Weekly Blog - 9 October 2023 - Israel/Gaza Conflict
Israel/Gaza conflict
The world has responded with horror to the appalling invasion of Israel by well over a thousand Hamas militants from Gaza who breached the border fence in multiple places early on Saturday 7 October. More than 1,200 Israeli civilians – men, women, children, and even babies, everyone the militants saw – were killed indiscriminately without mercy on the streets, at a festival and in their homes. Some bodies were beheaded. Some women were raped. More than 2,700 Israelis were injured and between 100 – 150 seized as hostages and taken back to Gaza. The BBC reports the horrific story of three of the victims, Shlomi and Deborah Matias and their 16-year old son Rotem. Hamas fighters surrounded their home and attacked. Windows were shattered and they used explosives to open the main door and the door to the family’s safe room. Both Shlomi and Deborah were shot and killed, their bodies falling on Rotem. He was shot in the abdomen, through the bodies of his parents. Miraculously he survived, and lay injured and hidden for hours under his parents’ bodies until he was rescued by the Israeli military.[1] The events are truly unprecedented in their scale, brutality, horror and significance, and have widely been described as the worst single day in Israel’s history.
It took the Israeli military until Tuesday 10 October to finally push all the militants back into Gaza, killing more than 1,500 in gun battles. Since then Israel has placed Gaza under siege, closing all border crossings and shutting off all electricity, fuel, food, goods and water supplies to the region. Israel has also retaliated with air strikes at Hamas infrastructure in Gaza resulting in the deaths of over 1,000 Palestinians, and the wounding of over 5,000, inevitably including many civilians, men, women and children, since Hamas sites are intricately embedded in civilian areas. Again the BBC reports the story of one of the millions of Palestinians enduring these strikes. Plestia Alaqad is a Palestinian journalist living in Gaza. She is living with airstrikes landing on homes and buildings all around her. Her windows are blown out, dust is everywhere, even in the house, making it hard to breathe. She has been hiding in basements and safer areas with friends and neighbours with no electricity and no news on what is happening. When airstrikes come too close to one neighbourhood they are told to evacuate to another, then told to evacuate again, but there is nowhere for them to go.[2] Israel has called up more than 300,000 reservists and is massing them on the border to Gaza in preparation for an inevitable ground offensive, designed to crush Hamas and prevent them inflicting further violence against Israel.
How did we get here?
In light of these heart-breaking developments, let’s rewind the clock and consider how we got to this appalling and tragic situation. After hundreds of years of exile (following the widespread expulsion of the Jewish people from Israel by the Romans in ancient times), the developments that led to the modern state of Israel began in the early twentieth century. During World War 1, the British famously made contradictory promises of an independent homeland in Palestine to both the Jewish people, and the local Arab population, in exchange for their support against the Ottoman Turks (who then held the region as part of their empire). At the end of the war, the League of Nations gave Britain the British Mandate over the area in 1922, granting temporary colonial authority with a view to eventual transition of the region to an independent nation. As a result, Jewish immigration into the area in pursuit of this vision increased dramatically in the 1920s, and continues to the present day. Repeated episodes of local Palestinian violence against the Jewish community also began. As pressure for independence grew, Jewish militant groups staged multiple terror attacks against the British colonial authorities. Eventually the British withdrew in 1948, and the modern nation of Israel was declared.
The surrounding Arab nations immediately invaded, but were successfully repelled by the Israeli army in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Multiple Palestinians have lived as refugees in camps in the region ever since this conflict, unable to return to their homes in Israel. Twenty years later, Israel was the aggressor, launching the 6 Day War of 1967 against the neighbouring Arab nations. At the end of this short conflict, Israel had captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula (later returned in 1982) from Egypt, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan: the infamous ‘occupied territories’ that have never been recognised as legitimate Israeli territory by the international community. In 1973, Egypt and Syria were again the aggressors in the Yom Kippur War. In 1978 and 2006 Israel launched invasions into southern Lebanon against Palestinian and Lebanese militants who were attacking from across the border. As well as these conflicts with its external Arab neighbours, Israel has also faced attacks from Palestinian militants, ever since the foundation of the modern state in 1948. And in 1987 the First Intifada, mass uprising of the Palestinian people began. In return, Israeli rule over the Palestinian people of the occupied territories has been brutal and oppressive. In addition more than 140 settlements (widely considered to be illegal by the international community), housing around 600,000 Jewish settlers have been built in the occupied territories since their capture in 1967.
Against this tragic history, hopes for a better future were high in the early 1990s, when in 1993 peace talks led to the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority to govern the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Later at the Camp David Summit in 2000, the Israeli government for the first time proposed an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, with Jerusalem as a shared capital, the ‘two state solution’. However, the talks collapsed, and after a controversial visit to the Temple Mount by then opposition leader Ariel Sharon, the Second Intifada began. The following year Ariel Sharon became the Prime Minister and began a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and the building of the Israeli West Bank barrier, a wall to shut off the West Bank from Israel. Tensions have remained high, and hopes for a lasting peaceful settlement remote, in the two decades since then. They have deteriorated even further in the last few months with increased violent incidents culminating in the horrific and unprecedented events of Saturday 7 October.
How can we move forward from here?
What possible hope for peace can there be now, and how can Israel and Palestine move forward? One of the areas explored in the Arise Manifesto report (Arise’s Christian vision for a better world) is what the Bible says, and what history teaches us about how to end conflict and bring about peace in even the most desperate contexts. Ultimately, we know that God loves every person in the region, is heartbroken by every tragedy, and wants to see lasting peace. As we read in Isaiah, we long for the day when “He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” (Isa: 2: 4) Therefore striving for reconciliation, forgiveness and lasting peace are essential. At the same time the Bible is also clear that states can legitimately use limited force where necessary to protect innocent citizens and enforce the law (detain criminals etc.). We see this in the Old Testament, in the law and the teaching on the role of kings and national authorities, but also in the New Testament, where John the Baptist, Jesus and Peter all seem to accept, and not criticise, the role of soldiers and national authorities to enforce justice. Paul tells us, “rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from the fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment to the wrongdoer” (Roms 13: 3 – 4).
The state is the only institution in the Bible that is permitted to use force in any way (certainly the church and us as individual Christians should never use it), and even here that force should be significantly limited. States therefore can use limited force to detain criminals and enforce the law amongst their citizens (Arise Manifesto, pg 81 – 82). And by extension of this principle when states do find themselves the victims of aggressive invasion by other nations, they can legitimately use limited force to defend and protect their citizens, but not to escalate or extract revenge. We read how during the exodus “The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim. Moses said to Joshua, ‘Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites’” (Ex 17: 8 – 9). Later the prophet Micah declared, “Marshal your troops now, city of troops, for a siege is laid against us. They will strike Israel’s ruler on the cheek with a rod” (Micah 5: 1) (Arise Manifesto, pg 89).
Targeting Hamas, not the Palestinians
In the light of this, it does seem legitimate that Israel can use limited and proportionate force to target Hamas, rescue hostages, and to protect its citizens. It is hard to imagine any country in the world not doing the same after such a brutal attack. However, Israel must do everything in its power to separate out and target Hamas specifically, follow the rules of war and avoid civilian casualties. It must also do everything it can to avoid escalating wider tensions in the region, particularly on its northern border with Lebanon and with the Palestinian population of the West Bank. It is worth considering a little more about who exactly Hamas is. Hamas is not the same as the more moderate Palestinian Authority which negotiated and came so close to peace with Israel in the 1990s, still rules in the West Bank, and is widely recognised by governments around the world. In 2007 the more hardline Hamas fought a brief civil war with the mainstream Fatah, and split from the Palestinian Authority, coming to power in Gaza. Hamas believes in the complete destruction of Israel, to be replaced by an Islamic state. Making it virtually impossible to negotiate with. It has fired thousands of rockets into Israel from Gaza over decades. It is designated as a terrorist organisation by many governments around the world. It is not democratic. A key lesson from the Arise Manifesto is that in any conflict and any peace process there will always be extremist factions that can’t be convinced or won over. Instead they must be reduced, marginalised, and peeled away from the populations they claim to represent, so they become a smaller and smaller faction, with no popular support and no legitimacy. Then the legitimate and contained use of limited force can be used to target them and shut them down (Arise Manifesto, pg 127 – 128, 132).
Re-starting moves for peace
The challenge is that at the moment the more hardline Hamas enjoys significant popular support from much of the Palestinian population. Many see it as standing up to Israel, compared to the Palestinian Authority which is increasingly seen as corrupt, stooges of the Israel regime, and not representative of the Palestinian people. At the same time, Israeli popular opinion has also hardened in the face of decades of violence. Both Palestinians and Israelis have become more radicalised, and are more divided than ever, compared to where they were during the 1990s and early 2000s. The road to peace will be a long one from here. But there is no other choice either morally or practically. There is no military solution for either side that will end the cycle of violence and lead to a lasting peace. There is no way Hamas can be isolated contained and shut down through he limited and proportionate use of force, unless there is also a significant parallel track to rebuild progress towards peace with the Palestinian people, and gradually begin to peel their support away from Hamas.
The Arise Manifesto contains many lessons on how these steps towards peace can be begun. A first crucial step would be to address some of the legitimate concerns of many Palestinians. Israeli settlements in the West Bank, widely seen as illegal by the international community, must be ended. The high handedness with which Israel controls access to the West Bank and Gaza and regularly disrupts or temporarily blocks goods, electricity, water, fuel, food, finances and people moving into and out of the areas often goes way beyond legitimate security concerns and makes life very difficult for ordinary Palestinians. This too should be stopped. So too must the restrictions Israel imposes on where ordinary Palestinians can live, build, work and travel, and the harassment of ordinary Palestinians. All of these actions stoke resentment, anger and desperation in the Palestinian population, driving their support towards more extreme groups like Hamas. Stopping them would begin to send different signals of a desire for peace with the wider Palestinian population, and begin the process of peeling that support away from the extremists. It could be done in ways that don’t compromise on ensuring Israel’s security from extremists is maintained.
Following this good start, both sides should come back to the negotiating table to discuss their grievances and agree a peaceful way forward. This should include a wider process within the Palestinian community to ensure the talks include representatives from different sections of the community, which together have the trust of the community and can carry the majority with them. International mediators could help with this, as could the presence of UN peacekeepers to maintain a neutral peace, if both sides agree. Alongside this there should be a wider programme of rebuilding and significant financial investment and economic development backed by the international community. This would build good jobs and public services to strengthen the desire for peace and stability and diminish the incentives to return to conflict. A significant part of this should be ensuring fighters for Hamas and other extremists groups should be rapidly demobilised, disarmed and reintegrated, and jobs should be found for them, so they too have more to lose than to gain by taking up arms again. There should also be a process of truth telling and reconciliation, similar to other such processes that have been successful in countries like South Africa and Rwanda. This means telling the truth about the violence that has been committed; confessing that it was wrong; asking for forgiveness; turning away and rejecting the use of violence in the future; and receiving forgiveness and amnesty from prosecution for those crimes. Public information campaigns and corresponding programmes should be taught in schools to stress respect for both communities, and unity between them to further help current and future generations to come together. These and other similar approaches have been shown to work over and over again in ending violence and rebuilding communities and nations around the world (Arise Manifesto, pg 89 – 90, 129 – 136). Of course the final details of any eventual peace deal, political settlement and normalisation of relations, will be for the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to decide.
Conclusion
We are sadly currently further than ever from a reconciled and peaceful Israel and Palestine. The immediate short-term future seems certain to be grim as Israel takes military action to rescue its hostages and protect its citizens. If carefully targeted at Hamas militants alone and minimising civilian casualties as much as possible, such action may be understandable. But there is no end to the cycle of violence if that is the only response, and generation after generation on both sides will continue to suffer. There must also be renewed efforts by both sides to reach out for peace and begin to turn the views of the majority on both side towards peace, isolating the extremists. That will be a long road. Nevertheless, all of the lessons of the Bible and recent history would indicate that it is the patient, prayerful and persistent application of just such an approach that will bring the longed for day of peace ever closer.
Find out more
Find out more about how God is at work in the world, and the role we all have to play in that work, in the Arise Manifesto. This report is Arise’s big picture, researched, Biblical, holistic and practical vision for a better world. It looks at what the Bible says, and what we can learn from the best data and the world’s leading experts on the five major areas of evangelism, discipleship, social justice, development and the environment. It then draws these lessons together into a practical road map for the changes we need to see in our world, which the Arise movement campaigns to achieve.
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[1] My daughter’s final moments as Hamas invaded her home, BBC, (11 Oct 2023), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-67074046
[2] Hiding at home, blinded and choked by dust – life in Gaza, BBC, (11 Oct 2023), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-67074435