By Jeremy Moodey

The Archbishop of Canterbury met last month with leaders of the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ). According to a Lambeth Palace press release, the meeting discussed a number of topics, including “the need to confront a worrying increase in anti-Semitism”. No further information was provided, but it is possible that the CCJ had in mind a recent survey of almost 6,000 Jews in nine European countries by the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) which had suggested that three out of four respondents, 76 per cent, believed anti-Semitism had increased over the past five years. There was particular concern about anti-Jewish postings and pages on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

If there has been a rise in anti-Semitism, then this is of course to be deplored. But it is important to highlight several major caveats with the FRA report. The first is that the Jewish people who were polled were self-selected, rather than randomly sampled. A second is that the survey was based on the subjective perceptions and experiences of the individual respondents, rather than on absolute figures of anti-Semitic incidents. Finally, the report relied on each respondent to determine his or her own definition of anti-Semitism. No single definition was provided for use by all respondents.

This may be because no one – not even the EU - can ever quite agree what actually constitutes anti-Semitism, over and above the simple dictionary definition of hostility towards Jews. Many Jewish people feel that criticism of the State of Israel is intrinsically anti-Semitic.

This definitional confusion came to mind when I read a recent intervention in these pages from a Canon Michael Paddison (letters, 7 February 2014). Mr Paddison took exception to my defence of St James’s Church in Piccadilly and its ‘Bethlehem Unwrapped’ festival over the Christmas holidays. What most exercised Mr Paddison was my use of the word ‘occupation’. In his view Israel was perfectly entitled to expropriate land that it militarily occupied in 1967, and to argue otherwise was “blatantly anti-Semitic”.

Since anti-Semitism is an expression of racial hatred, and thus a crime in the UK, this is a very serious accusation.

Needless to say, I utterly refute the claim that my comments were in any way anti-Semitic. For a start, my use of the word ‘occupation’ is entirely consistent with international practice and law. Both the International Court of Justice and repeated UN Security Council resolutions have declared Israel’s presence in or effective control of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank to constitute ‘occupation’. Our own Foreign Office refers to the ‘occupied Palestinian territories’. It is the fact that the occupation has lasted over 46 years and effectively become an annexation that makes it illegal, since international law expressly forbids nation states from acquiring territory through military conquest, even if this is ostensibly in self-defence. So in what possible sense was my citing of international law “blatantly anti-Semitic”?

I wrote in this newspaper on 24 January, and am happy to repeat again: the battle against genuine anti-Semitism is devalued when it is widened to include non-violent efforts to persuade the State of Israel to comply with its obligations under international law. The long-term security interests of the State of Israel would best be served by the ending of its occupation of theWest Bank and East Jerusalem and its blockade of Gaza. Jeremy Moodey is Chief Executive of Embrace the Middle

East. www.embraceme.org/syria2014.