Responding to Violence
In New Zealand there never seems to be very much news on Boxing Day, just page after page of advertisements offering 50% discount on Boxing Day sales in the major department stores. But there were a few news items which stood out, some of which appeared to run totally counter to the spirit of the previous Christmas Day, while others captured the essence of the day’s message.
First, there is the brouhaha which has enveloped over the release of Stephen Spielberg’s new film, the geopolitical thriller Munich. The film recounts the aftermath of the kidnap and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, and Spielberg has described it as “a prayer for peace”. The film recounts the way that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, sent agents to track down and kill those whom it believed to have a degree of responsibility for the outrage, something which has been standard practice for that agency. But as in all instances of this kind of response, moral ambiguities begin to emerge, over the precise degree of personal responsibility and whether perpetuating the cycle of violence can ever produce a peaceful and just resolution.
Spielberg seems to have hoped that these historical events would prompt debate both within the United States and beyond, about the moral legitimacy of the Bush administration’s War on Terror. But the film has touched an extremely raw nerve, both amongst conservative Americans and the Jewish lobby within Israel and in the Diaspora. It is the suggestion of moral ambiguity which enrages both the American administration and the Israeli Government. The latter has recycled its standard response, that there can be no moral equivalence between those who have been designated “terrorists” and those who are mandated to hunt them down and kill them. But what that response never addresses is the first order question of who decides who are terrorists and who are freedom fighters. I imagine that had these terms been in use in the eighteenth century, the American colonists fighting for independence from Britain might well have been designated freedom fighters by the colonists and terrorists by the Crown. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Israeli commentators have often resorted to the Jewish Bible’s revengeful exhortation of ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’, a principle which I have also heard reiterated by many Christians who clearly have forgotten what Jesus in the New Testament had to say about violence. Despite the fact that Jewish colleagues in the religious studies department of my university would not interpret these words literally, there are many people more than willing to do so. Two other pieces of news this week attest to this. The first was confirmation of something many of us had in any case assumed, that Israel has all along been offering assistance to US troops in Iraq in the hunting down and assassination of those who under any definition might be designated ‘enemies’. The second was the boast of a group of Holocaust survivors known as the Avengers who, disguised as American and British officers at the end of the last war, indiscriminately poisoned Nazis who were being held in American prisoner-of-war camps. Geneva conventions apparently count for nothing in such circumstances.
Amongst the many Christians down the ages who have spoken about the need to find alternative responses to violence was the Latin American bishop Dom Helda Camara, one of whose books was called The Spiral of Violence. Jesus lived in an age when the notion of violent retaliation, particularly to protect family honour, was endemic. He saw what needed to be done. Jesus said in effect, ‘Don’t retaliate. Don’t fulfil the enemy’s expectations of you. Respond in unexpected ways’. When people respond non-violently a number of things occur. The cycle of violence is unexpectedly interrupted; one’s enemy is in a very real sense disarmed; and new values and behaviours are being established. One of my mentors, Paulo Freire, used to say that we cannot build a just, free and peaceful society employing tactics and strategies that do not embody these goals. It is impossible to build a peaceful society by using violent means. Of course a non-violence renders one vulnerable, but if the Christmas message is about anything it is about the vulnerability of a baby born in a stable.
The good news on Boxing Day was embodied by two Prelates. Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch for the Holy Land, made mention in his sermon at midnight mass in Bethlehem of the new political landscape beginning to emerge in that region. He said, “Leaving all violence, all vengeance, freeing political prisoners, and putting the past behind, can create a new land”, one in which Israelis can feel secure and Palestinians can feel free. With elections amongst both Palestinians and Israelis scheduled for the new year, and Ariel Sharon attempting to break the mould of Israeli conventional politics, we can hope that such a scenario becomes more a reality than a possibility.
Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Christmas sermon in Canterbury Cathedral made special mention of two families who, in response to senseless violence, spoke not in terms of retaliation, but of forgiveness. In a reference to Abigail Wichells who remains paralysed after a frenzied knife attack, he noted that Abigail’s mother upon learning of the suicide of her daughter’s attacker said ‘his death is the real tragedy in this story’. Williams said that the mother was “not making light of her daughter's terrible ordeal or denying the complex evil of the action, but simply making space in her heart for someone else's fear and pain". He also commented on a moment many of us witnessed on television news in the UK when the mother of Anthony Walker, a Liverpool teenager murdered in a racist axe-attack “told us that yes, she forgave her son's killers and yes, her heart was still broken. What made this so intensely moving was the fact that her forgiveness was drawn agonisingly out of her, without making her loss easier. She could not have been who she was if she did not recognise that forgiveness was laid upon her; her life and her dead son's would have been nonsense if she did not forgive”.
One of the greatest tragedies of our human condition is that we all too often opt for the Old Testament’s eye-for-an-eye notion of vengeance in both our personal and political relationships, rather than the New Testament’s vision for the creation of just and compassionate relationships based on our capacity for forgiveness.
First, there is the brouhaha which has enveloped over the release of Stephen Spielberg’s new film, the geopolitical thriller Munich. The film recounts the aftermath of the kidnap and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, and Spielberg has described it as “a prayer for peace”. The film recounts the way that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, sent agents to track down and kill those whom it believed to have a degree of responsibility for the outrage, something which has been standard practice for that agency. But as in all instances of this kind of response, moral ambiguities begin to emerge, over the precise degree of personal responsibility and whether perpetuating the cycle of violence can ever produce a peaceful and just resolution.
Spielberg seems to have hoped that these historical events would prompt debate both within the United States and beyond, about the moral legitimacy of the Bush administration’s War on Terror. But the film has touched an extremely raw nerve, both amongst conservative Americans and the Jewish lobby within Israel and in the Diaspora. It is the suggestion of moral ambiguity which enrages both the American administration and the Israeli Government. The latter has recycled its standard response, that there can be no moral equivalence between those who have been designated “terrorists” and those who are mandated to hunt them down and kill them. But what that response never addresses is the first order question of who decides who are terrorists and who are freedom fighters. I imagine that had these terms been in use in the eighteenth century, the American colonists fighting for independence from Britain might well have been designated freedom fighters by the colonists and terrorists by the Crown. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Israeli commentators have often resorted to the Jewish Bible’s revengeful exhortation of ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’, a principle which I have also heard reiterated by many Christians who clearly have forgotten what Jesus in the New Testament had to say about violence. Despite the fact that Jewish colleagues in the religious studies department of my university would not interpret these words literally, there are many people more than willing to do so. Two other pieces of news this week attest to this. The first was confirmation of something many of us had in any case assumed, that Israel has all along been offering assistance to US troops in Iraq in the hunting down and assassination of those who under any definition might be designated ‘enemies’. The second was the boast of a group of Holocaust survivors known as the Avengers who, disguised as American and British officers at the end of the last war, indiscriminately poisoned Nazis who were being held in American prisoner-of-war camps. Geneva conventions apparently count for nothing in such circumstances.
Amongst the many Christians down the ages who have spoken about the need to find alternative responses to violence was the Latin American bishop Dom Helda Camara, one of whose books was called The Spiral of Violence. Jesus lived in an age when the notion of violent retaliation, particularly to protect family honour, was endemic. He saw what needed to be done. Jesus said in effect, ‘Don’t retaliate. Don’t fulfil the enemy’s expectations of you. Respond in unexpected ways’. When people respond non-violently a number of things occur. The cycle of violence is unexpectedly interrupted; one’s enemy is in a very real sense disarmed; and new values and behaviours are being established. One of my mentors, Paulo Freire, used to say that we cannot build a just, free and peaceful society employing tactics and strategies that do not embody these goals. It is impossible to build a peaceful society by using violent means. Of course a non-violence renders one vulnerable, but if the Christmas message is about anything it is about the vulnerability of a baby born in a stable.
The good news on Boxing Day was embodied by two Prelates. Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch for the Holy Land, made mention in his sermon at midnight mass in Bethlehem of the new political landscape beginning to emerge in that region. He said, “Leaving all violence, all vengeance, freeing political prisoners, and putting the past behind, can create a new land”, one in which Israelis can feel secure and Palestinians can feel free. With elections amongst both Palestinians and Israelis scheduled for the new year, and Ariel Sharon attempting to break the mould of Israeli conventional politics, we can hope that such a scenario becomes more a reality than a possibility.
Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Christmas sermon in Canterbury Cathedral made special mention of two families who, in response to senseless violence, spoke not in terms of retaliation, but of forgiveness. In a reference to Abigail Wichells who remains paralysed after a frenzied knife attack, he noted that Abigail’s mother upon learning of the suicide of her daughter’s attacker said ‘his death is the real tragedy in this story’. Williams said that the mother was “not making light of her daughter's terrible ordeal or denying the complex evil of the action, but simply making space in her heart for someone else's fear and pain". He also commented on a moment many of us witnessed on television news in the UK when the mother of Anthony Walker, a Liverpool teenager murdered in a racist axe-attack “told us that yes, she forgave her son's killers and yes, her heart was still broken. What made this so intensely moving was the fact that her forgiveness was drawn agonisingly out of her, without making her loss easier. She could not have been who she was if she did not recognise that forgiveness was laid upon her; her life and her dead son's would have been nonsense if she did not forgive”.
One of the greatest tragedies of our human condition is that we all too often opt for the Old Testament’s eye-for-an-eye notion of vengeance in both our personal and political relationships, rather than the New Testament’s vision for the creation of just and compassionate relationships based on our capacity for forgiveness.
posted by MichaelElliott @ 5:05 PM
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