(LifeSiteNews) — The largest Christian ecumenical organization in the Holy Land launched its second major document in November calling for continued non-violent Palestinian resistance in the face of Israel’s occupation and genocide while crying out to Christians worldwide for solidarity and assistance.

Having recently returned from the Holy Land, Catholic humanitarian and Vulnerable People Project founder Jason Jones recommended the document from Kairos Palestine in a telephone interview with LifeSiteNews.

“I always feel guilty when I come home,” he said after spending significant time in the Palestinian West Bank broadcasting on Christmas, interviewing Christian clergy and others. “It’s like visiting a friend who is fighting cancer and then you have to leave and return home to your comfortable life.”

Jones’ work in bringing relief to Christians in the region has made him an important advocate for them and other innocent Palestinians, most recently calling out Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for hypocrisy in promising to defend Christians while his government has perpetrated and supported their persecution in many ways.

Asked what the condition is for Christians and the broader Palestinian people, he encouraged fellow Christians in the West to read and consider the Kairos Palestine document titled A Moment of Truth: Faith in the Time of Genocide.

“It is comprehensive, clear and may even be shocking to some in describing the reality in the Holy Land,” he advised. “And they don’t mince words.”

The Kairos Palestine movement was initiated in 2009 with their first major document self-described as “the Christian Palestinians’ word to the world about what is happening in Palestine.” It was endorsed at the time by heads of all the churches in Jerusalem, including all of the Catholic and Orthodox rites, along with the Anglican and Lutheran denominations. Among these endorsements was Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who was head of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land at the time and is now the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.

As of spring 2025, the Kairos Board of Directors consists of prelates, priests, ministers and community leaders representing these various churches, including its president, former Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, Orthodox Bishop Atallah Hanna, and Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, pastor of the Lutheran Evangelical Church in Ramallah who is also a past guest on the Tucker Carlson show.

Offering comments on the new 14-page “Kairos II” initiative, Isaac said “is not an attempt at the beautification of suffering, it is a call to persevere.” The document uses “clear, unambiguous language that calls for naming things” and presenting them accurately as they are.

Gaza genocide ‘continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine’

In the document’s first section titled “The Reality: Genocide, Colonization and Ethnic Cleansing,” the Christian coalition laments, “We raise this cry from the heart of the assault on Gaza — a war that has left behind hundreds of thousands of martyrs and wounded, and nearly two million displaced people. Many were buried beneath the rubble, burned alive, tortured to death in prisons or forcibly displaced more than once. Others endured starvation, targeted even as they ran in search of food. Tens of thousands of children were killed in the most horrific ways. Gaza’s health, education, economic, and environmental sectors — indeed, every component of life — have been destroyed.”

Addressing the gravity of this ongoing international crime, the document affirms, “Human rights organizations, legal institutions and international experts have been unequivocal: the statements of Israeli political leaders and Israel’s actions in its assault on Gaza constitute genocide. Many of the war crimes and crimes against humanity have been documented and arrest warrants have been issued against Israeli political leaders based upon rulings of the International Court of Justice.”

Speaking with direct clarity, the prelates affirm what close observers have known for many decades: “Zionists do not want us to remain on our land. Their plan for us is displacement, death or submission. The genocidal war on Gaza is the continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine, emptied of its Palestinian people.”

READ: Christian leaders in the Holy Land rebuke Trump’s plan to relocate Palestinians

‘The Western world has sacrificed us, revealing racism and double standards toward our people’

“Exposed today,” the document continues, “is the true face of Zionist ideology: a system that over decades has entrenched an organized and sophisticated regime of apartheid supported by advanced technologies that exercise total control over every aspect of Palestinian life — fragmenting the land, dividing its people, and turning Palestinian existence into an unbearable hell.”

Echoing a maxim of St. John Paul II, the document endeavors to “call things by their proper name” and thus defines Israel as “a colonial, settler and exclusionary entity built upon the displacement of the indigenous population and their replacement with new settlers”

“For this reason, we reject the very concept of ‘conflict.’ The reality on the ground is rather tyranny and an oppressive regime of settler colonialism and apartheid,” they affirm. “Any denial of this reality is an evasion of manifest truth — one that reinforces and perpetuates the injustice.”

The authors further call out hypocrisy of the United States and other Western countries who continue to support Israel’s ongoing aggression: “While people of the world have stood in solidarity with us, the genocidal war has laid bare the hypocrisy of the Western world, its hollow values and its empty boasts of commitment to human rights and international law. In truth, the Western world has sacrificed us, revealing racism and double standards toward our people.”

Christian Zionism a ‘theological distortion and a moral corruption,’ must be ‘boycotted’

The Christian leaders also address the heresy of Christian Zionism, calling it a “theology of racism, colonialism and ethnic supremacy” that “has produced apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide of indigenous people.”

“Christian Zionism calls on a tribal, racist god of war and ethnic cleansing, teachings utterly alien to the core of Christian faith and ethics,” the document states. “Christian Zionism must therefore be named for what it is: a theological distortion and a moral corruption.”

And due to genocidal results of this heresy, the Christian prelates, priests and other leaders insist that the time has come for the churches to end all ecumenical dialogue and collaboration with Christian Zionists.

“After all efforts to invite Christian Zionists to genuine repentance have been exhausted,” Kairos II reads, “moral, ecclesial and theological responsibility requires that they be held accountable and that their ideology be rejected and boycotted. The time has come for the churches of the world to repudiate Zionist theology and to state clearly their position on Palestine: this is a case of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people.”

West Bank Israeli settlers commit ongoing terrorism against Palestinians

The Christians also denounce aggressions by Israeli settler terrorists against indigenous Palestinians in the West Bank recalling how they “wreak havoc upon the land, destroy crops, poison or seize water resources and attack residents — all under the protection, support and even participation of the Israeli army in acts of violence, killing, home demolitions and forced displacement.”

READ: Holy Land bishops urge Christians worldwide to help defend faithful from Israeli settler attacks

“Palestinian society lives under a suffocating siege imposed by checkpoints, gates and other mechanisms that deny our people freedom of movement,” they wrote.

And with regards to Palestinians living within the state of Israel, the Christians affirm, “blatant racism and discrimination persist. Palestinian communities face intimidation, criminalization of free expression, and persecution of any effort to defend Palestinian rights.”

Furthermore, “(t)hose displaced within Israel in 1948, whose lands were confiscated, are still denied the right to return to their villages and rebuild their homes.”

Christian document condemns slanders of ‘antisemitism,’ honors Jewish voices confronting Zionism

Addressing common Zionist calumnies against their interlocutors, the Christians “condemn all who exploit and support the charge of antisemitism to silence the Palestinian voice of truth. We reject every attempt to conflate antisemitism with opposition to apartheid and with pressure to hold Israel accountable under international law.”

Additionally, they condemn actual antisemitism “alongside all forms of racism, exclusion and prejudice including Islamophobia.”

They argue that it is illegitimate to conflate “Jew” with “Zionist” noting “Not every Jew is a Zionist and not every Zionist is a Jew. This confusion has done great harm to Judaism itself and to its image worldwide.”

The Christian leaders go on to “honor the growing number of Jewish voices that oppose the war and confront Zionism from moral, faith-based and human conviction. In them we find partners in our shared humanity and in the struggle for freedom and human dignity — partners also in religious and political dialogue.”

READ: On Holocaust Memorial Day, Jewish group protests Israel’s ‘sadistic’ genocide in Gaza

Churches must ‘boycott dialogue with Zionist voices,’ and ‘amplify prophetic Jewish voices that call for justice and truth’

Marking this essential distinction, they lament that for “too many years” such religious dialogue with Christian authorities has been “monopolized by Zionists and their allies” with “premises built upon the reinforcement of Zionist ideology and the persecution of Palestinians.”

We therefore call on the churches of the world to distinguish between dialogue with Jews and dialogue with Zionism — indeed, to boycott dialogue with Zionist voices that have supported and continue to support occupation, apartheid and the genocide of the Palestinian people. Instead, we call upon the churches to stand with and amplify prophetic Jewish voices that call for justice and truth.

In a stirring open letter last April, the Kairos board of directors admonished the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for collaborating with a Zionist (and pro-abortion) organization issuing a document which they affirmed “misrepresents our struggle and seeks to silence voices advocating for truth and justice in the Holy Land.”

While the current Zionist “war of extermination” was being inflicted upon them, the Christian leaders charged the USCCB document also negated “the immense injustices inflicted upon Palestinians, including the indigenous Christian community whose presence in the Holy Land is on the verge of extinction.”

READ: Holy Land Christians demand USCCB denounce Israel’s genocide, oppose US military support

In contrast last May, on behalf of Kairos and Palestinian Christians at large, Latin Patriarch Emeritus Sabbah wrote the Bishops’ Conference of the Church of Norway thanking them for their clear statement condemning Israel’s assault upon Gaza and standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Christians worldwide, others, called to ‘costly solidarity’ with Palestine

Making an appeal to Christian churches around the world, Kairos II encourages them to work with “both religious and secular coalitions” in order to “pressure their governments to isolate Israel, hold it accountable, impose sanctions, boycott it, and to ban the export of arms until it complies with international law, ends oppression and tyranny, and adheres to the principles of justice and peace.”

These governments must also “press for the prosecution of war criminals whoever they may be … ensure reparations for the Palestinian people … work for the immediate return of the displaced through the reconstruction of Gaza and the strengthening of its people’s steadfastness.”

Turning their attention to the heart of faithful Christians and others, they state, “More than ever, now is a time for costly solidarity.”

“By its very nature, true solidarity is costly. It has a price. It is a faith-based stance, a human commitment and a moral responsibility,” Kairos II affirmed. “True solidarity is also the embodiment of our shared humanity and fraternity. Either we live together — or we perish together. Today it is Palestine. Tomorrow it will be other marginalized and oppressed peoples.”

As reported by Jewish Voice for Liberation, the Kairos II document was released during the organization’s 16th Anniversary International Conference held November 10-16 in Bethlehem, Occupied Palestine. Those in attendance included 140 Palestinians and 160 internationals.

“From the land of the Incarnation, the Cross and the Resurrection, we renew our word of hope in the God of the poor, the oppressed and the downtrodden,” the Palestinian Christians profess in the final section. “The genocidal war has sought to strip us of our hope and faith in God’s goodness and in life upon our land.”

“Yet we declare our adherence to our faith in a holy and just God, and in the right God has given us to live with dignity on our land and the land of our ancestors. This is our hope. This is our steadfastness. This is our resistance.”

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