Ask not for whom the bell tolls…. a response to Bishop Makgoba
By Craig Snoyman, Daily Friend.
Bishop Thabo Makgoba of the Anglican Church of South Africa, in his 2023 Christmas sermon highlighted the plight of children and other vulnerable people in Gaza, who due to Israeli military operations were forced to move from one place to another, none safer than the last. He also stated, “There is little doubt that adherents of both sides in Gaza and the West Bank have committed war crimes. There are leaders on both sides of Hamas and Israel who have made declarations and statements which either constitute incitement to genocide or will be interpreted as such…”
His speech and legal pronouncements are very troubling.
In response to Hamas’s attack on 7 October, Israel exercised its right of self-defence, and the war moved to Gaza. The all-too-foreseeable and tragic horrors of this war play out on global television screens every day.
The Bishop exercised his clerical right to chastise Israel about the children in Gaza who have died in the war, reminding us that they died in the land in which Jesus lived and ministered.
The Jews know all too well about war and death in this land. A rebellion by the Jews in the Roman province of Judaea led Titus, the future Roman emperor, to besiege and destroy Jerusalem and the Second Jewish Temple. Their zealot leader, Bar Giora, in vain demanded that the Jews defend Jerusalem against the Romans.
The Bar Kokhba revolt, in 130 CE, was the final crisis that scattered the people of Israel into a diaspora. Enormous numbers of Jews, soldiers and civilians, were slaughtered by Emperor Hadrian’s troops. Many survivors were either sold into slavery or fled.
Hadrian changed the name of the province to Syria Palaestina, after the biblical Philistines, to erase its Jewish past and the threat it posed to his hold on power.
Hadrian expelled Bar Kokhba’s followers and forbade any Jew from ever entering Jerusalem.
Just as the Jews were a threat to Rome, Hamas is a similar threat to Israel. Having repeatedly engaged militarily with Israel and continuously fired missiles at it, Hamas engaged in a feast of butchery and debauchery, and issued threats to repeat its massacre. Hamas has become Israel’s intolerable insurrectionist.
If those Jewish leaders had surrendered when it was clear that the war was lost, then the Judean population would have been safe from the ravages of the ongoing war and dispossession. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is unconcerned by the lessons of history; even when the war is lost, he persists in causing the unnecessary deaths of thousands more innocent victims. The Gazans, like the biblical Jews, are dependent on the will of their leader.
It would be absurd to demand that Israel lay down its arms merely because Sinwar refuses to accept that Hamas is defeated. A return to the status quo is a return to the certainty of further war. It is a tragic consequence of war that the vulnerable continue to suffer because of the decisions and delusions of their leaders.
War is hell, but if combatants hide amongst civilians, use hospitals, mosques and schools as places of war, refuse to distinguish themselves from non-combatants, and wage war from within the ranks of civilians, the death count of civilians will be absurdly high. These are the war crimes of Hamas.
Horrific consequences for Gazans were part of Hamas’s intention to prosecute the war. Only the naïve souls calling on Israel to turn the other cheek or to be deprived of weapons could expect a different outcome. Any civilised country will respond to the massacre of its citizens. That Gazan civilians would face death in numbers was confirmed when Hamas stated that ‘the tunnels are for Hamas fighters, the UN must look after the citizens above the ground’. Gaza’s citizens were condemned to death and displacement by its leaders; Israel was merely the instrument.
Just as Hitler fought on knowing World War II was lost, the Hamas leadership, inconceivably, fights on, glorying in the death of its citizens and the carnage. Just as Dresden did not have to be bombed, so too Gaza does not have to be reduced to rubble.
The Bishop implores that the war be fought under ill-defined ‘international humanitarian law’. Wars don’t have lunch breaks, or 45-hour weeks, or no after-hours fighting. Israel’s continued provision of electricity and water to the enemy is unheard of in the laws of war, and unprecedented in the history of war.
Throughout the ages many great minds have accepted that war is inevitable. Theologian and philosopher St Augustine contributed greatly to the laws that would govern war. The principles to determine who is a war criminal have stood the test of time. Rules have been formulated for clarity of action in war, notably those of distinction and proportionality. And proportionality is not a scorecard of each side’s death tally.
Targeting a hospital is a war crime, but targeting a hospital when enemy combatants are fighting from within it, is not. Attacking, murdering, raping, burning and taking civilians hostage are war crimes. Torturing and murdering hostages is a war crime. However, blowing up an enemy intelligence site with combatants in it which results in some civilians being killed requires careful consideration of the principles of distinction and proportionality.
The Bishop’s casual comment that ‘There is little doubt that adherents of both sides, in both Gaza and the West Bank, have committed war crimes’ does not really attribute war crimes to Hamas, or any organisation or person in the West Bank: it is a duplicitous attempt to show even-handedness. Israel’s conduct is not an “unquestionable war crime”. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia battled for many years to decide whether offences constituted war crimes or not.
As the Bishop said, numerous wars are going on in the world at present, each with its own horrifying humanitarian catastrophe, and the world has been silent. Arguably, not as silent the Anglican Church, except on the Israel-Hamas war.
Bishop Joshua Louw of The Diocese of Cape Town issued an invitation to attend a ‘Silent Vigil at St. George’s Cathedral, Wednesday 11 October 2023 at 13h00’.
The invitation only mention of Israel was ‘fight against the scourge of the Zionist State of Israel and its oppression’: the massacre of Israeli citizens by Hamas was ignored and he made it clear that ‘As Christians, we join with our peace loving Muslim brothers and sisters and non-Zionist Jews, to raise our voices with the oppressed, calling for peace with justice in Palestine.’ The Church has been very active in word and deed.
The Bishop’s Christmas sermon is notably anti-Israel: he supports the Palestinian narrative completely. There is no reference to the horror of Hamas’s attack and the consequent suffering that led to this war. Jews, neither Israeli nor diaspora, are mentioned.
On 28 September the Church’s Provisional Standing Committee resolved to endorse the position taken by the South African Council of Churches’ national executive committee: to declare Israel an apartheid state. The resolution came just a few weeks after the head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, insisted that Israel was not an apartheid state.
The Bishop’s vocal condemnation of Israel is a rejection of St Augustine’s philosophy of a Just War and also of the universally accepted Laws of War, in favour of questionable liberation theology. Christ was never a freedom fighter, nor was he a Palestinian. As a Jew, he did not seek to change the Law; he did not side with genocidal thugs seeking the annihilation of his Jewish brothers.
“Fighting for freedom” is not a free pass to commit war crimes, nor to destroy Jews, wherever they may be found. To the Bishop I say this is not ‘loving thy neighbour’,or turning the other cheek or fighting injustice. This is embracing the heart of absolute evil and encouraging the flock to do the same. The bell is tolling…
(Craig Snoyman is a practicing advocate of the South African High Court.)
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