Many of us will have seen and heard the Gaza relatives of the children burnt to death in their refugee tents by Israeli bombs crying out in disbelief and despair: "why does the West not act to stop such atrocities?" How are we to respond?
One answer might be that the political leadership in the United States and its European allies harbours a fundamental distrust of Iran and its proxies, Hamas, Hizbollah the Houthis.
Much the same is true of Western public opinion. Understandably so.
Therefore despite our growing disquiet at Israeli conduct, ultimately we identify with Israel, our traditional partner, politically and economically in the Middle East.
Memories of the Holocaust, too, have become part of our inmost being. We shudder at any threat to Jewish wellbeing.
Here in Dunedin, though, a growing number of us have been fortunate enough to find Palestinian friends.
We learn from them first hand about what is happening to their relatives in the West Bank or Gaza.
At a recent service in Knox Church, one of our hospital’s neurosurgeons spoke movingly to us about the suffering of his people in Lebanon.
In other words the filters through which we process events in Gaza and Lebanon have changed.
Humanity has to be viewed inclusively is the conclusion we draw. Lebanese lives matter. Palestinian lives matter.
They cannot be dismissed as collateral damage. The excuse that they are a cover-up for Hamas terror groups wears thin.
As a young person the cataclysm of the Vietnam War changed forever my perception of the US.
I think much the same is happening for many of us today as we view with incredulity the failure of the Biden administration to exert any effective leverage on an Israeli regime that flouts every rule of war with impunity.
As a British academic pointed out, civilians no longer exist for the Israel Defence Forces. Everything that moves and breathes in a Gaza refugee camp is a legitimate target. Most being women and children.
When the IDF has crossed the line in this fundamental way we too, in the West, have to cross a line. The filters through which we used to view Israel have to be discarded.
Its state terrorism appears to be taking on a genocidal character. It is leading us all into the abyss, not least because there is no hint from the Israeli government of any openness to a mid- or long-term political solution.
We cannot speak any longer of a Palestinian problem. The instigator of ongoing political instability in the Middle East is this crazed Israeli regime. It is the problem.
Many of our friends tell us they can no longer watch the daily news from Gaza and Lebanon. It makes them ill. They have to look after their own sanity first.
One gets that. Horror, however, which has been politically created and which rests on an ideological Zionism has to be confronted politically and debunked rationally. None of this will be easy or straightforward.
But it is time to don the hard hat of geopolitical common sense. We also have to raise our voice for children burnt alive in their tents.
And of course there is another dimension to all this. For those of us in the Abrahamic tradition the unspeakable tragedy is that we are witnessing, day by day, the betrayal of the utterly unique Judean moral, spiritual and artistic traditions which has been a bedrock of the very best of our civilisation.
For this no tears are enough.
— The Rev Dr Peter Matheson is an emeritus professor at Knox Theological College in Dunedin.
