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

Character

Comment

17 April 2024

5 min read

Work isn’t working, it’s killing us

We mistake the nature of work and our purpose within it.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

Two people sit beside each other working on laptops, One looks askance to the other who frowns.

Resume Genius on Unsplash.

What is work for? In our individualist society we perhaps might zoom in on the minutiae of the specific role that we fulfil. Work is for the success of the company I work for, work is for building up my CV, work is to earn money enough to live, work is for seeing people I don’t have to live with. But what about work? The burden that humans have always had to gather enough resources to provide for themselves. We are mistaking the nature of work and our purpose within it, and it is beginning to kill us.

Each of the recent generations have had different, and askew, attitudes to their work. Baby boomers- those who got a job and a sensible haircut in the 60s, conceived work as a contract. They worked well at almost anything and the reward was home ownership, resources to provide for a family, and saving for leisure. The purpose of their work is the lifestyle it creates. To some extent, their successors in Gen X had the same perception and the same contract- stick at any industry and the reward will be generous enough to make the graft worth it.

But what happens when that contract is broken? When work no longer leads to those rewards? The Millennial answer is to seek out work that gives purpose, to accept the reward will not be fulfilling and so to find the purpose in the end of the work itself. Even if that means a lifetime of renting and scrimping, because the reward is not to be found in the payment.

A slow generational drift from the true purpose and boundaries of work has left us confused about its point and struggling to engage.

The Gen Z answer to this broken contract is the most fascinating of all; a reluctance to work at all. There is ‘quiet quitting’ whereby you do as little as possible whilst remaining employed, ‘bare minimum Mondays,’ and, of course, ‘lazy girl jobs.’ The purported aim of this generation is to find jobs where they can work from home, do almost nothing, and still receive a generous salary. Others are living the ‘soft life.’ They move in with mum and dad (usually boomers who have run the rat race and received the benefits of the contract) and do something creative part-time, earning little but doing little. It's a bit of the old baby boomer attitude seeking pleasure outside work but without the corresponding work ethic or career mindset.

On top of this is the mental health crisis, which prevents many of Gen Z from working, with one in three non-graduates out of work with mental health conditions. Bosses receive calls from parents of those in their 20s explaining that their children are too unwell to work.

I suggest that these things are linked, and a slow generational drift from the true purpose and boundaries of work has left us confused about its point and struggling to engage. We must look outside ourselves to understand what work was created for. In Genesis, the Christian origin story, God conceives work as a place of dignity and purpose. What Adam and Eve did in the garden mattered- they were the leaders of creation, and God even gave them the responsibility of naming other creatures. Humans were made to have responsibility, made to express this in their work. Even in the drudgery of repeated physical, administrative, or household tasks, we have the freedom to find purpose. We can take pleasure and pride in making things, fixing things, restoring things, even if just to the state they were in when we cleaned last week.

Find the purpose in the making, fixing, restoring, the very task itself.

The ‘quiet quitting’ of Gen Z or the dry contract of the boomers will not cut it. Even in jobs we don’t like, or tasks we find overwhelming, the same reframing is needed, perhaps even more so. Work itself brings purpose, and that is worth giving our whole selves to, otherwise listlessness and sadness will get us. We were made to find purpose and joy in the task of whatever is in front of us, no matter how simple.

Millennials have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. Yes, this generation have found the importance of purpose in their work. But only in work that has an end outside of itself. Work has been created with an internal, permanent purpose. Suggesting that meaning only comes from employment with obvious altruistic ends means that any other kind of work, domestic or employed, is devoid of this meaning. The same listlessness ensues in any role not found to have such an end.

St Paul elevates work explicitly even beyond this created place of purpose. In his letter to a church in Colossae, he writes, ‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.’ In other words, work is an act of worship, acting as if the task we are completing is for God, and putting the requisite effort in.

Of course, this is a massive challenge. How many of us put as much work in to satisfy our bosses as we would if they were the ultimate director of our eternal destiny? But it does redeem those moments where we wonder what the point of what we’re doing is, who will see it, and if it is really worth doing properly at all. God sees. God knows. And that makes it worth doing properly.

Paul also makes it clear here that work is not just what we get paid for. Work is everything we do that is not rest. Whatever we do - employed, at home, inrelation to our families. And this allows those who cannot work, in an employment sense, to take part in God’s purpose for humanity by working in a way in which they can. Whether it’s caring for a relative, nurturing a tiny veg patch, creating a piece of art, or hoovering the carpet. Find the purpose in the making, fixing, restoring, the very task itself. Do it as if God were watching. And feel yourself become more human.