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

General Election 24

Morality

Politics

2 July 2024

4 min read

Make it a morally decisive election

This week we’re making more than a political decision.

George Pitcher

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

A AI generaed montage shows two politicans back to back surrounded by like, share and angry icons.

The divide

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

I still treasure my copy of the New Statesman from almost exactly 13 years ago, which was guest edited by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. I’ve kept it partly because I organised the edition and deputy edited it on his behalf. And partly because it cost me my job as public affairs chief at Lambeth Palace after it provoked predictable Conservative backbench fury for his alleged meddling in politics.

Digging it out now, there are some surprises from near that beginning of the 14 years of Conservative rule that’s expected to come to its end this week. The first is how mild mannered is the archbishop’s leader comment that cause so much trouble. In the years since, politics has become brasher and blunter, more facile and reductive.

The second surprise is the fuss it caused at the time. Williams is politely critical of politics across the board and there’s a plus ca change moment when he wonders “what the left’s big idea currently is… we are still waiting for a full and robust account of what the left would do differently”.

And he could be talking about now as he concludes by hoping for a “democracy going beyond populism and majoritarianism… capable of real argument about shared needs and hopes and real generosity; any takers?”

A magazine cover lists articles on one side and an image of half a face on the other.

That final question may get its answer this week. But at this distance, the furore that Williams caused in government takes on a different perspective. We can see, partly as a consequence of what’s happened latterly, that he wasn’t really mounting a political argument at all. His was a moral case, a prophetic voice calling out how the government, any government, “needs to hear just how much plain fear there is.”

That fear hasn’t abated 13 years after that article. It has built around a faltering economy, an island mentality inflamed by the perceived threat of migration and a sense that a political elite has abandoned its people.

Political policies alone aren’t going to salve this pain. The response to it needs to be as much a moral as political one, as caught by the headline I wrote above Williams’ piece all those years ago: “The government needs to know how afraid people are.”

The government in power for the past 14 years has chosen not to address, or has ignored, or has been incapable of addressing the morality of our societal decay, favouring instead a search for eye-catching policies and initiatives that it has hoped, admittedly with some success until now, would also be vote-catching.

That it has now run out of road has as much to do with its moral as its political failure. When Williams published that piece, we were talking about the Big Society, the prime minister was on a mission to save the planet and urged us to “hug a hoodie.” Such moral imperatives seem very distant now and a moral degeneration in government has tracked the downward slide of the governing party in the opinion polls.

So we’re not asked just to make a political decision this week. We’re making a profoundly moral one.

We haven’t had a prime minister for whom morality was a governing principle since David Cameron laid claim to one (perhaps disingenuously) in his early days, before being led by his chancellor, George Osborne, into enforced economic “austerity” with surely one of the most cynical assurances of modern times that “we’re all in this together.”

Brexit did for Cameron and his successor Theresa May. She, I believe, is guided in public life by a personal morality, rooted in her Anglo-Catholic clergyman father, but by now there was no room for all that. Her “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, with vans telling them to go home, was a moral low point which then found its hideous nadir in the Windrush scandal, with elderly people who had lived here all their lives threatened with deportation.

Boris Johnson thought that he could make a political virtue of his immorality, a demonic possession that made him believe that he’d be loved for it. So he fiddled while Covid burned, partying in Number 10 while those who had voted for him were denied access by his rules to their dying relatives.

I wrote in the Guardian that he wouldn’t be able to hide his immorality in Number 10 when he became leader and was sadly proved more right than I could have known. Liz Truss is said to be on an autistic spectrum, which is the kindest way to explain her mini-budget that offered tax-breaks for the wealthiest in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis for the rest of us.

Rishi Sunak is widely said to be a decent man, but it's too late. This government had already rotted from the head – witness the spivs in its ranks hoping to make a fast buck out of the date of the general election.

So we’re not asked just to make a political decision this week. We’re making a profoundly moral one. It’s time to turn the fear that the archbishop observed into moral indignation.

It’s not really about who we want in government. It’s what we need, morally, to expel from it.