The Israel genocide delusion of the Church of England

Not one Church of England bishop voted against the motion to “hear” the Kairos II manifesto entitled “A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide.” The manifesto alleges that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, that Israel’s war on Hamas is not self-defense, that Palestinians are the “indigenous” people in the land and Jews are “settler colonialists,” and that Christian Zionism has produced “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.”

We will examine each allegation in turn and then argue that this recent vote is profoundly un-Anglican.

The word “genocide” comes from the Greek genos for “tribe/race/nation” and the Latin caedere “to kill.” In 1948, the United Nations defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious groups” (emphasis added).

If Israel has been intending to destroy Palestinian civilians in Gaza, why has it regularly sent Arab-language warnings before attacks? Why did it repeatedly evacuate civilians through humanitarian corridors? Why does it use foot soldiers on dangerous missions in booby-trapped areas when it could kill far more from the air with bombs? As British Colonel Richard Kemp told the BBC in the midst of the war, “I don’t think there’s ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.”

No genocidal government delivers humanitarian aid to a people it intends to destroy. Recent reports calculate that Israel has facilitated the delivery of 1.78 million tons of food into Gaza, triple the amount of nutrition necessary for daily requirements according to the World Food Program.

During the Allied bombing of German cities in World War II, the Allies never organized food deliveries to civilians in unsurrendered areas. Their bombs killed an estimated 350,000-600,000 German civilians.

In genuine genocides, the vast majority of a population is exterminated. In the Holocaust, 67% of European Jews were killed. Eighty-five percent of Tutsis were murdered in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and 80% of Armenians were massacred in Turkish-controlled lands in 1915-17. 

If we accept numbers from the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry, 81,000 people in Gaza have perished in the Gaza war. Most Western estimates figure that at least half were combatants.  But if we accept the total numbers, it is helpful to recognize that 81,000 is only 4% of Gaza’s population of two million. And as Britain’s 2024 report by the Henry Jackson Society showed, this figure distinguishes neither natural deaths nor between terrorists and civilians, so the number likely conceals the deaths of roughly 40,000 terrorists. This would bring the deaths of civilians to about 40,000 or 2% of Gaza’s population.

To put it crudely, if Israel is intending genocide, it is remarkably ineffective.

In short, while the IDF’s policy is to protect civilians when feasible, Hamas targets civilians.  Article 7 in the Hamas Charter says, “Fight the Jews and kill them” wherever they “hide.”

Is the Church of England correct when it suggests agreement with the manifesto’s accusation that Israel’s war on Hamas was not in self-defense? 

On October 7, 2023, thousands of Gazan terrorists and civilians swarmed nearby Jewish enclaves and left 1,182 dead and more than 4,000 wounded. Civilians were targeted with precision. Children were shot in front of their parents, women raped, elderly set on fire, young and old were shot and hacked to death. There were gang rapes and sexual mutilation of both living and dead. Two hundred fifty-one hostages were taken.

The aim of the war since then has been to destroy the army that started the war and has declared its intention to annihilate Israel and all Jews. Do we doubt that our own nation would launch a war in self-defense against an army that attacks it and intends to destroy it?

Unless the Church of England bishops are so intimidated by fear of Muslim backlash that they omit mention of these barbarities and ongoing Islamist attacks on Christians in England, their silence about the persecution of Christian Palestinians by their Muslim cousins in Palestinian-controlled territories is baffling. Why don’t they vote to “hear” the cries of Christians in Nigeria, where they are being regularly slaughtered by Islamists? Or the cries of Christians around the Middle East and across the Muslim world, whose greatest threats come from those Muslim governments? Or the cries of Christians persecuted in Syria (not to mention India, China, and North Korea)? Why don’t they note the decline of the Christian population in Gaza before the war and in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, but the steady increase of the Christian population since 1948 in Jewish Israel? Is it because they are afraid to name the enemy-that-must-not-be-named? And they have an obsession with Israel, the only country in the Middle East where Christians have religious freedom?

The Kairos II claim that Palestinians are the land’s indigenous people is risible. Joshua and his tribes conquered much of the land 3,400 years ago, and Jews were the majority population until AD 135, but remained in clusters on the land for the next 16 centuries until their massive return started in the 19th century. This means Jews were the indigenous people for two millennia before the Muslim empire started to colonize the land in the 7th century AD. Therefore, like everything else in this manifesto, its claims are upside-down. The Jews are the indigenous people, and Muslims are the interlopers.

It was only 69 years ago that the manifesto’s authors started calling themselves Palestinians.  Before 1967, they called themselves Jordanians because in 1950 Jordan illegally took control of Judea and Samaria, ignoring protests from the Arab League. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian academic and activist, concedes that it is “a relatively recent tradition which argues that Palestinian nationalism has deep historical roots.” This “anachronistically read[s] back in to the history of Palestine … a nationalist consciousness and identity that are in fact relatively modern.”

Has Christian Zionism produced “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing”? In her book The Trouble with Islam Today, the Muslim writer Irshad Manji has written forcefully against the allegation of Israeli apartheid: “At only 20% of the population, would Arabs even be eligible for election if they squirmed under the thumb of apartheid? Would an apartheid state extend voting rights to women and the poor in local elections, which Israel did for the first time in the history of Palestinian Arabs?” Do the bishops know that today in Israel, there is an Arab on Israel’s Supreme Court? What apartheid state would permit that?

Our final point is that this dismissal of Christian Zionism is not only ignorant of its deep roots in Anglican history but also demonstrates a certain hermeneutical tone-deafness.

As far back as the 16th and 17th centuries, Anglican thinkers started using the Reformation hermeneutic (or way of interpreting Scripture) of the plain sense (rather than the allegorical way of interpreting the Old Testament). Using this hermeneutic, they rejected Luther’s and Calvin’s supersessionism —the idea that after the time of Jesus, the Jewish people and land were superseded in God’s plans by the Gentile Church and all the lands of the world. 

In his Christian Zionism and English National Identity 1600-1850, Andrew Crome argues that Anglican priest Thomas Brightman criticized “over allegorization” of biblical promises to the Jews. Brightman used the historical-grammatical hermeneutic of Protestantism to argue that “there is nothing more certain” in the Hebrew prophets than the promise that the Jews will “return to Jerusalem again.”

One of Brightman’s disciples was Sir Henry Finch, Member of Parliament and Hebrew scholar. His 1621 book The World’s Great Restauration, or, The Calling of the Jews, predicted the return of the Jews to the land.

In 1817, Bishop Thomas Newton of Bristol published a 2-volume commentary on biblical prophecy that became widely popular. Other Anglican bishops like Richard Hurd of Worcester and Samuel Horsley of Rochester published books popularizing the idea that England’s role in the end times was to restore the Jews to their homeland.

By the 19th century, dispensationalists were making similar predictions but disapproved of political engagement. Anglicans were not dispensationalists and promoted political action, in part to atone for England’s antisemitic past. 

This motivated the most effective Anglican Christian Zionist of the nineteenth century, social reformer Anthony Ashley Cooper, better known as the Earl of Shaftesbury. It was Shaftesbury’s advocacy for a Jewish homeland that laid the foundation for the Balfour Declaration (1917), a publicized  letter from the British foreign secretary declaring that Britain would seek “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The letter contributed significantly to the League of Nations assigning to Britain in 1922 control over the regions that are now Jordan and Israel, which in turn helped stimulate the United Nations partition plan for Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Shaftesbury was ashamed of England’s history as the first Western nation to ban Jews from its soil in 1290. He hoped that England would be the first gentile nation to stop the pattern of “treading down Jerusalem” (Luke 21:24).

Shaftesbury noticed that ever since England started sheltering Jews under Cromwell and Charles II, England had prospered. The same was true for tiny Holland. But Spain, which had once been a superpower, declined after it expelled Jews in 1492. Shaftesbury contemplated in his journal the import of the biblical promise that God would bless those who blessed Israel and curse those who dishonor her (Gen 12:3).

It is striking that in this manifesto and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s explanation for her receiving it, there are zero acknowledgements that the New Testament contains both implicit and explicit endorsements of God’s land promise to his Jewish people. Jesus, for example, declares that God inscribed even the smallest stroke of the pen in all the Old Testament (Matt 5:18), where the land promise is repeated explicitly 500 times and implicitly 500 other times. In a sermon preached more than 25 years after he met Jesus, Paul told a synagogue in Antioch of Psidia (in today’s Turkey) that “the God of this people Israel chose our fathers … and after destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave [the people of Israel] the land [of the Canaanites] as an inheritance” (Acts 13:17-19).

The July 13 vote by the leaders of the Church of England has confirmed to the majority of global Anglicans the reasons why they rejected Canterbury’s leadership in 2023. They can see that once again those leaders have rejected history, facts on the ground, biblical promises, and their own Anglican roots.