For the first time in 12 days, the archbishop of Canterbury was on the defensive. Wearing a purple No 15 shirt emblazoned with the crest of Lambeth Palace over his clerical shirt and dog collar, Justin Welby played sweeper in a game between mixed teams of Muslim, Jewish and Christian children in Jaffa. The final score was an equitable 0-0.



Welby was at the Equalizer Project, a coexistence scheme funded by the British government, on the last morning of the longest and most fraught trip in his four years as head of the Church of England and the global Anglican communion.



The archbishop, who confessed to having no hand-eye coordination, performed passably despite recovering from reconstructive surgery to both feet.

For Liran Gerassi, the Equalizer project’s founder, prowess on the pitch was not its main purpose. “Here we’re not trying to turn out the next Wayne Rooney, but decent human beings,” he said. Meanwhile, one 12-year-old said playing football with the archbishop of Canterbury was “weird”.



Later, Welby was relaxed and convivial as he thanked his relieved team at lunch in Jaffa port before they headed to the airport at the end of almost a fortnight in Israel, Palestine and Jordan.

The archbishop of Canterbury visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Photograph: Ariel Schalit/AP

Despite the archbishop’s well founded pre-trip anxieties, the carefully calibrated visit was hailed a success. It had taken more than a year of planning, with an advance recce party from Lambeth Palace and the detailed involvement of the British embassy in Tel Aviv and consulate in Jerusalem, and local staff at St George’s Anglican cathedral in East Jerusalem.

Part of the anxiety for Welby and his team stemmed from a trip to Jerusalem a few months after his consecration as archbishop in 2013, which had led Palestinian Christians to complain they had been overlooked.



This time the itinerary was scrupulously balanced. Welby prayed at the Western Wall, visited the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, ate Shabbat dinner at a kibbutz in the Galilee, and met survivors of the Nazi death camps.

He visited the Dome of the Rock, heard the testimonies of Palestinian families living next to the huge separation barrier near Bethlehem, spent several hours in Gaza, and (against the Israeli government’s entreaties) toured the divided West Bank city of Hebron, where a few hundred hardline Israeli settlers have forced Palestinians out of the Old City. He visited churches, Christian schools and health clinics, and interfaith and coexistence projects.



Among almost 80 meetings in 12 days were hour-long sessions with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli president, Reuven Rivlin, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and King Abdullah of Jordan. The talks, which focused on the prospects of a new round of peace talks, were frank and surprisingly positive.



Welby had insisted on a long trip and a packed itinerary. “He doesn’t do down time,” said one aide. The early starts were no problem for someone who routinely rises at 5am for quiet prayer and reflection, but towards the end of the trip the archbishop found himself flagging over another dinner meeting.

Welby and Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City. Photograph: Dusan Vranic/AP

He was courteous and engaging with the people he met; to the handful of journalists accompanying him, he was chatty, warm and sometimes surprisingly indiscreet.



This was his fifth visit to the Holy Land, the first being his honeymoon in 1979. Even so, he stressed his lack of expertise in the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying he had come to learn. “We know we don’t know anything,” he said of himself and his wife, Caroline, who accompanied him, at the Peres Centre for Peace and Innovation on his last day.



He felt on guard throughout the trip, anxious about inadvertently making a comment which would be misinterpreted or cause a political furore in a place where both sides scrutinise the words of public figures and observers for perceived bias.



“Everything you say here has to be qualified with the comment that it’s not as simple as that,” he said at a press conference in Jerusalem on his penultimate day. “Everything has to be seen in the light of a history that stretches back further than any other conflict in the world.”



The archbishop’s meetings with political leaders gave him cautious hope – which, he said, was not the same as optimism. The US president, Donald Trump, might bring fresh eyes to the decades-old conflict when he visits Jerusalem on 22 May. Political leaders, he told a mixed audience at the Peres centre, needed be “courageous, adventurous and have a big vision”.



Welby was also left in no doubt as to Britain’s legacy in the area. At a meeting in the West Bank, William Shaer, the mayor of Beit Jala, berated the archbishop over the 1917 Balfour declaration in which the British backed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.



Welby with sheikh Omar al-Kiswani, director of al-Aqsa mosque, during a visit to the Dome of the Rock on the compound known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount. Photograph: Ammar Awad/Reuters

It was “one of the darkest acts of colonialism ever seen”, said Shaer. He demanded an apology, but added: “Instead [the British] are preparing for a celebration.”



Welby diplomatically sidestepped the issue, but in a later meeting with Rivlin spoke of “an element of unfinished business” in the declaration. The text also urged: “Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”



The archbishop intends to press home the message in the run-up to events to mark the centenary of Balfour this year. Lambeth Palace planned to host a symposium on the issue in the autumn, and Welby was keen to “feed into a national perspective”, a close aide said.

The trip was always intended to be the start of a closer engagement on the issues facing the Holy Land, rather than a one-off. In the coming months, key Lambeth Palace staff are returning to Jerusalem and elsewhere to build on relationships and continue dialogues begun over the past 12 days. Welby wants to make another – albeit shorter – trip in a couple of years.



As some his team enjoyed an hour in the sun before embarking on the evening flight to London, Welby was whisked off for one last meeting. Then, he said, he would allow himself “one glass of champagne” on the flight home.

