FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - God's Side‏

Rant Number 335 15 January 2009

God’s Side

After General Sir Charles Napier won the battle of Hyderabad in Sind he sent back a one-word telegram, announcing his victory in Latin: ‘Peccavi’. I have sinned. A clever pun. Napier had indeed got Sind but he had also sinned, as by his attack he had broken a treaty.

The Israeli generals heading the onslaught on Gaza are unlikely to imitate Sir Charles. They may, perhaps, achieve their objectives: break or enfeeble Hamas militarily, stop or minimise the rocket attacks on Israel and destroy the tunnels linking Gaza to Egypt. But I doubt they or their government will ever consider the war a sin. Wasn’t Israel’s God the Lord of Hosts? Echoes of the warlike deeds of Moses, Gideon, Joshua and other ancient warriors in Canaan surely endure in the national consciousness. So Israel’s God was on Israel’s side. But not always. Hebrew prophets like Jeremiah warned about relying on realpolitik and brute force in foreign policy. The alliance with Egypt, then the local superpower, was misguided, Jeremiah thundered. He predicted the nation’s impending doom at the hands of the Babylonians.

“Be appalled, O Heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no

water.”

Hebrew prophets were hardly PC. Jeremiah likened Israel to a faithless wife who forsakes her husband – to a common harlot driven by lusts as violent as that of a bitch in heat. (Guess today he’d be prosecuted for hate crime on sex workers.)

Alas, the prophet was accused of being unpatriotic and his warnings went unheeded. The destruction of the Temple and the deportation to Babylon followed. Israel had indeed sinned and the wages of sin is death, as that other great Jew, Saul of Tarsus, later put it.

Last Monday the priest appeared again on Press-TV. On a discussion led by celebrated Tariq Ramadan. (A Muslim Martin Luther, some have called him. Sorry Tariq, no way that’s true!) On air I quoted Jeremiah’s strictures on his people’s errant leaders. I also lamented the lack of prophetic voices in the church. Our bishops are being as quiet as mice. (What’s new?) Tariq and I agreed. This conflict is not essentially religious, one between Islam and Judaism, that is – though some theological overtones cannot be gainsaid. It is a matter of national resistance. But one voice dissented. That of a spokesman for Hizb Ut-Tahrir, the global Islamist movement which calls for the restoration of the caliphate. He appealed for the Muslim Umma, the worldwide community, as well as the Arab armies, to intervene and fight the Israelis. Whose side God is on in this war, the fiery chap had no doubt about.

God’s side. It seems so natural to believe in it, so easy to determine where it is, doesn’t it? In the Middle Ages, the English at the battle of Agincourt slaughtered the French, a fellow Christian nation, to the cry of ‘England and St George’. As if the holy dragon slayer was also in the business of slaying Christians! During WWI angels were sighted fighting for the Christian British against the Christian Germans – huh! Presumably German angels had gone AWOL. And in WWII the SS, of all people, were so sanguine about it that they sported the words ‘Gott mit uns’ – God with us – on their belts. Almost a reductio ad absurdum of the whole thing.

Muslims – I don’t think they would deny it - generally believe that Allah is on their side. The Quran is adamant. Yet, in whose side was God in the Iran-Iraq war? 500.000 Muslims died fighting it – the majority Iranians. The outcome of all that bloodshed was a standoff. Is the Deity a Sunni or a Shia? (And the Prophet Muhammad, was he a Sunni or a Shia? ‘Oh, he was a Sunni!’ a nice lady responded at once. I fear she could not see why I found her answer a wee peculiar.) On whose side was God when Tamburlaine took Isfahan and built 45 minarets, each consisting of 1500 human skulls? I somehow dread the voices that speak with absolute certainties in these terrible matters. Agnosticism seems almost a merit here.

My last peroration about Gaza resulted in a complaint by an old Jewish friend. Isacco Israelovici and I met doing our national service in the Italian Army. ‘Frank, why are you so hard on my people? Have they not suffered enough?’ he wrote.

Dear Isacco, I grieve if I have offended you but two wrongs do not make a right. Exactly because your people have suffered abominably in the past, they should now know better than to make the Palestinians suffer so much. I know some argue that Israel is after all a state like all others, just as imperfect, as flawed as all human polities, and so that it is unfair to ask the Israelis to be better than any other nation. Well, maybe. Providing they do not end up being worse.

‘Do you think I have committed a crime?’ Napoleon asked Talleyrand. He meant his illegal seizure and execution of the Duke of Enghien, a young man of royal Bourbon blood. It revolted all Europe. ‘It is worse than a crime – it is a mistake’ the great cynic’s reply came. It seems that the Gaza offensive may involve the Israeli Army in some serious violations of the laws of war – that is, in crimes. The Just War concept of Jus in Bello – what is justified military conduct in war – demands that non-combatants, civilians, must be immune from direct attack. It also requires that military actions should not be disproportionate in their effects. But my guess all that will not bother the Israelis too much. International law is even more toothless than theology when the chips are down.

A mistake is another matter. That would worry Israel. A lot.

Is Gaza a mistake, then?

Time will tell.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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