Three Angels.

“I have been hard at work,” replied the Avenging Angel, “and where I have been there is no shortage of blood. I was there, above the field at Re’im when the fighters of Hamas arrived. All those revellers, so young, so beautiful, they were dancing and singing, oblivious in their joy to the horror that was advancing fast upon them.

“TELL ME WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN”, cried the Angel of Justice. “I have been seated here for hours, watching the ripple of explosions lighting up the length of Gaza, tracing the rockets’ fiery arcs across the skies of Israel, of Palestine. It is my fate to weigh the guilt of men, but in this land that is no easy task. And now you interrupt my thoughts, your raiment torn, your wings all blood be-spattered, a wild light in your eyes.”

“Indeed, I have been hard at work,” replied the Avenging Angel, “and where I have been there is no shortage of blood. I was there, above the field at Re’im when the fighters of Hamas arrived. All those revellers, so young, so beautiful, they were dancing and singing, oblivious in their joy to the horror that was advancing fast upon them.

“Where was the Angel of Pity upon that terrible field?”

“Absent. But the hot rush of my wings was there to fan the flames of retribution in the gunmen’s hearts. To blow the tinnitus of hatred into their ears. It drowned out the pleas for mercy of the young women, overwhelmed the shouts of protest from the young men. Such a ringing there was in their ears as their weapons dealt out death all around.”

“And Pity absent”, whispered the Angel of Justice.

“Oh, yes, there was no trace of Pity as they stripped, and tortured, and raped, and killed. But, I was there. How often had they called upon me, the Angel of Vengeance, to deliver their enemy into their hands? Out of the ruins of their homes, over the bodies of their brothers and sisters, as the limp forms of their infant nieces and nephews were passed down solemnly, hand-to-hand, from the mounds of rubble. Out of all that grief and rage, how could I not hear their prayers, their summons, their calls to me, the Avenging Angel?”

“And you granted them their wish,” said the Angel of Justice, casting a wrathful glance in the direction of his companion.

“I did, my friend, but only because their calls to you, for Justice, had for so long gone unanswered. And where Pity and Justice are absent, or unheeding, what is left but Vengeance?”

“Justice in Palestine? In the land of Israel? And exactly when, my friend, would you have me set that clock ticking? With Vespasian and his legions? With the destruction of the Temple? With a people dispersed to, as it says in the Hatikvah, “the ends of the East”. Shall I start the clock then – in Roman times? Or, perhaps you would have me begin with the first medieval pogrom? Or, with the greatest? With the Shoah, the Holocaust, and all that mechanised Nazi terror? If I remember rightly, Pity was also absent at Auschwitz. The Jews have reclaimed their ancient homeland because they have learned, from the bitterest experience, that they are never truly safe in anybody else’s.”

“But Palestine is somebody else’s homeland, also, my friend. The memory of the Arab is no less poignant than the memory of the Jew.”

“True enough, but when that same Arab has tried, on three occasions, to drive the Jew into the sea, it is difficult for the Jew to resist the temptation to call upon you, the Avenging Angel, to even the score. Because, as I recall, it was your swift sword that avenged the slaying of Israel’s Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972. Your wings that blew sand in the faces of the Egyptians and Syrians just one year later in the war that began on Yom Kippur.

“It is difficult, is it not, my friend, to rightly distinguish Vengeance from Justice? But – hush! What is that sound!”

The two angels’ wings lifted them high above the mountaintop, their eyes searching the cracked rocks and bare sands below for the sound’s source. While they looked, the heart-rending wailing, born of that worst of mixtures – grief and rage – throbbed louder and louder, as if to set the whole of Israel, the whole of Palestine, vibrating with its inconsolable misery.

At length, the Angels’ gaze fell upon the source of the sound. Sobbing, beneath a bare and bitter thorn tree, sat the one so many in Israel/Palestine speak of, but so very few speak to: the Angel of Peace.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 October 2023.