The Anglican Consultative Council, whose President is the Archbishop of Canterbury, has voted to recommend that its member churches divest from businesses that support Israeli “occupation” of the territories. As Melanie Philips said, they did this in response to a report “full of the most inflammatory lies, libels and distortions about Israel”.
In an attempt to ward off accusations of bias, they also recommended that churches divest from businesses that support Palestinian violence against innocent Israelis. With this attempt at formal ‘even-handedness’ the Council betrays its moral bankruptcy and ignorance of the situation in Israel and Palestine as much as with anything else in the report. Palestinian terrorist groups try to attack Israelis and fantasise about destroying Israel. So the Israelis run military operations to stop terrorism and take security measures to prevent murderers from coming into Israel.
The Council are trying to be neutral between Palestinian terrorists on the one hand and Israel on the other. Their press release illustrates the dark logic of this moral equivalence. In it they do not mention terrorism. Nor do they mention that the Palestinian terrorist groups want to destroy Israel. Nor that their ideologies are based explicitly on wild antisemitic conspiracy theories, and that all the institutions of their society relentlessly transmit these to their children. Nor do they mention that Palestinian terrorist groups regularly murder Palestinians for “collaborating” with Israel, i.e. - for warning Israelis who are in danger of being murdered. However, they do manage to squeeze in a reference to “the draconian conditions of the continuing occupation under which so many Palestinians live.” The Council's problem is that if they wish to remain neutral then they can't mention the agenda or the crimes of Palestinian terrorists. If they did, then they would have to admit that the terrorists are evil and the Israelis are defending themselves from this evil. So they can only mention the Israeli government's security measures while carefully refraining from putting them into context. And so their ‘even-handedness’ leads directly to their one-sided condemnation of Israel. The Church of England has sold its soul for the sake of appearing neutral.
