Whose "Existential Crisis" Is It?

The Episcopal Church's Palestine lobby has discovered suffering in the Holy Land. It has yet to discover who started the war.

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD davidvirtue2.substack.com  October 22, 2026

The Episcopal Church wants you to believe that the "existential crisis" in the Holy Land is Israel's doing, and Israel's alone.

The Episcopal Peace Fellowship Palestine Justice Network (EPF PJN) is now amplifying a statement from the Synod of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem declaring that its communities face an "existential crisis" after "years marked by devastating war, destruction, displacement, and profound human suffering." EPF PJN pairs the synod's plea with a new report from the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem and urges Episcopalians to answer it by booking a pilgrimage. Not just any pilgrimage, mind you. The right kind of pilgrimage, with the right itinerary, to see the right suffering.

Read the statement twice. You will not find the word Hamas. You will not find Hezbollah, the Houthis, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose rulers have spent four decades promising to wipe Israel off the map and bankrolling the proxies who try. You will not find October 7. There is only one actor in this drama, and it wears a Star of David.

Who Started the War?

The synod speaks of "devastating war" as though war were weather, something that simply falls out of the sky. It did not fall. On October 7, 2023, Hamas and its allies broke into southern Israel, murdered some 1,195 people, most of them civilians, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. It was the worst single day of Jewish slaughter since the Holocaust. Israel did not choose this war. Israel answered it.

Israel has paid for that answer in blood. A year ago, the Israeli Defense Ministry reported that 1,152 members of its security forces (soldiers, police, Shin Bet agents and reservists) had been killed since October 7, nearly half of them under the age of 21. Add the Israelis gunned down in the West Bank since the war began, at least 41 by this summer, including a father of six shot dead at a spring near Neve Tzuf just last month. Not one of these names appears in the Jerusalem synod's lament. Their widows and orphans are living through an existential crisis too.

Destruction, and the Tunnels Beneath It

Yes, Gaza lies largely in ruins. No honest observer denies the scale of the suffering there, and Christians should grieve it. But ask why.

Hamas spent the better part of two decades building a city beneath a city: hundreds of miles of tunnels, command bunkers and weapons depots dug beneath homes, schools, mosques and hospitals. Where did the concrete come from? Much of it flowed through aid and reconstruction channels meant for Gaza's families. It could have built schools, clinics, and seaside hotels for a Mediterranean tourist trade. Hamas chose to build a war machine instead, and then placed its own people on top of it. No hotels. Just tunnels loaded with weapons.

And Hamas is still choosing. A year after the October 2025 ceasefire, it has dissolved its Gaza government but still refuses to disarm. Donors have pledged more than $17 billion to rebuild Gaza through President Trump's Board of Peace, yet only about $280 million had actually been transferred by September, because no government wants to pour money into a war zone still run by men with guns. Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad has vowed to repeat October 7 again and again. The rubble will not be cleared until the rifles are laid down. That is the one fact the synod cannot bring itself to say.

Displacement: Whose?

The synod mourns displacement. So should we. But the story of displacement in this land did not begin in 2023.

In August 2005, Israel uprooted every one of the roughly 8,000 to 9,000 Jews living in 21 communities in Gaza, some 1,700 families, many of them carried bodily from their homes and synagogues by their own soldiers, so that Gaza could govern itself. It was land for peace in its purest form. Within months, Gazans elected Hamas. By 2007 Hamas had seized the Strip by force and thrown its Fatah rivals off rooftops. Then came the rockets. How did that work out?

Now to Judea and Samaria, and here honesty cuts both ways. Roughly three million Palestinians live in what the world calls the West Bank, alongside about half a million Israeli settlers. According to the UN's humanitarian office, more than 4,300 Palestinians have been displaced there since January by demolitions, evictions and settler attacks, with settler violence now the leading cause. Another 33,000 have been out of their homes in the northern refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams since Israel's counterterror operations began there in early 2025, operations aimed at armed cells that had turned those camps into fortresses.

Set against a population of three million, these numbers fall far short of the "elimination" B'Tselem alleges. But they are not nothing. Each one is a family, and some of them are Christian families.

Justice and Security

Palestinians want justice. Israel wants security. Both are legitimate longings, and neither will be won at the expense of the other.

That is why this week's arrests matter. On Monday, Israeli police, working with the Shin Bet and the army, arrested ten Israelis in an operation dubbed "Olive Leaf," after masked settlers attacked Palestinian olive pickers near Ramallah, beat Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine, and assaulted a party of European diplomats. Israel's police commissioner declared that the law applies to everyone, whatever their identity or affiliation.

Good. It is overdue. Prosecutions of violent settlers remain rare, and these arrests came only after Washington leaned hard on Jerusalem. With Israelis going to the polls on October 27, no doubt politics played a part. Still, a nation that arrests its own lawbreakers is behaving like a nation of laws.

Let me be plain. Christians who love Israel, and I count myself among them, should say without hesitation that the thugs who torch olive groves and beat farmers are a disgrace to the Jewish state and a gift to its enemies. Saying so is not anti-Israel. It is the kind of friendship that tells the truth. What I will not accept is a church statement that can see only one set of victims.

The B'Tselem Problem

EPF PJN leans heavily on B'Tselem's September report, "The Elimination Project," which charges Israel with a systematic campaign to dismantle Palestinian life in the West Bank and concludes that Israel's conduct meets the legal threshold for apartheid. The report rests on some 2,000 Palestinian testimonies.

It records real harms. B'Tselem counts about 1,087 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank between October 7, 2023, and June 30 of this year, and Netanyahu's government has approved a record 104 new settlements. Those facts deserve an answer from Jerusalem, and VirtueOnline will not pretend otherwise.

But a report that reads every raid, every arrest and every checkpoint as one master plan of "elimination," rather than as a response, sometimes heavy-handed, to gunmen, bomb-makers and terror cells, is not neutral human-rights reporting. It is advocacy with footnotes. Critics at the Jerusalem Post noted that the report treats virtually every Israeli military and security action as part of a settler-colonial pattern. Israel's government, for its part, says it condemns nationalist violence and rejects any claim that it is persecuting the Palestinian population. EPF PJN tells its readers none of this.

Pilgrimage with an Agenda

EPF PJN wants Episcopal pilgrims, under General Convention Resolution 2024-C002, to "explore and engage the realities" of life in the land, "paying particular attention to the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories, to the violations of human rights, and to Palestinian national aspirations."

Note what is missing from that list: Israeli security, Jewish victims of terror, the hostages, and the Jewish people's three-thousand-year bond to Judea and Samaria. A pilgrim who follows that brief will notice the soldier at the gate of the Old City and never think to ask why the soldier is there.

EPF PJN recommends a short film. Fine. I recommend that pilgrims also stand at Kibbutz Be'eri and at the Nova festival grounds near Re'im, where 364 young people were butchered at a music festival. Visit the families of Sderot, who for twenty years have had fifteen seconds to reach a bomb shelter. That, too, is the Holy Land.

We have seen this pilgrimage before. In June, Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally spent five days in the region alongside Archbishop Hosam Naoum, became the first Archbishop of Canterbury to preach in Birzeit, and promised Palestinians she would seek "the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve." Their joint pastoral letter urged Anglicans to work toward ending the occupation. She met the parents of a detained Christian student and a jailed Christian community worker. Reported accounts of her visit record no stop at a single Jewish holy site.

The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, came home from the West Bank last November accusing Israel of genocidal acts, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Neither archbishop offered a public word of understanding for a nation burying its sons and daughters.

The Christians in the Middle

Here is the real tragedy, and on this point the synod is right to grieve. Palestinian Christians are being squeezed from both sides: by settler thugs on one hillside, and by Islamist pressure, corruption and economic despair under Palestinian rule on the other. The Christians of Taybeh know what settler fire looks like. The Christians of Bethlehem, once a majority in their own town, know the long, quiet exodus. Gaza's tiny Christian flock lived for nearly two decades under Hamas.

Meanwhile, inside Israel proper, the Christian population continues to grow modestly year after year. That is a fact you will not read in any EPF PJN bulletin.

A church that truly cared for Palestinian Christians would name all their oppressors, not merely the convenient one.

Whose Crisis?

Israel is a nation of some ten million people, roughly the size of New Jersey, ringed by those who would prefer it did not exist: Hamas to the south, Hezbollah to the north, the Houthis firing missiles from Yemen, and behind them all, the ayatollahs in Tehran. That is an existential crisis.

Palestinian suffering is real, and I have no wish to minimize it. But solidarity that never asks who started the war, who refuses to lay down arms, and who still dreams of a Middle East without Jews is not solidarity. It is partisanship in a clerical collar.

The Jerusalem synod asks the Church not to look away. Fair enough. Then let the Church look at everything.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East can be viewed here: davidvirtue2.substack.com