Together in our hearts

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has a marmite effect. You love her or hate her. Whenever she posts on Twitter (X) about an atrocity in Huwara or shootings and home demolitions elsewhere she receives a torrent of abuse. She is seen as very partisan, supporting the Palestinian cause, and therefore an enemy of the State of Israel. She says her focus is on the rule of law and on upholding UN conventions on human rights.

Her response to the horrific attacks by Hamas militia on October 7^th, which took the Israeli Defense Force by surprise and which are not yet contained, demonstrates this. She does not support the violence and bloodshed, which she and many other commentators have warned about for years. Today Al Jazeera reported her reaction:

It’s possible to stand with both: UN official

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, warns of a dangerous narrative taking shape around the ongoing conflict.

“I am totally petrified, I am shocked and appalled by the violence, But before anything else, I am horrified by the narrative because it is possible, and necessary, to stand both with the Palestinians and the Israelis without resorting to ethical relativism, to selective outrage or worse, calls for violence,” Albanese told Al Jazeera.

“Policymakers should prioritise restoring legality and accountability, and restoring diplomacy and peace, rather than advocating for more violence or standing with one side or the other,”

Francesca Albanese

“Policymakers should prioritise restoring legality and accountability, and restoring diplomacy and peace, rather than advocating for more violence or standing with one side or the other,” she added.

Her initial response, to utterly condemn the terrorist action against civilians on a scale hard to imagine is absolutely the right one. It is also right to condemn the desecration of bodies and any scenes of jubilant celebration, which are sickening.

But what is the ‘dangerous narrative’ she is warning about? There are some Israeli politicians and commentators who have called for Gaza to be absolutely flattened. In a completely cynical move, since there is nowhere for Gazans to go, Prime Minister Netanyahu called for Gazans to leave. The defense minister Yoav Gallant has described Gazans as ‘human animals’. One politician has promised that this war with Gaza will be the last one. In order to keep this promise, Israel will need to continue to bombard the densely populated enclave. Already, electricity, water and supplies have been cut off. Gaza is 26 miles long and 8 miles wide at its widest point. This makes it smaller than the Isle of Arran, yet almost 2.3 million people live there, grossly overcrowded in densely packed high-rise buildings with no air raid shelters.

My colleague Rev Dr Stewart Gillan and I, with colleague Doug Dicks of the PCUSA, have been planning a visit to Gaza which was due to take place 10-12^th October. We were planning to visit partners with the Near East Council of Churches including their kindergarten and health clinics and Ahli Arab Hospital. Since Saturday 7^th, Ahli Arab Hospital has declared a state of emergency, is running short of supplies and medics and is being used as a makeshift safe space by Gazans sheltering from air strikes as well as trying to treat many seriously injured patients. It sounds like hell on earth.

In her statement Albanese says, ‘It is possible and it is necessary to stand with both the Palestinians and the Israelis without resorting to ethical relativism.’

For many years the Church of Scotland have used a prayer by Christian Aid:

Pray not for Arab or Jew,
for Palestinian or Israeli,
but pray rather for ourselves,
that we might not
divide them in our prayers
but keep them both together
in our hearts.

This is not easy when the narrative dictates that you choose sides, and privilege one ethnic group over another. But this is where Albanese calls for the restoration of legality and accountability. World leaders giving unqualified support to Israel are continuing to ignore the crimes against humanity perpetuated by a government which discriminates against its Arab citizens and ignores the human rights of Palestinians. The polarization of opinion, with some praising the actions of Hamas and some giving unqualified support to the state of Israel, perpetuates the 75 year-old problem and dehumanizes all involved.

Today in my inbox, from the Centre of Action and Contemplation https://cac.org/ comes some words from Archbishop Desmond Tutu exploring ‘God’s dream for the world through a message of hope, justice, peace, and inclusion’.

Tutu says:  ‘We can look at the life of Jesus to see what God asks of us. Jesus came into a deeply divided and polarized society…The world saw a veritable miracle unfolding before its very eyes as all sorts and conditions of women and men, rich and poor, slave and free, Jew and Gentile—all these came to belong in one fellowship, one communion. They did not regard one another just as equals. That in itself would have been a huge miracle…. No, they regarded one another not just as equals but as sisters and brothers, members of one family, God’s family.’[1]

The narrative of one family is a hard one to hold right now for Jews, Muslims and Christians but it is the only story that holds out hope that a way can be found to live together in peace. And ineffectual as it seems, and despised by some as the UN Declaration of Human Rights is, it is the tool we have right now to move beyond partisan rhetoric and restore diplomacy and build genuine peace, as Albanese suggests.

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[1] Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time (New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 2005), 19–22.