Anglicans should apologize for their role in Zionist dispossession, not embolden genocidal fanatics.
On Monday St. Paul’s Bloor St. Anglican church in Toronto succumbed to pressure from genocide lobbyists and cancelled the room for my NDP leadership event with Rabbi David Mivisair, student encampment organizer Sara Rasikh and former Canadian Union of Postal Workers president Mike Palecek. A number of Zionist groups have lauded the church’s move to suppress the launch event of a 10-city tour.
The cancelation contravenes the spirit of a June resolution passed at General Synod, the Anglican church’s highest decision-making body. It called on Anglicans to pressure Canadian officials to “uphold their moral responsibilities” by adopting an arms embargo on Israel.
In 2013 the Anglican Church of Canada committed itself “to explore and challenge theologies and beliefs, such as Christian Zionism, which support the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.”
The Anglican church has a long history of Zionism, which began as a Christian movement. “Christian proto- Zionists [existed] in England 300 years before modern Jewish Zionism emerged,” notes Evangelicals and Israel. Until the mid-1800s Zionism was an almost entirely non-Jewish movement. And yet it was quite active. Between 1796 and 1800 there were at least 50 books published in Europe about a Jewish return to Palestine. The movement reflected the more literal readings of the Bible that flowed out of the Protestant Reformation.
Rev. William H. Hechler, chaplain to the British Embassy in Vienna, arranged for Jewish Zionist leader Theodore Herzl to meet Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Ottoman sultan, which then controlled Palestine. Another Anglican, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, came up with the infamous Zionist slogan “a land without people for a people without a land”. He wanted Jews to go to their “rightful home” (Palestine) under a British protectorate. According to a Canadian Jewish News review of Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism, “The Earl of Shaftesbury was the first millenarist, or restorationist, to blend the biblical interest in Jews and their ancient homeland with the cold realities of [British imperial] foreign policy.” He got Britain’s foreign secretary to appoint the first British consul to Jerusalem in 1839.
A speech in England by Anthony Ashley Cooper in 1839 or 1840 was the first encounter with Zionist thinking for Canada’s leading early proponent of the movement. At the time of Confederation Canada’s preeminent Zionist was Henry Wentworth Monk who briefly studied to become an Anglican minister. In A Coat of Many Colours: Two Centuries of Jewish Life in Canada Irving Abella explains: “Henry Wentworth Monk, an eccentric but respected businessman, spent much of his time and money crusading for a Jewish homeland. In the 1870s and 1880s — long before Theodore Herzl, the Austrian founder of [Jewish] Zionism, even thought of a Jewish state — Monk took up a campaign in Canada and England to raise funds to buy land in Palestine for European Jews. In 1881 Monk even proposed setting up a Jewish National Fund. He issued manifestoes, wrote long articles, spoke to assorted meetings and lobbied extensively in England and Canada to realize his dream.” Citing a mix of Christian and pro-British Empire rationale, Monk called on London to establish a “dominion of Israel” like the dominion of Canada.
Monk was not alone in Canada. Many public figures, including prime ministers Lester Pearson and Arthur Meighan, expressed Christian Zionist thinking in backing the formation of the Israeli state. While Meighan was a convert to Anglicanism, Pearson, the son of a Methodist minister, in his memoirs refers to Israel as “the land of my Sunday School lessons” where he learned that “the Jews belonged in Palestine.”
Pearson played a central role in promoting the anti-Palestinian 1947 UN partition plan. At the start of the last century Canadians raised money, armed and fought (in 1917 and 1948) for Zionist colonization.
Whether St. Paul’s honours its room booking contract or not, my campaign event is going ahead at 7 pm on Thursday at 227 Bloor St. east. It will hopefully take place inside, but we will hold the talk outside if we must.
As Israel attacks Qatar, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Tunisia and commits the most unspeakable crimes in Gaza, the Anglican church should be doing its utmost to oppose the lawless terror state. The church should also be reckoning with its role in the development and continuation of an ideology that justifies the horrors currently taking place in west Asia.
Please join over 4000 individuals who’ve already told St. Paul’s to reverse course and reinstate the room booking.
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