Theology has long been used to justify war. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it’s happening again in the Middle East. The defining difference between the warring parties in the Middle East is religion. Indeed, in many ways this is a depressingly old-fashioned conflict. So are its grizzly dynamics and rationales. Benjamin Netanyahu was clearly appealing to the highest Continue reading »
Religion and Faith
Overhead, suddenly, there was a noisy helicopter. I didn’t look up. Then I noticed that I hadn’t looked up. If I was in a place of terror from the sky, I would have looked up. The next day a friend and I went for a walk by the beach in Point Lonsdale. He is just Continue reading »
At the core of the cycle of violence in Israel and Palestine is “the studied blindness of two people to see the other, to accept that they have a legitimate place on the landscape”. Without such acceptance, this horrific war in Gaza will not be the last. We cannot know when and how the Israeli-Hamas Continue reading »
Hamas’s refusal to recognise Israel as a state is as absurd as Israel’s belief that the current massacre of Palestinians will destroy Hamas. If all this were mere stupidity it would be bad enough, but the consequent violence against innocent people is extreme and it is accelerating. The 1500 Israeli deaths and hundreds of kidnappings Continue reading »
Over the last few weeks we have been bombarded with a number of assertions, advanced firstly as mere mantra, but then appearing as axioms, or self-evident truths. Israel has a right to defend itself; and Israel has a right to exist. I wish to question whether these two statements are as axiomatic as our Prime Continue reading »
The UN is calling the Israel-Hamas war a ‘graveyard of children’…. an adult conflict, in which the young are suffering most. What we see on our TV screens every night is impossible to watch. Did Netanyahu see the young lad who had just carried the decapitated body of his friend from the rubble. If so, Continue reading »
The most pressing challenge for the Catholic Church remains addressing women’s inequality in its ranks. The current Synod on Synodality offers some hope, but there are huge roadblocks. The likelihood of equality for women in the Church requires a leap of faith, extremely long-term thinking, and hoping against hope. I cannot see it happening in Continue reading »
Albert Einstein once said that Palestinians (Jews, Christians and Muslims alike) lived in peace and worked together before the European Jews were sent to Palestine. He also said that if Jews could not co-exist peacefully with Arabs “then we have learnt nothing in 2000 years of civilisation”. I once interviewed numerous elderly Palestinian refugees who Continue reading »
No attempt to “explain”, rationalise, find some counter-“equivalence” for, nor any attempt to see matters through the eyes and the experiences of the murderers rather than the immediate victims can justify or forgive the barbaric massacre of Israeli children, women and men by Hamas warriors after they broke out of Gaza. It does not forgive Continue reading »
An aside to what is happening in Gaza is events occurring in the West Bank, where there has been little focus. Reports in recent days have drawn attention to attempts by settlers – read the Israeli government – to “Judaise” Area C and to push Bedouins out of the West Bank. Some 98 families, numbering Continue reading »