Today, In The Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett wrote this.

Feeling powerless in the face of such egregious injustice can result in a loss of trust or faith, not just in governments and institutions but also in the moral order of the world, and its ability to protect children. I wonder what the impact of this will be: will it, as certain politicians no doubt hope, result in a numbness that presents as indifference? Traumatic events can result in a lack of affect – millions more people should be marching and raising their voice – but they can also be channelled into righteous anger.

I certainly feel a profound loss of faith. Something I felt to be true about humanity – that people are fundamentally good, that we owe it to children to protect them – has shifted because of this conflict. I walk around with a feeling of heaviness that I cannot seem to shake. Thousands of miles from Gaza, I am changed by the past 18 months. I have learned that, for some people, compassion for children has political limits. What does one do with that terrible knowledge once it sits inside you like a leaden stone? I don’t seem be able to find an answer.

Whilst, I refuse to join her on her loss of faith in the goodness at the heart of humanity, It is impossible not to agree with the seeming numbness we feel towards the on going horror unfolding in Gaza. Like the photo above, we look from distance – worse than this, we look only through the goggles we are given.

A channel 4 news report yesterday made the rather sobering point that the images of dead and starving children in Gaza are NOT SHOWN in Israeli media at all.

This is shocking, right? Can it really be true that in this so-called bastion of democratic liberal western civilisation, media outlets are so compliant as to generally not show the consequences of Netanyahu’s vengeful war crimes?

But what about the rest of us? How is it possible to see reports like this and ignore the human suffering – to demote it to something less important than OTHER human suffering, or even worse, render it as necessary for the pursuit political or economic expediencies?

Or even worse than that – obscure it behind religious doctrines, like Zionism?

We are all living in the shadows cast for us by algorithms made from our search histories, our viewing habits, our social media connections. To pretend any of us are free from influence or constructed sectarianism is foolish indeed. However, what is happening just now is more than just the consequences of our media bubbles. In the face of such horror, we have switched off.

Some of us have stopped looking, others never looked at things like this in the first place.

Let me tell you a story. I must be careful how I tell it, because I do not want to create more hurt and division. It is a story in which I am certainly not the hero – in fact it is one that ends in defeat. Perhaps I should have titled this piece ‘How not to speak to Zionists.’

In the early days of the current Israeli invasion of Gaza, I posted this on a forum I was hosting. It was a discussion about using art, spirituality in the service of social justice, and I was interested in the fact that a church in London had hosted this gathering.

I then found myself in an extended discussion via message and e-mail with a friend who saw things very differently than I did. Their concern was firstly about Roger Waters, who they felt was a proven antisemitie.

As the discussion went on, it became clear that my friend also believed strongly that the protests against the war in Gaza within the progressive Christian circles we had both moved in were also antisemitic, and that the use of words like ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ in relation to Israel’s necessary war – triggered as it was by the horror of October the 7th – placed Jews all over the world at risk.

Our discussion was always polite, but we were never able to find much common ground, despite having so much else in common. My friend shared how, when the October the 7th events were unfolding, they had felt a huge collective wave of fear, related to the past persecution and present uprise in antisemitic attacks all over the world. The very present need for a modern state of Israel as a home for Jews was a holy, Godly pursuit in this context. It was Shiloh.

In return, I tried to talk about the generations of injustice and increasing oppression of the Palestinian people, and how Zionism has had terrible consequences for indigenous residents of the Holy Lands. I raised the issue of the West Bank settlements and abandonment of the rule of law. The shooting of children throwing stones. The forcing of people from their homes and ancestral lands. The unequal health and educational outcomes and so on.

I shared a report from Amnesty international with my friend, but this was dismissed as ant-Israel as it was one-sided and failed to criticise the terrorists. I sent a link to the transcript of the International Criminal Court’s investigation into Genocide, which led to the issuing to arrest warrants, but I don’t think my friend read it.

I tried to talk about those cases in which war crimes by the IDF had been investigated – for example the terrible case of Hind Rajab, the 6 year old killed beside her family whilst on the phone to the emergency services – and the ambulance staff killed trying to reach her. My friend became quite irritated, saying that ‘we can all find terrible stories’ and anyway, ‘the IDF is the most humane army in the world’.

In the end, all we could do was agree to differ, and to go our seperate ways as the terrible war continued to get worse and worse. As thousands more children died under the rubble.

I often found myself thinking about our conversation though. I even wrote this poem in an attempt to process it all in my head;

.

Victims

.

My victims are more victimised than yours

She said, pointing to the blown-out bus

And the young bodies under blankets

Swimming in pools of broken glass

.

My genocide is more genocidal than yours

She said, pointing to a pile of scuffed shoes

To empty wooden huts behind rusted wires

And a yellow star on a stained jacket

.

The prejudice we experience is more prejudicial than yours

She said, pointing out the broken synagogue windows

The graffiti and the students protesting peacefully

In a public park

.

She must not know about Ahmed’s beautiful little sister

Under fifteen meters of concrete rubble

There was a time when it seemed like the war in Gaza might be over. A very unequal ceasefire was negotiated and prisoners were being exchanged for hostages. Bodies were being pulled out from beneath the rubble of hospitals, schools and mosques. People were making the long walk home, or at least to the pile of rubble that had once been their homes.

Meanwhile I was still wondering about my friend and feeling uncomfortable with how our discussion had ended. I was also wondering if they had changed their position at all, so I reached out again and asked if they wanted to talk. This time it would be face-to-face, via Zoom. My friend graciously said they would like to do this, and suggested that we start by watching this video;

I watched this video twice. I have a background within the social sciences, so have spent a long time thinking about prejudice, racism and scapegoating. Antisemitism seems to me to come from the very worst of what we are and can be as humans, and I have no argument with almost all of what Sachs has to say in this video. We need to understand how people from a Jewish background feel in the face of rising antisemitism across Europe.

This fear seems to be a big part of my friend’s desire for people like me to stop using pejoritive terms like ‘genocide’ in relation to Gaza. As far as they are concered, this produces direct results in the form of antisemitic attacks.

But there is more we have to talk about in relation to this ugly phenomenon. Firstly, it is not just antisemitic attacks that are increasing, but also anti-islamic violence, which has grown three times more, according to this report by Hope Not Hate.

Tell MAMA, the leading agency on monitoring
anti-Muslim hate, has recorded a 335% spike in hate
crimes from 7th October 2023 to 7th February 2024
compared to the same time period the previous year,
a record high since the charity began in 2011.

British Jews have also faced similar consequences,
as events in Israel and Palestine frequently drive
increased antisemitism in the UK. The Community
Security Trust (CST) recorded reports of 4,103
anti-Jewish hate incidents in 2023, a rise of
147% compared to 2022. Two-thirds of incidents
happened on or after 7th October, a 589% increase
in reports from the same time period in 2022.

It seems to me that we are now in a strange new world in which the far right – previously the political engine for so much antisemitism – are confused by the fact that Netanyahu’s governement is also on the far right. A lot of that hatred has been redirected towards Muslims, but a lot still remains. Add to that the way that the concept of antisemitism has arguably become a political weapon to silence dissent – used with no sense of irony by right wing newspapers such as the Daily Mail (despite its own shameful record of antisemitism.) There are also the murky waters of Labour party politics, in which the labour left has been silenced in the face of its apparent antisemitism. What we are left with is a new landscape in which hate is rising and old politics are being destablised and undermined. VIolence is always likely in these circumstances.

Where does this take us in relation to Zionism and the war in Gaza, which has now entered a new phase in which ethnic cleansing is being openly talked about as a military aim? In which starvation is talked about by Israeli ministers as a legitimate tactic to drive Gazans out of their land? This was all yet to kick off again when I was talking to my friend, so instead I tried to ask what might be the common ground we could find. I also wondered whether their position had shifted at all – if their views had changed in the face of such overwhelming slaughter and destruction.

It seemed clear that there had been no change at all in the views of my friend. I was genuinely perplexed at this, as I felt them to be a good person, full of spiritual depth and insight. How could the scale of death and destruction not have evoked some kind of empathetic response, critical of the actions of the perpetrators of such slaughter?

The first problem was how to agree on the nature of this death and destruction when you can not agree on the validity of sources of information. My friend made it clear that he no longer consumed any media sources apart from The Times of Israel, because all other sources of information – including the BBC – were biased. This newspaper does seem to be fairly centrist in its approach, but a centre media bias rating does not necessarily mean a source is totally unbiased, neutral, perfectly reasonable, or credible, just as Left and Right don’t necessarily mean extreme, wrong, unreasonable, or not credible.

The only defense against limiting our perspectives is surely to do our best to read outlets across the political spectrum. This is a hard lesson for us all, as we tend to look for articles that confirm our bias or become ways to point out the ‘wrongness’ of the other but without this effort, it is perhaps no surprise that my friend had made no journey of discovery.

The next problem was a religious one, in which my friend said something like this;

Here’s a thought. I wonder if my perspective is a big picture one, yours a close focus. Both of which are important, both of which can learn from the other?

Your perspective is particularly focussed on the misbehaviour of the state of Israel, tiny but in comparison with its close neighbours strong. So the reactions of the IDF in Gaza loom large.

Mine is a big picture, long-term view, shaped by the Shoah and centuries of antisemitism, seeing the current conflict as just the latest example of ongoing concerted attempts to kill Jews and to destroy their place(s) of safety. We are in a struggle for existence.

Was it about the fear we mentioned earlier, leading to a kind of bunker mentality in which survival seems to justify such punitive violence, even for good people like my friend? I can only speculate as pretty soon, our conversation ground to a halt. In the face of the comment above, I found myself writing this rather harsh, angry reply;

 I honestly find the idea of it incredulous. I cant go with the big picture/close picture split, no matter how neatly this might enable us to place things.

The ‘big picture’ you describe is entirely one sided. It does not engage with the complex history of the Palestinian people, or the history of violence, displacement, breaking of international laws that have stemmed from that. 

My exasperated and rather unkind response- via e-mail too, rather than face to face – was the end of the discussion.

I wish we have been able to talk about a different kind of common ground- after all, we are both followers of Jesus, and yet we spent no time at all seeking to place the teachings of Jesus into this dreadful context. I think I felt like this would have been to use Jesus as a stick to beat my friend with – Jesus as a dialectical debate weapon – which did not feel apprporiate, but in hindsight, I still find myself wondering why this was not our common ground.

Might talking about Jesus have made us think about what loving our enemies or seeking to be peace makers in this context might have looked like? We will never know I suppose. We missed out on this particular blessing.

How do we talk to Zionists?

Clearly I am not the person to answer this question, but talk to them we must.

We have to understand each other, to humanise and seek compassion, particularly with those with whom we have a disagreement. Particularly in a world in which violence is increasingly seen as a legitimate response to political, religious or geographical difference.

Perhaps we have to start too by understanding the way fear works, particularly the legacy of such global hate as the Holocaust. How it is weaponised by people like Netanyahu and his media machine. How it is fostered and monetised by the algorythm.

But we must go beyond fear, back towards compassion. We must name those who are victims on both sides, not just the Israelis. Not just the Gazans.

We must call out the war makers for what they are – on both sides…

…and we must grieve for the children, who grow in this polluted, toxic rubble we have made for them.