The Fourth Sunday before Advent, 5 November 2023
Eldroth, Clapham
Each Friday for the past thirty-five years, groups of Israeli women dressed in black stand at intersections and traffic lights and in central squares in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other towns and cities, carrying black signs with the image of a white hand and the lettering: Stop the Occupation. [1]
A mother, Nurit, and her young daughter, Smadar, were often among them, protesting what they considered to be serious violations of human rights by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian women: ordering mothers at gun-point to strip in front of their children; jailing young women without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses, separating them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers, barring their way to hospitals, blocking their way to education, confiscating their lands, uprooting their trees and preventing them from cultivating their fields. [2]
One day Nurit and Smadar joined the protesting women in Paris Square in Jerusalem. Then nine years old, Smadar had no proper black shoes so she wore, instead, a pair of ballet slippers which she darkened with polish. She stood at the intersection, alongside Judy Blanc, an older activist. Together they held a sign aloft: End the Occupation. Some passers-by gave them abuse. They did not flinch when a car full of dark-hatted settlers threw a carton of popcorn at their feet. [3]
You may recognise the name Smadar, for I have spoken of her before, recently. In September 1997 when she was thirteen Smadar died, blown up by a Palestinian suicide bomber on Ben Yehuda Street, Jerusalem, whilst out shopping with her friends for the new school year. [4]
Since then, on every Memorial Day, Israel’s day of remembrance, packages arrived at the home of Smadar’s parents, Nurit and Rami Elhanan.
The packages unhinged Rami and Nurit. Neatly wrapped in sky-blue paper with white ribbons, and sealed with a silver Star of David. They were left on the doorstep along with a note from the Minister of Defense: Dear Elhanan family.
A different item every year: a cut-glass bowl with names of the fallen engraved around the rim, a pewter vase with biblical quotes, a porcelain flag, a pair of silver Shabbat candlesticks.
The note - a special message to the bereaved - was florid. On this momentous Memorial Day we wish to honour Smadar's memory and the special sacrifice you and your family have made for the eternal State of Israel.
Nurit was livid: it was not just the vulgarity of the gifts or the saccharine letters, but how they co-opted Smadar as their own, as if the child had been somehow complicit, as if she had stepped selflessly down Ben Yehuda Street into the arms of the bomb.
She and Rami took a hammer and a wedge to the glass bowl and smashed it to pieces, a small rubble of death and memory. They put the pieces in the box, re-ribboned it, and shipped it to Benjamin Netanyahu with her own note: Dearest Bibi, something is broken. [5]
Nurit explained her position this way:
For me, the other side, the enemy, is not the Palestinian people. For me the struggle is not between Palestinians and Israelis, nor between Jews and Arabs. The fight is between those who seek peace and those who seek war. My people are those who seek peace. My sisters are the bereaved mothers, Israeli and Palestinian, who live in Israel and in Gaza and in the refugee camps. My brothers are the fathers who try to defend their children from the cruel occupation, and are, as I was, unsuccessful in doing so. Although we were born into a different history and speak different tongues there is more that unites us than that which divides us. [6]
What Nurit Peled-Elhanan says is clearly controversial in her place and time. She is a provocation to the Israeli powers-that-be. I think that she speaks in the spirit of Micah, a prophet of Israel in the eighth century BC who proclaimed himself to be ‘filled with power, with the spirit of the Lord, and with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin.’
The objects of Micah’s judgement were ‘the rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who,’ he said, ‘abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong.’
Amongst these were the prophets employed by the establishment who only said what their paymasters wanted to hear; they tried to silence Micah, for his criticisms were disgracing them. [7] But he stuck to his message of challenging the moral rot at the heart of society, calling the people to repent in the hope of God’s pardon and the coming of a time when Jerusalem would once again be the Lord’s house and when nation would not lift up sword against nation, neither would they learn war any more. [8]
Micah is well known for having written one of the most memorable summaries of Israel’s ancient law. His famous statement reduces the 613 laws of Moses to just three: ‘He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?’ [9]
We know of course that Jesus further reduced the law down to just two commandments: to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and to love your neighbour as yourself.’ [10] He meant acting lovingly towards one’s neighbour, one’s Samaritan or Palestinian neighbour, one’s Muslim or Jewish neighbour, one’s outcast, troubling neighbour.
We also know that Jesus warned those who tried to keep his commandments and stay faithful to the good news of God’s kingdom, that they would be ‘hated by all nations because of his name’, would be ‘tortured and put to death’.
Doing justice is costly, loving kindness provokes opposition; walking humbly with your God raises criticism. Peacemaking with neighbours comes at a price.
Jesus saw, in his time, an ‘increase of lawlessness’ which caused ‘the love of many to grow cold’. Does that sound to you rather like the times we are living in?
‘But anyone who endures to the end will be saved’, he said. Let us pray constantly that those working for peace will be strengthened in their task. Let us pray constantly that we may find ways of being among them. Let us pray always that our love - for God and all our neighbours - may never grow cold.
Notes
[1] Wikipedia: Women in Black; WomeninBlack.org: About Women in Black.
[2] Nurit Peled-Elhanan, A Really Remarkable Speech: Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s Address to the European Parliament, 4 August 2005. The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy – MIFTAH, March 05, 2007
[3] Colum McCann, Apeirogon. p.320, 322.
[4] John Davies, Is this your God, O Israel? Sermon preached 15 October 2023.
[5] Colum McCann, Apeirogon. p.362.
[6] Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Nurit’s words to Women in Black. JoanNestle.com, 14 June 2001.
[7] Micah 2.6
[8] Micah 4; John Bowker, The Book of Micah in The Complete Bible Handbook, An Illustrated Companion, p.234-5.
[9] Micah 6.6-8; John Bowker, The Book of Micah in The Complete Bible Handbook, An Illustrated Companion, p.235.
[10] Matthew 22.34-40
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