When Words Run Out, We Pray
A Personal Reflection from Israel-Palestine, offering insights and a call to prayer and action — by David Nelson of Wetherby Baptist Church
It should be impossible to be in southern Israel and look through a telescope on a hillside close to Gaza, seeing so many ‘fallen down houses’ that you can only wonder who is left there, in them, under them, walking around them.
It should be impossible for my friend Awdah to die the way he did, shot outside his own home by a settler in the West Bank 4 weeks ago.
It should be impossible for a Palestinian Christian lady, just 25, living near Ramallah, to be arrested and jailed for months without being charged, in 2021, and 2024, and quite possibly in September 2025 as well.
It should be impossible for our government, and others, to use only words but not take action.
It should be impossible for America to organise a ‘big conference’ on Gaza this summer without any Palestinians being present.
It should be impossible that it is now more than 700 days since 250 Israeli hostages were taken into Gaza, with 20 still alive there, somehow.
It should be impossible for there to be famine and malnutrition right on the edge of Europe while just a few miles away from there the restaurants are full, the shops are full, the beaches are full. Worse, it’s a man-made famine.
And as we ponder all of this, I’m left to ask… Where is the holiness in the Land we call Holy?
Every single morning on our radios and screens and devices we hear and see unimaginable things. We’ve heard them about Ukraine for 3 ½ years, and we should be hearing more about the horrors of Sudan. We do hear them about Gaza, unless we are some of those for whom it is all too much and we cannot listen or watch anymore - and I do understand that.
We have to stay in the fight though, for a better world, a more just world. You’ll know of the theologian Karl Barth saying how we should hold a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Well I’m not one to come over all theological, but whatever your view of the rights and claims to the various parcels of land in the Middle East, I do not find that my God is one who would support what is happening there right now.
Over the past three years I have been to Israel-Palestine on 4 occasions - twice before 7th October 2023 and twice since. I have had many conversations with people on both ‘sides’. I have marched to Netanyahu’s house and I have been in protests when the watercannons have come out in Tel Aviv. I have seen air strikes on Gaza and seen ‘apartheid roads’ in the West Bank. I have friends in both Israel and Palestine. And just five months ago I sat by the border fence looking into Gaza at the worst thing imaginable. Even now, I find it extremely hard to find the right words or the right emotions to cover that apocalyptic view of the northern Gazan towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia, just beyond the beautiful deep green grasses and bright yellow flowers of the meadows that run alongside the Israeli border fence.
My fundamental thoughts are about how Israel is deeply divided; how the situation there felt so much worse this spring than it had been even just a few months after 7th of October. I also found the same in the West Bank in Palestine when I visited Ramallah and Bethlehem in April - people have lost even the vague optimism they felt a year before; they now just live for each particular day, they go to bed at night, and hope that they can manage to live for the next day when it comes around. Goodness knows what people feel in Gaza. My fundamental thoughts include that the occupation of the West Bank is at the heart of so much of this. And above that so much is the simple inability of one person, or one ‘side’, to see the other as a person, as an equal.
So what can we do? A number in our churches, and many in our social networks tell us they feel helpless, that it is all hopeless. I’m sure you hear that, maybe that’s how you feel yourself. Well, I understand that too. Yet hope here is not simple optimism, but it does have to act; it is a doing word.
Not everyone can march in our towns and cities on a weekend, or hold placards at a silent vigil, and sometimes it's even hard to find the right words to write to our MP's - but we can all be praying and maybe that will lead us to take further steps as we go through this autumn.
BMS World Mission have published a ‘30 days of prayer’ programme, available through their website (and there is a link below). I’ve contributed to this from my own reading, and my research from personal visits. It covers a number of places and situations in Gaza, it has sections covering BMS work in the region, and it also reflects the situation within the West Bank and on the people and situation within Israel as well. If you find it helpful, that’s great. If it’s informs and allows space for you to act further, that’s great.
There will also be a National Day of Prayer for the Holy Land on Sunday 21 September, called by a number of Christian agencies and promoted through Churches Together. It would be great if each church in Yorkshire could spend part of their service that morning in concerned prayer and reflection for Israel-Palestine.
It should be impossible not to get angry at what is happening, but also impossible not to be motivated to do everything we can with our individual abilities, to get this to a better place.
Published 04/09/2025