The Bishop of Gloucester has angered Jewish groups by publicly calling Israel an apartheid state.
Bishop Rachel Treweek, a member of the House of Lords, said she wanted to “boldly” stand with those comparing Israeli treatment of Palestinians to how black people were treated in South Africa.
Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, accused Israel of “illegal” and “systemic discrimination” against Palestinians when contacted by The Telegraph but the leader of the Church of England said it was not an apartheid state.
Jonathan Turner, the chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, said: “Reading the Bishop’s article and much else these days, we feel like Jews of the Middle Ages, accused of poisoning wells and murdering Christian children to make unleavened bread for Passover.”
Bishop Treweek is the first senior member of the Church of England to publicly call Israel an apartheid state.
Her intervention was in the form of a reflection published on the Diocese of Gloucester website. In it she criticised Hamas’s “horrendous” taking of hostages on Oct 7 and Israel’s “cruel and devastating” war on Gaza.
“Just as with the Holocaust and the October attack by Hamas, it will leave a scar on the face of humanity with far-reaching consequences for many generations to come,” she said of the war.
“In the past I have been wary of using the word apartheid to describe the situation in Palestine+Israel,” she said after visiting Israel and the West Bank last month.
“But having seen even more starkly how life is now in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, I wish to stand alongside other individuals and groups, not least Christians, in boldly naming apartheid.”
During her visit, Bishop Treweek met the family of Layan Nasir, a 23-year-old Palestinian Anglican woman held in detention in Israel without charge since her arrest in April.
“Whilst the situation in Palestine-Israel has many differences compared to the apartheid years in South Africa, the resonances are strong,” the 61-year-old, who is the Anglican bishop for prisons in England and Wales, said.
“I do stand by what I said. I do want to call out the way that the Israeli government and military are acting in the West Bank. But I’m not anti-Israel and I’m not pro-Palestine. I think I am standing for justice for all people,” Bishop Treweek told The Telegraph on Thursday.
“Yesterday, I actually met with some of the families of those who’ve been killed or who are still being held hostage, and that was really powerful. It is not the first time I’ve met hostage families and what Hamas did was abhorrent and the hostages must be released.”
She added: “There are layers of trauma and injustice and I think, in this whole conflict, people find that really hard because they want to stand on one side or the other. How do we stand in a place of justice?”
A Lambeth Palace spokesman said Mr Welby was grateful for her “powerful reflections”.
“While not naming Israel as an apartheid state, the Archbishop agrees with Bishop Rachel Treweek that the regime imposed by successive Israeli governments in the Occupied Palestinian Territories constitutes systemic discrimination that has deprived the Palestinian people of its rights to self-determination for far too long,” he said.
“This state of affairs is illegal, unjust and needs to be brought to an end as quickly as possible.”
That February communication called for an immediate ceasefire in the “relentless bombardment” and added, “the manner in which this war is being prosecuted cannot be morally justified”.
While Bishop Treweek’s stance makes her an outlier in the UK clergy, the Anglican Church of South Africa officially declared Israel an apartheid state in September last year.
American Anglican bishops rejected resolutions labelling Israel an apartheid state in June.
Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Commission, said: “Bishop Treweek is right to assert this truth. One cannot tackle an injustice unless one is prepared to name it.”
Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the European Jewish Association, said “It is very sad that an eminent Bishop chooses to repeat a completely false accusation, a falsehood used by anti-Semites as a justification to target innocent Jews.”
He said Israel was an “ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse country” and did not meet the definition of an apartheid state in the Rome Constitution of the UN.
“The separation fence was solely designed to stop the infiltration of terrorists who come to harm and murder innocent citizens within the territory of the State of Israel and not to separate Jews from Arabs,” he said.
He added: “I would like to ask what the reaction would be if, on any given day, people would enter her or her neighbour’s house, rape young girls, burn babies, rip apart a pregnant woman’s stomach and stab the foetus, and go on a murderous rampage with utter cruelty.”
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