Christ on the Gaza border
The authentic voice speaks not of revenge, but of peace, writes George Pitcher
The West’s response to the crisis in Gaza is acutely worrying. Not so much because of its factional nature, inflammatory and offensive as that may be, but because it’s insufficient.
Western leaders have united in their resolution that Israel has a right to defend her borders. Of course she does. The danger arises, after they have projected her flag onto their government buildings and sent armaments to assist her to do so, that these leaders then look away as Gaza is flattened in reprisal for Hamas atrocities committed on Israeli soil.
This is where moral insufficiency in leadership occurs. The crimes against humanity committed by Hamas, in places such as the Kfar Aza kibbutz, cry out for vengeance. They are almost too horrific to witness, so we’ll look away not only from those crimes, but also as their victims are avenged.
The West is comprised of (predominantly) Christian states but, arguably, we don’t have the option of looking away from these horrors as they unfold in (predominantly) Jewish and Muslim jurisdictions.
Effective agents
Prayer is vital under these circumstances – it never changes an impassible God; it always, every time, changes us to be more effective agents in the world. But our agency is as nothing if it remains unimplemented. The Christian voice needs to be articulated in action as well as word.
To say we stand with Israel is an incomplete statement in this regard. It needs to be followed by vocalising what we stand for. And, whatever that is, it can’t be the destruction of a people as the price of the defeat of its terrorist leadership.
If that were the case, the Allied advance on Berlin from the west at the end of the Second World War would have more closely resembled the horrific brutality of the Soviet advance from the east. There was a moral assumption on our part that the German people were not to pay, beyond reparations, for the crimes of Nazism.
Racist
To apply similar moral principle to the current crisis, it’s right to defend Israel from Hamas, but it is right also to defend Palestinians from the crimes of Hamas. To fail to make such a distinction isn’t solely inhumane, it’s racist.
The criteria of Augustine’s “Just War” are a good place to start. One of the justifications for waging such a war is that it is proportionate. A scorched-earth policy in Gaza in reprisal for the massacre of families in Israel cannot be countenanced and we, in the West, should say so.
Gospel injunctions, in truth, can ring hollow in these circumstances. To suggest, on the Gaza border right now, that we should love our neighbours as ourselves would sound tin-eared and trite. But it doesn’t make it any less true.
Justice
Nor is anyone likely to suggest that Israel turns its other cheek – the Christian cries out for justice too. But we might be bold to say that the way to exact that justice is not an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
Challenges to a Christian response to the conflict are twofold. First, Christian witness is woefully diminished on the very ground on which Israeli military boots currently stand and where they are likely to march very soon.
It’s been a fluctuating historical demographic, but the Christian population across the holy lands of the Middle East has declined from about 20 per cent a century ago to just 5 per cent today. There is now less than 2 per cent of the population of Israel that is Christian. Gaza has been a hostile environment for Christians since the Hamas takeover in 2007; out of a population of 2 million, perhaps 1,000 are Christian.
Uneasy stability
This is not to suggest that Christian presence alone could change the course of Israel-Palestine armed conflicts. It didn’t prevent the Six-Day War in the 1960s when it was far larger, nor during intifadas since. But, as I have written before, the Christian quarters in Jerusalem have maintained an uneasy stability between Judaism and Islam and their decline has made the city more volatile. As a buffer to conflict, the Christian role is diminished.
The other complicating factor is Christian Zionism, a doctrine that holds that the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 is eschatological – that is, that the return of the Jewish people to the holy lands is a precursor to the “end times” and the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Holy voice
None of which is likely to comfort those suffering so dreadfully there. Perhaps, ultimately, we look for the holy voice in the wrong places. I don’t mean to misappropriate her faith or ethnicity, but I think of the traumatised young woman who survived the massacre at the Re’im Supernova music festival.
Asked on ITV News if she wanted revenge, she replied through her tears, quietly but firmly: “I don’t want revenge. I want peace.” There speaks the authentic voice of hope.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest
Thanks, George. Can you maybe address the 'sins of the father' question? I want someone to ask the IDF or the Israeli cabinet whether a baby on an incubator in Gaza deserves to die because of the terrible things his or her father (or brother) did. I'd expect them to say Hamas put that baby in danger – it's up to them to make them safe. But it's the absence of the slightest expression of human sympathy for innocent Gaza lives that's so depressing.
Thanks George, for this which I largely agree with. The important thin, I think is first to make sure that the evil of Hamas and their deeds and those who stand behind them is uneqivocally condemned as evil without any temporising references to history, context, other suffering or any other 'whataboutery'. Other evils can and must be condemned on their own terms, but relativising one evil against another is to avoid truth telling.
The key question which is so difficult, is how can Israel - and we in our minds and words - separate Palestinian people - in Gaza in this case - from Hamas. I listen to the stories of Gazan families suffering and who could not empathise. But how are Hamas to be punished, ejected or defeated without wholesale suffering of ordinary Gazan families. I have no answer other than looking to examples of people rising up against what is being done in their name - in Iran at present or the Confessing Church in Hitler's Germany in the past. All such involve very great suffering and nothing of what many would call victory.