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War & peace

18 October 2023

8 min read

Israel-Hamas war: the courageous leadership that might solve this most intractable of problems

Amidst the horror of the Israel-Hamas war Graham Tomlin recalls the revolutionary leaders who were prepared to take the bold path away from violence and bloodshed.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

People walk across the rubble beside a recently bombed building.

Residents of Gaza City walk past a recently bombed building.

WAFA.

How can you say something sensible about the horror that has unfolded in Gaza and southern Israel? The actions of Hamas on October 7th were deplorable. Whatever the perceived justice of a cause, using rape as a weapon of war, kidnapping and killing babies and children, parading terrified kids as trophies of war in a pre-meditated campaign is abhorrent and indefensible. However sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, surely no-one who can imagine the terror felt by teenagers taken hostage, parents fearing what is happening to their children, or the notion of cutting the head off a fellow-human being can celebrate the actions taken by Hamas. The irony of western liberals expressing loud support for Hamas, an Islamist group that is fundamentally opposed to all the ideals of western liberalism is a strange quirk of our confused contemporary moral life.

Of course, these developments need to be seen in the light of the long-running hostility between Palestinians and Israelis, and their supporters elsewhere in the world. The issue cuts right along the already existing fissure of the culture wars, with those on the left generally supporting the Palestinians, sometimes veering into outright anti-Semitism, as the Labour party has discovered, and those on the right supporting Israel, sometimes veering into uncritical support of any action by the current Israeli government – a concession few would offer to any other national government worldwide.

The result is a depressingly familiar pattern. Since then, Gaza has endured constant bombardment, food and power shortages, death, destruction and huge suffering. The infrastructure of the enclave has been destroyed yet again, although more severely this time, leaving the problem of rebuilding hospitals, schools, houses, sewage systems that take years to construct. The people who suffer, like the Israelis who have had loved ones cruelly taken from them, are the ordinary people of Gaza. It may lead to the satisfaction of having punished the perpetrators, but will leave behind a legacy of continued hatred and resentment of Israel that will only erupt again in a decade or so’s time.

The idea that Nelson Mandela would one day wear a Springbok rugby shirt, the symbol of the oppressor, was unthinkable for the young ANC activist – as unthinkable as an Israeli Prime Minister wearing an Arab keffiyeh, or an Arab leader waving an Israeli flag.

Successive world leaders, American Presidents and international commissions have tried to solve this most intractable of global problems. And failed.

Yet other seemingly intractable problems have managed to find a way forward. Tensions between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland haven’t gone away but the violence that accompanied them has largely ceased. Racial inequalities in South Africa remain, but apartheid as a policy is discredited, and again, the threat of violence has diminished.

The common denominator in these places where deep divisions have found some resolution, is a new, re-imagined and bold leadership - on both sides of each dispute. It required a willingness to think the unthinkable and do the undoable. In South Africa it was the courageous and mould-breaking leadership offered by both Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk. Both did things unimaginable in their respective camps beforehand. The idea that Nelson Mandela would one day wear a Springbok rugby shirt, the symbol of the oppressor, was unthinkable for the young ANC activist – as unthinkable as an Israeli Prime Minister wearing an Arab keffiyeh, or an Arab leader waving an Israeli flag. The idea that FW de Klerk would dismantle apartheid, free Mandela and fully back an election that he was likely to lose to the ANC was again inconceivable when he took power as Prime Minister in 1989.

Similarly in Northern Ireland, the idea of Ian Paisley the embodiment of Protestant ‘No Surrender’ and Martin McGuiness, second in command of the IRA in Derry at the time of Bloody Sunday in 1972, shaking hands and sharing power was literally unimaginable when the troubles were at their height. These were all flawed men, each with some measure of blame for the suffering involved in their countries, yet who saw a better way and had the courage to take it.

Israeli soldiers console each other while searching a home attacked by Hamas.

Two soliders console each other as they search a house that has been ransacked.

Israeli soldiers console each other while searching a house attacked by Hamas.

As is often observed, if the Palestinians had had wiser leaders, there might have been an independent Palestinian state years ago.

Of course, these very public gestures of reconciliation took years of careful negotiation and sensitive diplomacy to achieve. Yet they happened. And they happened because these leaders gradually recognised that the path they were walking down would only lead to ongoing mutual destruction, continued conflict and suffering. As the saying goes, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

This is what has been lacking in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian people have been badly let down by the ineffectiveness and corruption of Fatah, and the senseless Islamist terror of Hamas, exploiting the understandable sense of injustice in Gaza in particular for violent ends. Hindsight is a great thing, but if the Palestinians had had wiser leaders, there might have been an independent Palestinian state years ago, whether through the UN Partition Plan in 1947, which offered 46 per cent of the land to an Arab state, in the 1990s through the Oslo Accords or other opportunities in between.

On the Israeli side in recent years, Prime Ministers like Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have played on the (to be fair, often justified) fear of Israelis, to offer themselves as the security candidates who can keep Israel safe by building a wall or enact tight border controls around Palestinian communities, restricting their movement, as if long-standing Palestinian resentment at the loss of their land will just go away one day if you keep the pressure on long enough.

If his vision of Zionism had won out over the more aggressive version of David Ben Gurion, might this long history of conflict have been avoided?

There have been glimmers of hope. In the lead up to the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, the Zionist philosopher and politician Martin Buber argued for the right of Jews for a homeland, yet also believed the moral test of that homeland was going to be the way they would treat their Arab neighbours. For him, the call on the new Jewish state was bigger than just to provide a safe place for Jews to live, but, in alignment with the Old Testament call on the people of Israel, was to be a blessing to the nations. As he wrote in his visionary book A Land of Two Peoples:

“A true Zionist wants not to rule over his Arab brothers but to serve together with them.”

If his vision of Zionism had won out over the more aggressive version of David Ben Gurion, might this long history of conflict have been avoided?

In the 1980s, Anwar Sadat moved from being the leader of Egypt’s attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 to the architect of a ground-breaking peace treaty with Menachem Begin, Israel’s Prime Minister at the time. Later still, the Oslo Accords of the 1990s offered the possibility of a resolution – land for peace. Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat shook hands on the White House Lawn, as hopes began to rise of a new dawn for the Middle East.

Yet in both cases it cost these leaders their lives. Sadat’s assassination by an Islamic extremist in 1981, Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish militant in 1995 and the subsequent refusal of both sides to build on these delicate beginnings effectively put an end to the fragile hopes for peace.

Over many visits to that extraordinary land, I have experienced two communities with much in common, living alongside one another, yet with little direct interaction, and often living in fear of the other. Many Jews believe all Arabs want to kill them. Many Gazans think all Israelis want them dead. Of course, some do on both sides, but most people simply want to live in peace without the threat of explosions or being killed, or home demolitions and feeling like second class citizens.

If I have a prayer for the land of Israel/Palestine, it is for bold, imaginative leaders. There was once such a Jewish leader in Israel. There were at the time, as now, fights over who really owned the land - the Jewish people with their roots in the story of Abraham, Moses and King David or the Gentile Roman empire, with might on their side. The question of how should you deal with your enemy was a live one. Different Jewish groups argued that you should hate the Gentile enemy and kill them (the Zealots), blend in with them (the Herodians), avoid any contact with them (the Pharisees), or feel superior to them (the Sadducees). Jesus of Nazareth came up with the crazy idea that you should love them and pray for them, and thus be true children of the God who made both you and your enemy.

Unrealistic? Maybe. And also today, perhaps much too early to talk about such a thing when emotions are so raw. Such a call doesn't deny Israel’s right to reasonable self-defence and the Palestinian right to legitimate protest. But this was the basic idea that lay behind the revolutionary leadership of Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk, Martin McGuiness and Ian Paisley. Here were leaders who were prepared to take the bold path away from violence and bloodshed.

In each case, it took leaders on both sides to find a way forward. A commitment to such a path on one side alone is not enough. If that is all you have then you get killed, just as Jesus did. And of course, such a path does not avoid the possibility of suffering and even death, as both Sadat and Rabin found out. Yet, in the strange mystery of God’s working, even that - especially that - was the path to peace.

In the depressing cycle of hatred and death, the grieving families of Israel and Gaza, the weeping sons and daughters of Isaac and Ishmael, we can only pray for new leaders who will walk the difficult yet fruitful path of making enemies into friends.

Essay

Creed

Middle East

Monastic life

Royalty

11 August 2023

9 min read

Edward I and the monk from China

A tale of a Chinese priest meeting a medieval monarch sheds a different light on the extent of Christendom. Benjamin Sharkey tells the surprising tale of the historic Asian church.

Benjamin Sharkey

Benjamin is a DPhil student in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. He is researching the experience of Christian communities in medieval Central Asia.

A medieval illustration of two sets of monks seated and facing each other. One gestures towards the sky

A 13th Century depiction of a meeting between Latin and east Syrian clerics.

AtlasAtlas des Croisades, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the summer of 1288, outside the city of Bordeaux in Gascony, a small group of travellers approached the city walls. The inhabitants of the city gathered, curious to meet this collection of strange looking clergymen who were clearly far from home. The strangers told them that they had come from ‘over the eastern sea’ with letters and gifts from the ‘Mongol kings’ and the Patriarch in the east. Such strange reports, from visitors emerging from the unseen world over the horizon, a world known only from fantastical stories, deserved the immediate attention of the king.

Edward I, the Duke of Gascony and King of England had been resident in Bordeaux for the last two years, overseeing the affairs of his duchy. Assembling his court, he welcomed these visitors from the east. The leader of the travellers was a monk named Rabban Sawma. He was a Uyghur Turk from China. He presented to Edward letters and gifts from the Mongol ruler of Persia, the ilkhan, Arghun, a great-great-grandson of Genghis Khan, and from the patriarch, Mar Yahbalaha, the head of the Church of the East.

As a young lord, Edward had taken the crusader’s oath to go and fight to attempt to regain Jerusalem for Latin Christendom from the rule of unbelievers. Jerusalem had fallen from crusader control in 1244 after the city had been sacked by a large force of Kipchak warriors, nomads from the Central Asian steppes who had been displaced by the expanding Mongol empire. Arriving in 1271, Lord Edward managed to break the siege of the port-city of Acre, one of the last cities held by the King of Jerusalem. Over the next two years, however, his small force accomplished little, mostly skirmishing with herdsmen and burning houses and crops. His time in Acre came ignominiously to an end when he was stabbed with a poisoned dagger by one of his Muslim courtiers leading to lengthy and painful surgery. He left the dream of reaching Jerusalem behind him. Returning from crusade, Lord Edward was greeted with the news of his father Henry III’s death, heralding the start of his own reign. It wasn’t until 1274 that he finally reached England for his coronation. There in Westminster Abbey, he was invested with the splendour of Christian kingship. He swore on the gospel books to uphold and dispense justice and, having been anointed, he was dressed by the bishops in priestly robes and given a sword for the defence of the weak and ‘constraining those who do wrong to the Church’. Now, here in Bordeaux, these new visitors represented something quite outside his experience.

When we dig (literally, archaeologically), we consistently find the evidence of Christian communities that no text ever told us about.

Edward would have been familiar with the stories of Prester John. Reports of a grand and mysterious figure, a Christian ruler somewhere in the east who was both a priest and king, had begun circulating in the mid-twelfth century and were still current in European imaginations, especially as they tried to make sense of the new world that was opening up to them through contact with the Mongols. While there was not really any great Christian king in the Mongol empire, this legend does reflect the (correct) sense of medieval Europeans that a whole world of Christianity was going on beyond their horizon.

Many historians today believe that until perhaps as late as the fourteenth century there were more Christians outside than inside Europe. Yet, in our books of global church history these believers rarely get more than a slim chapter, unrepresentative of their large share of the historical Christian demographic and experience. Throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages there were significant numbers of Christians across Asia and Africa, in Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt; Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia; India, Central Asia and China. Christians had been present in China as early as the sixth century, with significant numbers elsewhere much earlier. Meanwhile Egypt and many other areas of the Middle East had predominantly Christian populations until at least the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, which continued to makeup significant minorities into the twentieth century. In the Middle Ages these areas were global centres of population and development. Bordeaux was one of the largest cities in Europe at the time with a population of nearly 30,000 but cities like Alexandria, Baghdad, Merv (in present-day Turkmenistan) and Samarqand (in present-day Uzbekistan) were among the biggest in the world with populations in the hundreds of thousands, far larger than any in Europe. Present in the historical record of all these urban centres were Christian communities. We find them scattered across the textual record, although for many of these regions this record is far patchier than for medieval Europe, but when we dig (literally, archaeologically), we consistently find the evidence of Christian communities that no text ever told us about.

Most Christians throughout history have lived outside Europe and North America, in pluralistic societies, ruled over by and living alongside non-Christians.

By far the largest group of Christians outside Europe was the Church of the East. This church, once termed, inaccurately, Nestorian, was entirely distinct from the Eastern Orthodox churches but had rather grown out of those early churches that had been founded to the east of Judea, outside of the Roman empire in Persian ruled Mesopotamia. They soon rapidly grew to include communities across Asia, from Syria to China, and India to Mongolia. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, was the primary language of worship, prayer, and literature in these communities but the gospels, psalms and hymns were often translated into local vernaculars. Growing up outside the Constantinian revolution, which had seen the ushering in of the conception of Christian kingship with the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, and never succeeding in converting the Persian Shah or any other significant rulers, these eastern Christians had no experience of existing in a Christian state. Throughout the Church of the East, Christians always lived in pluralistic societies. The patriarch, the head of the church, was indeed for most of the Middle Ages based in Baghdad, also the seat of the Muslim Caliph, from where he oversaw the affairs of more communities than the Pope in Rome.

By the time that Rabban Sawma made his journey to Europe, there were Christians throughout the Mongol empire (the largest empire until then ever seen). These included many Mongol queens, Khatuns, such as Sorqaqtani Beki, the mother of Kublai Khan, as well as many ordinary Mongols. Christianity had been present in Mongolia for at least a century by the rise of Genghis Khan in the early-thirteenth century and was very popular among many of the tribes he subordinated.

Christianity for well over the first two thirds of its existence then was not a majority European faith and today it is again not majority western. Most Christians throughout history have lived outside Europe and North America, in pluralistic societies, ruled over by and living alongside non-Christians. The western experience is not just unrepresentative of Christianity today but unrepresentative of Christianity in the past. Christendom has been only a small part of the Christian experience.

There in Bordeaux, near where the Garonne flows into the Atlantic, the king of England knelt as the monk who had grown up not far from the banks of the Yellow River began singing in Syriac.

This was the experience of the monk who stood before Edward I. Rabban Sawma had grown up near Khanbaliq, ‘the city of the khan’ (present day Beijing). When still in his early twenties, out of ‘the love of his Lord’ he had become a hermit, living in a cave near a mountain spring, in the manner of many Chinese Taoist, Buddhist, poet and artist ascetics. People would regularly make the day’s journey from the city to come to hear him preach. He was later joined in his secluded life by another young man with a desire to lead a life for Christ named Mark. The two had lived together for some time when one day Mark shared with the older hermit his desire to visit Jerusalem. Together they set out on the long and perilous journey to see Jerusalem and all the sites of the life of Jesus. Like a reverse Marco Polo they travelled west across the Mongol Empire, sometime in the early 1270s, perhaps indeed at the same time as Marco Polo, taking the opportunity for long distance travel which the continent-spanning Mongol empire had made possible.

When the two monks eventually reached Iraq they were told that fighting between the Mongols and the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, who then controlled Jerusalem, had made travelling the final part of the journey impossible. So they settled down in Iraq until the time might come when it would be safe to make the journey. Such a time never came but while they were in Iraq they became involved in the life of the church and when in 1281 the patriarch died it was with some surprise that Sawma’s young companion Mark found himself chosen by the bishops to be the new patriarch. He chose the new name Yahbalaha.[3] He was the first believer from the more eastern regions of the church to be chosen as patriarch, reflecting the greater involvement such believers were able to have in the life of the whole church under the Mongols. In 1287 the Mongol ilkhan Arghun, seeking to use the European desire to regain Jerusalem to coordinate attacks against his enemy in Egypt, asked Yahbalaha to provide a Christian messenger to go to Europe with gifts and letters for its Christian kings. Yahbalaha recommended his mentor Sawma, also providing him with his own letters of friendship for the Europeans.

A year later, having visited the cardinals in Rome, who had quizzed him on his beliefs and been left perfectly satisfied that he shared the same beliefs as them, and in Paris the King of France, who had shown him around the rapidly expanding city with its sprawling universities, Sawma met the king of ‘Inglatar’. In their audience Edward’s attention was particularly caught by the reference in the ilkhan’s letter to Jerusalem, having again taken the crusading oath only the spring before. But Sawma was far more interested in using his trip to see artefacts associated with characters from the gospels, to hear stories of heroes of humility and of the miracles God had worked in the lives of saints, and to observe the novelty of life in a predominantly Christian society.

In the evening Sawma was invited to lead the king in worship. There in Bordeaux, near where the Garonne flows into the Atlantic, the king of England knelt as the monk who had grown up not far from the banks of the Yellow River began singing in Syriac:

‘Teshbuhta l-alaha ba-mrawme’ ‘Glory to God in the highest…’

On the altar Sawma broke the bread and made the sign of the cross over the chalice of wine. As he broke up the bread he sang: ‘Abun d-ba-shmaya’ ‘Our father in heaven…’ Edward and some of his courtiers and clerics might have recognised the prayer and tried to repeat the strange words or to follow along reciting in Latin. The king and his courtiers approached and Sawma served them. The king of England and the Chinese monk together participating in the divine mystery of Christ’s incarnation and sacrifice.