Having
spent much of the past six years in and around the Holy Land, the current
implosion of any sort of peace process, and the outbreak of waves of hatred,
brutality and violence leave me desperately sad, and scrabbling to try and make sense of
what is happening around me. As I write I can hear gunshots in the distance, and the other night the house was shaken by the explosion of a Hamas rocket.
My main
point of reference is Pope Francis’ visit. Just six weeks ago he stopped at the
wall and prayed. Now, every night, the exact same spot is a place where
soldiers and youths fight it out with tear gas, rubber coated bullets and
stones. Can we say with any sincerity that his prayers weren't anything more than a very public humiliation and a sign that the age of faith is finally over?
On June 12th,
just four days after the Papal prayer meeting at the Vatican on June
8th, 3 Israeli teenagers from a Jewish settlement deep in the West
Bank were kidnapped. Nearly 40 Israeli battalions were
sent sweeping the entire West Bank. The Israeli government declared that the kidnapping was a 'golden opportunity' (sic) to smash Hamas, and to bring down the Palestinian unity government. In the chaos and turmoil, six Palestinians died
at the hands of the Israeli security forces, including children and the disabled. Thus within a week the Papal prayer meeting seemed a deluded whim.
If
the scale and actions of the security forces struck against our hopes for
peace, the rhetoric of the Israeli establishment sought to pummel it into the
ground. Peace depends on empathy, on finding space in one’s mental and
emotional space for the humanity of the ‘other’, not demonising but
re-humanising those with whom we live, even if in conflict. This humanising of the enemy is the basis for the rules of war, of the protection of civilians and the ideas of proportionality. It is also the path to a real and embedded peace as shown by South
Africa and Northern Ireland. Humanity has to triumph over ideology, reaching
beyond retribution rooted in raw and open wounds to the healing balm of
forgiveness, sorrow and humility.
However,
what the Israeli PM and his government did is set out in their own words: the Prime Minister didn't just denounce Hamas, but
he spoke in these terms: that the teenagers “were kidnapped and murdered in
cold blood by wild beasts.” (my italics). Israel's
Economic Minister Naftali Bennett said
Israel would make membership of Hamas a 'ticket to hell', branding it one 'of
the most "lethal, barbaric organizations in the world" and that
both the PA and Hamas formed a 'complete culture where Israel is [perceived as]
Satan''. Netanyahu explicitly lumped the Arabs in
the occupied territories with the rise of extreme radicalised
Islam: 'We're witnessing the unrestrained brutality of Islamic terrorism,
both in Israel and around us', thus equating the kidnapping of three teenagers
with the chaos and violence in Syria and Iraq, maximising the sense of fear and
deepening the sense of alienation between Israeli Jews and their Palestinian
neighbours.
Yet Israeli military intelligence confirmed that Israel was working
closely with the PA authorities (See Wiki) and on 17 June,
Israel defence sources said PNA assistance had been "very
professional".(See Wiki) Nothing of this was mentioned by any government minister. The unrelenting message was to make a clear divide between 'us' and a very evil and threatening 'them'. As a result fear and grief were easily fanned into that the venom of hate.
The impact of this within Israel became tangible as hate of Arabs gripped Israeli society.
Arabs going about their own business were assaulted in the street, harassed on
buses and groups of Jewish youths rampaged through Jerusalem openly shouting
'Death to Arabs'. Then, the day after the burial of the poor Israeli lads who
had been kidnapped and shot, a16 yr old Arab boy was dragged into a car, and in revenge for the deaths of the three Jews, was taken to a nearby forest, had petrol forced down his throat and then burnt alive.
It was a horrendous event and it shook Israeli society profoundly. For a moment
it seemed that the hate mongers might actually take a hard look and hold back,
but things were out of control and the deluge of hate and violence entrenched
itself. Meanwhile the hate spilled over on the other side, with violent riots breaking out not in the West Bank but among the Palestinian community in Jerusalem,
and elsewhere in Israel itself. Deep tears have been ripped into the very heart of Israeli society, tears rooted in fear, injustice and the populism of politicians.
How Israeli security forces got caught up in it all can be seen here. It shows a pair of Israeli adult policeman setting upon a 16 year old Arab boy,
kicking, beating and hitting him. The boy's family maintain he was nowhere near
the rioting and had not taken part in it. More poignantly not only was the boy
an American citizen but he was also a cousin of the murdered Arab boy who only the day before was burnt alive. It is
sobering to watch what takes place, as it shows the reality of what is tearing
Israel and Palestine apart, not at the level of rhetoric and political
posturing – for which all sides are guilty – but how it plays out in the life
of one ordinary family and in the behaviour of those who have a responsibility to protect all citizens and visitors. The politics of fear, hate and of separating everyone into 'them' and 'us' has enormous consequences for the normality of ordinary people's lives. It is perhaps only because of the unforeseen coincidences of this lad being an American and being the cousin of the murdered boy that the poignancy brings so much more to light?
And of course since then, we have had the
bombardment, yet again, of Gaza. As of now over 185 Palestinians have been killed and 1,385 injured as
Israel assault enters its seventh day
while among Israelis there have been a few injuries but fortunately no deaths. The
Israeli government and Hamas have begun an escalating cycle of revenge, determined to carry on with this without any exit strategy, some commentators suggest that the Israeli govt has got itself caught up in its own whirlwind, in a cycle of violence and revenge which it now cannot easily control, let alone stop. Both Hamas and Likud and its allies seem now wedded to each other's mutual, blind destruction, but it is hundreds of civilians, especially children and the disabled, the defenceless in other words, that are paying the cost of political hubris. And the world now sees this in all its horror as social media beams out one bloodied young corpse after another. Is this really the way a Jewish state behaves? Is this really the face of Islamic society? Does neither side have no alternative than to play politics with the lives of others when the violence has no chance of reaching any of their goals, just an intense slaughter and a deepening of fear? Have they lost all capacity for empathy with their religious 'other' or is religion as an ideology more important than the humanity of those who follow them? Perhaps the time has come for these questions to be asked more thoroughly? It is a fair question to ask if religion here is part of the problem, and prayer far from its solution.
I
list all this because it is the reality, it is what has taken place since the
Pope’s prayers for peace in the Vatican. For many I guess it simply shows the impotence
of God and the futility of such dreamers who follow him. It’s a powerful
argument given this long and woe-filled tale, but the pope has made this comment: “Someone could think that such a
meeting took place in vain. Instead no, because prayer helps us in not letting
evil win nor resigning ourselves to violence and hatred taking over dialogue
and reconciliation...” Pope Francis made this statement on July 13th 2014, 6
days into the violent attack on Gaza. Unlike many of us, I don’t think the Pope
was under any illusion about the depth of the malaise in the peace process, and
of the struggle that bringing peace to life as a real possibility would
take.
He wasn’t praying from some lightening strike to come from
heaven bringing everyone to their senses but of a much deeper process which is absolutely crucial if peace is to be built: a journey into reality, a journey
into truth, with honesty and humility, a desperate struggle to resist the violence
and hatred which lies like a coiled snake along the path, and so to walk in a much more
difficult way that perhaps politicians would like to offer. In this Pope Francis was striking at the evil that has stalked the Holy
Land since the time of Christ, that engulfed Bethlehem in the massacre of the innocents, and which took Christ through the brutality and agony of
the Passion, costing Him his life.
What has happened since those prayers
is that the reality has been unmasked, laid bare and thus the real business of
dealing with it can begin. Prayer,
Henri
Nouwen said, is three movements: loneliness to solitude, hostility to
hospitality, illusion to prayer. Prayer takes us from our self-obsessed
preoccupation in which is rooted our alienation, fear and hostility towards
others, and which traps us in a fantasy far from the reality of God, to a
renewal of our capacity to love our neighbour as ourselves and to become
intimate with a God who is all merciful and compassionate. The loss of empathy
is the loss of the capacity to deal with reality, that we are not by nature isolated
persons or insular groups but all sharers in the same God given humanity. Brutalising
one another crushes this capacity, and drives us into fear and hatred, into
demonising ‘the other’ and seeking ever more isolation, thinking that safety
comes in loneliness, ie. being cut off from the other.
 |
| Our Lady of the Wall |
In this fascinating
article in the New York Times Ethan Bronner explores how separation has brought about a real decay in the
life of not just the Palestinians but also of Israelis. I have long thought the separation wall
represents everything that is wrong here, and has literally cemented the most
diabolical currents in the contemporary situation. Setting oneself apart,
corralling the ‘other’, believing that safety comes from total segregation, all
of these speak about a failure of politics, of a failure of people to live with
one another, to see the ‘other’ as a neighbour, of the failure of people to
live in the ‘polis’ in any sort of ordered and meaningfully human way. As this
crisis deepens more and more is, in this way, coming into the open, and while
dreadfully painful, perhaps it is the only way in which some real sense can be
brought to the deep and complex realities which any peace process needs to
address. This is, I would dare to suggest, the fruit of prayer, unmasking the
roots and tentacles of evil so that it can be fought more effectively – the
truth will set you free, what is in the shadows will be brought into the light,
blindness gives way to clear insight. And once it is known, then fear can be
calmed, as we often are more afraid of what we know than what we can only
imagine. The prayer of Pope, Patriarch, Presidents and people of good will was
such a surge that the masks have been ripped off and at least we have a
situation which is much clearer to see.
Perhaps
emblematic of this lifting of the veil, of a dawning transparency came even as
those prayers were being offered. As President Peres joined the Pope and
President Abbas to pray for peace, the Prime Minister of Israel visited an
elite police corps. He told them that Israel had prayed for peace for 1000
years, and while they waited for that to happen they, these paramilitaries,
were the ones he was relying on to deliver peace for Israel. He thus revealed
that he had no faith in prayer, in any peace that wasn’t made at the end of a
gun. Subsequently, last Friday he gave a press conference at which he said, in
Hebrew, that there would never be two states west of the river Jordan. You can read
the full account here but in summary he said that dealing
with Hamas was the current priority, but that there would never, ever be a
sovereign Palestinian state, because Israeli security could never countenance
it. He dismissed openly Kerry, Obama and the US general who was sent to
advise on security as naive. This reveals just how dead the Kerry peace
initiative was even before it started, and about what some of the Israeli
participants wanted as an outcome.
And thus it makes clear what the real obstacles are in making
peace even a remote possibility, and who the most courageous people are and the
obstacles and challenges they have long faced. It also shows us that we need to
begin to be clear about what ‘peace’ means, to give it back some actual meaning
after the glib use of the term by legions of politicians.
Perhaps, then, amid the sadness, trauma, carnage, fear and
drama of the past four weeks something good is happening, deep below the surface, as the scene is being
re-calibrated, a clearer picture is emerging and thus a clearer sense of where
people have to choose to stand. I for one, in thinking through the tragedies
through which we have passed here over the past six weeks, am more certain than
ever that the only hope lies in a renewal of humanity around the radicalisation
of life which Christ brought, a faith in God that believes that loving your
enemy is a Divine imperative, that forgiveness and turning the other cheek are
the ways to make space that good might be done on earth and not just in heaven,
and that all people need grace if they are to have any chance of finding the
resources for such a gargantuan task. All of this comes at the heart of my
faith in Jesus Christ, for whom I thank Almighty God from the depths of my
heart. No, the prayers of the Pope, Patriarchs and Presidents are working, even if in ways which are hard to comprehend.
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