Some news stories seem too serious to pass over in silence on this page, and at the same time too serious for me to feel that I have anything worth saying about them. The recent events in Israel and Palestine fall into that category.

The grief and fear of those in Israel and beyond whose loved ones, including children and grandmothers, have been taken hostage or killed, is beyond my imagination. As is the grief of Palestinian citizens who have lost homes and families and fear a devastating onslaught.

The complexity of the background to these events is overwhelming: the Intifadas, the terror attacks, the house demolitions, the wall, conflicts in Lebanon, the Yom Kippur War, the Six-Day War, the founding of Israel, the Holocaust. All this is within living memory, in a story that goes back to the ancient world.

Then there’s the complexity of the geopolitics – Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the US, Russia, China. The nuclear threat. The map of loves and hatered, ambitions and grievances, is as far beyond me as the fear and sadness it provokes are deep within.

I think of my own children in the safety of the UK, and once again I am thankful for their wellbeing, which I take for granted so often. At the same time I mourn the fact that my generation is passing on to them a world in worse shape than when we received it.

I’m not up to this. Even in saying how ill-equipped I am to talk about it, I fear what I’ve said wrong. And as I write that, I remember what St Paul tells us, that when we do not have the words ourselves, the Spirit prays on our behalf with groans. That is what the rest of this page is for.

___

This article was published in the November 2023 edition of Reform

Subscribe to Reform