World Council of Churches Favors Nationalism and Antisemitism

The Kairos Palestine Document and Alternative Tourism

by Petra Heldt

The Christian faith is known for holding aspects of the divine commitment to the Jewish people by seven biblical covenants: six unconditional ones with Abraham (Gen 12, 1-3), the Land (Gen 12, 1), the Levites (Num 25, 10-13), David (2 Sam 7, 10-16), Israel and Judah (Jer 31, 31-34), Jerusalem (Ez 16), and one conditional one at Sinai (Ex 19, 5). Those commitments are preceded by the universal covenant with the whole creation (Gen 9, 12-17). Many attempts which try to re-draw that celestial union of universality-cum-Israel-particularity fall, unswervingly, into the trap of nationalism and anti-Semitism.

Two recent divine-restructuring efforts of that kind count the Christians in Nazi -Germany and some Palestinian Christians. The former attempt ended in the Holocaust; the latter is now sponsored by the World Council of Churches (WCC) through two major engines, the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme to Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), and the Kairos Palestine Document with its spin-off, “Alternative Tourism.” These two programs are of interest here.

In December 2009, a Bethlehem panel chaired by the retired former Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Michel Sabbah, launched the Kairos Document. The WCC Secretariat swiftly spread the paper among Protestant churches worldwide, calling for a program of boycotts, divestment and delegitimization directed at the State of Israel.

In April 2010, Malcolm Lowe wrote the seminal article “The Palestinian Kairos Document: A Behind-the-Scenes Analysis,” published by the New English Review. Lowe’s careful study exposes a number of deceptions behind the Kairos Document. Seven of those pretenses are mentioned here.

Deception 1: Israel is an Apartheid-State.

The Case: The document’s name alludes to the name of a statement issued in South Africa in 1985.[1] That allusion is meant to deliberately compare Israel with the regime of apartheid.

The Fact: Israel is no apartheid state. Israel is a thriving democracy, with huge numbers of non-Jews fully integrated at all levels of Israeli society.

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