Reading the News with Jesus - Gaza (Part 1)
My intention when I began writing this first installment of “Reading the News with Jesus,” focusing on the situation in the Gaza Strip, was to finish it and publish it as a complete post, but I’ve now been working on it for a couple of weeks, and it’s still growing. The nature of the topic requires that I try to be as thorough and thoughtful as possible, and writing is taking longer than I anticipated. So, I’ve decided to release this first post in parts. You’ll find the first part below, and I will continue writing and posting over the next couple of weeks.
Recently, the situation in Gaza has dominated the news, so it only seems right that we start our practice of Reading the News with Jesus there. But before we dive into the news, I just want to take a moment to share what this blog will look like and how it's intended to be used.
Since I wrote the first post introducing this series, I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about and praying through the format. If you've been reading any of my posts over the past several, you'll already know that my writing tends toward a traditional essay format, an introduction complete with thesis statement followed by long paragraphs that develop and reiterate that statement. However, I'm not sure that format is the most useful one for this series. I want this practice to be accessible and nourishing, so rather than writing a series of essays, I'll instead follow the format I used in this previous post about the L.A. protests. I'll write a short introduction followed by a few things that I think Jesus might be saying to us as we read the news with him. These thoughts will be numbered so that they can be read and digested individually, if you so desire.
That said, I want to make it clear that I am not claiming to speak for Jesus. These are things that I think Jesus might be saying to us. They are things that I believe he is saying to me as I've read through the news with him, but I might not communicate it clearly or adequately. Or I may just be wrong. I have been following Jesus for over 40 years, but that's doesn't mean that I always hear him clearly or represent him well. I say all this to say these posts are intended to supplement your own time with Jesus, not to replace it. They should be used to provoke and inspire your own conversations with him, your own study of Scripture, and your own dialogue in Christian community. As you read these posts, please listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit as he speaks to you individually and utilize the tools he has made available to you so that you can best discern what Jesus is saying to you.
Now, let's get into the news.
By way of introduction, let me provide a bit of context for the news about Gaza:
The Gaza Strip is a small Palestinian territory situated between Israel and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. Though it occupies only 141 sq. miles (25 miles long and 7.5 miles wide at its widest point), it is home to approximately 2.1 million people, making the Gaza Strip one of the most densely populated places on earth. Most of the people living in Gaza are Palestinian refugees. There used to be Israeli settlements in Gaza, similar to those currently in the West Bank, but in 2005, then Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, ordered a "disengagement" from Gaza and forcibly removed all Israeli settlers. Though Israel's motives in disengaging from Gaza were largely demographic (the large Arab population in Gaza and the rapid population growth made it increasingly difficult to maintain Israel's desired identity as a Jewish democratic state), there were those who hoped that this move might lead to improved diplomatic relations between Israel and Palestine. Sadly, this would not be the case.
In 2006, residents of the Gaza Strip held their own elections, and Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council. After ousting their rival party, Fatah, in a brief civil war in 2007, known as the Battle of Gaza, Hamas seized control of Gaza. As Israel, along with most of the rest of the world, considers Hamas to be a terrorist organization, and Hamas has made is clear both through words and violence that it will never accept the Israel’s legitimacy, this effectively ended any diplomacy between Israel and Gaza.
With Hamas' ascendancy, Israel enacted a blockade on Gaza, restricting the flow of goods, services, and people into or out of Gaza. The citizens of Gaza were rarely permitted to leave, only under the direst of circumstance and, even then, only with great difficulty. Egypt soon followed suit, and so Gaza was effectively isolated from the rest of the world.
That has been the status quo in Gaza ever since, and the results have been devastating. A rapidly growing population cut off from the rest of the world, movement restricted, denied access to essential goods and services, under the governing authority of a terrorist organization who have often been accused of stealing aid sent into Gaza and using it to fund terrorist activities, with no real sustained efforts at diplomacy between Israel and Gaza. As s result, Gaza has become one of the most impoverished places in the world, and these living condition have only served to exacerbate tensions between Gaza and Israel. And so, for 15 years, more or less, there was an uneasy stalemate: Israel insisted that, if Gaza would remove Hamas from power, they would be willing to come to the negotiating table. Gaza doubted Israel's sincerity and continued to look to Hamas for leadership in its efforts to resist the occupation and to establish a permanent state for the Palestinian people. Until October 7, 2023.
That night, under the cover of a significant rocket barrage, Hamas-led militants invaded Southern Israel, targeting both civilian communities and Israeli military installations, brutally killing at least 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage (some 50 people are still being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza). This was a heinous act of terrorism that shocked and appalled the world. Hamas claimed that their goal to draw global attention to the plight of both the citizens of Gaza as well as to Palestinian people everywhere and to demand that the international community pressure Israel to end the occupation and to work toward the creation of a Palestinian homeland, but this was a clear act of terrorism and has been rightly condemned by much of the global community as such.
Israel promised a swift and significant response to the savage attack against its nation and people and, two days later, declared war on Hamas in Gaza. Since then, Israeli Defense Forces have decimated Gaza. It is estimated that over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict (though some argue that this number is much higher when we consider "indirect" deaths caused by the conflict; we'll talk more about this in a moment). The majority of Palestinians killed in the conflict are not combatants but women and children. Another 145,000 Palestinians (estimated) have been injured in the war. In other words, an almost unimaginable 10% of the population of Gaza have had their bodies damaged or destroyed in this conflict. All Gazans have been affected. Nearly all citizens of Gaza have been displaced from their homes by the fighting and have been forced to live in increasingly harsh conditions (keeping mind that conditions in Gaza were already well below livable standards). Poor sanitation, inadequate access to health care, exposure, malnutrition and starvation: these are the daily reality for all citizens of Gaza.
Recent news reporting has focused specifically on the famine and imminent threat of starvation that Gazans are facing. During the conflict, much of Gaza's food infrastructure has been destroyed, leaving its citizens unable to produce or purchase food. Further, Israel has continued to enforce its blockade of Gaza, and though some aid is being allowed through, what is being received is no where near enough to meet the needs of Gaza. Israel disputes reports of widespread famine and starvation and claims that they have allowed (and provided) sufficient aid for Gaza but that much of the aid is being seized by Hamas militants and is, therefore, never reaching the people of Gaza. The ongoing targeting of aid trucks by Hamas is undoubtedly one of the factors that is contributing to food crises in Gaza. However, it is also widely reported that the consensus among global experts is that the amount of aid making it across the border in the first place is no where near enough. This is both the result of logistical challenges—as delivering aid on the scale necessary to meet the needs in Gaza is a massive undertaking—and direct intervention by the Israeli government as part of their military strategy in Gaza. As a result of all these factors, Gaza is on the brink of one of the worst man-made famines in history. If the world doesn't take immediate and drastic action, tens of thousands of people in the Gaza Strip may die of starvation.
Most recently, the Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has revealed its intentions to seize control of Gaza City with the aim of annexing the Gaza Strip and forcibly relocating Gazans (some reports indicate that Israel has entered into conversations with South Sudan as a potential resettlement location). It goes without saying that any such attempts will cause untold and unprecedented suffering across the region and will strike a fatal blow to any future attempts at diplomacy and peace. And this is to say nothing of the global ramifications of such action. What happens in Israel/Palestine does not stay in Israel/Palestine but has significant repercussions across the globe.
Forgive the very brief and cursory summary. I'm quite certain I've glossed over a hundred different things I could have/should have said, but I hope I've done an adequate job of fairly summarizing where things stand right now and how they’ve gotten here.
Now, what do I think Jesus might say to his followers about the situation in Gaza?
1. "Eyes on me."
I have a feeling this will be a constant refrain in our practice of Reading the News with Jesus. There are so many voices vying for our attention, both out in the world and in our own minds. An endless torrent of media outlets, armchair journalists, celebrities and influencers are flooding our minds and feeds with information (and misinformation) about Gaza, each with its own slant and bias. But none of them have the words of life. Only Jesus can guide us down the narrow path that leads to life. Only his voice can lead us to the spring of living water that will not only satisfy our thirst but also well up in us to become a fountain of life and healing for the nations. But he does not shout. He is not trying to compete with the volume, ferocity, or relentless pace of the pundits and influencers. His Way is narrow, and few find it. His voice is quiet, and only those with ears to hear, that is those with a genuine desire to know his will and do it, will hear. We must prioritize his voice above every other in the world if we truly desire to learn to think, speak, and act like he would if he were us.
And, of course, it's not just the voices out in the world that ought to concern us. We each have our own internal dialogues, our own sets of predilections and biases. None of us are blank slates, but we all come to a conversation like this with established worldviews informed by family, friends, churches, schools, geography, trauma, and, of course, the aforementioned cultural voices. And while many of these are valid and important contributors to our personalities, none of them are Jesus. None of them should claim the allegiance that belongs to him alone. In the book of Colossians, the Apostle Paul instructs Christians to "set (our) minds on things above not on earthly things" and then gives us the rationale in the next verse. We are to set our minds on heavenly things because we "died, and (our) lives are now hidden with God in Christ." When we place our faith in and give our allegiance to Jesus, we surrender every other identity to him. The earthly things that defined us now become a distant second, at best, and as we "consider everything loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord" (Philippians 3).
Practically speaking, this means that Jesus will inevitably affect the way we think. He will put to death our prejudices and biases. He will upend our worldview. He will change our politics. We must allow him to do so. We are no longer what we were. We are a new creation in him. We are Christian. And as such, we must learn to see the world through his eyes (for this is what it really means to set our minds on heavenly things; it does not mean, as some Christians suppose, that ignore the realities of this world to spend all our time in "spiritual" contemplation).
All that to say, as we seek to understand and respond to the realities of Gaza, it is essential that stubbornly fix our eyes on Jesus. If we lose sight of him in the chaos, we will not only lose our own way but will also lose the capacity to be useful to anyone else.
2. "Beware generalizations."
I've lost track of how many times I've heard Christians, referencing the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, say things like:
"All Palestinians are..."
"All Israelis are..."
"Muslims and Jews just hate each other."
"All Arab people just want to see Israel wiped off the map."
"There's no such thing as peace in the Middle East. There's always been war over there, and there will be until Jesus comes
back."
To my shame, I have said some of these things before, but by the grace of God and through the intervention of true friends, I've since had experiences that have forced me to see these generalizations for what they are: ignorant oversimplifications that completely distort and misrepresent the facts on the ground in order to provide me with a convenient excuse for apathy and inaction. Over the past decade, I've had the distinct privilege of countless conversations with people living in Israel/Palestine, people from all walks of life--Arabs, Israelis, Jews, Christians, Muslims, priests, rabbis, imams, soldiers, settlers, farmers, homemakers, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters--and I've learned that the only generalization that holds up is that all generalizations are wrong.
There is no singular perspective shared by all Israelis.
There is no such thing as the Palestinian position or strategy.
Muslims and Jews are no more prone to animosity than any other religious groups.
Diplomatic relations across the Middle East are far more varied and nuanced than our partisan news outlets would have us
believe.
The Holy Land has not been and is not now locked in eternal war.
This last generalization (that Israelis and Palestinians are locked in eternal conflict) is, in my experience, one of the most widespread, insidious, and damaging of the assumptions made by Western Christians about the conflict. In making it, we distort the complex and often beautiful history of the region, we deny the humanity of the people who have called it home, and we ignore our own role in its historical conflicts. It is true that, due to its economic, strategic, and religious significance, the small piece of land known as Israel/Palestine has experienced more than its share of war and conquest, but if we know our own history, we will be forced to acknowledge that much of the conflict in the region has been "exported" from elsewhere.
The Western world has a long history of using the Middle East as staging area and the people of the region as proxies in its own conflicts. This started with the Crusades and continues even in the current conflict. Throughout the history of the Holy Land, there have been significant and extended periods of peace, in which the diverse ethnic, cultural, and religious groups have coexisted in harmony. These times of peace have historically been the rule and not the exception, and often, when such peace has been broken, it has been at the hands of Western (European/American/"Christian") intervention.
In fact, the origin story of the modern conflict is steeped as much in Western Christianity as it is in either Judaism or Islam (more on that next week). Our claims that the people of the Holy Land are historically inclined and eternally fated toward violence and war are, therefore, not only ignorant and inaccurate but also hypocritical. We have the audacity to prejudge the people of the region as particularly predisposed toward violence and to blame them for their situation while ignoring our own history of violence and significant and ongoing contributions to the conflict. And worse still we often do so in the name of the Jesus, claiming that His Word has decreed this war and that the atrocities committed in it are, therefore, his will. It is simply unacceptable for us, as followers of Jesus, bond-servants of the Prince of Peace, to justify this war on the basis of false historical generalizations and dubious biblical interpretation.
Our generalizations simply do not hold up to careful examination, and we must do this careful examination. We owe it to ourselves, the people of the Holy Land, and to our King, to do the hard work of confronting and, where necessary, toppling our biases and presuppositions so we can know the truth and be useful to Jesus and to the people of Israel and Palestine.
We’ll discuss some ways we can partner with Jesus as he challenges our generalizations in next week’s post as we continue this conversation with a few more things I think Jesus might be saying to us about Gaza. Stay tuned.
