Gaza Crisis: Challenging Some Stereotypes
A friend of mine who has been posting some resources on peacemaking and reconciliation vis-a-vis the recent crisis that is occuring in the Gaza strip has been receiving some critical e-mails from fellow Christians about what they perceive as his blind support for the Palestinean cause.
In a sense, it is fortunate that my friend is not very familiar with the history and politics of the crisis. To him, he sees children being killed on both sides of the fence and that is enough for him to urge action.
Some of the e-mails go to the extent of taking positions like:
.. don’t push for a cease fire, lest we hinder God’s plan for Israel and the world. Christians should support and pray for Israel. The Bible says those who bless Israel shall be blessed, and those who curse Israel shall be cursed. Pushing for a cease fire would mean letting the enemies to regain their power sooner and planning for eradicating God’s chosen people ..
I wonder, how different is a position like the above different from this one below (from the opposing side of the conflict):
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah (children of God), there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharqad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.
- Article 7, Hamas Covenant
Here’s something that perhaps those of us who are still looking at this from politically nuanced lens (esp. if one feels that Hamas is a big part of the problem) to think about:
If we don’t step in and provide what the Palestinians need, Hamas will; in fact, they already do. They operate medical clinics, schools, soup kitchens, and other necessary social services. They are entrenched in every sphere of Palestinian society, social, economic and religious. They are vicious, barbaric murderers who call for the destruction of Israel and her people…and they operate what is essentially the only effective social safety net in Palestine.
Why? Because no one else does. Egypt, Jordan, and other nearby Arab states, all dealing with their own problems, would like nothing better than to forget about the Palestinians altogether, and they certainly aren’t going to provide for the Palestinians when they can barely (if at all) provide for their own people. The obscenely wealthy Gulf regimes do little to solve the problems, although they certainly have enough money to do so if they truly wished. The UN has proved useless, for all its anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian blather.
The “official” government of the Palestinian Authority is basically a kleptocracy, about as corrupt as such an organization can be, and is wholly unable to provide any kind of social services for the people it ostensibly governs. The people trust neither them nor the UN. and they most definitely don’t trust Israel, the US, or the West in general.
Hamas stepped into that breach long ago. They aren’t just evil Jew-hating killers; they’re evil Jew-hating killers who run schools and hospitals for people who have been essentially abandoned by the rest of the world, even by their fellow Arabs, whose outrage and righteous indignation about the situation has never quite been caught up to by action (you can ask the Lebanese about how effective the Arab League is). Stopping terrorism in Palestine isn’t just a matter of wiping out Hamas; poverty, disease, ignorance, and desperation must also be wiped out. Israel is apparently not going to do it, and the Palestinians are unable at the moment to do it for themselves.
If we really want the killing to stop and a sustainable peace attained, the blind support of Israel or Palestine will not bring this objective anywhere nearer to fruition.
Another friend who is an advocate of the “rottweiler” conspiracy theory I implied in an earlier post of mine mentioned after reading the post that the conspiracy theory is just a mental model and one should use it if it suits them and claims that the facts fit. I feel that in many such cases, the facts that fit tend to be selectively chosen to advance one’s preferred narrative.
What perhaps is needed is a total shift in one’s mental perspectives, instead of embracing the existing and prevalent mental models (on both sides of the fence). Perhaps then we can really see a way forward.
