Today no one tolerates conquest, least of all the Palestinians. Their land was taken from them and many were driven out. Those who remain live like prisoners in their own country. From time to time they rise up in frustration and then they are once more crushed with overwhelming force.
There is no will to solve this issue. For more than 60 years conquered and conquerors have lived with guns at their side. This week’s events are a repetition of what has happened so often before. It is sickening to see the endless routine played out. There is some spark and then a response, and then a response to the response. There are words of hatred and mistrust. More people are killed, women and children. Eventually it dies down. Nothing is solved.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love.
To even mention loving your enemies in the context of the Israeli Palestinian conflict sounds crazy. It would be like suggesting putting out a fire in a blazing building with a glass of water.
There are many imaginative people on both sides, building bridges though art and music – but their efforts so far are precisely that: a glass of water in a burning furnace. Pilate asked Jesus if he was a king and Jesus replied, “Yes, I am.” It sounded like pure nonsense; there he was cruelly scourged with a crown of thorns on his head wearing a mock royal robe and he says, yes I am a king.
As the year closes the church puts before us this scene from John’s gospel but she combines it with the words of Daniel, ‘I saw, coming on the clouds of heaven, one like a son of man … and on him was conferred glory and kingship’ (7:13). And the book of Revelations calls him ‘ruler of the kings of the earth. He loves us and washed away our sins.’ (1:5) Pure nonsense?
The poem of W B Yeats, quoted above (Mediations in time of civil war), ends, O honey-bees, Come build in the empty house
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis