Letter to the Editor “Chaos & Carnage in Lebanon
Church of England Newspaper
24th July 2006

As someone regularly accused of being biased, I felt deep sadness reading both the editorial and Andrew White’s article “Chaos and Carnage” in CEN (21st July). The pro-Israeli bias is increasingly obvious in your newspaper and I am sure I am not alone in despairing at your lack of journalistic objectivity as well as Christian conscience.

In your editorial, you describe Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza and Southern Lebanon as ‘buffer zones’. You focus on the ‘huge arsenal of hi-tech rockets from Tehran’ without a hint that Israel is the fourth largest nuclear power in the world and receives unlimited quantities of even ‘higher-tech’ rockets from the USA. While UN officials accuse Israel of war crimes you refer to “its bombing of infrastructure.”

You justify this punishment of Lebanese civilians because apparently “Israel seems to lack the fine tuning to target the rocket launchers and to locate Hezbollah fighters.” With the most sophisticated weapons in the world, it is indeed strange that Israeli forces just keep on hitting convoys of civilians, residential areas, power stations, bridges, airports, hospitals, schools and mosques.

You lament that “The peacemakers seem to have failed miserably” without explaining why. It is because the USA and Europe are unwilling to uphold the rule of international law and impose the Road-Map on Israel, force her to end her illegal occupation and create a state for the Palestinians.

And your last sentence just took my breath away. “Israel fights for its life, Islam grows increasingly warlike.” If that is not incitement to religious hatred then what is? Please remember who it is who has invaded and still occupies Gaza, Palestine, and parts of Lebanese and Syrian sovereign territory. 

I do not doubt Andrews desire to see those suffering in Gaza and the West Bank receive humanitarian aid, but I long to hear him identify who it is that is perpetuating their suffering and speak God’s word prophetically. He ignores the brutal occupation, targeted assassinations, the home demolitions, the illegal settlements, the exclusive Jewish roads and the illegal separation barrier that denies any hope of a future Palestinian state. He rightly insists Israel get her captured soldiers back but what of the many hundreds of Palestinian civilians kidnapped or arrested and held without trial by Israel? What other country in the world would dare arrest the duly elected members of parliament and government ministers of another country?

Andrew suggests, “All those who are caught up in this conflict suffer because of a few evil people.” Not so. They suffer because democratically elected governments, principally Israel and the USA, are intent on occupying, colonizing, militarising and destabilizing parts of the Middle East, and then we are surprised that the stronger Arab states respond in kind?

He blames it all, including presumably the ‘bombing from above’, on Hezbollah. “All of this because in Lebanon resides the Party of God. In the name of the almighty were atrocities performed.” Is it not ironic then that in so many of the photographs in the newspapers showing Israeli tanks firing shells into Lebanon, we see Jewish soldiers wearing their prayer shawls and phylacteries, and reciting the scriptures?  And, if we include the Christian Zionists as well, are not all sides claiming divine endorsement?

Without the respect for the United Nations, the rule of international and humanitarian law and the political will to impose it, there never will be security for Israelis, justice for Palestinians or peace in the Middle East.

Stephen Sizer

Virginia Water

Church of England Newspaper: 21 July 2006 p.19
Editorial: The unceasing search for peace


‘Blessed are the peacemakers’, says Jesus to his disciples in his ‘sermon on the mount’, teaching peace and humility as the way of the kingdom of God. But his earthly homeland is now a place of war and murderous hate. Beirut, only a few decades ago a world financial centre and place of multi-cultural respect and prosperity, is again a war zone in economic ruins. Israel herself receives dozens of daily flying bombs from Hezbollah, clearly now armed with a huge arsenal of hi-tech rockets from Tehran, a small army rather than a guerrilla force, located in the state of Lebanon.

Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and South Lebanon, formerly held as buffer areas, has not led to a peace dividend at all, rather to the opportunity for Hamas and Hezbollah to build up their strength prior to stinging Israel into reactive attacks. The plan certainly worked, and Israel has in effect waged war on the Lebanon and gained few friends globally for its bombing of infrastructure. Lebanon has been fiercely punished for allowing Hezbollah to bed into its civilian society, but Israel seems to lack the fine tuning to target the rocket launchers and to locate Hezbollah fighters, no doubt very cleverly hidden as part of the prepared plan. The peacemakers seem to have failed miserably and the war-makers have stepped in. Israel has responded to provocation, and Iran has pursued Ayotollah Khomeini’s doctrine of fomenting crisis after crisis in the cause of spreading Islamic revolution.

Jesus lived and died the way of peace, but he envisaged a history of ongoing wars, famine, and natural disasters as he pondered the sinfulness of humanity, as we read in Matthew 24, where false messianic leaders are portrayed as part of this chaos. The Book of Revelation takes up this theme with the famous ‘four horsemen’ of conquest, war, famine and death and disease rampaging over the earth. The message of Jesus is both idealistic and realistic, we are confronted with the negative forces of war as well with the gospel of Christ’s kingdom of love and peace. Theologically Calvary is where God’s justice and love overcome the forces of violence and retribution, of hatred and resentment. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, turning the blades of weapons into ploughshares. It is a terrible irony that the Holy Land is the scene of such hatred and violence.

No nation can lay down its defences against the aggressor, any more than a state can disband its police force and adopt a pacifist attitude towards criminals. We do not yet inhabit the realised kingdom of heaven and have to cope with this world of sin. But how do we do so without collapsing into unholy cynicism and forgetting our Christlike vocation? We must never cease to work for negotiated settlements, and to water the gardens of peaceful societies and peaceful ideologies. The current situation looks dark indeed: Israel fights for its life, Islam grows increasingly warlike.