An existential Easter challenge is playing out in the Middle East

Humanitarian aid is airdropped over Gaza from a RAF A400M aircraft.

Easter was traditionally the most important annual ritual in the Western calendar. This year it is significant in portentous new ways that invite reflection. On the one side, there is continuing decline in Christian observance, highlighted in generations emerging with no knowledge of who Jesus was. On the other, a serious cultural and social divide has exploded across the West charged by the same Easter issue of death and its weight. It has been triggered, with dark irony, by two beleaguered people clashing in the same region in which Jesus was crucified. Jerusalem seems to be a magnet for suffering.

Let me elaborate. There are two meaning questions which confront all humans, everywhere and in all ages: how should I live in a way that gives sense to my life, and what happens when I die. Christian belief put the second question at its crux. Its pivotal story became that of crucifixion and resurrection, its commanding symbol the cross – a death symbol.

Easter marks the annual remembrance of the cruel killing of the exemplary man, aged in his thirties, followed by his rebirth, and the hope that death may not be the end. It used to be a communal coming together in churches in reverent mourning and praise.

Switching to today, a culture clash that has been building for decades has come to a head over the war in Gaza. On the progressive side, there is a loud, influential, and sizeable minority protesting for a free Palestine. In its moderate form, it wants Israel to temper its attack on Hamas on the compassionate grounds that too many innocent people, especially children, are being killed. In its radical form, it is virulently anti-Semitic, it is in denial about what happened on October 7, and it wants Israel obliterated.

On the other side of this culture clash are the majority of people, often with confused and undecided views, governments and main political parties, themselves ill at ease and wavering, and another sizeable minority in strong support of Israel and the rightness of its cause, and the necessary evil of the bombing of Gaza in order to destroy Hamas.

To better understand what is happening here, marked by the extraordinary intensity of feeling that has been aroused – the high pitch of public clamour – it is helpful to look at the roots of belief on both sides. Which takes us back to the significance of Easter and its symbolism, and why death has ­become politicised.

Progressive belief in its beginning had to find its own authorities to combat the dominant Western orthodoxy, which was based on a conjunction of Christ crucified with Greek tragic stoicism. It found its own prophets in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx.

Rousseau answered the death question with a kind of return to the biblical Garden of Eden, in which Adam and Eve were cast as living for ever in a paradise of abundance on earth. Rousseau postulated that humans, in the state of nature, were “noble savages”, before being corrupted by civilisation. His famous line put it: “Man was born free but is everywhere in chains.” Here was the origin of the modern utopian view that humans are essentially good, and nice. They would live in peaceful harmony together, and happily, if corrupting social influences were removed – such as capitalism, Western civilisation, and the controlling repressions of modern society. “Derepression” was one of the catch cries of 1960s student radicals, drawn from that latter-day Rousseau, Herbert Marcuse.

Rousseau’s vision was childlike, imaging the ideal society as one of wholly good and innocent children at play, children who defy death and live for ever. It also believed in the wave of a magical wand to usher in the new perfect world.

Marx further developed the counter-myth. His communist utopia would evolve after a violent struggle overthrowing the bourgeois class and its wealth and power elites. He drew on different Biblical mythology, he a latter-day Moses projecting forward to a promised land of milk and honey to rise from the ashes of capitalism, with the working class taking over to run a society cleansed of inequality, private property, and the need for any conflict. Like Rousseau, he believed that purging the corrupt old order would miraculously usher in a golden age. He dreamed of the end to what he personally nominated as the central life principle – struggle. Marx seemed to draw, perhaps unconsciously, on his own Jewish roots, to posit an apocalypse, like Noah’s flood, leading to regeneration.

Palestinian gunmen and residents evacuate the body of a man killed in an earlier Israeli raid at the Nur Shams refugee camp near Tulkarm on March 21, amid a surge of violence in the Israel-occupied West Bank while battles continue between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.

With a sleight of hand, religion had been funnelled into politics. Kill God, and he risks reappearing as Satan. Thus, the 20th century would be cursed by generations believing that individual salvation could somehow be achieved through social revolution. Marx’s vision was put into practice by Lenin and Stalin, leading not to the promised land of plentiful equality but totalitarian despotism, secret police, the Gulag, and the loss of millions of innocent lives. The French Revolution, itself with Rousseau as intellectual father, was being repeated: after 1789, the opposite to the theory manifested in practice, not liberty, equality, and fraternity, but the Terror and Napoleon. Dreams of redemptive politics also appeared on the right, with fascism. Hitler launched a quasi-religious nationalism, promising a messianic thousand-year German Reich – the reality, his ­defeat and suicide in a bomb-­devastated Berlin.

Jumping forward to today, the Palestinians are imagined, in the progressive mind, as the new noble savages, or the new impoverished, exploited and downtrodden working class. Israel and the Jews are the current agents of satanic Western power and its money elites, and it is imagined that if only this evil could be defeated, then the virtuous and innocent Palestinians would be freed to live in peace and prosperity. This is reminiscent of 1960s hippy students who championed “flower power”.

The progressive view is being opposed, on the other side of this culture war, by mainstream opinion, which is harder to classify, being a lot more complicated in the threads it draws upon from across the breadth of the Western tradition. And it is less well articulated. In the background, the shadows of Christian belief may be discerned. The commanding image is of Jesus crucified on the cross, suffering to the end, praying for some transcendental relief, a grave image that is emblematic of the human condition. It stands diametrically at variance with golden-age utopias. Suffering, it is implied, is in the nature of things, to be borne as best as a person may, with uncomplaining stoic fortitude.

Further, the Western tradition is uncompromisingly individualist, seeing the important questions of value orbiting around the human individual – not the collectivity, whether tribe, people, or nation. Christianity focused on the salvation of the individual soul. Classical Greek culture singled out the individual hero, as with Achilles and Oedipus, or the individual virtuous person, as championed by Socrates. Rousseau’s noble savage, like Marx’s idealised working class, has a quite different parentage, being tribal or collectivist, and as such out of kilter with mainstream Western consciousness.

The Western tradition – unlike, say, Islam – has usually differentiated the material from the spiritual, separating state and church. Jesus put it: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Knowledge and faith are quite distinct categories, or realities. From there, the tradition has advocated, on the material side, the application of cool, clear analytical reason and logic to the matters in question, whether they be scientific research or political challenges, from planning cities to prosecuting a war. The affairs of the spirit, by contrast, are the ­domain of poet, painter, and composer. Machiavelli caricatured the point by warning that anyone concerned about the state of their soul should not go into politics, for they would, most likely, be bad at it.

The two perspectives, progressive and mainstream, derive different moralities from their response to the Easter challenge. On the progressive side, there is a clear line of argument from the assumption that humans are basically good, implying it is open to every individual to change their character at will for the better, just as it is possible for any society to reform its institutions, customs, and social hierarchies, and endlessly so, to reach perfection.

It follows that those who benefit in status, wealth, and power from preserving the old order are morally reprehensible. Their shameless culpability is reflected today in the killing of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza. Ceasefire means, at the local level, the saving of life, and at the broader level, the defeat of Israel. In this moral equation, thou shalt not kill and the lives of the innocent are being set against the survival of a country.

The view from southern Israel as smoke billows over the Gaza Strip during IDF bombardment.

The moral derivations on the Greek-Christian side are more modest. At the individual level, they command a person to live as justly as they can, with the virtuous life being rewarded at death, at least according to Catholic teaching. Protestant theology put it more obscurely that the wages of sin are death. There is stress on character virtues such as justice, courage, moderation, and common sense. At the collective level, there is encouragement to work for the common good, striving to leave a person’s home society a better place. Above all, there is reverence for the care of the soul, and its yearnings for transcendence.

Further, the Western tradition, from Thucydides to Shakespeare and Burke, values what might be called political realism. Good government is hard to achieve and difficult to maintain. The task of politics, in succouring a prosperous and stable society, requires balancing circumstance and principle, making big decisions often on the basis of flimsy evidence and unclear consequences, decisions that may bankrupt businesses or even lead to the death of citizens. A moral balance sheet may be ­impossible to script in advance with any confidence, yet leaders must take responsibility for what they decide.

Israel is confronted today by the most severe of political realities. There is no happy ending in sight, no clear path out. Israel must eliminate the Hamas leadership if it is to live in tolerable long-term peace without turning itself into an embattled police state. It must do so without inflicting an unreasonable level of death and destruction in Gaza, both for its own moral equanimity and for the practical reason of not alienating its crucial ally, the US. Even if it achieves this end, it is faced with the seemingly intractable challenge of finding an acceptable body to rule Gaza.

The pro-Palestinian protests seem to have no cognisance of this political reality, or they choose to pretend it away, while chanting catchy slogans and regressing into cloud-cuckoo-land fantasy.

The gravity of Easter remembrance would tell against politicising death. Its emphasis is on contemplating the awful, tragic reality that is at the heart of the human condition. Keep religion in its own domain, it would advise, separate from politics, which obeys its own quite different, antithetical logic.

It is often, however, that politics intrudes, inevitably, as it did in the case of Jesus himself. The Jewish clerical hierarchy judged and ­condemned him for being a revolutionary leader working to overthrow their synagogues and their religion – a judgment that had some cogency. The Roman governor agreed reluctantly to commit Jesus to death by crucifixion, although he was sceptical of the charges levelled against him. His job was to maintain political order. In other words, the formative Western story puts the key meaning questions for the individual – identity, how to live, and the possibility of some kind of personal salvation, and what that might mean – in the shaping context of a political reality. But there was no ambiguity about Jesus’s own apolitical message.

In effect, the mainstream Western view of the Gaza conflict, at its best, would combine its own reflections on the tragic implications of life meaning symbolised by the cross, with facing up, soberly and rationally, to very difficult political realities on the ground. And it might reflect on how it has let the malign shadow of Rousseau and Marx fall across a significant proportion of its younger generations, those in their 20s and 30s. And what now to do about that.

John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University.