Article
Comment
Easter
Middle East
Resurrection
War & peace
7 min read

The Friday world of the Middle East at Easter

Violence begets violence in a zero sum world.

Todd  is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Telos Group. It forms communities of American peacemakers across lines of difference and conflict, including Israel/Palestine. 

A family look at the concrete shell and remains of a bombed building.
Christian Aid.

What do the events of Holy Week and Easter---these seminal events in Christianity-- have to say in a time of slaughter and now starvation in the Middle East? The closer we get to Easter Sunday, the most sacred day in Christianity, the more I’ve wrestled with that question.  

I’m neither Palestinian nor Israeli, and so my connection to the historic tragedy continuing to unfold is not as visceral or as obvious as some.  But as an American and a Christian, I’m deeply bound up in all of this.  The realization of my own implication led me back in 2009 to co-found a nonprofit whose mission is to help Americans better understand the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the American role in it, and to learn about the difficult work of honest peacemaking.  These past five months are a nightmare I can’t wake up from, and of course they’re more than a nightmare for the people in the south of Israel and the West Bank, and they’re an absolute hell on earth for the people in Gaza today.   

For more than 20 years I’ve lived in a set of deep relationships with both Palestinians and Israelis.  The horror and barbarity of the Hamas attacks on October 7th and the horror and devastation of the slaughter and starvation taking place unabated in Gaza even this Holy Week have left me begging God to intervene and begging our leaders to do whatever we can to stop the madness.  

Sometimes there’s a lot more of the darkness of Thursday and Friday than the joy and light of Easter Sunday morning.

In most of the 65 trips I’ve led to the Holy Land over the years, after we’ve had our heart broken by the stories we’ve heard and the experiences we’ve shared with people on all sides, we visit the place on the Mount of Olives looking at the Old City of Jerusalem where Jesus stopped, looked at the city, and wept. It is here, just as he entered what we call his Passion Week, that he said “Jerusalem, Jerusalem if only you’d known the things that make for peace.”  If only you’d known.  If only we’d known.  If only we knew.   

I need this story to be in the Bible. Many times I’ve had to fall back on Jesus weeping for the mess we’ve made of our lives, the way we allow our fears and our hatreds or our indifference to guide how we treat our neighbors, how often we use violence and power to deny the way they too bear the image of God.  

This is one of those times. The worst of those times in all the years I’ve been involved in Israel and Palestine.  I’ve found myself weeping privately, in conversations, and sometimes in public places.  And I’ve spent so much time asking God to intervene. To comfort the terrorized and afraid, to feed the starving, to silence the guns of war, to rescue and deliver those who are dying.  

And the answer I keep getting has felt like silence.  Deafening silence.  

At times like this, the Christian life feels like a Thursday night in a garden when your friends can't’ stay awake to help you and even God is not answering your prayer. Or it feels like a Friday afternoon in Jerusalem when all hope has died and you can’t imagine how the world will ever be better. Sometimes there’s a lot more of the darkness of Thursday and Friday than the joy and light of Easter Sunday morning.  

The work of justice and mercy make for peace. Revenge and violence do not. 

But Lent and Holy Week have given me another answer, beyond God’s silence--the reminder that the people in Israel and In Gaza, even those this very night who are displaced and starving, are not alone.  God is with them. And he weeps for them. And he weeps for us. If only we knew the things that make for peace.  If only we knew how to love God and to love our neighbor and to love our enemies. If only we knew the limits of violence to achieve good ends. If only we knew the connection between peace and justice.  

And the fullness of this Holy Week also brings me to this reminder that if God does not seem active maybe it’s because we are not listening to his call.  My friend Bill Haley says this:  

“The actual invitation of the Christian faith is not just to believe in Jesus or be like Jesus or tell others about Jesus (as right as these thing are), but actually to be the presence of Jesus in the world, our hands his hands, our feet his feet, our heart his heart, our bodies his very body...  By this does the reality of the risen, living Jesus continue to be displayed, visibly and tangibly, in and around the world (and yours and mine), day after day.” 

To do this we first seek to know the things that make for peace (and equally important is to know the things that don’t make for peace). The work of justice and mercy make for peace. Revenge and violence do not. The embrace of our mutuality and interconnectedness make for peace. Tribalism and dehumanization of our neighbors do not.  Justice and respect make for peace. Systems of domination and ideologies of hatred do not. Respect for the sacredness of life and the inherent dignity of all as made in the image of God make for peace. Brutality, murder, and starvation do not.  Acts of love and service make for peace. Fear and self-centeredness do not.  

The Friday world is zero sum.  Justice and peace are separate things.  Some lives are more important than others.

In a Good Friday world, to live as if these “things that make for peace” are actually true is a costly endeavor.  Jesus paid with his life.  Others like Martin Luther King have also. For most of us, it may just be the way our reputation suffers, or how certain relationships are strained.  There may be some economic cost or sacrifice of our time and attention required. But if it says anything, Holy Week teaches us that incarnational living is costly.  Reconciliation comes at a price. The crucifixion wasn’t just something that happened to Jesus on the way to resurrection.  It is central to it.  

And yet, believers in Jesus know that Holy Week and the shame, humiliation, brutality and injustice of the crucifixion were not the last word.  To borrow from the legendary Black preacher S.M. Lockridge, we live in a Friday world, but we know that Sunday’s coming.  

In a world of Fridays, violence begets violence.  The Friday world is zero sum.  Justice and peace are separate things.  Some lives are more important than others. There is minimal cost to looking away from people who are hungry and imprisoned.  Religion is used to baptize injustice.  We live in a Friday world.  But we are Sunday people.  And we are called to live as best we can as reminders that in a Sunday world we are responsible for what we know, responsible to each other, and responsible before God. To quote Dr. King again, in a Sunday world, "darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."   

Sunday people are Easter people.  And Easter people have a mandate to live as peacemakers in a world riven by conflict. To be purveyors of light and hope in a time of devastation and despair.  Frederick Douglass said “I prayed for freedom for 20 years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”  As we pray for peace, and we have to be people who pray for peace, let us also be agents of God’s peace.  Let us be those incarnational Easter people who pray for peace with our legs.  Let us do the urgent work for a lasting ceasefire, for a release of all hostages, and for food for hungry people.  And when the guns are silenced and the hungry are at last being fed and the wounded and traumatized are given space to heal, then the greater work begins.  Let us learn the lessons of how we got here and let us commit ourselves to a different path forward, one grounded in the sacred dignity of all the people of the land, Palestinians and Israelis alike.  Let us support all those who seek justice and peace and security through the path of mutual flourishing.  These are the things that make for peace. 

 

Article
Comment
Feminism
Migration
Trauma
6 min read

“Defending our girls” is less about safety, more about scapegoating

The men who finally care about violence against women — just in time to blame immigrants for it

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A protestor holds a blue smoke canister towards the camera lens.
An asylum hotel protester, Epping.

Something has profoundly shifted in the way we are speaking about male violence against women and girls. Or perhaps I should say, the shift is precisely that we are speaking about male violence against women and girls.  

Wait.

Would you allow me to slightly amend that statement once more?

I say ‘we’ are talking about it, what I really mean, if I may be so blunt, is ‘men’. Men are talking about male violence against women and girls.  

Therein lies the shift. 

Women have been speaking about this epidemic of violence for years, they have been having endless conversations about the complexities of their own sense of sexual safety, relentlessly sounding the alarm. And, all too often, being ignored. It has so commonly felt as though women could scream about this topic at the top of their lungs and be met with an exasperated eyeroll. Perhaps that’s ungenerous of me, maybe the lack of political interest has been more about despondence than disbelief. Either way, it has continually appeared as though male violence against women and girls has sat, slumped and hopeless, at the bottom of the political agenda.

Until now, that is. Now, it is the crux of many campaigns, sitting right at the forefront of multiple political conversations. One conversation, in particular.  

Earlier this year, Conservative MP, Robert Jenrick, wrote an article in which he stated that he fears for his daughters’ safety, not wanting them to live near ‘men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally and about whom you know next to nothing’. Political party Reform UK has a concern for women’s safety sitting at the forefront of their campaigns; again, Nigel Farage (leader of Reform UK) has continually suggested that it is the immigrant communities in the UK who are posing the threat. Signs that read ‘defend our girls’ have been ever-present at many of the anti-immigration protests that have happened throughout the summer months, the same phrase was chanted by those taking part in the ‘Unite The Kingdom’ march, organised by far-right activist, Tommy Robinson.  

So, we have a direct line being drawn between immigration and the epidemic levels of violence against women and girls. A common enemy is a powerful thing, isn’t it? A uniting thing? An energising thing, even? This line from A to B (‘A’ being the violence and ‘B’ being people who have come to this country from another) is one that I cannot draw myself. I find no biblical nor sociological justification for doing such. In fact, I’m hit with quite the opposite. 

I’ll get biblical, but shall we start with the sociological?  

Violence against women – be that physical, verbal, sexual, financial, or any other nuanced kind – is a tragic reality here in the UK, as well as globally. We know this and there can be no denying it.  

One in three women will experience domestic abuse.  

A woman is murdered by a partner/ex-partner every four days.  

One in two rapes against women are carried out by a partner/ex-partner.  

More than 90 per cent of perpetrators of rape and/or sexual assault are known to their victims.  

One in three adult survivors of rape experience it in their own home.  

These facts are heartbreaking, stomach-churning, worthy of our indignation and fury. They do not, however, imply that the dominant threat to women are strangers who have come to UK from other countries. Such claims, while being spoken of loudly and continually, are unfounded.  

There’s almost an ‘if-only-ness’ about such claims, isn’t there? And so, if I lower my hackles, I can sympathise with wanting such claims to be true, albeit momentarily - if only we could solve male violence against women and girls so easily.  

If only it were so neat.  

Instead, we have to sit in the utterly overwhelming, and often debilitating, reality that violence is being carried out against women in every age group, every socioeconomic group (although it must be acknowledged that women who can’t access public funds, such as welfare support or housing assistance, are three times more likely to experience violence), every ethnic group, and in every corner of the country. As a woman, if a man is shouting at me while I’m alone – it makes no difference what language he’s shouting at me in, tragically, I’ve learnt to be scared regardless.  

The notion that it is an imported problem that can therefore be a deported problem, is wrong. And, dare I say it, undergirded by racism.  

It’s perhaps also worth mentioning that there is footage from the recently held ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march, during which the mandate to ‘defend our girls’ was continually chanted, of men chasing female counter-protesters down the street. While a call to defend women was chanted one minute, a call for women to expose themselves was chanted the next. Furthermore, it has been reported that 40 per cent of those arrested during the 2024 anti-immigration protests had previously been reported to the police for domestic abuse. In my home city of Bristol, it was two-thirds of those arrested.  

So, while women’s safety seems to be at the forefront of political and social movements right now, I can’t help but be deeply suspicious of the intentions behind it. It seems to me that the same people who have spent the last five-or-so years responding to women’s pleas for help with an irritated ‘not all men’ chant, are now more than happy to point at a marginalised group of people and declare ‘but probably all those men’.  

But this isn’t simply sociological, nor is it purely political. For me, there are theological reasons why I can’t help but wince at what is happening.  

I simply don’t think the Bible gives us the option of pitting one marginalised group against another; it’s clear on the fact de-humanisation can never be a tool in our societal toolbox. In fact, if we’re going to get biblical with it, vulnerable women and ‘migrants’/’foreigners’/’strangers’/’sojourners’ – they’re always on the same list.  

‘He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing’ – that’s the book of Deuteronomy. And this – ‘Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.’ – is the book of Zechariah.  

I could go on.  

We have a shared humanity and, therefore, a sacred responsibility to protect both the women and girls who are facing unspeakable injustice, and those who are being unfairly scapegoated for it. It’s an uncomfortable tension, I can’t deny it. It refutes quick-fixes, it raises its eyebrows at cheap blame, and it absolves any comforting notion that the problem flows from elsewhere - Christianity simply does not offer such a luxury. Compassion cannot be finite, love – as Graham Tomlin has argued – cannot be a limited commodity. 

And this is precisely why such things being increasingly carried out in the name of Christianity makes no sense to me. Surely, this cannot be espoused in the name of the Jesus who destabilises the boundaries between ‘Our Sort of People' and 'Those Others Over There?’ (to quote Francis Spufford)  

We cannot be fooled, fear and distrust on the basis of someone being different from ourselves is not – I repeat, not - a Christian value. One vulnerable group’s pain being unjustly weaponised against another vulnerable group has no hint of Jesus about it. Plus, doing so knowingly compromises the care we can offer to both groups. 

I’m getting a little weary of being told that, as a woman, this hate will ensure my safety. Both sociologically and biblically, I’ve found the grounds to call time on such a claim. 

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