I read how Elisha prayed God to blind the Arameans and then went out to them and said, “This is not the way, and this is not the city. Follow me and I will lead you...” He then led them into Samaria and asked God to restore their sight.

The dismayed Arameans found themselves captive in the Israeli capital, and the King of Israel asked Elisha whether he should kill them. Instead Elisha suggested he should feed them well and send them home. The result was “The Arameans no longer came raiding in Israel.” The Israeli hospitality and mercy had evidently won them over.

What a contrast between today’s OT reading and today’s news. It is nearly a year since the uneasy pseudo-peace between modern Israel and its neighbours was shattered by Hamas’s raid into Israel, killing many, sometimes brutally, and capturing others. It was undoubtedly a horrible day and a horrible provocation. The result was predictable. Those Israelis who had been reaching out to their neighbours were disillusioned and attitudes hardened. Many came to the same views as their more aggressive co-nationals who had always persecuted their neighbours. Since then, the Israeli response has also been aggressive and obviously brutal, so far killing about 30 times the number killed in the original raid, and now escalating and spreading further.

There are causes for grievances on both sides which go back almost a century, but those original grievances cannot be solved by adding new ones. While confrontation is seen as the way forward things can only get worse. We British are not innocent; in a sense we created the problem by making incompatible promises to world Jewry and Arab nationalists during and after the First World War, in order to gain alliances against the Ottoman Turks. No doubt it was our Imperial mindset which persuaded us we could divide lands we had never owned between rival claimants and they would be happy to accept what we ‘gave’. The problem was a failure to see the small picture – private ownership of particular plots of land. You can’t take away a house, farm, or home village where a family has lived for generations and expect them to be happy.

While the historic grievances remain real, new ones are now being added. The idea the problem can be solved by destroying the current structures through which such grievances are expressed without addressing the underlying problem is absurd, and it must be clear no one who seriously thinks about the problem could believe it, but people suffering from grievances might be persuaded to believe anything if they can see no other hope. That lack of vision, of an alternative hope is key to many attitudes. Only today I heard an Israeli spokesman, when challenged, reply with the worn-out “Do you expect us to do nothing?” as if the only alternatives are mass destruction and war or doing nothing. The inevitable consequence of the current conflict will be further generations with even greater grievances who, in time, will build further structures of violence to express them. That way the cycle will never end until both sides have destroyed each other and much of the surrounding world.

Added to that, we have Israel’s biggest ally and arms supplier paralysed by an election campaign. Any sensible person might think the obvious answer is to pull the plug on arms supplies until Israel is forced to scale down its ambitions or accept they are unrealistic, but America cannot act sensibly. Bad exegesis in the Middle West has long killed people in the Middle East and will continue to do so. American Christians, for centuries detached from the historic Old-World origins of their faith, placed their identity in eschatology – what God will do in the future and the present signs we can look for that God is indeed working his purpose out. They mistake the current State of Israel for a fulfillment of Biblical prophesy and therefore a guarantor of their faith. While it exists their faith can hold firm. They see opposition to it as both inevitable and a proof that the final battles which they believe must presage the End of Time and the return of Christ are imminent. They also see opposition as inherently Satanic, whatever atrocities the country’s government might commit. In that climate, no American president can afford to do anything practical to clip Israel’s wings or scale back its capabilities a few weeks before an election. The Bible Belt would never forgive that.

Similarly, in Israel, there is considerable doubt about what will happen to Mr Netanyahu when he leaves office. He was facing demonstrations and calls for his resignation before the Hamas attack. He currently enjoys immunity from prosecution on corruption charges while he remains in office. A war enables him to present himself as his country’s defender and might even enable him to postpone elections while it lasts. Peace is not really in his interest.

How different from the example in the generally-considered more warlike ancient world, where kindness won peace with an aggressive neighbour. Maybe the Israelis who reached out shouldn’t be disheartened. If the country’s official policy had matched theirs, if the government had resisted the ‘settler’ violence and prevented attacks on Palestinians, if peace had been given a chance and generosity shown on both sides, resisting the few who tried to sabotage it instead of reacting to provocations with revenge, just maybe, just maybe the world would be a better place. If only ambitious despots were not allowed to ruin everything!

As Elisha told the Arameans, “This is not the way.”