You grieved for Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land. I ask you to grieve, with equal honesty, for the Jewish lives that 7 October stole — and to name what truly stands between this land and peace.

A response to the joint pastoral letter of Archbishop Sarah Mullally and Archbishop Hosam Naoum, issued at the close of their pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

I write not to dismiss your pilgrimage but to take it seriously. You went to the Holy Land to pray with Palestinian Christians, to sit with families who feel unmoored by years of conflict, and to plant an olive tree on land its owners fear losing. A Christian leader who cares about the ancient Christian presence in that land, who weeps for the suffering in Gaza, and who longs for peace is doing something honourable. I do not doubt the sincerity behind your words, and I share your grief for innocent civilians.

But moral seriousness asks more of us than compassion. It asks for context, proportion and honesty. Your letter, written with Archbishop Naoum, presents Israel as the principal author of Palestinian suffering, while saying almost nothing about the ideology and the choices of the Palestinian leadership that brought mass murder, hostage-taking and war into Israeli homes on the morning of 7 October. A Christian appeal for peace cannot be credible if it treats Jewish self-defence as the central moral problem and leaves the eliminationist forces of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as little more than background noise.

So I offer this reply in the same spirit in which I hope your letter was written: directly, and to each of the claims you made.

“A credible path towards ending the occupation”

You urge Anglicans to press politicians towards ending the occupation, as though Israel need only withdraw and peace will follow. The recent past says otherwise. In 2005 Israel removed every settlement and soldier from Gaza. Within two years Hamas seized the Strip by force, and the blockade you and others lament followed because of that takeover and the rockets that came with it — it did not precede it.

That sequence is not a debating point; it is the lived memory that shapes how Israelis hear the word “withdrawal.” Israel’s security posture was not handed down as theology. It was built, painfully, out of suicide bombings, rockets, tunnels, abductions and cross-border raids, and above all out of 7 October. To ask Israel to relinquish control without enforceable guarantees is not a peace plan. It is a request that Israel gamble with Jewish lives, and Israelis are entitled to refuse a second Gaza overlooking their towns.

The West Bank is also more complicated than the phrase “the occupation” allows. Jordan annexed it in 1950, a move almost no state recognised; Israel took control in a defensive war in 1967. UN Security Council Resolution 242, so often invoked, did not demand unilateral surrender to undefined lines. It tied withdrawal to the end of belligerency and to the right of every state in the region to live within secure and recognised borders. You cite the 2024 ICJ advisory opinion; you might equally have cited the framework the parties themselves signed at Oslo, which left borders, settlements, refugees and Jerusalem to be negotiated — not settled by declaration.

A two-state solution — but with whom, and on what terms?

You call for a viable two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians live in peace, dignity and security. As an aspiration, that is at least morally sound, and I share it. But if we do consider it, it becomes an empty phrase unless the Palestinian side is asked to do the one thing your letter never names: recognise Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and abandon armed rejectionism. At least their leadership does not want a two state solution.

The obstacle is not that Israelis refuse peace as such. It is that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have treated the whole of Israel as illegitimate. Hamas’s 1988 covenant did not merely object to Israeli policy; it called for religious war, named jihad as its path, and declared all of Palestine an inviolable Islamic trust. Its softer 2017 document still denied Israel’s legitimacy, still spoke of the land “from the river to the sea,” and accepted 1967 lines only as a staging post, never relinquishing the claim to the whole. That is not a two-state programme. It is a........

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