Church of England backs Palestinian Christians despite backlash
The Church of England passed a motion to hear about the experiences of Palestinian Christians from the Kairos documents. The Church of England’s national parliament
The Church of England passed a motion to hear about the experiences of Palestinian Christians from the Kairos documents. The Church of England’s national parliament, the General Synod, has voted to stand in solidarity with Palestinian Christians and “hear” their experiences despite backlash from Jewish counterparts. The decision, reached on Monday morning after the debate began a day prior, stemmed from a motion calling for engagement with documents issued by Palestinian churches titled Kairos Palestine and Kairos Palestine II. According to a statement by the Church of England, the motion was passed to stand in solidarity with Palestinian Christians, “their fellow Palestinians in non-violent resistance to the ongoing occupation” and “reaffirm our commitment to inter-faith dialogue, including Christian-Jewish dialogue”. Kairos documents In the Kairos Palestine document, which was launched in 2009, church leaders described experiences of Christians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza and called for an end to Israeli occupation. “Our presence in this land, as Christian and Muslim Palestinians, is not accidental but rather deeply rooted in the history and geography of this land, resonant with the connectedness of any other people to the land it lives in,” Kairos Palestine stated. “The West sought to make amends for what Jews had endured in the countries of Europe, but it made amends on our account and in our land. They tried to correct an injustice and the result was a new injustice,” it added.
In 2025, the collective issued a new document named Kairos Palestine II – A Moment of Truth: Faith in the Time of Genocide, which took into account Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and continued attacks by both Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied Palestinian territory. “In light of all this, we must call things by their proper names: Israel is a colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity built upon the displacement of the indigenous population and its replacement with new settlers,” the latest document read. But the documents received backlash during the debate for the language they used to describe Israeli actions. Addressing the criticism of the documents, the Ven Stewart Fyfe, archdeacon of West Cumberland in the Diocese of Carlisle, opened the debate on Sunday and acknowledged that some of the language in the documents was “challenging”, but he said it was written after the war on Gaza. “If the language is challenging, it comes from a place of deep trauma,” he said. “Would we, in any other circumstances, say to survivors of trauma, ‘You can’t use that language; you are wrong; this is not true?’ Would we not receive their disclosure and seek understanding? That is what this motion calls for,” Fyfe said. Since October 2023, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed at least 73,250 people and injured 173,751, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
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