Tension between Canadian Jewish groups, United Church sparked by Gaza

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The war in Gaza has become a new flashpoint between Canada’s largest protestant church and Jewish groups, who say that the famously activist church is dividing Canadians with its “unhealthy obsession with Israel and Jews.”

In recent months, the church has made a number of statements vociferously opposing Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, launched in retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attacks.

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In August, Rev. Michael Blair, the church’s general secretary, wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, urging Ottawa to suspend diplomatic relations with Israel until it complied with an opinion from the International Court of Justice, which concluded that Israel’s “continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” referring to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“This is the first time that we are asking for Canada to issue this kind of sanction on the State of Israel, because, clearly, quiet diplomacy is not working,” Blair wrote.

Then, in mid-November, it called upon the Canadian government to implement a complete arms embargo, adopt sanctions against Israel and officially declare Israel an apartheid state just weeks after it endorsed the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and recognized Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as apartheid.

The statement, calling Israel’s war in Gaza “ethic cleansing and genocide,” and its reference to “Israeli state-sponsored terror,” represent the outcome of a years-long process of the church attempting to sort out its positions on the conflict between Israel and Palestinians.

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Richard Marceau, the vice-president, external affairs, with the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, said that the United Church is on a “problematic trajectory,” and that it began many years ago.

“Nobody in Israel cares what the United Church of Canada says or does. No one. Where it can have an impact is in Canada,” said Marceau. “So, instead of bringing people together, to get people to closer together, despite fundamental differences, what the United Church is doing is actually pulling people apart. It is singling out Israel, which is central to Canadian Jewish identity.”

While it is dwarfed by the number of Catholics in the country, who numbered nearly 11 million in 2021, about 1.2 million Canadians are affiliated with the United Church.

The tension between the United Church and Canadian Jewish groups isn’t new. Japhet Ndhlovu, the United Church’s head of mission who oversees global justice work, said in an interview that the church has been consistent for years.

The church condemned the October 7 attacks and has been “consistent in asking for the release of all those that were abducted by the terrorists,” Ndhlovu said, but it has also spoken out against the death toll from Israel’s military operation against Hamas in the Gaza strip and the expansion of the conflict into neighbouring Lebanon.

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“I would say that the United Church stand has never changed,” said Ndhlovu. “Of course, the reactions to what the United Church has said over the years has taken different twists and turns, and it depends on the people that are responding.”

After the Second World War, as the revelations of the Holocaust became better known, support within the church for Israel grew, though not officially; the church had been conflicted in its stance on Zionism and Jewish persecution in Europe. “The horror of our people expressed itself in the support of the establishment of Israel. The only guard against a repeat of such mass destruction was a strong Israeli nation with secure borders,” A.B.B. Moore, a prominent United Church minister, wrote to Israeli academic Haim Genizi in 1995.

Still, by 1954, the church was objecting to the way Israel had expanded, according to Genizi’s book, The Holocaust, Israel and Canadian Protestant Churches. The church’s Committee on Church and International Affairs condemned the use of force that accompanied Israel’s expansion, while imploring Israel’s Arab neighbours to accept Israel and “learn to live with her as a neighbour.” Within a couple years, though, Genizi writes that the church had “adopted a position that delegitimized Israel’s right to exist, on the grounds that the establishment of the State was based on moral injustice to the Palestinians.”

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The church’s newspaper — editorially independent but indicative of the trends of the time — the United Church Observer, was “almost without exception unsympathetic to Israel and to the Zionist movement” by the time Israel fought the Six-Day War in 1967. The newspaper, and prominent church members and editorialists, were denounced by some Jewish, Christian and Catholic thinkers for criticisms of Zionism that veered into antisemitism.

Anti-Zionism sooner or later reveals a distressing tendency to shade into antisemitism

Alan T. Davis

“Anti-Zionism sooner or later reveals a distressing tendency to shade into antisemitism,” wrote Alan T. Davis, a United Church minister, in a 1970 essay in the Christian Century, a magazine publishing in Chicago.

The internal church debates seemingly quieted for a few decades as the church dealt with other issues, including reckoning with its role in the residential school system, declining church membership and its approach to social issues. Judaism more broadly, however, did receive some attention in 1997, when a church report concluded that Christians should stop trying to convert Jews to Christianity.

But over the past 20 or so years, the church has once again taken positions on the conflict between Israel and Palestinians.

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In 2003, the United Church adopted a report that sketched out the centuries of Christian antisemitism. “We know that the Christian tradition for over 1,900 years plus, can be condemned to be antisemitic,” said Ndhlovu.

It also affirmed that Israel had a right to exist and that criticisms of Israel “that dwell on its Jewish identity rather than the exigencies of power as the cause of its real or imagined misdeeds are highly suspect.” However, relations between the United Church and Canadian Jewish organizations deteriorated in 2012, when the church urged Canadians to not purchase goods made by Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs promptly announced its own boycott of the United Church and called on Canadian Jews, including rabbis and community organizations, to make a “wholesale break” with the church, including severing ties with interfaith groups that include the United Church and ending any educational interactions. Since then, attempts have been made to reknit those ties, including in 2022 when the church vowed to build an antisemitism education campaign.

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Since it was founded in 1925 by way of a merger between a handful of other mainline protestant organizations, the United Church has championed many progressive political causes, including universal health care, sanctuary for Vietnam draft dodgers and, since the 1980s, LGBT rights.

In the background to all of this, the church had been working to develop what it calls justice-based principles that guide its stance on issues in foreign nations, where it has numerous partners and local connections. This includes its perspective not just on Israel and the Palestinian territories, but on other governments and areas, such as the Philippines and El Salvador.

Back in 2021, the church’s general council — the top decision-making body — received a report on how the church should approach the tensions between Israel and Palestinians. Martha ter Kuile chaired the task force that authored the report and recalled to the National Post that the last time the policy had been updated was in 2012, and it was necessary to revisit the policies.

“The 2012 policy wasn’t quite meeting the need,” ter Kuile said.

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The report her task force produced, after three years of work, suggested the United Church could support the principles of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (and rejected the idea that BDS is inherently antisemitic) and refer to Israel as an apartheid state, though the report stopped short of calling on the church to take particular actions.

It also developed a set of overall justice principles that inform the church’s social justice work.

“Christ does not call us to be polite or to walk some middle line until all parties are appeased, but rather, Christ calls us to stand in costly solidarity with those who seem most at risk of losing the fullness of life that God intends for all people,” the report says.

That report also grapples with whether or not the United Church should continue to refer to Israel as a Jewish state.

“Using the language of ‘Jewish state’ vis á vis Israel will likely be interpreted as implying support for Israel’s Nation State Law,” the report says.

That law, passed in Israel’s Knesset in 2018, says that Israel’s right to self-determination is “unique to the Jewish people.” The objection of the church report’s authors is, essentially, that this does not grant equal rights to non-Jews in Israel, and that the church’s support of Israel as a Jewish state “is specifically qualified as a state which extends equal rights and dignity to all its citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity.”

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Those proposals were not adopted at the church’s 2022 general council, although a later proposal, which called on the church to further the ideas contained in the 2021 report, was adopted. By October 2024, the church’s general council adopted a policy declaring Israel an apartheid state and supporting BDS as a means of non-violent protest.

“When they accuse Israel of being an apartheid state, what they’re doing, in effect, is negating the right of Jews to self determination, and saying that their their right to self determination, which is a state of Israel, is inherently racist and tainted,” said Marceau. “The next step is that it should not exist. They’re not saying it out loud but when you decode the language, that’s where it leads.”

Pro-Israel groups have also long argued that the BDS movement is antisemitic.

“It has become like any criticism, any criticism of the nation of Israel, the pro-Israel lobby groups will come up with antisemitism,” countered Ndhlovu. “So all we are supposed to do is maybe keep quiet and just allow the violence to continue, and then we’ll be told, ‘Yes, now you are in support of Israel.’”

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Marceau called the church’s stance an “unhealthy obsession with Israel and Jews,” and that it could in part explain the church’s declining influence in Canada.

“The negative comments are an indication that there is actually an effect there,” said Ndhlovu. “The very fact that they have responded, I think, for us, is a sign that there is some success there. They are listening, they’re hearing, and that’s why they are reacting the way they are reacting.”

Even within the church, however, there isn’t entirely a consensus on the Middle East.

John Ryerson, a Toronto social justice activist and United Church member, has criticized the church for its use of the term “genocide,” in particular, calling it a “trigger word.”

“They jumped on the genocide bandwagon very early. They took a side and stopped conversation,” said Ryerson.

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