Ambushed by a CD – and Made to Think About Israel, Gaza and Land Ideology.

I like this CD. No accounting for taste.

It has several songs that sound different in male voice chorus – not always better, but different.

Tonight this CD ambushed me.

I was working away innocently listening to background music as I wrote a prayer of intercession.

Then they sang the theme from the film "Exodus".

Those first words – "This land is mine, God gave this land to me…"

It's a song of passion, religious fervour, political hope and even generosity.

And I couldn't listen to it.

The ideology of land, underpinned by religious claims, against the tragedy that is Israel, Gaza and the West Bank drain this song of the very humanity of which it sings. 

So what do you do with a CD that has a song which celebrates the claim to land, when the way of defending it has become indefensible?

Seems a pitifully small gesture to skip the track – but that's what I did.

Sometimes our inner discomforts, and our outward actions however trivial, are nevertheless the raw material of larger moral choices and more hopeful moral visions.