It is a beautiful Autumn day here by the Sea of Galilee. The sun, though still warm, is not relentless as it is much of the time here, and the air is still and clear. This morning, I sat at a home with colleagues from the Scots Hotel with one of the staff whose mother died quite suddenly last week. We sat under a white canopy and sipped coffee and water and the conversation ebbed and flowed, encompassing various cat stories and weaving back round to the loss: ‘She was my mother, but she was also my best friend. I can’t imagine life without her.’ This is a human moment of loss and comfort and friends sitting together.
We drive back to the hotel past all the empty beach resorts, closed because of the heightened security advice, and I wonder about all those unemployed or facing financial ruin. The sun continues to glint on the calm waters of the Sea of Galilee. It is a very beautiful place. Overhead a sonic boom: a war plane on its way to or from Lebanon, only 60 km to the north. Today, the Israeli military ordered people in Tyre to evacuate. I heard a commentator say that something apparently humanitarian has been co-opted as a weapon of war. The displaced have nowhere to go, and as in Gaza the majority of casualties are non-combatants.
The news out of Gaza is available in Israel, but the vast majority of people have blinkered it out. There are brave exceptions. Dahlia Scheindlin, along with her Haaretz colleague Gideon Levy, write against the tide. In her latest article (which you’ll need to register to read – but it’s free) https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-10-27/ty-article/.premium/gaza-is-the-horror-that-cant-be-denied-but-israelis-will-try/00000192-cf22-d4a2-ab97-cf2fe1640000 she writes: ‘Denialism kicks in when events are too terrible to admit.’
She discusses the use of the phrase ‘humanitarian zone’. ‘The IDF,’ she writes quoting Tanai Hary, a human rights advocate, ’says it has expanded the humanitarian zones for Gaza’ but ’there is nothing actually humanitarian about the humanitarian zone…there’s not enough aid or shelter for people there, and airstrikes still take place in the zone.’
Screening out inconvenient truth is not unique to Israelis. Palestinians do it too. Many deny the October 7th atrocities, according to Scheindlin. But she says, what matters right now is stopping the war. The destruction and humanitarian disaster in Northern Gaza is overwhelming. Very little food, fresh water or other supplies are getting in, and medical facilities are not able to function.
Yesterday, the Knesset passed two bills outlawing UNWRA from Israel. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency provides education, social welfare, food and other services not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank. They are the only agency who have consistently managed to get aid to starving Gazans, despite being compromised by Israeli accusations of staff members’ involvement in Hamas. Both the US and the UK have condemned the ban.
It’s not that UNWRA is an unqualified success. Some have argued that UNWRA has allowed the Occupation to more or less succeed for more than 50 years, by propping up the system, though Israel have long wanted rid of it. It is a time of absolute crisis not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank where flying checkpoints, house invasions, settler violence against olive pickers and herdsmen make life intolerable.
Israeli hostages, living and dead, are still held in Gaza. Israeli soldiers are being killed on the ground in Lebanon and Gaza. Each one is rightly named and mourned. But hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese (many of them with Palestinian ancestry) are existing on the edge, and many are being killed. There is no time to mourn. Who can be surprised if there are knife attacks by young boys or truck rammings? In both these instances, the perpetrators were shot dead at the scene. These are not so much acts of resistance but inchoate rage; and suicide by soldier (or armed civilian). But the loss all round is incalculable.
As I write, the sun streams warmly through the window. I can hear sounds of daily life continuing in the street. I find myself conflicted. I know so much about what is going on, so nearby, and I am cushioned from it. I am exhausted with helplessness. I don’t know what I can usefully contribute.
Words ring hollow, and there seems so little I can do. How to keep going?
In this I have been greatly helped by an extraordinary article in Sunday’s National (27th October 2024) by Alison Phipps. Alison is UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts at the University of Glasgow. She has worked with colleagues from Gaza for the past fifteen years, and much of the appalling news is personal. Over the years, and since October 7th she has used her gifts of language and poetry to process the inhumanity. On Sunday she wrote, ‘For more than a year now, I have been, like so many readers, lost for words in the midst of terror, in the midst of horror….but it’s literally my job to find the words.’ Her article is called ‘Seven words to save our sanity in the midst of the terror in Gaza’. Her seven words are genocide, prevention, helpful, lean, tell, abomination, and love.
Some of these are big words that demand response from a muted world, but three of her words seem to particularly speak for me in this moment. They are lean, tell, love.
When images and words are sickening, of men stripped naked with hands tied behind their backs, or another parent with a small bundle of dead child, it is easier to turn away. And so to lean in and pay attention, as friends do (Christian, Muslim and Jewish) sitting shiva with a bereaved colleague, is important. And to remember all the dead, the named and the unnamed.
It is important, too, to try to tell the story and inform the prayers, and to encourage you to lean in too, and not turn away.
And, finally, and in the beginning, love is key.
Alison finishes her article, ‘We must never tolerate the intolerable. We must never surrender our love.’
My Scripture reading this morning is that extraordinary set of sayings of Jesus which ends, ‘ You have heard it said, ‘Love your friends, hate your enemies’. But I say to you, love your friends and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in Heaven.’ Matt 5:43-46
I have no idea what it is like for a Palestinian Christian to read this text. I do not presume. But I remember Nader Abu Amsha of DSPR (Department of Support for Palestinian Refugees) talking about a card visible over his shoulder during a recent Zoom call. It read ‘Hope is stronger than fear.’ He talked about the God of Love who is able to do more than we can ask for or think about. And that it is imperative to hope that things can change for the better, even as we sit with loss.