The valley of the shadow of death – reflecting on the situation in Gaza

I visited Bethlehem in the build up to Christmas 2015. It was being made ready for the influx of pilgrims celebrating new life and hope through their faith in Jesus and the story of renewal through his birth. This year the customary crib scenes are replaced with images of a Palestinian child in rubble or wrapped in a death shroud. The symbolism is powerful; the mood is one of despair. The tourists are absent.

Our Christmas worship this year included the reference “though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil”. I used to interpret this text as biblical hyperbole. But that was before our visit to Israel and Palestine, when we found there is indeed a valley which is the shadow of death. 2,000 years ago, people travelling from Damascus and Galilee to Judea and Jerusalem had to pass through Samaria, where lived notorious bandits, the Samaritans. The route was through a deep narrow valley in which travellers were often attacked. The daytime temperatures at the bottom could be 40 degrees; survival could not be taken for granted. The image looking down near the start conveys some sense of the depth.

The personal risk was significant – faith in the protection of God was important. Of course, the phrase has become a metaphor for faith in the face of all kinds of adversity.

The cancellation of the customary celebrations in Bethlehem could be symbolic of loss of hope in the Christian message of peace and goodwill towards all men.

Alternatively, it is a political statement and the only available way to protest the appalling savagery that has and is taking place in Southern Israel. As such it does not deny hope for a better future; and it is a pragmatic response to the lack of visitors.

The dream of a better future in which we love our neighbours as ourselves is the bedrock of Christianity but is also a core tenet in both Judaism and the Islamic faith. On the other hand, the idea of retribution is present in both the Jewish and Islamic teachings, in contrast to the Christian principle of forgiveness.? I am not a religious scholar by any stretch, but I have prayed for peace at the western wall in Jerusalem, on the shore of the sea of Galilee and in the shrine at Bethlehem. In Jerusalem, the prayers were followed by a stabbing and a shooting; by the Sea of Galilee, Israeli jets flew over and bombed the Golan heights. In Bethlehem, a conversation with a Palestinian gentleman introduced the concept of ‘bulletics’.

A Jewish friend with family in Israel provided me with these searing sentences a few days ago. “….hugely sad about all the events in Israel/Gaza and Ukraine and loads of other trouble spots we don’t even get to hear of…..who would think we’d see these kinds of conflicts in our lifetime…our family are all old fashioned Zionists deeply despising Netanyahu ,the settlers and religious zealots who highjacked the State?trying to turn it into a theocracy …we have always favoured 2 State solution as do all the people we know …..it all came so close with Oslo accords but the assassination of Rabin ended that ….tragic scenarios.”

The word ‘bulletics’ helps to convey powerfully the point where geo-politics meets national self-interest. Make no mistake, and as my Jewish friend observed, this has nothing to do with any religion even when it is presented by leaders as ‘just and right in the sight of God’. ?

The abject failure of the United Nations as a platform to promote forgiveness, coexistence and the mutual interests of humanity should not be truly surprising in the context of competing political ideologies and massive inequalities in wealth and wellbeing.? The natural human instinct is to protect what you have and acquire more; the paradox is that competition is simultaneously the source of human progress and its self-destruction.

And the world seems to be sliding democratically to more extreme political positions (mostly to the right) which play to popularity, feeding on the instinct for self-preservation and playing on fear.? Social media is full of hate and misinformation in the face of mass migration, the effects and implications of climate change, racism, border conflicts and curious ideologies. Much of this anger can be characterised as ‘stress-related’ behaviour; the question is how this might be turned round and some degree of sanity restored from which we can dare to hope?

Purely for my own interest I have thought endlessly about if and how the global condition might be turned round: how the current paradigm might be broken? The alternative seems to be that humankind rushes like lemmings over the cliff to self-destruction.

That search led me to test the potential to apply proven problem-solving techniques to find some new angle – forgive me but that is my background. The idea of ‘asking why five times’ can take you to new places and I put that together with the concept of ‘wicked’ problems.

Asking why five times helps to get the root cause of any challenge that persistently keeps coming back. The key to fresh insights is to ask the right questions. I gave it a go:

1. Why is the world incapable collectively of addressing its well-being as a planet? – because one country’s gain may be another’s loss in the short term
2. Why can countries and the world not take a global longer-term view? – because the cause and effect and timescale cannot be agreed
3. Why cannot the cause, effect and timescales be agreed? – because the complexity of the scientific and social and economic system is such that it cannot be predictably analysed and modelled
4. Why cannot the complexity be predicted and solutions be found? – because leaders’ primary focus is on their ‘electoral base’ – they are not driven by just good societal outcomes even when they are somewhat obvious
5. Why are leaders so distorted in their personal goals? – because leadership is attractive to certain personalities and has created a reinforcing ‘system’ that does not take challenge and innovation well

This is a wicked problem – a complex vicious circle. Complexity is where the relationships between inputs and outputs are ill-defined and can create second and third order effects; the combination of models, analysis and policy will not produce reliable outcomes. The idea of ‘wicked’ problems is not new; Rittell and Webber introduced it in 1973.? It is remarkable that the implications for policy have not been assimilated.

The problem with wicked problems is there is no one ‘right’ solution and no ‘best’ organisational orientation. There will be many dimensions (technical innovation, organisational models and behaviours) on which parogress can and needs to take place. There will be apparent inconsistencies and misperceptions. This is inevitably ‘clumsy’; the breakthrough idea is that global society should actively promote this state, embrace the differences in thinking, culture and approach and fund them. The second and third order consequences of lots of small changes will be less; furthermore, many good results will be unexpected. That is the essence of solving wicked problems. The parallel breakthrough idea is to do things at speed and be ready to ‘fail fast’. ?As a recent UK parliamentary enquiry showed, this idea of testing and being ready to fail and do it at speed is anathema to politicians.

This narrative seems to a dead end – a stalemate of zero progress. However a story from Ireland of how the country set up a Citizens Assembly to address one of the most difficult societal problems of abortion law reform. It was met with deep scepticism but delivered political breakthrough which gathered wide consent. The idea of actually talking ‘with’ and listening ‘to’ rather than talking ‘at’ people should not sound innovative, but it is. We should be doing more of it, as the results will be surprising.

It seems that we get the sceptical and closed leaders through the system that has emerged and the personality type that can navigate it for their own benefit. It is not open to clumsy solutions. We need more Gandhi’s and Mandela’s and citizens assemblies who can break the mould.

There is a message of hope hiding here – if only a few bold people would pick up the ideas and run with them.

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