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
Community
Nationalism
5 min read

I protested against the Unite The Kingdom protest

The need to see one another

Thomas is a writer exploring the intersection of faith, politics, and social justice.

CCTV footage show two rival protests divided by a line of riot police.
CCTV image of the rival protests on Whitehall.
Met Police.

I don’t know why I was so concerned about the horses. I kept noticing them swaying through the sea of shivering bodies. I was so drawn to them that I tried to take a photo, a rare occurrence for me, but I was too far away. The horses riders, dressed in full riot gear, were being pelted with beer bottles. Maybe the horses were getting hit too, but it felt like they were recoiling on behalf of their riders. 

In front of the horses, engulfing Trafalgar Square, were tens of thousands of “Unite the Kingdom” protestors. From what I could see, they were predominantly white men. Many of them were dancing and waving flags, but a sizeable contingent was furious, drunk, and insisted on attacking any unfortunate police officer in their way. 

Behind the horses, lining the streets of Whitehall, were five thousand counter-protestors, including me. Unlike our opposite numbers in Trafalgar Square, we were trapped, surrounded on every side by St George’s flags, Union Jacks, and, oddly, some Georgian flags too. Maybe the shop had sold out. To my right, I could see the counter-protestors defiantly dancing. To me left, I could see a group chanting “Nazi scum, off our streets” whilst swearing towards the St George’s flags. 

There in the middle, I found myself feeling a curious mixture of discomfort, sadness, and anger. Uncomfortable because I’d been trapped for four hours, stuck on a continuous cycle of rinse and drain. Sad, because I knew that much of the “Unite the Kingdom” violence was built on misinformation and the scapegoating of refugees, a group I know well, and because this fog of violence blew over the counter-protestors as they hurled insults towards the St George’s flags. And angry, because figures like Elon Musk were using their extraordinary wealth and influence to spread fear and lies: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either fight back or you die. And that’s the truth. It’s only a matter of time till that happens to towns and villages. It will spread. And no one will have any peace.” Over the years, I have spent many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours with refugees and asylum seekers, both in my home and at my church. I had experienced no violence. In that moment, I was surrounded by “leftists”, socialists, and trade unionists, and the only violence I was experiencing was from the glint of beer bottles raining down on the police two hundred meters away. 

I was grateful for the interruption of an elderly lady asking if she could get past. I’d been asked a number of questions throughout the day, primarily because I was one of a group of four Christians holding signs like “Jesus was a refugee”, “love thy neighbour”, and “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”. At the start of the protest, an older lady and a young man joined our circle. The young man asked “I’m glad to see there are some Christians here. What do you think of Christian nationalism? Your religion doesn’t feel much like Jesus?” He was a brave Saudi Arabian refugee with a bright smile, earnestly questioning the fractures in my community of faith. Taken aback by the poignancy of the question, I fumbled a response before being rescued by one of my friends. 

Protest signs written on cardboard.
Tommy's protest signs before the rain.

 

After a while, the older lady started speaking. “Sorry for interrupting. I used to be a Roman Catholic, but I’ve lost my faith. On days like this though, I always want to pray. I don’t feel much hope for the church. A while ago, I went into a catholic church. I asked if the church could do anything about the divisions in our community and the anger at refugees. The priest shrugged and said no. I’m glad you’re here.” Her short, staccato sentences mirrored the tension of the day. I told her about how our church serves refugees, how I struggle with the anger of days like today, and how some of us have forgotten that the bible tells us to welcome the stranger dozens of times. As they walked away, I felt touched by the honesty both the young and old had gifted to four strangers, and I was glad to be carrying our smalls signs of hope. 

The megaphone brought the present back into view with another question. “Could everyone please get ready to leave up the left of Trafalgar Square?” it said. The police had cleared a path for us to leave, the sea of flags artificially parted by riot gear. We were escorted to Green Park tube station, at which point we turned off towards Oxford Street. My wife remarked at how quickly normality returned. I was devastated by the day, but felt too tired to weep. I wasn’t quite the same Tommy that I’d been that morning. The man who shares my name, and the chaos he wrought on my city, had turned a dial in me a little further than it had been turned before. 

I knew that I would have more days like this. In the midst of my discomfort, sadness, hope, and fear, I knew that I was supposed to be there, holding my soggy “Jesus was a refugee” sign, shivering in my damp clothes, and praying under my breath. I knew that I needed to gather other reluctant protestors alongside me, holding their own soggy signs and praying their own prayers. 

And I also knew that there was a better way to carry this fragile message of unity in our increasingly fragile land and increasingly fragile time. As a half-British, half-South African man, I’ve had the privilege of growing up with the stories of the anti-apartheid movement, stories which steward the hard-earned truth that defiant, tenacious, persistent love is the only antidote to hatred, misinformation and fear. As Desmond Tutu once said, “when we can accept both our humanity and the perpetrator’s we can write a new story”. Saturday left me feeling that we desperately need a new story, and that requires us to look beyond the swaying horses and see one another clearly. 

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