The Church of England is undergoing a disheartening descent into spiritual darkness. Once an institution embodying truth, conscience, and moral authority, it has evolved into a church that proves itself uniquely receptive to one-sided propaganda against Israel, the Jewish state, and ultimately Judaism itself.
By Oscar Hammerstein
The General Synod’s decision this week to officially engage with the Palestinian Christian document *A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide*—also known as Kairos II—marks the culmination of a trend that has been unfolding for decades.
The document accuses Israel of genocide, apartheid, and colonialism. It characterises the Jewish state as a colonial enterprise allegedly built on racism, portrays the war in Gaza as the continuation of a Zionist project to rid Palestine of its population, and calls Israel’s right to exist into question.
It refers to Israel not as a state or nation, but as an “entity”—terminology also employed by Israel’s most radical enemies. The Palestinians are depicted as the land’s sole indigenous population, while the millennia-old Jewish connection to Judea, Jerusalem, and the Land of Israel is erased or cast under suspicion.
The General Synod decided not to formally endorse every word of *Kairos II*, but rather to ‘hear’ the document and engage with it. That distinction offers the Church of England a bureaucratic fig leaf, but not moral absolution.
A church that accepts a document rife with demonisation, historical distortion, and collective accusation as a serious contribution to the debate thereby grants it legitimacy. The fact that the Synod decided to do so despite serious warnings from Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis and other Jewish leaders makes the matter all the more grave.
Mirvis called the decision ‘shameful’ and described it as a sad day for Jewish-Christian relations. The vote was telling: among the bishops, there were 25 votes in favour, none against, and only five abstentions.
The hypocrisy is almost absolute. The Church of England claims to reject antisemitism, yet simultaneously provides a platform for a text that portrays Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, as a malevolent, colonial, and genocidal ideology.
It claims to foster dialogue by paying attention to a document that itself calls for shunning dialogue with ‘Zionists’—a stance that, in practice, treats the vast majority of Jews as pariahs. It speaks of nuance, yet accepts as a serious basis for discussion a text that reduces the world’s most complex conflict to a primitive narrative of Palestinian innocence and Jewish guilt.
Even more disturbing is the theological undercurrent. This is not just about Gaza, Netanyahu, or the 1967 borders. It concerns the place of the Jews in history and the question of whether, as a people, they have a right to national sovereignty in their historic homeland.
Here, an old Christian spectre reappears: replacement theology, or supersessionism. According to this doctrine, the Christian church has replaced Israel as the chosen people; the biblical promises made to the Jews have passed to Christians, and the Jews themselves have become theologically obsolete.
For centuries, this doctrine provided the religious justification for the persecution of Jews, forced conversion, exclusion, and bloody pogroms. After Auschwitz, it appeared to have fallen into disrepute. The Roman Catholic Church confronted its own history—at least openly—in the 1965 document *Nostra Aetate*.
Large segments of Protestantism did so far less thoroughly. The old theological hostility did not vanish; it went underground and re-emerged in a new guise: no longer the Jew as the killer of Christ, but the Zionist as a coloniser, racist, and genocidal oppressor.
In Palestinian liberation theology, this age-old Christian hatred of Jews has found a modern political language. Within this framework, Jesus is severed from his Jewish identity and recast as a Palestinian.
Palestinians become the newly crucified; Israelis become their crucifiers. The Jewish state is not judged as a country that, like any other, has good and bad governments and is capable of making both just and unjust decisions. Instead, Israel is elevated to the status of a metaphysical evil.
The historical absurdity of this is evident. Jesus was a Jew from Judea. He lived centuries before the advent of Islam and before the Romans gave the region the name “Palestine”. Yet Palestinian leaders and Christian theologians have repeatedly portrayed him as a Palestinian—sometimes even as a kind of precursor to the contemporary Palestinian national struggle.
At the same time, the historical bond between the Jewish people and the land is denied, minimised, or dismissed through pseudo-historical theories regarding the Khazars.
The Church of England is no innocent bystander to this distortion of history; for years, it has allowed it to fester within its own ranks. Church officials and organisations have systematically portrayed Israel as the aggressor and the Palestinians almost exclusively as victims. Israeli security measures are described without mentioning the terrorist attacks that preceded them.
The security barrier is depicted as a symbol of Israeli cruelty, while the fact that it was built after suicide bombers blew up buses, restaurants, and shopping malls, and that it has drastically reduced the number of attacks, is left unsaid.
Bethlehem is portrayed as a Christian city being strangled by Israel, while the dramatic decline of the Christian population under Islamic and Palestinian rule largely goes unmentioned. The persecution of Christians across much of the Islamic world, from Nigeria to Syria, from Iraq to Pakistan, has never triggered a comparable obsession within the Church of England.
Israel, by contrast, the only country in the Middle East where Christians can freely practice their faith and where the Christian population has seen sustained growth in absolute numbers, is repeatedly placed in the dock by the Church.
The current Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, is not immune to this criticism either. Her statement that Kairos II “reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people” sidesteps the fundamental question: since when does the trauma of one group make lies about another group acceptable?
Pain can be acknowledged without legitimising the falsification of history. Palestinian suffering can be lamented without casting Israel as a demonic power. Compassion does not require intellectual capitulation.
It is the same old accusation in new clothes. For centuries, the Jew was the eternal culprit—the outsider, the Christ-killer, the one beyond God’s grace. Now, Israel is the eternal culprit: coloniser, apartheid state, genocidal entity. The vocabulary has changed; the structure of the indictment is chillingly familiar.
That is why the decision regarding Kairos II is far more than an unfortunate church motion. It is the symptom of an institutional malaise. The Church of England has neglected its Jewish roots, failed to reckon with its historical guilt adequately, and allowed itself to be seduced by an ideology that repackages ancient Christian prejudices in the contemporary language of anti-colonialism, human rights, and liberation.
The most damning verdict, then, is that the Church—in its desire to stand with the oppressed—no longer seems capable of discerning who is truly oppressed, who is truly threatened, and who is truly intent on the destruction of whom. It has confused compassion with naivety, activism with theology, and propaganda with prophecy.
A church that once claimed to be the nation’s conscience has itself become the subject of a moral reckoning. The question is no longer merely what the Church of England thinks about Israel; the question is what its stance toward Israel reveals about the Church of England itself.
The answer is hardly edifying. An institution burdened by centuries of Christian antisemitism ought to exercise extreme caution before once again embracing a doctrine that severs the Jew from his history, his land, and his national identity. Instead, the church lends legitimacy to a document that does precisely that.
The tragedy is complete: while the Church of England believes it stands on the side of justice, it is breathing new life into old prejudices. While claiming to seek peace, it legitimises a narrative that undermines the Jewish state’s right to exist. While invoking love, solidarity, and compassion, it remains blind to the historical echoes of its own words.
The Church of England has not merely lost its way in the Middle East conflict; it has lost its way in its own history. And most disturbing of all, it does not even seem to realise it.
During her visit to the Holy Land, Mullally spoke of Palestinians living under occupation, of checkpoints, discrimination, and powerlessness. But where was the equally compelling acknowledgement of the Palestinian terrorism that led to many of those very security measures?
Where was the remembrance of October 7, 2023? Where, in the church’s moral universe, were the murdered Israeli families, the hostages, the raped women, and the slaughtered music festival-goers?
The Church of England likes to present itself as a listening, inclusive, and nuanced institution. Yet selective listening is no virtue. Those who listen at length to those accusing Israel of genocide, while treating the historical experiences and existential fears of Jews as an inconvenient complication, are not engaging in dialogue but in partisanship.
The most serious charge, therefore, is not that individual Anglicans criticise Israel. Criticism of any government, including Israel’s, is, of course, legitimate. The charge is that the church repeatedly shows itself receptive to a worldview in which only the Jewish state is stripped of historical context, national legitimacy, and the right to self-defence.
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