Creating Peace Without Weapons. An Appeal for Peace in the Israel-Gaza Conflict
This is a slightly slimmed down and lightly paraphrased translation of a Youtube video by Eugen Drewermann, a pacifist German theologian who has written lots about war and peace and who is also a passionate campaigner against NATO and US military bases in Germany.
I have always said that only forgiveness and non-violence can overcome violence and establish peace. Is that still true, given the current situation in Ukraine and Gaza?
I say, Yes, we have only one possibility of coming to peace. We must not put our hope in weapons and in the peace of the graveyard and the battlefield. Instead, we need to understand the anxiety of our opponents and work through it. We mustn’t work against each other using power politics. Instead, we should spread trust and be willing to sign agreements.
According to Paragraph 51 of the constitution of the United Nations, “Nations have a right to defend themselves.” The churches, the states, all ministers say, Israel has a right to defend itself. In a certain sense, we have to say that too, because Hamas’s attack is violent aggression, that we can only regret and wish it had not happened. But what can happen so that this stops and doesn’t just keep on going?
Jews might perhaps ask what right do we Christians have to join the debate. We should keep our mouths shut; we Christians have for long enough oppressed Jews. I had a discussion on German TV with a Jew, who did not want Christians to continually think they are superior to Jews and said, “You Christians would still believe in Wotan if it wasn’t for us.” She may be right; actually we have become Jews through the Jew from Nazareth. We must not turn the God, whom Jesus brought to us, the Jewish God as father of all peoples, into a god of war. This is what the Christian God became through Constantine in 312; a god of battles, a peace-bringer on the battlefield and we must stop it in the name of the Jew Jesus.
In his day, Jesus believed that his God, the Jewish God, would make true what he promised Abraham; that he will be the father of a people as rich as the stars in the sky and the sand on the beach and that he will be a blessing for all peoples (see Genesis 12:1-3).
If that, Israel’s commission, is the basis for there being a promised land for his people, then you only need to keep telling the biblical story a bit further. Israel dwells now as a state in Palestine, claiming God’s promise. But how do you win the land that God has promised? We are Israelis and Arabs. The bible tells the story of both of us. Both are children of Abraham, both are brothers. The story is that Sarah, Abraham’s wife, despaired of having children, so she took her slave and servant Hagar (an Egyptian) and had her bear a child from Abraham, Ismael. The name came about because Sarah took a dislike to Hagar and had Abraham banish her, twice in fact.
Ismael and Israel, both children of Abraham, must live with one another. Otherwise they cannot settle in and occupy the land that has been promised by God. Martin Buber, a pious Jew, could explain it like this: If Zionism wants to prove itself in its religious truth, according to which God promised us as children of Abraham a land. A land that we now, after 2000 years of dispersal, since the time of the Romans, since the end of the Bar Kochbar rebellion at the beginning of the second century, want to re-occupy. If we want to do this by appealing to the bible, there is only one way; we must live there with the other people who are there, with our brothers, with the other children of Abrahams in an inclusive community. That’s the only way we can enter this land again in reverence and kindness.
We can tell the story differently. In Genesis 4, Cain murders his brother because he doesn’t feel accepted. He can sacrifice as much as he wants, but there is someone nearby and the eyes of God look at him, not at Cain. Out of inferiority feelings, out of hatred, out of the fear of not being accepted, of not being good enough, he kills him. Then God explains that the earth has opened its mouth and calls out to heaven because it had to drink the blood of your brother. You will be a refugee on earth and the earth will refuse to give you its fruit. When humans kill humans, they lose the ground under their feet, the mouth of earth opens up to an abyss, a world of anxiety, of apocalypse. We must not live like that.
So we we face the question, how we deal with so-called evil. Everyone says, we must fight it. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says we must not resist evil. This is our equivalent to 9.11 for the Americans. There is a similarity between the two. A surprise attack, a terrorist action that hurts unbelievably and sacrifices innocent people. How do we overcome something like that? We said then, we must hit back. We attributed the cause to Afghanistan, which was not correct. The result? 20 years of war with thousands of deaths. $300 billion dollars spent in a war that has brought nothing but more misery and suffering. And today there is hunger in Afghanistan, because we have other things to do, we must continue militarily elsewhere. It was then that the Dalai Lama, a Buddhist, said (there was no Christian who spoke like this), “This is a great chance for non-violence.” As Christians we could say, also as Jews, “Do not resist evil.”
We must ask about the causes. Why do they hate us so? What did we do to them? There were decades of the English colonial regime in Palestine. We took over, after they dropped Palestine in the face of Jewish terrorist attacks like that on the King David Hotel. Begin (later President of Israel) was a member of this group, Irgun, and was able to ally himself with Arafat of the PLO, based on the Oslo Peace agreement.
In this world, wanting peace by understanding the causes of a lack of peace and working to overcome them is deadly dangerous. We risk a lot when we talk of peace, but we should have the courage to do it.
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In 1914 there was a socialist who declared, workers mustn’t shoot at workers. He was murdered.
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Mahatma Gandhi in 1947 said that he is a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim and they all adore the same God and that they are destined for peace over the whole little planet earth and that this God is so broad that he embraces them all. Gandhi was murdered for this prayer and confession.
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Martin Luther King wanted the Vietnam war to end. He wanted people to forgive each other. To stop dropping more bombs on a land the size of Bavaria than in the whole of the second world war. To stop defoliating the jungle with chemicals that cause cancer and birth defects. Peace is possible. For that, he was murdered.
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Rabin was an Israeli general. He understood that there can’t be war for ever and ever. As a military man, he understood better than the politicians, that a two-state solution can only come when Jews give the Arabs a fair chance to self-determination. Then we are no longer an occupying power. In 1995 he was murdered.
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Anwar Sadat was murdered because he dared to negotiate peace. Land for peace was his compromise. He went to the Israeli Parliament, into the Knesset in Jerusalem. For that he was murdered.
People who want peace in a crazy world are murdered. This has been true since the time of Jesus, who was crucified. Should things continue like this? They don’t have to. We should learn at last from the disaster of murdering humans that that we investigate the causes. We are not lords of the world. We don’t have to continue the colonial regime. Earth does not belong to us, especially not an earth that God gives us. We have to share it as a gift of God with one another. Then hatred must cease and fighting people whom we declare to be animals becomes impossible. That is not the language of a person, who as president of Israel should keep the power of Israel’s regime. We must rediscover the language of humanity and those whom we would like to condemn because of their deeds are the victims that we must understand so that we can grow together. Otherwise we will always be about to wage war, claiming we are right and we will only multiply hatred. We eliminate Hamas, we plough their underground tunnels, we decide that there will be no more Hamas. That is the deadly program for the elimination of an unknown quantity of humans, and a whole area.
Can’t this be done differently? Israel is militarily and economically and technically 10 times superior than the Arabs who live in an open-air prison. We give you the water that you need, the food that you need, the medical treatment that you need. You no longer live in separate zones like subhumans alongside us. We accept you as our brothers, as children of Abraham. We learn to see the bible in a new relevance in our days. Can we say that as Christians? We call ourselves Christians because we call Jesus the Messiah. The Mea Shearim in Jerusalem say that there cannot be a state of Israel because the Messiah has not yet come and the Jews say to us Christians, Christ cannot be the Messiah, because you haven’t realised his message of peace. Then a state of Israel in the sense of the Orthodox Mea Shearim would have a basis. The messiah would not come as a second David with military power, with better bombs, with better tanks with better infantry in a grand offensive. He would come kindly and humane and sympathetic. A different Messiah will never come from God. That is what I can certainly say, as a human being, as a theologian reading the bible that the Jews gave us. I thank you for listening and for the uncomfortable demand it makes.
Eugen Drewermann. Translated by the Editor from
https://youtu.be/FpW_BFEk8Q4?si=UOtvsHdLORPFQd3x