Gaza-Israel: bankrupt ideas still capture too many of us

One year on, we’ve turned no pages, learned no lessons, made no progress.

Todd Deatherage

Todd is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Telos Group. It forms communities of American peacemakers across lines of difference and conflict, including Israel/Palestine.

A graffitied concrete border wall stands below a blue sky and dusty ground

Border wall between Gaza and Israel.

It’s the first anniversary of October 7, and we’re left with the grim task of finding a way to appropriately honor the dead, stand in solidarity with the bereaved, and mourn with all who mourn. And we do this as we acknowledge our ongoing collective failure and the unimaginable and avoidable loss of so many innocent lives, each one with its own promise and possibility forever denied. In the end, it’s hard to find a way to commemorate the horror of that day because it’s still going on. We’ve turned no pages, learned no lessons, made no progress.

Someday there will no doubt be a grand and somber memorial that tells the story of the brutal October 7 attack. The victims of that day will be remembered, the captives and their fates memorialized. And some day there will be a museum that tells the story of what many already believe will be characterized in the historical record as a genocide in Gaza. To what we already know of the massive destruction of a place and a people will be added details that will be excavated from the rubble, testimonies from the traumatized survivors, heartbreaking tales of orphans and of the destruction of entire families. Maybe these places of collective memory will offer greater context for the world in which the tragedies that created them took place, some kind of “never again” lessons to learn, and no doubt some sharp analysis of the failures that led to these days of great darkness. If these attempts at memorialization are honest, they will hold many of us up to withering critique. We’ll be in the museums too, enduring rebuke for the indifference that led us here or for our zero-sum thinking that could only imagine a world born of and sustained by violence in all its forms.

These are lone and lonely voices in a land besieged by brutality, dehumanization, and ideologies of ethnic and religious supremacy. But they are not unicorns.

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If we don't want the story to be about our blind complicity, but about our courage, we still have time to own our agency. Because this isn't over yet. We can mark this day by remembering that it will continue to be like all the others until we all do our part to achieve a ceasefire, a release of captives, and an end to support for systems of inequality and control. In whatever ways great or small that we can, we have to reject the logic of violence and the ideologies of hatred and exclusion. And to be active participants in cultivating in ourselves and in our communities an imagination for the way each human life is sacred and our flourishing is tied to that of our neighbors.

We do this even as we pause and honor the innocent dead in Israel, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and now in Lebanon. We mourn with all those who mourn. But we do that with people still dying in Gaza, with millions of Palestinians still displaced, with disease and hunger rampant, with Israeli hostages still being held, with massive street protests calling for a ceasefire being ignored, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis still displaced from their homes in the north and the south, with Hezbollah rockets still falling and now with the war more fully advancing into Lebanon, with a wider regional war ever a distinct and terrifying possibility, with settlers rampaging in the West Bank with impunity, with ideological zealots setting the terms of debate, with economic catastrophe as hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians have endured a year with no income, and with palpable fear among Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The bankruptcy of the ideas that have prevailed this past year remain firmly in control and continue to capture the imagination of too many. And yet there are those who know that violence begets violence begets violence, and that this is how we got here, not how we get out.

I spent a day in New York City last month with four members of the Parents Circle/Families Forum, an organization made up of 700 Palestinian and Israeli families, each who have each lost a loved one in the conflict. In addition to the pain of loss they share, they also share a commitment to a rejection of the very notion of revenge and an embrace of the work of reconciliation. Four members of this group traveled to the United States for a two-week tour to help us understand our part in their shattered and unjust reality and to let us know that there is another way if we can find the courage to pursue it. That way is mutuality. It is an embrace of security, dignity and freedom for all the people of their traumatized shared homeland, Israelis and Palestinians alike, in equal measure.

Each member of this unlikely tribe has a unique story of personal loss, and as they speak, they tell of the worst day of their lives, over and over again. But there is exponential power in the fact that these stories are told in one voice. Two members visiting the U.S. are mothers, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who have lost children in the conflict and have been transformed by the deep realization that they share the same pain. One was a young man whose ten-year-old sister was killed by an Israeli border policeman and after some years of anger-fueled stone throwing as a teenager, he began to channel his trauma into the work of resisting occupation and violence via the collaborative work of justice, freedom and security through reconciliation. And one of the newest members of this work is a man whose mother, an internationally recognized Israeli peace activist, was killed in a kibbutz on October 7. He has chosen to pick up his mother’s work and devote himself to a just peace for himself and for all his neighbors, Palestinians included.

These are lone and lonely voices in a land besieged by brutality, dehumanization, and ideologies of ethnic and religious supremacy. But they are not unicorns. There are others there whose stories need to be told and whose work needs our support.

My church is preaching a sermon series reflecting on the leadership and choices of the kings of biblical Israel and Judah. Their stories are old but their inclinations to violence, their neglect of care for the poor and the widow, and their lack of concern for justice are timeless. In a recent sermon I was struck by my pastor’s observation that even those of us who have regularly engaged with the Bible all our lives don’t always know much about the kings, but we do know something of the prophets. They are, in his words, “the ones who hold the story for God.” And in times like these, as we descend ever deeper into darkness and inhumanity, they are the ones who share in the pathos of God, to borrow from rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. But they also show us the way out. Warmongers in the Middle East and here in the West are creating massive destruction. We too easily and readily live within the world created by their corrupted imagination. We can’t ignore them. But we don’t have to listen to them. Listen to the prophets, those who hold The Story of God’s shalom, of his kingdom of justice and peace. They are still among us. One of our responses is to make sure we’re listening to these voices, amplifying them, and following their lead.

As a Christian, over this past year, I have found myself being drawn more deeply into the life and the person and the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. The deep love of the maligned and suffering, enemy-loving Jesus, he who was accused by the religious establishment, executed by one of the great empires of history, mocked and spit upon, all for the threat he posed to those addicted to power, control, exclusion and the violence needed to enforce it all. This is the Jesus who boldly declared liberation of the captives, vision for the blind, food for the hungry--a new kingdom of justice and mercy, of wholeness and shalom.

None of these things I believe absolve me from acting. Jesus is not my cop out, he’s my way out. What if we who seek to follow him were to repent of our propensity to violence, our fascination with the zero-sum binaries we use to create hierarchies of exclusion, and our failure to demonstrate our love for God by showing love of our neighbor? We might not solve all the problems that are destroying us but we’d at least stop contributing to them. And imagine what a more generative and healing presence in the world we would be if we joined our voices with others of different faiths and none who also believe in a world more just and whole. I would argue that the world in all its diversity and complexity needs Christians to mark this day and this moment is by taking Jesus so seriously that we start to live out his calling to be active participants in the work of justice, healing and repair and living reminders that all are made in the image of God, violence begets violence, and the simple truth of Mother Theresa who said, “If we have no peace it’s because we’ve forgotten we belong to each other.”

Essay

Culture

War & peace

23 February 2024

7 min read

Swords now, ploughshares later

There’s a moral case for investing in defence capabilities right now.

Tom Simpson

Tom Simpson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

A religious icon is propped on the side of a trench, a soldier can be seen further down the trench.

An icon of St Michael in a Ukrainian army trench.

It is two years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on 24 February 2022. We are still sleep-walking, with the British public and political class yet to grasp its implications. The risks of large-scale conflict have surged, and the British military is inadequately prepared for the operations it may soon be called on for. One day, swords will be turned into plowshares. But right now, in this imperfect world, we need more swords. Even if not widely enough, some have realised that the global order has changed. But fewer still are willing to act on that realisation.

The Russian assault in February 2022 was designed to shock. Repeating the plan which the Soviet Union had used in Afghanistan in December 1979, armoured columns advanced on the capital on multiple axes, preceded by an aviation assault into an airport just outside the main capital, intended to allow invading forces to ‘decapitate’ the government. The 2022 attack was also accompanied by strikes on key targets in Kyiv itself, with Russia mimicking the ‘shock and awe’ campaign with which coalition forces had initiated the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The international situation has been parallel, with an immediate shock, galvanising intensive and often heroic action—but the resolve for which has withered with time. Some moments of demonstrated resolve among the public during the early months stand out in my memory. The students in Oxford who were fundraising not just for blankets for refugees, but for body armour, night-vision goggles and, if I remember rightly, even weapons. The stranger who bought a decrepit caravan from me for scrap saying, quietly and undemonstratively, that she would not buy fuel from Shell because it was blood oil. And, the 12-foot-tall statue in Oxford’s Broad Street of a Ukrainian soldier expressing the city’s solidarity.

This was echoed at the national level. In a welcome act of leadership, Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister, declared that Putin “must fail and must be seen to fail”. This gave the necessary direction for a series of forward-leaning policies, both economic and military, to support Ukraine.

The shock was short-lived, however, and in its place are concerning questions about both public and political resolve. The underlying issue is the significance of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While the immediate consequences of this conflict are felt by Ukrainians, it matters more widely—to both the British and the global public. Realising these consequences, and then taking the appropriate action to address them, is now urgent. That action involves serious investment in defence industries, defence capability, and the military.

The lights on the dashboard of global security are all flashing—some amber, and some red.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine matters more widely in at least the following four ways.

First, it has incurred immediate costs on consumers globally. This sounds bland but is not. Soaring energy bills have cost lives, with the Economist estimating that the war indirectly killed more people in Europe in winter 2022 than Covid-19 did; so too do soaring food costs in countries which desperately need a steady, cheap supply of grain.

Second, the current course of the conflict in Ukraine has dramatically raised the risk of a confrontation between NATO and Russia, which may include either or both of conventional or hybrid conflict. Russia has not succeeded in turning Kyiv into a satellite state. But, unless NATO dramatically increases its supply of materiel, including high-end capabilities, the most likely outcome of the war is that Russia will successfully ‘freeze’ the conflict while controlling approximately a fifth of Ukraine, including the most economically productive part of the country in the East. Such success increases the likelihood of a revanchist Putin, seeking to establish Russian control over its claimed ‘historic’ borders and having put his economy on a war footing, attacking perhaps the Baltic states. Or Russia may simply seek to disrupt NATO countries in forms of conflict that fall short of conventional war, but risk escalation, as witness the recent Estonian arrests of ten people alleged to be part of a Russian destabilisation operation. The collective self-defence pact embodied in NATO’s Article 5 means that UK forces will be involved in any response to such aggression.

Third, the current inability for the US and Europe to act decisively, due to domestic political irresolution and polarisation, in the face of a clearly deteriorating security environment, emboldens potential adversaries. This is evident daily at the moment, with Republican politicians refusing to approve the $60 billion support package for Ukraine proposed by the Biden administration; as a result, the Ukrainian army has just withdrawn from Avdiivka, because it lacks the artillery shells to defend it. In a post-2016 timeline, and from an external perspective, the West now looks decadent.

Fourth, that Russia is likely to succeed in its war aims (unless something changes on the battlefield) further undermines the norms of non-aggression which are central to our currentrules-based international order. The domestic political trajectories of Russia, China, and Iran are not presently encouraging. All have stated goals which would see change in who controls relevant territories, and none rule out the use of force in achieving their goals.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, then, is an inflection point. The lights on the dashboard of global security are all flashing—some amber, and some red.

But Javelins do not descend ex nihilo from the clouds: they need to be manufactured by advanced industries.

In the face of such a deteriorating security environment, the urgent task for a responsible government is to ensure that it has the required military capability. This capability must be at minimum sufficient to defend its own citizens. It must also be sufficient to protect more widely those whom it has undertaken treaty commitments to defend. And, as a contribution to the wider public good, it is desirable that that capability should be sufficient to defend other innocent parties globally, subject to appropriate authorisation. Central to this capability is having a defence industry which will develop and manufacture the arms required.

The defence industry has frequently attracted criticism and controversy, with the most damaging charge being that it sells weapons to authoritarian regimes in corrupt deals. Exporting arms to regimes that will use them repressively, through corrupt contracts, is plainly wrong. But responding to this criticism does not require banning or otherwise abolishing the defence industry. Rather, the correct response is to reform it and then regulate it effectively, on the grounds that if war itself can sometimes be just, then the production of the tools required for war must itself be just.

If the state is, as St Paul had it, commissioned to punish the wrongdoer, ‘not bearing the sword in vain’, someone must make the swords.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a paradigm of wrongful aggression; if war is ever justified as, I think, an imperfect world forces us to accept, it is in such circumstances. Those who would contest such aggression, in defence of innocent lives and sovereign states, need the weapons to be able to do so, and they need the best weapons that are available. One of the immediate actions that Ben Wallace, then UK Secretary of State for Defence, took in response to the invasion was to surge Britain’s stocks of man-portable anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. One of these, the Javelin weapon, literally gained iconic status, in the meme of ‘St Javelin’, styled as an Orthodox saint. But Javelins do not descend ex nihilo from the clouds: they need to be manufactured by advanced industries.

The defence industry, then, may certainly play a valuable role in a country’s economy. But more than that, in a world of predatory and repressive states, and violent non-state actors, it is a moral necessity. Isaiah foresaw, prophetically, a time when swords will be turned into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. But this side of that new reality, we need states that protect the innocent, and without a defence industry to equip the state to do so, the innocent lie vulnerable. If the state is, as St Paul had it, commissioned to punish the wrongdoer, ‘not bearing the sword in vain’, someone must make the swords. The peace dividend at the end of the US-Soviet Cold War has been spent, and we are in ‘the foothills’ of a new one, as the late Henry Kissinger described it. Ploughshares later; it must be swords now.

How long have we got? It is a basic principle of military planning that, while you should structure your own operations around the enemy’s most likely course of action, you should also, and crucially, have contingencies for the enemy’s worst-case course of action. That worst-case may be with us sooner that we think. In the lead-up to the recent Munich Security Conference, the Estonian intelligence chief estimated that Russia is preparing for confrontation with the West ‘within the next decade’; the chair of Germany’s Bundestag defence committee indicated five to eight years; and the Danish defence minister suggested three to five years.

With procurement timelines for advanced equipment—such as main battle tanks, frigates, and next generation fighter aircraft—typically taking over a decade, the urgent priority is for defence investment now. The UK’s Armed Forces are in a parlous state, as the recent cross-party report by the House of Commons Defence Committee makes clear. This investment in defence will not be cheap, and the difficult political task is deciding what spending to cut to allow for this uplift. But this debate cannot wait, and politicians must lead the country now in the required mind-set shift. Poland is the only NATO country to have convincingly demonstrated that it understands the times we live in, by investing seriously in its army. The UK government certainly wills the end, of ensuring the country’s security. The present question is whether it wills the means.

The St Javelin icon meme