Coren | It can be healthy to debate Israel and Palestine but on the ground little will change

2026/07/21 Leave a comment

Good discussion regarding the Church of England’s reference to genocide:

…In a highly controversial vote, they encouraged congregations to read and engage with “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide,” a report by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide and describes the country as a “colonial enterprise.” In other words, the report wasn’t adopted as church policy but accepted as a “heartfelt expression of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians.”

The country’s chief rabbi described the decision as “shameful” and a “sad day for Jewish-Christian relations” and numerous Anglicans have complained that the language used is unnecessarily provocative, one-sided, and taken directly out of a Marxist playbook.

That’s harsh because Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally and fellow bishops have repeatedly and passionately condemned antisemitism, and during the debate she spoke of “the pain and trauma of the appalling 7 October attacks” that remains, “a daily reality for Jewish people in Israel and around the world.”

While Palestinians certainly and understandably feel as if they’re constant victims of colonialism, Zionism itself was an ideology produced by desperation rather than a policy based on exploitation. The 1290 expulsion from England was one of many throughout Europe, accompanied by mass slaughter, terror, discrimination, and eventually the Holocaust. Jews in Arab countries were expelled from where they’d lived for centuries between 1948 and the 1970s. Where else could all of these people go apart from to a land where they have proven historic and genetic links?

As for genocide, we often hear that scholars of the subject believe that the Gaza campaign and the general Israeli approach to Palestine is indeed genocidal. Actually, there’s a profound division among experts. While Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is often unjust and the military campaign in Gaza appallingly costly, does Israel seriously want to murder every single Palestinian wherever they live?

The most infamous example of genocide was the Nazi attempt to eliminate the Jews as a people and expunge them from human consciousness. It was industrial mass slaughter and had nothing to do with national security or territorial expansion. Surely, we can criticize Israeli actions without employing such language.

Perhaps if the Israel-Palestine issue had been more thoroughly and openly discussed in the past, and if churches had had the courage to do so, the narrative would now be more considered, but some of those currently so outraged by the synod decision were in the past the fiercest opponents of any sort of dissent. Yes, it’s true that Israel is treated differently than other countries by its opponents, but also by its supporters. Double standards do have that tendency.

The fuss over all this will continue for a while but on the ground in Israel and Palestine it will change little. Those at the synod were good people rather than a performative street mob and genuinely do seek peace and progress. They also look to a Jewish Messiah who told his followers to shock the world with their ideas and guaranteed them that it wouldn’t be easy. He preached all this largely to a Jewish people living in a Jewish land, and the irony of it all should be obvious.

Something has to change but language matters very much indeed.

Source: Opinion | It can be healthy to debate Israel and Palestine but on the ground little will change

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Hewitt: In its progress and pain, Windrush brought us the birth of modern, multicultural Britain

2024/06/24 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Being London-born of Barbadian and Indian parentage, racial difference was part of my upbringing. However, my first experiences of racism would be transmitted subliminally. I was a child of the 1970s, and programming such as The Fosters, Desmond’s and Empire Road, which portrayed the Black experience in Britain, couldn’t counteract the effects of the dominant media messaging coming from The Black and White Minstrel Show, nor overcome the persistent characterisation of Africa as the “dark continent”, and as “backward” and “savage”.

This racism came back into view with the Windrush scandal in 2018. The assertion that the affair was the unintended consequence of the hostile environment immigration policy was best countered by former Guardian columnist Gary Younge who argued that this persecution was “no accident” but rather “cruelty by design”. For Younge, a chronicler of the Black experience in Britain, the Caribbean and US, “this is not a glitch in the system. It is the system … A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.”

Too often, racism is perceived as bad acts perpetrated by the warped mindsets of unsavoury individuals. However, this oversimplification neglects to recognise the embedded racialised policies, procedures, practices and power relations that undermine the equity of systems and the fairness of institutions. The Home Office is one such institution where racism was embedded in its culture.

The Windrush victims found genuine sympathy among large swathes of British society. But also some resistance. There is undoubtedly a reticence among some Britons to really listen to arguments for racial justice. The reasons are many: an English tradition of avoiding uncomfortable conversations; the highly contested and polarised debates dominated by a small, vociferous group for whom colonialism was an act of benevolence; a zero-sum mindset perceiving benefits to some coming at the expense of others; and a selective memory when it comes to our colonial history – and wilful misunderstanding, too.

These rationalisations serve to place the burden of responsibility for tackling racism on to victims rather than the perpetrators – and have made it difficult for the Windrush victims to receive the justice they deserve.

Black and other minority ethnic groups are held to a different standard compared to the victims of other miscarriages of justice. Windrush victims have been required to prove their case “beyond reasonable doubt” rather than “on the balance of probabilities” in order to access compensation, with some suffering the ignominious request to undergo DNA testing to prove they are related to their immediate family. The government has also rolled back three key recommendations of the Windrush Lessons Learned Review. But I am ecstatic, as I am sure are the wider Windrush generation, that this decision was found to be unlawful in a high court ruling this month.

In 2022, I was appointed the Church of England’s director of racial justice to implement From Lament to Action, the Church’s commitment to overcoming its institutional racism. The report of the Archbishops’ Antiracism Taskforce affirmed the “urgency of now” noting: “A failure to act now will be seen as another indication, potentially a last straw for many, that the Church is not serious about racial sin.”

A journey of healing and repair has already begun. In 2020, the Church of England’s ruling body, the General Synod, issued an apology for the racismdirected at the Windrush generation, whether through direct hostility by some congregations or the absence of welcome by others, since their arrival in the 1940s and 1950s. While 69% of West Indians attended a historic denominational church in the Caribbean (Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational or Baptist), only 4% of those arriving in Britain continued to worship in the same tradition.

This apology was accompanied by a statement from the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, accepting that the church was “still deeply institutionally racist”. Since then, research has concluded into the historic linkages between the church and African chattel enslavement and a £100m Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice established, with aims to increase it to £1bn. Racial justice is not yet embedded in the church’s mission, but I can attest to the fact that we as an institution choose to stand against the evil and pernicious sin of racism. There is much work to do, but I hope we can be a model for genuine reflection on the injustices experienced by Black and ethnic minority communities in the UK – and for how true justice can be achieved.

James Baldwin, once, briefly, a neighbour of my parents in London, wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” At the heart of all racial progress in Britain must lie an acceptance that there are inequities to be challenged – the Windrush scandalproved that to be true. So let us use this day to honour those West Indians whose landing at Tilbury Docks on 22 June 1948 symbolised the birth of modern, multicultural Britain. For they, for I – for we all – belong here.

Guy Hewitt is the inaugural director of racial justice in the Church of England, a priest and former high commissioner to the UK. He was born in London and raised in Barbados

Source: In its progress and pain, Windrush brought us the birth of modern, multicultural Britain

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