England’s chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, has issued a plea to the Church of England that I hope it heeds.
The plea is as follows. The Church’s General Synod begins today and runs through Tuesday. A Palestinian group has put forth a document for discussion at the gathering. Mirvis is urging the Church to reject the document rather than engage with it.
The document itself shows why Mirvis is right to ask this of the Church. Called Kairos II, the document includes passages like: “The genocidal war on Gaza is the continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine, emptied of its Palestinian people.”
As with most such pro-Palestinian gambits, it is presented in the name of open debate but is an attempt to silence debate. The document tells the churches to “distinguish between dialogue with Jews and dialogue with Zionism,” essentially ruling out any engagement with most Jews. Those few Jews who can be engaged with must first renounce their brethren to the church.
It isn’t atypical of Palestinian groups who have hijacked their local religious institutions to urge the Jews be treated with medieval dehumanization. But it would be atypical of the modern Church of England to participate. It should be obvious why the Church of England should not entertain a request to boycott the Jewish people, and I have too much respect both for the Church of England and for myself to engage in that debate here.
But there are less obvious reasons the document is problematic, beyond simply its barbaric premise. And that is the assertion of a principle that’s been increasingly mainstreamed in left-of-center ideological spaces, especially but not limited to college campuses: “[Israel’s] claim of ‘self-defense’ cannot stand. How can a colonizer defend itself against those it has colonized and expelled from their land?”
This is, in part, why the “decolonization” discourse is not abstract. Jewish indigeneity in the Holy Land is not in dispute. So why do progressives and academics cling to an obvious lie? Why spend so much time and energy and resources pushing the idea that Jews are colonizers in their own land, when it is the equivalent of evangelizing the idea that the earth is flat?
The answer is the line quoted above. It is an attempt to argue that Jews in their homeland have no legal right of self-defense—that you can do what you want, no matter how violent, to the Jews. Legally. And that the Jews have no recourse.
This idea is also creeping its way into BDS discourse in an attempt to really break into the mainstream. Take this fascinating article by PJ Grisar in the Forward about the off-Broadway play Birthright. The show tracks a group of Birthright Israel participants through two decades of their lives. As is often the case with Jewish art, the characters question the dogmas of their youth, their parents, and their peers.
The play is sold out, but that hasn’t stopped groups like Artists for Ceasefire and Theater Workers for a Ceasefire (they are aware that the cease-fire is over eight months old, right?) from boycotting it. Why? Well here’s their attempt at an explanation:
“Normalization includes any plays, festivals, and other kinds of cultural activities that are based on the false premise of symmetry between oppressors and oppressed or which assume colonizers and colonized are equally responsible for the ‘Israel/Palestine conflict.’”
How is this rule violated in practice? One character loses her job for sending an angry text message referring to Hamas’s campaign of sexual assault on October 7. Artists for Ceasefire, Grisar notes, says this part of the script includes “a text accusing Palestinians of being rapists.”
Of course, this is plainly untrue. It is a text referring to rapes that have already happened, some of which were admitted to by the terrorists themselves.
So, to sum up: Here we have a play in which the characters grapple with their misgivings about Zionism that is being boycotted because it obliquely acknowledges that rapes happened on October 7. This means the play, according to the pro-Palestinian activists, portrays “symmetry” between “colonizers and colonized.”
Decolonization principles, therefore, excuse not just certain types of violent resistance but even rape and sexual torture of innocent women. That is, in fact, the purpose of “colonizer vs colonized” discourse. It is the ghoulish language of violence, and that is the only way it should ever be treated.