Essay

Comment

Gaza

Israel

Middle East

War & peace

18 December 2023

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 Deatherage

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

Culture

Israel

Middle East

Politics

27 June 2024

7 min read

Netanyahu’s baffling ability to bounce back

Disliked and embattled, the Israeli premier’s purpose strengthens him.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson Csorba works in deep tech, following experience in geopolitics and energy.

Between two generals wearing camouflage uniforms, a man in a black shirt listens.

Bibi ponders future plans.

Prime Minister's Office, Israeli Government.

Are the dreams of Bibi Netanyahu about to be crushed? As the Israeli prime minister’s coalition teeters, what is remarkable is that he has survived so long. Central to this survival is his purpose – a dream of a secure Israel. We need to unpack such leaders’ dreams and understand why they are so potent.

Langston Hughes, in his poem ‘Harlem,’ asks what ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’ Several possibilities are put forward: ‘Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? And an alternative: ‘Maybe it just sags like a heavy load?’ And finally ‘Or does it explode?’

It’s possible that Hughes referred to Harlem race riots in the 1930s and 1940s, but no-one knows for sure. The question is what happens when a dream is put on hold – or worse, destroyed – in the face of struggle?

Do we press on? Do we give up? What happens if we press on, and things do not work out? Or perhaps we press on, and things do work out. Hughes’ poem encourages us to ask these questions.

Looking back, Hughes’ poem is interesting but obviously gloomy, without hope. A dream is deferred. It withers, and then vanishes. But what if a dream is – when encountering struggle – maintained, kept in tact? The dream, perhaps nearly lost, emerges in the end, stronger than it was before.

Hughes’ poem is one of struggle and eruption. Not struggle and emergence. It is a despairing poem, one that denies the possibility of resurrection from the brink of death, even if the obstacles are significant.

We all have dreams, perhaps about peace, career, family, community, love, or something else. Inevitably, these dreams are – as dreams always are, in order to test our faith - met with opposition.

In these moments, we have two options: we can believe in what we see – the dream faltering, withering on the vine, ever so slowly. Or we can believe in the unseen, in which the dream re-emerges from whatever resistance it encounters. The former values the material, what we can actually see. The second values and trusts in what we cannot see. This brings us back to the point of faith.

'I have lost count of how many political obituaries I have written about Netanyahu — and how many resurrection stories.’

Nicholas Goldberg

The ability to struggle and emerge, in which death or near-death is followed by resurrection, is a quality that is in short supply in modern political leadership. It is easily – and not surprisingly – overlooked in a culture prone to despair and hopelessness, in which we are met with a new crisis at every corner.

But some leaders have a unique, if not baffling, quality: the ability to struggle and emerge stronger, somehow renewed. They resurrect themselves where this was thought impossible. And when they have this quality, they become unrelenting forces, whatever you might think of them.

No leader better embodies this quality in the political West than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (or ‘Bibi’ for short). Netanyahu strengthens whenever he is on the ropes, perhaps because he is on the ropes.

Although a profoundly disliked figure by many, Netanyahu’s ability to struggle and emerge merits serious study from any student of politics. It is worth asking where his ability to struggle and emerge, resurrecting oneself from the depths of despair – in seemingly impossible situations – comes from?

Ishaan Tharoor puts it well in a recent Washington Post article: ‘Yet Netanyahu is expert at defying the odds.’ However, puzzlingly few articles are written on this topic – Netanyahu’s ability to come back from seemingly impossible circumstances.

Columnist Nicholas Goldberg comes even closer to the essence of resurrection in a Los Angeles Times op-ed in 2020, in which he writes ‘Over the years, I have lost count of how many political obituaries I have written about Netanyahu — and how many resurrection stories.’ He later comments on Netanyahu’s single life mission focused on security.

Both articles are more anti-Netanyahu than they are a reflection on the why and how of his countless resurrections. So it is worth asking: what is behind this quality?

A mission is fundamental to resurrection, in which certain politicians find a way through whenever the world counts them out.

While commentators focus on the ills of Netanyahu’s tenure as Israeli Prime Minister – indictments of corruption and possible future jail time, thwarting of a two-state solution in favour of the Abraham Accords, and the security failures that contributed to the October 7 disaster – they fail to consider deeper questions related to Tharoor’s description of Netanyahu as constantly ‘defying the odds.’

Neglected in analyses on Netanyahu is the deep trauma of his brother Yonatan’s passing in the famous Operation Entebbe. Neglected is the fact that he was wounded, sometimes severely, on many occasions while fighting for the Israeli special forces. And neglected is the influence of his father Benzion, a notable academic well-known for his writing on the historical oppression of the Jewish people (and on his own later rejection by the Israeli academic community).

These are powerful, deep-seated experiences if not major traumas, which – as Israeli friends well-acquainted with Netanyahu wisely note – underpin his clear life mission of increasing Israeli security in a dangerous world.

Goldberg puts this mission, even if uncharitably, as follows in his column: ‘Netanyahu has stood for one key proposition: that peace is not to be trusted; it is a pipe dream pushed by starry-eyed doves who fell hard for the likes of Yasser Arafat. According to Netanyahu, only battening down, fighting back hard, building walls and rejecting compromise protects the country.’

Netanyahu provides us with a crucial lesson in political leadership: a clear and simple life mission provides the ability to claim victory from the jaws of defeat, even in the most seemingly intractable of circumstances. A mission is fundamental to resurrection, in which certain politicians find a way through whenever the world counts them out.

A mission – simple because it is grounded in brokenness (the death of his brother) – provides Netanyahu (and other politicians that have this quality) with a strategic and tactical advantage that cannot be replicated by opponents without similar purpose. Such mission is not fleeting but enduring, Netanyahu resisting all temptations that might thwart his single-minded purpose.

In the case of Israel, no other Israeli political leader has operated with the same sense of mission as has Netanyahu over the last two decades. For if this were the case, Netanyahu would not currently be in power.

Our focus therefore should never be on dreams deferred, as per Hughes’ poem, but rather on the realisation of our dreams – underpinned by unique and consistent life missions.

Commentators, focusing on external circumstances – the current direction of the war, certain decisions made, the opinions of well-read ‘experts’ – neglect these deeper human questions at their peril, because the answer to the question of purpose helps people find ways through where none seem to exist. Purpose, not circumstance, allows a political leader to struggle and emerge in circumstances where most others falter.

For wider context, we can here turn to the example of Jesus, whose resurrection follows his trials at Gethsemane. When Jesus prays in Gethsemane, it is not clear how he should act. Jesus does not know what God wants from him. But he knows that he must carry out the will of his Father.

He asks ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not what I want but what you want’. Jesus is alone in his deliberation. He asks and waits, and in this waiting, the way forward is revealed. Here we see, in its most poignant form, struggle and emergence. Jesus is resurrected three days following his death, when even his disciples had counted him out.

Our focus therefore should never be on dreams deferred, as per Hughes’ poem, but rather on the realisation of our dreams – underpinned by unique and consistent life missions. Discerning these missions is not easy. If anything, there is considerable pain involved in doing so.

Yet, struggle that involves the possibility of failure of a dream, within a consistent and singular life mission, contains within it the seeds of success. The dream emerges intact from whatever short-term struggle it faces, if not strengthened.

A way is found where none previously existed, when those focused merely on the seen long counted a person out. In the long run, mission enables victory: the realisation – not deferral – of dreams.