formation. Congregations that study Kairos II will encounter a Jewish people who exist in it almost exclusively as Zionists, as objects of an ideology critique, or as approved dissenters. They will not encounter European Jewish history at all. And it will find no naming of Hamas for what they most definitely are—genocidal terrorists.

Then there are the mistakes. Kairos II makes at least one that is simply, completely wrong, and it is not a minor one.

Section 1.2 states that “arrest warrants have been issued against Israeli political leaders based upon rulings of the International Court of Justice.” They were not. The warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant were issued in November 2024 by the International Criminal Court, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.⁹ The ICC and the ICJ are different institutions with different jurisdictions. The ICJ adjudicates disputes between states and determines state responsibility. The ICC prosecutes individuals. No ICJ ruling can produce an arrest warrant, as the ICJ does not issue them.

The document knows this. Section 3.10 correctly names both courts and asks governments to press for prosecutions “under the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.” Therefore, §1.2 is a slip, not an ignorance. However, it is an uncorrected slip in the second sentence of the document’s central factual claim, in a text that has been through translation, publication, and eight months of international circulation, and that is now going to be studied in parish groups by people with no independent means of catching it. Defenders of Kairos II have spent considerable energy correcting the formulations of its critics. It is odd that none of that energy has gone into correcting this.

The confusion of the courts is not an isolated slip, and this is where a document being commended for study invites a kind of attention it has not so far received. Kairos II carries seven footnotes. Three of them are sound: the UN OCHA reporting on West Bank movement and access behind §1.9, the OHCHR report on detention behind §1.13, and the Fides survey of Christian institutional employment behind §2.14 all say what the document says they say.

The other four are weaker than the claims resting on them. The footnote to §1.2, attached to the sentence about arrest warrants and the ICJ, points not to any court but to the UN Commission of Inquiry. The footnote supporting “decades of apartheid” in §1.3 points to a Human Rights Watch dispatch which itself states that the Court’s language was “a compromise, limited to separation,” and that the apartheid conclusion is HRW’s reading of it — a reading two of the fifteen judges expressly rejected.¹⁰ The footnote to §1.6 cites a General Assembly resolution as though it settled a question of binding law. And the footnote to §3.3, beneath the claim that Israel continues a European colonial enterprise built on racism, points to an online petition. A petition is evidence that people hold a view. It is not evidence for the view.

None of this is fatal to the document’s testimony, and I am not suggesting the footnotes were laid down in bad faith. But a text whose citations point mostly to advocacy characterisations of legal findings, rather than to the findings, is a text whose confidence exceeds its apparatus. That matters far more, and not less, once a church has told its parishes to study it. 

A subtler problem is associated with the genocide claim itself. Section 1.2 states that “human rights organisations, legal institutions and international experts have been unequivocal” — and the supporting footnote in the document points not to a court at all, but to the September 2025 finding of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry.¹¹ This is a real and serious finding, and it does not stand alone: Amnesty International and the Israeli organisation B’Tselem have reached similar conclusions.¹² Anyone who dismisses this as fringe is not arguing in good faith.

However, “unequivocal” is doing work that the evidence does not support. There is no judicial determination of genocide. The most frequently cited legal authority for one — the ICJ’s provisional measures order of January 2024 — has been explicitly and publicly disowned as such by the judge who presided over it. Joan Donoghue, then the Court’s president, said on the BBC: the Court “did not decide — and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media — it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”¹³ What the Court found plausible was a right: the right of Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from genocide, and South Africa’s standing to bring the claim. That is a meaningful finding. But it is not a finding of genocide.

One further point of precision, and it cuts against me as much as for me. Section 1.3 refers to “Israel’s decision to annex the West Bank” as an accomplished fact revealing colonial intent. When Kairos II was written in November 2025, that was not accurate: a sovereignty bill had passed a narrow preliminary vote in the Knesset in October and had then been frozen. But on 8 February 2026 the Israeli security cabinet approved seven measures — opening the West Bank land registry, repealing the restriction on land sales to non-Palestinians, extending Israeli enforcement into Areas A and B, stripping planning powers from the Palestinian authority in Hebron — which Peace Now, Haaretz and a range of Israeli analysts have since described as annexation in all but name, and as a legal reality rather than a proposal.¹⁴ So the document asserted as accomplished a thing that had not yet been accomplished, and the record has since moved a long way toward it. I set that down because it is true, and because a critique that could only ever find this document overstating would be practising its own version of the essentialism it complains about.

None of this makes the genocide question illegitimate. It is being litigated by serious institutions, and the answer may well go against Israel. What Kairos II does is close a question that is open, and then — this is the crucial move — make the closure a test of Christian standing. Section 3.4: those who deny the genocide “deny the very humanity of the Palestinian people,” and the document asks “how can one speak of Christian fellowship or communion” with them.

Consider what that does to the Synod’s decision. The Church of England has commended for parish study a document that defines disagreement with its central contested claim as a denial of Palestinian humanity and a possible bar to communion. You cannot study a text on those terms. Study requires the possibility of arriving somewhere else.

The treatment of Zionism is where the document’s method becomes most visible.

Section 1.3: “Exposed today is the true face of Zionist ideology.” Section 3.3: “Our present Palestinian reality is the inevitable outcome of Zionist ideology.” Section 3.3 again: the State of Israel is “a continuation of that same colonial enterprise built on racism and the ideology of ethnic or religious superiority.”

This is essentialism, and it is the kind of move the Church of England’s own teaching document on Christian–Jewish relations was written to warn against — the collapsing of a plural tradition into a single hostile essence.¹⁵ The historical record does not support it. The Basel Programme of 1897, Zionism’s founding statement, sought “a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law.”¹⁶ A home, secured in law. The demand for a Jewish Commonwealth became official Zionist policy only with the Biltmore Programme of 1942, forty-five years and one European catastrophe later. Between and around those dates, Zionism contained statist, cultural, religious, socialist, revisionist and binationalist currents that fought each other bitterly. Brit Shalom in the 1920s and Ihud in the 1940s — Judah Magnes, Martin Buber — argued for a binational state with political parity and no Jewish majority. Ahad Ha’am attacked the movement’s treatment of the Arab population as a moral failure from within. Much of Orthodox Jewry opposed political Zionism as blasphemy.

To acknowledge that diversity and then define Zionism by its most coercive expression is not analysis. It is the selection of a selective essence. And that selection is inconsistently applied. Palestinian nationalism, in this document, is granted its full internal complexity—it has factions, failures, corruptions, an unrepresentative leadership, internal violence, competing strategies. All of that is candidly set out in §§1.14–1.17. Zionism gets no such interior life and recognition. One movement is given a history. The other is given a traduced ideological and flattened nature.

That asymmetry is the document’s governing method, and once you see it you see it everywhere.

Consider 1948. Section 3.3 describes the establishment of Israel as a project that “settled Palestine and worked to displace the indigenous people of Palestine from the time of the Nakba until today.”

The facts underneath this are grave and must not be minimised. Roughly 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Israeli forces carried out expulsions, at Lydda and Ramle among other places. Hundreds of villages were destroyed or repopulated. Israel then legislated to prevent return and to absorb the property of those who had fled. Nothing in what follows is intended to soften any of that, and Christians who reach for context here in order to avoid the moral weight of it are doing something contemptible.

But a single causal mechanism is being asserted where several operated. Direct expulsion, flight from combat, flight from atrocity and rumours of atrocity, the collapse of Palestinian urban institutions and leadership, the intervention of neighbouring states, and subsequent Israeli policy on return are distinct things with distinct moral valences. Compressing them into the execution of a pre-existing plan requires the omission of a good deal: that the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League rejected the partition plan; that a civil war followed that rejection; that five Arab armies invaded after Israel declared independence; that Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt held Gaza, so that the territory allocated to an Arab state was withheld from Palestinian sovereignty by Arab governments for nineteen years.

These facts do not excuse the Nakba. They are not offered as a defence. They matter because a catastrophe with several causes cannot be presented as the unopposed unfolding of one intention without ceasing to be a part of history. This is propaganda in the place of accurate and readily available history.

The same compression runs in the opposite direction. Where the document reaches for the pre-1948 period, coexistence is the frame. There genuinely were long periods and durable practices of coexistence between Arabs and the small Jewish minority, and they deserve to be remembered. So do the Arab riots of 1920 and 1921, the Hebron massacre of 1929 in which sixty-seven Jews were killed by their neighbours, and the Arab Revolt of 1936–39. A history in which only one community ever initiates violence is not a history.

The most consequential absence is Jewish history itself.

There is no Holocaust in Kairos II. Not a mention. A document that locates the origin of genocide in “the minds of the settler-colonial powers of Europe” (§3.3) and traces a single line from European colonialism to Gaza passes over the European genocide of the Jews in silence. Whatever one concludes about the relationship between the Shoah and the founding of Israel — and there are serious arguments that Palestinians were made to pay a European debt — a theological account of this conflict that never names it has left out something it cannot afford to leave out. Not because Jewish suffering cancels Palestinian suffering. Because a document about how peoples with extant good reason come to fear annihilation has omitted the twentieth century’s central instance of it.

The Jews of the Arab and Muslim world appear with no agency behind their displacement. Where such displacement is acknowledged in the wider Kairos discourse, it is framed as a consequence of Israel’s establishment. The conflict was certainly a catalyst. However, anti-Jewish violence preceded Israel: the Farhud in Baghdad in June 1941 killed approximately 180 Jews two years before the Biltmore Programme had any purchase and seven years before Israeli independence.¹⁷ The departures that followed involved persecution, denaturalisation, confiscation, expulsion, fear, and Zionist recruitment in different proportions in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Morocco. Arab governments and societies had agency. To make their actions wholly derivative of Zionism is to apply, in reverse, exactly the causal reduction the document rejects when Israel applies it to Palestinians.

This produces the asymmetry that troubles me most, because it is not historical but political, ideological and concerns the future rather than the past.

Section 4.4 rejects a religious state and calls for a civil, democratic state grounded in “a culture of pluralism — not numerical dominance.” Read as a universal principle, this is admirable. However, read against §§1.3 and 4.2, where Jewish majority sovereignty is named as supremacism, and its dismantling is the precondition of any political future, it functions differently. Palestinian majority rule appears as the natural form of justice. Jewish majority rule appears as an ideology to be dismantled. One people is offered national self-determination; the other is offered protected communal existence within someone else’s state.

That is not neutrality. It is a settlement that is presented as the mere absence of supremacy.

This brings me to October 7 and §1.6, which is the most revealing paragraph in the document.

Israel commits these crimes by invoking the events of October 7, 2023, claiming that its actions are an act of self-defense — forgetting that the Hamas attack of that day was itself born out of decades of injustice, oppression and displacement since the Nakba of 1948, and more than sixteen years of an immoral, suffocating blockade on Gaza.

Read that construction carefully. The attack is the grammatical object of history. It was born out of conditions. It has causes but no author. The paragraph does add: “Mentioning the context does not justify the killing or capture of civilians, the violations of international law and norms, and war crimes.” That sentence is there, and critics who claim that the document offers no condemnation at all are misreading it.

But look at what it condemns and how. “The killing or capture of civilians.” Not the abduction of civilians. Not hostage-taking. Capture — a term from the law of combatants, applied to two hundred and fifty people taken from homes, a music festival, and their beds.¹⁸ The word “hostage” does not occur in the document. Neither does any account of Hamas’s ideology, its charter, its stated aims, its decision-making, or the planned and documented character of what was done that day, including sexual violence. Hamas is named once, as the subject of a verb in the passive voice of history.

Set beside this the document’s language about Israeli violence: the “true face” of Zionism (§1.3), the “inevitable outcome” of Zionist ideology (§3.3). One party’s violence discloses an essence. The other party’s violence discloses a context.

Section 2.4 compounds this. “We reaffirm the right of all colonized peoples to resist their colonizers,” and creative resistance is located in “popular Palestinian movements confronting occupation, settlement expansion, settler terrorism and apartheid,” in civil society, legal work, culture, students and labour. That list is almost entirely nonviolent, and the document’s own supporting citation is UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 of 1982.¹⁹ Two things need saying about that. A General Assembly resolution is not binding law. No principle of self-determination in international law licenses attacks on civilians, indiscriminate rocket fire, sexual violence, or hostage-taking; international humanitarian law binds every party to a conflict, regardless of the justice of its cause, and the illegality of an occupation does not suspend that obligation for those resisting it.²⁰ Kairos II never says otherwise. It also never says so.

A church studying this document will come away with a rich account of Palestinian nonviolent resistance and no framework at all for thinking about Palestinian armed violence against civilians and their participation in October 7th. That is a formation problem, not a nuance.

I have left theology until last because I think the real weakness lies there, and because it is the part least discussed by either of Kairos II’s constituencies.

Section 3.2 is, on its own terms, seems to me to be unobjectionable, and stands on ground held in common by Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican and Protestant alike: God the Creator of all humanity, incarnate in Christ, “stands in solidarity with and takes the side of the oppressed and the downtrodden, the victims of all forms of injustice and tyranny from every nation regardless of race, religion or nationality.” That is Luke 4. It is the Christian tradition. I have no quarrel with it.

The difficulty is the step that follows, and it is never argued, only performed.

If God takes the side of the oppressed, and we are the oppressed, then our reading of this conflict is God’s reading of it. Suffering becomes not merely a claim on the Church’s attention — which it certainly is — but a source of authority that settles historical, legal and political questions. Section 4.5 names the document “a prophetic cry.” Section 3.5 hears in agreement with it “a sign of the Holy Spirit.” Section 3.4 makes disagreement with its central claim a denial of Palestinian humanity and a question mark over the dissenter’s Christian communion. Section 3.7 declares that once Christian Zionists have been invited to repent and have not, “moral, ecclesial and theological responsibility requires that they be held accountable and that their ideology be rejected and boycotted.”

This is a specific and serious ecclesiological move. It makes a contested political and historical judgment into a condition of fellowship. And it inverts the order of the Church. Communion is not a reward for correct politics—at least as far as I understand Anglican ecclesiology. It is the means by which people who cannot yet agree are held in one body long enough to be changed. A theology that makes agreement the entry condition has abolished the very thing it claims to be defending.

There is a second, deeper problem. God’s identification with the oppressed is not an epistemology. It does not confer accuracy. The God who stands with the crucified is not thereby a guarantor that the crucified have got the history right — and the whole Christian account of the cross depends on that distinction, because the crucified Christ does not respond to injustice by producing a superior political analysis. He gathers his enemies into himself. That is what makes the Paschal mystery unavailable as a partisan resource. Any theology of this land that cannot hold Jewish memory and Palestinian memory in one body has not yet reached the theology of the Body.

This is why the standard defence of Kairos II collapses under its own weight. The defence runs: Kairos II is prophetic contextual theology, and therefore carries authority; but Kairos II is not a theological or exegetical document, and therefore should not be subjected to theological or exegetical criticism. Both halves are asserted, often within a paragraph of each other. They cannot both be true. Its title is Faith in a Time of Genocide. It invokes God, Scripture, sin, repentance, the Holy Spirit, the mission of the Church, the nature of communion, and the theological status of Christian Zionism. It instructs churches on their liturgical, investment, dialogical, and diplomatic practices. It is a theological document, and theological documents are answerable to theology.

The parallel move on history has the same shape. Kairos II is testimony, we are told, not comprehensive history, and testimony has different obligations. That is true, and it is a real principle. However, the document does not confine itself to testimony. Testimony says: this is what was done to us, this is what we saw, this is what we carry. Kairos II also says that Zionism has an essence, that Israel’s founding was a colonial enterprise built on racism, that Western silence is explained by Gaza’s offshore gas, that arrest warrants issued from ICJ rulings, that 7th October was born of oppression, and what the political future of the whole land must be. The moment a document moves from this is what we suffered to this ideology inevitably produced genocide, it has entered the order of claims answerable to evidence. Trauma gives testimony its urgency and its right to be heard. It does not confer historical infallibility. No one would say otherwise about a document written from the other side of this conflict, and that is the test.

Which is the test I would put to anyone defending this document: would you accept an Israeli Christian statement as “contextual testimony,” immune from historical scrutiny on grounds of trauma, if it made no mention of the Nakba, described settler violence principally as a reaction to terrorism, and treated Palestinian nationalism as an essence rather than a history? If the answer is no, then trauma is not functioning as a principle. It is functioning as a permission.

Finally, I return to York, because the Synod’s decision has a structural problem that neither the document’s supporters nor its critics have quite named.

The motion the Synod passed asks the Church to hear the Kairos documents as expressions of lived experience, and to engage with them in study, at every level, with resources commended by the Faith and Public Life Division.²¹ The amendment to “hear” was intended, transparently, to avoid endorsement. Fair enough.

But Kairos II itself does not ask to be heard. It asks and demands to be obeyed. Section 3.10 asks churches to press their governments to isolate, sanction, boycott and embargo. Section 3.7 asks the churches of the world to repudiate Zionist theology and boycott those who hold it. Section 3.12 asks churches to “boycott dialogue with Zionist voices,” and to amplify instead the Jewish voices it deems prophetic.

And the same motion, at point two, commits the Church of England to “reaffirm our commitment to inter-faith dialogue, including Christian-Jewish dialogue.”²²

These two things cannot be done at once. A Christian body that lets another Christian body determine which Jewish interlocutors are legitimate has not entered into dialogue; it has delegated it. This is also why the frequent claim that Kairos II is simply not about Jews or Judaism cannot be sustained from the text. It criticises churches for prioritising Jewish–Christian dialogue over truth (§1.5). It describes “Jewish supremacy” (§1.3). It discusses antisemitism and the relation of Jews to Zionists (§3.8). It tells churches which Jewish partners to boycott and which to amplify (§3.12). It is right to insist that not every Jew is a Zionist and not every Zionist a Jew — that distinction is worth defending. But drawing it does not remove the subject from the document’s agenda. Drawing it is an intervention in the subject.

The Synod chose a word to protect itself. It could not change the genre of what it was voting on by choosing a word. Once a cry is commended for parish study, it becomes a curriculum—for teaching and instruction. 

That is the honest difficulty in the argument, made from the floor of Synod, that we would not tell survivors of trauma “you can’t use that language; you are wrong; this is not true.”²³ Of course we would not. That is precisely how one ought to receive a disclosure. However, receiving a disclosure pastorally and adopting it as a study text for a national church are different acts, and the latter carries obligations that the former does not. The trauma argument is unanswerable in the first case. It is not available for the second.

So the questions I would put, kindly and without hyperbole, to those on both sides who have made this document into a weapon:

1. How can Kairos II be prophetic theology when it speaks, and not theology when it is examined?

2. How can it be unconcerned with Christian–Jewish relations while instructing churches which Jewish voices to boycott?

3. Why must Zionism be treated as a single essence while Palestinian politics is granted its full internal complexity — a complexity the document itself sets out with real honesty?

4. Why has so much energy gone into correcting the formulations of the document’s critics, and none into correcting its confusion of the ICC with the ICJ?

5. Why does Palestinian trauma excuse the omission of Jewish history, when Jewish trauma is never permitted to excuse the omission of Palestinian history?

6. And to those who have used this vote to dismiss the entire Palestinian Christian witness: what have you actually read? Because the document you are condemning contains a sharper critique of Palestinian political failure than most of its opponents have managed, and a firmer rejection of religious nationalism than most of its supporters have noticed.

Summary

A full endorsement of Kairos II is difficult to justify. It confuses the ICC with the ICJ. It presents contested legal judgments as settled facts. It reduces the diversity of Zionism to a single genocidal project. It gives almost no attention to Jewish history, Jewish persecution, or the legitimate question of Jewish self-determination. It elevates one nationalist reading of the conflict into God’s own perspective, so that Palestinian suffering becomes a source of theological and political authority, while Jewish suffering and memory are interpreted chiefly through the lens of colonial power.

A full dismissal of it is also difficult to justify. The suffering it describes is real, documented, and significantly corroborated by Israeli and international bodies. Its internal self-criticism is more honest than that of most national churches. Its rejection of the religious state is a genuine theological achievement. The people who wrote it are burying their own dead.

Both of these things are true, which is why the document is a poor weapon and why almost everyone reaching for it has reached for something other than what is actually on the page.

Palestinian Christians must be heard. The Nakba, the occupation, settlement expansion, and the devastation of Gaza demand an honest Christian response, and the Church of England was not wrong to say so. However, listening to a witness is not the same as endorsing every historical, legal, and theological claim the witness makes. Christian solidarity does not require the suspension of critical judgment. Neither suffering nor trauma places a political theology beyond critique.

Solidarity requires truth. It cannot replace it.

One last thing, and I set it down in advance so that it cannot be claimed afterwards as hindsight.

This article began with an observation: that people I know had judged Kairos II before reading it, in both directions, and that the document had become a badge rather than a text. I expect the response to demonstrate the point. I expect to be told that I have provided cover for genocide, and to be told that I have gone soft on a libel, by readers who will have taken from several thousand words the one sentence that confirmed what they held before they arrived. If that is what happens, then the comments will not be a reply to the thesis. They will be its proof – QED.

I would genuinely rather be wrong, so let me say plainly what would be worth reading.

Show me where the history is wrong. Tell me that §1.2 does not confuse the two courts — or that it does, and it does not matter, and say why. Show me that the essentialism I describe is not in the text, and give me the section number. Defend §3.12’s instruction to boycott dialogue partners on its own terms; there is a serious case to be made there, and I would like to see someone make it. Tell me the theological step from God sides with the oppressed to our reading is God’s reading is not the step I say it is. Argue with me from the document.

That is a conversation, and I will take it seriously wherever it lands. Anything else is two prepared positions being recited at each other while the dead go on being counted.

Additional Note: A word about the sources, since I have just spent several thousand words asking a document to be accurate.

I have drawn on a good many of them: the text of Kairos II itself, the Synod record, court documents, UN reporting, Israeli and Palestinian monitoring organisations, and the press. I have checked what I could and rechecked what seemed substantive. Where a figure is contested, I have tried to say so rather than take the number that suited me, and where the record has moved against my own argument I have said that too.

But this is a blog post, not a journal article. It has no peer reviewers and no fact-checking desk, and the situation it describes changes weekly — some of what I cite here will likely have been superseded by the time you read it. Several of my sources are secondary where a primary would have been better, and I have flagged those in the notes. Readers will know things I do not.

Accuracy is expensive. It takes time and a sort of cold, unhurried attention that a cry — written under bombardment, by people burying their own dead — does not have and cannot reasonably be asked for. Which is the genre question again, arriving from the other side. Nobody asked Kairos II for footnotes that would survive an audit. The Synod asked for exactly that, implicitly, the moment it commended the document to parishes for study. Having now spent a while on a small fraction of that burden, I find I hold the document’s authors more gently than when I started, and the vote rather less so.

So: if you find an error here, tell me, and I will correct it in the text rather than in the comments, and say that I have. That is the standard I am asking Kairos II to be held to. It would be incoherent to exempt myself from it.

Dr Jason Swan Clark is…

1. “Synod votes to stand in solidarity with Palestinian Christians and ‘hear’ their voices in amended motion,” Church of England, 12 July 2026. Voting: Bishops 25 for, 0 against, 5 abstentions; Clergy 115 for, 20 against, 30 abstentions; Laity 113 for, 27 against, 35 abstentions.
2. Michael Ipgrave, Bishop of Lichfield, speaking in the debate; quoted ibid.
3. Sarah Mullally, Archbishop of Canterbury: “To hear the heartfelt expressions of the lived experiences of the Palestinian Christians does not mean we agree with everything in these documents.” Ibid.
4. Gaza Ministry of Health figure of 72,063 as at 16 February 2026, reported in “Gaza death toll exceeds 75,000 as independent data verify loss,” Al Jazeera, 18 February 2026. The “conservative floor” characterisation is that of the Gaza Mortality Survey: Michael Spagat, Jon Pedersen, Khalil Shikaki, Michael Robbins, Eran Bendavid, Håvard Hegre and Debarati Guha-Sapir, “Violent and non-violent death tolls for the Gaza conflict: new primary evidence from a population-representative field survey,” The Lancet Global Health 14, no. 4 (April 2026): e552–e559, doi:10.1016/S2214-109X(25)00522-4, PMID 41722607. The survey interviewed 2,000 households across 200 sampling locations between 30 December 2024 and 5 January 2025 and estimated 75,200 violent deaths between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025, some 34.7 per cent above the Ministry’s figure for the same period. Its sampling method has been contested — see the commentary “From enumeration to inference: what the Gaza Mortality Survey reveals — and misses — about counting deaths in the Gaza Strip,” The Lancet Global Health (2026) — which is a reason to cite it as corroboration of the Ministry’s floor rather than as a replacement figure. An Israeli army official was reported in January 2026 as accepting a figure of about 70,000.
5. Save the Children International, “Gaza: 20,000 children killed in 23 months of war“; and UNICEF State of Palestine, Humanitarian Situation Update, which records at least 21,289 children killed to 3 February 2026.
6. OHCHR, “UN report: Palestinian detainees held arbitrarily and secretly, subjected to torture,” July 2024 — the source cited by Kairos II at §1.13.
7. Rossing Centre for Education and Dialogue, Attacks on Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem: Annual Report 2025, launched 30 March 2026; figures as reported by Middle East Eye, 14 July 2026.
8. Counts are of the English text of Kairos II as published (KP-2-Final-English.pdf), taken across the whole document including its title and part headings, and excluding the URLs in the document’s own footnotes — one of which contains the word “genocide” in the OHCHR web address. Counting the running text alone, and setting aside the title and the headings to Parts I and IV, the figure is twenty-six. The twenty-nine break down as “genocide” (24) and “genocidal” (5); the twenty-seven as “Zionist” (14), “Zionism” (9) and “Zionists” (4). Of that second set, five are “Christian Zionism” or “Christian Zionists” (§§3.5, 3.7), where the target is a Western Christian theology rather than Jews or Israelis — a distinction the document is entitled to, and which I note so that the count is not doing more work than it can bear.
9. International Criminal Court, Pre-Trial Chamber I, warrants of arrest issued 21 November 2024 in Situation in the State of Palestine. The Chamber found reasonable grounds to believe both men bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts, and as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population. A warrant was issued the same day for Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri (Deif), including for hostage-taking, rape and other forms of sexual violence.
10. International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, advisory opinion of 19 July 2024. The Court found that Israel’s measures maintaining separation between Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the West Bank breach Article 3 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which obliges states to eradicate racial segregation and apartheid. Clive Baldwin, writing for Human Rights Watch — the source Kairos II cites at §1.3 — states that “though the court’s language is a compromise, limited to separation, the finding means that Israel is responsible for apartheid,” and records that President Nawaf Salam and Judge Dire Tladi said as much in separate declarations, while two of the fifteen judges, including Judge Georg Nolte, held that the Court should not find apartheid. The opinion treats apartheid as a human rights violation, not as a crime.
11. UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, September 2025 — the source cited in Kairos II’s own footnote to §1.2.
12. Amnesty International and B’Tselem have each published findings of genocide; for a summary of the converging assessments, see Middle East Eye, 14 July 2026.
13. Joan Donoghue, former President of the International Court of Justice, BBC HARDtalk, April 2024.

14. On the preliminary Knesset vote of 22 October 2025 and its subsequent freeze, and on the seven security cabinet decisions of 8 February 2026, see Foundation for Middle East Peace, Settlement & Annexation Report, 13 February 2026, which reports the cabinet as having “approved seven new measures that result in the annexation of the entire West Bank,” and collects the responses of Peace Now (“de facto annexation”), Haaretz (“Israeli annexation is now a legal reality”), and the Yesha Council (“entrenching Israeli sovereignty on the ground, de facto”).

15. God’s Unfailing Word: Theological and Practical Perspectives on Christian–Jewish Relations, Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England (London: Church House Publishing, November 2019), 144 pp., ISBN 9780715111611 — the first attempt to set out the Church of England’s teaching in this area in a single volume.
16. Basel Programme, First Zionist Congress, 1897: “Zionism seeks to establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law.” Herzl’s formula “secured under public law” was itself a compromise, adopted after younger delegates pressed for “secured by international law” in order to sharpen the political character of the movement — evidence of the internal contest the essentialist reading erases. The 1897 text is cited in its original form, rather than through a later commentary, because the argument turns on what the movement’s founding statement actually said at its founding; the wording is what is at issue. Two independent repositories carry it, one Palestinian and one Jewish, and they agree: Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest), “Basel (Zionist) Program,” ; and Jewish Virtual Library, “First Zionist Congress & Basel Program (1897).”
17. On the Farhud of 1–2 June 1941 in Baghdad, see United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “The Farhud.” An Iraqi government commission of inquiry recorded at least 180 Jews killed; the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center puts the figure considerably higher once unidentified victims buried in mass graves are counted. See also Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), ISBN 9780804778756; and Moshe Gat, The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948–1951 (London: Frank Cass, 1997), ISBN 9780714642239, now Routledge, doi:10.4324/9781315037677. Gat remains the standard monograph-length treatment of the Iraqi departures and of the proportions between persecution, expulsion and organised emigration; it is cited here for that archival work rather than for currency, and nothing in the subsequent literature has displaced it as the point of entry to the primary record.
18. 251 people were taken into Gaza on 7 October 2023. Of these, 168 were subsequently recovered alive and 87 recovered dead; 36 were children, the youngest nine months old.
19. UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 (1982) — the authority cited in Kairos II’s own footnote to §1.6, and cited here in its original form because it is that instrument, and not a later gloss on it, which the document invokes.
20. Geneva Conventions of 1949, Common Article 3; Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 1977, Articles 48 and 51 — the principle of distinction and the prohibition of attacks on civilians. These are cited in their original form because they are the founding instruments of international humanitarian law and remain in force as such; they bind all parties to an armed conflict irrespective of the legality of the underlying cause.
21. Motion as amended and passed, points 4 to 7; see note 1.
22. Motion as amended and passed, point 2: “acknowledge with repentance the Church’s historic contribution to antisemitism and to the situation now affecting the Palestinian people, reaffirm our commitment to inter-faith dialogue, including Christian-Jewish dialogue and encourage a deeper understanding of Judaism and other faiths.” See note 1.
23. The Ven Stewart Fyfe, Archdeacon of West Cumberland, moving the Diocese of Carlisle motion: “Would we, in any other circumstances, say to survivors of trauma, ‘you can’t use that language; you are wrong; this is not true?’ Would we not receive their disclosure and seek understanding? That is what this motion calls for.” See note 1.