The response to President Trump’s straight-faced proposal (“I don’t mean to be cute, I don’t mean to be a wise guy,” he explained) that the US could take over Gaza, decant its population and convert it into a shopping and bathing waterfront development – “the Riviera of the Middle East” – has ranged from Benjamin Netanyahu’s smug smile to a horrified UN secretary general Antonio Guterres warning of the less than cute examples from history of ethnic cleansing. In The Jewish Chronicle today, Jacob Jaffa writes that thousands of Jewish people in the UK who trace their roots to Poland, Russia, Iraq and elsewhere are united by having ancestors who were expelled from their homes after the nation that housed them declared that the land was not theirs. “The 7 October massacres were the latest in a long line of pogroms dating back to the first century, but we should know better than anyone that the answer is not ethnic cleansing.”
In the paper this week, Tom Phillips describes Trump’s proposal to relocate a large number of Gazans to Egypt and Jordan as “strategically incomprehensible”. The long-term human tragedy will continue, he says, unless an intelligent effort is made to address the core issues rather than simply to stick plasters on the problem until the next round of fighting. Phillips, who served as ambassador to Israel from 2006-10 and as ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from 2010-12, argues that the key to the resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue is held by the Saudis.
“A growing number of commentators are reaching the view I have long and reluctantly held,” writes Phillips, “that while it might once have met the needs of two valid nationalist movements, the window for the two-state solution closed some time ago”. So, what role should the UK play in the reconstruction of Gaza? “It would surely be madness,” he concludes, “to put any taxpayers’ money into Gaza reconstruction unless there were some kind of cast-iron link to a wider political process”. He adds, perhaps close to despair, “And what on earth could that be?”
In our lead book review Lucy Beckett is convinced by Pankaj Mishra’s “riveting and unhappy” The World After Gaza that “what has happened in Gaza is only the most extreme example of Israeli failure, over decades, to acknowledge the basic humanity of Palestinians”. In our Arts lead, Anna Moore speaks to the Cambridge art historian Federica Gigante, whose research seems to show that Catholic churches in the early Renaissance used beautifully embossed Islamic fabrics as altar screens and wall hangings. Her discoveries reinforce our growing understanding of “how interconnected Christianity and Islam were, and how much adoption there was of one another’s motifs and ideas”.
Elsewhere in the Books pages, Paul Keyte warms to the Jamaican-born Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, Rachel Kelly is won over by an endearing account of the relationship between a mother and her troubled daughter, and Mary Kenny quickly spots the villain in a new Irish novel (“he’s the church-goer, and his family are sanctimonious and judgemental”). In Arts, Mark Lawson salutes an attempt to inject drama and tension into a play about climate change and Lucy Lethbridge is charmed and touched by our cover boy, Niall from Lurgan, Co. Armagh, who lights up a BBC documentary that follows four children preparing for their first holy communion.
In her View from Mexico City, Joanna Moorhead writes that friends there think another of Trump’s jaw-dropping proposals – to slap 25 per cent tariffs on imports from Mexico, postponed for 30 days after the US president had a phone call with Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum – was always just a scaremongering tactic, “but they’re proud of Sheinbaum, who is seen as emerging as a smart, refined and measured figure, as opposed to you-know-who”.
Liz Dodd weaves Trump, Elon Musk, Traitors, the Gen Z turn to God, and the late film director David Lynch into her column this week, in Letters Fiona Hicks would like to see Eric Gill’s Stations [Gill’s statue of St Michael sits at the rear of St Patrick’s Church in Dumbarton – Ed] removed from Westminster cathedral and Sara Parvis insists that “rumours of the stagnation and isolation of academic theology are a little exaggerated”, and, on the back page, Rose Prince serves up a delicious frittata with winter greens and Jonathan Tulloch enjoys a wet afternoon in Hartlepool.
In spite of the confusion, resistance and obfuscation, Austen Ivereigh is seeing a slow transformation in the way Catholics are listening to each other and deciding together making its way through the life of the local Churches. But some, he observes, with a disappointed eye on parts of England and Wales, are yet to smell the synodal coffee. Paul Tighe, one of the joint authors of the new Vatican document on Artificial Intelligence, tells Paddy Agnew that only an inclusive dialogue between its developers and political, cultural and community leaders will ensure that AI serves creativity and human flourishing rather than greed and destruction. Seamus Heaney’s selected letters are now available in paperback; they confirm, writes Michael Duggan, that his Catholicism provided him with a bedrock of imagery and inspiration, and his defection from it was without bitterness or reproach.
It’s a Jubilee year and Ellen Teague reports on Cafod and Sciaf’s call on the UK government and world leaders to cancel global debts that are strangling health provision and public services in the Global South. Victims of trafficking and modern slavery are being failed by poor quality referrals and widespread difficulties in accessing legal aid and psychological support; Tabitha Smith reports on the disturbing findings of research conducted by the Theos think tank and published by the Catholic charity Medaille Trust. And Bess Twiston Davies writes that wet rot has riddled the magnificent Preston cathedral church of St Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception – now the headquarters of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church in Britain.
The Bishop of Goma reported grim conditions after Rwandan-backed rebel forces announced a ceasefire and a halt to their advance through the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The hospitals in the city were overwhelmed and bodies have been left for days on the streets. Cafod’s partners on the ground were telling us that at least 600,000 people were displaced around Goma. We have a report by two of our Africa correspondents Ngala Killian Chimtom and Marko Phiri. In an editorial, we point out that for several years Rwanda’s leader Paul Kagame has been annexing territory and plundering resources which are then sold for use in our smart phones and electric car batteries. Western leaders are now sternly upbraiding Kagame for his part in the spiralling violence and the humanitarian crisis in the Great Lakes region. But the avarice of the international community has been the fuel for the conflict that it now laments.
There’s much more news, features, analysis, comment online and in the print issue of The Tablet. If you are not a subscriber you can try five issues for just £5 followed by quarterly auto-renewing payments, including a print copy each week, full access to the 185-year archive and full website access – just follow the link here.
Brendan Walsh
- The Tablet magazine is available weekly in good bookshops and the bookstalls of Catholic churches.