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
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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