Looking Down
I have been reminded these past few weeks of the feelings and thoughts I had two years ago while standing at the edge of the Israeli town of Netiv Ha’asara looking down into Gaza.
The people of Gaza are, for all intents and purposes, prisoners. They are Palestinians who were relocated from their homes in what is now Israeli territory. In Gaza there are four hours of electricity per day at best, and only one in ten households have access to safe water. Healthcare is limited and sub-standard, and resources for education are scarce.
From the edge of the Israeli territory, one can literally look down past the Israeli machine gun towers on to the Gaza Strip - an area by the sea that measures just 141 square miles that holds in its grasp around two million people. It is cut off from the world in that it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for the “residents” of Gaza to travel outside its borders.
Looking down from my relatively comfortable vantage point that day, I saw Gaza as a simmering pot, ready at the slightest provocation to boil over.
When any group of people - image-bearers of God - is continually and repeatedly treated as inferior and systemically given limited access to resources, desperation sets in. Desperation is a flammable substance that can burst into flames at any moment.
The protests and rioting we are witnessing at present are not the result of one or even a handful of horrific incidents. They are the inevitable result of long-term systemic oppression. And looking down from the relative safety of my societal position will not solve the problem. From this vantage point I can only observe and offer impotent editorial.
As a follower of Jesus, the question I’m asking myself is how to step in. How can I use whatever voice, whatever influence, whatever limited power I hold to move in and do something different? We do not need a temporary fix for unrest and rioting, we need an end to oppression by one group of people against another. I don’t know exactly what it will take, and I don’t know if the steps I am taking into the simmering pot will be of any real significance, but I know I have to act. I have to share what I have been given. I have to come down into the unrest and do whatever is in my power to do.
Inaction and silence are not the way of Jesus and they are not neutral. They are incendiary, and the pot is already boiling over.
