“There’s no far away
There is no more far away
These dreams of the Wild West, they lead us astray.
There is no more far away.”
— David Wilcox
I hardly know what to say to you all today as events in Israel and Gaza unfold this week. I hope, like me —and especially if you happen to be a White American Christian— you’re doing a lot of listening.
Opinions are a dime a dozen, and with a good bit of trepidation, I’m about to offer some here.
Grief, shock, anguish, and fear are rampant.
I’m a straight White American Christian preacher.
I’m not Jewish, or Israeli.
I’m not Muslim, or Palestinian.
But I have beautiful friends in every possible configuration of those previous modifiers. And I know that emotions are high, opinions are many.
I’ve been honored to be present at many interfaith events with Jewish supporters of Israel and at other events with Muslim supporters of Palestine. Some of these events have been in Synagogues, some in Mosques, and some in churches I have been blessed to serve.
With Jewish friends, I’ve mourned the anti-Semitic hate that still erupts in our country. I’ve heard Israelis describe the near constant state of anxiety they live with day to day in their home country.
And over the years, I’ve listened to the fearful voices of Muslim immigrants, afraid of becoming the targets of Islamophobia. I’ve heard the cries of anguish over the treatment of average Palestinians; Muslim, Christian, and secular.
The song lyrics above are from a very old song by the great David Wilcox. And this song comes back into my consciousness this week. It’s been rattling around as the ear worm that God and the muse sent me.
I had to make a quick trip to the lake late this afternoon so I pulled out the mini Taylor and sang out a quick version. Somehow, it’s helped organize all these random thoughts.
For those of us paying attention, trying to be the best neighbors we can, there really is no “far away.”
Events half a world a way affect our friends, our neighborhoods, and deeply shake the courage and resolve of us all.
As an old faith-based peace-activist now, I suddenly harken back to other times of shock and trauma - when “far away” events shook us all to our core. I think of too many lessons our world has never learned and so many bad choices we’ve all made.
And by “we,” I mean “our entire world…our planet.”
So much trauma.
Do you feel it?
I certainly do.
To my Jewish friends, please know I stand beside you and grieve with you. I can never know what it’s like to be in your skin. No humans ever deserve to suffer the kind of terrorism that was inflicted upon Israel this week. And for American Jews, I can only imagine the remembrance of murders in synagogues in our country too. I know the trauma is real and I grieve with you.
I understand the regrettable(1) need for Israel to defend its people, up to and including the ground war soon to be underway. I cannot for one millisecond condone the acts of Hamas any more than I could condone the acts of Bin Laden a generation ago.
It’s terrorism. And terrorism has a goal. The goal is always destabilization, fear, and the creation of even more violence and hate.
My prayer is that whatever morally justified response is still forthcoming in the next days-to-weeks does not in itself simply lead to more violence and retribution.
And I know that many of you hope for this too.
To my Palestinian friends, I also know your deep frustrations with the untenable situation in Gaza. The world has not paid nearly enough attention to the injustices there. And even me writing these words now feels like too little too late.
Please know that I understand the differences between terrorist organizations and ordinary Palestinians, just as I understood the difference between American Muslims and Al-Qaeda terrorists a generation ago.
I have heard many people in recent days decry how the sufferings of Palestinians is not being fully named. And I believe this is right.
Finally, to all of us trying to make sense of these events, consider this assertion: There are credibly very few groups as generationally traumatized as Jews and Palestinians.
The generational trauma carried by all of my Jewish friends….by all my Palestinian friends…where do you mark its beginning?
For Jews…
Do you start in 1930s Germany?
1800s Europe?
The Crusades, Pogroms, and Inquisitions?
The Persians?
Egyptians?
How far back do you want to go?
Because you can make a very credible case for Jewish generational trauma that extends back millennia.
And so, how can we outsiders even *begin* to fathom what it must feel like to experience this kind of horror?
We cannot.
For ordinary Palestinians, how far back does *their* trauma go?
The current Gaza Ghetto?
America’s Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
The Six Day War?
The Lost Years?
The Nabka?
The British?
Ottomans?
Christian Crusaders?
Romans and Byzantines?
Again, my goal here isn’t to say “one trauma is worse than the other,” or even “both are the same.”
My only thought here as a pastor who has tried very hard to listen to my friends on all sides of these conflicts, is to simply note this pastoral truth:
Nearly everyone involved in the ongoing conflicts in this part of the world are carrying their OWN traumas and the traumas of generations before them.
I try to keep this truth very much top of mind as I am thinking about all these things. The trauma doesn’t have to be the same in order of us to name that it is quite real and quite tender for all those involved.
For several decades now, many of us have said two parallel thoughts:
“Israel has the right to exist.”
“There should be a Palestinian State.”
SAYING these things is easy. But politicians in every country, including our own, have failed our world by not more actively pursuing peace.
At the risk of riling folks up more, may I make an analogy?
It’s a bit like the border crisis along the southern United States..not in terms of the players involved but in terms of the world response.
Everybody understands there will always be immigration. Everybody understands there must be both a process for continual immigration as well as limits to it.
But the conversation is SO difficult that successive Presidential Administrations of both parties have either kicked the can down the road…making the issues far WORSE and endemic…or they’ve relied on stunts like a border wall and razor wire.
Either way, the one thing we don’t end up with is a serious and substantive talk about the root causes of immigration and what we can do to fix things.
The situation in Israel/Palestine is similar in form.
Successive groups of world leaders have just kicked the can down the road. Israeli and Palestinian leaders have often used this stalemate for their own purposes.
Meanwhile, Israel remains unsafe and ordinary Palestinians remain virtual prisoners in Gaza.
Which gets me back to the David Wilcox song and its heartbreaking lyrics:
“When the missiles are waiting to fly
They’ll cut right through the innocent sky
If we pull out our six guns, like the sheriff on high
It’s not just the bad guys who’ll die.
These changes cannot be denied
We live close to the world’s other side
And that can save us or kill us, it’s time to decide
The past is no safe place to hide…
Cause there’s no far away…”
— David Wilcox
I keep coming back to this song because these issues keep coming back anew.
David Wilcox wrote this song about the FIRST Gulf War…the invasion of Kuwait in the late 1980s.
He was obviously urging America and its allies to be careful in their use of military power. Of course, as quickly as it came, that war ended. And David pretty much put the song away.
But lo and behold, he brought it back as America started rattling its sabers after September 11th…as we as a nation appeared to be careening toward military intervention in Afghanistan. (We didn’t yet imagine Iraq a second time…)
It was during this time —in late 2001 through 2002– that I found myself pulling out this song and playing it every chance I got. Every show I played, several times in church, I played this song.
Somehow it urgently spoke to some need we’re called to grasp but were missing. As we stirred up our moral outrage to fight those wars, I was especially chilled by the final verse:
“Vengeance never dies with the dead
Despite what the generals said
And this oil slick of blood across the ocean will spread
And poison our own wells instead.”
— David Wilcox
This verse chilled me back then. It chills me today.
So let me end with some potentially more challenging thoughts for us all…about the past and the present…
As noted, Wilcox wrote this song well before 911….and yet it seemed to presage 911 itself.
In recent days, many observers have suggested that this new war is “Israel’s 911.”
Here’s what I remember about the original 911…
The anger, frustration, humiliation of Bin Laden’s followers led them to commit truly heinous and evil acts of terror in the United States…adding Americans to the list of those deeply scarred by terrorism worldwide.
I believe what Westerners often miss is the feeling of “humiliation” that many Muslims and Middle Eastern persons feel. In the immediate aftermath of 911, Americans soothed themselves by saying “they hate our freedom.”
But as I wrote at the time, my sense is that it was more about hating lack of respect that a small group of humans in the Muslim world felt about Soviet Afghanistan, Gaza, the Gulf War, US Military in Saudi Arabia…and other perceived indignities. Whatever WE thought of these, they felt like humiliation to some in the Middle East.
Most folks bear up under those feelings and don’t act on them. Terrorists for their own sick purposes do not.
They seem to become convinced that the destabilizing fear and chaos of terrorism will somehow help their cause.
Again, terrorism never helps any cause. (Including the Palestinians, hopefully this is clear…)
But if we’re going to ever fight it with more than blunt force military weapons, we’ve got to understand these credible root causes far more than we still apparently do.
In the immediate wake of September 2001, I found myself feeling increasingly helpless as *my* nation, *my* government, made choice after choice from anger, bitterness, fear, and sometimes outright hatred. (And if government officials want to deny that *they* did these things, we all must admit that MANY average Americans signed up to go to war with express goal of “killing Muslims”…)
In recent days, I have heard the same troubling mix of fear, grief, and potentially blind anger.
So, let me say the following in quick succession:
— Just as we could say after 911, “we are all New Yorkers,” so too we can stand with Israelis in their grief and anger.
— But just as we could criticize our American government for its many failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, so too we can now demand a level of moral accountability from the Israeli government.
— And finally, just as we could condemn 911 terrorists and rampant Islamophobia of the early 2000s, so too we can condemn Hamas *and* condemn the dehumanization of average Palestinians.
Israel is not just a collection of traumatized Jewish people. It’s also a nation state with a government and army. As such, and just as with the United States, we can and must insist that their responses to this terrorism limit the harm to civilians.
Christians have a moral duty to raise the standard of “Just War” here. Yes, Israel was attacked. But as a nation state, the world must insist that Israel has the responsibility of the responsible use of its power.
As we Americans learned in our post-911 wars, this is challenging, perhaps even humanly impossible.
Everyone analyzing the likely coming ground war suggests it will be horrific, and fears are that innocent civilians could be killed by the thousands.
I fear this too, even as I fear the continued existence of Hamas terrorists if there is no ground war.
And so, even in this fraught time, I raise these challenging issues before you.
Whatever your mix of fear, anger, desire for vengeance…whatever your level of support for Israel, Palestinians, consider the lyrics….
Consider how *often* violence leads simply to more violence….how the “oil slick of blood” can spread like a virus of unintended consequences, across a nation…even across a world.
“There is no far away.”
It is not hard to imagine greater war being on the horizon for much more of the world.
I suppose what I am saying is this: If 911 taught ME anything, it was that military actions taken in anger, vengeance, and without forethought can have disastrous long term consequences….not just for the “enemy,” but also for us.
We Americans —at least some of us— learned that, and some of us even understood it at the time.
I’d implore the Israeli government to consider this hard lesson….one I am still convinced we Americans have not fully come to terms with.
Thinking back to those months after 911, I repeatedly preached caution in numerous sermons.
“Yes, we should bring terrorists to justice,” I said.
“No, we can’t blame all Muslims,” I said.
“Yes, there’s a moral justification for defending ourselves,” I preached.
“No, that doesn’t mean every “end” justifies every “means,” I implored.
Trauma, anger, bitterness, the desire for revenge can lead to all sorts of unintended violence.
Which brings me to remember my friend, Rais Bhuiyan, who was shot in the face at point blank range in the weeks after September 11, 2001 as he worked his clerk job at a local Dallas area convenience store.
A White man from my city had internalized the hate, anger, and desire to “do something,” and so he decided he’d go kill some brown people who looked Middle Eastern.
Rais wasn’t even from the Middle East.
This is where my mind goes.
As I meditate on the coming weeks and months, my mind goes back to the rage and violence that can get unleashed in times of trauma and terror. Rage that, in the case of 911, led to two “forever wars,” one with a partial moral justification and another with none whatsoever.
The moral injury that was visited on America, from the blind vengeance we inflicted, from the innocent we killed, from our own dead and war-wounded soldiers….we still have not come to terms with all the lessons.
In sum….
The blame game is easy.
The blind vengeance game feels good…at first.
But, compassion for all traumatized people….
Refusing to hide behind “whatboutisms”…
Making space for grief…
Committing to the actual work between cultures and people…
This is all FAR harder.
I do not envy the burden on every world leader seeking to navigate these fraught times.
I do not envy prophets, preachers, and thought-leaders who will continue to express both compassion and a call for complicated justice.
I know just how hard it will be for us to find a sense of our common shared humanity as I recall the sober truth that nothing is really ever “far away.”
Therefore, I am in constant prayer…
For Israel and all who love her.
For Palestinians and all who love them.
For our broken world.
I hope you will pray all these things too.
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(1) I call it “regrettable,” because as a Christian committed to non-violence, any use of military force, however morally justified, is “regrettable.” It means that all other efforts and means at resolving disputes have failed. This is my meaning here.
