Column

Comment

Gaza

Israel

Middle East

22 October 2023

5 min read

What it really means to take a stand

George Pitcher explores the challenge in applying moral principle to the savage international crisis that is the Israel-Hamas war.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Two country leaders sit in chairs next to each other with their country's flags behind

President Biden meets Israel's Prime Minister.

The White House.

The first fortnight of the Israel/Gaza war has seen distinct phases in the West’s response. Initially, our leaders united in their resolution that Israel had a right to defend her borders. Of course she did – tell us something we don’t know.

The danger then arose, after they had projected her flag onto their government buildings and sent armaments to assist her, that we would look away as Gaza was flattened in reprisal for Hamas atrocities committed on Israeli soil.

We didn’t look away, thank God. The missile strike on the Gaza hospital (whoever caused it) marked the second phase of our horror at what was unfolding in a city under siege. It meant the US president Joe Biden arrived in Israel with a more conciliatory tone: “While you feel... rage, don’t be consumed by it.”

On his copycat visit, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak was more hawkish: “We will stand with you in solidarity… and we want you to win.” Well, not all of us, actually; he apparently hadn’t noticed, or chose to ignore, loud pro-Palestinian British demonstrators. Sunak’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, evidently had noticed the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and urged “restraint”.

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 and, largely, are saying so.

Overall, in the past few days, Israel seemed to be grabbing global opprobrium from the jaws of western support. In a turbo-charged burst of whataboutery, Jewish commentators have been reminding us of the unspeakable horrors of the Hamas invasion that sparked the conflict.

Our respectable, mainstream media don’t need reminding. They repeat the details of Hamas’s crimes against humanity relentlessly as further harrowing details of them emerge. But the story has developed, if not moved on.

The consequent challenge is to apply moral principle to this savage international crisis. The criteria of Augustine’s “Just War” are a good place to start. One of the sanctions 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 and, largely, are saying so.

Biden said so in Israel. In doing so, he showed leadership in the best traditions of the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage. Graham Tomlin has spelt out here our urgent need for such leadership and it would be only faithful to meet that challenge.

To say we stand with Israel, as Sunak does, is an incomplete statement in this regard. It needs to be followed by vocalising what we stand for.

From a perspective of faith, the first thing to say, almost to get it out of the way, is that 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. What we call the Holy Spirit changes events through us. So 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, as Sunak does, 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 then that the German people were not to pay, beyond reparations, for the crimes of Nazism.

To apply similar moral principle to the current crisis, it’s absolutely 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.

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 (yet it doesn’t make it any less true).

Nor is anyone likely to suggest that Israel turns its other cheek – the Christian cries out for justice as well. 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.

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, after all, 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.

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 Hamas 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.

Article

Comment

Work

10 September 2025

4 min read

Can KPIs really measure what matters?

Distilling down worth risks losing something sacred

Rick Hansen

Rick writes and speaks on leadership, transformation, and culture.

Which box this year?

Yogi Atmo on Unsplash

I remember recently when I was reduced to a data point. I became an inconvenient name on a spreadsheet.

"Your services are no longer needed. We have to let you go," he stated with feigned empathy. Just like that, years of my work and contributions - hours, days, weeks, months - ceased to matter. I didn't matter. "HR will contact you shortly to explain the final details. Again, I am truly sorry."

The Zoom meeting ended, the camera went blank. I sat in my home office, staring at the blank screen of the company-issued laptop. The only sounds were the disheveled thoughts scrambling in my head and the gentle hum of the fan circulating cool air from the ceiling above. All went quiet. Just like that I was reduced to a KPI - a key performance indicator.

Having spent years in the business world, I'm well-acquainted with its dynamics, including hiring and firing. I recognize ambition and its relentless pursuit of progress. Still, it felt like a personal blow, like a scene on Instagram or YouTube you replay endlessly on loop, trying to comprehend, trying to make sense of it all.

As your value is quantified and found wanting, a sacred inner part of you perishes. In that moment, it’s hard to feel the wonder and mystery of your creation. You don’t feel what for centuries has been called the imago Dei - that we humans are made in God’s image. Instead, you think about how you were just told “we don’t need you.” You think about paying your bills? How will this impact your career? Where will you find your next job?

As a leader, I understand metrics are crucial for business. However, this pervasive culture of metrics has warped our perception of worth. Instead of marveling at the wonder of being made in the image of God, we have become trained to value only what can be counted. We’ve become both deaf and blind to the unquantifiable beauty of human existence.

We’ve prioritized metrics over people. We’ve created a world where efficiency presides over meaning and productivity overshadows purpose. Ironically, this has crippled entire organizations, not optimized them. Critical components like morale, engagement, and productivity are at an all time low. Just check the numbers. (See what I did there)

We have built a ruthless culture defined by a dehumanizing machinery of metrics. People have become problems to be optimized rather than mysteries to be revered.

If we let our job define us and if as leaders we let it define our mystery and those we lead, we succumb to a cancerous, spiritual violence. To treat a person as a set of outputs is to willinging deny our capacity to reflect a divine truth.

Does it have to be this way?

William Blake's poem, "The Divine Image," eloquently conveys a core theological principle: humanity mirrors the divine, embodying God's very image. We are an irreducible, immeasurable value.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love

Is God, our father dear

And Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love

Is Man, his child and his care.

Are we imago Dei? Are we the very image of God the first chapter in Genesis speaks of?

Is this true? Are we always irreducible, immeasurable? Or is this just a conversation to have in a broader discussion when contemplating humanity’s place in the cosmos?

What about the workplace? What about when human worth is distilled into key performance indicators that then become the only thing measured, the only things that defines a person’s worth? What happens when our irreducible human value, this imago Dei is distilled to mere data points on business dashboards? To KPIs.

On one hand, nothing happens; we are still a complex mystery of God’s creation. We are still immeasurable, irreducible. We are imago Dei. On the other hand, something does happen to the person. Something sacred is expunged. Our infinite complexity like emotions, dreams, quirks, ideas, feelings, and virtues are reduced and transcribed into metrics and evaluated against random data sets. Perhaps this is where the shallow quip originates? “It’s not personal. It’s just business.”

I mean I get it. In the business world, we are a metrics driven culture, quantifiable data points are seemingly the only identifier of worth. It drives the business, right?

We read in our company handbooks that, “our people make the difference.” In reality, we all know that data is the true currency. It is here, I argue, that the soul gets buried beneath spreadsheets and the image of the divine is lost within a myriad of data sets.

We must raise a quiet but profound rebellion.

Our spirit of God’s very image that thrives in a mutual wonder and shared humanity cannot be replaced by a zero-sum race for higher scores.

Ask someone at work “How are you doing?”, actually listen to them and engage, and only then ask, “How are you doing with your targets?” Metrics are important, but the person behind them is essential.

When we become our job or when we think those we work with are defined only by how well they do their job, we are all vulnerable to this sacred loss. Our goal is not our job. Our purpose is not how and if we hit our metrics. Instead, our sole aim should be to seek how to better understand this mystery of this life - this imago Dei - that we have been given and how to share it with others.

This reminds me of the saying, "Not everything worthwhile can be measured, and not everything that can be measured is worthwhile."

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