Kairos Palestine
Last week, the Church of England’s General Synod voted to hear the “Kairos Palestine” document that had been presented to them “as heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians”.
The document carried the title: “Faith in a Time of Genocide”. In fact, the terms “genocide” and “genocidal” were used no less than 26 times and “ethnic cleansing” a further eight times.
We Jews know what genocide is. The term was coined in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin when 6,000,000 Jews, one third of our people, were hunted down, taken to concentration camps and murdered by the Nazis and their sympathizers.
By contrast, according to the United Nations Population Fund, the Palestinian population growth rate “stands high at 2.8% and it is expected to remain stable due to decline in mortality rates while fertility rate remains one of the highest in the Arab region standing at 4.06%”. Hardly genocide!
The document further asserts that “Zionists do not want us to remain on our land. The genocidal war on Gaza is the continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine”. It fails to note that almost 80% of Mandate Palestine is in fact occupied by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Furthermore, in an effort to appease the Palestinians, in August 2005 Arik Sharon forcibly removed approximately 8,600 Israeli settlers who were living in the Gaza Strip. The pogrom of October 7 showed only too clearly that it did not help.
The document asserts that “Palestinian society lives under a suffocating siege imposed by checkpoints, gates and other mechanisms that deny our people freedom of movement”. It fails to refer to the 1st and 2nd Intifadas in which over a thousand Israelis were murdered and tens of thousands wounded.
Were the Palestinians to agree to live in peace with Israel, there would be no need for checkpoints. We have tried so often to reach an accommodation with them, but they have always refused.
Although Kairos Palestine’s document is couched in religious language, it is in fact a political statement that calls for “an end to arms shipments to Israel”. It does not demand the same of those sent to the Hezbollah and Hamas!
If their end game were not clear, they state that “We also reject proposals for a weakened, conditional state lacking full sovereignty over its borders, waters, airspace and security.” That is not a religious statement but a political one.
The document is headed by the words: “A Moment of Truth for Us.”. However, that truth should begin with an honest appraisal of the role that Palestinians and Arab states have played in the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Nowhere is that addressed!
The decision to “hear” the document rather than to adopt it was no doubt made as a compromise to reflect the conflicting views of members of the Church Synod, but, if the truth be told, it should have been rejected as a political statement that was a travesty of the truth.