Church of England backs Palestinian Christians despite backlash

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The Church of England’s national parliament, the General Synod, has voted to stand in solidarity with Palestinian Christians and “hear” their experiences despite backlash from Jewish counterparts.

The decision, reached on Monday morning after the debate began a day prior, stemmed from a motion calling for engagement with documents issued by Palestinian churches titled Kairos Palestine and Kairos Palestine II.

Kairos documents

In the Kairos Palestine document, which was launched in 2009, church leaders described experiences of Christians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza and called for an end to Israeli occupation.

“Our presence in this land, as Christian and Muslim Palestinians, is not accidental but rather deeply rooted in the history and geography of this land, resonant with the connectedness of any other people to the land it lives in,” Kairos Palestine stated.

“The West sought to make amends for what Jews had endured in the countries of Europe, but it made amends on our account and in our land. They tried to correct an injustice and the result was a new injustice,” it added.

In 2025, the collective issued a new document named Kairos Palestine II – A Moment of Truth: Faith in the Time of Genocide, which took into account Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and continued attacks by both Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied Palestinian territory.

“In light of all this, we must call things by their proper names: Israel is a colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity built upon the displacement of the indigenous population and its replacement with new settlers,” the latest document read.

But the documents received backlash during the debate for the language they used to describe Israeli actions.

Addressing the criticism of the documents, the Ven Stewart Fyfe, archdeacon of West Cumberland in the Diocese of Carlisle, opened the debate on Sunday and acknowledged that some of the language in the documents was “challenging”, but he said it was written after the war on Gaza.

“If the language is challenging, it comes from a place of deep trauma,” he said.

“Would we, in any other circumstances, say to survivors of trauma, ‘You can’t use that language; you are wrong; this is not true?’ Would we not receive their disclosure and seek understanding? That is what this motion calls for,” Fyfe said.

Since October 2023, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed at least 73,250 people and injured 173,751, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Criticism

Following the passing of the motion, an open statement signed by 1,877 people as of Friday, titled A Christian Declaration Against Kairos II and led by Regan King, pastor of The Angel Church in Islington, London, called on churches to reject the document.

“It is our conviction that Kairos II is not in the interests of Palestinian Christians and only serves to hinder the cause of peace,” the letter read.

“The document falsely and without substantiation accuses Israel of genocide in relation to its war on Hamas and terror factions in Gaza to rescue hostages and destroy Hamas’ capabilities,” it added.

Last year, a United Nations commission found that Israeli authorities and forces committed genocidal acts in Gaza as defined by the 1948 Geneva Convention, including killings and the destruction of Palestinian life in the besieged enclave.

The United Kingdom’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis also condemned the decision taken by the Synod to engage with the Kairos II document.

“This is a document full of falsehood, which openly rejects dialogue, uses extreme rhetoric to challenge the very existence of Israel and objects to existing peace agreements in the region,” Mirvis wrote on X on Tuesday.

“Though it poses as a route to understanding, Kairos II in fact functions as an egregious barrier to it, reducing one of the world’s most complex conflicts to a single, warped narrative, which can only harm the cause of peace,” he added.

‘Difficult conversations’

Still, the archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, told the Synod that hearing the experiences of Palestinian Christians in the document did not mean the Church agreed with everything being said.

“The urgency of the situation in the Holy Land demands that we have difficult conversations,” she said.

“We must listen to those things that are hard to hear, and take the risk of engaging across divides.

“As a pastor, I hear the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers – a cry that rises from the ruins of Gaza, and from the violence and oppression of the West Bank,” she added.

The Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs in Palestine welcomed the Church of England’s decision on Tuesday and said it carried weight because of the Church’s influence on British life, with some bishops serving in the House of Lords, the second chamber of the British Parliament.

“This decision reflects the growing awareness within the global churches of the reality of the situation in Palestine, the importance of listening to the voice of the Palestinian churches,” it said.

The committee added that Mullally recently visited the occupied West Bank, met with several Palestinian religious and political figures and “listened to the reality of churches and Christian communities”.

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