‘For peacemakers to be effective, no party in a conflict must get the idea that the peacemakers are against them.’ Photo: by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
Hold your peace: Keith Braithwaite has a personal take on the conflict in Gaza
‘To be for peace we cannot be against Israel, and we cannot be for Hamas.’
I find myself reluctant to embrace the term ‘war crime’. It invites us to sometimes say: but this is only war, not a crime.
In 1660, twelve Friends declared to Charles Stuart (called king) that ‘All bloody principles and practices we do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever.’ That’s ‘all’ and ‘any’. Not ‘some’; ‘all’. No buts.
In 2002, ahead of the proposed invasion of Iraq, it was just such a clear position that first got me into a Quaker Meeting house. The mainstream churches were quick to find reasons to claim a ‘just war’; the Society of Friends stood firm for peace. I knew where I should be.
In 1693, William Penn wrote that: ‘A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it.’ And yet I find myself these days conversing with Friends who do find ends that might sanctify evil means. Some Friends do seem to think that in the case of Israel there might be a just war.
On 7 October 2023, after more than twenty years of launching indiscriminate rocket bombardments, the terrorist group Hamas changed its tactics. It launched an incursion by land and by air. Its fighters took hostages, some held still. Its fighters raped women, murdered children, and mutilated the remains of some victims. Some Friends think they have room for a ‘but’.
Here in the UK, some left-wing groups, such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), celebrated that incursion as a blow against an oppressor – a step towards liberation; a justified act in a struggle. The SWP began to plan events in support of the action. And to encourage working people around the world to follow the example of Hamas, which they described as ‘heroic’ and ‘magnificent’. That’s on their conscience. But many of those events were booked into rooms in Quaker Meeting houses. Posters showing a digger breaking through the Gaza border fence, and inviting people to learn why that was right, started to appear, with the address of a Meeting house at the bottom. Many on the hard left certainly do believe that a good end can sanctify evil means, that some good may come of doing evil. And they expected to use rooms in Meeting houses to spread that message.
Amid growing alarm among Friends, the wardens of Meeting houses, and trustees of Area Meetings, were encouraged by Britain Yearly Meeting to closely examine the bookings for space in their buildings, and to consider how closely aligned those events were with Quaker principles. Many of those events were cancelled.
In February 1990, much of the world came to a stand-still to watch Nelson Mandela walk free. Yasser Arafat, then leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, never reached that degree of regard, nor of success, although in the eyes of many on the western left-wing, he should have been next. Mandela made the journey from (self-declared and unashamed) terrorist to statesman, and along the way came to see peace as a precondition for successful negotiations with an oppressor to secure freedom. In that order, not the reverse. Arafat was on that journey, and Fatah is something like an ordinary political party. Hamas is not. Hamas’s founding principles include the destruction of Israel, and its original charter is explicitly antisemitic. Its leadership has, perhaps, modulated that stance, and claims now to be fighting because Israel has dispossessed Palestinians of their land, and not simply because it is a Jewish state.
At its inception, Hamas saw itself as the Palestinian branch of the totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood, declaring that ‘Allah is its goal, the Prophet is the model, the Quran its constitution, jihad its path, and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes’. Its charter contained a range of well-known antisemitic tropes, such as that Jews control of the world’s media and fomented both world wars for their own benefit. It claimed that world war two was a Jewish plot intended to lead to the creation of the state of Israel. Its more recent 2017 charter does try to be more clearly secular and more pragmatic. Whether that is an accurate summary of Hamas’s actual position is open to debate. It uses the language of international law, of identity politics, and of resistance to and freedom from settler colonialism. It speaks of liberation, self-defence, and self-determination. These ideas fit very comfortably into Western ‘progressive’ thought. They encourage that ‘but’.
I fear that this appeal to ‘progressive’ thinking can make it hard for Friends to find a principled response to events. The Ecumenical Accompaniers (EAs) and others who work for peace on the ground in Israel/Palestine emphasise the vital importance of principled impartiality to their work. My Area Meeting heard this first-hand from an EA a few weeks ago. For peacemakers to be effective, no party in a conflict must get the idea that the peacemakers are against them. Quaker conciliators know this well. To be for peace we cannot be against Israel, and we cannot be for Hamas, nor really for Palestine the state as such. We can, however, be emphatically for the people injured by the conflict on all sides. Is there a ‘but’ here?
Some Friends do agree with the SWP that violent action by Hamas is justified by the idea that Israel is a settler colony. I’ve been told – in a Quaker space, by someone identifying as a Quaker – that any concerns that I may have about violence done by Hamas are ‘petty’. It seems to me that the situation in and around Gaza is blowing the fuses in some Friends’ heads. In the darkness following, perhaps a voice says ‘but’.
It’s hard. The Israeli writer Amos Oz described Israel and Palestine not as a fight between right and wrong, but between two rights. Two historically-disadvantaged, oppressed peoples, both with a history of being shunted around by well-established states who don’t want them. Both see their only hope of safety and security in the same small area of land. There’s no easy answer to this. But my Quaker principles tell me that peace is where any answer, however complex, must start. So it must start with Israel ending its campaign. And it must start with Hamas ending its campaign. And it must start with Hezbollah not starting a new one. Is there a ‘but’ to that?
As Ali Abu Awwad, an intifada veteran turned peace campaigner, said to an audience split between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel sides, ‘Can’t you be pro-solution? Are you expecting that either Israelis or Palestinians are going to disappear?’ Neither of them is, so let’s not say ‘but’, and let’s not choose a side in the conflict. Let us choose peace.
Comments
Well said. It’s an incredibly difficult situation.
By rosete on 22nd February 2024 - 18:04
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