The following was an X/Twitter post about the conflict in Gaza. I generally have taken the side of Israel while this person, who I was responding to, has generally taken the side of Gaza. As outside observers, who are of different cultures than either of the parties in conflict, it is admittedly difficult to know how we should respond. Israel is justified in wanting to eliminate Hamas while Gazans are caught in-between and are justified in wanting peace and protection. How, then, should a Christian respond? This is my attempt at looking at the conflict through the lens of the principles of the New Covenant.
I have formatted but largely left my response intact. As such, it is a rough draft of my thoughts at a point in time. I am sure I’ll come back to this later with new thoughts and my views will change over time. Hopefully, though, I am honing and narrowing in on a strategy for dealing with thorny questions.
It certainly doesn’t make me happy.
I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about this whole situation and how a Christian should approach it. I’m trying to work through that in my writing about living the New Covenant.
Your tweet is a good prompt, though, and is probably a hint from the universe that I should apply my own ideas about how to work through these things.
What follows is not so much for you as for me. This is me thinking out loud.
Love God and Neighbour
Preach the Gospel and Make Disciples
Mercy Triumphs Over Judgment
Nobody but Christians are expected to uphold these principles so this can’t be about justifying Israel or Hamas’s actions but about how Christians should relate to and respond to Israel, Hamas, and Gaza.
Love God
In this case, avoiding killing and encouraging peace. So encourage Israel and Hamas to be peaceful. Israel might show restraint but Hamas will keep firing rockets. So, it seems that to encourage peace, Hamas must be dealt with in some manner.
Love Neighbour
Isreal, Gaza, and even Hamas are our neighbours. What do you do for your neighbour? Love them as yourself, sacrifice for them. I suppose this means encouraging Israel to peace and helping them defend themselves and encouraging Gazans and helping them defend themselves. And Hamas? How do you love them and sacrifice for them? It might be more loving to firmly restrain them. It’s already crazy complicated. After encouraging peace, defending vulnerable parties, one has to take a look at who is still violent and focus on reducing those tendencies.
Preach the Gospel
In our relation to Isreal and Gaza, we ought always to reach back to the Cross and the message of forgiveness. We could convey to Israel, Hamas, and Gaza that in all of our actions forgiveness is ultimately needed for peace to prevail and that can only happen in converted hearts and so we’d invite them all to accept Jesus, if not for his own testimony than for his works, which still play out today in our values and show the way to peace and prosperity for all.
Make Disciples
None of this ends unless they really believe what we’ve been saying and they won’t believe it unless they become disciples of Jesus. But if they do, even if by mere Western Christian influence, it could promote peace. So, in our dealings with Israel, Gaza, and Hamas, we ought always to communicate the need to adopt the ways of Christ.
Mercy Triumphs Over Judgment
What is the merciful thing for Christians to do in relation to Isreal, Hamas, and Gaza. Certainly work to reduce death and suffering. But what if, in doing that, we enable greater death and suffering from Hamas, which they have demonstrated they will keep up? And what if we show “mercy” to Israel, don’t say much, and they commit worse death and suffering?
So we see mercy is not an easy out.
Israel is certainly judging Gaza and so should be encouraged toward mercy. Hamas is certainly judging Israel and, likewise, should be encouraged toward mercy…but that’s not likely is it.
And so on this principle pacifism seems like it will lead to worse death and suffering.
Conclusion
We can only judge people on their words and actions and when they both align you can have greater confidence in their intent.
Israel has spoken words of peace and, one might argue, at least has not been systemically, continually, physically violent.
Hamas speaks of the physical violence they will do and proceeds to do it.
It seems that total pacifism is off the table and so the question is what actions will be taken and in what direction will they tend to go.
In this case, whatever those actions are, Israel at least holds to some kind of peaceful order (even if some number of hard-liners do not) while Hamas holds to an order of violence.
As such, the West should clearly communicate what is expected of Israel while not denying that something needs to be done not just in words but action with regards to restraining Hamas and lifting up Gazans.
Post Script
This has been a seriously quick and dirty sketch up of how I think Christians should relate to the situation with Israel, Hamas, and Gaza.
It requires much more serious consideration than a 4000 character tweet.
Most importantly, I think, is a commitment to the truth at all levels of analysis. We need to be informed about hard truths, like the fact neither Israel or Gaza are majority Christian, only one has even moderate Western Christian influence, Hamas’s reason for being is genocidal, Gazans enable Hamas, Islam is evil, culture matters, we cultures are not the same, and some cultures are in fact superior to others. We can no longer afford political correctness which is just a euphemism for avoiding hard truths.
Even just thinking through this is an exercise in intellectual brutality but it’s also an exercise in humility and a commitment to an ideal without which everything tends to disorder.
This commitment to brutal truth is what is needed to work through an understanding of how the West and Christians should relate to the situation in Israel and Gaza.
Post Post Script
We can see how hard it is to live with even three seemingly simple New Covenant principles. The ‘everythingness of everything’, the sheer combination explosion of anything more than this rightly points us to the impossibility of righteous existence.
And that’s why at the end of the day, after all this thinking, we must make our decision and then fall at the feet of Jesus and accept the mercy of the forgiveness in Jesus Christ that we are unable to live in the catastrophe of the complexity of the Fallen world.
Only in the Age to come will any of this be made right.
Follow Up
What’s this all about with principles of the New Covenant? It’s something I’ve been working on for some time. Most recently, I’ve written in a relatively concise bit titled How to Live in the New Covenant.