As I’ve watched the news coming out of Israel, the occupied Palestinian territory, and the broader Middles East over the last year my heart has been heavy.
I’ve listened to people talk about losing their loved ones with tears on my cheeks and struggled to comprehend the possibility of peace as the death toll rises and poverty deepens.
These terrible events, we know, are instalments in a much longer story. Decades of violent conflict and trauma have shaped people’s lives in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory. The displacement and control of Palestinians by the Israeli state has resulted in deep poverty and inequality. As the war in Gaza persists, and injustice continues, I find it very hard to hold hope for the future, let alone think about what I could do that would make a difference.
As a Christian who holds to the call to ‘act justly’, what am I to make of this?
The world as it is
It’s not hard to look around the world and see things going wrong. And it’s not that I’m looking on as a neutral observer, I know I’m part of it, we all are. As humanity we’ve hurt one another in some of the worst ways imaginable. We’ve created poverty by treating each other unfairly, we’ve waged war and taken life. We’ve neglected to love our neighbours and to see them as those that bear the image of God. This is visible not just in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, but in the experience of people all over the world. It’s visible in farmers in Nicaragua pushed into poverty by a climate crisis they did not create; in the lack of schools and hospitals in the 34 African countries where governments spend more on external debt repayments than education and healthcare.
But many times, throughout history, even amid such awful realities, something has happened. Groups of people, sometimes Christians, sometimes not, have looked at devastation and seen something else – possibility. I can almost hear them whispering, as they survey their circumstances - It doesn’t have to be like this… we can change things.
Those whispers will have become conversations, the conversations actions, and the actions movements of people together saying – it doesn’t have to be like this… we can change things. Apartheid South Africa – it doesn’t have to be like this, the Civil Rights movement – we can change things, coal power in the UK – change is possible.
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Struggle
We often celebrate the success of these movements. Freedoms have been won and realised by people that were oppressed and marginalised – and their allies, just think of US civil rights. In the celebration it’s easy to overlook the struggle. There was a cost to seeing the possibility of change. People gave up their time, their money, their reputations and sometimes their lives so that others could live free.
Social movements are called struggles because it’s tough to move against the grain.
US Civil rights campaigners were maligned – Martin Luther King was tracked by the FBI and ordinary citizens at protests were physically beaten. They weren’t the only ones; Suffragettes were imprisoned as was Nelson Mandela. In 2023 alone 123 environmental land rights defenders around the world were killed protecting our precious planet. Today in the UK protest is more heavily policed than ever before.
The sense of struggle is not always as intense as state monitoring, prison time or physical violence, sometimes it is simply being mocked or patronised, but when we want to be part of changing an entrenched system, we should expect resistance. It will be a struggle. I’m certain that most people who have been part of a successful movement for change didn’t think they were in a successful movement - until they were. Until you win, you’re in the struggle.
I don’t know about you, but being honest about how difficult it can be to change things is a bit of a relief.
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Hope
Having just admitted to the difficulty of being part of change making, pointing to hope as the anti-dote might feel a bit glib. But I think hope and struggle can be held together – just as faith and doubt can be. Think of the disciples after Jesus’ resurrection – ‘they worshipped him but some doubted’ (Matthew 28:16). They were in the room with Jesus, they believed in an incredible new reality, but they also held that faith together with doubt. It is possible to hold the hope of a new reality, whilst experiencing the uncertainty of the struggle.
This is real hope, gritty hope, hope found in the midst of struggle.
“Hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” (Romans 8.24)
It’s challenging to have hope. It is challenging to look and imagine our world restored and healed. It’s challenging to imagine what is unseen - a just peace for people in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.
But hope is vital.
Writer Rebecca Solnit says:
Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen, and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.
When we look on great and unimaginable suffering, it is difficult to imagine resolution or how we can change the situation. But we are called to hopeful action. We must ask ourselves in the face of whatever injustice we see - ‘and what shall I be’?
Struggling with hope
Earlier this year, I stood outside UK Parliament in vigil with Rev Munther Isaac from Christmas Church in Bethlehem. Our elected officials were about to have what was at that time a failed attempt to vote in support of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
I was struck by this man of faith who has witnessed decades of conflict and grief speaking of the deep hope on which our faith is built. That we have a just and good God, that we cannot accept that darkness wins. This hope doesn’t brush away the realities of pain and suffering but holds the two together.
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We have to believe that Sunday will come, I know it’s a long Friday… but if we forget that Sunday will come and if we lose hope then it’s our Christian faith that is at stake, it’s the idea that all we are doing is wishful thinking.
This Friday is long, it is hard, and it is dark. But we are a people that hold the hope of resurrection and restoration. We hold the hope of Sunday, while we live through Friday.
And so, I continue to struggle with hope. Like many peacemakers, campaigners and those that persistently pray but feel weary in the struggle, I too feel weary. I struggle, but I do so with the gritty hope of what is unseen, the first light of Sunday.
Join us and take hopeful action in the struggle for a just peace in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory