5th September 2025

Elie Wiesel’s Night is one of the most telling descriptions of life in concentration camps. In stark language he writes:

‘Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.’

Later during the hanging of a young boy, who had the face of a sad angel, he heard someone ask: Where is God? Where is he? Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the young boy died slowly, whilst Wiesel with the rest of the men in the camp was forced to file past him. Behind me, records Wiesel, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? and he replies ‘I heard a voice within me answer him: Here He is – He is hanging here on these gallows.’

Wiesel, active in his support of Israel but critical of Hamas, died in 2016, aged 87, so we do not know what his response to recent events in Gaza and the West Bank would have been; but for me the death of a child suffering from hunger raises the same question of where God is to be found in all of this – with the same answer from within, that here God is to be found in the experience of the suffering, posing the question of how many Calvaries are scattered across those war-torn communities?

The claims that all this violence is in search of securing a God-given Promised Land only magnifies the enormity of the offence. Certainly God’s promise of dedicated territory to the children of Abraham is firmly to be found in the Old Testament, but scripture has also much to say about care for neighbour and foreigner, for example Leviticus 19, 33 reads ‘When an alien resides with you in your land you must nor oppress him… Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt.’ The prophets have a similar emphasis: indeed Jeremiah includes ceasing to oppress the foreigner as a condition for continued residence in the Promised Land [Jeremiah 7, 6], so for the Promised Land to be a Holy Land, justice for the Palestinians is essential.

John Briggs