On March 26, 140 Global Christian leaders sent a letter to President Biden demanding an “immediate and permanent ceasefire” in Gaza and a halt to arms shipment to Israel. The letter was organized by the Churches for Middle East Peace.
It was signed by a number of Religious Left figures including mainline Protestant officials: United Methodist Council of Bishops President Thomas J. Bickerton, Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, and Acting Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly Bronwen Boswell. Representatives of liberal Catholic organizations Pax Christ and the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns also signed, as did Evangelical Left figures Shane Claiborne, Jim Wallis and Sojourners President Adam Russell Taylor.
Under the guise of peace, these leaders are promoting war and the continued slaughter of innocents.
A permanent ceasefire today would leave Hamas in power and free to continue its violent assault on the State of Israel, its citizens, and any prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The letter conveniently never mentions the cause of the war, namely Hamas’ barbaric slaughter, rape, beheading and kidnapping of more than 1,300 innocent Israelis on October 7.
Should a permanent ceasefire stave off its defeat, Hamas will repeat its massacre “time and again in order to achieve its aim of the complete destruction of Israel,” as the high Hamas official, Ghazi Hamad proudly proclaimed on October 24, soon after the initial slaughter.
A Palestinian state living peacefully alongside the Jewish state is unthinkable for the Islamist terror group. Hamas’ charter explicitly rejects all peaceful solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and is committed to destroy Israel through continued armed struggle. That is, it insists on continued war against Israelis until it exterminates the Jewish state and makes Palestine Judenrein. This is the radical vision to which these 140 misguided Christian “apostles of peace” condemn both Palestinians and Jews in the Holy Land.
Perhaps the letter is merely the result of the leaders’ unwitting ignorance of the brutal realities of the conflict or naïveté about the violent and evil nature of Hamas.
Or perhaps it is the result of the classic Augustinian prejudice against the success and dignity of the Jewish people after the emergence of Christianity. How else can we explain the letter’s one-sidedness and the Christian leaders’ blithe and total disregard for the safety of Israelis and their rights to defend themselves, the same as every other human being? Not-so-subtle intimations of the old toxic supersessionism pervade nearly every sentence of the letter.
Leaving Hamas in power to continue ruling Gaza through terror heralds disaster not merely for Israelis, but also for the Palestinians of Gaza. Under theocratic Hamas rule since 2005, the residents of Gaza have suffered poverty, corruption, intolerance, widespread violence, and hopelessness. Before October 7, Arab polls reported that less than 25 percent of Gazans supported the repressive Hamas regime and 72 percent believed that the Hamas government was corrupt.
Christians in particular have suffered under Islamist Hamas. When Hamas assumed power in 2007, there were 3,000 Christians living in Gaza. After 17 years of Hamas rule, there are less than 1,000 Christians remaining. The only Christian bookstore in Gaza was burned down and its owner killed soon after Hamas came into power. This should not surprise us since Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which never was known for religious tolerance. Hamas’ vision is for Islamists to subdue the entire world, including “treacherous Christianity” to quote Hamas’ co-founder, Mahmoud Al-Zahar.
All of us hate war and violence, and no one among us wishes to see more death. The raging war is heartbreaking. Yet the witting or unwitting blindness and one-sidedness of the Christian letter undermines the moral integrity of its authors and the wisdom of its demands. A rabbinic maxim teaches that when a person is merciful to the cruel, it results in cruelty to the merciful. Surely allowing Hamas to continue to terrorize, butcher and rape innocent persons is giving license to such cruelty.
There are times when barbarism and evil are so great that there is no choice other than to destroy it for peace to have a chance. The Bible recognizes this, instructing us that we must “destroy evil in our midst.” (Deut. 19:19) If we allow Hamas to survive by stopping the campaign to defeat it, however bloody that necessary campaign may be, we sow the seeds for the destruction of all civil society based on our Judeo-Christian values.
Whether due to ignorance, blinding bias, or theological intolerance, the authors of the letter have issued dangerous and immoral demands. President Biden should ignore the letter, as should all people who want to bring peace to the Middle East.
Dr. Eugene Korn is an ethicist who lives in Jerusalem.
Comment by Corvus Corax on March 29, 2024 at 11:27 am
It always amuses me when left wing Christian groups petition our government in an attempt to influence public policy. Is this the frightening specter of Christian Nationalism I’ve been hearing so much about? But even liberal airheads are right twice a day.
In any case, Dr. Korn points out that Israel’s current military campaign in Gaza is a direct response to Hamas’s October 7 surprise attack and civilian massacre on Israeli soil. That much is not in dispute. Of course, it should also be noted that the October 7 attack was itself a response–to decades of military occupation and oppression of the people of Gaza by the Israeli state.
Says Korn, “Under theocratic Hamas rule since 2005, the residents of Gaza have suffered poverty, corruption, intolerance, widespread violence, and hopelessness.”
This is an absurd claim in light of the permanent blockade that the Israeli state has placed over the Gaza strip since 2005. Gaza suffers because of generations of occupation and sanction, all of which were perpetrated by Israel with the help of the United States. Crocodile tears at this juncture are unpersuasive. Additionally it is obvious that the current war was not launched to raise the living standards of Palestinians.
Korn goes further, concluding that “If we allow Hamas to survive by stopping the campaign to defeat it, however bloody that necessary campaign may be, we sow the seeds for the destruction of all civil society based on our Judeo-Christian values.”
This is outrageous hyperbole. I fail to see how the “destruction of all civil society” hangs in the balance of this near-eastern sectarian bloodbath. Excepting the possibility that the barbarism and intolerance on both sides soils all humanity by its filth. To say nothing of the ludicrous neologism “Judeo-Christian” which, suspiciously, only seems to appear in print when Judeans are petitioning Christians for moral permission to wage endless wars of revenge for ethnic nationalist reasons. I have had quite enough of Judeo-Christianity and will take regular old Christianity, thanks.
Comment by Douglas Ehrhardt on March 29, 2024 at 4:32 pm
It’s the Koran folks.
Comment by George on March 29, 2024 at 10:54 pm
What?
Comment by George on March 29, 2024 at 11:06 pm
What? You would prefer “regular old Christianity “ ? Is that the same old Christianity that has persecuted the Jews for eons? Yeah brother, give me that old time religion, right?
How do you feel about the way we ended WW2 ? I think Israel has had enough. War is bad. Never ending war is worse.
Comment by Curtis Nester on March 30, 2024 at 7:37 am
A cease fire would just give Hamas and other terrorists a chance to rearm and prosecute terrorism further.
It would be tantamount to surrender and prolong the war. I’m glad those liberal church leaders didn’t get their way during WWII or we would all be speaking German.
Comment by Palamas on March 30, 2024 at 9:21 am
“Says Korn, ‘Under theocratic Hamas rule since 2005, the residents of Gaza have suffered poverty, corruption, intolerance, widespread violence, and hopelessness.’
“This is an absurd claim in light of the permanent blockade that the Israeli state has placed over the Gaza strip since 2005. Gaza suffers because of generations of occupation and sanction….”
Another memory-impaired, informationally challenged leftist speaks. The blockade (implemented by both Israel AND Egypt to try to keep weapons out of a place with no need for them except to kill Jews and dissenters from Hamas thuggery) has not kept billions of dollars of aid from reaching Gaza since 2005–aid that Hamas has turned around and used to buy weapons and built military infrastructure under and in schools, mosques, and hospitals. The people of Gaza could be living in a prosperous, well-ordered independent state, but for the murder-obsessed terrorists they ELECTED to rule them, and the kleptocrats running the West Bank, who have rejected multiple offers of independence because they want Israel destroyed and ever Jew dead or gone. And the idea that one would speak of “endless wars of revenge for ethnic nationalist reasons,” while saying NOTHING about the barbarity on the part of the Palestinian terrorists that ALWAYS spark war, is nothing less than revolting anti-Semitism.
Comment by Corvus Corax on March 30, 2024 at 10:28 am
“What? You would prefer “regular old Christianity “ ? Is that the same old Christianity that has persecuted the Jews for eons? Yeah brother, give me that old time religion, right?
How do you feel about the way we ended WW2 ? I think Israel has had enough. War is bad. Never ending war is worse.”
There is nothing in the substance of Christianity that involves the persecution of jews, which I’m sure you already know. Ethnic hostility—which is perpetrated by people of all faiths in all times and places, sadly—is another matter. I hope that the people of Israel and of Palestine can somehow have peace, but in the meantime I hope they’ll kindly refrain from dragging the American people and the name of Christ into their interminable butchery.
Comment by George on March 30, 2024 at 8:36 pm
“Nothing in the substance of Christianity that involves the persecution of Jews “. Give me a break. I really do believe the Spanish Inquisition involved a bunch of Christians. It would be fair to say most all of those Nazi Germans were baptized Christians. Look, there is just one tiny little homeland in this whole world that the Jews claim and the enemies keep piling on.
Now I’m afraid that my own country is about to turn its back on Israel. I love Jesus. Jesus was a Jew. So were his apostles. You cannot be a follower of Christ and hate Jews.