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Comment
Gaza
Israel
Middle East
Old Testament
Trauma
War & peace
10 min read

Eyeless in Gaza: the tragedy and the trauma of Israel and Palestine

An ancient story of a captured warrior demolishing buildings and devastating Gaza, prompts Graham Tomlin to view the current conflict through the lens of pain and trauma.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Two soliders console each other as they search a house that has been ransacked.
Israeli soldiers console each other while searching a house attacked by Hamas.
Israeli Defense Forces.

In Israel, 10/7 has become a date to sit alongside 9/11. 1400 people lie dead, a nation is in shock and families are grieving unimaginably. In Gaza, an even greater and growing number of people are buried, or wait for burial in white shrouds, or lie dazed and wounded in hospitals, wondering how their lives and their cities can be rebuilt after such devastation.

The rest of the world is caught up in the question about blame. Is it, as the Israelis say, firmly Hamas’ fault, the result of a fanatical Islamist group determined to extend militant Muslim control over the Middle East in general and Israel in particular? Or, as the pro-Palestinian crowds chant, the inevitable outcome of Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza? The argument has reached the shores of capitals across the world as supporters of both sides reach for their flags and banners, and post support for one side or the other on X or TikTok videos. Everyone is pushed to decide. As a child of a friend asked his mum the other day: “Which side are we on?” 

Yet what if we try to see this conflict in a different light - not so much in terms of blame but pain?

Echoes of the past

Of course, this is not the first time there has been war between the people of Israel and their enemies on the coastline of Gaza.

The book of Judges in the Bible recounts a series of confrontations around 3,400 years ago (or 1400 BC) between the Israelites and the Philistines, who harassed and taunted the Hebrew tribes as they struggled to establish themselves in the land of Canaan (though it’s important to stress that the Philistines are not precursors or ancestors of modern Palestinians, there being no direct link from one to the other, apart from a politically-motivated decision of the Romans back in the day to change the name of the region from Judaea to Palestina.)

One of those stories tells of Samson, an immensely strong Israelite warrior, who kills numerous Philistines in a spree of violence lasting several years. Samson marries a Philistine woman, Delilah, who betrays him into the hands of his enemies. He is captured, and his eyes are gouged out. In a final act of heroic violence, he brings down the roof of the Philistine Temple at the height of a religious feast, killing both himself and more of his enemies than he killed in his lifetime.

The story is both a tragedy and a trauma. John Milton’s great verse drama Samson Agonistes, written around 1650, presents Samson as a tragic figure, gifted and heroic, a hero of Israel brought low into his Gazan prison by a fatal character flaw of pride and lust, betrayed by his cunning wife, and in his famous phrase, ‘eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves, Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke’. The tragedy is complete in his final act of destruction both of himself and his enemies.

Yet besides a tragedy, this is also a story of trauma. The roots of the trauma lie deeply hidden in the history between Israel and the various tribes that surround them. Samson is one of many dragged into a history of tit-for-tat violence which ends in this scene of death and devastation. He is caught up in the long history of human wrongdoing – as both victim and perpetrator - that stretches right back to Adam and Eve in the garden. The result is Samson and his enemies all lying dead in the rubble of a demolished building in the heart of Gaza.

In this one small strip of land today we find two peoples living out the trauma of what has happened to them in the past. And without a new approach, the result will be the same – destruction and devastation.  

On many trips to Israel/Palestine over the past 35 years, as I have listened to both Palestinians and Israelis look at the same issue with such different eyes, this conflict has often struck me as both a tragedy and a trauma. That sounds bleak. Yet this perspective can, despite its apparent gloom, bring a glimmer of hope.

This is because tragedy and trauma don’t avoid the question of blame, but they don’t start there. They start with a posture of empathy. Tragedy makes us pause before making moral judgments and instead, simply to notice and enter into the sadness, the grief of it all. When we watch the final scenes of Hamlet or Macbeth, or even the Samson story, we are simply left in silence. We don’t rush to judgment, but simply acknowledge the heart-breaking sorrow experienced by the ordinary people caught up in this. Tragedy sits with the grief and darkness, and does not reach immediately to blame, realising that real life is usually more complex and the causes of conflict more opaque.

At the same time, understanding this as trauma forces us to enter into the pain underlying the conflict. Samson is born into traumatic times with his people under attack, and ends up living out the trauma he has experienced by brutal revenge on his enemies. In a similar way, in this one small strip of land today we find two peoples living out the trauma of what has happened to them in the past. And without a new approach, the result will be the same – destruction and devastation. 

The Jewish people of today, especially in Israel, remain deeply traumatised by the history of anti-Semitism which climaxed in the Holocaust of the 1930s and 40s. A determined attempt by a sophisticated, modern European nation to systematically exterminate every single one of the Jewish race is not just a historical event but one whose ripples or perhaps better, stormy waves, reach us today. Alongside this there is the expulsion of Jews during the C20th from Muslim countries such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. For those of us who are not Jewish it is hard to imagine the impact of such a reality, not just as a fact of history but as a real danger in the future. After all, if it happened once, it could happen again. It explains why Israel has always paid scant attention to international opinion and resolutions of the UN for a ceasefire, such as the one recently called for. As the Jewish writer Daniel Finkelstein put it:

“The origin of the state of Israel is not religion or nationalism, it is the experience of oppression and murder, the fear of total annihilation and the bitter conclusion that world opinion could not be relied upon to protect the Jews. So, when Israel is urged to respect world opinion and put its faith in the international community the point is rather being missed. The very idea of Israel is a rejection of this option. Israel only exists because Jews do not feel safe as the wards of world opinion. Zionism, that word that is so abused, so reviled, is founded on a determination that, at the end of the day, somehow the Jews will defend themselves and their fellow Jews from destruction. If world opinion was enough, there would be no Israel.”

So, with such a trauma behind them, it is not surprising that when Arabs set off bombs in Tel Aviv, when rockets rain down on Israeli towns, or Hamas militants swagger through kibbutzim, shooting people just because they are Jews, it triggers exactly the memory of the trauma that they have been through as a people. What Palestinians think of as resistance to an occupation of their land, is experienced by Israelis as an echo of the desire to exterminate the entire Jewish people, in a way that sends a shiver down the spine for anyone who has lived this story.

Just like Samson and his enemies. An eye for an eye leads both to end up eyeless in Gaza.

Yet the Palestinian people also have a trauma of their own. In 1948, at the time of the creation of the State of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were made homeless and stateless, deprived of their homes and their land, often at gunpoint, and many killed by Zionist fighters. The Arab nations did little to help, only interested in their own interests. The European nations stood by. And the Americans continue to fund Israel so that their army vastly outweighs any other army in the region, and certainly enough to crush the stones, knives and bombs of various intifadas. Their deep sense of injustice also leaves a scar, one that can continue to be used by groups like Hamas or other surrounding nations for their own purposes.

And so today when Palestinians are made to queue at checkpoints simply to travel from one place to another, when Gazans are not allowed to leave their overcrowded homeland, when land is taken through the building of a security wall, and Israeli settlements continue to get permits to build on Palestinian land, while it is much harder for Palestinians to get planning permission to build a new home, all this triggers the memory of what Palestinians call the Nakhba or the disaster. What Israelis see as legitimate self-defence, security measures to keep terrorists at bay and to keep their people safe, is experienced by Palestinians as an echo of their own past trauma of dispossession.

The result is that both sides end up caught yet again in a cycle of violence, just like Samson and his enemies. An eye for an eye leads both to end up eyeless in Gaza.

Yet this approach perhaps places upon us who look on, the responsibility to try to enter into the pain of the other side.

Now of course, we can argue about which trauma is the greater. We can debate the merits of each moral case, or where real blame lies. But trauma doesn't work like that. Trauma sits within the mind and the body, and spreads, overwhelming any ability to cope normally and react with a sense of proportion and balance. The effects of trauma are not deliberate or logical but involuntary. Reactions to trauma are notoriously complex and differ according to individuals. Trauma stays with individuals for years and with communities for generations.

Understanding this conflict not so much as through the lens of blame but of pain may help us approach in more helpful ways. Of course, this does not avoid the question of blame, because terrible things have been done here. It also doesn’t deny Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas’s attack with legitimate force. Most of us tend to lean towards one side or the other of the conflict. Yet this approach perhaps places upon us who look on, the responsibility to try to enter into the pain of the other side. And when the dust of battle settles, it perhaps promises a better way to cut the cycle of violence in the future.

Understanding this conflict as both tragedy and trauma helps us see it in a new light. And perhaps it gives us the glimmer of a hope of a way forward. The memory never goes away, but trauma victims can find ways to approach the memory of what happened to them in different ways.

The story of Samson ends with destruction and his burial in the family tomb. It ends in death. Within the whole narrative arc of the Bible, however, the chaotic period of the Judges is superseded by the monarchy – the kings of Israel, the best of whom is King David – a ruler with flaws, but described as ‘a man after God’s own heart’. Beyond that, the story of David points to a later ruler also born in Bethlehem, whose rule meant not hating and killing his enemies, but loving them to the point of dying for them, thus, finally, bringing peace. It is that kind of Jesus-shaped, self-sacrificial, radical, counterintuitive leadership on both sides that can show a way out of the cycle of violence and hatred that was there in the period of Samson, and is there today.

Only leaders who are not concerned with doing whatever it takes to stay in power, nor willing to sacrifice others for their own purposes, who don’t care about personal reputation, but are willing to take the risky path of reconciliation, as I have argued elsewhere on Seen and Unseen - only this kind of leadership can lead us beyond the tragedy and trauma of the past into a more hopeful future.

The last word might come from Audeh Rantisi, a Palestinian evicted from his home in Lydda in 1948. He went on to become an Anglican priest and an activist for reconciliation between Jews and Arabs and the need for both to recognise the scars and humanity of the other:

I still bear the emotional scars of the Zionist invasion. Yet, as an adult, I see what I did not fully understand then: that the Jews are also human beings, themselves driven by fear, victims of history's worst outrages, rabidly, sometimes almost mindlessly searching for security.

Four years after our flight from Lydda I dedicated my life to the service of Jesus Christ. Like me and my fellow refugees, Jesus had lived in adverse circumstances, often with only a stone for a pillow. As with his fellow Jews two thousand years ago and the Palestinians today, an outside power controlled his homeland - my homeland. They tortured and killed him in Jerusalem, only ten miles from Ramallah, and my new home. He was the victim of terrible indignities. Nevertheless, Jesus prayed on behalf of those who engineered his death, "Father, forgive them..."

Can I do less?

 

Article
Culture
Sport
Trauma
5 min read

Scottie Scheffler, Welsh Rugby and the fading of sporting glory

Scottie Scheffler has a lesson for this summer's fading sports teams

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A cricket batsman surrounded by opposition players leaves the crease.
A West Indies Batsman leaves the crease.
xcom/windiescricket.

This past week, while England were beating India at Lords in a nail-biting, high-quality Test match which was in the balance until the very last ball, on the other side of the world in Jamaica, something tragic was unfolding. The West Indies were bowled out for the paltry sum of 27 runs against the fearsome Australian bowling attack, the second lowest total of any team in around 150 years of Test cricket. 

Why tragic? People of my age remember the 1970s and 80s West Indies as one of the best cricket teams in the world. Superb bowlers such as Malcolm Marshall, Curtly Ambrose, Michael Holding and Joel Garner terrorised batsmen from Adelaide to Antigua, from Cape Town to Christchurch. They hurled down cricket balls at a frightening speed, whizzing past the heads of batsman who didn't even have the security of a helmet. At the other end, a succession of brilliant batsman like Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Clive Lloyd and Alvin Kallicharan scored hundred after hundred, as together they made-up one of the greatest teams in the history of Test cricket.  

Since then, a sorry mess of dried-up funding, poor governance, neglect of grassroots cricket, and the competition of other sports such as athletics or basketball, has seen the standard of West Indian cricket decline dramatically, especially at the most complex form of the game - international 5-day Tests. So, the 27 was not a huge surprise. Something catastrophic like that was bound to happen one day.  

In those same 1970s, Wales boasted one of the best rugby teams in the world. Gareth Edwards, Barry John, JPR Williams and Phil Bennett were at the heart of a dazzling and brilliant team. Rugby is Wales's national sport, yet in recent years a similar story of incompetent governance, lack of funding, and an inefficient regional structure has led to its dramatic decline, and a harrowing 18-match losing streak, which finally came to an end with a narrow victory over Japan, hardly one of the world's greatest teams. Last year's Six Nations ended with an embarrassing 68-14 home defeat against the team they hate to lose to - England. The current Lions team contains no Welshmen at all - the first time since 1896.

Then there is the demise of Manchester United. “We’ve seen it all. We’ve won the lot. We’re Man United and we’re never going to stop” sing United fans at most games. All very grand, but these days they don't win anything. The great triumphs were back in the 1960s, and then the 90s and 2000s under the great Sir Alex Ferguson. After a takeover by the incompetent Glazer family, who have increased sponsorship revenue but leeched billions out of the club, and seem incapable of running a global football institution, United have declined dramatically, ending up 15th in the league last season, and with a failure to recruit new players this summer, look destined to do even worse next season. 

The fall of such sporting giants often elicits a strong dose of Schadenfreude in opposition fans. I was moaning about the fortunes of Man United to a Chelsea-supporting friend recently. He had zero sympathy. 

And yet there is something tragic about lost sporting glory. Watching the current West Indies, Wales and Man United teams getting beaten by mediocre opposition brings a heavy sense of sadness - even if you're not Welsh or West Indian. Like King Lear, reduced to wandering around a ‘blasted heath’ like a madman, Icarus falling to the sea after over-reaching, or Sisyphus, once a king, yet incurring the wrath of the gods and now condemned to eternally rolling a stone up a hill only for it to fall down the other side (sounds just like Man United’s recent seasons), these teams’ current manifestations can’t escape the glory that was once theirs but is no longer.  

Fading sports teams are our contemporary memento mori

“How the mighty are fallen.” The phrase comes from the Old Testament - when the young warrior David mourned for the slain King Saul. Reflecting on lost human glory was in the past thought to be a valuable thing. Churches up and down the country have effigies of dead local grandees, lying in stone with hands clasped in prayer, as a reminder that human glory fades, death comes to us all, that our wealth will be handed on to others, and the things we are most proud of most likely forgotten. 

Scottie Scheffler, the best golfer in the world recently spoke about winning a gold tournament, having a brief sense of euphoria, which then vanishes within a few minutes as life returns to normal. He wondered aloud whether it was all worth it: “There are a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfil them in life, and you get there, you get to number one in the world, and they're like, 'what's the point?'” 

Scheffler has made no secret of his Christian faith. It presumably lies behind his comments that golf can’t give what he called “fulfilment in the deepest places of your heart". And maybe that is the ultimate lesson of these teams that were once great and are no more - a reminder that sport can be a source of great joy and achievement, but ultimately is unable to satisfy our deepest longings, because its glory is fleeting.  

Fading sports teams are our contemporary memento mori. As humans we somehow yearn for something permanent, unshakeable, eternal, what our forebears found in God, but we moderns struggle to find anywhere. Wordsworth’s classic questions: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” are echoed in the demise of sporting greatness, and the existential musings of Scottie Scheffler. 

One day, every sportsman or woman, every team - in fact, every one of us - will experience what the West Indies, Wales and Man United experience right now. The flower fades and the grass withers. And perhaps in that moment of lost fame, we will find the wisdom to seek more lasting things than sporting glory. 

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