I've commented before about the way the Palestine-Israel conflict is treated among the churches in this area. One of our churchwardens headed up to London to join one of the pro-Palestine demonstrations the weekend before last, and I came across very quiet and polite demonstrators carrying the Palestinian flag in Guildford High Street. There is one person in the local ecumenical structures who becomes virtually speechless with rage if you suggest that there might be more to the matter than simply the wickedness of Israel, and I've heard a local Christian making an incautious remark along the lines of 'that's what you'd expect of the Jews', followed immediately by 'oh, I probably shouldn't have said that'.
I touched on this - just touched, mind you - in a sermon the other day, considering the unique ability the Israel-Palestine conflict has to provoke rage in people who aren't actually involved in it, and wondered why this was, when there are other and bloodier wars around the world and inter-cultural struggles we seem to care about much less. Now that there is a second truce in Gaza and attention shifts elsewhere, I see more news reports about the polarisation it seems to have produced across Europe: the identification of Jews generally with the policy of the State of Israel, and the corresponding sense of vulnerability that European Jews feel in what were previously pretty safe environments. There is some question as to whether some of the reports of attacks on synagogues have arisen from lazy journalism, but the tendency is clear enough; and you will observe how querying the reports of antisemitic acts becomes itself part of the rival narratives of victimhood promoted by pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli camps. In fact, I've concluded that the only thing the rest of us can do is keep quiet, given that any criticism that might be voiced of either side gets fed immediately into their own narrative of persecution and self-justification, some of which is true, and some of which is less than true.
One might like to make a distinction between the State of Israel and the Jewish people one knows, and this is what anti-Israeli protesters like to claim they do. The trouble is that the Jewish people one knows now increasingly know people in Israel itself, go on holiday there, have relatives there, deliberately buy its products as an act of solidarity and, in general, tie up their own identity with it and what it does. Meanwhile that state has long since decided that, if it is to fulfil its mission as a refuge of last resort for the Jewish people, it must be secure against those who would threaten it and if that means doing things that the rest of the world doesn't like, so be it. This means that protests like this one in Manchester may be directed against investment in Israel, but that effectively means being directed against Jews. Meanwhile, Baroness Varsi resigns from the UK government citing its insufficiently anti-Israeli stance, and a journalist visiting her home town in Dewsbury (sorry, I don't have a source, but it was on the radio as usual) finds local Muslims 'furious' about Israel and the Government's behaviour towards it: 'they are facing a choice between being Muslim and being British, and choosing to be Muslim'. The Israel-Palestine conflict isn't essentially about religion, and yet it seems to be turning into a means by which Muslims identify themselves, in this country and elsewhere. Muslims are against Jews; secular western liberals are against Jews; leftish-minded Christians are against Jews. This of course paradoxically means that Jews in western Europe who feel increasingly insecure are thinking more seriously about emigrating to Israel and in some cases actually doing so ('I believe Jews will not be able openly to practice our religion in the UK in a generation or two' one rabbi told Radio 4 at the weekend), and that only fuels Israel's sense of mission and its urgent need for security - and, perhaps, expansion. Disapproval of Israel's actions and therefore of Jewish people's connections with Israel itself generates those actions and connections.
The Western powers created the State of Israel, and then essentially left it and the peoples around it to work out the consequences. Unless they reverse that criminally irresponsible policy, or unless God works some sudden miracle in the hearts of the peoples involved, I can't see any clear way forward that doesn't involve more polarisation. Essentially, we may all end up choosing whether we think the State of Israel needs to exist as a Jewish refuge or not, and accepting certain unpalatable consequences to that decision (although they may not necessarily be the ones the State of Israel itself accepts as necessary). If we decide not, when, in the future, the UK government begins to close synagogues and expel Jews, where will the Christians of southern Surrey be?
You posts are always interesting, often entertaining and amusing, and this - well, should be required reading throughout the land. Thanks.
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