Essay
Comment
Gaza
Israel
Middle East
War & peace
8 min read

A peacemaker’s guide to keeping hope alive

Amid continuing despair around the Israel-Hamas war, former diplomat Todd Deatherage shares the practices of the peacemaker.

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. 

Two people down a table turn and listen to someone closer talk, against a wall mural.
Reconciliation event, Northern Ireland.
Telos Group.

The world seems enveloped in darkness right now. The list of things that hide and extinguish the light is long, but for many of us it is the ongoing war in the Middle East that casts shadows of gloom and foreboding over our days and sometimes our sleepless nights.  

As I write, Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza continue to die daily from unrelenting bombardment. Treatable injuries and illnesses are now fatal. Many lack access to food and clean water. About 134 Israelis remain in captivity. The West Bank teeters on the brink as ideological settlers pursue an agenda of harassment and displacement of Palestinian villagers. 

Israelis and Palestinians remain deeply traumatized people and are transferring their untransformed traumas onto each other in endless cycles of conflict that are brutal to both, though glaringly asymmetrical. The rest of the world cheers and rationalizes and mourns and protests and marches and divides itself as the body count in Gaza soars.  

‘Hope is not the same thing as optimism, hope is not a feeling. Hope is what you do.’ 

Mitri Raheb

Even for those of us watching from a distance, despair is unavoidable, and in many ways, the only rational response. Who dares speak of hope amidst such horror?  And yet, without hope we are all lost. Hope is essential for life and flourishing--a life devoid of it is only existence. But how do we face such a brutal reality and look to the future with any sense of a better one? Is it even possible?   

Hope is possible, even in such a time as this, but only if we define it correctly. The Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb says that hope is not the same thing as optimism, hope is not a feeling. Hope is what you do.  We push back against violence, hatred and fear by living and acting in hopeful ways. Daily acts of resistance against injustice and brutality protect and nurture our humanity and open up space for our own transformation. As we allow ourselves to be transformed we can be better agents of healing in the world around us. Hope is what you do.  It is an active, intentional, clear-eyed yet generous way of living in the world.  

The physicist Niels Bohr said the opposite of a fact is a falsehood but the opposite of a truth may be another profound truth. 

And it’s important to connect hope and action in a moment like this in particular because the horror we’re witnessing has a context. This is not a natural disaster.  We're not where we are simply because bad things happen, but because we brought ourselves here.  Because too many have believed the lie that freedom and security come through violence, and that equality and peace can come via ideologies of exclusion and religious or ethnic superiority.  We have accepted the fiction that our lives are not interrelated with those of our neighbors.  And we have imagined that inequitable systems of subjugation and control can be sustained forever.  

And so we keep hope alive by embracing the truth and grounding ourselves in the conviction that the death and destruction of this war will only lead to more of the same. Our words and our actions in this moment can be demonstrations of hope when they are rooted in a steely conviction that the horror of October 7th did not make Palestinians freer, and nothing that’s happened since is making Israel, or any of us, safer. This is how we got into this, not how we get out of it.  Violence begets violence begets violence.  We act in hope by calling for a ceasefire and the release of hostages. And ultimately we set our sights on a new reality in which Palestinians and Israelis can enjoy freedom, dignity and security in equal measure.   

  

Here are some practices of the peacemaker that not only represent acts of hope but that open the possibility to bring about change in us and change in the world. 

Listen to understand. Many of us live within the sound of only one narrative of the shared reality of Israelis and Palestinians.  Listening to understand those whose stories are new to us is a first step in nurturing the empathy that will allow us to see the humanity of all.  

Listening to those with whom we disagree, not to combat or argue, but to truly understand has the potential to sharpen what we know and believe even as it holds open the possibility of lowering the temperature between us and the person being seen and heard. And this may expose that behind our disagreement may be something deeper.  (Hint: It’s often fear.)   

Learn to hold experiences in tension. The physicist Niels Bohr said the opposite of a fact is a falsehood but the opposite of a truth may be another profound truth.  Palestinians and Israelis each have their own connections to the same piece of land, their unique histories and experiences, and any honest peacemaking effort great or small has to hold these experiences in tension, not as equally true, but as the things that must be understood and dealt with in any effort at conflict resolution. 

Peacemakers know the importance of centering the voices of those most vulnerable. In this case, that has to begin today with the millions of displaced Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the families of the hostages, the Israelis who’ve fled their homes in the south and north of their country, and the Palestinians trapped and apprehensive in the West Bank fearing all this is coming their way.  

Peacemakers also acknowledge that each of us has agency.  We may think our influence is small, but we have communities and circles of friends, we have elected leaders who are meant to be responsive to our concerns.  There are always things we can do, and the cumulative effect of many small actions can bring change.  

At a time of such horror and atrocity, casting blame is an easy and natural response.  But what can’t be overlooked for those who want to create hope is the necessity of doing the honest work of self-interrogation. The persistence of antisemitism for centuries and its alarming rise in the present, coupled with the growth of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiments, force us each not only to examine our internal biases and those that exist within our own communities, but also to confront them.  Credible voices from within our communities are needed, to borrow from Jesus of Nazareth, to point out the proverbial logs in our own eyes so that we might see more clearly to help our neighbor remove the splinters from theirs.  

Part of the work of self-interrogation is also to own our complicity in creating the conditions we see today.  For too long our governments in the West have acted as if the blockade of Gaza was somehow sustainable, and that Israel can perpetually occupy the West Bank with no political horizon for a better reality.  And in recent years, the Americans have pursued a fiction that Arab-Israeli normalization could proceed with abandon while the Palestinians fall ever deeper into Israeli control and their own internal political dysfunction.   

The fact that we are a party to this conflict---our implication in it--- also creates the opportunity and the imperative to transform our involvement into morally grounded policies and interventions that create greater space for the work of peacemaking and conflict resolution. Which leads us to advocacy as an essential practice of peacemaking  

He told us the peacemakers are blessed. His universal invitation to live as his ambassadors of reconciliation and healing still echoes down through the centuries as a calling the world so desperately needs. 

  

In the West, as an atrocity of historic proportions is being perpetrated right now, in real time, in our lifetime, we have to call on our leaders to end the ruination of Gaza. To work to return the hostages. To truly commit our governments to cease being peacetalkers and to become peacemakers. To use our influence to create the conditions for true security, honored dignity and freedom for Palestinians and Israelis alike, in equal measure.  To support diplomatic initiatives, political arrangements and grass roots efforts that are all oriented toward their mutual flourishing,  

For people of Christian faith, these dark days have now taken us into our season of Advent.  The American Episcopal theologian Fleming Rutledge says “Advent always begins in the dark.” But it ends with the arrival of God in our midst, God with those in the ravaged kibbutzim of southern Israel.  God with those in the bombed out wreckage of the cities and refugee camps of Gaza. And God with those cowering in fear in their homes in Bethlehem, the very place where the Christian story begins.  In a normal year we sing, some years deeply from our hearts and our sadness, 'O Come O Come, Emmanuel, and rescue us'.  This year that cry is nearly guttural for many of us. But it is a cry rooted in a belief that God has not forsaken us in our hatreds and our violence and our inhumanity.  He is a God of transformation and invites us to join him in the work of healing and repair. Jesus came to make the world more merciful and just, to teach us to love our enemies, and to show us how to care for the weak and the vulnerable. He told us the peacemakers are blessed. His universal invitation to live as his ambassadors of reconciliation and healing still echoes down through the centuries as a calling the world so desperately needs.  This Advent, let us live as agents of hope as we work for a future in Israel/Palestine---and in our own communities-- in which all can flourish in justice, security, freedom and dignity.   

  

Article
Comment
Purpose
Sport
5 min read

So we won the Ryder Cup. At what cost?

When beer flies and etiquette dies, maybe we’ve mistaken sport for something else

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

A video still shows a beer can thrown at a golf amid a crows
The beer flies towards Rory McIlroy.

Phew. The Ryder Cup was an epic. After a couple of days of European dominance, fans on this side of the pond looked forward to the Sunday one-on-one single matches as a formality, only needing a few more points to wrap up the Cup, only for the American team to suddenly discover they could play a bit after all. It turns out Europeans play better together (the matches on Friday and Saturday all involved teams of two playing against each other) but the Americans excel when they're on their own. The latter nearly pulled off a famous comeback but finally fell short as the gritty Europeans stumbled across the line, Shane Lowry holding his nerve to sink an eight-footer on the 18th, and Tyrell Hatton sealing the win with a nerveless par on the last.

Much of the talk afterwards however was not about the match but the behaviour of the American fans. The European golfers, especially their talisman Rory McIlroy, were subject to some pretty vile abuse throughout the three days. His wife was drenched by a beer thrown in her direction, insults were shouted as he prepared to play a shot (you just don’t do that in golf) and some idiots seemed more keen to abuse their opponents than support their own players. It seemed strange that Keegan Bradley, the American Captain made no effort to call out his own errant supporters. Yet it was perhaps not surprising in a country where public models of leadership hardly encourage moderation and restraint.

Of course, we are used to this kind of thing in football stadiums in the UK, but golf has somehow always felt different. Football is a fast-paced, hectic game with players running full tilt for just 90 minutes and so it’s understandable that emotions get high and passions flare. Golf is more measured. It takes time, has always laid a great stress on etiquette, following the rules and respecting your opponent. Yet none of that seemed to matter in the bearpit of Bethpage.

To be fair, European fans get pretty partisan when the Americans come here - yet they do seem to stop short of personal vitriol. It seems every time the Ryder Cup is played, the rivalry just gets a notch higher. You just have to hope they rein it in in Adare in Ireland in two years’ time. As the match reached its climax, players (on both sides) leapt about like wild things, thumping their chests like cavemen on winning a point. The crowd hollered their lungs out, or continued hurling insults at the opposition.

I found myself wondering why all this seemed to matter so much? Why were grown (mostly) men reduced to appalling behaviour or breaking down in tears over hitting a small white ball around a field?

Maybe I’m just getting old and nostalgic, but Ryder Cups in the early days were different, with those grainy black and white photos of players in baggy plus-fours and tartan socks. It was the same with Wimbledon before the Open era, Wembley Cup finals back in the day, cricket matches with baggy flannels and thin bats. At the end of titanic struggles there would be a gentle skip towards the opposition, a polite shaking of hands, a wave to the cheering crowds and the presentation of the cup, which was held aloft briefly, before everyone went home. Yes, of course, people got steamed up about sport back then. The 'bodyline' cricket series in Australia in 1932 got the blood boiling between Aussies & Poms, but it was precisely because the English team were playing unfair. There were street parties and public joy when England won the World Cup in 1966, yet there is the famous story of Geoff Hurst after scoring a hat-trick in the 1966 World Cup Final going home and mowing his lawn the day after. Hard to imagine that today.

Nowadays, the presentation ceremony goes on forever, with microphones thrust into players’ faces with the most boringly predictable question: “how do you feel having won (or lost)?” asked every single time. Emotion pours out everywhere. Superlatives are expected and duly uttered.

My mind went back to something the theologian James K. A. Smith said to me in a conversation some time ago. “When there is no longer any Ultimate”, he said, “the Penultimate seems to matter so much more.” His point was that in the absence of a general social belief in God, or a divine order above us, with little sense of any social or divine sanction for, frankly, atrocious behaviour, then things like politics or sport become more and more charged with meaning.

When there is nothing higher than politics, electoral victory becomes all-important. And anything goes in silencing the opposition. When the most significant thing in life is a sporting achievement - even vicariously as a fan - then winning is everything. Where there is a more pervasive sense of belief in God, or an afterlife, where the death of friends or neighbours is a more common occurrence throughout life, or even the task of putting food on the table is a daily struggle, such things matter less. Activities such sport, which were once seen as mildly significant, a pleasant diversion from more onerous tasks, found their true place as something important, but not that important.

Blaise Pascal once wrote: “People are bored stiff with their normal lives and so they need perils and excitement.” He thought that we crave distraction to stop us looking into the abyss, or up into the heavens, to contemplate the ultimate meaning of our lives, the reason why we are here in the first place, and our final destiny. It is classic displacement activity. It is why we pay entertainers more than doctors, vicars or philosophers - because we need the distraction.

The Penultimate begins to matter too much when we no longer have an Ultimate to relate to. Sinking a clutch putt to win a game is satisfying. Yet it is not the reason why we exist. Sport is a great diversion. But it is just that, and realising that might make us behave a bit better towards our opponents and help us to focus on the things that really matter – the questions of meaning and purpose that humans have always asked since the dawn of our race.

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