I haven’t logged an opinion on the Middle Eastern conflict until now because it’s been so fraught these days. Everyone seems to hold a rock-solid stance and everyone else is being called out who oppose it.
Yesterday I saw in the news that there had been “an explosion” at a hospital in Gaza. The passive tone of the statement was used because no one wants to be held accountable for bombing the Baptist hospital. The reality is that the hospital did not blow itself up, someone caused the damage and people suffered. It’s too much. It’s all too much.
It’s an impossible situation to begin with. Two groups of people feel they have a birthright to the same land and have history, religion and friends to help them back it up. Tim and I occasionally talk about the “God card” that people sometimes use to end debates. “God told me to do (whatever they actually want) so I don’t have to listen to you.” It’s used by people who have a hard time either expressing or owning their own opinion. I have spent enough time in churches, on mission trips and at Bible colleges both as a student and an instructor to not take another claim of “God told me” at face value. It’s not that I don’t believe that God may have an opinion, it just I am not sure God is backing their current, selfish agenda.
Take the American civil war for example. The South felt they had a divine right to own slaves and the North felt they had a divine right to own the South. Again, I am not saying there wasn’t a better or worse side, but rather that individual conviction is not evidence enough.
Not that we should ignore individual convictions, because they are very firmly rooted, often with years of grievances to back them up. Convictions drive people to all kinds of actions. People believe with every fiber of their being that are in the right and God or righteousness alone will deliver the answer that they are fighting for. So much so, that they feel free to engage in a no-holds barred conflict. If God is on their side, they feel that it is okay to treat the other side with total disrespect and contempt because “those people” deserve it. They are not only allowed to get what they desire, but also are free to bring down vengeance on our opponents and possibly please God in the process. It’s a win, win, win in their books. Except that it isn’t.
The American civil war was the deadliest military conflict in our history with hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead from both sides and widespread poverty, disease and famine. Did the conflict eventually provide the American Blacks a path to freedom from bondage? Perhaps, and it can be argued that it was unavoidable as the South would not have ever relented and had plans to expand human bondage into other states and Mexico.
Maybe the North also deserved to suffer too for its own part in slavery, as many of the Northern textile mills depended on cheap, slave-picked cotton to make their wealth. And if that is the case, then we need to pray for our souls, that we will not be held accountable for every article of clothing we wear that was in a sweatshop or piece of furniture assembled by underpaid hands or cups of made of coffee beans or tea leaves picked under the shadow of an oppressive regime.
My point is both sides in a conflict are heavily influenced by their own ambition and both can be a little or a lot wrong in how they go about getting what they need or want.
In the current Middle East situation, there may be a stronger religious, political or legal claim with one side or the other, but it doesn’t mean that either side can act in undisciplined rage. We all live in a finite space. When people fight without self control, the innocent get hurt. The land may never satisfactorily be carved up to suit everyones needs and desires because it’s a very tiny place to begin with. Yet all the players are being brought to the stage—tanks and bombs and neighbors are being dragged into the ever-escalating battle.
I am hugely reluctant to see the US dive into yet another land war in Asia. Our twenty years of fighting in Afghanistan as evidence of expensive, pointless conflict. Aren’t we also involved to some degree in the Russia/Ukrainian war? How many of these conflicts are we signed up for? How many refugees are will willing to take on? How many people need to die for a dusty plot of land?
Right now we need to pray for peace and level-headed leadership to come forward. Instead of trying to prove the rightness or wrongness of sides, we need more compassion for the human people trying to live their lives and raise their children everywhere. Earth is currently the only inhabitable planet in our neck of the galaxy, so we need to take extra care.