Weekend essay

Culture

Gaza

Israel

Middle East

Politics

War & peace

2 December 2023

9 min read

The Israel-Hamas war: how does it all end?

Some of the supposed solutions to the Israel – Hamas conflict, may not be the end of it. Graham Tomlin explores what’s on offer and the need for a newly imagined form of politics.

Graham Tomlin

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

A re-united couple hug each other deeply.

Hostage exchange: Avigdori family members reunited.

Prime Minister's Office, Israeli Government.

With the drama over temporary ceasefires and limited hostage exchanges, we are fixated at the moment on the day-to-day drama of the Israel - Hamas conflict. Yet, to draw back for a moment, what about the longer-term prospects for peace? Many people in the west, dimly aware of the politics of the region might wonder how on earth some kind of settlement might ever be reached. How does it all end?

Prediction, so we are told, is a mug’s game when it comes to international politics. Or is it? Because the history of Israel/Palestine has taken a depressingly predictable pattern over the past 50 years or so – periods of relative peace, interspersed with occasional Palestinian uprisings of various degrees of violence, followed by Israeli military reactions, of which the current conflict is the most serious for many years.

So, what are the options for the future? This article aims to spell out the main possibilities going forward, their advantages and their problems.

We start with the two extreme scenarios.

The Hamas solution

The original charter of Hamas, published in 1988, called “The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement” is uncompromising. Article 1 reads:

“The Movement's programme is Islam. From it, it draws its ideas, ways of thinking and understanding of the universe, life and man. It resorts to it for judgement in all its conduct, and it is inspired by it for guidance of its steps.”

Hamas is an explicitly Islamic renewal movement and aims at the creation of an Islamic state across the land of what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The covenant was updated in 2017 with (mostly) more moderate language, but still the aim is clear:

“Palestine is a land that was seized by a racist, anti-human and colonial Zionist project that was founded on a false promise (the Balfour Declaration), on recognition of a usurping entity and on imposing a fait accompli by force.”

Now, it states:

“Hamas’ is a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means."

It claims to oppose, not Jews as such, but what it calls ‘The Zionist entity’, in other words the state of Israel.

The Hamas solution is an Islamic state within which Christians and Jews would be allowed to live, but definitely under Muslim rule. It has no truck with a shared land: “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete ‘liberation’ of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” As the 1988 version puts it:

“The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.”

It’s hard to see this in any other terms than a project which would mean ethnic cleansing of the majority of Jews from the land of Israel.

The settler solution

Israel's political voting system is Proportional Representation. Historically the two main parties, Labour and Likud have struggled to gain enough votes to have an absolute majority. PR means that numerous marginal political parties have small groups of members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. It also means that they wield disproportionate power as they can make or break governments by joining one or the other of the two main parties. At the most recent elections, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, generally the more right-wing of the parties, established a coalition which brought some of these more extreme right-wing parties into government.

For example, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, a member of the Otzma Yehudit party, recently suggested that one way to resolve the war would be to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza. For him, the people of Gaza “could go to Ireland or deserts [and] should find a solution by themselves.” He was immediately suspended for his comments by Netanyahu, but it illustrates the problem the Israeli Prime Minister has. Eliyahu is at the extreme end of the spectrum, but many of these small parties are strong advocates of the building of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, taking more and more of that land under Jewish control and effectively freezing out the Palestinian population. Their solution is somewhat of a mirror image to the Hamas solution. It is effectively to push as many Palestinians out of the land as possible, ideally relocating them in other Arab countries or throughout the west – another form of ethnic cleansing.

The two-state solution

This has been the favoured end-game of many on both sides of the dispute and the wider international community until relatively recently. Going back to the UN partition plan of 1947 which proposed two contiguous states, one Jewish, one Arab, various versions of this solution have been proposed over the years including the Oslo accords of 1993. This has also been the cornerstone of US foreign policy and its preferred pathway. Its attractions are obvious - two independent states living happily alongside with another without the ongoing tension of the Israeli occupation or Palestinian hostility. There are however a number of problems with it.

First, political solutions that involve partition are rarely stable. Northern Ireland embraced a version of partition in 1921 with the island of Ireland split between largely Protestant Northern Ireland and a largely Catholic Republic in the south. However, this did not resolve tensions between the two communities and led to the troubles of the 1970s and 1980s which left thousands of people dead. Secondly, it is not clear what kind of state the Palestinian entity would be. As outlined above, Hamas envisages this as very definitely an Islamic state under which Christians and Jews would have to submit to a form of Islamic law, whereas Christians (for example) have in the past been a major presence in Palestinian society. Third, and most importantly, the West Bank would clearly be an obvious location for a Palestinian state, yet Israeli government policy over the past few decades has seen a huge increase the building of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, especially within the West Bank. With its numerous scattered Jewish settlements, it is really no longer viable to envisage an independent Palestinian state as so much of the West Bank is now occupied by settlers who have no intention to leave.

The one state solution

This is the solution increasingly favoured by many Palestinians, whether in the West Bank, or Israeli Arabs who live within Israel itself. It is the idea of a fully democratic state where Jews, Christians and Muslims could live alongside with another with equal rights and responsibilities, where Israelis and Arabs were equally recognised as full members of society with no need for rockets fired, suicide bombers, checkpoints, house demolitions, security walls, freedom of movement and so on. The attractions of this to those living in western liberal democracies will be obvious.

The problem, however, is that Israel has always been seen from the beginning of the Zionist movement as a safe haven for Jews in particular, and in 2018, a law was passed to make Israel an exclusively Jewish state. It is not hard to see the anxiety that a one-state solution would create amongst Israeli Jews, with the memory of the Holocaust behind them. What if the Palestinian population were to grow such that Jews were in a minority? Would Israel then be a safe place for Jewish people? Also with the history of tension and trauma in the past, it's hard to see Jews and Palestinians, especially those who have been through the traumas of the past living peacefully alongside each other anytime soon.

The status quo

Israeli government policy in recent years has effectively been to keep the lid on a relatively unstable situation by the gradual increase of settlements to make a Palestinian state impossible. It may be hard to imagine under current circumstances, but the Israelis have until recently thought that Hamas’ control of Gaza was a good thing for their purposes, as it split the Palestinian population between the Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Fatah-controlled West Bank, the two parties being at loggerheads with each other. Combined with the policy of what is sometimes called ‘mowing the lawn’, striking back with some force at Palestinian uprisings when they occur, keeping resistance in check, this is represented to many within Israel as the only and best way of ensuring some kind of security in the long term. The problem is that it perpetuates the conditions that sustain Palestinian resentment, leading to the regular intifadas, uprisings and rebellions that we have seen over the past decades.

What is clear is that the international community has not always helped to find solutions, either supporting extreme parties on both sides to protect their own interests, or funding for military purposes that ensure these constant uprisings and responses, rather than advocating for the genuine long-term benefit of the people who live in the land itself.

What do we make of all this? And what does Christian faith have to offer such a bleak prognosis? For one thing, it doesn't offer a neat solution. The important business of politics is to work out the intricacies of ways of living together in peace and harmony. What seems clear, and as Christian faith insists, with its unlikely and radical call to love the enemy, is that there is no way to kill your way to peace and security. What Hamas did on October 7th and, however it may be justified in the short term, what the Israeli government is doing at the moment - neither will lead to peace and security. The Israeli bombardment of Gaza is a tragedy not just for the Palestinian people but also for the Israelis as well. Unless it succeeds in driving the Palestinians from the land entirely, in the kind of ethnic cleansing that few seriously contemplate, it will simply lead to another generation of young Palestinians who hate Israel and all it stands for, and who are dedicated to attack it again in a decade's time. Recent polls among Palestinians suggest that Israel’s action in Gaza, however understandable, is already having that effect. It is very hard to see any way in which it can lead to the security and peace that most Israelis want and so badly need.

What would Jesus do?

The first century in Judaea faced similar issues. The ownership of the land was disputed – did it belong to the Jews or the Gentile Romans? And how do you relate to those on the other side? Is the only way to either avoid them or try to kill them?

The result of the coming of Jesus was the creation of an entirely new kind of community: the Church. Here was a gathering (which is what the word 'Church' or ‘ecclesia’ really meant) where the main distinctions that ran through normal social life no longer mattered – here there was to be “neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free”. It was not that these distinctions were done away with entirely - but they made no difference within this new community. The unity between people was based not on any ethnic, class or national commonality, but on each of them belonging separately to God in Christ. Their relationships were not two-way, but three way – each relating to the other because they both relate to the God revealed in Jesus.

This was a new kind of politics. The church has, to be fair, struggled ever since to live up to this vision. It is as if a beautiful song was given to the church to sing, yet it so often sings it out of tune. Yet the church, for all its faults, is the vision that Christianity offers the world. A way needs to be found for this land with such a complex heritage, where both Jew and Arab have strong claims for it as a historic homeland, to be shared in some way. Whether that is a form of the one-state solution or a two-state solution - or an entirely new scenario as yet unimagined - that cannot be decided from outside but has to be decided by those who live there. What it will need is a newly imagined form of politics, both within Israel and outside - a new way of living together with difference in the polis, one towards which the Church, with all its faults, and in its own stumbling way, points.

Explainer

Belief

Community

Creed

Politics

10 June 2025

7 min read

The peripheries of belief: how faith shaped the north’s identity

Northern spirituality’s rebellious capacity to adapt is still in play today

Tom Rippon

Tom Rippon is Assistant Editor at Roots for Churches, an ecumenical charity.

Durham Cathedral and town.

David Connor on Unsplash.

2025 has so far been the year of the north. At its start, we were treated to the plasticine escapades of Wallace and Gromit, whose unabashed northern-ness was enough to faze American TV executives. Then in April, the story turned to northern industrial decline when Scunthorpe steelworks hit the headlines, prompting last-minute state intervention. In May, the local elections saw the astonishing rise of Reform across areas previously dominated by Labour. Taken together, these three moments encapsulate the range of associations often evoked by life on the periphery of England: regional pride, good-natured humour, close communities, economic precarity and hard graft.

The north is a landscape of contraries and co-existence, where sweeping fells and dark skies meet red-brick chimneys and rolling waves of terraced houses. As David Barnett puts it, it is “a place made up of individuals, bound by an ethereal quality that is at once a myth and, conversely, as real as grit and graft.’

Hard to pin down, yet real once seen, the same could also be said for the faith that has filled the region with a multitude of expressions to this day.

Of course, when we talk about ‘the north’, we mean everything and everyone from the conurbations of Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the Lake District and Northumberland, where centuries of border warfare have left a plethora of castles and fortified houses (‘pele towers’). Two landscapes dominated by buildings which have long lost their original purposes. Perhaps the principal shared characteristic of these communities is a sense of distance from mainstream political and cultural life (just try catching a train that isn’t heading to London). But with distance comes an independence of identity and a proud sense of cultural distinctiveness. If anything, the only thing that can be definitively said about northern identity is that it is the quality of being ‘not southern’.

Northern Christianity has not escaped this wavering relationship with the south. In 664 AD, the Northumbrian Church gathered at Whitby for a meeting presided over by King Oswy of Northumbria and the Abbess Hilda of Whitby. It was quite literally a pivotal moment for the early Church and the north more widely. The matter at hand was whether Northumbrian Christianity, then centred on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, should remain orientated towards Celtic Christianity, which had as its principal focal point the abbey of Iona, or whether to turn towards Rome and its growing mission in the south, headquartered in Canterbury. North or south? Canterbury or Iona?

In the end, the group opted for closer links with the Roman Church. Yet the Christian faith in the north remained distinctive, blending the older influences of St Columba and St Aidan with the new ones coming up from the south. Lindisfarne Priory remained a centre for Christian life in the north and its prestige led it to accumulate the wealth that eventually precipitated its own destruction by Viking raids in 793 AD. In spite of this, the northern saints drew reverent pilgrims for centuries to come, as the grandeur and scale of Durham Cathedral, the burial place of St Cuthbert, testifies to this day.

Behind the independent northern spirit lies a long history of political, economic and spiritual divergence from the south. Northern spirituality is characterised by a sustained distinctive flowering of the Christian faith that intertwines itself with the social identity of the peoples and places of the north. The region’s response to the religious reforms of Henry VIII was the Pilgrimage of Grace, which protested both his break from the Roman Catholic Church and socio-economic policies implemented by the king and his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.

By the seventeenth century, faith in the north had taken on a distinctly reformist hue as non-conformism – that is, churches and sects not aligned with the Church of England, the Church of the state and the establishment – flourished in the region. The beginnings of the Quaker movement can be traced to an open-air sermon given by the reformer George Fox in 1652 on Firbank Fell, near Sedburgh in modern Cumbria - the crag he spoke from is still known as Fox’s pulpit - while other reformist movements, including Methodism, Congregationalism and Presbyterians, also drew increasing crowds with their passionate preaching in fields, moors and disparate farming communities.

The very landscape of northern England, often challenging and remote, drew its inhabitants away from both socio-political centres and the established Church, nurturing forms of belief in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which were as independent as those of seventh- and eighth-century Northumbria. Much of religious life in the region was organised around a large parish church that served numerous small communities spread across a large area. Living at such distances, no wonder people felt a disconnect from the parish church and the national Church it represented. Non-conformist chapels and meeting houses quickly spread across the landscape, particularly in remote villages outside of the control of major landowners and Church authorities. As David Petts argues, the building of chapels expressed the collective economic and organisational independence of rural labourers and miners, and united dispersed communities through collective endeavour.

The region has proved itself capable of delivering considerable shocks to the London political establishment.

Once the chapel was built, they would prove valuable training grounds for rethinking the political organisation of the poor; the significance of non-conformism thus lay not only in its spiritual divergence from the establishment, but also in its fostering of alternative political systems. Methodism in particular was to provide an ideological and practical template for mass movements such as Chartism, which campaigned for social reform and an expansion of democratic suffrage in the mid-nineteenth century. Chartist campaigners called themselves ‘missionaries’ and crisscrossed the country preaching ‘the gospel of Chartism’ and forming Chartist congregations. Their political vision found a receptive audience in the working population of the industrialised north, who were raised on the non-conformist emphasis on Christ as the carpenter’s son and a poor man, one who worked for his living as they did. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the non-conformist social Gospel produced notable reformers such as the journalist W. T. Stead, born in rural Northumberland as the son of a Congregationalist minister, and the Quaker confectioner Joseph Rowntree of York.

Amidst the darkness, grime and crushing conditions of nineteenth-century mills and mines, the Christian message of mutual aid and fellowship, first articulated by the early Church, again found expression. In Manchester, the Methodist Central Hall served a dual purpose, providing a space for worship on Sundays and a community space during the week, when it offered libraries, food, clothing, shelter, childcare and even entertainment to the people of the city.

Social reform and the Christian faith buttressed one another across the region and together resisted the fractures, pressures and degradations that industrialisation exerted on the communities they served. The social values of these interdependent movements left a lasting impact on the modern political landscape of the region, until recently known as Labour’s ‘Red Wall’. As any political correspondent will tell you, northern politics can no longer be taken for granted and the region has proved itself capable of delivering considerable shocks to the London political establishment. Walking through these communities, left behind by deindustrialisation, globalisation and our periodic post-crisis recoveries, the air seems pervaded by a sense of unravelling as the old bonds and certainties slowly slip-away. The Church is not immune to these processes and the north follows the overall national trend of declining church attendance. The empty chapels testify as much to the seismic shifts taking place in the region as the empty warehouses and factories.

But if the history of Christianity in the north tells us anything, then it is that northern spirituality has never stood still. It has an ingenious capacity to adapt, to regenerate itself to meet the challenges faced by each generation. The challenges are varied and specific to each community, but the Church is there. In Burnley, the fight of the early disciples against urban poverty is echoed in the work of the Church on the Street, whilst on Holy Island itself, the Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin is a driving force behind the Holy Island 2050 project, which aims to assure the sustainability of the Island community in the face of depopulation and rural precarity.

If the dominant atmosphere in the north is one of feeling left behind, then the Christian call to reach out to those around us is needed more than ever. More than one thousand years separate St Aidan from us, but the Christian faith can still help the us to navigate the challenges and precarities of a changing world.

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