VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS
Reflections on 100 years of Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
INTRODUCTION
Ever since 7th October 2023 the entire Middle East has been threatened with a continuing spiral of fear, greed, hatred, violence, destruction and death. Both Israeli and Palestinian sides are victims and perpetrators: Israeli victims and Israeli perpetrators; Palestinian perpetrators and Palestinian victims. The rest of the world responds with plaintive pleas for restraint and unlikely pathways to a sustainable peace.
Realistic negotiations are essential to stop the violence. But real peace is an inside job, ultimate reconciliation of victim and perpetrator, however impossible it seems.
Maps in Bethlehem 2017
THE GAZA WAR
Since 7th October 2023 to date (6th January – the Feast of the Epiphany), 1,200 Israelis have been murdered by Hamas; 22,600 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, 57,900 wounded by air strikes and 1.9 million displaced from their homes; over 170 Israeli soldiers have been killed or wounded; 200,000 Israelis have evacuated from their homes in the south and the north (); over 480 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. The conflict between Israel and the Hizbollah could easily engulf Lebanon. These are perhaps the darkest days of the Middle East ever.
ZIONISM
Zionism was created out of two ideas. First was the end of Jewish hopes of a Messiah. When the most popular contender, Shabbatai Tzevi, converted to Islam in 1666, Jews began to look for a different way forward, either through assimilation to the prevailing Western culture, or in enthusiastic movements led by charismatic rabbis. Then came the pogroms in Russia and elsewhere which sent thousands seeking sanctuary in the West.
Once again Jews were victims.
The Zionist movement emerged to create a new kind of Jew, no longer the victim, but a Jew who creates his own future, ideally through manual labour, farming the land in Palestine, which they typically bought from absentee landlords. Socialist farm collectives were created, ‘kibbutzim’. Of course this resulted in conflict with Arab Palestinians who felt squeezed out and ultimately the 1948 war which created the state of Israel.
After the war a ‘Transfer Committee’ organised the demolition of hundreds of Palestinian villages, turning 750,000 Palestinians into permanent refugees. In 1975 the right-wing Israeli party Likud organised a march across the West Bank, calling for the whole land to be open to Jewish settlement. Settlements have grown dramatically since then, despite international condemnation.
In 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip. The electoral victory of Hamas in 2007 led to a total economic blockade.
IDF soldiers as Sunday tourists, Old City
PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE
Palestinian opposition to Jewish immigration increased in 1933, when large-scale Jewish immigration followed Hitler’s coming to power. From 1921he Grand Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, was the leader of Palestinian nationalism and was openly anti-semitic. A wide-scale revolt against the British mandatory authority took off 1936. Atrocities were carried out by both Arabs and Jews. The Palestinian cause was crushed in the war of 1948. Individual acts of terror tried to draw world attention to the plight of Palestinians. Attempts to create a permanent two-state solution foundered in the Second Intifada (Uprising) 2000-2005 with the frequent use of suicide bombings by Palestinians and Israel’s invasion of the West Bank.
VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS IN ISRAEL
On 17th December the liberal Israeli newspaper reported the reaction to a media post on the ‘window of hell’ which is Gaza. Ben Caspit, a highly respected Israeli journalist, responded, “Why should we look? Honestly, they earned their hell; I don’t have an ounce of sympathy.” Since the brutal massacre by Hamas on 7th October, in Israeli eyes all Palestinians are murderers.
Which makes all the more remarkable the article published in Haaretz on 17th December, written by a Palestinian woman journalist living in Amsterdam. The headline was “We Palestinians are also Murderers.” Rajaa Nartour wrote,
‘My national expertise is Palestinian loss and grief… I used to say only ‘They’re the murderers and now I also have to say ‘we’ too… It was and still is, a conscious ethical, moral and political choice…. My friends, this confession was catastrophic on the narrative level, but it set me free.”
VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS IN GERMANY
My father was a German Jew who left Germany in 1933. After the war he steadfastly refused to buy anything German. In the early 1960s the city of Munich invited former Jewish residents to visit the city, and we drove there as a family. It was a healing experience.
In 1995 I went to Berlin and visited a photographic exhibition detailing the destruction of Berlin in 1945. The first section showed Berlin reduced to ‘the pile of rubble outside Potsdam’ (Bertolt Brecht). The second section detailed all the cities destroyed by Germany – Rotterdam, Coventry, Leningrad etc. It is this German frankness in facing up to the crimes of the past that enabled both him and later me to reclaim German citizenship. It is summed up in the plaque on the ruined spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin:
“This tower has been kept in its ruined state as a memorial to the judgement of God which fell on our people in the war years.”
WHAT JESUS SAID
Jesus lived at a time of violence and oppression, e.g. the Galilean pilgrims “whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” (Luke 13.1) Jesus’ teaching on how to break the cycle of violence was radical:
“I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile… Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…” (Matthew 5.39-41, 44)
Checkpoint outside Ramallah 2004
ROADMAP TO PEACE
The real roadmap to peace will start when both Israelis and Palestinians acknowledge their joint history of being both victims and perpetrators. Both peoples need to acknowledge their shared and tangled history. The Church calls it repentance.
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