Our memories are often haunted – not just by ghostly others, but by the horrors we have done, seen, and facilitated, or by the unspeakable things from which we have profited and failed to prevent.
In Gaza, the smoke may clear, the bodies buried under rubble may be found, the homes destroyed one day rebuilt – but the ghosts will remain.
They will rise not just in Rafah or Khan Younis, but here too, in the UK. We may glimpse them in the annual accounts of arms dealers. We may find them in the memos of civil servants who rubber-stamped export licences for weapons used in this war. We may, too, carry them even if we don’t realise we are doing so. After all, those in the UK are complicit in the deaths of civilians in Gaza, even if we don’t want to admit we are.
Since 2015, Britain has approved nearly half a billion pounds in arms exports to Israel. Among these are critical components for the F-16 and F-35 stealth fighter jet – aircrafts central to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. These jets strike dense civilian areas, levelling homes, schools, and hospitals. And while some might say that we did do something (the UK government suspended 30 export licences in September 2024), the most consequential flows – the parts that keep the F-35s aloft – continue.
So our economy profits; our consciences, not so much.
The International Court of Justice has said it is “plausible” that Israel’s military campaign could constitute genocide. And still, the parts are shipped. The justifications are repeated. And still, the ghosts multiply.
Perhaps the Pope’s death might be something to contemplate in this moment. As a Jesuit, Pope Francis was clearly also a man of peace. Knowing this, I turned to the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, exercises in which we are invited to pause each day and review our actions. Not to wallow, but to discern. To see clearly where we failed in compassion, or upheld injustice through silence or convenience.
Pope Francis would have joined Ignatius in urging us to ask: Where have I turned away from love today?
And I can’t help but wonder what, if this question were put to the British government, to the arms dealers, to ourselves, would their answer be?
Our hearts, Ignatius wrote, is shown more in deeds than in words. What, then, have our deeds been?
We have – even in our silences – enabled the sale of weapon parts knowing full well the consequences. We have – even in our absences – confined our outrage to parliamentary statements and press releases while exporting the means of destruction. We have – even in our inaction – profited, either through shares or through taxes paid by BAE systems, from the suffering of strangers, whose names we do not know, whose pain we keep at a distance.
Yet the spiritual cost of such complicity is incalculable. This is not simply a matter of policy, nor even of law. It is a matter of what kind of nation the UK chooses to be. One where we are haunted not only by the lives lost in Gaza, but by our own failure to protect them – by the gap between what we know and what we do?
The Ignatian call to magis – to do more, to go deeper, to act more courageously – demands we do more than simply mitigate risk or express regret. It demands we stop the flow of arms that fuel civilian death. That we reckon with the wreckage left in our name. That we listen to the stories of those harmed not with pity, but with responsibility.
It also means we ask: what would it mean for Britain to walk a different path? What would happen if we halted all arms exports to Israel to let investigations into alleged war crimes proceed? If we placed human life above trade interests? If we saw in each destroyed home not an unfortunate externality, but as a site of our own moral reckoning?
These are not easy questions. But easy questions rarely lead to justice. The ghosts of Gaza do not need our sympathy. They need our action. They need us to heed the movement of our souls – that inner discomfort which arises when we see injustice clearly, and feel the weight of our connection to it. Britain must end its role in this machinery of death. We must stop making excuses and start making different decisions. Not to do so only risks harming ourselves.
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