Coffee, Interrupted

'Are you working on sermons for Christmas?' asked the older gentleman who entered the café this morning, saw me, and came and sat at my table, leaving his companion scanning the menu at theirs. As a matter of fact I was, but I was quite happy to have a conversation with someone new.

He was a Quaker, he said, and asked what our church was doing to support the Palestinians. Not a great deal, I had to admit, although at the start of the war I'd observed the Patriarchs' call for prayer and fasting in a somewhat thin way as you may remember. My interlocutor was very disappointed at the Churches' response to the Gaza war, 'whereas they've fallen in line with what the Government's told us to feel about Ukraine, and that's a situation completely of the West's own making'. He was wearing a keffiyeh: although I think for a Christian to wear a keffiyeh as a sign of solidarity with the Palestinians is a bit like a White person blacking up to protest against racism, people will have different opinions about that and I didn't raise it. 'It's a terrible situation in which there is much evil', I offered, 'But there are many terrible situations in which there is much evil around the world, and I never quite see why so many people who aren't involved feel so invested in this one particularly'.

I was being slightly disingenuous: I have a pretty definite suspicion why, and there's a kind explanation and a less kind one. The kind one is that Christians read about Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and all these other places in their Bibles, and feel a sense of connection with them as a result. (I am curious about the fact that I don't. I have absolutely no interest at all in travelling to the Holy Land, walking in Jesus's footsteps or anything of that kind, not when the whole point of the Christian religion is that you can walk in his footsteps perfectly well here rather than burning up hydrocarbons to visit a war zone. But anyway.) 

As for the second explanation, my unsought companion was about to prove it. 'Well', he said, 'How would you like it if someone was to hand your country over to the Jews? - Or anyone', he added hurriedly, editing his instinctive opinions in a way that made the original outburst worse. Thankfully by this point the café staff were very keen that he should return to his seat before it was time for him and his friend to leave.

It's not the first conversation I've had with a keffiyeh-wearing Christian who's made an eye-stretching comment about 'the Jews' - not just some Jews, not those Jews, note, but all of them. That this hides among ordinary people who talk a lot about Peace with a capital P shouldn't perhaps provoke such shocked disappointment, but it does.