by Rosa Silverman, Telegraph
Rt Rev Philip North tells The Telegraph why the Synod ‘hearing’ a document criticising Israel will have real repercussions for British Jews
On the streets of urban Lancashire, war in the Middle East looms large.
“Just down the road from me,” says the Bishop of Blackburn, the Rt Rev Philip North, “is an enormous, very complex, overlapping set of Muslim communities. What unites them is Gaza and a really visceral, intense antipathy towards the state of Israel.”
But there is also what he calls a “tiny, beleaguered” Jewish community. “Part of my job is to listen to the leaders of both sides, and that Jewish community is close to no longer feeling welcome in the UK,” he says.
That task has been made all the harder, he believes, by a document heard by the General Synod this week describing Israel as a “colonial enterprise” that unleashed a “genocidal war on Gaza”.
Titled A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, and known as Kairos II, the report was produced by a group of Palestinian Christians. It was one of a list of documents contained in a Synod motion expressing the Church’s solidarity with them and their fellow Palestinians.
While the final motion lamented the loss of Israeli and Palestinian lives, and “the violations of human dignity and rights on both sides”, Bishop North fears the Church’s decision to “hear” Kairos II could have real repercussions for British Jews.
“We’ve been forced to take a binary position, and whatever binary position we take, one side celebrates and the other feels bitterly betrayed,” he says. “The situation we’ve seen is there’s a Palestinian Muslim and Christian side celebrating, and I fear what this vote has done is add to a growing tide of anti-Semitism in our country.”
Read also: C of E shamefully opens the door to anti-Semitism by Bepi Pezzulli, TCW