Last night, Hezbollah attacked northern Israel with long range missiles, one of which hit Nazareth.
Since Christians believe that Nazareth is where Jesus spent his childhood it is an important, even sacred town for them. One might therefore expect that the Church of England’s clergy would voice horrified condemnation of Hezbollah.
You think? I haven’t been able to find a single such utterance. From the Archbishop of Canterbury: nothing. From the bishops of Gloucester, Chelmsford, Norwich and Southwark: nothing. Instead, they have expressed horrified condemnation of … how did you guess? And as ever from the Church of England hierarchy, this condemnation is based on venomous and ignorant bigotry.
Today’s Observer carries a letter from four church prelates. It accuses the Israelis of the “forceful dispossession of the Kisiya family from their ancestral land in the al-Makhrour valley outside Bethlehem”.
The clerics wrote:
The Israeli authorities have demolished their home and restaurant many times over the last 12 years and allowed an illegal settlement to be established on their land, but until now the family have continued to find ways to farm there.
This is a very human tragedy but, as the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion (22 July 2024) recognised, Israel’s ongoing occupation and its associated policies of settlement construction and the forcible transfer of Palestinians from their lands and their homes are, despite Israel’s protestations, in violation of international law and must end immediately.The Israeli government must stop acting as if it is above the law.
The four who signed this letter were Rachel Treweek, bishop of Gloucester; Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, bishop of Chelmsford; Graham Usher, bishop of Norwich and Christopher Chessun, bishop of Southwark. Today the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, wrote on X:
This is an urgent and important intervention by my fellow bishops and I support them in it. The oppression, violence and discrimination against Palestinians in the West Bank, including Christians, must cease. The Israeli government is not above the law and must stop acting otherwise.
Steadfast Christian families such as the Kisiya family, whose ancestral land has been forcibly stolen from them, remain especially in my prayers. We continue to stand in prayerful solidarity with our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers as they resist the injustice of occupation.
The story of this family has long been taken up by anti-Israel activists. But there’s a very different story about this. On Israel National News last month, Sheri Oz wrote:
If what I am reading in the court protocols from 2014 to the present day provides the true story, we have here an amazing fairy tale put forth by a stubborn and dedicated liar who refuses to let the truth get in his way. And sharing in his delusional disorder are Jewish leftist activists who do not let even the last court verdict sway them. But don’t just believe me — I provide links to the court documents (Hebrew) and you can read them yourselves.
Almost every day, the Israeli NGOs, Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) and Combatants for Peace (CfP), are out there demonstrating, backing the claims of Ramzi Qasiyeh and his wife. In an email to supporters, CfP writes: “As you read this, a Palestinian family in the ‘West Bank’, in Beit Jala, is facing violent settler land theft as Israeli soldiers back the settlers. CfP activists are on the ground, putting their bodies on the line to stop this injustice. [emphasis in the original]
And: “This Palestinian [Arab] family holds a deep connection to their land and its necessity for their livelihood. In 2012, they built a home and restaurant on their property. However, in 2019, the Israeli army arbitrarily demolished both. In 2023, settlers challenged the family’s ownership and the family overcame them by obtaining their land deed through the Israeli court. The family has remained steadfast since and continues to farm their fields.”
In court, Qasiyeh claims that he inherited the plot from his father who bought it from its former owners.
Let us unpack this:
- In 2005, Ramzi Qasiyeh got a stop-work order from the Israeli Civil Administration (המנכל האזרחי – haminhal ha’ezrahi or Haminhal) regarding illegal construction on the land.
- By 2012, Qasiyeh had built a home and a restaurant he called al-Makhrur after the valley in which the land is situated. He challenged a new demolition order in Israel’s Supreme Court (SC) in 2014 (case 5874/14) and his petition was rejected. In other words, he lost.
- That did not stop him from rebuilding without even requesting a permit (the restaurant was last reviewed on Tripadvisor in 2019). In fact, Qasiyeh had petitioned the SC in 2016 and 2018 to vacate subsequent demolition orders (cases 6667/16 and 2088/18) and both petitions were rejected. Therefore, the demolition in 2019 was not arbitrary, as CfP writes in their email.
- The judgments to demolish were based on evidence that the land was privately owned by Hemnutah and reversing this requires going to the lower court, Therefore, Qasiyeh filed a suit in the Jerusalem court (not settlers as CfP says), saying that he had inherited the land and it was his.
- In May 2023, the final judgment came down (63103-07-19 ת”א ). It clearly stated that the property claimed by Qasiyeh is not owned by Qasiyeh and he is forbidden from even entering the plot. One year later, illegal construction was again found and it was taken down on July 30, 2024.
I read the court protocol in which Qasiyeh’s claim to land ownership was decided. He did not submit a bill of sale transferring the land from the previous owner to his father or a will bequeathing the land to him. The document Qasiyeh put into evidence to support his claim of ownership was, in fact, simply a document saying he paid taxes. Here it is held up proudly in misleading campaign photos such as this CfP “X” post as if it proves ownership.
The NGOs claim this is a deed for the property even after the court decided this is not proof of anything other than paying taxes. Perhaps it can be compared to someone saying that because they paid arnona (municipal taxes) on a rental property they own it.
On the other hand, Hemnutah (a subsidiary of the Jewish National Fund aka Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael) did provide proof of officially having registered their ownership of the property in 1969. Hemnutah won their countersuit against Qasiyeh and the latter has to pay the former rental fees of NIS 18,000 for having used the land since 2012 plus NIS 20,000 in court costs.
In a post entitled, URGENT: UNITED FRONT TO RECLAIM STOLEN LAND, RHR wrote on Facebook:
“On August 5, we discovered that the military’s justification for enforcing the eviction is based on a civil administration order that is not related to the Kisiya family’s plot in Al-Makhrour. The order actually applies to another area entirely—Wadi Heletz. Accordingly, the eviction of the Kisiya family and the forceful actions taken by the army against them and against activists offering support are illegal. [emphasis added]”
Maybe someone should tell them that Wadi Makhrur and Wadi Heletz are one and the same.(!) Middle East botany expert, Prof. Avi Shmida wrote: “Suddenly (2021), after 2000 years, during which the river valley was called Wadi Heletz, it became ‘Wadi Makhrur’.”
Neither RHR nor CfP have responded to requests to support their belief that the land actually belongs to Ramzi Qasiyeh and why the court decision that it belongs to Hemnutah is wrong.
Did Welby and his four clerics make the slightest attempt to discover the truth of this story? Did they consult the Israeli court records? Did they even ask the Israelis for their side of the story? Of course not. As usual, they believed the claims of those who routinely defame Israel in order to destroy it — just as the International Court of Justice’s opinion was based on exactly the same kind of lies and distortions.
The church hierarchy’s venom towards Israel — as in secular liberal circles — goes beyond reason. For years, clerics have blamed Israel for the flight of Christians from the once-Christian majority town of Bethlehem, even though a) the town is run by Muslims who are actually responsible for oppressing and terrorising the town’s Christians; b) not even Israel’s worst enemies claim that Israel has a particular animus against Christians anywhere, so why should Christians flee Bethlehem while the Muslims remain? c) Israel is in fact the only country in the Middle East where Christians are safe and thriving.
The deranged nature of the church’s attitude has been illustrated by the bishop of Gloucester, Rachel Treweek — one of the four signatories to the Guardian letter. In July, she called Israel an “apartheid state” and said she stood “boldly” with people who compared the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to how black people were treated in apartheid South Africa.
Since Treweek doesn’t even appear to understand that the Palestinian Arabs of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria aren’t Israeli citizens because these areas aren’t part of Israel — which means that the situation of these Palestinian Arabs is entirely different from the black citizens of South Africa who were disempowered and denied their citizens’ rights under apartheid — she clearly doesn’t even understand what apartheid was. The depths of her ignorance thus exceed even her bigotry.
And on that last point, as I have written on many occasions the church’s bigotry towards Israel is underpinned by theological antisemitism — the revival of the ancient, murderous Christian heresy of supersessionism, now turbo-charged by cynically substituting the Palestinian Arabs for the Christians who, according this heresy, inherited all God’s promises to the Jews who were accordingly denounced as the party of the Devil.
This heresy caused the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in pre-modern Europe. Now it has been re-purposed and re-weaponised to incite murderous hatred of the Jews of Israel.
This most ungodly church has long horrified and embarrassed Christians of integrity who are faithful to the Bible and to the truth. The falsehoods about Israel that the church has has been promoting have played a key role in knocking the west off its moral compass.
In Britain and elsewhere in the world, decent Christians should now rise up and publicly denounce the antisemitism of the church hierarchy and the lies about Israel that it is constantly promoting, and demand that it immediately stop perpetrating such murderous evil.
