Saint Cyril of Jerusalem and the poverty of philosophy

St Cyril of Jerusalem

Today, the seventh of May, is one of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem’s two feast days in the Orthodox Church—the other one, the commemoration of his repose, being on the eighteenth of March. This is the day on which the miraculous appearance of the Cross in the skies over Golgotha and the Mount of Olives occurred in the year 351, and Saint Cyril’s is commemorated for his role in witnessing this event.

Not much is known of Saint Cyril’s early life. He was born in 315 and became a priest at the age of 31, in 346, and was elevated to the archbishopric four years later. His archbishopric was marked by a decades-long string of exiles, imprisonments and persecutions: under Emperor Constantius, under Emperor Julian the Apostate, and under Emperor Valens. Yet Saint Cyril somehow managed, in the midst of it all, to retain his humanity and trust in God—over against the princes and sons of men who seemingly always and everywhere opposed him. Saint Cyril spent all of his own wealth providing for the citizens of Jerusalem during a famine, and even pawned off Church utensils in order to buy grain for those who were starving. At another time, Saint Cyril was said to have prophesied that Julian the Apostate’s attempts to rebuild the Jewish Temple would come to naught—and later a series of disasters struck the Temple such that construction couldn’t continue.

If his hagiography is to be believed, then, like the Scriptural God he glorifies, Saint Cyril was emphatically not a fan of sedentary architecture.

Yet Saint Cyril is important, not for his miracles or for his prophecies or even for his works of charity, but instead for the writings and the teachings that he left. I have recently returned to reading his Catechetical Lectures. It is stunning how much I garnered, going back for a reread.

In my own anti-philosophical mood, reinforced by the occurrences in Gaza and a certain well-known continental philosopher’s morally-indefensible stands on this and other current events, I find myself in particular drawn to Saint Cyril’s prophetic invective against the Hellenic philosophers of his own time:

There is need of a wakeful soul, since there are many that make spoil through philosophy and vain deceit. The Greeks on the one hand draw men away by their smooth tongue, for honey droppeth from a harlot’s lips: whereas they of the Circumcision deceive those who come to them by means of the Divine Scriptures, which they miserably misinterpret though studying them from childhood to old age, and growing old in ignorance. (Lecture IV)

In his lecture against heresy, Saint Cyril correctly upbraids the philosophers in the point of his jeremiad against Manichaeism for ‘not… reproving the king in the cause of truth’ and ‘not… destroying the idols’. The promise of Plato’s Socrates, and the promise of Aristotle, that men might be made their own masters through the search for truth along the path of reason—is a deception. Philosophy is a path, not to self-mastery, but to self-idolatry.

If the entire Strauss-Kojève debate shows us anything useful, it is that Saint Cyril is right on the money at that point. The entire Western philosophical project in fact enslaves the human being to a mode of language and its use, that will always and everywhere serve the purposes of would-be Pharaohs, Alexanders, Caesars, Napoleons and Hitlers. Philosophy cannot speak truth to power, but will ultimately always be the slave of power¹. The only way to win the philosophers’ semantic shell game is not to play. Why is this? It’s because Socrates’s entire aim, to start with, is flawed. In his fallen state, man is not his own master, and cannot be.

So then, where can we turn?

The Palestinian Patriarch’s point of reference, as for Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Ephraim the Syrian, is always Scripture. Though we are not made aware in his hagiography of his parentage, Saint Cyril reads Scripture the way a Syriac or a Palestinian—that is to say, as a Semite—does. Saint Cyril speaks as a pedagogue, not as a debater or a polemicist, of Scripture.

The catechumens to whom Saint Cyril delivered these addresses during Great Lent, would have heard Scripture, read aloud to them, in the context of the Divine Liturgy before they would have been called upon to depart. These writings that Saint Cyril has left to us, likewise, were first delivered as lectures to the catechumens. Saint Cyril’s method is as important as the message: he appeals to what is written, and attempts thereupon to interpret all of the catechumens’ questions about the Symbol of Faith.

For Saint Cyril, the rational intellect is something that must be yoked, and brought under the discipline of the text. This is in order to bring the catechumens’ behaviour into accord with Scriptural statutes, and the will of the Scriptural God:

Seek not the things that are too deep for thee, neither search out the things that are above thy strength: what is commanded thee, think thereupon. (Lecture VI)

To give one example, when discussing the Mystery of Baptism, does he go into abstruse theologising over the symbolism of the waters? Not in the least. He says instead:

What then must you do? And what are the fruits of repentance? Let him that hath two coats give to him that hath none… and he that hath meat, let him do likewise. Wouldst thou enjoy the grace of the Holy Spirit, yet judgest the poor not worthy of bodily food? (Lecture III)

Baptism entails upon itself a change, not only in mind, not only in ideas, but in comportment. And the measuring-stick is not any creed, not any mental formula: it is concrete love of neighbour… and that, as understood in the context of the Law of Moses, the Books and the Prophets.

Once more, in discoursing upon God the Father, and the relationship between the Father and the Son, Saint Cyril pointedly does not come to any philosophical conclusion regarding the oneness or the many-ness of the substance or the nature or the will of God the Father:

I have ever wondered at the curiosity of the bold men, who by their imagined reverence fall into impiety. For though they know nothing of Thrones, and Dominions, and Principalities, and Powers, the workmanship of Christ, they attempt to scrutinise their Creator Himself. Tell me first, O most daring man, wherein does Throne differ from Dominion, and then scrutinise what pertains to Christ… Not even the Holy Ghost Himself has spoken in the Scriptures concerning the generation of the Son from the Father. Why then dost thou busy thyself about things which not even the Holy Ghost has written in the Scriptures? Thou that knowest not the things which are written, busiest thou thyself about the things which are not written? (Lecture XI)

Instead, he comes to the conclusion that

the first virtue of godliness in Christians is to honour their parents, to requite the troubles of those who begat them, and with all their might to confer on them what tends to their comfort… (Lecture VII)

What is important to St Cyril is not to dispute over the underlying attributes or inner relations of the Persons (let alone about even whether or not they are ‘persons’, in the language of Greek philosophy!), but instead what is implied from the Scriptural Godhead in how we should behave, from the love of the Father for His Son. In other words, St Cyril places himself and his catechumenate under the didactic hand of Scripture. He does not try to philosophise it; nor does he try to read it as history or as science. His concern is chiefly the manner in which we behave, and finds that Scripture will judge us on not on how we think, but on what we do:

We do nothing without the body. We blaspheme with the mouth, and with the mouth we pray. With the body we commit fornication, and with the body we keep chastity. With the hand we rob, and by the hand we bestow alms; and the rest in like manner. Since then the body has been our minister in all things, it shall also share with us in the future the fruits of the past. (Lecture XVIII)

This saintly Patriarch, the direct apostolic predecessor to the current Patriarch Theophilos III, speaks as much to Christians now, not to sit aside idly and watch as the Holy Land burns once again. Instead, we are to follow the statutes and commandments of the One Scriptural God, and to love our neighbours, today: not just in the idle chatter of the philosophers, but in truth.

What is commanded thee: think thereupon. Amen.

^{1. That’s how someone like Žižek can pretend, and perhaps even delude himself, that he’s doing something liberating… when in fact he’s actively and consciously demonising the Arabs at the same time as they’re being slaughtered en masse by the Israelis, and cravenly serving his NATO paymasters’ interests at the same time.↩}

Peace will surely come

A letter to Palestine from Faina Savenkova, the children’s author in the Donbass. I have no comment of my own to add; it suffices to let her speak for herself:

Hello, Palestine!

My name is Faina. All my short life I have lived in war. I know what a blockade is. I know what it’s like to be under fire. I know how it is when people are dying not far away, but you hold on with all your might because your whole family needs water. I know what it is to realize that old people and children have been and are being killed by weapons supplied by the West, and you can do nothing. Every day, like you, we bury our fathers and mothers and children. They destroy, like you, hospitals, and temples just because we want to be free and happy. I know what war is. I know what it is to lose friends, but I ask you to hold on and not to despair. We will cope with everything, no matter how hard it is.

In Donetsk and Lugansk there is the Alley of Angels. There is a memorial there dedicated to the children who were killed by Ukraine. I can say with bitterness that Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria have their own Alley of Angels who died under destroyed mosques and churches. Because the world is unjust and cruel, and the enemy is merciless. But I have hope that Donbass, Syria, and Palestine will be free and children will stop dying from shells. And the souls of the victims of these wars will look down on us from heaven, protecting our fragile lives. That’s what will happen. That’s what I believe. I do not know what will happen tomorrow to each of us, for we all live in war, but peace will surely come.

With love to you,
your friend Faina Savenkova

Of Guatemala and Gaza

This past Tuesday, after two and a half years of construction and labour of those monastics and faithful under the guidance of Archimandrite Evangelos Patá, a seminary and mission centre opened in the Huehuetenango District of Guatemala, reports Pravoslavie.Ru. The Orthodox community in Guatemala is one of the explosive success stories of twenty-first century Orthodox mission work, particularly after 2010 when 500,000 Guatemalans—mostly indigenous Maya people—converted en masse. A steady stream of converts into the Orthodox Church has continued since then.

This new seminary and mission centre will ‘serve the spiritual, educational and administrative needs of the faithful’, who are As Fr John Chakos puts it on his blog: ‘The palpable joy that filled this day reflected the vibrant Christian faith of the long suffering Mayan people who endured much throughout their tragic history, but never lost hope.’

How true this is. The ‘tragic history’ of the Guatemalan Mayan people is one which can be attributed directly to American imperialism and the legacy of colonialism. During this time, the Guatemalan military and government forces, trained by the School of the Americas and funded by the American government, used ‘scorched earth’ tactics against the Indigenous people of the country: including death squads, ‘disappearances’, strafing from helicopters, internment camps, forced starvation, torture and sexual violence. Leftists, labour leaders and union organisers were also subjected to this targetted violence from the state. Canadian folk-rock musician Bruce Cockburn, after visiting Guatemala during this time, wrote the song ‘If I Had a Rocket Launcher’ specifically about this situation.

The flocking of Indigenous Maya Guatemalans to the Orthodox Church in the present day, may be considered one of the fruits, primarily, of the career of Archimandrite Andrés Girón, a cleric who took up the cause of the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala, specifically during this time of the US-backed military dictatorship in the 1980s. For his efforts, Archimandrite Giron was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church on account of his pro-Indigenous stand, and he fled to Mexico after several assassination attempts on him by the right-wing government, after which he joined the Orthodox Church and continued his advocacy work. Although he was an agrarian-minded Christian and not a Marxist, he gained the moniker ‘Father Revolutionary’ from both his supporters and his opponents, particularly when he began supporting progressive land reforms which would benefit the Indigenous peoples. He even began political action against the US-backed military government, at the head of the left-wing, anti-capitalist Asociación Nacional Campesina Pro-Tierra, and direct action by occupying and farming land collectively for the benefit of the people living there.

Archimandrite Andrés Girón

Even though his electoral campaigns did not win him much support in terms of government reform, the Indigenous Mayans quickly gravitated to his social ideals, not to mention his religious convictions. At a time when the Catholic Church was divided between a reactionary hierarchy and a liberation-theological parish priesthood (and the hierarchy winning out more often than not); and when Evangelical Protestantism was marching in lockstep with state violence and American-style capitalism and white supremacy; Orthodox Christianity began to look all the more attractive. When Fr Andrés Girón joined the Orthodox Church in 2010, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Mayans came with him. Stop me if any of this starts to sound familiar.

I beat this drum a lot. I have remarked before, and repeatedly, that the Indigenous peoples of Asia and America are a valuable witness within Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy at its best does not see Indigenous traditions and languages as things to be assimilated from the outside or suppressed from above. It values these traditions and languages in themselves, and transfigures them from the inside.

Orthodox womens’ monastery in Kyltovo, Komi Republic, Russia

For example: Orthodox Bibles, prayer books, patericons and religious texts have been published in Indigenous languages such as Sakha, Nenets, Evenki, Chukchi, Khanty, Skolt Sámi, Komi, Veps, Aleut and Tlingit and Yup’ik. Saint Innocent of Irkutsk, Saint Herman the Wonderworker of Alaska and, later, Saint Tikhon of Moscow defended Indigenous rights against oppression and exploitation first by Russian and later by American pecuniary interests and colonisation. (One can see from these examples that the witness of Fr Andrés Girón was not without precedent!) But Indigenous people themselves have contributed to Orthodoxy in profound and ineluctable ways. Saint Peter the Aleut, Saint Jacob Netsvetov, Saint Olga of Alaska... these Indigenous saints have deeply and without question enriched the experience of American Orthodoxy. And the former two of these saints did so, while Indigenous people in the Americas were undergoing one of the worst genocides of human history.

Now, let us turn our attention, for the sake of comparison, to another Indigenous people. The people of the country of Palestine are descended, indisputably from a scientific and genetic point of view, from the ancient Levantines. Modern Palestinians are genetically closest to the Bronze Age inhabitants of Canaan, with unbroken ancestral roots in the Levant going back nearly 4000 years. (We ethnic Ashkenazim simply cannot claim the same thing: over forty percent of our autosomal ancestral DNA originates in Western Europe--France and Germany.) What appears clear now, is that this Indigenous population of the ancient Holy Land has undergone numerous cultural and religious and linguistic shifts through the millennia. So although Palestinians are culturally Arabic, and the majority are Muslims, their presence in the place where they are long predates the Arab conquests and the rise of Islâm!

Church of St Porphyrios, Gaza, Palestine

Indeed, Palestinians were among the first Christians. Gaza was a Christian city. The Church of Saint Porphyrios, which was bombarded by the Israel Occupation Forces two weeks into their current war, dates back over sixteen hundred years. Gaza was home to Christian saints such as Bishop Saint Porphyrios himself, Abba Dorotheos, Saint Vitalios and Saint Silvanos, to name but a few. Before Palestine was Muslim, Palestinians followed Jesus Christ. And before Palestinians followed Christ, Palestinians were without question among the people who worshipped the God of the Hebrews, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, at the Second Temple.

Despite the prevarication and mealy-mouthed excuses that issue from on high in Washington and New York, there can be very little doubt now that what is going on right now as we speak, in the home territory of this very oldest of Christian Churches, is a genocide of the Palestinian people, at the hands of another US-backed far-right parafascist government: complete with scorched-earth tactics, death squads, weaponised starvation, torture, sexual violence. In short, the Palestinians now are suffering everything that the Indigenous Guatemalans faced from the military dictatorship of that country in the 80s and 90s. And the American government backs the Israeli fascists to the hilt.

Archbishop Alexios of Gaza

But if there is another Indigenous genocide occurring right now in Gaza, there is also another Fr Andrés Girón, in the saintly Archbishop Alexios of Gaza. Archbishop Alexios has courageously declared that he will not abandon his flock there even if he is the last Christian standing in Gaza. And he has dedicated his work to giving food and clean water and shelter to any who have come to need it, even as they are being denied these by the military. And he has rededicated himself to praying for the dead, the dead without number: and many of these dead are Christians.

The Indigenous Christians of the Holy Land need our solidarity, and they need it now more than ever. But, just as Efraín Ríos Montt has gone down to Sheol, while the relatives of people he ordered to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands are flocking to the Church to be joined to Christ, so too will Netanyahu and his hateful right-wing butcher-regime and his death squads go down to the pit, while the names of the innocents who died at Saint Porphyrios shall be sung by the heavenly choirs without end. Of this I am sure. And if God wills it, may He let Gaza again breathe, be free and be green, as Guatemala may now (to a certain extent) do.

Iraq War III, Syria War II, Yemen War II

Man, I get sick to death of this culture of remakes. Hollywood really doesn’t have any new or original ideas, do they? It’s just Iron Man this, Batman that: military abuses abroad, police abuses at home. And even the focus group-tested corporate-boardroom storylines don’t change. Or rather, I should say, the lies. We have to bomb Iraq because of… wait, what again? Weapons of mass destruction? Oh, wait, no, it’s those evil Eye-ranians up to their no-good tricks. Because three soldiers are dead who… wait, what were they doing there, again? Why were they there? I thought the Iraqi government had already given us the eviction notice? Or several? Why were they even there in the first place?

So, under Biden we have another war. Another unilateral illegal military action, without Congressional approval, open-ended, with no strategy for either victory or exit. And we have declared it, make no mistake, on the people of Iraq—who apparently haven’t suffered enough these past two decades on our account—and on the people of Syria, who apparently also haven’t suffered enough these past dozen years. Oh, and on the people of Yemen just for good measure, because why not? Clearly 377,000 dead people, mostly children, in that country didn’t get that message across firmly enough. And of course, we have also declared war on truth, because American imperium has no greater enemy than reality.

But tell me again how it’s those evil Eye-ranians who are to blame. Or the Russians, always the Russians. As Ginsberg put it: ‘Its them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.’ Point the finger anywhere but at Washington, anywhere but at Hollywood, anywhere but at Wall Street, anywhere but at yourself—in short, anywhere but at those actually responsible.

I’m sick. I’m not motion-sick; there is no motion, and that’s the problem. I’m sick to death. I’m sick of the lies. And I’m sick that children die, under the flag that I’m told is mine, while we all clap along passively in the theatre and wait for the after-credits teaser that previews the next million children to die. I beg God to let me leave the room, but I can’t. What else can I do? They’re not going to stop the reel no matter how much I object, and attract the heckling of the people in back who are still in their trances. But there’s nothing else for me to do, except pray.

Six Walks in a disappearing wilderness

Cross-posted from Silk and Chai:

I just finished reading Palestinian Walks—a poignant and tragic memoir by human rights lawyer, author and Palestinian activist Raja Shehadeh about his work in the Holy Land over the course of nearly four decades. Shehadeh, who is an ethnic Palestinian Christian, makes numerous Scriptural references owing to the simple fact that he lives where Scripture was written, and where the events of Scripture took place. But his spirituality is not of an overt, apologist or confessional nature; indeed, his attitude toward organised religion in general is self-avowedly ‘cynical’. Living in a land which is riven by communal factionalism and self-serving zealotry on the part of the settlers, does understandably tend to leave a bad taste in the mouth when it comes to theological questions. But rather, we can see that spirituality most clearly in his meditations on the shifting ecological balance and the fragile disappearing landscapes he loves so dearly. He is very much so a lover of the land and its people, a fact which comes through painfully in every chapter. Glimmers and moments of his faith in Christianity do emerge, however—particularly in his visit to the Monastery of St George Choziba in Wadi Qelt.

To get a good grasp of the tenor of the book, it’s necessary to quote Shehadeh at length about the nature of these walks he would take. Here is his description of the sarḥa (سرحة), which is the term he uses for the sort of walk he would do:

It was mainly young men who went on these expeditions. They would take a few provisions and go to the open hills, disappear for the whole day, sometimes for weeks and months. They often didn't have a particular destination. To go on a sarha was to roam freely, at will, without restraint. The verb form of the word means to let the cattle out to pasture early in the morning, leaving them to wander and graze at liberty. The commonly used noun sarha is a colloquial corruption of the classical word. A man going on a sarha wonders aimlessly, not restricted by time and place, going where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself. But not any excursion would qualify as a sarha. Going on a sarha implies letting go.

Shehadeh’s evocation of the sarḥa rather mirrors the false etymology that Henry David Thoreau posits for ‘saunter’ (from ‘sainte-terre’) as a sort of pilgrimage, though one without a fixed aim. I have little doubt that this choice was intentional on Shehadeh’s part, even if it’s left unsaid. Shehadeh demonstrates a firm command of English-language literature regarding his home country, and an enviable degree of appreciation for its artistry—even as he chides figures like WM Thackeray, Herman Melville and Mark Twain for their unappreciative, imperialist’s-eye view of his country and his people.

Shehadeh describes a landscape in which every ridge, crest, rock, dry riverbed and hill-slope has a name—in Arabic, most commonly, but with the occasional Canaanite and Aramaic epithet arising. He describes an austerely exquisite panorama, not to everyone’s tastes, but with life and vibrancy enough to one trained in the ability to look for it. His careful—yet lively—descriptions of the geological features, of the local plant and animal life, and the ways in which his fellow Palestinians (and their goats, their grapevines and their earthen houses) came to a modus vivendi with their near-desert surroundings, all bear witness to the personal stake he has in the well-being of this place.

Yet despite this naturalist, travelogue feel, Palestinian Walks is very much so a memoir, a personal text. He describes the effort his maternal uncle, Abu Ameen, put into constructing a qasr, essentially a cottage, in the wilderness of Harrasha—and the quirky romance he enjoyed with his hardworking bride, Zariefeh, as they spent their honeymoon hauling rocks and setting them into place. We get to see some of the family dynamics, too. Raja Shehadeh belongs to that educated class of Palestinians, who were drawn into the British administration at Jaffa… although they all hailed from Ramallah. He describes the differences in attitude between his two uncles: one who went off to Jaffa to become a ‘successful’ administrator; and the other who stayed behind and lived stubbornly in the desert hills outside of Ramallah, neither knowing or needing any other kind of life.

A personal streak runs throughout each of these sarḥât. Raja describes one of the first land cases that he took up on receiving his law degree, defending the title of a certain Palestinian named François Albina (who was referred to as ‘the Christian’ landowner by his Muslim neighbours in Beit ‘Ur, in contradistinction to another large landowner nearby whom his neighbours called ‘the Jew’). He details much of the history behind this case, including how the Israeli settlers—with the entire machinery of the Israeli legal system and seemingly bottomless foreign pockets behind them—resorted to practically every trick of legal chicanery and sleight-of-hand in order to undercut Albina’s claim to the land… and even essentially blackmail him into abandoning that same claim by demanding compensation for its use. Raja also describes how this served as an almost perfect test case: the defendant was an independent landowner who was not a Muslim. Yet the Israeli judiciary, despite being forced at every turn by Raja’s argument to acknowledge that Albina had an incontestable and continuous presence on and claim to his own land, ultimately decided on an expansive interpretation of an Israeli military order that gave the go-ahead for settlers to take it and build on it anyway.

Raja’s description of the wall that went up, straight through Albina’s property, is heart-wrenching. Instead of a gentle hillside shaded by pine trees, there was a garish, sixteen-foot concrete wall separating a nestle of villas in a gated community for Israeli high-tech IT employees, with a highway running to the coast, all lit by electric floodlights, overshadowing what remained of the Palestinian community in Beit ‘Ur. He describes both the intrusion of the built space, and all of the architectural choices which accompanied it, as perfectly keyed to stir up animosity and hatred between the two sides, assuring that violence would become an issue later. This point is driven home as, later, in the same vicinity, Raja and his wife Penny end up being shot at by Palestinian militants (Raja doesn’t say Ḥamâs specifically) even after calling to them in Arabic to stop.

Raja Shehadeh makes no bones about the fact that he refuses to consider violence as a legitimate tool. His weapon of choice is the law. His reasons for this are not religious at all, but primarily secular and practical: he knows full well that the Palestinians will not be able to outgun or outkill the Israelis; and he also understands that no peace arrived at through bloodshed is capable of being permanent. He also takes a long-term, generational view of the conflict… though to what extent this view is the product of hindsight in view of the Oslo Accords (which undermined practically all of his legal work defending Palestinian land claims) is unclear.

The Oslo Accords loom large in Shehadeh’s narrative as a kind of classical nemesis. In his view, the Palestinians who came to Oslo were essentially lulled into a false sense of security by the theatrics of hospitality put on by their Norwegian hosts, while the Israelis essentially walked away with the legal rights to the proverbial lock, stock and barrel. Although Shehadeh clearly, and for very good personal reasons, shuns and deplores the violence of the militants, still he views the political opportunism and low cunning of Fataḥ and the PLO more generally in still-bleaker terms: having sold out the patrimony of their people in exchange for aid money and pats on the head from Western governments. (In this, he echoes a sentiment I’ve heard repeatedly in Antiochian and Palestinian Christian circles, particularly with regard to Mahmoud Abbas.) One sees a lot of this frustration in his third sarḥa down to the Dead Sea, which he takes in the company of a young PLO member who talks about the Oslo Accords with a nigh-intolerable rose-tinted naïveté. Here he also describes with alarm the disappearing biome and impending ecological catastrophe which can be observed in the lowering line of the Dead Sea, as Israeli interests divert the fresh water of the Jordan.

In another rare flash of religiosity, Raja Shehadeh describes his pilgrimage to the Monastery of Saint George Choziba in the chapter which follows. He is more comfortable, it seems, referring to figures of the Old Testament (like King David and the Prophet Isaiah) than to the figures of the New—but given where he lives and what his context is, perhaps this is not so strange. Again: his attitude toward religion in general is a negative one. Given what he has described of the overt religiosity of the Israeli settlers, which somehow coexists with callous disregard for neighbour, with casual violence and with absolute comfort in the one-sided and prejudicial use of the machinery of law… this is understandable. And yet he approaches the monastery, sixteen centuries old, with its fortified walls, its dark incensed cloistered interior, its candle-lit icons, with an attitude of deep respect and admiration, if only in the sense of inspiration for the ordering of one’s own life, or the attitude which a people under siege need to adopt.

Raja Shehadeh’s cloister of choice was a modest home with a courtyard in Ramallah… though even this was not inviolate of Israeli brutality, as he learned the hard way when his town came under siege and later occupation. More to the point, perhaps, is that writing became the discipline through which he could manage the defeats, the insults, the violence and the hopelessness which had become the common lot of his people. He discusses, in the context of a sarḥa which the two of them took together, the long friendship he has with Dr Mustafa Barghouti of the PNI Party, and the differences which their lives took. Raja Shehadeh began as a lawyer and ended up as a writer; Mustafa Barghouti began as a medical doctor and ended up as a politician. Yet the two men share a conviction that the Palestinian struggle must be waged in civil society and in terms of generations rather than intifadas.

The final chapter is a harrowing one, but it’s one which I think Shehadeh relates masterfully, simply from a literary standpoint. He describes getting lost right around Dolev, where he grew up—not because of his failing memory, but because the landscape itself had changed so much as to be unrecognisable to him. He ends up finding his way back to Ramallah by process of elimination: all the places which are blocked off to him by Israeli settlements, border walls or checkpoints. He describes a tense encounter with a young, armed Israeli settler who has snuck out of Dolev in order to smoke hashish. The conversation between the two is narrated excellently: a confrontation between two views of the same place that have been shaped by different values and different realms of knowledge. Placing this conversation at the end of the book, after we have been given this personal history of legal struggle and attempts to conserve some semblance of legal consideration for both the landscape and its original inhabitants, was a shrewd choice on Shehadeh’s part: we can see the clear delineation between his view and the ‘settler’ view. Shehadeh is a conservationist and a believer in the rule of law; the settler he encounters is a believer in material progress and victors’ justice. Yet in the end the two of them come, if not to an understanding, then at least to an uneasy truce over the nargileh (punctuated poignantly by the sounds of distant gunfire—whose ‘side’ it is, neither can tell).

Palestinian Walks is a book that I would strongly recommend as a means of understanding the (both literal, figurative and historical) lay of the land in the Israel-Palestine conflict, as well as the common experience that shapes the convictions of the Palestinian side of that conflict. The author—a nominal Christian and a functional pacifist—is nonetheless an authoritative voice for a people who are predominantly Muslim and who are committed to a resistance which can turn, as we have seen, violent. It’s also valuable as an English-language travelogue. However he might chide and wag his finger at the likes of Melville and Thackeray and Twain, what Shehadeh has given us could easily be placed alongside them as a companion-piece, painting in intimate colours the intricate but endangered desert ecology and human communities of the West Bank.

One last note. My own view is that it’s a grim necessity, in these days, to engage in such intentional book-reading as a counterpoint to the prevailing media narratives over the recent conflict. You are not going to get the truth about this or any conflict abroad from CNN, from Fox News, from the New York Times or from the Wall Street Journal, which are all mouthpieces for the State Department and committed to a singular liberal ideology and historical myopia which colours their entire editorial perspective. The benefit of reading books like Shehadeh’s, is that such reading can help someone who is distant and removed from the conflict gain a sense of context, a sense of historical grounding, which is not otherwise available in our information landscape. Although Shehadeh is somewhat self-deprecating about his chosen means of coping with political defeat and the disaster befalling his people, his writing does serve this very needful and, dare I say, God-pleasing purpose.

Raja Shehadeh

Russia, Palestine and ‘moral equivalence’

I.

With regard to the war in Ukraine, I’m in a relatively strange position. When the most recent phase of the war began in February 2022, I was firmly opposed to Russia’s incursion, though I reserved a series of criticisms of the Ukrainian government with an eye to the injustices against Russophone Ukrainians and ethnic minorities in places like Bukovina and Transcarpathia which preceded it. My reasons for opposing the Russian war effort were, in retrospect, perhaps a trifle naïve. I thought the initial attack by Russia against Kharkov was inhumane and inexcusable, given that Kharkov was the site where Russophone Ukrainians first came under violent attack from the Ukrainian SBU back in April of 2014.

Later events and revelations caused me to significantly revise my stance. Whereas before I was critically pro-Ukraine in the current conflict for principled anti-war reasons, I am now critically pro-Russia… for principled anti-war reasons. I still think that the Russian armed forces have made significant strategic errors and tactical bungles in the prosecution of the war, and that the political leadership has been… inconsistent. But several factors caused me to change my view. Firstly, there were the revelations from Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud that western nations were conducting military exercises in the Black Sea and that the Ukrainian military were ramping up attacks on Donbas before 24 February 2022. Secondly, there were the Russian peace proposals in April of 2022 that the Western bloc, and the United Kingdom in particular, did their level best to scupper. Thirdly, there were the striking admissions by high-ranking European and American officials such as Angela Merkel and François Hollande, that the West never intended to abide by the Minsk Agreements but instead use them as a time-buying pretext to arm Kiev for war.

Although none of these three reasons by itself constitutes a valid casus belli for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (at least, in light of Western Christian just war theory), when taken together as a pattern, they cast Russia’s actions in an entirely different light. Russia was acting in response to a series of premeditated, offensive provocations from the West. And Russia had attempted numerous times to come to a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. These factors convinced me that Russia’s actions were in fact defensive rather than offensive, and that the Ukrainian nation as a whole had been grievously abused by the Western bloc, and made to serve as a catspaw to advance Western plans to weaken and compromise Russia’s political process and territorial integrity. Basically, everything the West accused Russia of doing to Ukrainian society, the West was actually doing (or planning to do) to Russian. I think it is fair to say that my previous critically pro-Ukrainian position was already being revised by July, and was already critically pro-Russian by January of this year.

I can still understand and sympathise, to a limited degree, with the attitude of anti-war moral outrage over the February 2022 Russian incursion. After all, I shared in it! But, as the great British economist John Maynard, Baron Keynes, is often famously credited with saying: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind, sir—what do you do?’ Just as the first impressions of Elizabeth Bennet of Mr Darcy and Mr Wickham had to be revised as enough of the facts became known to her and pointed to an entirely different interpretation and colouring of events and circumstances, so I too all but had to revise my position concerning the events of February 2022.

I also began to notice, in the prosecution of the ‘special military operation’, that Russia’s tactics and overall military doctrine were aimed not at territorial conquest at all costs, but instead at the degradation of Ukrainian military capacity and the protection (insofar as possible) of civilian lives. This was clearly not owing to Russian military weakness and strategical stupidity, but owing to an active choice on the part of the Russian chiefs of staff. Inexcusable high-profile incidents such as Bucha notwithstanding (and in the awareness that a full-scale impartial investigation has yet to be conducted), the Russian armed forces have taken great pains to remove civilian populations from positions of physical danger, and direct their attacks as exclusively as possible at military targets—most of these being along the line of contact.

As of four days ago, the UN Human Rights Office has reported that over the past 20 months, 10,000 civilians have been killed in the Russo-Ukrainian War. This sounds like a lot, and indeed there can be no moral excuse for such death as in any modern war. But for a modern armed conflict, Russia is actually incurring a comparatively low rate of civilian deaths. For comparison: the Iraq Body Count project (which is in fact probably a severe underestimate of civilian deaths) showed that American servicemen were responsible for over 20,000—twice as many—confirmed Iraqi civilian deaths across a similar period of time. (And the Iraq War was in fact a war of choice, and no such tragic conflict of two nations’ defensive claims as the Russo-Ukrainian War is!)

It is also worth noting that there is no active armed resistance to speak of against Russian rule inside the territories that Russia is occupying. There are a handful of far-right neo-Nazi Russian paramilitaries and criminal groups associated with the so-called ‘Irpin Declaration’ in armed opposition to the Russian government. But these seem to operate exclusively out of Ukrainian-controlled territory and enjoy practically zero support in Russian-controlled Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhzh’e and Kherson oblasts. A critical thinker is forced to wonder why this is. If Russia really were behaving as the brutal, imperialistic, homicidal territorial aggressor so commonly portrayed, then why are the civilians in the territories it controls acquiescing to Russian rule so passively and meekly? Why not take up arms against the oppressor?

II.

This context also formed in large part my attitude toward the current war being waged by Israel against Gaza. To engage in any analysis of this conflict is to step into a rhetorical minefield. This is because the Cold War-relic snarl-phrase of ‘moral equivalence’ is again being bandied about with great abandon over the past month and a half, notably by Sam Harris, Bill Maher, Jonathan Tobin, Alan Dershowitz and other such liberast luminaries. Condemnations of ‘moral equivalence’ in this context are very nearly equivalent to a ‘how dare you!!’ non-argument. It’s almost an emotive reflex, to the effect of: How dare you liken us enlightened ones, us democratic and human-rights-respecting heroes, to those unspeakable and irredeemable villains, terrorists, baby-killers and death-cultists over there?

The first and foremost philosophical problem with condemning ‘moral equivalence’, in fact a huge problem on its face, is that all moral reasoning relies to some degree on drawing analogies between disparate situations such that certain equivalencies can be meaningfully derived. Practically all systems of ethics in Western thought going back to Plato and Aristotle rely at their basis on analogical arguments and reasoning. Plato in particular was famous for using analogies (‘the divided line’), parables (the Charioteer, the Cave, the Man chained to a Lion and a Many-Headed Beast) and even myths (Atlantis, the Ring of Gyges) to draw the characters of his dramas—and with them, his readers—into a deeper understanding of the particular point of virtue or knowledge that he was exploring. Plato’s discursive methods were formalised into a system by his student-cum-rival Aristotle.

In a very real sense, all serious moral thinking in the West is an exercise in drawing equivalences, and the ‘how-dare-you’ demand to cease drawing such analogical equivalences is tantamount to demanding that we turn off our brains and toss out the very fundaments of Western ethical thought. In this case, a fortiori, the need for meaningful analogies, and a cogent language for evaluating such analogies, is paramount. For example: I note that these same talking-heads condemning ‘moral equivalence’ seem to have no objections to the rather spurious moral equivalence of Palestinians to Nazis that the Israeli authorities are wont to engage in.

Now, it should be obvious from this example that some analogies are better, closer and more cogent than others. The benefit of accepting equivalency and analogy as a valid method of moral reasoning, is that we are better equipped to say which equivalencies and analogies are invalid. The Germans during the Second World War were in command of their own state, for one thing. The Palestinians have no state. And they have a ‘government’ only in the most risibly loose of senses. The Germans had control over an entire financial sector, an entire industrial war machine, a command structure, including an air force, that the Palestinians completely lack. And, probably most importantly, the Germans were also driven by an ideology of racial superiority and social Darwinism, which, for reasons which should be obvious, holds no endogenous currency whatsoever among the Arabs of Palestine.

Regarding the neologism of ‘Islamofascism’, a coinage which circulates promiscuously among the same people who snarl against ‘moral equivalence’, the following must be said. We must speak of the Ikhwânism of Ḥamâs on its own demerits, and these are very real. It is disgusting beyond words that the Ḥamâs leadership lives like kings in places like Dubai and Doha while the Palestinian constituency they supposedly govern gets bombed to hell. But, while Ikhwânism may bear comparison to fascism in some respects, fascism is in a very real sense secular and nationalistic, in a way that even the most brutal and death-loving forms of Islamism are not.

III.

But, having established foremost the need for ‘moral equivalencies’ (in the most basic sense of simply having an analogical method for ethical comparison), I think it may be possible to begin to discuss the parallels between the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and the Israeli-Palestinian one a bit more cogently. Hopefully a more convincing case can be put forward than Biden’s senile and inchoate conflation of Russia and Ḥamâs as fellow-dastards and enemies of all that is good and decent.

Three such equivalencies, between Russia and Israel, do rise immediately to the surface.

1. Fraternal conflict.The Israelis and the Palestinians, much like the Ukrainians and the Russians, are quite literally brother-peoples.
   
   Israelis and Palestinians have been shown by objective genetic studies to share recent ancestry. Both Palestinians and Israelis are largely Semitic peoples with roots in the Levant.
   
   Likewise, all of the East Slavic peoples—Ukrainians, Belarusians and ethnic Russians—share ‘almost identical proportions’ of Caucasian and Northern European genetic material, making them incredibly close kin simply from the standpoint of heredity.


2. Defensive justifications. The Israeli case for war is, on its face, similar to the Russian one—insofar as it is justified on the basis of self-defence and security against not merely local but also regional foes.
   
   In Russia’s case, those regional foes are the eastern European nations which are members of the NATO bloc; while in Israel’s case, those regional foes are the Arab nations with which it hasn’t yet come to a modus vivendi.


3. Territorial occupation. It must be mentioned that in each case, Russia and Israel in the prosecution of their respective wars hold and occupy territory that, under international law, does not belong to them.
   
   Russia occupies much of the Donetsk Basin, Zaporozhzh’e and Kherson in defiance of international law. Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza in defiance of the same international laws.

However, there also arise a number of dissimilarities between the two conflicts; mostly historical in their import, though not irrelevant to the current situation in each country.

1. Religious significance. Palestine is very literally holy ground to all three of the major Abrahamic religions. The Temple Mount, the Tombs of the Patriarchs, the site of Christ’s Nativity, the Holy Sepulchre, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives—all exist within the borders of the present Holy Land. There has historically been massive contention over these sites, both among Christian confessions and between Christians, Jews and Muslims.
   
   The Pontic territories under dispute do contain religious significance for Orthodox Christians. Sevastopol in particular is a place sacred in Russian Orthodoxy, as the site of the baptism of St Vladimir. But there is nothing in Crimea or elsewhere in the territories under dispute between Russia and the Ukraine, which qualitatively resembles in character the holy sites in Palestine.


2. Settler colonialism. The presence of Russophones in the Ukraine is not, in overall terms, the result of a deliberate concerted policy of colonialism or settlement—even though Tsarist Russia, and later the Soviet Union, did have deliberate policies of colonial settlement in numerous other places. By contrast, Israeli history is very overtly and self-consciously colonial and settlement-oriented: the main organisation for Jewish settlement was literally called the Jewish Colonisation Association; Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky both explicitly framed their project in terms of colonisation.
   
   Ironically, the use of ‘postcolonial’ discourse to describe modern Ukrainian reality is not endogenous but rather a postmodern (and post-Soviet) borrowing from the West… and this discursive strategy is, to put it mildly, broadly unconvincing to the actual former subjects of Western colonial governments, who (not without reason) see this discursive strategy as self-serving and driven by ulterior interests.


3. Social segregation. The people who now live in the Donetsk Basin are, by and large, the descendants of the same Don Cossacks that had independently lived among and intermarried with the locals since the seventeenth century. Rates of intermarriage between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine have historically been high enough that Russians and Ukrainians in the Ukrainian East are functionally the same people. No formal segregation policies have separated ethnic Ukrainians from ethnic Russians in the past, neither under the Tsars, nor under the Soviet government, nor under the current Russian Federation.
   
   By contrast, segregation in Israel has been legal and formalised since its founding. Intermarriages are vanishingly rare between Israelis and Palestinians, and the Israeli state actually erects legal barriers as well as physical ones in order to prevent it.


4. Economic disparity. There has historically been very little difference between residents of Ukrainian territories and residents of Russian territories in terms of wealth, even going back to Tsarist times. Certain politically-charged famines notwithstanding, Ukrainians were overall about as well-off as Russians throughout most of their history together. The recent disparity between overall Ukrainian wealth and overall Russian wealth has more to do with the policies chosen by their respective governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After the disastrous shock-therapy of the 1990s, Russia turned toward a mixed economic policy based on self-reliance and food security; while the Ukrainian government largely remained mired in Western neoliberalism with all its attendant ills.
   
   The marked disparity between Israeli wealth and Palestinian wealth, by contrast, is the product of deliberate design rather than negligence or happenstance. The Palestinians were not only driven off the land they had once owned, but they were directly plundered of their resources of all sorts, by both legal chicanery and outright burglary, under Israeli administration. This was the case both in the 1948 Nakba, and in the wake of 1967.


5. Violent resistance. Both Ukraine and Palestine do have histories of violent resistance, though these are different in character. Ukraine has witnessed sporadic uprisings against Tsarist rule; it resisted incorporation into the Soviet Union during and after the First World War; and Ukrainian nationalists fought in the Nazi SS against the Soviets during the Second World War. Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule was largely politically rightist and middle- and upper-class in terms of class base, being motivated largely by nineteenth-century nationalist ideas.
   
   By contrast, there has been armed resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestinian land practically since the very beginning. Palestinians of all social classes began fighting back against the expropriation of their land and the expulsion of their people almost immediately after 1948, and again repeatedly through the Intifadas. The Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and displacement has been ideologically diverse: ranging from left-wing Marxist-Leninist (PFLP) through secular-liberal (Fataḥ, Third Way) to right-wing Islâmist (Ḥamâs).
   
   Currently there is no real resistance movement to speak of against Russian rule inside the territories it occupies. (The aforementioned Irpin-aligned groups operate within Ukrainian territory and with Ukrainian state support.) Though one may (and should!) deplore Ḥamâs’s ideology and its methods, the fact of its very existence points to the adverse conditions under which Palestinians live, and the continued determination of Palestinians to resist their occupiers. Clearly these conditions of life are not mirrored in Donbass, Zaporozhzh’e or Kherson.


6. Avoidance of civilian casualties. In the present conflicts, there are clear distinctions in the treatment of civilians in war. The best UN estimates of civilian death toll in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict since February 2022 sit right around 10,000; 545 of whom are children. This is over a time period of 20 months. These deaths are not to be minimised in terms of the moral harm done; however, as noted above, Russian forces have been demonstrably willing to sacrifice territorial gains and forward momentum on the battlefield precisely in order to avoid placing civilians in harm’s way.
   
   By contrast, over the past 7 weeks, Israeli forces have already killed 13,000 civilians; about 5,300 of whom are children. This comes from a deliberate military policy of targeting civilian areas and humanitarian infrastructure with shells and air strikes.

IV.

In drawing these parallels, and showing points of similarity and dissimilarity between the conflicts in Gaza and in the Ukrainian East, it is not my primary intention to make a simple and straightforward case of ‘Russia good; Israel bad’—even if one of my secondary intentions was indeed to complicate President Biden’s (and the US State Department’s, and that of the ‘moral equivalence’-shouters) narrative of ‘Russia bad; Israel good’. I have neither the desire nor the inclination to hide or hedge about my sympathy for the Palestinian cause… or my comparative lack of sympathy for the Ukrainian one. But I equally have no desire to fall into a ‘how dare you!!’ trap of my own. There are numerous complexities and tragic historical contingencies to both conflicts that render any such Manichæan interpretation analytically worthless.

In the case of Palestine in particular, no historical reckoning can be complete without a thorough accounting for Western Europe’s colonial designs on the region after the Ottoman collapse, or for its inexcusable and genocidal crimes against European Jewry during the Shoah which lent new urgency to the Zionist plea. And in the case of the Ukrainian problem, one has to navigate the disparate experiences of the Galician west, the maritime south and the industrial Russophone East, and the attempts they did make to live together in peace in the wake of independence. There one also has to navigate the problems of debt politics and the legacy of the same European genocide.

In leaving off this analysis, I think the only truly proper thing to do is to lift it up to the Most High, in Whose hands justice is complete and not partial, and in Whose ultimate reckoning all things will be given their proper place and due, and before Whose Truth I hope I dare not exalt the fruits of my own reasoning or prejudices as rivals.

Giving thanks today

There is good reason to be thankful, first of all, that a holiday exists in American public life upon which gratitude—not merely a sentiment, but a virtue indeed—can still be, and is expected to be, expressed. Gratitude, which presupposes contentment with the good things one has, and which excludes by its nature expressions of covetousness and of entitlement, is a virtue completely alien to the ideology and the ethos of hyper-capitalism and hyper-individualism which suffuses the vestiges of the American public sphere. If this isn’t good reason to be thankful that Thanksgiving still exists, I quite frankly don’t know what is.

I am grateful, firstly, to God for His manifold blessings, for His creation, for His tireless labour through which creation exists, for His Sabbath rest (undertaken not out of His need but out of ours). I am grateful that God precedes us all and yet still loves us; I am grateful that God chose that we should exist, rather than that we should not. I am grateful to our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, for whatever hope I have left in me. I am grateful to my parents, without whose love and support I would not be here, sustained me when I was hospitalised and still sustain me now. I am grateful to my ancestors of whatever country they come—English, Welsh, German, Jewish, Illyrian and Scythian.

One reason why this Thanksgiving is special, is because my parents-in-law have arrived here from China for an extended visit. Their arrival is timely and deeply appreciated. Because I am their son-in-law and they are my parents-in-law, it’s to be expected that we don’t see eye-to-eye 100% of the time. However, I can already tell that my wife is happier because they’re here. I can already tell that my children are happier because they’re here. And they are already making our home a more complete one while they are present. My parents-in-law have been an inestimable help to my wife and me, in getting us physically and financially established in our living situation here in the Twin Cities metro area, and in assisting us with various aspects of our life here together. I am and will continue to be grateful to them for as long as they live and as long as I live.

This reflection on the Chinese side of my extended family, prompts me to undertake an examination of my own weak spot for the Arab cause. The root of the matter is this: my family would not be here with me in the United States, if it were not for the sustained Herculean efforts of the Arab-American community in Pawtucket, Rhode Island prevailing against the legal inertia of the DHS and immigration services. In particular, I want to give thanks for Fr Elie (Estephan) of St Mary Antiochian Church, whose own efforts in helping Syrian and Lebanese refugees find support and shelter here from war and deprivation at home, equipped him to address my own (much less dire) family situation.

In 2015 and 2016, Fr Elie assisted me with a list of contacts and advisers as well as his own introductions and good words, including with Ms Susan Saliba (an immigration attorney in Massachusetts) and Mr Albert Mokhiber (an immigration lawyer in DC), who afterward assisted me pro bono with completing the paperwork and navigating the ‘grey areas’ necessary for my wife and kids to join me here legally and in a timely way. For this reason, ever since that time I have always felt a need to pay it forward. Those same war refugees, who are the main beneficiaries of this legal and financial and physical assistance, and in much greater need than I am, I have come to see in a very real sense as my own family by virtue of our common situation. This is what underlies, to a significant degree, my sympathy and support for the cause of Syrian peace, and for the cause of Palestinian peace.

I am grateful to St Alexander Nevsky Church in Saimasai, Kazakhstan, for introducing me to the Orthodox Christian faith. I am grateful to Fr Sergey (Voronin), one-time rector of Holy Dormition Church in Beijing, China, for educating me and guiding me gently into that faith, and chrismating me. I am grateful to St Herman’s Orthodox Church, and to all of my friends and fellow-parishioners there, for continuing to assist in my salvation. I am grateful to them for putting up with my eccentricities, and for encouraging me to continue learning the Russian language.

I am grateful to the school I teach at, and to the Saint Paul Federation of Educators for being a source of community belonging and a source of strength for me. (Pray that we get a just contract!) I am also grateful to the students I teach—even the ones who misbehave occasionally!—Hmong, Karen and Vietnamese; White and African-American; Ojibwe and Hispanic. I learn as much from them as they learn from me, and I hope that in my classroom at least, they get as many chances as they can to explore how much they have to offer, and to exercise the reserves of strength and wisdom they possess.

And I am grateful indeed to the Ojibwe and Dakota nations whose guest on this earth I am. I am grateful that the Ojibwe and the Dakota are still here and still speaking and still active, and that they continue to bear witness to the sacredness of things like clean drinking water and healthy land. (And if this sentiment is somewhat subversive of the civic mythology of Thanksgiving: so much the better! I was always a bit of a Mary Dyer at heart; that’s something I come by honestly, and am also grateful for.)

To all I wish a Thanksgiving filled with love and gratitude: for the good things that we have been given, and for the one Good One that is given us to expect at the end of the season, through the prayers and labours and faith of our Lady, the Most Holy and Most Pure Birthgiver of God and Ever-Virgin Mary.

Collected aphoristic thoughts and quotes on Palestine

All thoughts are my own unless quoted otherwise.

I honestly think that for most people, they simply parrot [about the conflict] what their favoured media outlets tell them to, and CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo and WSJ all tell them the same thing... with some surface-level permutations based on domestic political / cultural / tribal alignment. God forbid we should read actual books about each region’s history and the roots of each conflict, instead of just regurgitating easily-digestible headlines, op-ed columns and talking-head takes.

~~~

One thing that Vladimir Solovyov got very much right in War, Progress and the End of History, is that there is a kind of falsehood, a deep moral obscenity, in those who preach non-violence to the powerless, from a position of safety and security.

The argument between the General and the Prince in the first conversation was over the Armenians in the late 1800s, but equally so I think it could apply to the Palestinians today.

~~~

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English, or France to the French.

- Mahatma Gandhi

~~~

We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

- Nelson Mandela

~~~

It’s tragic that so many people are made unable to tell the difference between “explanation”, “justification”, and “apologia”. Often, those things are conflated on purpose with the help of the media to prevent/shut down any civilised discussion around certain subjects.

- Denis Vladimirovich

~~~

A few assorted thoughts. Not all of them are completely consistent with each other, but so be it.

1. All war is bad on all sides.
2. Some casus belli are more just than others.
3. Few conflicts have stable solutions (this side of Parousia).
4. Still fewer conflicts have obvious solutions.
5. That does not mean we (individually and collectively) shouldn't look for solutions.
6. No one who isn't in a position of power should be expected to have the solutions.

~~~

Imagine engaging in abstruse academic debates about dogmatic vs. hopeful universalism as Gaza burns.

~~~

To have empathy is not to assert power or to take revenge. It is to feel broken with those who have been broken—and if you are a follower of Jesus, which, de facto, we are not, is to be broken with them.

- Fr Marc Boulos

~~~

My hope and prayer is to be a source of light, and not darkness. Let’s be honest: this pain we’re all feeling isn’t specific to this moment; it’s ongoing. The truth is that for me, for my family, for Palestinians: this is life.

- Mo Amer

~~~

Enough oppression against the Palestinian people! Peace does not come from the bodies of children, killed people, innocent people, and women. Peace comes when the decision-makers in this world realize that our people have dignity, as all the peoples of the world. We are not advocates of war, we reject violence and killing, and we are seekers of peace, but at the same time, we seek justice and have a right that we will not give up.

- His Holiness Patriarch John X (Yazigi) of Antioch

~~~

In the Middle East, the net effects [of European cultural hysteria] are:

1. that Europe is burdened with the heavy baggage of interventions that inflame Muslim hostility toward the West, and
2. to create the psychological imperative to find some way to assuage their own sense of guilt by finding, and magnifying, the sins of their victims.

- Dr Michael Brenner

~~~

Moral discourse in the West has degraded so far that even the most basic calls for justice and humanity are considered to be Marxist, subversive or terroristic.

~~~

The descent to evil. “Do unto others what you would like them to do to you” has increasingly been replaced by “Do unto others the evil they did to you”, and even by “Do to others the evils before they might do it to you.”

- Fr John D’Alton

~~~

As an Orthodox Christian leftist with Semitic ancestry, I have two questions.

1. By what moral logic are the Arabs supposed to shoulder 80 years of responsibility, at the cost of their lives and their homes, for the crimes of Hitler?
2. By what moral logic are Palestinian Christians supposed to shoulder responsibility, at the cost of their lives and their homes, for the recent crimes of Hamas?