Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis, who has a son serving in the Israeli army, has warned the Church of England’s General Synod that it risks damaging Christian-Jewish relations if it proceeds with a motion encouraging engagement with A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, a document published by Kairos Palestine, also known as Kairos II.

The General Synod, the Church’s legislative body, is due to consider the motion at its annual gathering in York. The motion does not ask the Church to endorse the document, but to receive and engage with it as part of its understanding of Palestinian Christian experience amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The document describes Israel as a “colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity” and says Palestinians are “the indigenous people of this land”. It calls on churches “to distinguish between dialogue with Jews and dialogue with Zionism”. It also says “The genocidal war on Gaza is the continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine, emptied of its Palestinian people.”