Shalom/ Sala’am?

Many years ago when I was an undergrad at a posh Scottish university, I handwrote an essay for Practical Theology that was marked down severely for naivety by my lecturer, a former Secretary of the World Council of Churches—an English, liberal, Anglican minister.

My naive analysis was that a Roman Catholic Irish Republican and a Protestant British Unionist, both born and living all their lives in Northern Ireland, would never agree on constitutional arrangements so long as they prioritised their identity over peace.

I didn’t write “constitutional arrangements” then but I would now because that’s what I meant. Identity politics were certainly rife in the late 1980s but that’s not how we referred to them. The only available alternative meta-analysis was Marxian, as full blown Critical Theory had yet to spread its spores all over academia.

His solution for the ills of the Northern Irish body politic was basically the talking cure, which in these islands usually translates to a listening cure—as dissidents are treated to middle-class Southern English people (yes, the women are just as bad and yes they’re mostly White or assimilated) jawing on about being reasonable, to Yorkshire regionalists or Scots nationalists or Welsh miners or Irish Republicans or Ulster Unionists, with absolutely no awareness of their own embarrassingly meagre grasp of relevant history or culture and absolutely no willingness to take responsibility for Westminster’s insidious role in producing current oppressive material relations.

I’m not being fair, I admit. He was a very nice gentleman (they usually are) and honestly believed that with enough hand-holding and Kumbaya all would be well and all would be well and all manner of thing would be moste well—as St Julian of Norwich almost said.

Now let me fess up: I am Roman Catholic, ecumenical, and have held hands in an ancient Scottish abbey while leading, unabashed, that very hymn. It is a powerful African affirmation of the incarnation—the presence of God among the people. When people focus more on what unites them than on their divisive identities, that kind of affirmation can be deeply healing. What tends to happen though is that people start to identify with a third community: Corrymeela or Iona or Taizé…or with some political movement that takes on and replaces the phenomena of church.

There’s nothing wrong with that, provided it doesn’t lead to cultish behaviour or self-deception but, as people move out of Identity A and Identity B towards Identity C, it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade those left behind that there’s any overlap and—in extreme cases—these movers and shakers may end up being accused of treachery: how could you shake their hands, after all they’ve done to us?

I’m also being unfair to women who, notably, dominate peace movements—although usually on the unproven and sexist assumption that one sex is innately more aggressive than the other and that had women been in charge everything would be currently wonderful. I’m not a fan of sexism and I think this attitude is extremely naive.

I’m also not in favour of White Southern English Liberal Anglican ministers (of Church or State) who attempt to impose their religion of Reasonableness on everyone else because persons with that identity can be every bit as insidiously evil as anyone else. Rex Harrison’s facetious why can’t a women be more like a man? is echoed in their every Reasonable condemnation of behaviour abroad: why can’t they be more like us? Yet the list of atrocities committed by the British Empire is so long, you must have heard about at least one of them.

As sectarianism loses its grip (young people in these islands, where it used to matter, tend to care very little whether someone’s family is Catholic or Protestant these days) constitutional arrangements involving Northern Ireland may be resolved due to economic considerations rather than those of Christian denominational identity. Brexit, trade and immigration appear to be key points at the moment.

An immediate difference between Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel/ Palestine is that the first two names do not seem to be extremely objectionable (to Catholics/ Protestants and Blacks/ Whites, respectively) whereas the name on each side of the latter binary seems now extremely problematic for the other.

While it is true that some Palestinians have dual identity—being ethnically Palestinian and legally Israeli—I have heard on social media and also in person that these people feel they can never return to Gaza or the West Bank for fear of being branded as traitors to their people.

So the official Israeli solution that all Palestinians should become assimilated citizens of Israel and submit to its laws and social mores seems at least unpopular, if not unworkable.

Solution 1

What if there were another name for that whole land—not Israel or Palestine, with all their associated cultural values, but something fairly neutral, like “Levant”?

At the moment, tragically, it’s very clear why the Lex Talionis was a legal improvement on internecine blood feuding. Each life lost by one side is generating the will (and the reality) of killing many more of the other. As I write, it’s very much one way—but what of the future and what of the situation of those associated with one side living in countries where those associated with the other massively outnumber them?

There are two strategies for stopping the bloodshed:

1) kill all potential terrorists and, as they’re difficult to distinguish in terms of person or place, just bomb everywhere they might be.

2) ask people to stop killing each other.

Neither strategy seems to be working. Even if every single Palestinian in Gaza is massacred, is the Israeli Government naive enough to imagine that the reprisals will end there?

People in trauma cannot be expected to act reasonably, and cannot be expected to make responsible decisions about where the line between defence and attack lies. Every person in that land appears to be in trauma now, even those in charge of it, on either side. They are not going to desist from attempting to destroy those who have attacked them and killed innocent members of their community.

Asking traumatised people, terrorists or not, to stop killing those seemingly intent on killing them is unlikely to meet with success. People must be forced to lay down their arms—but not forced by their enemies. Therefore, the question is, what force is available to massively overpower both sides to mutually guarantee the safety of survivors?

Solution 2

What if UN peacekeepers (from countries other than Israel, Palestine, USA, UK, Germany and Austria, and no Jews or Muslims) flooded Israel and Palestine, confiscated all of their arms and imposed martial law until a pacific political solution was found?

Even if both solutions were adopted (I’m aware that both solutions are extreme but their combination seems preferable to Armageddon) there would still be the ongoing trauma of the bloodshed and the very human desire for revenge. For this there are two possible solutions:

Solution 3a

What if there were a Law of Forgetting—that for 100 years no narrative of past bloodshed in the land could be published or spoken of in public and that public discourse were laid under an enchanted sleep, to give time for the body politic to heal?

Solution 3b

What if there were a Commission of Truth and Reconciliation—that in every village and every town and every city men and women and children could tell their truth of their participation in past violence, and of suffering, and be heard without call for, or fear of, reprisal?

For 3a the experience of Spain post-dictatorship may be helpful and for 3b the experience of South Africa post-Apartheid.

I am quite aware that these 3 solutions may be exactly what this conflict was engineered to bring about: Problem, Reaction, Solution. Yet I think that the technocratic aim would be different: total surveillance, digital ID linked to access to currency and all social interaction. It is very likely that the powers-that-be will try to use this conflict not only as yet another ground-clearing for the real estate opportunities of disaster capitalism but also in order to impose a technocratic state as they are doing in the Ukraine.

So peacemakers, if that’s what they really are, must be very wary indeed of that insidious agenda. Finally…the UN? No, they’re definitely not neutral but what other force is there that could be massively deployed and stop these people killing each other and avoid the situation escalating to the Samson Option: global thermonuclear war?

Thanks to Anon Anon who has released the image Palestine Gaza Hamas Israel Peace into the Public Domain.

…and you came to visit me

The first time I visited a prison, it was with the Cub Scouts. We all got locked behind bars (for a few seconds) and loved it. I still remember, after the satisfying clang of the lock turned by the big jangly keys, looking around and seeing…a hard bed, a metal toilet (no lid) and a barred window. When I asked the policeman (it was the local nick so just holding cells, not really a prison) “What do they do in here?” genuinely puzzled, he said, with a shrug, “Count the bricks?”

Was I about ten then? I’m hazy on the date. The second time was around a decade later and not in Scotland. The Jerusalem Praetorium, so my aunt (a Franciscan sister stationed in Jordan) had informed me, is one of the most reliably identified sites in the Holy Land. Famously known—all with reasons but confusingly—as the Palace of Herod, the House of Pilate, the Antonia Fortress, Gabbatha, and the Pavement, it is the location of the prison cell of Jesus.

Actually there are two, so I don’t know if I was in the right one. What I do remember is that it was too small to stand up in, and to lie down in. I remember hunching inside (I must have been lucky avoiding crowds that day) and thinking: He was here. The Holy Land felt like a movie lot sometimes (there are two separate locations for the tomb of Christ, the Garden Tomb and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, both with a venerable heritage and claim to authenticity) but this prison cell, this felt real.

The third time I visited a prison I’m not going to give you either the date or the location but I will say it was in the UK, it was the first of several prisons I visited, voluntarily, and I visited each one several times.

Why?

Again I’m going to be vague. It could be to visit a family member, a friend, a neighbour, an acquaintance—or maybe someone you didn’t know at all. A fellow human being who, for some reason, and for some period of time, is behind bars.

Why?

Why would anyone want to do that? Someone has (presumably) broken the law. Why not leave them to it?

Maybe for the reason that the policeman’s flippant (and truthful) answer stayed with me after all these years. Maybe because of that cramped stone cave. Maybe because my father was also innocent and was a prisoner. Not, mostly, behind bars. The Nazis didn’t have all their P.O.W.s in solitary all the time. But certainly deprived of his liberty.

Yet the guilt or innocence of prisoners, while of great importance to them, isn’t the main reason why people like me (and maybe you) find ourselves visiting them. I know that sounds strange, and not very just. After all, should we really be making life easier for people being punished for a crime? What about their victims?

I don’t know their (presumed) victims. I do know that there’s someone in prison and that I believe that visiting them may do both of us some good.

So do the authorities. At least for the prisoner’s sake. And this is the first thing to say about prison visiting. You are, willingly, putting yourself into the hands (quite literally) of the authorities. You won’t get in until they say so—and you won’t get out either.

Think about that. It can be a bit nerve-wracking. There are forms and phone calls and doors and locks and fingerprints and lockers for belongings and a sniffer dog (don’t pat the dog, no really, they know he’s cute) and lots and lots and lots of waiting, for the next stage.

For the mythically-minded, the Descent of Inanna comes to mind. You shed your outer layers: jacket, gloves, hat, car keys, credit cards, mobile phone. Any gift has to be notified in advance (and is not given directly to the prisoner) and you walk into the visiting area (eventually, because the whole process of entry can take an hour, so do go to the loo at Reception!) with some change in your pocket, maybe a tissue, and that’s it.

The staff are, at least, civil. In my experience, that’s the baseline but usually they’re amicable, even friendly (I know one’s a translation of the other but the second feels warmer).

We (the free) walk in first. We’re assigned a table number, each prisoner has one, and—when they all come in—they have to sit on a different coloured chair. You have to open your mouth and stick your tongue out at the guard and if you hug or kiss the prisoner they’ll get frisked at the end. Because people try to smuggle things in. Seriously.

Then someone (not the prisoner) will go up to the hatch for sealed cups (no, don’t take the lid off) of tea or coffee or cartons of juice, and biscuits. Don’t be arsey about the selection. It’s a treat for the prisoner. This is another county. The rules are different here.

The guards stand around the room, watching. Well you’d complain if they didn’t, wouldn’t you? You’re in a room with a large group of (presumed) lawbreakers. They’re unlikely to start anything. But it’s a risk. Think about that.

About being arsey. Don’t. Just don’t. It’s not about you getting in your Guardian reader civil liberties points. You may be escorted from the building, early; the person you’re visiting won’t—and he may suffer for your outburst. So be positive about the experience but not presumptuous. The guards are playing out possible scenarios in their heads and in some of them you end up imprisoned or dead. Think about that.

All the prisoners are the same sex (in theory). That changes things. So whoever in your group (because you might be two or three) isn’t, may be aware of that. There’s a children’s corner. They’re (hopefully) not really aware of the underlying tension in the room. Everything is voluntarily circumscribed. There are things you don’t say and things you don’t do.

Okay, enough gloom. What’s good about this situation? Chat. Talk about family and friends. World and national news probably isn’t a good idea. It’s too remote, especially for longer sentences. Football. How’s the team doing? What about that penalty? That’s good if you can do it. Remember he has TV. So he’ll know.

Share your life. Keep it light. Remember he can’t solve problems in here so don’t give him any. Don’t boast, but share joys. There’s a world out there, let him keep in touch.

Listen. There will be a detail. The food has changed. Different job. That guy is a good mate. Bit dodgy. (Said in a whisper. No don’t look. No it’s not smart and yes you’ll be noticed.)

Something about the lawyer. Guilt and innocence it’s just not your concern. Not today. It’s all theoretical. He’s in here. They think he did it. You keep an open mind and nod along to whatever he thinks. This is NOT the place to play judge and jury. No matter how many cop shows you’ve watched.

Remember the power differential. Always. You’re free. He’s not. Underneath his amiable exterior (because he’s pleased to see you) there’s probably seething resentment against the screws/ the system/ her that dobbed him in/ the mate that dared him/ got him drunk. Don’t go there.

Time’s up. Maybe a hug. Take your cue from him. Back they all go through the gate. It’s not just a door.

Clang.

A tangible feeling of relief runs round the room, mingled with sadness. Some family members (usually female in men’s prisons, for some reason) start being arsey with the guards. Get that door open! I need to pee! Because they can. Understandable. Not advisable. The ascent is quicker than the descent.

Outside. Fresh air. Walking to the car. Liberty.

We don’t think about it till it’s temporarily abdicated. It’s a previous gift.

Why do I visit prisoners?

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Matthew 25:35-36

I don’t think the point of that passage is the heavenly reward. I visit a prisoner because as well as keeping a link to civil society and his hopes up that he’ll be able to rejoin it, safely, even if he has (perhaps and perhaps only to some extent and temporarily—or perhaps not) forgotten his humanity, visiting him may help me remember mine.

Padlock on heavy chain on iron gate

Thanks to Alex Borland for releasing his image Rusty Padlock and Chain into the Public Domain

The Real Greens

The trouble with the terms “greenwashing” and “pinkwashing” is that those using them may (perhaps) inadvertently do what they accuse others of doing: painting over structural issues that need to be addressed.

Pinkwashing is often used to denigrate the success of the LGBT community in Israel and there have been several aspects to this accusation:

• Denying the issues faced by LGBT people in majority Muslim countries in general and in Palestine in particular.
• Denying the freedoms won by the LGBT community in Israel.
• Denying the possibility of a people under oppression to simultaneously oppress a community of their own.

Countering the first denial, Mark Segal of NY Daily News is quoted as stating:

If you have a need to prove your “wokeness” by assimilating with those who support the rape and death of LGBT people, you don’t know the meaning of LGBT liberation.

Countering the third denial, Al-Qaws, a group dedicated to gender and sexual diversity in Palestinian society, has a more nuanced statement:

Singling out incidents of homophobia in Palestinian society ignores the complexities of Israel’s colonisation and military occupation being a contributing factor to Palestinian LGBTQ oppression

My point is not to reduce the socio-political complexities to which the latter quote alludes to some kind of catchy soundbite but rather to emphasise that key word. Some issues aren’t simple—but that doesn’t mean they should be painted over in pink.

Or green. Cory Morningstar, on the blog Wrong Kind of Green, has written a detailed take-down of current media environmentalism entitled The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg. (For those who prefer listening to reading, there’s a beautifully-read podcast version.)

The reaction to greenwashing can also be rather simplistic and, similarly, has various aspects:

• Denying the ecological issues of the planet
• Denying the benevolent motivations of environmental protestors
• Ignoring the possibility of both of the above co-existing with invented (or exaggerated) issues and with malevolent motivations

To stop communicating in double negatives, let me state clearly what I mean. While climatologists are divided on the question of there being a planetary temperature crisis caused by human (or animal) agency, no-one sane denies the obvious issues of air, land and water pollution by pesticides and other poisons and by plastics. Electromagnetic (high or low) frequency pollution is another source of concern.

Related issues are those of the cost-effectiveness of supposedly environmental alternative sources of energy and fuel—as well as the social impact of the market for conflict minerals (used in phones, laptops, solar panels and electric cars).

About all these issues my point is simple:

• Unless supposedly progressive groups are prepared to grapple with the complexities of real intersectional oppression and liberation, they aren’t really progressive.

It’s not enough to pay attention to the wake-up calls of green celebrities; we also need to see beyond—to the marketisation of Africa and other repressive goals of the Great Reset.

It’s not enough to acknowledge the latter and ignore the very real problems of pollution.

It’s not enough to be aware of the dangers of Frankenfood and the sinister appropriation of the means of global food production by a very small group of plutocrats; we also need to acknowledge the unnatural and inhumane treatment of farmed animals—if not for their own sake then at least for the effect that their confinement, torture, forced assimilation of toxins and barbaric slaughter has on our own bodies and on our souls.

The so-called Green parties are allied with inhuman forces indifferent to the fate of most of the planet and its population—apart from some ecological pleasure parks strictly set aside for the elite. Let’s not pretend that meanwhile these plutocrats are all ethical vegans: they’re all guzzling meat pizza, fatty hamburgers and high sugar Coca-Cola.

In contrast, the resistance to global tyranny is full of people who eat healthily, exercise daily, participate voluntarily in various community projects and grow our own food.

We’re the real greens.

Cress growing out of soil held in a White male hand in front of the mesh cover of a plastic greenhouse.

Backstage at the Panto

Backstage, during a pantomime, is an odd place. Actors rush up and down stairs, still putting on their costumes, and communicate with each other and with the stage crew in frantic gestures. No-one speaks. Everyone’s listening. Props and scenery are being whisked on and off, during blackout, and the Stage Manager’s word (or signal) is LAW! No-one questions her authority. There’s no time to renegotiate your entrance or your already-blocked moves. The Director isn’t even there. He’s up the back of the hall with Sound and Lighting. Worrying. You live for the applause, or the boos. They’re really the same thing. It’s the strength of the reaction that shows if the audience are enjoying the show. When I was playing the Baddie in Aladdin, a couple of years ago, at the end of Act 1 a wee boy in Row 2 audibly called me “a jobby”. I strutted back into the dressing-room exultant! Take that Olivier! I thought. High praise!

Caught up in the performance, with the doomed romance of the pretty Hapless Heroine (who probably does kickboxing) and the Handsome Prince (who’s a boyish girl), with the slapstick antics of the fools, all meticulously rehearsed, the exaggerated dramas of the Dame (who’s a man) and the carefully choreographed cries and dance routines of the Chorus, the audience forgets – or never realises – that backstage at the panto we’re all friends. Everyone’s working together. The Hapless Heroine helps me on with my heavy robe – before I go onstage and capture her. The main Fool (the Daftie in Scotland) has a degree in astrophysics and is best mates with his rival – who’s just about to plaster his face with a custard pie. The Chorus aren’t really shocked by my latest Evil Deed. They knew it was coming. They just want to do their number so they can troop downstairs (Shhhhh! says the Stage Manager) and grab a Coke and a KitKat before they’re back on for Act 3.

The conflict in Ukraine is a panto because everything in the Theatre of War is a performance. Right now, a young woman who’s recently been…

• a beauty blogger
• pregnant
• bombed
• twice
• dead
• queuing up for bread
• a refugee
• captured
• freed
• all of the above, simultaneously

…is now apparently safe and sound in Russia and confusing everyone on Twitter. Don’t ask me what the truth is. I don’t know. I do know that this is political theatre. It’s a panto.

Unlike a friendly neighbourhood panto, in the Theatre of War the participants risk more than a stubbed toe falling over a stage weight supporting the flats. Participation is usually not voluntary and even when there is an actual Baddie, the Goodies aren’t that good. Ask any older Russian what they think about the Yalta Agreement. Or ask an old German about carpet bombing. Ask yourself why you’re surprised that in WW1 the British Army shot shell-shocked soldiers in a pretty little Belgian town called Poperinge, surrounded by Flanders fields. And we all know about Abu Ghraib. No? Look it up. If you have the stomach for it. I’m not providing a link.

The fact that some Ukrainian battalions apparently have links to Neo-Nazi groups, that the persecution of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine has been going on for 8 years and that NATO is using this fake war to play checkers with China doesn’t mean that there aren’t real people caught up in it. I don’t know who those people are, clingfilmed to Ukrainian lampposts, beaten, stripped, raped and doused with water, left to freeze to death. I know that people have been reporting Russian deadly homophobia for years so before you jump to that conclusion – no, I’m not a fan of Putin!

There are wheels within wheels at play here. Suddenly all the slebs are focussing solely on this drama, ignoring the release of Pfizer data on adverse reactions and the conviction of smiling Ghislaine Maxwell – and all the political blackmail that went on with everyone on the guest list at Jeffrey Epstein’s island – as well as the long list of other countries in conflict: #Yemen #SaudiArabia #Palestine #Israel #DRCongo #Syria #Afghanistan #Ethiopia #Eritrea #Colombia #Myanmar #Algeria #BurkinaFaso #Cameroon #Libya #Mali #Mozambique #Niger #Nigeria #SouthSudan #Tanzania #Tunisia #Chile #Venezuela #Iraq.

Backstage at the panto, everyone is cooperating. They’re read the script and they’ve rehearsed the moves. Someone might muff their lines or dry up but that’s no problem. There are plenty more to take their place. People get cut all the time in this production. It’s not only the jokes that die onstage. There are trap doors and not everyone gets the heads up.

The Stage Manager is in charge. In agreement with the Director. No, I don’t know who they are either. But I know that they’re there. And I know that all they want is for you to sit back – and enjoy the show.

Just watch out for the forced Audience Participation. At the Finale.

Scary Clown Faces

Thanks to Circe Denyer for releasing her image Halloween Whispering Clowns into the Public Domain.

Taking Teddy Bears to Gaza

I take off my sandals, for this is holy ground.

Sitting in her sometimes sunny garden in a small town outside of Glasgow, my mother (with the same span of years as the Queen) looks at the twenty-two pictures I show her from the Twitter account of the Rev. Kate McDonald, ‘an Appalachian Scottish Episcopal priest serving in the Church of Scotland in Israel and Palestine’.

The first photo is of this year’s Pride parade in Tel Aviv. Rainbows and the Star of David. The Sabra are a handsome people but I don’t see any smiles in this picture. This parade is controversial inside and outside Israel. It is opposed by Orthodox Jews, by the Muslim majority states of the Near and Middle East (including the Palestinian West Bank where same sex relations are criminal and Gaza where they are punishable by death) and denounced as ‘pinkwashing’ by Western liberals.

On Saturday I plan to attend a small, new, Pride parade taking place on the Isle of Bute, a promontory a ferry ride over the Clyde Estuary. I usually attend both Edinburgh and Glasgow parades. I take my dog, who loves the attention. I can remember when homosexual ‘acts’ were criminalised here in Scotland. I remember when the age of consent was six, then two, years above that for heterosexual ‘acts’. My heart was moved when I attended a civil partnership in Cardonald and the gallus MC, wearing a pink fringed Stetson, said ‘right let’s have the grooms to lead us in The Slosh’. I cried when the people of my country decided ‘it’s time’ to legislate for equal marriage.

The next two photos are street scenes from Gaza. A man under the bonnet of his car, the typical webs of two-thirds-world electricity cables on the graffitied concrete walls and (looking closer) the holes in the concrete and in the beautiful patterns of ventilation tiles. A thin donkey harnessed to an empty cart waits patiently in the sun while two wee boys are in a shaded doorway, one winding something on a stick. Fairy lights above a closed shop.

Then, two blonde White women, both wearing a voluminous white blouse and a long black skirt, trundle smart suitcases and tote Lululemon bags (from the store in Glasgow?) bearing inspirational messages that are full of plastic-wrapped teddy bears from the congregation of Dunfermline Abbey, on the ‘long walk through no-man’s land between Israel and Gaza’.

Two photos: the rusted sign in English and Arabic over the steel plates and delicate tracery of the gate of the Ahli Arab Hospital; and Suheila Tarazi the Director, gesticulating with a pen as she says: ‘We are part of a mosaic picture – whether Christians, or Muslims, or Jews – and we have to keep this hospital as a witness of Christianity working in Gaza…we are small instruments to do God’s work.’

Then Fr Mario, in his Catholic black clericals and white collar, makes a point sitting on a worn brown sofa with a white phone behind him on the painted cream wall: ‘Our work is to preach about hope & pardon & forgiveness.’ Kate tells us that there are roughly 1,100 Christians in Gaza, 138 are Catholic (out of a pop. of 2 million).

Three photos titled ‘Morning beach walk in Gaza’ and the first just looks like flotsam and jetsam at the tideline until I notice the rods sticking up out of the sand. They might be seaweed. They might be barbed wire fence pickets to deter boats landing. The second has lovely smiles from girls in a peach, plum or black and white mosaic hijab, Kate’s in this selfie and smiles too. She’s not wearing a hijab. An attractive face, strong and honest, and determined, but there’s tension there. How could there not be? Then there are covered stalls on the beach and what I recognise as cabanas. A fishmarket? A marina beyond the harbour wall (is the harbour open at all?) and the city beyond. Grey cloud covers most of the blue sky.

Three photos from Rafah, near the border with Egypt, ‘glimpses of Gaza’. So this must be a neighbourhood or region. Concrete walls, bars on windows, washed underwear, shalwar kameez and a prayer mat hung out to dry in the sun. A white Subaru (is it a taxi?) driven by a bearded man with a smiling woman beside him and someone in the back, a big air conditioner outside a Wataniya mobile shop where three men look at plants on a horse-drawn cart. People wearing white herd sheep past buildings and white cars and carry what may be hay or wool on a cart.

Then thirteen little kids, with all the expressions that kids have everywhere, kneel around a multicoloured fabric circle (was it a balloon?) and play cat’s cradle with a smiling woman in a fawn hijab with white lace trim with coloured plastic bins and shelves full of toys and books. Beside two beach balls, surreal lines of poetry in beautiful handwriting on foolscap paper: ‘All of this gets in front/ All the world’s esophagus/ an[d the] Arabs/ […]’. A mystery, to me.

But Kate’s caption is clear: ‘Today the teddies were delivered to Lubna at the Near East Council of Churches to be distributed at their clinics which provide healthcare and psychosocial support to children throughout Gaza. Thank you @abbey_church @churchscotland!!’.  And a smiling young woman with a white cloth hairband carrying a more serious wee tot wearing a pink bolero top with puffed sleeves with a bow in her Champaign coloured dress and a Kirby grip in her hair. A slighty older woman with black hijab and glasses gesticulating in an office with a poster on a cork board behind her with Arabic and the red kangaroo of Australian Aid. And then the teddies. In a big transparent vacuum sealed clothes storage bag, with a sign from Dunfermline Abbey: ‘A Labour of Love’.

Four photos from Hilarion Monastery. Kate says it’s ‘a site dating back to the 4^th century & an important part of Gaza’s rich cultural heritage.’ Red tulip roses (?) with flower and thorn, outside, and inside a beautifully preserved leafy floor mosaic with a baptismal font in the centre. A basket of grapes in the centre of a patio mosaic with a surrounding peacock, a horse, an ibis, a swan, doves, a dog – and is that a hippo? Beyond the patio is the city. How will such treasure, the patrimony of humankind, survive?

Kate says goodbye to Gaza with the interculturally comprehensible Wataniya Arabic ‘W’ inside a heart on the concrete roadsign that reads ‘I love Gaza’.

Twenty-two photos. One for every letter of the alphabet I learned, lazily, at university where I studied alongside candidates for the ministry of the Church of Scotland. Hebrew is a language that some ancestors of mine may have spoken. Although the matrilineal descent was broken, when my German great-grandfather came to London, if the patronymic was passed down faithfully, then one of them may have been Aaron, brother of Moses, liberator of the oppressed.

In my naïve youth, I spend four months washing dishes and picking mangoes on a kibbutz opposite Tiberias, where the Rev Kate is stationed. There was no wall then but there was always war. I learned a little as I sat with Scottish and German girls making anklets and friendship bracelets, eating baklava and drinking endless cups of Arabic coffee from a lovely porcelain demi-tasse all afternoon with a Bedouin called Ali in his shop just off the Via Dolorosa. Leaving, I looked out over Jerusalem and thought that the only conclusions I had come to were that the Holy Land is so beautiful, and the situation so complex.

Thirty years on, I haven’t learned anything more.

But this I know. If ever there was an image of priesthood, it’s this: a woman walking a careful line through no man’s land. Taking teddy bears to Gaza.

 

The Other Refugees

On Saturday I attended the “Refugees Welcome” rally in George Square, in my native Glasgow, with my mother who was herself a refugee in time of war when for five years she forsook the banks of the Thames for the shores of the Irish Sea. My father’s people had crossed that sea three generations before and while my mother’s mother was from the West Highlands, her father’s father crossed the English Channel from Germany and his Hebrew surname dates back to an old story about an enslaved people fleeing for their lives across the Red Sea.

This isn’t the usual ‘everyone comes from somewhere else’ memo, true as that reminder is. This is about another group of refugees. Their cause cannot be proved to be as urgent as that of the millions who now face religious death squads, famine, disease, and the torturous labyrinth of the asylum process, should they be fortunate enough to even be admitted into it. Their cause is not, now, so urgent, not now, not at the moment but it has been so before and many of them fear that it may be so again. Not urgent, but important, and not just for them.

I, still, call myself a Roman Catholic, yet no-one blames me for the deaths of slaves and Christians in the Roman amphitheatres. No-one blames me for the blind spot the present pope has (for all his humility, simplicity and courage) about sexual ethics. No-one, at least no-one who knows my continued criticism of them, even blames me for the continued pastoral stupidity of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Scotland or for the vile outpourings of blatant prejudice of its clergy-fawning press. In short, the people of my country do not hold me accountable for the evils of the rulers, past and present, of the political State most closely associated with my religion and not even for the continuing evils of some of my coreligionists.

Why are some Scots not using the same common sense with the Jews?

I know racist people and I know those who hate Islam because they hate religion (usually because of vile prejudice that stems from the influence of White, Christian missionaries). Such people do not convince anyone of goodwill or who has any grasp at all of European history. I am not going to argue against racism or against Islamophobia because there is no need: they are indefensible.

Apparently some Scots don’t feel the same way about anti-Semitism.

‘I am Jewish’ and ‘I am Israeli’ are not identical statements; neither are ‘I am Israeli’ and ‘I support the policy of the Israeli government’. I do not ignore the atrocities carried out by Israeli soldiers; neither do I ignore those carried out by British or American soldiers. I do not ignore the deadly game of chess that the colonial powers, notably Britain and France, played in 1948 in the Near East (no, the Levant is not the Middle East) nor the atrocities carried out by the Christian hordes of the Middle Ages (on Muslims, on Jews, on women) nor those carried being out today by Daesh. All this must continue to provide a context for the fear (is it paranoia?) of being ‘swept into the sea’ while the surrounding powers-that-be do what they have always done for the protection of the Jews: nothing.

My Roman Catholic coreligionists who display such culpable and malevolent stupidity are stuck in the past. When the four Scottish banks wouldn’t employ a Catholic. When you had to change your school name on your CV. When you had to be guarded with your surname. This clannish fortress mentality sees the compassion and common sense that caused a country to declare that ‘it’s time’ for equal marriage as a personal attack on all they hold dear. As if G_d were not Merciful and Compassionate!

But no-one blames me for that.

Can we please stop blaming the Jews?

Do I have to mention the cultural impoverishment that happens (not ‘would happen’ yes, disgracefully, we Europeans have experience of this) when the Jews are no longer here? Do I have to recall the eminent Jewish men and women who with clear-sighted intellect have graced our progress as a civilisation? The empresarios? The entertainers? The artists, novelists? Our friends, lovers and family?

Can we, together, as Scots, realise that knowing someone’s ancestral religion gives no clue as to their current political position in regard to the ideology of another country? If anyone wants to know my position as regards Ulster/ Ireland/ Eire/ The Six Counties they had better be prepared for an intensive course in history and cultural studies, if they have the temerity to ask me, or worse to presume to know what my position is without asking. Will it surprise anyone to know that my basic view is: it’s complicated?

What isn’t complicated is to stop making assumptions. A good friend this evening told me that he is thinking of leaving this country. My country. His country. He’s thinking of becoming a refugee. No, he’s not poor, he’s healthy and he has a UK passport. He won’t starve and he won’t be homeless. But if he goes, to Manchester, to London, to the USA, to Canada, to Israel, he will be a refugee. He will be fleeing from our refusal of Scottish hospitality, from our lack of canny commonsense, from our ignorance of kinship. My father fought and suffered years of imprisonment in a war waged by those who tried to wipe out the Jews and eradicate them from Europe. I cannot but take up his cause. Times have changed since the crossing of the Red Sea. These people are our people. These people are my people. Don’t let my people go!

Thanks to Carlos Sardá for releasing his photo “The Jewish Cemetery” into the Public Domain.