- “Christian children are massacred, and everything is done in plain sight. Islamists proclaim on a daily basis that they will not stop until Christianity is wiped off the face of the earth. So are the world Christian bodies denouncing the Islamic forces for the ethnic cleansing, genocide and historic demographic-religious revolution their brethren are suffering? No. Christians these days are busy targeting the Israeli Jews.” — Giulio Meotti, Italian journalist.
- The Kairos document seems to be so egregiously discriminatory that in 2010, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) declared it “supersessionist” and “anti-Semitic.”
- We must ask why a presentation of the work of Kairos in an Anglican church made no reference whatever to the many associations with extremism and denial of a more rational Christian approach to the problems faced by Palestinian Christians.
Last September, during the World Week for Peace in Palestine Israel — an initiative of the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum (PIEF) of the World Council of Churches, St. Thomas’ Church in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, hosted an event titled “Wall Will Fall”.
For anyone unfamiliar with the history, legal issues, and distortions of the Israeli-Arab and Jewish-Muslim conflicts, the deeply one-sided presentations and literature of the event may seem reasonable in the lack of such a context, and this report will, therefore, attempt to rebalance the narrative.
There are, broadly speaking, two clashing narratives about historical and current events in the region. By presenting only one side of the conflict, Wall Will Fall served only to exacerbate the root cause for the failure of peace negotiations: Palestinian rejection of the two state solution. Although Israel was repeatedly condemned — often very harshly — for its treatment of Palestinians, not once in the presentations or in the literature available were the Arabs ever censured for their series of aggressive wars against Israel, or the Palestinians criticized for their decades of terrorist attacks on Israelis, their preaching of anti-Semitic hatred in school textbooks, mosque sermons, summer camps, government-controlled media, and elsewhere. During the event, guilt was placed on one party only: Israel. As we shall argue, Israel is the least likely candidate for censure at such a high level.
Kairos
There were two workshops. One was a PowerPoint presentation and commentary by a local leader of Kairos Britain, an organization based on the much-criticized document, Kairos Palestine. The Kairos document seems to be so egregiously discriminatory that in 2010, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) declared the statement “supersessionist” and “anti-Semitic.” Since the Kairos session and literature associated with it were a core feature of the event, I will analyse the very real and dangerous implications of its support by Christians.
The Kairos Palestine venture was presented as the work of supposedly all Palestine Christians, but it was and is an extremely radical position adopted by a relatively small number of churches and individuals. In 2010, the politically balanced Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East, an organization of Protestants and Catholics in North America, wrote a detailed critique entitled “Cautions to U.S. Churches Regarding the Kairos Palestine Document.” It was endorsed by St. Paul University’s Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations, and by Dialogika (as is made clear on the Christians for Fair Witness website). While treating the Kairos document with respect, the cautions expressed were far-ranging and crucial.
The Cautions document begins by saying that “U.S. Churches cannot adopt this narrative without bringing a critical eye and ear to bear upon it and without similarly listening to an Israeli narrative which also has its truth.” That sort of critical eye and openness to an Israeli narrative was wholly absent from the workshop session I attended. The Cautions document continues: “The Kairos Palestine document states that ‘[the Palestinian] connectedness to this land is a natural right.’ (Sec. 2.3.4) We agree . . . But the Jewish connection to the land is also a natural right. Both Jews and Palestinians have legitimate claims to the land, which can and must be accommodated through a negotiated two-state solution.”
Read the Remainder at Gatestone Institute
“Both Jews and Palestinians have legitimate claims to the land, which can and must be accommodated through a negotiated two-state solution.”
Which won’t ever happen; short of the false peace mentioned in Bible prophecy. The Arab agenda is, and always has been, the destruction of Israel.
I agree. But I think the reason this article was important was to expose this under-stated threat of Christians who stand with the so called “Palestinians” and their continued false hope of this “two state solution”…there is no 2 only 1.