Two books which you can find on this website have inspired me in my search for answers. They are Whose Side Is God On? by Peter Hannon from Northern Ireland and The Forgiveness Factor - Stories of Hope in a World of Conflict by Michael Henderson from England. Both authors are unfortunately not with us anymore, but their written words are. Then I came across an article in The Guardian where a Palestinian and an Israeli woman engage in a sincere dialogue in the aftermath of 7th October.
But let me start with two personal experiences which made a deep impression on me.
It was summer 1971 at MRA/IofC’s conference at Caux in Switzerland. A group of black and white people spoke of their friendship and respect for one another, and how they were learning to overcome anger, prejudice and fear. They were from South Africa. Liberation from the oppressive system of apartheid was still a distant future. I was in the audience watching and listening attentively. It was my first visit to Caux and I could hardly believe what I saw and heard. A documentary about the apartheid regime had shocked me deeply some months earlier.
Just over six months later I was listening to a group of Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland at an MRA conference at Tirley Garth, Cheshire, in England. It was the weekend after Bloody Sunday, 30th January 1972. British soldiers had opened fire on a demonstration of Catholic civil rights supporters in Derry/Londonderry. They killed 13 unarmed protesters and injured 14, one of them dying later. Tensions were at boiling point. Months and years of violent clashes and killings were to follow. I tried to grasp how the Catholics and Protestants I met that weekend had the courage to build bridges with people of the opposite camp.
Peter Hannon was from Northern Ireland and worked with MRA both in his own country and South Africa. The title of his book ‘Whose Side Is God On?’ is provocative, and highly relevant, given the present war and tragedies in the Middle East. Although religion probably is not the main cause, it provides fuel to the conflict.
Hannon offers deep insight into the attitudes that keep conflicts burning. He belonged to the privileged Protestants who had discriminated against the Catholics, not least in the job market, and treated them as second-class citizens. Once asking a Catholic friend what the real facts behind the conflict were, his friend answered: “Facts? Facts only confuse the issue. Each side has its own set of facts, mostly accurate, but selected to prove its own case. Each ignores the real facts which is what the other side feels. Feelings are the real facts.”
“In Ireland,” Hannon writes, “the power of our remembered grievances, often justified, is world famous… I need the sensitivity as to the reality of what others remember.”
He moved to South Africa and while working with MRA there his self-image of being a reasonable person, who could stand above the quarrelling and divisions and give sensible advice, was shattered. A friend of his angrily blurted out: “You are totally impossible to work with.” Some days later Hannon wrote down, addressing himself: “You need your friend’s help to understand what you do to people simply by being you. Some of the worst hurts can be inflicted even when you are unaware of it.”
The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa had defended apartheid. Some of its leaders had the courage to speak out against it in public and thereby contribute to the fall of the system. One was Professor Jonker. When he spoke at a gathering of 250 delegates from 80 South-African churches in 1990, The Guardian in England carried the headline ‘Churchmen Atone for Apartheid Sins’. Archbishop Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, spontaneously went up to embrace the Professor.
Although far from perfect, Northern Ireland and South Africa turned important pages in their history and were set free from the shackles of conflict and oppression. The new South Africa’s first President, Nelson Mandela, got a place in world history.
In these two cases the recognition of the injustice victims suffered was, and still is important. As a result, progress in the process of reconciliation often requires reparation. Many peace agreements just patch things up. Grievances are kept simmering to explode later.
At this present moment in history, looking at the heaps of rubble which were people’s homes in Gaza and imagining the trapped children underneath, I wonder whether the cruelty of hate and revenge are being taken so far that the doors to any kind of peaceful relationship are being slammed shut for ever. What about Ukraine, and the atrocities in the civil war in Sudan? Deep wounds are inflicted which will be hard to heal.
I am casting doubt on the possibility and viability of reconciliation. But, in doing so, have I forgotten on which page of history my own generation in Europe appeared? I was born in 1952 in Oslo, Norway, only seven years after the Second World War. Parents and grandparents of my generation had witnessed terrible destruction, many had lost close relatives and friends. The continent was in ruins, millions killed and terrible concentration camps telling the story of deliberate extermination of people. Yet, nations of Europe, especially France and Germany, were reconciled in the years following the war by foresighted leaders who did not want a repeat of what had happened after the First World War. People on all levels of society engaged in this process. Europe needed to get on its feet materially and economically, but there were equally the ruins of people’s souls, emotions and mindsets. At a conference of MRA at Caux in Switzerland Irène Laure from France said the words which have been quoted hundreds of times. “I have so hated Germany that I wanted her erased from the map of Europe. But I have seen here that my hatred is wrong. I am sorry and I wish to ask the forgiveness of all Germans present.” That opened the hearts of Germans to come forward and express their deep regret for what their nation had caused, and German authorities invited Irene Laure and hundreds of others for campaigns to restore Europe’s relationship with a nation that had terrorized the continent.
Irène Laure had suffered under German occupation and oppression. Yet she asked the Germans present for forgiveness. Not for her resistance, but for her hatred, which she realized, if multiplied, would create fertile ground for new wars. Is that realization of what our own poisoned emotions and mindset may cause sometimes a key to healing and the beginning of reconciliation?
Our history affects us, and many conflicts are still stuck in history. This brings me to the two women, Christine and Orna, Palestinian and Israeli. They had met each other through a docuseries Couples Therapy in 2022, and in their pain and sorrow after 7th October they decided to engage in a dialogue on the unfolding tragedy. It is a sincere, but stumbling walk through the wreckage of history, their very different perceptions of that history and the chaos of their own emotions and hurts. Take the wall which the Israelis built. Orna says: “The wall was erected to try to stop the suicide bombers.’ Christine: ‘To you it’s a security wall. To us it’s an apartheid wall.”
They are tempted to give up, and yet they keep at it. Orna: “We continue talking even when we disagree about fundamental questions, when we feel deeply hurt, afraid, angry, victimised, murderous.” Christine says: ‘This is one of the most draining things I have ever done.” Eight months after the recording of the dialogue she writes: “When continually engaging with empathy and kindness, something started to shift. My so-called ‘enemy’ became a person with her own fears, dreams and histories.”
Their dialogue conveys a commitment to walk through the darker periods of history together, not in fortresses of closed mindsets. It tells me that reconciliation is a demanding and never-ending process.
Let me end with a quote from Donald Shriver,* with which Michael Henderson introduces the question ‘Can one love one’s enemies?’: “The most sober – and most hopeful – form of international remembrance, is forgiveness, that long, many-sided, seldom completed process of rehabilitating broken human relationships.”
*Donald Shriver, president emeritus and professor at Applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary, quoted in Michael Henderson’s book ‘The Forgiveness Factor’, chapter 5, page 74.
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