More on the Anglican's anti-Israel resolution...

Melanie Phillips's blog is a regular read for me. She is idignant about the decision of the Anglicans to stop investment in Israel.

It is a defining moment. With last Friday’s vote by the Anglican Consultative Council to ‘commend’ divestment from companies supporting Israel’s polices, based on a travesty of a report on Israel by the Anglican Peace and Justice Network, the Anglican church has descended into the moral abyss.

The APJN report is full of the most inflammatory lies, libels and distortions about Israel — and the fact that the amended resolution that was finally passed only welcomed part of it (a weaselly caveat to provide deniability) does not alter the fact that it provided the ammunition for a poisonous onslaught against Israel. The document uncritically reproduced the Arab propaganda version of Israel’s history and the present circumstances of the Middle East conflict, presenting the Arab perpetrators of genocidal mass murder as victims and their real victims as oppressors merely for trying to defend themselves. But then what can one expect of a report which concludes by referring to ‘the honor of meeting the President of the Palestinian Authority, the late Yasser Arafat, who so warmly welcomed us in what turned out to be one of his last days among us’?

Statement after statement is pathologically twisted. ‘…there have been no significant positive steps towards the creation of the state of Palestine. On the contrary, the state of Israel has systematically and deliberately oppressed and dehumanised the people of Palestine…’

Far from dehumanisation and oppression, Israel has behaved with suicidal forbearance towards the Arabs of the territories, as demonstrated last week when a woman returning to hospital in Beersheba for treatment tried to blow up the hospital, intending specifically to murder as many children as possible.

Yet the report does not present Israel's actions as a defence against mass murder but instead represents them as oppressive and dehumanising.: ‘We note the continuing policies of illegal home demolitions, detentions, checkpoints, identity card systems and the presence of the Israeli military that make any kind of normal life impossible.’ It thus presents Israel’s military actions as a deliberate policy of oppression, whereas in fact the only reason that normal life is impossible is that the Arabs of the territories are intent on ending as many Israeli lives as possible.

It refers to the occupation of ‘Palestinian land’. But the West Bank and Gaza are not Palestinian land. They are strictly speaking no-man’s land — which was illegally occupied by Egypt and Jordan in 1948-50. The report says the Arabs were removed from their ‘historic lands’ — by which it means Israel. But this is a rewriting of history. Judea, Samaria and Galilee are the historic lands of the Jews, not of the Arabs who subsequently drove them out. Many of these Arabs' forbears only came to Palestine in the early years of the 20th century from other Arab lands because they were attracted by the prosperity being created in that previously sparsely populated and inhospitable country by the Jews who were returning to their historic homeland.

It describes the security barrier as an ‘apartheid/segregation’ wall and compares the territories to the ‘bantustans of South Africa’. But the only reason the barrier was erected was to defend Israelis from the systematic mass murder perpetrated by Arabs from the territories. The comparison with apartheid, where the majority was kept down by the minority on racial grounds, is false and libellous.

Please read the whole thing. Also, in the Anglican report is support for the right of return - a right that would flood Israel with the descendents of Palestinian refugees and change the demographics of the country. The Israelis will not and cannot accept the right of return.

You can read the Anglican document here.