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

General Election 24

Politics

20 June 2024

4 min read

What small boats tell us about belonging

Do I belong to these politics? And do these politics belong to me?

George Pitcher

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

A grainy surveillance picture of an rusty boat overloaded with people

A small boat overloaded with migrants.

BBC.

Our son used to say that “home is where the dogs are”, as he was greeted by them. It’s a variation on “home is where the heart is”. Either way, it means that a sense of home isn’t just about place or geography, so much as family and, relatedly, the familiar.

If home were simply an address, candidates in an election campaign wouldn’t bother knocking on doors to meet people. To be familiar is to meet people where they are, circumstantially as well as literally on their doorstep.

To date, the solution to the refugee crisis has been to “stop the boats”, as if our principal concern is with rubber dinghies. We’ve still not addressed the people in those boats; we’re not familiar with them, their circumstances and motivations.

I’d hazard a guess that a common desire among those who flee persecution and mortal danger is something else associated with familiarity – a sense of belonging.

The refugee belongs nowhere, until she or he reaches a new and safe home. Indeed, all of us know we’re home only when we’re somewhere we belong.

Somewheres are rooted in place and community; Anywheres are footloose and and educationally privileged. To which I would add the global category of migrants, who are Nowheres.

This is Refugee Week (17-23 June) and Thursday 20 June is World Refugee Day. It’s theme this year is “Our Home”, which is why I started this column on the nature of familiarity and belonging.

Out of which arise two questions: Do I belong to this country? And does this country belong to me? The first is fairly straightforward in a practical sense – I have a British passport and pay my taxes here, so yes I do. The second question is more complex, more of which in a moment.

When it comes to sovereign governments, the questions move from first to third person. Do you belong to (or in) this country and does this country belong to you? Again, the first question is about paperwork. The second, however, becomes crucially about exclusivity.

Exclusive ownership reaches its abhorrent nadir in a BBC2 documentary this week titled Dead Calm: Killing in the Med?, which provides evidence that the Greek coastguard has been employing masked vigilantes to cast adrift landed refugees, including women and children, in international waters and, in some cases, to throw migrants overboard to their deaths. A story told alongside the capsizing, through incompetence or otherwise, of the rust-tub Adriana, in which more than 600 migrants drowned a year ago.

These are matters for international law. But it shows where treating migrants like cargo, rather than people, takes us. It’s a mindset that could start with repellent (in both senses) wave machines, as considered by a former UK home secretary.

None of which arises if the criteria of belonging are applied. Former Prospect editor David Goodhart famously wrote that a key electoral demographic could be defined in Somewheres and Anywheres. Somewheres are rooted in place and community; Anywheres are footloose and and educationally privileged. To which I would add the global category of migrants, who are Nowheres (see above).

The key here is having nowhere to belong. Former PM Theresa May talked of “citizens of nowhere” in 2016, but she meant globe-trotting tax-exiles and the like. I mean Nowhere people, with nowhere to go – and it’s toxic for all of us that there are so many of them.

This is where the question “does this country belong to me?” carries so much human freight (like a small boat, as it happens).

To belong is an atavistic human need. American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs places belonging and love as principal needs in his pyramid between basic physicalities (such as safety) and self-fulfilment at the apex. “Belongingness”, a sense of home, is vital for human stability.

This is where the question “does this country belong to me?” carries so much human freight (like a small boat, as it happens). Simply to repel refugees like they’re someone else’s problem is massively to miss a point, because they’re going to carry on looking for somewhere to belong. So they’re going to keep coming.

Maslow identified religious groups as one of those offering a sense of belonging. I would guess as much as two-thirds of the congregation I’ve looked after over the past decade came to church for that sense of belonging, which we’re called to offer to the despised and marginalised as well as the Somewheres and Anywheres.

Miroslav Volf has written here that “God created the world to live in it” and therefore, I contend, belongs to it. So we’re called to “live in more homelike ways”, which I define as a sense of familiarity and belonging. That’s the theology of it.

We are now facing the politics of it. Nationalism is not enough. We need leaders who can solve this at a global level, which is both a political and a theological imperative.

Perhaps a way of reframing my questions, in this Refugee Week as we ponder how to vote, is: “Do I belong to these politics? And do these politics belong to me?”