the cross between Israel and Gaza

I’m not writing this because I’m particularly well informed about the West Bank. I’m writing this because I feel pretty uninformed but continue to hear equally uninformed people, who strangely hold the strongest opinions about it. Who is the culprit? Who is the victim? Who is observing that lowest common denominator called wartime ethics? Who is in excess?

On the second day of what will hopefully be a prolonged ceasefire, it’s always a little bit jarring to me to hear someone confidently sum up decades of internecine conflict with a straight and simple pronouncement of guilt for one side and innocence for the other. I’m not well informed about the West Bank, but I am fairly well schooled in things like guilt and innocence. It never actually works out quite that neatly.

What’s become clear in the USA over the last week is that neither the real Israel nor the real Palestine are being discussed at all in our popular discourse. What’s really at issue are the ideological hobbyhorses of the speaker. The entities that we refer to as “Israel” and “Palestine” are just abstractions as Hegel used the term: they’re ideological props devoid of their own socio-historical content. We developed them a priori to satisfy the needs of our own self-images. They enable us to make clean and forceful political commentaries because, as abstractions, they lack any of the counter-evidence, the morally neutral red herrings, and the complicating baggage that tends to come along with real people and places.

And put aside the predictable hedge that we’re simply lacking enough real facts to see the inevitable grey areas involved and simply need to pull up a half dozen articles from respected sources. On the contrary, it may just be that we already have an overabundance of facts, which can, as often as not, become an impediment to real understanding. Knowing a recent list of important dates, the names of major players, and a handful of quotable statistics gives us the very dangerous illusion that we are therefore equipped to comment on the motivations, the fears, and finally the guilt or innocence of the opposing sides.

Coming from the right side of the Western, ideological jousting arena, one champion wants to present Hamas as a fair representative of all Muslims, because it helps him make the case (in the abstract) that Islam is the great boogeyman of our time (no doubt, providing a concrete explanation for his own sense of guilt and dis-ease with his comfortable socio-economic place in the world). Coming back at him from the left, we have a challenger who wants to act as if Hamas developed in a vacuum and shares no ideological moorings with Palestinian context outside itself (which all sounds very enlightened but which backfires when it renders arbitrary any real grievances of the society for which it speaks; this effectively ends up serving the same Western purposes as the right’s narrative). Coming back from the right, we hear (per usual, with any fighting that involves American interests) that the casualties would be much worse were it not for the benevolence of the bigger dog in the fight. From the left we hear the familiar cant (which no one actually believes when his or her own skin is in the game) that the smaller dog is morally exempt for the simple fact that it is small (a notion which may come from a sympathetic place but finally turns out to be the most dehumanizing of them all).

So how do I as a Christian begin to process these events when both the predictable liberal and conservative narratives are too constrictive and self-serving?

First and foremost the Christian reserves the right to take both sides.

Someone will object to this and say, “refusing to pick a side is to have made a choice.” I reject that tired bit of cynicism, outright. The Christian is always free to simply choose the side of humanity general. For centuries, Christians have been risking their lives to cross front lines and serve as medics for the enemies or have been court martialed for refusing to shoot at them. Apropos too are the group of hundreds of Israeli reservists who in early 2002 refused to serve in occupied lands saying that they could not “dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.”

The freedom to choose humanity is not an exclusively Christian freedom. However, it ought to be at least characteristically Christian. It ought to be rooted not only in Jesus' plain and simple teaching but in the heart of his story.

Part of the artfulness of the people who wrote the four gospels is that they finally leave it ambiguous who actually put Jesus to death. However much anti-Semitic ideologues have wanted to blame the Jews, and revolutionary ideologues have wanted to blame the government, and reforming ideologues have wanted to blame religious leaders general; the honest reader is still left with the vague but powerful impression that the culprit is really all of them—and, in a weird way, none of them. Or rather, each of those groups is simultaneously a victim and a culprit of an offense and punishment schema that has moved down through the generations since time immemorial. The reader starts to sense that we’re riding a wave of insecure and fearful aggression for which no one is fully responsible but of which no one’s hands are fully dry. The reader is left with the impression that if these particular groups and individuals hadn’t gotten rid of Jesus, someone else would have, if for no reason other than a deep-seated frustration and self-hatred in the soul of humanity.  

These may have been the sorts of meditations going through the gospel writer’s head when, in Mark, Jesus makes the mysterious decree, ”It is necessary” (8:31) that he be crucified, as if these events on the ground were being governed by some inexplicable fate that tends in this direction. Likewise, for John, in the presence of true light, we must choose between either confronting our darkness or snuffing out the light source as quickly as possible (see 1:9-11 or 3:19-20). If you were to read his gospel for the first time, you wouldn’t have to be a prophet, just a good student of humanity to predict which we will choose.  

That’s why, when we ask about which group crucified Jesus, the only answer that has stood the test of time is: all of them. Or more mystically, all of us.

So rather than immediately pick out one guilty and one innocent party in order to patch up the threatening rift in our moral universe, the Christian reserves the right to mourn, to pray, and to simply admit helplessness in the face of tragedy. This includes both the most recent tragedies that occupy our newsfeeds and the more sustaining tragedy that plagues humanity. Through the ages, the debacle of justice that is the cross yells from the top of Golgotha to an over-certain humanity, “Don’t just do something; stand there. Before your next counter-offensive, your next crusade against terror, your next witch-hunt—take a moment to really grieve the state of humanity. See how the situation looks after you’ve spent some time mystically communing with both culprit and the victim throughout history.”  

At first, this will sound very idle to a society much inclined to believe that for every problem we face there is a drone or a smart bomb to fix it. But just there is what I call the Nazi paradox: when we seek to forcibly remove what’s wrong with the world, we invariably become it.

In a world where “mission accomplished” signifies nothing more than the start of a decade long semantic debate on the definition of “accomplished” and “conflict” replaces “conflict” as if they were only filling spots on a calendar, is a little idle mourning and prayer really such a bad response? By refusing a knee-jerk call to action, are we creating the situation of helplessness or merely acknowledging the helplessness that is our current reality?

The Christian looks beyond the political pragmatism of the moment to a future where, for lack of any other use, swords will be beaten into plowshares and the boots of tramping warriors thrown into furnaces to heat our homes.  For millennia, societies have said, “We’ll get to peace…as soon as all our enemies are eliminated. We’ll get to peace, we just need one more ‘war to end all wars’. We’ll get to peace, just one more atom bomb should about do it. Hang on, shalom, we just need to take out one more terrorist leader, one more enemy cell, one more, one more, one more…”

The Christian is tired of saying, “One more.”