The Church of England’s General Synod has overwhelmingly approved a motion that creates an institutional pathway for the anti-Israel ideology of Kairos Palestine, issued November 14, 2025, to influence Church teaching, advocacy, investment policy, and relations with British Jews.

General Synod is the Church of England’s national governing assembly. Its members sit in three houses—bishops, clergy, and laity—and deliberate on Church legislation, public policy, worship, doctrine, and matters affecting the Church’s national witness. The Kairos Palestine proposal originated as a Diocesan Synod Motion from the Diocese of Carlisle before advancing to the national body.  

At the center of the motion is the original Kairos Palestine Document, a Palestinian Christian ecumenical initiative, first issued in 2009. Kairos presents its publications as Christian testimony arising from Palestinian suffering, but its work goes far beyond describing the experiences of Palestinian Christians. Its documents advance an ideological account of Israel, Zionism, Jewish sovereignty, Palestinian violence, and Christian responsibility — and call upon churches to translate that account into theological, political, and financial pressure against Israel. 

The current motion brings together four related declarations: the original 2009 Kairos Palestine Document, the 2020 Cry for Hope, the 2023 Call for Repentance, and the 2025 Kairos Palestine II: A Moment of Truth—Faith in a Time of Genocide. These are not independent studies offering a range of Christian perspectives. They are successive expressions of the same anti-Zionist political theology, repeatedly depicting Zionism as colonialism and racism, portraying Israel as the principal source of Palestinian suffering, and calling churches to join campaigns of boycott, divestment, sanctions, and political pressure. 

The latest and most extreme of the four, Kairos Palestine II, claims to offer a Christian response to Palestinian suffering. Yet it also depicts Zionism as a system of racism and supremacy, rejects Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas, contextualizes the October 7 massacre as a product of Israeli wrongdoing, and urges churches to exclude Zionist voices from dialogue. 

The General Synod debate began on Sunday, July 12, 2026, and continued on Monday, July 13. As reported in the Church of England’s official Synod roundup, the amended motion passed by overwhelming margins in all three houses. Bishops voted 25–0 in favor, with five abstentions. Clergy supported it 115–20, with 30 abstentions, and laity approved it 113–27, with 35 abstentions. Not one bishop voted against the motion.  

According to the Jewish Chronicle, amendments changed the original instruction to “receive” the Kairos declarations into an instruction to “hear” them and added language about continued interfaith dialogue. An effort to remove Kairos II from the motion failed and the Synod retained the document and approved Church-wide engagement with it.  

The final motion commits the Church to solidarity with Palestinian Christians in what it calls nonviolent resistance to occupation. It encourages engagement with the four Kairos declarations “at all levels” of the Church, calls for resources to guide prayer, theological study, advocacy, and practical action, and directs Church investment bodies to review and report on their policies concerning Israel and the disputed territories.  

General Synod did not simply express sympathy for suffering Palestinians. It gave institutional credibility and reach to a movement that attacks Zionism at its foundation, minimizes Hamas’s independent responsibility, denies Israel the right to protect its citizens, promotes Israel’s international isolation, and seeks to determine which Jews and Christians deserve to participate in dialogue. 

The ramifications will extend far beyond a single debate in York. 

Kairos Palestine II Attacks Israel’s Legitimacy

Kairos Palestine II does not confine itself to criticism of Israeli settlements, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the conduct of the war against Hamas, or any other specific policy. 

Its target is Zionism itself and, by extension, Israel’s continued existence as the nation-state of the Jewish people. 

In section 1.3, Kairos claims that Zionists offer Palestinians only “displacement, death or submission.” It presents Israel’s war against Hamas as the continuation of a Zionist project to seize the entire land and remove its Palestinian population. It describes Zionism through the language of apartheid, colonialism, and “Jewish supremacy.”  

In section 1.22, the document calls Israel a “colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity.” In section 3.3, it portrays Israel’s establishment in 1948 as a continuation of European colonial racism. In section 4.2, it demands the dismantling of the structures it associates with Zionism and Jewish national sovereignty.  

These are not criticisms of an Israeli government. They are an attack on Israel’s legitimacy at its foundation. 

Kairos even rejects describing the Israeli-Palestinian situation as a conflict. That rejection is revealing. Recognizing a conflict would require acknowledging that two peoples possess histories, national aspirations, fears, grievances, and moral responsibilities. Kairos instead imposes a rigid ideological formula: Israelis are foreign colonizers, and Palestinians are indigenous victims. 

Once that formula is accepted, Jewish sovereignty becomes illegitimate by definition. Israeli security concerns become excuses for oppression. Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism become consequences of Israel’s existence rather than choices made by Palestinian leaders and armed organizations. 

The formula also requires the erasure of Jewish history. 

The Jewish people’s ancient connection to the land of Israel, the continuous Jewish presence there, centuries of persecution, the Holocaust, the flight of Jewish refugees from Europe, and the displacement of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries are pushed aside. Jews must be presented as foreign colonizers because acknowledging Jewish indigeneity would undermine Kairos’s entire accusation. 

In its briefing to General Synod members, the Board of Deputies of British Jews warned that the document erases Jewish faith, identity, and history. The Board noted that modern Jews arrived in Israel overwhelmingly as refugees from antisemitic persecution in Europe and the Middle East, not as agents of a distant colonial empire. It described the portrayal of Zionism as genocidal settler colonialism as a central libel against Jews everywhere.  

Synod members received that warning. They approved the motion anyway. 

October 7 Becomes Another Accusation Against Israel

Kairos Palestine II’s treatment of the Hamas-led October 7 massacre should have disqualified the document from institutional promotion by any church claiming to oppose terrorism and antisemitism. 

In section 1.6, Kairos says the attack was “born out of decades of injustice, oppression and displacement.” It invokes a Palestinian right to resist and then denies that Israel may legitimately claim self-defense against the organization that invaded it.  

The document includes a brief disclaimer that historical context does not justify killing or capturing civilians. But that sentence does not undo the argument surrounding it. 

Kairos systematically redirects responsibility for October 7 away from Hamas and back onto Israel. It treats the massacre principally as a consequence of Israeli oppression rather than as an atrocity planned and perpetrated by a terrorist organization with its own ideology, leadership, objectives, and responsibility. 

As stated by Middle East Forum, the 14-page document names Hamas only once—in the paragraph that presents its attack as the result of Israeli conduct.  

Kairos offers no serious examination of Hamas’s explicitly antisemitic ideology, its deliberate targeting of civilians, its years of rocket attacks, or its hostage-taking. It does not meaningfully confront the choices Hamas made before, during, and after October 7. 

Instead, the moral formula is simple: Hamas committed the massacre, but Israel supposedly caused it. 

That is not context. It is moral inversion. 

Hamas terrorists chose to enter Israeli communities. They chose to murder civilians. They chose to abduct hostages. They chose to terrorize Israeli families. No historical grievance can transfer responsibility for those choices from the perpetrators to their victims. 

Yet Kairos goes further. It grants Palestinians a right to resist Israel while denying Israel a corresponding right to protect its citizens. 

This is not a demand that Israel exercise restraint or observe the laws of war. It is a denial of the Jewish state’s basic right to defend its population after a terrorist invasion. 

In section 2.4, Kairos II reaffirms a general right of colonized peoples to resist. Although the document separately promotes economic pressure as nonviolent action, it never unequivocally limits its broader claimed right of resistance to nonviolent conduct.  

After October 7, that ambiguity is indefensible. 

A Christian declaration genuinely committed to nonviolence should state plainly that terrorism, hostage-taking, rocket attacks, and deliberate violence against civilians are not legitimate resistance. Kairos Palestine II does not do so. 

The General Synod motion’s reference to nonviolent resistance cannot sanitize the far broader and more dangerous framework contained in the document it asks the Church to study. 

Synod Elevated a Political Test for Jewish Dialogue

The motion declares opposition to antisemitism. Yet Kairos Palestine II calls upon churches to “boycott dialogue with Zionist voices.” 

In section 3.12, Kairos instructs Christians to distinguish between dialogue with Jews and dialogue with Zionism. It celebrates Jews who oppose Zionism as preferred partners and urges churches to amplify them. Zionist Jews, by contrast, are treated as unworthy of dialogue.  

Under this framework, Jews remain acceptable only when their understanding of Jewish identity, history, and national rights conforms to Kairos Palestine’s political demands. 

Anti-Zionist Jews are elevated as prophetic. Zionist Jews are excluded. 

That is not authentic Jewish-Christian engagement. It is a political loyalty test imposed on Jews. 

Nor would this exclusion affect only a marginal political faction. The Board of Deputies’ briefing cites research showing that 64 percent of British Jews surveyed identified as Zionists, while more than 80 percent affirmed that Israel is the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland and supported its right to exist as a Jewish state.  

Kairos Palestine II is therefore asking churches to marginalize views held by a substantial majority of British Jews. 

The contradiction could hardly be clearer. General Synod passed a motion condemning antisemitism while promoting engagement with a document that tells Christians which Jews are politically acceptable enough to hear. 

Adding general language about continued Jewish-Christian dialogue does not eliminate that contradiction. The Church cannot meaningfully affirm dialogue while institutionalizing a document that explicitly calls for its restriction. 

Before the vote, the Board of Deputies warned that engaging with Kairos II would harm British Jews and potentially cause lasting damage to Jewish-Christian relations. After the vote, Board President Phil Rosenberg called the motion “highly problematic” and said the document’s falsehoods, distortions, and erasure of Jewish identity were “a prescription for more division.”  

These warnings were communicated before Synod voted. The Church chose Kairos anyway. 

Kairos Uses Christianity to Condemn Supporters of Israel

Kairos Palestine II is not satisfied with delegitimizing Israel and Zionism. It also targets Christians who support the Jewish state. 

In section 3.7, the document describes Christian Zionism as a theology of racism, colonialism, and ethnic supremacy. It claims that Christian Zionism invokes a “tribal, racist god of war and ethnic cleansing,” calls the movement a “theological distortion” and “moral corruption,” and demands that Zionist theology be rejected and boycotted.  

This is not an invitation to theological discussion. 

Christians who disagree with Kairos are not treated as fellow believers engaged in a legitimate biblical or political debate. They are portrayed as complicit in evil and summoned to repent of supporting Israel. 

Kairos presents its own political analysis as an expression of Christian truth and its opponents as enemies of justice. It praises anti-Zionist churches as evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work while suggesting that Christians who challenge its genocide allegation deny Palestinian humanity. 

The result is theological coercion. 

Terms such as sin, repentance, prophecy, justice, and the Holy Spirit are used to give divine authority to a radical political program. Christians are not merely told that they are mistaken about Israel. They are told that supporting Jewish national self-determination is a corruption of their faith. 

General Synod has now encouraged the Church of England “at all levels” to engage with that message. 

The Vote Will Shape Church Teaching and Advocacy

The consequences of the motion will not remain inside General Synod. 

The resolution calls for Church resources enabling dioceses and local congregations to respond through prayer, theological study, advocacy, and practical action. It therefore gives the Kairos documents a privileged position in the way clergy and congregations may be taught to understand Israel and the conflict.  

That creates an institutional pathway for a one-sided anti-Israel narrative to move from an activist manifesto into sermons, study materials, parish programs, advocacy campaigns, and Church public statements. 

There is no comparable requirement to study Hamas’s ideology, the history of Palestinian rejectionism, the experiences of Israeli victims of terrorism, the displacement of Jews from Arab countries, or the perspectives of Christians who reject Kairos Palestine’s anti-Zionist theology. 

There is no requirement that Church resources meaningfully address the experiences of October 7 survivors, the families of Israeli hostages, Israeli Christians, Arab citizens of Israel, Jews displaced from Arab and Muslim countries, Palestinian critics of Hamas, or organizations promoting genuine Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. 

The Church claims to seek a full understanding while elevating four linked declarations advancing the same ideological conclusion. 

Reading repeated declarations from one advocacy network does not create a full understanding. It institutionalizes a predetermined narrative. 

Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally supported the amended motion while stating that hearing Palestinian Christian testimony did not mean agreeing with every claim in the Kairos documents. But institutional action carries greater weight than verbal qualifications: the Church has promoted engagement with the documents across its structures and connected that engagement to advocacy and investment policy.  

The Motion Creates a Path Toward Financial Pressure Against Israel

The motion directs Church investors to review their policies in light of the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 advisory opinion. It also requests recurring reports from the Church Commissioners and Church of England Pensions Board and calls for guidance to wider Church investors.  

These provisions must be understood alongside the political demands of Kairos Palestine II. 

In sections 2.5 and 3.10, Kairos II calls upon churches and governments to isolate Israel, impose sanctions, boycott the country, and prohibit arms exports. It endorses boycotts, divestment, and sanctions as forms of resistance.  

The motion therefore creates a progression from ideology to institutional action. 

First, the Church elevates the Kairos declarations as important expressions of Palestinian Christian experience. 

Next, it encourages engagement with those declarations throughout its dioceses and congregations. 

Then it connects that engagement to advocacy and investment policy. 

This is how anti-Israel activism becomes embedded within a religious institution: a partisan narrative is first presented as testimony, then incorporated into teaching, and finally translated into financial and political pressure. 

The Church of England’s influence also extends beyond its own congregations and investment portfolio. It remains England’s established church, and 26 of its archbishops and bishops sit in the House of Lords as Lords Spiritual, where they can question the government, participate in debates, scrutinize legislation, serve on committees, and vote.  

General Synod’s embrace of Kairos Palestine therefore carries potential political as well as ecclesiastical consequences. 

The Vote Will Damage Jewish-Christian Relations

The most immediate consequence may be the further erosion of trust between the Church of England and British Jews. 

British Jews told Synod that Kairos II erases their history, misrepresents their identity, undermines their right to national self-determination, and calls for the exclusion of Zionist voices. 

Synod’s answer was an overwhelming vote for institutional engagement with the document. 

The message is difficult to avoid: Palestinian Christian claims were treated as expressions of lived experience deserving institutional elevation, while Jewish concerns about those claims were heard and then disregarded. 

Israel’s special envoy to the Christian world, Ambassador George Deek—an Arab Christian from Jaffa—condemned the decision and accused the Church of legitimizing an extremist document that undermines Israel’s right to exist and attempts to justify October 7 by blaming Israel.  

His criticism exposes another failing of the motion. 

Kairos Palestine does not speak for every Christian connected to Israel or the Palestinian territories. Christians in the region are not politically or theologically monolithic. Yet the Church of England has elevated one deeply politicized movement as a preferred Christian interpreter of Israel, Zionism, and the conflict. 

This Was Not a Vote for Peace

The Church of England could have expressed solidarity with suffering Palestinians without elevating Kairos Palestine. 

It could have condemned violence by extremist settlers without erasing Jewish history. 

It could have advocated for Palestinian Christians without minimizing Hamas’s responsibility. 

It could have called for humanitarian relief without promoting a movement committed to boycotting and isolating Israel. 

It could have strengthened Christian-Jewish relations rather than giving institutional credibility to a document that demands the exclusion of Zionist Jews. 

Instead, General Synod embraced a framework in which Zionism is racism, Israel is colonialism, Palestinian terrorism is contextualized as resistance, Israeli self-defense is illegitimate, and Christians who support the Jewish state are morally corrupt. 

The ramifications will be felt in Church teaching, public advocacy, investment policy, political debate, and Jewish-Christian relations. 

General Synod’s vote will not advance peace. Peace cannot be built upon the erasure of Jewish history, the denial of Israeli security, or the refusal to hold Hamas responsible for its crimes. 

Nor will this vote protect Palestinian Christians. Enlisting churches in an international campaign against Israel does not address the corruption, repression, terrorism, religious extremism, and failed leadership that have also inflicted enormous harm on Palestinian society and Christian communities across the Middle East. 

The Church of England was warned about the falsehoods and hostility contained in Kairos Palestine II. Its leaders knew that the document challenged Israel’s legitimacy, shifted responsibility for October 7 onto Israel, called for Israel’s isolation, and threatened relations with British Jews. 

The Synod nevertheless approved the motion by overwhelming margins. 

That decision represents not Christian peacemaking, but the institutional advancement of Kairos Palestine’s anti-Israel agenda.