CURRENT TOPICS IN CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS

On July 12, 2006 Hezbollah operatives sent a barrage of rockets into Northern Israel , something that they had been doing periodically for several years. At the same time, they entered Israeli territory and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, killing three others. Another five Israeli soldiers were killed in pursuit of their kidnapped comrades. Since the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah had been supplied by Iran and Syria with reportedly as many as 10,000-12,000 missiles and rockets, some carrying large warheads and with capacity to reach major Israeli cities. Hezbollah began shooting such armaments at Israel, almost entirely at civilian targets. Israel began numerous bombing strikes at bridges, roads and Hezbollah installations in Lebanon and sealing Lebanon?s borders, both to try to prevent the hostages from being taken out of the country and to prevent new armaments from reaching Hezbollah. Hezbollah responded with hundreds of rocket attacks, targeting northern Israeli cities, including Haifa , Israel ?s largest port. Loss of life has been much greater in Lebanon for several reasons. These include Hezbollah?s location of military targets in the midst of civilian populations as well as the superiority of Israeli military technology. In addition, Israeli construction codes require the provision of bomb shelters or fortified rooms, providing accessible shelter for civilians.

This page offers links to information and statements that may be useful discussion resources for Christian-Jewish dialogue groups. The opinions contained in these items represent the views of their specific authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning or of the Board of Trustees of Boston College.

• Roman Catholic Statements

• International Council of Christians and Jews

• Religions for Peace

• American Jewish Committee

• Rabbinical Council of America

• Anglican Church

• Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

• United Church of Christ

• United Methodist Church

• World Council of Churches

• From the Website of the National Council of Churches: "Links to Statement on the Middle East issued by the faith communities"

Remarks by Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, President
Union for Reform Judaism

We are grateful for the analysis that we will hear tonight. It is important for us to understand as best we can the terrible conflict that rages on Israel?s northern border.

Still, as much as we appreciate analysis and commentary, it seems to me that the distinguishing feature of this conflict is the utter clarity of the issues and of the moral choices that it presents.

This is a war in which the rights and wrongs are beyond all doubt.

Southern Lebanon is taken over by Hezbollah after Israel?s withdrawal. Supported by Syria and Iran, Hezbollah amasses an arsenal of 13,000 missiles and rockets. Over a period of 6 years, it launches dozens of unprovoked attacks into Israeli territory? striking at military installations or launching rockets at civilian targets. All the while, Hezbollah?s leaders proclaim their genocidal intentions: Israel is to be wiped off the map.

And then, after it attacks again, kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers, Israel finally strikes back. After 6 long years, it has had enough. But without hesitation, Hezbollah unleashes a barrage of 2500 rockets against Israel?s northern cities, each and every rocket aimed at civilians, each and every rocket intended to kill, or to maim, or to terrorize.

And terrorize they have. A half million Israelis have been driven from their homes; nearly a million pass most of their days in bomb shelters. Life in the northern half of the country has come to a standstill. And not only that. Hezbollah intentionally operates from civilian areas, knowing that this will increase civilian deaths, no matter how precise Israel?s weaponry. And these deaths in turn will be used to ratchet up the violence and the hate.

Could the rights and wrongs of this conflict be any clearer? If Israel?s cause is not just in this war, then no cause can ever be just.

But, of course, there are those in Europe, and here too, far from Hezbollah?s rockets and terror, smug in the physical safety of their own homes, who accuse Israel of overreacting and of failing to exercise ?proportionality.?

To my fellow Americans who speak in this way, here is my question: if you were living in Houston, and if a terrorist body that the Mexican government refused to disarm were firing deadly rockets into your neighborhood night after night, endangering your life and terrorizing your children, would you be talking of restraint and proportionality? Or would you be demanding an immediate response from your government to assure that not a single additional missile threatened your family?s well-being?

This is not an abstract question. We know what President Roosevelt did when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. We know what President Kennedy did when the Russians put missiles in Cuba. And we know what President Bush did in Afghanistan, when it gave refuge to those who attacked us on September 11. Americans then did not talk of proportionality; they talked about providing security for their country and stopping those who wished to do us harm.

But let us not think for a moment, God forbid, that we can be indifferent to the death of innocents. The death of any child, Israeli or Arab, Muslim or Jew, is an unspeakable tragedy that rends the heart.

When Abraham argued with God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, his plea was: ?Ha-af tispeh tsaddik im rasha? Will you indeed sweep away the innocent with the guilty?? (Gen 18:23). And Abraham knew the answer, of course. Because you cannot turn your back on the innocent and still be God.

And so, what do we say about the children who died in Jana? We say that it was terrible beyond words.

But then we look at what happened afterward, and we see once again where justice resides in this terrible war.

Because immediately after the tragedy, Israel?s government said: this was an awful mistake and we are deeply sorry. And the next day, Israel?s papers and airwaves were filled with anguished debates about the moral implications of Israel?s actions. In Yediot Aharonot, Israel?s largest daily, the lead editorial proclaimed: ?In a national sense, we are all guilty, because small nations are nations of collective responsibility. This killing is on the head of all of us.? And it went on to say that what Israel must do is take responsibility and ask forgiveness.

Do not misunderstand me. No one was arguing that the war was wrong. Overwhelmingly, Israelis believe that this is a just war, that it must be fought, and that Hezbollah is a threat to their very existence. They know that morality begins with security, and that the first responsibility of any government is to protect its citizens. But Israelis also want to know that everything that can be done to avoid civilian casualties is being done. And they were sending that message to their leaders, loud and clear.

And now let?s ask ourselves: Can we imagine this conversation taking place in the ranks of Hezbollah? As Jewish children continue to die, can we imagine Hezbollah taking responsibility and apologizing? Can we imagine them pledging to do everything in their power to put an end to civilian deaths? No, we cannot. Because Hezbollah is fascist in its politics and fanatic in its religious zeal; and it dreams not of peace but of death?death to Israel, death to Jews, and death to America. Once again, even amidst the tragedy of innocent lives lost, we see with utter clarity who shares our values and who is worthy of our support.

What is our task? It is four-fold.

First, to support our government, which has been a voice of reason and good sense, and to thank our president, who has been a true friend of the Jewish state.

Second, to work for peace?real peace. And peace can come. If the attacks stop, and if Hezbollah is disarmed, peace can come tomorrow. So let us strengthen the hand of all who will join with us in making such a peace a reality.

Third, to make clear that we are not declaring war against another religion. Yes, we will oppose extremism with all our might. But remember: our adversaries are the angry and hating minority in the Moslem world who embrace radical Islam. Surely most Moslems want to live in peace, and with them we must engage in honest dialogue.

And finally, to embrace Israel in her hour of need. Because Israel is a cause for thanksgiving and rejoicing; a bastion of democracy in a very bad neighborhood; a friend of America and an enemy of terror; and an inspiration to Jews and to Christians everywhere. Israel is not a perfect country. It is a contentious country that is as complicated and as difficult as the Jewish people themselves. But it is also a country where most of the time, and certainly now, the best impulses of her leaders and her people determine her direction and give us hope.

And so where do we stand at this moment? We stand proudly with Israel.

And as always, we ask for God?s guidance. And we pray that evil will be overthrown and reason will prevail. And that peace and redemption will come to Israel?s border, and that harmony will hallow Jerusalem?s gates?bi?meheira u?viyameinu, speedily, and in our day.

Dr. Rowan Williams
Archbishop of Canterbury

Sunday 6th August 2006

As I write, the UN continues its deliberations about what kind of resolution might be possible to support and effect a ceasefire in Lebanon. The optimistic gloss is that this could be achieved ?in a few days?, though the organisation of an international peacekeeping force is likely to take several weeks.

A few days is a long time in the Middle East at the moment. Not only because of the uninterrupted cycle of slaughter, but because of the mounting humanitarian crisis in the region ? in Gaza and the West Bank as well as in Lebanon. If an immediate ceasefire is going to take a few days to implement, that will still mean an unpredictable number of Israeli and Lebanese civilian deaths and further damage to the infrastructure of Israeli, Lebanese and Palestinian society. It makes any prospect of a sustainable peace settlement more remote. The longer we wait for a ceasefire, the harder a ceasefire becomes ? let alone a more comprehensive settlement.

That is why voices in the region, notably from some connected with the Middle East Council of Churches, are increasingly concentrating their efforts on some short-term goals. There have been detailed proposals for a very brief ceasefire (seventy two hours, for example) designed to allow humanitarian aid to be delivered to areas that are currently unreachable. World Food Programme convoys are stopped and other vital supplies are being held back by blockade or bureaucracy. Hospitals are struggling to cope with uncontrollable levels of civilian casualties. Even if a complete formal ceasefire proved impossible, even for a short and defined period, a gesture like the lifting of the naval blockade for the delivery of humanitarian supplies would be a target worth working for.

There have also been appeals to Hezbollah to give assurances about the welfare of the captured Israeli soldiers to their families. There is a clear perception that even the remotest possibility of an exchange of prisoners would depend on some initiative that would break a deadlock of absolute mutual mistrust. Assurances from Hezbollah, no less than the suspension of the naval blockade, could, it is argued have this effect.

A good deal more in similar vein is coming from the churches in the Middle East (who, it?s worth remembering, have their own concerns about a Hezbollah ?victory?). It is time we listened harder to them. And what is important here is the motivation of these voices. They are saying with the greatest of clarity that every hour that passes is making the post-conflict prospect more and more unbearable ? to the point where even the briefest and most nominal interruption of the mutual carnage becomes disproportionately significant.

And the underlying problem, identified by one or two commentators in the USA, is that both sides in the Lebanese conflict are playing for very high stakes ? on one side, decisive victory over what is seen as an engine of terror, on the other, a decisive humiliation for Israel, with regional repercussions in the balance of power and a dramatic strengthening of certain elements in the Islamic world. In that sort of climate, the question of who blinks first becomes very fraught indeed ? so that the gestures of goodwill suggested by the Christian leadership of the region do not at first glance look all that probable.

But this means that, on both sides, the comprehensive ravaging of an infrastructure is seen as a price worth paying for an imagined future stability. Hezbollah directly and deliberately targets civilians in Israel and apparently regards the lives of Lebanese civilians as counters to be deployed in their strategy; Israel risks treating the Lebanese population as if they were all de facto collaborators with Hezbollah. Both act like this because the prize is so temptingly comprehensive. Yet the irony is that the only clearly visible effects are the returning of Lebanon to a chaos from which it had begun to escape and the continuing exposure of Israeli civilians in the border area to indiscriminate attack, which shows no sign at all of lessening. Those who are rightly anxious about Israel?s security have to ask about the cost of so dangerously unstable a neighbour. The big prize of some really decisive solution, some transforming victory for one value system over another, is simply being made more and more unattainable by the tactics being used. It is a lesson that could be applied, in a different degree, to the whole rhetoric of the war on terror.

The ethical tradition that has developed around the conduct and aims of war is profoundly discouraging about definitive solutions that will justify any amount of interim suffering and devastation ? which is why terrorist tactics are always immoral without qualification. But even in the deployment of legitimate defensive force, one of the moral criteria applied historically to the judgement of any such action is whether it has in view attainable, limited and realistic goals to be secured by any engagement of force. And this implies that a conflict fought on an all-or-nothing basis, rather than looking to measurable advantages and negotiated adjustments of interest, is going to be morally problematic. Consciously to create a civil vacuum in the hope that it will guarantee total victory is to court both practical and moral defeat in the long run.

So one of the middle-to-long term issues for any UN intervention will be what kind of peace is expected to emerge if a ceasefire is negotiated ? and who takes the responsibility for anything that looks like a ?common security? solution, preserving the integrity and legitimacy of civil society and government in Lebanon and giving no possible handle to the rhetoric of groups (or nations) that challenge Israel?s right to exist (the Arab Summit of 2002 - in Beirut, ironically ? attempted to put down a positive marker on this). Some of the Middle Eastern commentators I have been discussing have outlined a process by which Israeli withdrawal from the disputed Shebaa Farms territories (on the guarantee from Syria that Lebanese sovereignty here is recognised) matches a ?decommissioning? of Hezbollah units and their absorption into the Lebanese security forces under international monitoring. It is again a move that does not currently look easily achievable. But only something like this will make any useful contribution to a proper strategy for a law-governed outcome in the region. And that is the only goal worth working for.

A law-governed situation is one in which interests and conflicts are argued, negotiated and balanced out, with no permanent, unassailable winners and losers. At the moment, what we see is dangerously close to lawlessness in the strict sense, a disregard for present chaos and pain in the name of a future that will justify everything. The Abrahamic faiths are all committed to law because none of them can accept that consequences alone justify actions. So we need to hear more from leaders of all these faiths in support of law as well as of immediate humanitarian action ? in support of short-term improvements, pragmatic means of resolving injustices, civil procedures for discovering common goals, however limited, acceptance of interests that are more than ?reasons of state?. And we need to hear more from jurists of all backgrounds in the mapping out of what a ceasefire and an international presence will be seeking to make possible in Lebanon and in the region.

And meanwhile, we could do worse than spend a moment listening to the most immediate pleas from those on the ground. A statement from Hezbollah about its prisoners, an easing of the blockade to guarantee safe passage for WFP convoys and supplies for the hospitals of Lebanon and Gaza ? these are not huge and complex matters. But if they save even a handful of lives, they are not wasted. And they will represent just a small sign that somewhere there is a shared future to be negotiated for the ordinary people of the region, Israeli, Palestinian or Lebanese.