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.

Column

Comment

Conspiracy theory

Football

Sport

15 October 2024

5 min read

Football in the age of conspiracy theory

More politics in football is driving distrust and mis-information

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A Manchester City supporters' protest banner.

r/MCFC.

In 2008, Manchester United sign footballers Fábio da Silva and Raphael da Silva. They are twin brothers. Confusion follows. In 2009, referee Chris Foy seems to show a yellow card to Fábio for a foul committed by Rafael in a game against Barnsley. I’m still not sure who actually makes the tackle.

Then-manager of the club Sir Alex Ferguson admitted he often confused the two players. When Rafael was suspended for a game, Ferguson joked about playing him anyway, and just saying it was Fábio. “They wouldn’t know. Their DNA is probably the same,” he said.

Perhaps that’s how the rumour started.

Football is a game of small margins; minor gains can make for huge advantages. Few managers have understood this as well as Ferguson, a man who would do anything to make the most of marginal gains. Up to and including ‘bending’ the rules a little, if needs be. (Allegedly; if the lawyers are reading).

It’s perhaps not unsurprising, then, that there is an old conspiracy theory that Ferguson would swap the brothers at half-time to get an extra substitution. “They wouldn’t know. Their DNA is probably the same.” It’s the kind of thing Ferguson would do.

Allegedly.

Conspiracies have a long history: the earth is flat; Paul McCartney died in 1966; pigeons are actually government CCTV cameras.

I love weird footballing conspiracy theories. They’re ultimately harmless, and so implausible that they make me chuckle. But recently, it feels as though there’s been a sharp upturn in the amount of conspiratorial thinking surrounding football’s public discourse.

Everything is a conspiracy now; all 20 premier league clubs seem to be the alleged victims of some conspiracy or other to stop them from winning the title. At least one of them is proved wrong each year.

Every red card, disallowed goal, throw-in, and foul is now viewed as yet another part of the establishment’s ongoing plan to sabotage your club. Why they’d want to sabotage your club in particular is never made manifestly clear. That’s besides the point. The plan is obvious enough if you look for it; never mind the motivation.

Football doesn’t help itself at times. For example, the decision to allow Manchester-based referees to referee Manchester-based football teams is simply baffling (and, as is often overlooked, simply unfair on the referees who then have their integrity called into question).

It’s now public knowledge that Michael Oliver earned considerable money refereeing private games in the United Arab Emirates. And so, when he failed to send off Manchester City’s Mateo Kovačić for two seemingly nailed-on second yellows in a game against Arsenal on 8th October 2023, you can forgive people for joining the dots and making the connection to City’s UAE owners.

Even when there’s no grand conspiracy, giving people a reasonable excuse to crack out the tin foil is just dumb.

Of course, none of this is unique to football. Conspiracies have a long history: the earth is flat; Paul McCartney died in 1966; pigeons are actually government CCTV cameras. All the hits. Again, a lot of them are just comically harmless.

The ship has sailed, and as long as football remains a political plaything, the same distrust in our political authorities will lead to distrust in our footballing authorities.

But many aren’t, and these more malignant conspiracy theories seem to be becoming more prevalent and more dangerous. America saw an unprecedented attack on its democratic processes and institutions on January 6 2021; at the hands of its still-technically-then-President, no less. Allegedly. Elsewhere, numerous people declined the Covid-19 vaccination because of misinformation about its effects, a worrying repeat of the vaccines-cause-autism nonsense of the 1990s.

In the aftermath of the horrific murder of three young girls in Southport on 30th July 2024, numerous people wrongly identified a Muslim immigrant as the alleged attacker. This led to widespread riots across the UK involving attacks on mosques and asylum seeker accommodation. As I write this from my home in Liverpool, a community library down the road is still waiting to be reopened after it was burned down amidst claims it was giving Qur’ans to children. It was not.

Nigel Farage still refuses to apologise for claiming ‘the truth’ was being withheld from the public.

But the thing is some conspiracies turn out to be true. There was a conspiracy involving the state and South Yorkshire Police to blame fans at the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 for the death of (now) 97 people at the match; that is now undeniable. And the times when conspiracy theories turn out to be accurate only serve to enflame and empower the others.

Conspiracy theories kill people. And so, it seems distasteful to draw any sort of line from using twins to mask extra substitutions to terrorist rioting in the aftermath of three young girls being stabbed to death. But, these are two extremes of the same kind of behaviour made possible for the same reason: declining trust in established authorities.

This is not to say we need to ‘keep politics out of football’. That’s not possible, even if we wanted to. It will always seem disingenuous to me that the same people who were against football players taking the knee in support of Black Lives Matter also seem very happy to sing the English national anthem at the FA Cup final. You can’t have politics when its suits you; when it’s comfortable for you.

No; football is a political entity now, whether you like it or not. MPs performatively support the England national team during major tournaments to win votes; The UK government is seeking to introduce an independent football regulator; Prince William is president of the FA; Nation-states own football clubs. Allegedly.

The ship has sailed, and as long as football remains a political plaything, the same distrust in our political authorities will lead to distrust in our footballing authorities.

But the inverse is true now, too. Football’s pervasive presence in society offers an opportunity for football fans to be the best of us; to model a culture wherein institutional authorities are trusted and – more importantly – deserve to be trusted.

If I’m being honest, whether I’m watching it on the telly or in the ground, I am often at my least Christ-like when the football’s on. There I am: accusing the referee of all sorts, calling the linesman any manner of unspeakable things because he gave a throw-in to the opposition, even if it’s the right decision. There I am: contributing to the very culture of distrust that characterises so much of public life nowadays.

I have, I think, a genuinely ethical responsibility to stop behaving like that when watching the football. It won’t stop idiots from rioting, and it won't stop Donald Trump and Nigel Farage from lying. Allegedly. But it might just help contribute to a culture wherein those acts are increasingly harder to commit. A culture where trust and hope become genuine options again.