Britain’s Tilt Toward Antisemitism Faces Critical Vote in Coming Weeks

The drift toward antisemitism within Britain’s elite institutions will be tested in coming weeks when the Church of England weighs a resolution that designates Israel a racist enterprise.This summer, the Church of England’s General Synod, the institution’s doctrine-shaping and legislative body, had voted overwhelmingly in favor of a motion to engage with a Palestinian Christian text that describes the State of Israel as “a colonial enterprise built on racism.”Part of what it approves for engagement is a document called Kairos Palestine II, also titled “A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide.” It calls Israel’s military actions in Gaza a “genocidal war” that “is the continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine, emptied of its Palestinian people.” It denounces what it calls “decades of apartheid, settler colonialism, political repression” and “Zionist racism and arrogant Jewish supremacy.” In addition, it justifies Hamas’ attacks on Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. Tt asserts the attacks were “born out of decades of injustice, oppression, and displacement since the Nakba of 1948, and more than 16 years of an immoral, suffocating blockade on Gaza.”Kairos II also defines Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, deems Israel a racist, colonial endeavor, and expresses opposition towards the Abraham Accords. Moreover, it rejects Christian Zionism, which it deems to be “produced by the theology of racism, colonialism, and ethnic supremacy.”Many public figures in Britain, including several participants in the Synod, decried the document’s inflammatory language. A minister in the Church of England, Ian Paul, for one, asked, “How can we claim, as a church, to stand against antisemitism when we have tabled before us a document which says,‘we consider Israel a colonial enterprise based on racism’?”He added: “How can we avoid the charge of anti-Israel bias when we single out for censure the one democracy in the Middle East, the only place it is safe to be gay? We have never once debated the oppression of gay people in Palestinian territories, or women in the Arab world.”Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, who had earlier warned that Kairos II risks undermining decades of careful Jewish-Christian relationship-building, exhibited his characteristic restraint and averred that “While it is important to recognize the suffering of Palestinian Christians, this document does so in a way which can only harm the cause of peace.”The motion to “hear” Kairos II is scheduled to be put on the Synod’s agenda for a vote next month. In the meanwhile, the British Green party recently voted to adopt the “Zionism is racism” calumny, which was famously embraced by the United Nations’ General Assembly in 1975 only to be revoked in 1991.In response, a group of Church of England interfaith advisers condemned the Green Party vote, saying it forms part of a wider, “drift towards an increasingly antisemitic culture in our country.” The church’s lead bishop for interfaith engagement, the Right Reverend Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy, rejected the Green Party contention, saying that “I do not believe that Zionism can simply be equated with racism.”He also expressed concern “that this motion may leave many Jewish people feeling misunderstood, marginalized or unwelcome within a political movement that should be committed to the full participation and equal dignity of all communities.”“We should recognize,” he continued, “what Zionism means for many Jews: a profound longing for safety, belonging and self-determination, shaped by centuries of persecution and the Holocaust. That history cannot simply be dismissed. Nor can acknowledging it be allowed to obscure the equal dignity and rights of Palestinians. Both peoples have legitimate claims to safety, freedom and a future in which they can flourish.”Bishop Nsenga-Ngoy concluded that “we should be able to name occupation, dispossession, antisemitism and Palestinian suffering without resorting to collective blame. And we should be able to disagree profoundly while remaining committed to one another’s humanity.”The contrast between the positive reception the Anglican Church has given Kairos II and the laudable reaction of its interfaith leaders to the Green Party adoption of the anti-Zionist credo is striking.How the contradictory attitudes toward the Jewish connection to the Holy Land will be resolved by the church remains to be seen. It will either reassure British Jews that their millennia-old spiritual aspirations to support a Jewish presence in their ancestral land are legitimate or disabuse them of the charming notion that antisemitism in Albion is a relic of a distant past.

Britain’s Tilt Toward Antisemitism Faces Critical Vote in Coming Weeks

Britain’s Tilt Toward Antisemitism Faces Critical Vote in Coming Weeks

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