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.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Identity

Masculinity

29 October 2025

10 min read

Wanted, not wasted: the older brother who couldn’t lead

In Peaky Blinders and House of Guinness, Steven Knight shows being needed—not being perfect—transforms

Will Fagan

Will Fagan serves as a minister in the Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Dressed in Victorian clothes, two brothers raise their arms together.

Anthony Boyle and Louis Partridge in House of Guinness.

Netflix.

If you’ve watched House of Guinness recently, you’ll find show creator Steven Knight return to familiar territory: masterfully exploring complex dynamics between brothers, family legacy, and ambition – captivating themes he previously explored in his ever-popular Peaky Blinders. In the respective dramas, we find both older brothers struggling to fit into roles and living with the weight that often accompanies that struggle.

In societal terms, we are not unfamiliar with the oldest son’s placement as the first in line of dynastic succession and head of the family. The Prince of Wales will succeed his father as King; Prince George will succeed his father and so on.

This dynamic plays out, of course, in common lives as well. Throughout history, the oldest son, as a rule, inherited the family home, the landholdings, and the family business (even if its legal standing was murky at best): Santino became the Don (The Godfather, 1972), Josh Kroenke and Tony Kahn essentially run their respective fathers’ Premiership football clubs, and at some point in your family line, I bet a great uncle took over his father’s blacksmith shop, leaving his younger brother – your direct line – left to fend for himself. (You’re here, after all, so things must have worked out, anyway.)

What happens, though, when the oldest son is not fit to assume this role in succession? How does he respond if he is passed over? And what happens when he’s actually needed by the younger brother, the successor?

As Peaky Blinders opens in its first series, we are presented with a perspective that Arthur Shelby, the older brother, is the boss of the family bookmaking syndicate and racketeering operation only to soon discover that his smarter, more ambitious, and more capable younger brother, Tommy, leads the family.

Being passed over naturally plagues Arthur, and his behavior consistently confirms why he isn’t fit to lead: he is quick tempered, demonstrates poor judgement, and goes on drug-induced benders. He is loyal when he is sober, and you can’t help but love him, but you wouldn’t hire him to run your company, either. By the opening of the show’s concluding series, he is shown passing his days in an opium shop, strung out and all-but-abandoned by his family.

Knight revisits this theme within the Guinness family in his newest show, set in the 1860s and three generations after the founding of the brewery, the family well-established as the first family of Ireland and wealthy beyond measure.

From the start, family tension and doubts about the brewery’s continued success are palpable. At the time of his father’s death, the oldest Guinness brother, also named Arthur, is frivolous, irresponsible, and debonair, having returned to Dublin for his father’s funeral after years of carousing in London. He is unkind, arrogant, and frankly does not care what happens with the company, so long as its sale finances the rest of his life. (You don’t root for him like you root for Arthur Shelby.)

At the time of the reading of his father’s will, anticipating he would inherit the brewery and the bulk of the family property only to sell it, Arthur Guinness finds his father had other plans, haunting him from the grave. He learns that he and his younger brother Edward – responsible and having apprenticed at the brewery – would inherit an equal stake of the brewery and family wealth, but that Arthur would be entitled to nothing if he did not participate in the running of the business, something he neither wants nor cares to do. He wants to be the older brother to inherit but has less-than-no desire to lead the family.

Saddled with expectations that he neither wants nor could succeed under, he continues his path of ruination – marrying for convenience, partying in unfit circles, and participating in election fraud, all bringing the family into public scandal and private torment. Moreover, and perhaps of greatest importance, he knows that he is the oldest son who cannot succeed, who was never built to, and that his father did not trust him. Thus, he pursues the only thing he is good at – willful self-destruction.

Well, this is great saga material – one that we will undoubtedly follow in the Guinness family in the coming years – but for us poorer mortals, why care?

I believe, and I don’t think this is an overstatement, that there is an older brother in all of us. We may not be the actual older brother ourselves waiting to be handed a family fortune only to not receive it, but odds are that at some point there was an expectation thrust upon us – or even one we placed on ourselves – to be a certain type of person or to achieve a concrete level of success, and that didn’t work out.

Have you, for instance, taken a chance in bringing the antiquated family business into the twenty-first century only to watch it go belly up? Have you found yourself in a relationship for too long “for all the right reasons” because everyone wanted it but you didn’t? Did you want to study architecture at university but read law instead because your father and grandfather were called to the bar and now you find yourself drawing neo-classical designs in the courtroom?

What happened, then, when that expectation or dream did not come to fruition? Have you, even to a small extent, arrived at the future and found you’re not who you thought you’d be? To not achieve that thing we were destined for, to not rise to the standard, as it turns out, can often leave us in the same state of the black sheep older brother – directionless, lacking a clear station in life and without a sense of worth.

What is interesting and what is helpful, if I can go so far as to say, is that we find this dynamic at the moral heart of family and social relationships across millennia, a dynamic which is presented in the Christian understanding of relationships.

Christianity’s understanding of relationships – with both God and one another – rests on two essential claims. The first is that humanity was created for one clear purpose – to love God and to live in perfect harmony with creation and fellow man. According to Genesis, the first book of the Bible, this was the expectation of our divine father, the role destined for all children of God. Yet Adam and Eve, the original children, failed to live righteously according to the standard God gave them and were viewed, thus, as guilty before God. All their descendants (which is to say all humanity) inherit that guilt because of what Christian teaching calls original sin.

That may sound both celestial and like Sunday school at the same time, and you, by the way, don’t have to take my word for it. But if you were to say that you do live in harmony with God, creation, and fellow man perfectly, I might be compelled to ask, “How’s that really going?”

When we look around and are honest, we are free to admit that things are not perfect, and we live with the weight of imperfection.

How do we feel, for example, when we let someone else down? How does it feel when we wake up with a moral hangover? How does it feel when we don’t get the position because of an unexplainable gap in our CV, even though we think we’re fit for it? We can see quickly enough that sublime internal or cosmic harmony does not, in fact, exist in our lives or in any of the created realms. More so, we find that it’s not actually attainable.

Are we left, then, to live lives with potential unrealized, spiritually incongruent, and unfulfilled? Will the black sheep part of ourselves – perhaps not evidently front and center but certainly left in the margins – become the core of who we are and how we interact with the world?

As it pertains to Knight’s dramas, a curious occurrence happens to each of these older brothers during the arc of their respective shows, particularly in relation to their younger brothers.

At some point in every series, Tommy Shelby realizes that despite everything, the one person he needs by his side is his older brother, Arthur. He needs him as he takes down crime boss Billy Kimber and expands the family business; he needs Arthur to be the one to end the vendetta with the American mafia, and, finally, to be his strength and support as Tommy faces his dark and uncertain future in the final series, telling Arthur in the darkness of a damp cellar, “You will change because I need you.”

Similarly, in House of Guinness, faced with looming political trouble, wanting to expand the brewery, and to continue the family legacy of philanthropy in Ireland, Edward Guinness looks to his older brother Arthur – the only person he can – to fulfill the other half of the inherited partnership and to gain political ascendancy, their father’s MP seat, for the cause of good. He needs him.

How do these older brothers—otherwise unfit for duty—respond?

In each case, paradoxically, they don’t crumble under the weight of expectation, but heartily rise to the occasion, becoming the man who their younger brother needs them to be. They are able to do this, by the way, not because there was some secret unfulfilled potential inside them all along (clearly they are who they are), but because despite their self-destructive patterns, the older brothers actually step up when needed because the younger brothers treat them as though they are worthy of being needed.

Put another way, having worthiness ascribed to them makes them feel worthy, and the result is that they change, they deliver, and their own self-worth changes with it. They each become, as it were, a new man.

What are we to draw on from this?

Returning to Christianity’s understanding of relationships – with both God and one another – we find its second essential claim: it is that God knows that our lives are not perfect and harmonious, that we do struggle, that we do have dreams and expectations unrealized, all of which can, depending on the severity, leave one quite weighed down and without a clear path forward.

If there is good news that can be spoken into that state (and there is), it is that God is not a father with his arms crossed forever disappointed in his firstborn. He is a father who sees the whole picture, knows all the facts, and he has done something about it in the great narrative arc of the Christian story – the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. The result of which is that we flawed individuals are seen not as those who fail to love and obey God perfectly but as those who are worthy of being wanted.

If we can learn anything from these brothers in Knight’s dramas, it is that we need not climb out of imperfection and into success to be unburdened. We find that being seen as worthy is enough. And that changes – as it does for Arthur Shelby and Arthur Guinness – everything.

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