Giulio Meotti, Italian journalist with Il Foglio, remarked on UK clerics during the 2011 Christmas season as preaching "good will to all men," but not, apparently, to Israelis.
Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, made a comparison between Palestinians and Jesus’ passion. “We are to be freshly attentive to the needs of those who, like Jesus himself, are displaced and in discomfort”, he said during his Christmas Mass sermon at Westminster Cathedral. “A shadow falls particularly heavily on the town of Bethlehem tonight … We pray for them tonight.”
Nichols’ sermon has historical value, because now the entire Christian hierarchy in the UK, Catholic and Protestant as well, is part of the global battle against Israel.
There is a virulent animosity towards the Jewish state in the established churches in Britain. At the beginning of the 19th century, the UK Christian clergy was a driving force behind the Zionist enterprise, inspired by a brave interpretation of the Bible. Now, British Christianity is one of the major producers of blood libels against the Jews.
Recently Barry Morgan, the Archbishop of Wales, compared Israel to apartheid in South Africa. “The situation resembles the apartheid system in South Africa because Gaza is next to one of the most sophisticated and modern countries in the world – Israel”, said Morgan.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, joined the Church of England’s General Synod, which voted to disinvest Church funds from “companies that make profits from Israel’s occupation.”
Archbishop Morgan said in a lecture on the relationship between religion and violence: “Messianic Zionism began a policy of cleansing the Promised Land of all Arabs and non-Jews rather than co-existing with them”. Of course, he ignored that the only attempt at “cleansing” has been the Palestinian attempt to kill as many Jews as possible.
According to Bishop John Gladwin, a separate Palestinian state would be merely a “first step”. “Ultimately, one shared land is the vision one would want to pursue”.
Melanie Phillips, a Daily Mail columnist, in a Feb. 16, 2002 article described a meeting of a group of Jews and Christians to discuss the churches' increasing public hostility to Israel. To the amazement of the Jewish participants, the Christians said that the churches' hostility had nothing to do with Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians. This was merely an excuse. The real reason for the growing antipathy, according to the Christians at that meeting, was the ancient hatred of Jews rooted deep inside Christian theology and now on widespread display once again.
A doctrine going back to the early church fathers, suppressed after the Holocaust, had been revived under the influence of the Middle East conflict. This doctrine is called replacement theology. In essence, this says the Jews have been replaced by the Christians in God's favor and so all God's promises to the Jews, including the land of Israel, have been inherited by Christianity.
A highly influential book by the Anglican thinker Colin Chapman,“Whose Promised Land?”(Baker Books, 2002), recycles the worst Christian anti-Jewish theology. “When seen in the context of the whole Bible, however, both Old and New Testaments, the promise of the land to Abraham and his descendants does not give anyone a divine right to possess or to live in the land for all time because the coming of the kingdom of God through Jesus the messiah has transformed and reinterpreted all the promises and prophecies in the Old Testament”, writes Chapman camouflaging anti-Jewish replacement theology …as a dispassionate analysis of the conflict of Israel and the Palestinians.
The majority who have absorbed replacement theology see Zionism as racism and the Jewish state as illegitimate. Clerics and lay people alike are saying openly that Israel should never have been founded at all. One church source said what he was hearing was a 'throwback to the visceral anti-Judaism of the middle ages'.
This is manifested by ascribing to every Israeli action malevolent motives while dismissing Palestinian terrorism and anti-Jewish diatribes; the belief that Jews should be denied the right to self-determination and their state dismantled; the conflation of Zionism and a 'Jewish conspiracy' of vested interests; and the disproportionate venom of the attacks.
Andrew White, canon of Coventry cathedral and the Archbishop of Canterbury's representative in the Middle East, says replacement theology is dominant and present in almost every church in the UK, fueling the venom against Israel. He believes the reason for this revival of replacement theology is because of Palestinian Christian revisionism. After the Holocaust the Vatican officially buried the doctrine, the current Pope affirming the integrity of the Jewish people and recognizing the state of Israel. But, according to White, the doctrine is 'still vibrant' within Roman Catholic and Anglican pews. 'Almost all the Churches hold to replacement theology,' he says.
The catalyst for its re-emergence has been the attempt by Arab Christians to reinterpret Scripture in order to delegitimize the Jews' claim to the land of Israel. This has had a powerful effect upon the Churches which, through humanitarian work among the Palestinians by agencies such as Christian Aid, have been profoundly influenced by two clerics in particular.
The first is the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah Abu El-Assal, a Palestinian who is intemperate in his attacks on Israel. 'We interviewed Bishop Riah after some terrorist outrage in Israel,' says Colin Blakely, Editor at The Church of England Newspaper, 'and his line was that it was all the fault of the Jews. I was astounded.'
The bishop also has an astounding interpretation of the Old Testament. Last December, he claimed of Palestinian Christians, 'We are the true Israel ...no one can deny me the right to inherit the promises, and after all the promises were first given to Abraham and Abraham is never spoken of in the Bible as a Jew.... He is the father of the faithful.'
The second cleric, Father Naim Ateek, is more subtle and highly influential in contemporary British Christianity, not least through his Sabeel Centre in Jerusalem. Although he says that he has come to accept Israel's existence, his brand of radical liberation theology undermines it by attempting to sever the special link between God and the Jews.
Ateek’s denunciations of Israel include imagery linking the Jewish State to the charge of deicide that for centuries fueled anti-Jewish bloodshed. For example, Ateek wrote about “modern-day Herods” in Israel, referring to the king who the New Testament says slaughtered the babies of Bethlehem in an attempt to murder the newborn Jesus.
In a lecture last year Canon Andrew White observed that Palestinian politics and Christian theology had become inextricably intertwined. The Palestinians were viewed as oppressed and the Church had to fight their oppressor. '”Who is the oppressor? The State of Israel. Who is Israel? The Jews. It is they therefore who must be put under pressure so that the oppressed may one day be set free to enter their ’Promised Land’ which is being denied to them.”
The Bishop of Guildford, who is consistently hostile to Israel, shares the view that the Jews have no particular claim to the Promised Land. Christianity and Islam, he says, can lay equal claim. And although he says that Israel's existence is a reality that must be accepted, his ideal is very different. A separate Palestinian state would be merely a 'first step'.
'Ultimately, one shared land is the vision one would want to pursue, although it's unlikely that this will come about.' As for the Churches' hostility to Israel, his reply is chilling: 'The problem is that all the power lies with the Israeli state.' So by implication, Israel would merit sympathy for its casualties only if it had no power to defend itself.
The Bishop of Guildford, who chairs Christian Aid, says that he particularly admires Bishop Riah and Naim Ateek. He also warmly endorses a parish priest in his diocese, Stephen Sizer, vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water.
Sizer is a leading crusader against Christian Zionism. He believes that God's promises to the Jews have been inherited by Christianity, including the land of Israel. 'A return to Jewish nationalism,' he has written, 'would seem incompatible with this New Testament perspective of the international community of Jesus.'
He acknowledges that Israel has the right to exist since it was established by a United Nations resolution. But he also says that it is 'fundamentally an apartheid state because it is based on race' and 'even worse than South Africa' (this, despite the fact that Israeli Arabs have the vote, are members of the Knesset and one is even a supreme court judge).
He therefore hopes that Israel will go the same way as South Africa under apartheid and be 'brought to an end internally by the rising up of the people'.
But perhaps this is not surprising given his attitude towards Jews. 'The covenant between Jews and God,' he states, 'was conditional on their respect for human rights. The reason they were expelled from the land was that they were more interested in money and power and treated the poor and aliens with contempt.' Today's Jews, it appears, are no better.
Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, the director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, has been addressing Christian groups up and down the country on the implications of 11 September. When he suggests that there is a problem with aspects of Islam, he provokes uproar. His audiences blame Israel for Muslim anger; they want to abandon the Jewish state as a 'dead' part of Scripture and support 'justice' for the Palestinians instead. 'What disturbs me at the moment is the very deeply rooted anti-Semitism latent in Britain and the West,' he says. 'I simply hadn't realised how deep within the English psyche is this fear of the power and influence of the Jews.'
Since 11 September, he says, the Palestinian issue has had a major distorting impact on the whole of the Christian world. 'Those who blame Israel for everything don't realise that for Islam the very existence of Israel is a problem. Even a Palestinian state would not be sufficient. Israel may be behaving illegally in a number of areas, but she is under attack. But white liberal Christians find it deeply offensive not to blame Israel for injustice.'
Andrew Tucker, executive director of Christians for Israel International, finds something deeply wrong with Western Christianity today, and it has to do with Israel. It is no wonder the churches in the West are dying out. So long as the Church fails to recognize that its own identity – its genesis and its destiny – are bound up with the restoration of the Jewish people (yes, the literal Israel), we will continue to miss the mark, and we will fail to be relevant.
The nations of Europe are in an identity crisis, and so are their churches. They have forgotten where they came from, and they have no idea where they are going. In two world wars, many of our ancestors gave their lives in conflicts in which the enemies of freedom slaughtered millions of European Jews. Now, only decades later, it seems that these same freedoms are now being misused – often in the name of the rule of law – to allow a further attempted genocide of the Jewish people. Of course I am referring to the alarming level of political support in Europe for the recognition of a unilaterally declared Palestinian state.
All is not doom and gloom. A growing movement of Christians worldwide is coming to the realization that something has to change. Most of them are not in the West, but in the developing continents like Africa and Asia.
Tucker sees many African pastors and Christian leaders – free of the historical and theological shackles that continue to bind their European counterparts – pledged to reject all forms of “replacement theology,” and to embrace Israel as the apple of God’s eye. Similar groups are springing up all over the world. I believe there is a hidden army of Christians who are rediscovering their true identity as Gentiles grafted onto the Jewish olive tree.
Further Reading:
Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag fights for Jews and Israel with “The Big Tent for Israel” conference
Current anti-Semitism obsessed with concept of Jews as the chosen people
Bishop Williamson a No Show at his Appeal
Why the Pope’s new book is important
