Article

Comment

Easter

Middle East

Resurrection

War & peace

29 March 2024

7 min read

The Friday world of the Middle East at Easter

Violence begets violence in a zero sum world.

Todd Deatherage

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.

Column

Comment

Community

Economics

Holidays/vacations

31 July 2025

4 min read

Portofino’s real prisoners are not the beggars it is banning

The economic elite can’t exclude the poor from their privileged bubbles

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A colourful row of buildings in an Italian port.

Portofino's harbourside dining.

Slim Emcee on Unsplash.

I know Portofino a bit, because it’s nearby my Italian in-law family and we’ve been there a couple of times when visitors have wanted to see it. It’s a former fishing village on the Ligurian coast, a natural bay and beyond lovely. And its mayor, Matteo Viacava, has just banned beggars from its cobbled streets, as they irritate wealthy tourists and celebrity visitors, which is less lovely.

Italy struggles with its relationship with tourism. Rome was sinking under a pile of rubbish a few years ago. The more literally sinking Venice tries to repel visitors with taxes, while providing a backdrop welcome for mega-wealthy weddings. The walled Tuscan town of Lucca recently cracked down on the buttodentri, the restaurant touts who hustle diners. As with any European tourist destination, Airbnb apartments drive rental prices up and the indigenous population out.

There is something particular about the Portofino beggar purge though. Perhaps it’s a bit like Versailles before 1789 – in the case of Portofino, the poor have no clothes so let them wear Prada. It’s all designer boutiques and there isn’t a real shop, a paneterria or forno, to be found. No one carries any weight, naturally, but you do wonder how they eat at all, if not in one of the extortionately priced trattoria.

To visit, as thousands will this summer, is to realise how much there is that you don’t require. It has everything a rich visitor wants, but nothing that they actually need. We’ve heard people call it Disneyland Italy, but I think it’s more like Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner TV series, shot in another, similarly named, dystopian village, Portmeirion in North Wales, where everything is laid on except freedom. Even that’s not quite right – as The Eagles nearly wrote, in Portofino you can leave any time you want, you just can’t afford to check out, unless you’re loaded.

It strikes me now that the mysterious bubble that pursued the aspirant escapee McGoohan along the beach may have been a cunning metaphor. People who live in Portofino (and very few do), or who seek sanctuary there, or in Palm Beach, or on Long Island, or in St Moritz, or on Mustique, or in South Kensington, exist in a bubble.

Joining friend and foodie Loyd Grossman at the Chelsea Arts Club a while ago, he told me he’d just walked down from his home in South Kensington and seen not a single person who actually lived there, but only people who cleaned their houses. Residents arrive from and leave for the airport, often from subterranean garages, in privacy-glassed limos.

Like Portofino, these are bubbles from which anyone but their own demographic are excluded. It doesn’t have to have gates to be a gated community. The bubble is a psychological state, which is bought to protect us from those of lesser means and especially, God save us, from the poor.

Simply to have them removed is to have head and hearts dwelling in gated communities.

And, increasingly for the economic elite, the poor are anyone who cannot afford to, or are not forced to, separate themselves for security, because they have no access to a privileged bubble. That the poor are always with us is a gospel injunction, which I used to take at face value as a statement of apathy or resignation, even acceptance, in an inadequate world, that the poor are simply poor and there is nothing to be done about it.

Latterly, I’ve seen it far more in the post-modern sense of being present with the poor in their moment of poverty, in solidarity and in their corner. That means they share our space, as neighbours. We’re not just talking about the economically poor here, but the dispossessed and discarded; the vulnerable and volatile; the marginalised and maligned.

We, the rich, can’t afford to exercise zero tolerance, to pretend they don’t exist, because – to coin a phrase of George Osborne’s when, hilariously, he claimed as Chancellor of the Exchequer to be making common cause in austerity – we’re all in this together. And by “this” I mean the one, shared bubble, which is universal.

We’ve been considering tourists and beggars, but we can scale it up to famine in Gaza or Sudan; asylum seekers in small boats; prisoners in Guantanamo Bay or on death rows; those who face earthquakes and tsunamis. They can’t be made to disappear by magic or mayoral edict, only by addressing the circumstances of their poverty – of food, money or spirit – with practical, social and political policy, plus a dollop of compassion for the cause of their plight.

Simply to have them removed is to have head and hearts dwelling in gated communities. It’s not sufficient, for sure, to notice the beggars this summer, to drop a few euros, but it’s a start along the street towards knowing that the poor are indeed always here, with us. Even in Portofino.

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