As the debate on Israel/Palestine began at the General Synod of the Church of England on Sunday evening, the chair of the debate issued some words of advice, given the sensitive nature of the matter at hand: “Can I ask members to consider carefully the language that they use.” They didn’t. And what followed was a disgrace.

The motion being debated was proposed by the Diocese of Carlisle – basically Cumbria – which the 2021 census tells me has some 50-150 Jews living there. With this extensive experience of living amongst Jewish people, the Carlisle Diocese has urged the General Synod to receive a number of documents written by Palestinian Christians that condemn Israel as a “colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity” – yes, they use that horrible word entity – and that “Genocide is a cumulative process – one that began in the minds of the settler-colonial powers of Europe when they denied the image of God in others and legitimised death, domination and slavery. We consider the State of Israel, established in 1948, to be built on racism and the ideology of ethnic or religious superiority.”

It is important to note that this document doesn’t say that the Israeli government’s response to the massacre of October 7 was so excessive that the word genocide comes into view – they go way further than this and say that Israel was a genocidal project from the very beginning.

Read it all in The Jewish Chronicle