Reflecting on Issues
In the context of the current brutal conflict in Gaza there are several ways in which efforts are frequently made ‘to justify’ the actions of the state of Israel.
1. Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7th October 2023 was “unprovoked”.
2. “We know that Hamas is a Terrorist organisation that does not respect international law”.
Senator Penny Wong, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Insiders, Sunday 12th November 2023.
3. “Israel has a right to self-defence”.
4. Accusations of ‘antisemitism’ and the abuse of language.
There is also a further, underlying, ‘justification’ based on appeals to narratives in the Hebrew Scriptures of “God’s Chosen People” being given the “Promised Land”.
An Unprovoked Attack
On 7th October 2023, Hamas, through its military branch, the Al Qazzam brigade, launched a large-scale attack on Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 240 hostages. Almost universally, that action has been condemned as an atrocity, for example, the above comment by the Foreign Minister.
However, it has also been common for leaders of Western governments to say that Hamas engaged in an ‘unprovoked attack’. This is to ignore the reality of the context in which it happened.
What was the reality for Palestinians on 6th October 2023?
In 1971, a Brazilian Roman Catholic Archbishop, Dom Helder Camara, wrote a booklet entitled The Spiral of Violence. In it, he observed that in a society violence can build up at three levels. Primary violence is the structural social injustice under which some people live. This can generate secondary violence, which is a revolt by the victims of the injustice. In turn, the revolt provokes tertiary violence, which is the repression of the revolt by the powerful to secure their privileged position. Thus, the spiral of violence continues. His point was that the secondary and tertiary levels of violence will inevitably continue unless the primary violence is honestly recognised and effectively addressed.
For Palestinians on 6th October, it was a reality of primary violence.
Beginning with the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, there had been the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the erasure of villages, the ongoing, frequent demolition of their homes and property, violent dispossession by the massive seizure of their land and the erasure of villages, ethnic cleansing, Israeli settlement activity, the military rule over their lives in the occupied territories, the detention without trial of thousands, including children as young as 10 (since the Occupation began in 1967, Israel has arrested an estimated one million Palestinians according to the United Nations: that means one in every five Palestinians has been arrested and charged under 1,600 military orders), and the daily harassment, humiliation and provocation by a discriminatory system that controls every aspect of Palestinian life. The reality for Palestinians on 6th October was the dehumanising of a people. That was the reality of primary violence in which Palestinian people were living and have been forced to live for the past 75 years.
In Gaza, that dehumanisation has had another brutal form. The land, sea and air blockade that Israel has imposed on Gaza since 2007 has turned the world’s most densely populated, poverty-stricken territory into an open-air prison. That blockade means that Israel is the real controller of Gaza: Israel regulates the movement of people in and out of Gaza; it determines what goods are allowed in; it controls the water, energy and telecommunications; it sets limits even to what people can do, for example, the beaches on the 42 km coast of Gaza are off-limits to its residents with fishing prohibited, which the Israelis say is to prevent smuggling, and children cannot cool off in the Mediterranean Sea in the heat of the summer. The blockade is a dehumanising act of violence against the Palestinian people of Gaza. The blockade is part of the primary violence perpetrated in Gaza.
The action of Hamas on 7th October, an atrocious outburst of violence, has to be recognised as secondary violence. Simply to condemn it, as though it was unprovoked, without any reference to the context in which it occurred, without any acknowledgement of the primary violence that caused it, is completely one-sided, dishonest and a convenient dodging of the truth.
Hamas
It is the primary violence that has generated the conditions in which hatred has deepened and Hamas has thrived – conditions imposed by Israel. Indirectly, Hamas is the creation of Israel, with the support of Western governments.
More directly, the soil in which Hamas has grown is the soil of a people’s deep yearning for freedom and their natural instinct to resist oppression.
Partly because of dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah, the people of Gaza saw no hope of their oppression ever ending, and therefore nearly sixty percent of them voted for Hamas to govern them in 2006. The democratic process of that election has not been disputed.
Therefore, since 2006, Hamas has been responsible for delivering the basic humanitarian necessities to all who live in the Gaza Strip: food, medicines, education. This has been Hamas’ civilian wing at work. But like all governing bodies around the world, Hamas also has a military wing. It is that wing that has engaged in military action against Israel from time to time – the most extensive and brutal being on 7th October 2023.
It is because of Hamas’ hostility towards the state of Israel and the actions of its military wing that the whole Hamas organisation has been labelled ‘terrorist’ by many national governments, including the Australian Government.
Self-Defence
While the military assault on Israel by Hamas on 7th October was secondary violence that has to be seen it the context of the appalling primary violence against the Palestinian people over 75 years, it also has to be recognised honestly as a brutal act that was in violation the United Nations Charter and the Fourth Geneva Convention that proscribe military action and the taking of hostages.
Israel has justified its retaliation by claiming the right to self-defence, and many national governments, including Australia, have supported that justification.
The legal basis of Israel’s claim to self-defence is, at least, questionable. Article 51 of the UN Charter recognises the existence of a natural right of self-defence “in the event of armed aggression by a State against another State”. In this case, Israel is the occupying and/or controlling military power of the Palestinian territories, and the action of Hamas, evoked to justify the retaliation, originated inside one of those territories, and not outside it. Therefore, some have argued that Article 51 of the Charter is irrelevant to the particular case.[1]
However, even if Israel’s claim to self-defence does have a legal basis in international charters and conventions, one of those conventions, namely, the Fourth Genevan Convention states that “persons taking no active part in the hostilities … shall in all circumstances be treated humanely”. Israel clearly feels no obligation to abide by that requirement.
Indeed, Israel has been violating those charters and conventions and UN Security Council resolution since 1948. For example, the Fourth Geneva Convention states that forcible transfers of population from and within an occupied territory are prohibited; transfers of the civilian population of the occupying power into the occupied territory are prohibited; collective punishment is prohibited; the destruction and seizure of private property by the occupying power are prohibited.
Now, Israel appeals to its right to self-defence, and its retaliation – an example of what Dom Helder Camara called tertiary violence – is the most relentless, merciless brutality that anyone could imagine. We are witnessing the razing of Gaza. Almost 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 1.8 million have been displaced, and starvation and illness are being used as a weapon of war. Is it Israel’s intention to ‘cleanse’ the territory of Palestinians, and is this what is being implemented?
It is tertiary violence on an obscene level. Israel contends that the trouble will be over when it destroys Hamas, the agent of this secondary violence. That is a fiction. The destruction of Hamas will not kill the Palestinian’s yearning to be free. That is why this spiral of violence will be stopped only by addressing the primary violence that is the root cause of the suffering and the horror.
Antisemitism and the Abuse of Language
It has been a cause of shame that Western governments, of which Australia is one, have been strong in their support of Israel and its right to self-defence, while being weak, if not silent, about any rights that the Palestinians might have. It is another cause for shame that most churches and their leaders also have been silent.
One suspects that a reason for the silence is the fear of being accused of ‘antisemitism’. This possibly is exacerbated by the widespread adoption of, and consequent credence given to, the Working Definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) of ‘antisemitism’.
This definition has been condemned by over forty Jewish organisations, numerous Jewish lawyers and academics around the world. Many see it as an inadequate definition, expressing a narrow meaning of ‘antisemitism’; but a more serious problem lies in the eleven examples it gives of antisemitism. While the language used in some of those examples is vague and open to interpretation, they effectively conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Many current promoters of the definition use the eleven examples to stifle legitimate criticism of the Israeli Government and its abuses of Palestinian human rights – a use from which the original drafter of the definition has disassociated himself. The IHRA’s Working Definition also misleadingly avoids a broader point about the use of the word ‘semitic’ – a point which is almost never confronted. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines ‘semite’ as “a member of any peoples supposedly descendant from Shem, son of Noah, including esp. the Jews, Arabs, Assyrians, Babylonians and Phoenicians”. This means that Palestinians are also semitic, and speaking against the gross injustice that is inflicted on them and advocating for their human rights can never warrant the charge of ‘antisemitism’. To do so is to abuse the language.
Language can also be used and misused to create either favourable or hostile opinions about individuals or groups. In news reports, Palestinians are frequently called ‘militants’ or ‘terrorists’, whereas no such labels are given to others who also commit acts of physical violence but whom Western powers favour. Due to a heavy reliance on Israeli sources, there also has been a lack of balance in both printed and broadcast reports about Gaza. The obvious bias caused over 300 journalists to sign an open letter, identifying cases of censorship of their reports and stories which have been canned by management, who are presumably fearful of attacks from pro-Israeli lobby groups and accusations of antisemitism.[2]
Biblical Theology
The brutal war in Gaza demands that we hear again more clearly, and that we proclaim and live the biblical message of justice and peace that is so relevant for these times.
Undergirding that message is the understanding of the nature of God. Here, it must be recognised that the concept of God matured through the biblical writings, reflecting an evolving human understanding of God at different times. Affected by historical events and communicated through the human media of poetry and stories, within the Scriptures we discover a development in the understanding of God.
At a primitive stage of development, the concept of God was tribal, a nationalist god, who was war-like rather than peaceful, and whose power and presence were confined to a particular land. It was within the context of that understanding of God that the concepts of a ‘chosen people’ and a ‘promised land’ were formed. But the Scriptures cannot be read uncritically in the light of such a primitive understanding of God. A far broader, more universalist, concept of God began to crystallise during the Babylonian Exile. Removed to a foreign place, the Hebrew people could no longer understand God as belonging to a particular land. They began to understand that God’s concern was not limited to or even primarily focussed on one land but on all lands, not on one people but on all people. No longer could the divine love for human beings be seen as exclusive, it had to be seen as inclusive. While the voice expressing the exclusivist understanding was not lost in the Hebrew Scriptures, it was the inclusivist understanding that came to dominate, especially through the later prophets who articulated profound truths about the universal and inclusive nature of God – a God whose love is for all people and who uncompromisingly yearns for justice and peace for every person.
Given that humans are limited by the scientific and historical knowledge of their time, it is remarkable that such truths were discerned and flowed into an inclusive understanding of humanity, such as found expression in the first creation poem: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1.27).
However, to step forward to the knowledge of our time, the discoveries of science and the ever-expanding understanding of the story of the universe, enable us to see, and not to escape, the connectedness that is fundamental to reality. Everything that is, has been and will be, all creatures, all people, stem from the one God-given origin from which all life has been brought into being. All life is part of one single cosmic event.
For people of faith, this expands our understanding of God and expands our hearts to include all creation. It challenges us to think more creatively because it upsets old ‘truths’ and takes us beyond the biblical tension between inclusive and exclusive, nationalist and universalist conceptions of God and humankind. It enlarges our vision to discern God as Holy Mystery, Love and Light, as Creator of all that is, whose presence is woven throughout all creation, and to regard every person as part of the one inter-connected human family – and therefore to see that every act of discrimination and injustice against any person is a denial of this fundamental conviction of faith.
All this severely challenges the exclusivist and supremacist ideologies that operate in our world, and particularly underlie the conflict in Gaza. It challenges people of all religious faiths to pray for every division to be removed and for equity and justice to be established in human society, and to walk and work together in striving to be instruments of the reign of God, building an inclusive world of hospitality, compassion, justice and peace.
The Reverend Dr Ray Williamson OAM
Vice-President
Palestine Israel Ecumenical Network
[1] Francesca Albanese, the UN Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, speaking at the National Press Club in Canberra on 14th November 2023, said: Israel “cannot claim the right of self-defence against a threat that emanates from the territory it occupies – from a territory that is kept under belligerent occupation”.
[2] Source: Quentin Dempster in Pearls and Irritations, 14th December 2023