Towards the end of January a leading Liberal Democrat MP, Jenny Tonge, was removed from her party's front bench after saying that she 'might just consider' becoming a suicide bomber if she were a Palestinian living on the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip. The reaction to her comments - both from those who condemned them and those who supported them - amply demonstrated the visceral emotions that the apparently intractable conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is capable of evoking.

One increasingly troubling aspect of the conflict has been the way in which legitimate concern about Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories has been used as a cover by various groups and individuals who have a more overtly anti-semitic agenda. Jews everywhere, it seems, are to be held responsible for the actions of Ariel Sharon's government. Explosions at the Neve Shalom and Beth Israel synagogues in Istanbul last November killed over twenty people; now there are few synagogues anywhere in the world, including the ones in our own community in north Leeds, that do not employ firms to oversee security on the Sabbath and High Holy Days. Meanwhile one of the most ancient manifestations of anti-semitism, the claim that Jews use the blood of Christian children in their religious ceremonies, is beginning to reappear in the media of some Arab countries.

The history of Christianity's relationship with the Jewish people is a tragic one: nearly two millennia ago early Christian theologians began to lay the foundations of Hitler's death camps with their vitriolic and wholesale dismissal of the Jews and their religion; and it is only in recent decades that Christians have begun to rediscover and to celebrate our common heritage with the Jewish people in whose faith Jesus of Nazareth was nurtured. One way in which we can continue to redeem the shameful behaviour of our forebears is to speak out against those whose criticism of the Israeli government masks a deeply disturbing return to a more thoroughgoing and all-embracing anti-semitism.