Theology, Philosophy, Politics & Israel-Palestine

Dr Harry Hagopian 

It’s the same world as the one into which Jesus came - in so many ways a place that can drive us to despair or rage, and yet now and forever a world in which God is real, so that neither rage nor despair can be the only or the ultimate option for us - Dr Rowan Williams, friend & former Archbishop of Canterbury, Jordan, 2010

Some two weeks ago, when President Jo Biden embarked upon his tour of the MENA & Gulf regions, visiting Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Jeddah, I decided to reprise my own decades-long Middle Eastern odyssey by juxtaposing these inspiring words of faith from a theist of deep conviction and outreach with the belief system of Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps the ultimate atheist and celebrity philosopher. In one sense, both men hold out for me a same note of encouragement toward peace-seeking and non-violence throughout our global village let alone toward a Middle East and North Africa region that is riven with violence, hatred, injustice, discrimination, corruption, nepotism and wars. After all, Sartre was a man who provided the French people with a compass for some direction and hope during WWII. Not unlike Archbishop Rowan in the midst of so much present-day uncertainty, diffidence and fear.

• It has been written that Sartre’s existentialism addressed the dangers of allowing oneself to get trapped in the past, weighted under a whole host of positive or negative expectations, and that he underlined his belief in the corresponding need to take personal responsibility for the future. This idea of freedom, of stepping out boldly beyond the confines of one’s narrowly-defined identity with its exogenous parameters, was a political manifesto as much as a philosophical creed. Archbishop Rowan’s ethos also steered people in the direction of liberating oneself from a past of rage and despair and moving faithfully toward the future - in other words, not to be beholden to the angst of the past but to labour for the promise of better times.
  
• For me, a major difference between Dr Rowan Williams and Jean-Paul Sartre is that the former happens to be a man of vintage Christian faith in addition to having once been a nominal leader of some 85 million Anglicans worldwide. Conversely, the latter was someone who had drifted away from his maternal Catholicism although he still retained enormous influence in France till his death in 1980 as he highlighted the constant interplay between an inherited ‘facticity’ that forms us and a ‘freedom’ that takes us into a heretofore inexistent future. I am neither a philosopher nor a theologian, solely a lawyer, but I believe that both men encouraged people to move forward rather than stay shackled to the past. I would even venture to add that Sartre’s famous L’enfer, c’est les autres in the play Huis clos is tantamount to a political meditation on the ill-effects of living in what we call today a surveillance society that is dramatised by insufferable oppression and overweening vanity.
  
• But why do I introduce J-P Sartre and Archbishop Rowan into my Israeli-Palestinian short reflections today? After all, one is dead and the other is retired [at least officially] in Wales. Perhaps it is a cheeky response to my increasing frustration at the inability of second-rate politicians to go to a place where rage and despair are no longer the ultimate option or worse the necessary messenger but where they could discover a future that is not incandescent with bitter memories or insuperably real and virtual checkpoints. I find it harder every year to lay the blame for the political stasis in the region - including that in Israel-Palestine - on global influences alone rather than on a lack of fresh political vision that could couple itself with good faith and good will for peace.
  

So what about Israel-Palestine today, following President Jo Biden’s visit, as a case of the future overtaking the past?

• It is quite obvious that Palestinians today are in dire straits - or as we colloquially say in the UK, they find themselves ‘in a pickle’. The Palestinian Authority remains seriously discredited despite its hollow attempts - alongside those of other countries like Egypt or Jordan perhaps - to revive its credibility after the hard blows it sustained over the past 3 decades. Moreover, and encouraged initially by no less than former US President Obama’s demand from Israel for a full freeze on settlements, it is now left even more powerless since successive US Administrations have singularly failed to achieve anything more substantive than oratorical or rhetorical displays. President Biden today, once Obama’s veep and a self-avowed Zionist in spirit if not in ethnicity, seems to have almost yielded to Israeli diktats for the sake of his domestic and foreign policy considerations. Hence his abandonment of the pre-condition of a settlement freeze and the adoption of the already tested and failed two-state proximity talks as ways of elongating the negotiations whilst aborting any tangible results. With Hamas sniping at the legitimacy of the Authority despite the fact that it too is marginalised in Gaza and faces serious geopolitical challenges, ageing PA President Abbas finds himself on a political coniferous tree unable to climb down with any half-decent face-saving formula. I do applaud his irenic intentions, but his mandate has been characterised with manifold errors or misjudgements that have negated democracy and good governance. Rather, they have led people to question his penchant for going the extra mile with Israel - leading to an accrual of many extra miles that together have left Palestinians with hardly any territory, and with a sense of hybrid nationalism that neither feeds hungry babies nor restores dignity and justice let alone pride.
  
• Facing this Palestinian evanescent dream is a hapless US Administration that is a wonderful gift for the current Israeli squabbling politicians - whether interim, caretaker on otherwise - as they implement vicious right-wing policies on an occupied land that is not theirs anyway. So vicious in fact that they do not even refer to occupation anymore as the source of the conflict when dealing with the 1967 territories but turn the whole issue on its head by claiming that the occupation is actually helping combat terror that emanates from Iran! This Israeli truism suggests that any relinquishment of land to Palestinians would clearly weaken the so-called “war on terror”. How suitable for Israeli expansionism, but equally how sad for the EU, for many Arab states and for much of the US that accepts the oppression visited upon Palestinians as a quid pro quo for an amorphous global security.
  
• It baffles me that a whole stable of regional experts in the world capitals that matter - or those that do not matter - have not cottoned on to the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (1) remains (in the words of Dr Moustafa Barghouti, General-Secretary of al-Moubadara) the skeleton key to any peace in the whole region despite the sophistry of contrary arguments and the keen attempts at normalisation by some Arab countries, and (2) that it is a wasted and unproductive effort to spend time fighting Hezbollah or Hamas when the whole point is that these two resistance movements are willy-nilly viewed by large numbers of the pan-Arab populace as the sole true proponents of their inherent rights. When American, Israeli and Arab state policies continue to dehumanise and dismiss the ordinary Arab in the street, despite the lessons not learnt from the so-called Arab Spring chapter of protests, it does not require a genius with a degree in political science to conclude that these peoples would strongly resent their oppressors and those supporting them or are allied with them. Convinced of Western double-standards, and the dysfunctional nature of their regimes, they dig in their heels against further injustice, seeking self-protection in those core values that are at times viewed as regressive Islamist, extremist or violent.
  
  
• Yet, do Israel and the US truly appreciate this reality, and understand the shadow it is casting on the efforts of many peacemakers? After all, Israel (the spoilt child of the Middle East, as a Saudi Foreign Minister once described it), pursues apace its apartheid and colonial policies with arrogant impunity, correctly calculating that the US would not jeopardise the bilateral strategic relationship with Israel in the face of an Iranian nuclear issue. So Israel continues to build settler homes in occupied Arab East Jerusalem, near the Pisgat Ze'ev and Shu'fat neighbourhoods for instance, expands existing ones and evicts homeowners. There are now roughly 227,000 settlers ‘squatting’ in the greater Jerusalem area, living alongside some 354,000 Palestinians, in 11 large settlements and a number of smaller ones too. The numbers of settlers in the West Bank has quadrupled from about 78,000 in 1990 to around 450,000 in 2022. This is not only a demographic issue: it also wreaks havoc with any hope for a future independent, viable and contiguous Palestinian state - the so-called two-state solution. As far back as 1988, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat had predicted the establishment of a Palestinian sovereign state within two years. Yet today, 34 dismal years later, that prediction remains a distant unreality and the peace process has become an offensive façade and a chimera. America continues to bankroll Israeli policies that undermine its strategic objectives and render the whole region less safe, whilst the Arab World busies itself with summit meetings. compulsive communiqués and now normalisation efforts.
  
• But what about the EU, our own club of 27 member-states, a reader might ask me here in the UK? In some sense, the Venice Declaration of 13 June 1980 remains for me the most meaningful statement coming out of Brussels. However, the fact remains that the EU - whether as a collective body or individual states - is still unable to translate its financial and moral support to Palestinians under occupation into genuine political impulse. It needs to decouple its foreign policy from that of the USA long enough to deal with the conflict proactively and help tailor a resolution that would incidentally also serve our own European interests. Otherwise, its timid gestures - whether over the import of agricultural products from settlements or its cost-free statements - will remain mere whimpers in the face of a roaring regional calamity.
  
• Global terror is admittedly a menace today, just as the Russia-Ukraine war could stoke it further if left untended, but it is not a genetic Middle Eastern / Arab one. Most Arabs are not terrorists, just as most Palestinians are not rabid Israel-haters and most Muslims are not blood-curdling fanatics! Do wake up and smell the coffee! Walk away from colonial and Orientalist stereotypes. Global terror results from a mutation of different conditions ranging from military occupation to political oppression and consequential economic penury. So is it not high time that politicians stop using pretexts to ‘justify’ their immobility let alone their reluctance to act decisively? 
  
• It is self-evident that Palestinians should get their own house in order - a herculean task given their current fragmentation and animosities. So let us not hoodwink anyone facilely by hiding behind spurious pretexts: things could change through negotiation, not necessarily through bombs or militarisation or side-talks. After all, if we are ready to engage Taliban in Afghanistan today, could we not also think a bit more laterally in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Or has our leaders’ political imagination become so insular - dare I add sterile - that they create ethical excuses to justify unethical inertia as they pick and choose their friends and foes at the expense of Palestinian lives, hopes and rights?
  

Let me go back to the beginning in order to conclude with J-P Sartre and Dr Rowan Williams. Whilst they were perhaps ideological antipodes, they understood nonetheless this transparent reality. They encouraged us to overstep our narrow-minded realities by engaging with the future. So my challenge for politicians and readers alike today is to decamp from their fusty political cubicles and mull over an ancient Roman saying Tempus edax, homo edacior in the hope that they might - just - prove that Victor Hugo was wrong when he claimed that “Time is blind, man is stupid” in his The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831. 
It is not easy, but can we overstep our past, refresh our today and avoid being governed by rage or despair? Or are we handicapped by our blinders and traumatised by injustices to try even? Is that not also a definition of a quicksand? After all, our future might depend on our faithful answer. So let me leave you - dear Telos reader - with an admission by the French novelist Anaïs Nin who wrote tellingly, “We do not see things as they are, but as we are.”
© harry_bvH
July 2022

Dr Harry Hagopian is an International lawyer who is also involved in a range of ecumenical & political consultancies. He is Knight of the Orders of St Gregory & St Lazarus, Fellow at Sorbonne University and Associate at the Ekklesia think-tank. For the past decade, he was Consultant to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England & Wales as well as to the Armenian Orthodox Church in the UK & Ireland. Earlier, he worked with the Middle East Council of Churches in Limassol, Beirut & Jerusalem.