Why we are not
IT’S A wet night in February. The local parish church is hosting a speaker, and as the clink of cups and saucers subsides and the last Hobnob is dunked, the audience is taken of a tour of the Holy Land. What they won’t be seeing is a slide-show of the sights and wonders of Israel, the places of pilgrimage visited by thousands of Christians every year or even the images of the culturally and religiously diverse country that we all know Israel to be.
What they will instead get is a crash course in the brutality of Israelis, the suffering of the Palestinians and no context or deeper explanation of why things are as they are. The speaker is, after all, from the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme for Palestine and Israel, or EAPPI, a pressure group with a particular agenda to focus on all the perceived iniquities of Israel.
Next month in York sees the last meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England under the current Archbishop of Canterbury. With the world in economic crisis, the murder of thousands still unchecked in Syria and the continuing issues of gay marriage and women bishops occupying the Anglican church in this country, there is no shortage of topics for debate — but that hasn’t stopped one member of Synod, Dr John Dinnen, tabling a Private Member’s Motion in support of the EAPPI programme.
This is the same Dr Dinnen who campaigned for Synod to support divestment from Caterpillar, due to their alleged complicity in Israeli “crimes”. While that motion was passed by Synod, the campaign failed when the Church’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group rejected the call as unwarranted, after the intervention of the Board of Deputies and others.
But the current motion is far more insidious. If Synod formally endorses EAPPI, it effectively hands its speakers an open invitation to peddle their skewed viewpoint in Anglican churches the length and breadth of the country, while having little or no control over the content of such events. And therein lies the problem, because the EAPPI narrative is based on the experiences of volunteers who spend several months living alongside Palestinians in the Territories, but less than a day in Israel, and then return to address audiences who know little or nothing about the reality of everyday life for those on both sides of the conflict.
In these circumstances, even the most open-minded and even-handed observer could not fail to develop a one-sided view of a situation which demands context and perspective to appreciate the fears, aspirations and motivations of both Palestinians and Israelis.
This lack of balance is no mere oversight. The stated purpose of the EAPPI programme is to bear witness to hardships faced by Palestinians at checkpoints or caused by the security