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

Race

2 November 2023

4 min read

In search of Martin Luther King

Wanting to put flesh on the bones of a much-fabled tale, Ian Hamlin begins a journey in search of his hero.

Ian Hamlin

Ian Hamlin has been the minister of a Baptist church since 1994. He previously worked in financial services.

A street mural of Martin Luther King quoting him.

An MLK commemorative mura.

Stories define us. Especially genesis stories, stories of formation, of how things began. Because beginnings often harbour within them all the seeds of future growth, defining so much of what’s to come, size, shape, colour, character even, and, what’s true of the natural world, is also, so often, true for our own life journeys.

As I embark upon a particular journey, in many ways the centrepiece of my three-month sabbatical break from my life in Christian ministry, I find myself reflecting on a bigger, longer, greater journey that has, consciously and unconsciously, shaped a good deal of that whole life.

I’m writing these words on a train, from Boston, Massachusetts to Washington DC, eight hours through a variety of weather, landscapes, and a whole variety of provincial, and city stations, some of them famous, others vaguely familiar, still more completely unknown. I’m off in search of flesh on the bones of a story, a much-fabled tale, of a man and his life.

I came across a book, a thin tome and looking pretty sorry for itself, clearly already well thumbed. I started to read it and quickly became transfixed.

But first, more of mine. I grew up, the youngest of four children, in a pretty traditional working-class family in Bristol that, by virtue, of my parents owning their own home and my two older brothers having gone to university at the end of the 60’s, now found itself, contrasted starkly with all of my Aunties and Uncles, knocking on the door of middle-class comfort.

By the early 80’s however, as I was preparing to leave school, that all looked, and felt, a little different. Not having acquired sufficient spiritual credits to attend the city’s church school, and with my brother’s academies having long since migrated to the private sector, I’d meandered my way through the local comprehensive, with enough wisdom to avoid most of the outcomes for which it was renowned, but not enough application to really supersede them all. What I did learn though, was a strong sense of justice, together with a certain perplexity as to why this wasn’t more universally shared and even, in some cases its absence appearing to be celebrated.

In our playing fields and its environs there was a pretty regular flow of what today would be called ‘racially aggravated incidents’. I vividly recall one boy in my year having his legs nastily broken. What I also remember though, was the daily ritual of being handed a National Front promotional leaflet at the school gate. Difference begetting antagonism, spawning violence and demanding retribution, seemed to be the story, I hated it, and instinctively railed against it.

My response was hardly dynamic or revolutionary. I think I went on a march or two, I remember buying a mug once, yes, I was that sort of kid, oh, and I put a poster on my wall. Again, a fairly generic image, probably bought from Athena, of a man, half a generation older than me and a whole world away. A man, on a platform, speaking, and some of the words he spoke, super-imposed over the top of him, ‘I have a dream …’

A short while later, at a friend’s house, I came across a book, a thin tome and looking pretty sorry for itself, clearly already well thumbed. I started to read it and quickly became transfixed, it was more speeches from this same man, yet these were different, they spoke more about motivation than outcomes, about the passionate ‘Why’ of action, more than the ‘How’ of achieving meaningful change. It was ‘Strength to Love’, a book or sermons for, I discovered this man was not a politician but a preacher.

To cut a long story short, this encounter, these thoughts, along with a few others, caused me to translate my hitherto rather semi-detached relationship with my local Baptist Church into something more committed. Within eight years I was in London, training for ministry, and I‘ve now been in Church leadership for 30 years.

For stories, rooted in truth, throw a spotlight on those lived, core beliefs, out of which glorious, effective, fulfilled lives develop.

And so, our stories intertwine, mine and Martin Luther King’s, oddly, unexpectedly, yet profoundly, and so I find myself on a train, to DC, and then on to Atlanta, Montgomery, Birmingham, to dig more into his story, to discover more of my own.

Because stories not only define us, they fuel us. Idealism is all well and good, but where does it come from, and how might it be sustained? Inspiration, is often illusive, a fiery necessity for a purposeful effective life, in any sphere, but it needs a source, something in which to be rooted. A craving for justice, an attraction towards generous love, a passion for human fulfilment, and a whole host of other things, all seem like good and obvious things, in and of themselves, but why? And, given they are frequently costly and hard fought, from where might the motivation come to make the necessary sacrifices? Martin Luther King did what he did because he believed what he believed, given that, it seemed obvious, inevitable, for him to act, whatever the cost. The Apostle Paul encouraged the first generation of Christian believers, living challenging lives at the heart of the empire, in Rome, to tell stories; ‘How can they hear unless someone tells them?’ he reasoned, and then, with a flourish, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’

It seems we need preachers, storytellers, more than we do politicians. For stories, rooted in truth, throw a spotlight on those lived, core beliefs, out of which glorious, effective, fulfilled lives develop. With that knowledge in mind, I’m off on my journey, to experience tales, old and new, and see what they do to me, I’ll let you know what I discover.