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

America

Conspiracy theory

Culture

Politics

9 July 2024

6 min read

When America presses in on you

A returning American feels the heat generated by contesting ‘realities'.

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A runner passes a church and a flag in an America suburb, under billowing clouds.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

There’s a man. Running. My eyes snap into focus. Time slows - I catch his pace. Then, my eyes start widening. An odd feeling. Being forced into it. Seconds stretched out into minutes. Taking in more, looking for more, looking down that sidewalk, on a street corner in New Jersey.

Before? I was sitting there. In the backseat of my Uber. Winding our way through New Jersey. And I’m sitting there, tired, mindlessly scrolling my phone until that moment. He’s there running.

And I see him. T-shirt. Running shorts. And I’m sitting. And—a nervous flash—he’s running. Why?

And my eyes adjust, widening, scanning, checking detail, and I’m almost seized. My mind shaking itself, coming online, no more automation. My consciousness catches up: “you’re in America,” I tell myself.

Right. I’m not in Scotland. And that man is running. Here in New Jersey. In America. And I’m talking back to myself in this silent car. I’m watching him run. I’m asking why am I slowing this down? And—it flashes—“running from what?”

And I catch up to myself. To what I was trying to say, that people in America run from shooters, too. A wave crashing, sitting in the back of the Uber, and look. Now I’m really looking. Not forced. But naming. There’s other pedestrians passing him, walking. Slowing. On the other side of the street— no fast movement. No screaming. No pops.

I start breathing. I didn’t know I stopped. He’s out jogging. The automated safety check ends. The tranquility of tyranny resumes. I’m sitting in the back of an Uber. I make a note. Be more alert at the train station.

—

People ask me how the relocation back to America has been. And I don’t know what to tell them. There’s a wide gap between the visceral sense of it all pressing in on you, and more common—but also abstract—analysis.

The experience of coming back has been oddly particular. I lived in Scotland for three years, and most of it was spent studying America. From that distance, the broad strokes of American life, the larger trajectories and dangers of our shared political decisions and religious extremism, well, they’re a bit clearer.

But coming back, America presses in on you. And the only way of talking about that, maybe, is specificity. Kerouac was always good at articulating this. His America wasn’t the rise of the military industrial complex in the 50s. It was the road, the gas station on the way from Denver, it was jazz, the dim doorways of San Francisco bars. I’m thinking of Kerouac, but also Langston Hughes. Poets and artists who in their own time, held a mirror up to America, helped us move from the “I” to the “we” as Steinbeck said.

We’re all asking a version of “what’s wrong in America?” (And, do keep asking.) But to ask that question often assumes the broadest strokes, the ones that are most clear from a distance. Which means they are, in one at the same time, the most abstract.

These realities are everywhere, and no where. They are the air we breathe. They appear to the privileged as “logical” and to the powerless as “inevitable.”

Asking after democracy, after the election, and the increasingly nebulous “the church” — I’m convinced that answering “what’s wrong in America?” in the biggest of terms is leading me to (wrongly) believe that responsibility lies among the gargantuan free-floating concepts which we use to narrate our world. As if solving the “crisis of democracy” is a conceptual problem. When in reality, it is concrete, and involves more than coalition building or political activism.

Why more? Because the choices Americans have made over the last 10 years originate from imaginations which limits the scope and scale of what is possible. This is what I mean by “America presses in on you.”

Coming back to America has made this clear. I’m more aware than ever that we can produce good answers and generate compelling analysis about America without ever asking in what way these answers or analysis are sharp enough, concrete enough to puncture the bubbles of social reality in which people choose to live and in some cases are forced to live.

These realities are everywhere, and no where. They are the air we breathe. They appear to the privileged as “logical” and to the powerless as “inevitable.” They press in on us all in their own way.

In some cases, they dull our senses. We say, “as long as our Amazon deliveries continue, as long as the streaming services work.” In some cases, they don’t just press in on us, but press down and perpetuate injustice. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked, “where are the responsible ones?”

The visceral shock of return is ongoing. And it hits me in strange ways, on Uber rides and in worship. American life is everywhere and I’m seeing it with different eyes.

Do I care about democratic machinery? Yes. Am I concerned about whether or not the church is, in fact, the church, and not a gear in a partisan machine? Yes. But I’m increasingly convinced that responsible living in the American situation becomes most clear, most evident as we consider the large in terms of the small.

Responsibility emerges with attention paid to the concrete and intimate. January 6 is the subject of my dissertation. But before that, in the months leading up to January 6, I was a pastor just 40 miles from DC. For me, January 6 was a local event. That particularity, that specificity, is a window into a concrete responsibility.

And now, back in this same community, I found myself distracted in a church this weekend. The man in front of me raised his hands in worship, revealing a revolver hanging on his belt. What America is this? But also, what Christianity is this?

The visceral shock of return is ongoing. And it hits me in strange ways, on Uber rides and in worship. American life is everywhere and I’m seeing it with different eyes. And I wonder what it will take to break the spell of our most cherished illusions, of a certain type of freedom — one that tells us it is Christian to raise our hand in surrender to a god who we say is loving enough to save the world, but seemingly not strong enough to deliver us from our evil.

In the end, perhaps it’s best to say that it’s been proof of a good ruining. After all, we’ve experienced nothing short of a conversion, a move closer towards peace, towards hope, that unsettles all our strategies of security and comfort underwritten by violence and oppression. This is the kingdom of Heaven. Something Jesus announced that continues to unsettle and disrupt the likes of T.S. Eliot who put it well in Journey of the Magi:

We returned to our places, these

Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old

dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods

I should be glad of another death.