The Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem declared flatly today that Jews in Israel do not discriminate against Christians. He said that “to my knowledge, there has been no social discrimination against Christians in Israel similar to the kind of discrimination against Jews in other countries.”
The Rev. A.C. Maclnnes, whose diocese takes in the entire Middle East, came to Toronto to attend the World Anglican Congress which starts this week. He said there has been discrimination against the 200,000 Arab Christians in Israel, “but they have been discriminated against as Arabs, not as Christians.” He added that it was necessary to remember that “Israel is at war with the Arab nations.”
He agreed there had been much controversy in Israel concerning Jews who have married Christians, but he did not regard this as having anything to do with discrimination. There is still much debate in Israel over the age-old question of defining a Jew, he said, adding he felt that this accounted for one of the difficulties in Jewish-Christian marriages and problems faced by Jewish converts to Christianity. He said that, in Israel, the act of a Jew becoming a Christian was “simply looked upon as a contradiction.”
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