By Paul M
The 2026 Synod of the Church of England has concluded its final session, in York. Under the leadership of Archbishop Sarah Mullally (who gives an irresistible feeling that she’s really Alan Bennett in drag) the Synod decided to “hear” a document imaginatively titled “A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide,” otherwise known as “Kairos II.” Not to “receive” it, mind you, that would be totally different: Receiving would indicate approval, hearing merely means to take it seriously. They can always receive it after they’ve heard it, if it seems worth the extra bother.
What’s in “Faith in a Time of Genocide”? The title pretty much gives it away. It contains no truth and little to do with faith, but it does whiff of a wished-for genocide. That Israel is genocidal is a given, in no need of further, or any, proof. “Genocide” and “genocidal” are charged, on average, slightly more than twice per page—the standard tactic, by now, of repeating the word over and over to make everyone at home with it. “Apartheid” gets only 14 turns, one per page, but “colonize” and its derivatives do better at 25. You get the idea. The buzzwords are the garnish, the entrée is this: Zionism is genocide and ethnic cleansing and racism and supremacism and colonialism—sorry, settler colonialism, which had to be invented when too many people noted that there’s no metropole for the Jews’ “colony.” Zionists, we are informed three paragraphs after the introduction, want the “displacement, death or submission” of all Palestinians and the Zionist project is “to seize all of Palestine, emptied of its Palestinian people.” These are not arguments, presented with evidence, they are simply asserted. Kairos II doesn’t counsel neighbourly relations between two peoples, because Kairos II’s Zionists are the epitome of evil and must be swept away. In its way, it closes an old circle: For about sixty years from the 1920s the rhetoric was “We’re going to soak the desert with Jewish blood. We’re going to drive them into the sea.” For the next sixty it was “Two states. Land for peace. Concessions to show goodwill.” (Only Israeli concessions, because Israel had the upper hand.) With Kairos II, the air is cleared again. It’s saying “We’re going to soak the desert with Jewish blood while you to push them into the sea for us.”
Why should anyone care? The Synod can give its consideration to anything it likes. In our era, the practical consequences of anything the Church of England does are typically negligible; it bears the same, decorative relationship to moral authority now that Britain’s monarchy does to law (though authority had to be ripped from the King’s fist; the Church threw it away without a fight). But not in this case. Even if it never moves from heard to received the same malignant souls who have been pressing the attack on Jews everywhere and who came up with Kairos II will do everything they can to blur the delicate distinction. They will make sure that the message everyone hears is that the Church welcomed “Faith in a Time of Genocide” into its highest councils. Then they will add the Church to the list of Very Important Bodies that they cite to prove how evil Israel must be. And added to all the other walking dead on that list: Amnesty, the UN, the New York Times, the ICJ, the ICC et al., the Church’s name will again have some heft. Maybe that’s the attraction, a bit of borrowed relevance for a dying titan, like a cameo appearance for a nearly-forgotten movie star.
And yet, if the floundering, anchorless leaders of the Anglican Church actually wanted to play a real role, a role to make a difference in the bitter conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, a golden opportunity has just dropped into their laps. Having now heard the Palestinian Christians via Kairos II they could, if they had any remnant of a moral compass, reply to them in this vein:
We have nothing but sympathy for the suffering of your innocents. We have heard you and your words have helped us understand the true nature of the problem as never before. As your brothers and sisters in Christ, and out of deep love for you, for justice and for truth, it is our duty to stand and say plainly: You have suffered terribly. You are indigenous to the land. You have a legitimate claim to land and to sovereignty. But each of these things is true also of the Jews and it is your own unending refusal to accept that truth, so amply demonstrated by Kairos II, that is at the root of your suffering. If you could kill the Jews or drive them off the land it would be as great an injustice to them as you now claim for yourselves. If you continue to try, how can you complain when they resist you? Is it all Israel’s fault that the two-state solution never comes closer when you deny the justice or possibility of any state but your own? We have heard your characterizations of Zionism and Christian Zionism. Justice demands that they be spoken for not only by their enemies but by their friends. We reject your demand to “boycott dialogue with Zionism,” meaning, of course, Zionists themselves (and therefore the great majority of Jews). Out of respect for the Jewish people and their Christian allies, out of Christian humility and a desire to know the truth, we will listen with equal attention while the representative voices of the Jewish community and the leaders of Christian Zionism explain what Zionism means to Zionists and what suffering the conflict has inflicted on them.
That response—hopefully in better words—would breathe life into all the hollow protestations of care, justice and goodwill for all. It would have the merit of being not just true, but provable from Kairos II itself. It would point both to the root of the conflict and to the way out. The Church of England does still have enough stature that it could weather the storm that would surely follow, and its stature would only grow among the people who matter: Christians.
Could the modern Church do something like that? That’s the fly in the ointment. It would require basic principles fixed on something solid, not retrofitted to the cause du jour. Do Archbishop Mullally and her Church still have those? If they did, wouldn’t they have dismissed the poisonous Kairos II document out of hand and unheard? Cross your fingers for the Jews, but prepare to weep for the Church of England.
