Thought for the Day, 1 August 2005

Clifford Longley

Intensive efforts are being made this summer to repair a serious rift in the relationship between Christians and Jews. I have just attended the annual conference of the International Council of Christians and Jews in Chicago, with delegates from all over Europe and America; and on and off the conference agenda this was a major preoccupation. What has happened is that an increasing number of important church organisations, including the World Council of Churches and the Anglican Consultative Council, have recently come out in favour of a policy of disinvestment from Israel. This means selling their shares in companies which do business with, or in, Israel, and urging others to do the same.

It is a measure of how good the Christian-Jewish relationship had become that despite strong objections to the lead given the World Council of Churches, its general secretary, Dr Sam Kobia, was invited to address the conference. Mind you, he got a thorough ear-bashing. His message was that not every criticism of Israel's policy towards the Palestinians is motivated by anti-Semitism. The message back to him was that the WCC seemed to be falling in behind Israel's enemies, who didn't just want a small gesture of sympathy for the Palestinians but were bent on overthrowing the state of Israel altogether.

Thirty years ago when I first started going to conferences like this there would have been many Jewish people there who had themselves survived the concentration camps, many Christians who had fought Hitler personally. It was a shared bond, not just psychologically but spiritually. That generation, united in seeing Israel as a Jewish refuge from persecution, has more or less passed. Christian responsibility for the pre-war rise in antisemitism no longer brings an automatic sense of shame, or colours how Christians see their duty towards the Jews. Good relations with Muslims, they would insist, are just as important as Christian relations with Jews.

Yes and No to that, I would say. It is too soon to forget what centuries of what is called the "teaching of contempt" towards Jews did to the Christian soul of Europe. It is a religious obligation - or to put it another way, it is what God wants - that Christians should try to undo the consequences of that dark tradition. That means denouncing anything that seems to call in question Israel's right to exist.

Jews and Catholics - and other Christians too, I am sure - are shortly going to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council's historic decree Nostra Aetate. This condemned antisemitism as a sin, especially the charge that Jews should be held responsible for the death of Christ. These celebrations will enable Christian and Jewish leaders to stand publicly together again. And that should help put ill-conceived or ambiguous resolutions by the World Council of Churches into their proper perspective.