Britain's PM-in-Waiting and the Church of England Throw Israel Under the Bus

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 14, 2026

In the space of a single week, the man about to become Britain's prime minister and the Church of England's parliament both turned on the Jewish state. Andy Burnham, Labour's unopposed leader-in-waiting following Keir Starmer's resignation, apologized to the world for his party having stood too close to Israel and pledged to squeeze her harder. Days later, the General Synod, meeting in York, voted to "hear" a libelous Palestinian manifesto that brands Israel a racist colonial enterprise and explains away the October 7 massacre.

It is a week British Jews will not soon forget.

Burnham's Opening Salvo

Burnham, 56, re-entered Parliament in June by winning the Makerfield by-election and faces no challenger for the Labour leadership. In a video message setting out how he intends to govern, he stuck it to the Jews in no uncertain terms.

"Many people feel that at the start of Israel's military operation in Gaza, my party didn't get it right and I am sorry about that," he said. "The terrible suffering in Gaza is a scar on our collective conscience. It's completely unacceptable that innocent Palestinians including children continue to be killed... We've got to do more to put pressure on the Israeli government."

He endorsed the recognition of "the Palestinian state," sanctions on Israeli ministers, and "waves of sanctions on violent settlers and the organizations that support them." He backed the restrictions on arms licenses "to make sure that no British bombs or bullets can be used by the IDF in Gaza or in the West Bank." And he promised more: further sanctions on those involved in the violence, and measures to ban trade with Israeli settlements.

To be fair, Burnham managed a single throat-clearing sentence condemning Hamas's October 7 attack and the antisemitic violence that has followed on British streets. One sentence — and then straight back to the dock, where only Israel ever stands.

There was no acknowledgment that it is Hamas that caused the suffering in Gaza by using "innocent Palestinians including children" not just as human shields but as cannon fodder — war crimes against their own people. No mention that Hamas has been regularly torturing and murdering Gazans who dare oppose the tyrannical terrorist group. No mention that Hamas hid in the tunnels it built to commit war crimes against innocent Israelis, including children, while failing to build one single shelter for its own civilians. Hamas barred Gazans from those tunnels because the Islamist barbarians wanted as many of them as possible to die under bombardment — a deliberate strategy to get the credulous, post-truth progressive world to support barbarism against civilization.

Nor did Burnham mention that Hamas, though much depleted, is still attacking Israeli soldiers in Gaza and still refusing to disarm because, as it has repeatedly declared, it intends to commit more atrocities against Jews. All of it said and done to delegitimize and destroy Israel.

The Synod Climbs Aboard

Not to be outdone, the Church of England's General Synod climbed on the bandwagon. In a debate stretching from Sunday evening into Monday morning, Synod passed a motion from the Diocese of Carlisle standing "in solidarity" with Palestinians "in non-violent resistance to the ongoing occupation" and calling on the whole Church to engage with the Kairos Palestine documents — chief among them Kairos II, formally titled A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide.

Produced last November by Kairos Palestine, an ecumenical movement of Palestinian Christians, Kairos II describes Israel's military campaign in Gaza as genocide and the Jewish state as a "colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity." It goes considerably further than the original 2009 Kairos Declaration: it describes Palestinians as the indigenous people of the land, attacks the Abraham Accords, and calls on churches to "distinguish between dialogue with Jews and dialogue with Zionism."

The manifesto labels the Balfour Declaration a "historic injustice." It vilifies Christian Zionism as a "theology of racism, colonialism, and ethnic supremacy" that "calls on a tribal, racist god of war and ethnic cleansing," claiming that Christian support for Israel "has produced apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of indigenous people."

The document mentions Hamas only once — condemning the killing of civilians in one breath and explaining the massacre away in the next, as "itself born out of decades of injustice, oppression and displacement since the Nakba of 1948, and more than sixteen years of an immoral, suffocating blockade on Gaza."

Synod's managers, sensing trouble, amended the motion so that the Church would "hear" rather than "receive" the Kairos documents — as "heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians." A second amendment added repentance for the Church's historic antisemitism, presumably as an inoculation against the obvious charge.

Bishop Philip North of Blackburn, describing the hatred for Israel and the Jews that he encounters on the ground in his own diocese, told Synod that such "nice distinctions" between "receive" and "hear" make no difference in the street. He was right. The verbal fig leaf changed nothing.

The amended motion then passed overwhelmingly: 25 bishops for, none against, five abstaining; clergy 115 to 20, with 30 abstentions; laity 113 to 27, with 35 abstentions. Not one bishop of the Church of England voted against it.

The Jews Protested. Synod Shrugged.

Jewish leaders had begged Synod not to do this. Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis urged members to reject Kairos II as "a one-sided account of a complex conflict" that "downplays the historical experiences and legitimate concerns of Jewish people, and offers little more than political activism dressed up as theology."

"It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood — using extreme rhetoric to challenge the very concept of a Jewish state, and to oppose existing peace agreements in the region," Mirvis warned. After the vote, he condemned the outcome as shameful.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews excoriated Kairos II's "toxic narrative about Jews." The manifesto's central libel — that Zionism is a settler-colonial movement built on Jewish supremacy with genocidal intent — is "so false and destructive that the only responsible action is to reject it," the Board said, calling it "a libel against Jews everywhere."

Even Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, warned that the King — Supreme Governor of the Church of England and patron of the Council of Christians and Jews — could find, through no fault of his own, that the Church he represents has torched decades of Jewish-Christian relations.

Anglican biblical scholar Ian Paul cautioned on his blog that Palestinian Christians have historically been "deeply involved" in violent terrorism in their rejection of Israel, and that the motion would do irreparable harm to Jewish-Christian relations. In the debate he asked why Synod had singled out Israel for condemnation while never once debating the persecution of Kurds, Yazidis, Uyghurs, Yemenis, or Nigerian Christians, or the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands. "I wonder what we will say when the last Jew leaves Britain because they know that we will not speak up for them," he said.

Lichfield's Bishop Michael Ipgrave, a former chair of the Council of Christians and Jews, acknowledged that Kairos II speaks about Zionism and Israel in ways that stand in marked contradiction to how most Jewish people understand themselves, their history, and their identity.

And what of the new Archbishop of Canterbury? Dame Sarah Mullally spoke for the motion. Hearing the documents, she assured Synod, "does not mean we agree with everything in these documents." As a pastor, she said, she hears "the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers." One listens in vain for a comparably urgent word about the cries from the Nova festival, or from British synagogues now under police guard.

The Irony of Repentance

There is a profound irony in all this. Four years ago the Church of England formally apologized for eight centuries of Christian Jew-hatred, lamenting the medieval laws that led to the expulsion of England's Jews in 1290. Now its parliament has commended to every level of the Church a manifesto that condemns Israel as a Jewish supremacist state and frames Hamas's October 7 massacre as the inevitable consequence of Israeli policy. Synod repented of antisemitism in one clause and platformed it in the next.

From Balfour to Burnham

How far Britain has fallen. This is the nation of the Balfour Declaration, the nation that midwifed the Jewish national home.

Winston Churchill was the most consistent Zionist among the great British statesmen of his era. Testifying before the Peel Commission in 1937, he rejected the notion that Jews were intruders in Palestine, comparing the Arab claim to that of "a dog in a manger" — the dog may have lain there a long time, but that does not give it final right to the manger. Blunt even by the standards of the day.

In his 1920 article "Zionism versus Bolshevism," he wrote of a Jewish state by the banks of the Jordan as an event in world history beneficial to the British Empire and in harmony with the truest interests of Britain. And he bitterly opposed the 1939 White Paper restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine — "a plain breach of a solemn obligation" — voting against his own party rather than break faith with the Jewish people.

From Balfour and Churchill to Burnham and the bishops at York: from a solemn obligation to a shrug.

A Long Memory

Let history record what happened in Britain in July 2026. In one week, the man poised to enter Downing Street apologized for standing by Israel, and the established Church — with not a single bishop dissenting — commended a document that calls the Jewish state a racist colonial entity and rationalizes the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

Both will pay for it. Prime ministers come and go; Burnham will discover soon enough that Downing Street devours its occupants. And the Church of England — a church that cannot fill its pews, cannot hold its doctrine, and can no longer tell the difference between the cry of the oppressed and the propaganda of their oppressors — is fading into national irrelevance, with mosque attendance in Britain now rivaling its own.

Israel, by contrast, is going nowhere. She has outlived Pharaoh and Haman, Rome and the Inquisition, the pogroms and the Holocaust. She will outlive a Manchester politician and a York debating society. She is a rising nation, unstoppable in economic and military might, and she keeps a long memory of who blessed her and who cursed her.

"I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse." Britain once believed that promise, and under Balfour and Churchill she stood on the right side of it. This week she changed sides. The Jewish state will still be standing when the Church of England has faded into the sunset — an establishment husk, irrelevant to God and the British people alike, waiting only for its own Judgement Day.

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