The C of E and the singling out of Israel

After all, nobody can think that the archbishop and Lord Rogers are anti-Semites - or, for that matter, dupes of anti-Semites. They are concerned with human rights; perhaps even particularly concerned with Israel’s suppression of them because they hold it - as it does itself - to a higher standard than other states. And there is no question that Israel does behave oppressively to Palestinians, has killed non- combatants and does deserve criticism.

But the nag at the mind is this: why do their sins cry out for particular punishment? And what do people, with the best of motives, see as the result of such efforts to brand Israelis - scholars, architects or bulldozer traders - as uniquely unfit to be part of their international communities? What’s so especially awful about them, that we have to cease talking to them?

- from a recent piece by John Lloyd of the Financial Times (subscription-only, but the whole thing is here). Good that a prominent non-Jewish journo is sounding the alarm.

You think the C of E justified in singling out, from all the injustices committed around the world, those committed by the one small state that is run by Jews. You want to it do this even though you are unable to offer any coherent ethical case for doing so (sorry, but ‘The lands now known as Israel, Palestine and the West Bank are obviously very near and dear to the origins of Christianity’ won’t do at all - that was the Crusaders’ excuse). You want the Church to treat these injustices for all practical purposes as if they were the world’s worst, and thus encourage others to see them as such, even though they are manifestly nothing of the sort. You are content to see Israel put in the dock without Hamas standing alongside it. And, even though Christianity has a long, inglorious history of anti-Semitism, you expect that nobody will see anything remotely anti-Semitic in any of this – or at least nobody who is not making the accusation in bad faith.

How does the saying go? If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

Maybe someone can arrange to bring you face to face with a poor Zimbabwean whose house was flattened by Robert Mugabe’s bulldozers, or with a villager from Darfur whose family has been massacred by the Janjaweed, so that you can explain to them why their sufferings are ‘red herrings’.

- my response to a comment on Ruth Gledhill's Times blog.