The West's silence on peace
The West's silence on peace
All we hear is support for Israel at all costs, writes George Pitcher
The evil shooting stars of ballistic weaponry over Jerusalem would have been clearly visible from Bethlehem, just to the south of the capital in the occupied West Bank, last Monday evening.
“Above thy deep and dreamless sleep/ the silent stars go by” goes the children’s Christmas carol. Nothing deep and dreamless about sleep in the little town of Bethlehem just now. Those deadly Iranian-despatched stars were silent enough, until their alignment with Israeli ones in the Iron Dome. Then “whump!” as each star collapsed, leaving a black hole in the night sky.
How depressing that these shining stars of violence and hatred should hang in the same sky that, it is said, hosted the star to mark the birthplace of the Prince of Peace. Depressing but not surprising. The Christ child, after all, grew up to foretell to Jerusalem that “the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you.”
Still being crucified
And he predicted his own death in Jerusalem. For sure, the Christ is still being crucified there, every time a man, woman or child loses their life to that violence and hatred – there or in the surrounding region.
Where are the wiser counsels this week, witnesses to peace in the Holy Lands? The legend has it that Magi followed the messianic star to the stable. Who looks to these very different stars in the night sky this week and asks what they mean?
It’s a bit of a stretch to apply the status of magus to Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s new reformist president who had just been sworn in when he watched the rockets launched. His only similarity with the magi may be that he watched those travelling stars in the sky from an eastern perspective.
The possibility of peace
But Pezeshkian has, at least, tried to talk of the possibility of peace, among a middle-eastern cast who seem only to speak of war. He arrived back in Iran from the UN general assembly, where he had declared that Iran is “ready to lay down its arms if Israel lays down its arms.” He added simply to journalists: “We want to live in peace.”
Even if it’s not the wolf living with the lamb, or the leopard lying down with the kid, it does at least envisage a time when an Israeli wolf might lie down with the Iranian leopard. But Iran’s hardliners, under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, can’t countenance a dove with an olive twig. They’re consumed with vengeance for Israel’s killing of the their putative military leader, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon. And death must always be followed by more death in this scenario.
Defeat of death
Those who followed the Nazarene into Jerusalem committed to something very different, a defeat of death as a weapon of despair. Two millennia later, we might expect leaders of a western world founded on the principles of those first followers to speak to peace as the overriding priority for the lands from which their religion derives.
But not a bit of it. Peace in the Holy Lands doesn’t even sound like a strategic aim for the West anymore. On the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US Army general David Petraeus asked: “Tell me how this ends?” No such foresight today. The all-consuming desire seems solely to show that we’re tribally on Israel’s side, come what may.
“Fully supportive”
President Joe Biden responded to Iran’s aerial attack by saying that the US is “fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel”. For his part, prime minister Keir Starmer declared that “Britain stands full square” with Israel and supports its “reasonable demand for the security of its people.” Admirable sentiments, but they don’t point to peace any time soon, so long as they encourage Israel (or anyone else) to escalate the conflict.
In some quarters, this is held to be deliberate Israeli policy: To draw the West into a war with Iran in defence of Israel. A re-elected president Donald Trump would be a useful dupe for this ploy, abetted in part by the more extreme ends of the US Christian Right, for whom Israel must be protected at all costs as the locus for the second coming of the Christ. So war with Iran is Armageddon, the great conflict of the End Times.
Iran speaks more of peace
These are truly terrifying prospects. For the time being, it’s possibly enough to note that the president of Iran speaks more about peace than the West currently does. Given that the West is supposed to represent the legacy virtues of Christendom, that is in turn alarming.
That Bethlehem carol goes on to observe “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.” As we raise our eyes to the fearsome lights in the night sky over Israel – and Lebanon and possibly soon Iran – we might wonder whether, when it comes to peace, silence from Christian nations is really enough.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest
A version of this column first appeared on Seen&Unseen