This week, the Archbishop of Canterbury is visiting Israel/Palestine and meeting with Palestinian Christians there, who have made a plea for churches in the West to support them and campaign for peace in the region. For reasons I will explain below, I think this visit, like the earlier one by Rachel Treweek, Graham Usher, and Guli Francis-Dehqani (bishops of Gloucester, Norwich, and Chelmsford) are disastrous for the Church of England, for Jews in Britain, and for our relationship with the Jewish community.
The Archbishop, Sarah Mullally, has been posting daily on Facebook about her meetings in Israel/Palestine. Like the three bishops before her, she went to the home of Layan Nasir, who was detained without trial in the Israeli Government, and appears to have become the representative of such people.
The presentation of this on social media and in articles is that here is someone who is experiencing unjust oppression; we must stand with the unjust; and therefore we must stand with Layan. What very few people ever do in these situations is asked why she was detained.
The reason is that she was in the leadership of a student organisation, Democratic Progressive Student Pole (DPSP), which (it is claimed) was welcoming new students to Birzeit University. This Arabic human rights website argues that the proscribing of DPSP is oppressive, against free expression, and the maintenance of an ‘apartheid’ regime:
The intention of maintaining the apartheid regime is a core element of the definition of the crime of apartheid under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Israel spearheads a protracted campaign of silencing, intimidation, smears, and de-legitimization in pursuit of this goal imposed through various policies including mass arbitrary detention, systematic torture, and other forms of ill-treatment against individuals or groups seeking to challenge its apartheid regime.
This is language designed to appeal to liberals in the West, in order to recruit their support, which it appears to have done very effectively. (There is no mention here, of course, of human rights in Arab countries.)
But what the website won’t tell you is that DPSP is the student arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) at Birzeit University.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP; Arabic: الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين, romanized: al-Jabha ash-Shaʿbiyya li-Taḥrīr Filasṭīn)[4] is a Palestinian Marxist–Leninist[5] organization founded in 1967 by George Habash. It has consistently been the second-largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the largest being Fatah.
A secular organization, the PFLP has generally taken a hard line on Palestinian national aspirations, opposing the more moderate stance of Fatah. It does not recognize Israel and promotes a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The military wing of the PFLP is called the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades.
The PFLP pioneered armed aircraft-hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[6] More recently, the group has participated in the ongoing Gaza war alongside Hamas and other allied Palestinian factions.[7][8][9][10] It has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States,[11] Japan,[12] Canada[13] and the European Union.[14]
In particular, the PFLP was involved in the atrocities of 7th October 2023.
The controversy about Layan Nasir was the lack of due process in relation to her detention. But we need to put it in context, that she was in leadership of the student wing of an organisation in an active terrorist war, involving torturing and slaughtering Israelis. A comparison would be someone who was leading a student wing of the IRA at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland.
Read it all at Psephizo
