I used to play rugby before Harris Westminster got in the way and distracted me. It was something I came to rather late in life, showing up at the club at the age of thirty and saying “I’ve never played but I’d like to give it a go.” “Excellent,” they said. “Do you like to run or to fight or to push.” I didn’t really know and so they tried me in a few positions but where I ended up was fullback, standing alone in acres of space whilst the action all went on ahead of me, waiting to catch the ball when the opposition hoofed it over the top. When that happened, on the days I didn’t drop it, you’d look up and start running, running into that space, running as fast as you could, through the swiftly closing gaps, sidestepping the onrushing opposition until, almost inevitably, one of them would grab you round the knees. Accepted protocol at that point was to fall over and hope that the next heavy lump on the scene was wearing your colours – in my case, blue and gold with the badge of the Standard Telephone Company. I’ve never been so glad to see the letters STC as when twenty stones of prop forward stepped over me.
I loved a lot of things about rugby, but one of the things I didn’t like was the day we were playing against our sworn enemies Greenwich, high up on Plumstead common. It was a bad tempered match with lots of penalties and the word came round that Greenwich were winding Fighty Jim up and that there was going to be a brawl, and if there was one then we should all rush in for the honour of the club. I’m not much of a fighter – running and pushing is more my line - and I’ve never actually thrown a punch so this idea concerned me, but I was part of a team and if something kicked off I needed to be on the side of my guys. If I wanted fighty Jim to stand between my recumbent form and the opposition boots, and I did, then I had to be ready to take his part when fists started flying. Fortunately for me there was no fight that day, I can’t remember why, perhaps the referee had a good game, perhaps fighty Jim got sent off early, perhaps Greenwich heard I was playing and were in fear of my prowess in the noble art of fisticuffs, who knows. There wasn’t a fight that day, but I think if there had been then I’d have got involved, fighting for the blue and gold, for the STC, for fighty Jim, for honour. I think I’d have got involved, and I’m not at all sure it would have been the right thing to do.
And my rugby analogy has got me to where I was headed, because I want to talk today about symbols and sides and in the real world these are even more dangerous than they are up in the wind on Plumstead Common
Today is October 7th and a year ago, Hamas-led militant groups launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing, wounding and taking captive both members of the armed forces and ordinary civilians. Hamas has said that its attack was in response to Israel’s continued occupation, blockade of Gaza, expansion of settlements and disregard of international law. In response to the attack, Israel launched one of the most destructive bombing campaigns in modern history and kicked off the most significant military action in the region in my lifetime. Almost 2,000 Israelis and 40,000 Palestinians have been killed and almost all of the population of the Gaza Strip has been displaced, 2 million people turned into refugees with nowhere to go. This morning’s news was fighting on Israel’s northern border, with Lebanon: Israeli bombs in Beirut, Hezbollah rockets in Haifa, and an aid agency saying they were feeding 350,000 people in the Gaza strip and that this was less than half of what was needed to avoid famine.
I don’t know how much you know about this conflict, the background and issues, and I can’t do it justice in an assembly, particularly when I’ve spent half of my time talking about rugby, so I’ll tell you a little bit now, but if you’d like to know more, to learn and think about what’s happening then please drop me an email and if there’s a few of you then I’ll put a group together after school. There are, I think, three problems, the simplest of which is religion. Israel is a Jewish state surrounded by Muslim ones – it was created in 1947 as a Jewish homeland, a country where Jews could feel safe from the government and their neighbours. Unfortunately, and this is the second problem, they don’t feel safe – the neighbouring countries have all been to war with Israel in living memory and several of them still don’t accept Israel’s right to exist as a country. Land is the second problem, and the land that Israel is built on has been fought over for thousands of years with a dozen empires sweeping across it in one direction or another and when the dust settled from the second world war there were not just Jews living there, but Palestinians who were driven from their homes by Israel’s first war. The fight was an existential one, it involved Israel being invaded by its neighbours, Egypt, Syria and Jordan under a wider umbrella of the Arab League, including Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. One of the Palestinian leaders, Haj Amin al-Husseini, said that the Arabs would continue fighting until the Zionists were annihilated. One of the most dangerous things in the world is a frightened person with a gun, and Israel is full of guns and people who are terrified that if they stop firing them then the neighbouring countries will drive them out of their houses and into the Mediterranean Sea. They, too, have nowhere to go. Meanwhile the Palestinians are also rightly frightened, in their case of extermination, either through the casualties of war, hunger, and sickness, or by being displaced entirely and dispersed across neighbouring countries.
The third problem is that this has been going on for so long that the two sides fight because that’s what they do – there doesn’t have to be a reason, just loyalty to the badge, the uniform, the flag. A Palestinian who says something in support of Israel, or a Jew, anywhere in the world, who criticises the Israeli government is in danger of being called a traitor to their own side, or at least feeling torn between loyalty to their country and disgust at the actions of their leaders. Meanwhile the leaders of both Israel and Hamas are the military equivalent of Fighty Jim – and nobody thinks that he should be put in charge of an army. It’s a really hard problem where there are lots of wrongs and few rights, but, worse, it’s a really hard problem that some people think is a really easy one, one that can be boiled down to goodies against baddies and that you can tell the difference between them by the badge they wear. This kind of thinking is stoked by a social media quest for engagement – quick responses and not much thought.
Whenever there is increased tension in the Middle East, whenever there is fighting, some of that unhappiness, anger, spills over into London and other international cities. There’s a spike in antisemitism, an increase in islamophobia; the streets become less safe for certain people. For the last decade, this has also meant that whenever this happens there is an increase in tension within Steel House as some of us can feel obliged to take sides, to listen less and argue more.
It's my job to remind you that this isn’t how we do things here. Whatever else might be going on in the world, we’re all on the same team. As the Strokes said, we’re not enemies, we just disagree – and our challenge is to disagree idiomatically. Here we are a community of scholars, which is something remarkable, unlike any other team I’ve ever been involved in. We can think hard about ideas, think critically about what others say and scrupulously about our own beliefs, and bring to all our conversations a kindness that puts others first. The point of any discussion is not point scoring, but learning – it’s not debate, but discourse, and that means, in this case a few things.
Today’s final words come from John Donne – who I would also love to tell you more about than time allows, and who wrote this:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Go and have a good week, be quicker to listen than to speak, and be kind to one another.
Footnotes:
1. I last spoke about the conflict in Israel/Gaza in A Tense Topic
2. My rugby-playing career also gets a mention in Late June