David Gerrard
28th December 2008
Peace in Israel

At Christmas our minds turn to the Holy Land where our Saviour was born over 2000 years ago.  Sadly over recent decades it has been anything but a land of peace.  This year it is good that the numbers of pilgrims in Bethlehem is the highest for seven years, despite it still being almost completely surrounded by the vast twenty foot high security wall.  The numbers of Christians in Bethlehem and the rest of Israel continued to fall as they suffer continued persecution and economic hardship.  The unemployment in Bethlehem is now twenty percent.  A couple of years ago half the people were unemployed.
Nobody can understand what is happening in Israel today without realising the sacramental importance that the land of Israel, its rocks and rivers and lakes and stones have for the people of Israel.  And this possession of the land is identified with the acceptance by the Israelites of God as the one, only, true Lord in opposition to the many idols and false Gods worshipped by all the other tribes at that time.  Deuteronomy 6:6  “Hear, O Israel; the Lord is our God, the Lord alone” is the Jewish text.  Mentioned in prayers several times a day, written on the doorposts of house, and fastened as a scroll by leather throngs to the foreheads of men as they pray.  For faithful Jews for millennia Our God and Our Land have been inextricably linked.
Yet this fierce belief in God and his destiny for the people of Israel has paradoxically resulted into continual armed struggle with the Palestinians, most but not all devout Moslems who themselves believe in a very different plan by God for what they believe is their land.  How can we understand today the ways of God in the issues of conflict in the Holy Land?  For the past few years there has been continued armed struggles between Israeli armed forces, and Palestinians militants – who themselves have often been divided into different armed factions.  These armed struggles have come close to open warfare with yesterday’s savage bombing of Gaza by Israel in response to the ending of a truce by Hamas and increased rocket attacks on Israel.  There seems precious little chance of any reconciliation at the present time.
These struggles between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Muslims affect all of us, for this struggle is a prime cause, perhaps the prime cause, of the wider conflicts in the Middle East.  If there had been peace in the Holy Land the chances are there would be no wars with Iraq, no war in Afghanistan, no bombings of the twin towers in American, no bombs on the London underground, in Spain and Bali and elsewhere.
We can all understand why, after the dreadful sufferings of the Jews in the Holocaust, the foundation of the state of Israel represents to them one partial answer to the questions as to why they have been an especially persecuted people for thousands of years.  We understand their determination to avoid any such event ever happening again.  I have seen young Jewish soldiers raising the Israeli flag on the fortress of Masada as a solemn promise never to suffer as their ancestors who died resisting the Romans did.  I doubt if any people have suffered as have the Jews, and we Christians, and we English people, must remember with grief and penitence the part that our ancestors played in this persecution which continues to the present day.  England was in 1291 the first nation in Europe to expel all Jewish citizens from its shores.
Yet even after making all possible allowances for the sufferings of the Jewish people, we have to feel deep sorrow for the Palestinians.  We would not have cared for it if the Jews had been settled in South Eastern England, and our farmers, shopkeepers were expelled, and we were barred from our sacred and holy places.  Palestinians have also lived for hundreds of years in Israel.  Their holy places are also in Jerusalem.  They have been hounded and tortured, imprisoned, condemned to the poorest of jobs, had their lands confiscated, been expelled from their villages and towns, deprived of their civil and democratic rights.  Jewish retributions in Lebanon and in Israel and in Gaza and in the West Bank with guns and tanks and helicopter gunships and rockets have been savage.  As the Palestinian writer Edward Said has said, “It is a cruel fate to be the victim of victims.”
Both communities of peoples must feel, like Job in the Old Testament, that God has deserted them, that they cannot understand his ways and cannot hear his words.  Israel is an immensely polarised society.  Modern Hebrew was only invented a couple of generations ago.  The Jewish nation is a melting pot of Jews from many nations with little in common apart from their common return to their homeland.  The varieties of, and conflicts between, different Jewish traditions are immense, while many, many Jews in Israel are secular and irreligious.  A bitter, bitter election campaign is currently under way with different candidates struggling with each other to be seen as the most hawkish opponents of Palestinian rights.  In a similar way, Palestinians are not a united people, and the conflicts between those who want a secular, democratic state and those who wish for a religious theocracy are acute, with the president and ruling party, Hamas, deeply hostile to each other.  There are deep differences between those who live in the Jewish state of Israel and those in the West Bank, in Gaza, and in exile.
It is not entirely true that this is a conflict of religions.  There are many other elements, but it is certainly true that Islam and Judaism are in sharp conflict and opposition, and rare are the religious leaders who argue for peace and co-existence, and many are those who follow the bellicose and unforgiving strands in both religions and thus encourage violence and warfare.  Nowhere can we hear the language we hear from St Paul to the Colossians.  “Bear with one another.  Forgive one another.  Let peace rule in your hearts.”
Nor should we forget the many other groups in Israel who are neither Jews nor Muslim Palestinians, in particular the fate of the Christian Palestinians in Israel has been horrendous, squeezed between two warring opponents.  There have been sharp falls in the numbers of Christians in Israel not just in Bethlehem, as many have fled overseas for sheer survival.  The survival of any Christians who have lived continuously in the Holy Land for far longer than Christianity has existed on this island of ours is in real peril.
Is there any answer that we can learn from God?  Certainly we must be modest in our own views.  The immense complexity of the issues, the centuries of conflict and opposition do not yield to any easy answers or facile solutions, and sadly, many, many recent attempts at a just peace have yielded little.  We must all hope and pray that the efforts of many peacemakers may prevail, however unlikely that seems at the present.  We must all hope and pray that great leaders for peace will arise in both communities, for such people can transform otherwise hopeless seeming situations.  We must realise that, however far it seems from our own lives, peace is indivisible, and we must work for understanding and forgiveness not for rancour and bitterness, for prejudice grows fast and conflicts arise with terrifying speed.
Both communities engaged in this bitter struggle, Jews and Palestinians live in a society in which the forces of religion are immensely strong, and both, Jews and Muslims, believe in one God.  But both seem to have little idea of the second half of Jesus’ teaching, for after the rule “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength” comes the other equally vital rule, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”  Without the second rule, as we have all seen, Love of God can lead to war and conflict.  Impossibly hard it may be, but sooner or later, Jews and Palestinians must learn to love one another, or the conflicts and torture and death will never end.
And us.  Above all we must try to hold all those involved in our prayers.  In Psalm 122 David sang, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.  Peace be within thy walls.”  The very word Jerusalem contains within in it the Hebrew word for peace Shalom, and it is one of the great ironies of history that the city whose name means the possession of peace should have had more war and conflict than any other in history.
It is a fiercely powerful human instinct to hold on, to money, to possessions, to land, to nations, but Jesus showed us and taught us that only by letting go do we ever really receive all we need.  Let us pray that all in the Holy Land of Israel will recognise this truth.   Amen.

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