If you come across a terrible situation, what does it feel like to the people involved? And if it is a truly terrible situation, what does God feel about it?
We hear about Joshua leading the people of Israel into the promised land, and taking over the city of Jericho, in a very theatrical way, at the blast of a trumpet. It did occur to me that the priests who blew the trumpets, and blew the trumpets continually, must have been supremely fit, because they were walking round the city and blowing their trumpets at the same time, for seven circuits of the city. I have no idea how that compares with the effort required to undertake the half marathon, but I suspect that it is in the same league. To do that, while blowing the trumpet flat out is pretty impressive.
I’m very edgy about reading Bible stories about the Israelites entering the promised land at the moment, because I can’t get away from thinking about what is happening in the Holy Land today. In a sense we are looking at the consequences of the Israelites entering the promised land all over again, in 1948, or possibly you could trace it back to the Balfour Declaration, in 1917. If you want to know more about the history, there is a very good film which we saw the other night, courtesy of Christian Aid, called The Tinderbox.
Either way, they were displacing the indigenous Palestinians and now, in the conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel is to take steps to avoid genocide. I was listening to the BBC Today programme yesterday morning, and I would like to read to you what I made notes of from the programme and from Jeremy Bowen’s report.
Introducing the topic, the presenter Justin Webb said,“Israel’s operation in Gaza is intended to destroy Hamas. Now the medical charity MSF says the bombardment is turning neighbourhoods into uninhabitable ruins. There are still 400,000 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza, the UN says.” He introduced a report from Jeremy Bowen.
“JB: ‘Israel has upped the military pressure on northern Gaza once again…. Just a few miles away on the other side of the wall is Jabalia Camp, where Palestinian families were fleeing on the orders of the Israeli army. Some of them were hit by bullets.’
“A Palestinian, a woman called Manar al-Bayar, who was rushing down the street carrying a toddler, says: ‘They told us we have five minutes to leave the Fallujah school. Where do we go? In southern Gaza there are assassinations. In western Gaza they’re shelling people. Where do we go? O God! God is our only chance.’
“JB said: ’The Israelis don’t allow journalists in [to Gaza] except with the army in very restrictive circumstances.… the Israelis are doing a major military operation. They are working in virtual privacy there, secrecy. They are moving, they say, after elements of Hamas, but of course there are terrible things happening to the civilian population who have already lived under massive pressure for a year.’
“He introduced Liz Allcock, of Medical Aid for Palestinians, who said: ‘It’s been apparent for some time that this has been a deliberate systematic attempt to present an existential threat to the Palestinians, particularly in the north of Gaza, by making life unliveable but at the same time issuing these forced displacement orders, and then when people try to flee, direct targeting of those people while they are under the impression that they will be provided safe passage.”
JB asked how she could prove they were being aimed at deliberately. “After all, it’s a war zone”. She said, “When we are receiving patients in hospitals, [there are a] large number of those women and children and people of, if you like, noncombatant age, receiving direct shots to the head, to the spine, to the limbs -[which is] very indicative of direct, targeted, attack.’
JB: “At the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, the director is posting daily updates from his intensive care unit. It is filled with wounded children on ventilators.
He says Israel is blocking fuel deliveries for his generator and bringing the hospital and its patients close to catastrophe.
JB: “On Israeli TV, … a retired general has launched an idea that he believed can finally deliver victory to Israel in Gaza. The IDF is gradually adopting some or all of this new tactic, to clear northern Gaza, known as the “Generals’ Plan”. It was proposed by a group of retired senior officers led by General Giora Eiland, who is a former national security adviser. His idea is to tell civilians to leave, and if they don’t, to impose a siege. No food or water, and treat everyone left as a legitimate target.”
What does it feel like to be a Palestinian in Gaza right now? Could it be a bit like being an inhabitant of Jericho when Joshua and the Israelites were walking round blowing their trumpets? There’s no hope. Destruction is all around you. What did you do wrong? Isn’t it striking that the voice of the woman from the heart of northern Gaza appeals to God. Only God can help.
I can’t help feeling that somehow we should not be just leaving this to God. We should be doing something to stop this killing and this desolation. We should certainly bring this to the Lord in our prayers, but also what Jesus said about the unrepentant cities should resonate with us, surely.
That’s what Jesus felt. He was looking for repentance, for the minds of the people where he had done the deeds of power, his miracles, to be changed, and for them to follow his commandment of love.
We must repent, change our minds, and change the minds of the people in those terrible places. At the very least we should be writing to our MP to join the calls to our government to stop supplying weapons to Israel.
Because, after all, how hard is it? How hard is it to follow Jesus’s commandments? The answer is what we have traditionally called one of the ‘Comfortable Words’. ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you’. ‘For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light’.
If people really believed that, and if they did something about it, then a lot of the suffering in the world, if not all of it, would go away. Because they don’t, really they are like the cities in Galilee that Jesus condemned in frustration. Is what we do better than the genocide? What would Jesus say?
hughdbryant 