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When the United Church of Canada (UCC) adopted the document Bearing Faithful Witness in 2003 as a blueprint for rapprochement with Canadian Jewry, it issued a collective mea culpa for its historical treatment of the Jews. The church stated: "We believe that our faith calls us to repent when the church has been unfaithful in its witness by not loving Jews as neighbours."

Through this document, the UCC tried to come to grips with the place of Israel in this equation, partly because it recognized Israel's essential connection to the Jewish spirit and identity, but also because anti-Zionism had emerged as the nexus of the most contemporary manifestation of anti-Semitism.

The document tried to delineate the difference between acceptable criticism of Israel and statements that cross into anti-Semitism.

To our great dismay and pain, little of this message has since been internalized within the UCC. A series of resolutions and supporting material on "Israel/Palestine" up for debate at the UCC's General Council this month in Kelowna, B.C. suggest the church is not just stepping away from the Jewish community, but turning its back on us.

Should these resolutions pass, there will be serious consequences to UCC-Jewish community relations that will undo every positive step made since the adoption of Bearing Faithful Witness.

The materials are hurtful, both for what they say and what they glaringly omit. For example, there is no recognition of the existential threat facing Israel -- from suicide bombers, missiles and the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.

There is no mention whatsoever of the hundreds of rockets launched from Gaza that have wreaked catastrophic physical and emotional damage on Israeli civilians. Nor is there a single reference to Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran.

Despite claiming to seek a solution to the Middle East conflict, the UCC is painting Israel as the sole obstacle to peace and exculpating the Palestinians.

Its resolutions ally the church with the enemies of Israel, supporting the "Durban strategy" of boycotts, divestment and sanctions launched at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism. This campaign goes well beyond mere criticism of Israeli policies -- it seeks to marginalize and vilify Israel as the "new Nazi state" or the putative successor to apartheid South Africa.

If passed, these resolutions will repudiate the courageous and constructive approach of the last UCC General Council. At that time, the church rejected the call to boycott Israel and to apply methods that brought down the true apartheid regime in South Africa, and instead supported an investment strategy to contribute to peace and security for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Perhaps more disturbingly, the explanatory documentation to support the resolutions constitutes an inflammatory assault on Canadian Jews.

Using loaded and misleading terms, the material speaks casually of Israel being founded on land "ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian owners" and of what it refers to as the "recent assault on the population of Gaza" as constituting "a visible reminder of the ongoing Israeli regime of exclusion, violence and dehumanization directed against Palestinians, in violation of international law and human rights standards."

These are not objective statements of fact, but rather one-sided sloganeering that is entirely unhelpful to anyone who wants to truly understand the current situation in the Middle East.

The whole purpose of this material is to vilify Israel and to present it in a crude caricature as the "new apartheid" state, allegedly based on a state-sanctioned policy of racial superiority. The purpose of this hateful invective is to deny the legitimacy of Israel because it is a Jewish state.

Particularly egregious are the resolutions' "notes," which suggest that support for the state of Israel is the product of corruption and descends into florid anti-Semitism, with smirking insinuations about the loyalty of Jewish Canadians who hold dual citizenship or have affiliations with the Jewish state.

Jonathan Swift once observed that, "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." Bearing Faithful Witness brought the UCC and the Jewish community of Canada closer than ever before. Six years later, the UCC will have to decide if Swift was right.