The training of child suicide bombers, and the indiscriminate firing of rockets into Israel's towns and cities, are threats to the security and safety of the State of Israel. Hamas militants know the likely response and persist in endangering the Palestinian population who have nowhere else to go. Whatever the rights and wrongs of a cause, turning children into weapons and provoking massive retaliation against a civilian population effectively captured in a siege, as a political and military tactic, makes no moral sense and does lasting damage to the work of more moderate Palestinian representatives seeking negotiated peace.
The prolonged seige of Gaza, and the bombing of residential areas with battlefield ordinance is Israel's response, predicted by many, and deliberately provoked by Hamas. Given the siege, the population trapped and concentrated, their are inevitably tragic consequences that seem on any reckoning I can manage, beyond the scale of morally acceptable self-defence.
I struggle with the idea of proportionality, suggesting that as long as violent death visited on the one side was not exceeded by the other, the killing itself was tolerable. But at least the principle of proprotionality is a recognition in international law that retaliatory self-defence should be in proportion to the perceived and actual threat. With the death toll already at 300 and 600 wounded, the statistics are themselves intolerable. Collective punishment and civilian targetting are war crimes – and Hamas and Israel are both guilty. But Israel is infinitely more potently armed, its military capacity ranging all the way upwards to nuclear; and the Gaza civilian population don't even have the option of fleeing as refugees away from a small, heavily populated, hemmed in danger zone.
The cynical
fatalism of Hamas in firing rockets which though lethal have limited
capacity is obviously intended to buy the world's attention at the cost
of Israel's incrementally massive retaliation. It's a despicable
tactic. But at the same time I can't see warplanes firing missiles at
crowded houses in a besieged city, with catastrophic human
consequences, and think it justified self defence.
What on earth can I as a Christian say to a secular Jewish State and a radical Islamic and Palestinian Jihadist movement hell bent on reciprocal violence. The history of hatred between the peoples who contest the biblical lands and cities gives every impression of immutable enmity, intractability born of decades of bad faith, and levels of poison that suggest the causes are now systemic and chronic. In the relations between Israel and Palestine it is so endemic to the religious commitments and political ambitions of both, that the violence and death it visits on both sides are seen as both predictable and normal. And how to break the cycle of hatred; how to discover an antidote to viral vengeance; how to even speak the word trust without triggering toxic cynicism on both sides? I don't know.
So I pray. I pray for peace. I feel a fool, or at least so out of my depth I'm looking for something to buoy me up. Or I'm naive maybe, uninformed probably, and so, caught in the maelstrom of my own emotions, I try to handle my inner outrage. My whole humanity revolts at the language of violent death as the language of the blind and deaf – that is those who are blind to the existence of the other, and deaf to their voice. Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is one of those chilling terms used in nuclear deterrence theory. But even without the nuclear scenario, vengenace for vengeance, death for death, leads inevitably to atrocity for atrocity.
So I pray. And I ask, how in all this do those with power and a trigger finger or push-button detonator, recover, and rediscover a sense of their own humanity. Because until they do peace is impossible.
So I pray. For peace. Praying that those whose aim is the death of the other whom they don't see and won't hear, may be healed of blind hatred and blind deafness – that they may see, and hear, and turn. Blessed are the peacemakers – I so want to make peace happen. Wish I knew how. So I pray.
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