Some things don’t change. This year things have only gotten worse in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. A friend in Hebron commented, “There are so few signs of hope here now.” And as a bishop once said, “My message for the churches at Christmas is stop mentioning the word Bethlehem unless you care about [the Palestinian community]. Stop singing ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ unless you come and visit with its people, unless you do something....”
My first guide in Palestine, Zoughbi Zoughbi reminds us:
The Roman census brought the holy family to the Bethlehem cave where Christ was born. The conditions of the current Israeli occupation would preclude even this humble birth. Mary and Joseph would be delayed by over 500 check-points and the annexation wall would keep the Magi and their gifts away. Angels would not find shepherds tending their flocks by night but barbed-wire around confiscated lands. Occupation can block passage, hamstring commerce, annex all the land but the occupation will go broke before it takes away the star of hope and the spirit of Christmas: refuge for the homeless, safety for the vulnerable, bread for the hungry.
In Sabeel’s Christmas message, Naim Ateek echoes the prophetic witness in Zoughbi’s last words:
The message that the Gospels record about Jesus’ birth include words that ordinary people livingunder occupation and oppression long to hear, “Do not fear! There is good news that will givejoy to all people, a savior is born!” God has sent a liberator, and he is born in a humble setting. Indeed, liberation will neither come from the king’s palace nor from the courts of religious leaders but from among the people. In addition to being a message of comfort, it is a word of invigorating challenge: a strong invitation for each person to take part in and witness to the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God.
My friend in Hebron concluded, “perhaps there will be a surprise in store just around the corner. I certainly hope so.”
Virginia Tilley of the University of the South Pacific, however, calls the Christian community to task for its measured and careful witness [http://www.australiansforpalestine.net/5
Each Christmas, it has become a seasonal ritual for Christians to call for new care and action on Palestine. Each subsequent year, the same empty, circumscribed, ineffectual gestures result. The courage of the Arab Spring exposes this shameful ritualised cycle of moral failure as a spiritual imperative. This year’s Christmas must be a time for spiritual renewal, frank self-examination, fresh insight, and new courage to set aside sanitised pleas and empty prayers, stop listening to the internal gatekeepers, reject Israel’s manipulation of Christian theology to serve militaristic ends, and demand that all Church leaderships, with one clarion voice, call for true justice in Palestine. If the teachings of Jesus mean anything today, surely they mean this: the salvation of all three Abrahamic faiths from the false gods of mutual fear and the scourge of oppression. The alternative is to stand before the Cross at Christmas 2012 with a deepening and well-earned sense of shame.
How will we respond to this call? Will this be the year we ‘set aside sanitised pleas and empty prayers, stop listening to internal gatekeepers, reject Israel’s manipulation of Christian theology to serve militaristic ends, and demand that all Church leaderships ... call for true justice in Palestine’?
And let us not sing ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ until we have acted on this call.
20 December 2011
When I think of Palestinian American academic and writer Edward Said, one phrase he penned comes to the fore. It was the title of a piece he wrote for The London Review of Books in February 1984, “Permission to Narrate.” These three words described what Said felt was most denied to the Palestinians by the international media, the power to communicate their own history to a world hypnotised by a mythological Zionist narrative of an empty Palestine that would serve as a convenient homeland for Jews around the world who had endured centuries of racism, miraculously transformed by their labour from desert to a bountiful Eden.
On the occasion of another death, a representative of the Lumbee Indians remembered Ranny Umberger, the author of the outdoor drama Strike at the Wind, as someone who gave voice to the Lumbees in telling a piece of their history. A North Carolina Arts Council article says, “The drama describes Henry Berry Lowrie's struggle to avenge the murders of his father and brother while bringing freedom to the Indian and African American populations in post-Civil War Robeson County [North Carolina].”
Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas for over 5 years, or held as a prisoner of war, depending on who is doing the writing, recently returned home in an exchange for the release of over 1000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Mondoweiss: The War of Ideas in the Middle East, commented that the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article ‘Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life.’ It published this comment, with her permission, from Helena Cobban, a long-time observer of Palestine and Israel:
And when will the NYT magazine be running a piece of comparable length about the plight of any one of the thousands of Palestinian families whose sons (and, until recently, daughters) were torn from them by their Israeli captors...and the anguished decisions that Palestinian leaders have to make regarding them, etc. etc.?
How many other voices are lost when those characterized as the ‘winners’ write the history books? How many are lost because we are so wrapped up in our own narratives that we do not hear others’ voices? How many are lost when we fear telling another story because of what we may be called? How many are lost because we don’t take time to seek out those voices?
The Palestine/Israel Network of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship is offering a curriculum to explore these voices and a framework in which to take action. It’s called Steadfast Hope: The Palestinian Quest for Just Peace and is an Episcopal version of the original Presbyterian Church USA’s Israel Palestine Mission Network’s resource (and thanks to IPMN for their collaboration in and support of this effort).
For information on ordering copies, see
http://epfnational.org/PIN/the-episcopal-v
It’s an opportunity to hear those lost voices, to unwrap ourselves from our own narratives, to let go of the fear of being called names, to take time and seek out these voices. I hope you’ll join EPF PIN in this engagement.
29 November 2011
Durham NC
I was, therefore, surprised last night when I saw an email dated 15 January 2010 in the followup needed box. Somehow it had migrated to that box from wherever it was. However it happened, it was meant and thus this reflection.
On 31 October 2011 UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) voted Palestine a full member. The US administration immediately cut funding to UNESCO following statutes passed in 1990 and 1994.
From the US State Department’s website, a ‘Reuters soundbite’ from US Ambassador to UNESCO David Killion: "The United States of America: no ... However, we recognize that this action today will complicate our ability to support UNESCO's programs. There are other ways of promoting the cause of the Palestinian people that would not have involved seeking premature membership at UNESCO. We sincerely regret that the strenous [sic] and well-intentioned efforts of many delegations to avoid this result fell short. The United States has been very clear about the need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the only path to the Palestinian state that we all seek is through direct negotiations. There are no short cuts and we believe efforts such as the one we have witnessed today are counter-productive."
From my migrating email: In 1948 units of the Iraqi army responded to the call to support Palestine. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe says in A History of Modern Palestine, “The Arab world, its leaders and societies, vowed to save Palestine. The politicians were hardly sincere; the soldiers and their commanders were probably more genuine in their commitment to salvage Palestine.” (page 132) By spring 1949, Pappe continues, “Out of about 850,000 Palestinians living in the territories designated by the UN as a Jewish state, only 160,000 remained on or nearby their land and their homes. Those who remained became the Palestinian minority in Israel. The rest were expelled or fled under the threat of expulsion, and a few thousand died in massacres.” (page 138)
A young Palestinian woman, raised outside of Israel and Palestine, just beginning to learn about her people’s history, asked her grandmother why, after fleeing to Lebanon in the face of Israeli ethnic cleansing in the Galilee in 1948, she had returned with her family to Nazareth in the early 1950s. The grandmother said, “We were waiting for the Iraqi army and they didn’t come” -- or words to that effect.
Palestine and the Palestinian community has been ‘waiting for the Iraqi army’ for a very long time. Its negotiators have compromised over and over in their efforts to reach a negotiated settlement with Israel. If anyone wants to argue about what Palestine has done ‘wrong’ or where Israel has been ‘right’ please go to another room. That’s another discussion.
While the Episcopal Public Policy Network, implementing the Presiding Bishop’s Pastoral Letter on Israel-Palestinian Peace of 3 October 2011, calls on Episcopalians to advocate to “bring the parties back to the table for peace negotiations” Israel continues to build its apartheid wall, expand settlements and approve plans for new settlements, confiscate Palestinian land and enforce its land and sea blockade of Gaza. I have a hunch Palestine is tired of ‘waiting for the Iraqi army.’ I would be too. And that, I believe, is part of why Palestine has applied to the United Nations for membership and why the campaign to join UNESCO.
As Martin Luther King Jr said, “The Church must be reminded that it is not the master or servant of the state but rather the conscience of the State. It must be the guide and critic of the state, and never its tool. If the Church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”
1 November 2011
All Saints Day
Durham NC
Note: The Episcopal Peace Fellowship’s Palestine/Israel Network met in Chicago IL from 16-18 October 2011. This is the reflection I shared before we broke into small groups to discern next steps for action.
We’ve been meeting since Sunday evening to get beyond talk to action. Some of you have seen the reflection I wrote in response to the Presiding Bishop’s Pastoral Letter on Israeli-Palestinian Peace. In it I shared a parable that a traveler to the West Bank heard there but I edited out the last paragraph. Here’s the story with the last paragraph:
There was a city on fire. People in the city were unable to put the fire out. Many were burned, and many died from their burns. This alarmed people in neighboring cities. And they came to see what was happening in the city on fire. These visitors took pictures and talked about how awful the fire was. They offered comfort to the victims of the fire. They rebuilt sections of the city that had been burnt. Others went closer to the flames, wanting to touch them to see what it felt like to burn. They came and went, taking pictures, telling stories. Despite all the delegations, the fire continued to burn.
The man then wished us good day and walked away without shaking our hands. We found the rest of the group and left Qalqiliya on the next bus. We promised among ourselves to stay in touch with the people we’d met and to tell our community everything that we had seen and heard.*
When Grace Said thanked us last night for standing with the Palestinian community, I remembered the day Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron got called to two house demolitions. One was near Kiryat Arba, east of Hebron. There were only two of us in the office; the rest of the team was at an event at a school in the Palestinian-controlled section of Hebron. My team mate went off to Kiryat Arba. I went off to Sendas with our neighbor and translator Zleikhah Muhtaseb. We were there all day. From a nearby roof I shot picture after picture of the house being demolished and later we met with the family and walked to the site of other demolitions that day. While I was taking photos, Zleikhah was interviewing family members. We got back to the office exhausted around 6:00PM. Zleikhah sat down and translated all her notes from Arabic to English. It took a while. When she finished, I thanked her. She said, ‘No thanks are necessary. It is my duty.’ So when I heard Grace last night, I told her ‘No thanks are necessary. It is my duty.’ It is our duty to move beyond talk to action.
But back to the parable. ‘To tell our community everything we had seen and heard.’ What might that mean to us? What will we tell, what will we do, that goes beyond talk to action? Ponder it in silence for a few minutes.
Let us pray:
God of peace,
let us your people know,
that at the heart of turbulence
there is an inner calm that comes
from faith in you.
Keep us from being content with things as they are,
that from this central peace
there may come a creative compassion,
a thirst for justice,
and a willingness to give of ourselves
in the Spirit of Christ. Amen.
--from A New Zealand Prayer Book
*Elliott Colla is author of Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Duke University Press, 2007), and translator of works of Arabic literature, including Ibrahim Aslan's The Heron, Idris Ali's Poor, and Al-Koni's Gold Dust. He is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.
18 October 2011, Chicago IL
There was a city on fire. People in the city were unable to put the fire out. Many were burned, and many died from their burns. This alarmed people in neighboring cities. And they came to see what was happening in the city on fire. These visitors took pictures and talked about how awful the fire was. They offered comfort to the victims of the fire. They rebuilt sections of the city that had been burnt. Others went closer to the flames, wanting to touch them to see what it felt like to burn. They came and went, taking pictures, telling stories. Despite all the delegations, the fire continued to burn.
---Told by Elliott Colla, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Georgetown University,
on Jadaliyya
This parable recounts what I believe is our dilemma in the US as we advocate for and stand with our brothers and sisters in Palestine and Israel. How many years have we been traveling to Palestine and Israel and coming home and telling the stories? For how long have we been advocating change with successive US administrations? At how many General Conventions have Episcopalians introduced prophetic resolutions calling for peace with justice in Palestine and Israel only to have them eviscerated or defeated? For how long will we continue to do good but never get to the point that we are doing justice?
The fire continues to burn.
On 3 October 2011 the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church released A Pastoral Letter on Israeli-Palestinian Peace. It was balanced. It set out The Episcopal Church’s positions on a resolution of this conflict and called on the President and the Congress to take steps neither is willing to take towards its resolution. It set out how Episcopalians can financially support the good works of those institutions which are part of the infrastructure for a Palestinian state.
The fire continues to burn.
While acknowledging that official positions of The Episcopal Church are limited by policies as passed by its governing bodies, I do not accept that these policies silence the Church’s prophetic voice on Palestine and Israel. I do not accept why it all has to be ‘balanced.’ This is not a ‘balanced’ conflict. South Africans have called the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem ‘worse than apartheid.’ USers and Canadians of African descent have seen how Palestinians are treated under Israeli military occupation and said, ‘This is racism.’
The fire continues to burn. Who will put out the fire?
In 2005 Palestinian Civil Society issued a call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel ‘similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era,’ to be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies...with international law by ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall, recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality, and respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their home and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.’ The 2009 KAIROS Palestine document, written by members of the Palestinian Christian community in Israel and Palestine, endorsed boycott, divestment and sanctions as a nonviolent response to the evils of the Israeli occupation. The Presbyterian Church USA and conferences of the United Methodist Church, among others, have spoken out forcefully and bravely.
While it is important to continue taking the actions set out in the pastoral letter, the Palestinian community still lives from day to day under a brutal military occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem and under conditions of severe inequality in Israel itself.
It will be internationals and Israelis standing with their Palestinian sisters and brothers who will put out this fire for good through their courageous support of nonviolent actions such as the BDS movement. It won’t be easy and it won’t happen quickly. Look at South Africa. But we must take action. Who will join me?
7 October 2011
Durham NC
Durham NC USA
In my tradition, we renew our baptismal vows at the Great Vigil of Easter. We are asked ‘Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?’
This year Passover, Eastern and Western Holy Week and Easter fall between 17 April and 25 April. This confluence wreaks at best a logistical havoc for the Palestinian Christian community trying to get permits to travel to Jerusalem to worship, and Palestinians generally whose movements are even more restricted because of Passover.
Over the last month and a half Gaza experienced a weekend of increased shelling and bombing from Israel in which at least 18 Gazans were killed, in response to Palestinian militants shooting their generally inaccurate rockets into Israel resulting in one death, in response to Israel executing a targeted assassination of three Hamas militants earlier in the month. Five members of the Fogel family were murdered in their home in the illegal West Bank Israeli Jewish settlement of Itamar. Juliano Mer-Khamis, son of an Israeli Jewish mother and an Israeli Palestinian Christian father, was gunned down in Jenin outside his Freedom Theater. Vittorio Arrigoni, a member of the International Solidarity Movement, was kidnapped in Gaza and murdered.
There are practitioners of violence and of nonviolence on all sides of this conflict. There are those who want this conflict never to be resolved and those who work for a peace with justice.
Anger, grief and fear arises in these communities. How will we respond?
As observant Jews collected and burned every piece of leavening (hametz) in preparation for Passover, a spokesperson from the Hebron settler community explained that the wider metaphor spoke to ‘burning the evil from your midst...until nothing of it remains.” He continued,
Israeli security forces set forth, a month ago, searching for Hametz.... The creatures who massacred the Fogel family...had been apprehended.... The butchers from Awarta...must not be allowed to continue to live. They must be tried, as quickly as possible, and executed.... Those who directly helped them...they must die too. There can be no mercy for participants of a massacre. The[ir] entire village, Awarta, must be razed and burned to the ground, all its citizens expelled to Lebanon or Egypt. For they all knew, and did nothing. And that site must remain ash, just as Hametz is burned and left as ash, an eternal reminder that the Jewish people are not meek, that we know what to do and how to do it, when necessary.... And we will know, and our neighbors will know, and the entire world will know – we will not be massacred – we will burn the Hametz in our midst, we will seek out and burn the evil in our midst and we will live in our land, for this is the goal of Passover, not to end slavery, not to walk in the desert, but to settle and live in our land, as a free people, in our land, Eretz Yisrael.
I struggle to respect the dignity of every human being when I read something like that.
On Good Friday, my tradition commemorates Jesus’s torture and execution through the hands of an occupying Roman army. Yet it was much more than politics.
In my tradition there is a Confession of Sin saying in part:
We repent of the evil that enslaves us,
the evil we have done,
And the evil done on our behalf.
That is my prayer as I await the light of Easter.
Wednesday night I turned on CNN to take a break from watching Al Jazeera English on the internet. CNN reporters Anderson Cooper, Hala Gorani and Ben Wedemann were broadcasting from a building near Tahrir Square in Cairo.
As they talked about the events in Tahrir Square, I couldn’t stop crying.
I’ve never been to Egypt. My time in Palestine has been relatively safe in the scheme of things. In the days of curfew and clashes and split sessions in the schools in or near the Israeli-controlled part of Hebron, we always carried wipes with us in case the tear gas started. I’ve only been caught in live-ammunition cross-fire once, cross-tossing of stones more often. I’ve been nearby when Israeli military shot tear-gas canisters and percussion grenades towards demonstrators.
But this is nothing. I chose to be in Hebron with Christian Peacemaker Teams. I knew the risks. I could leave.
Journalists know the risks too. They are paid to take them and their employers most likely insure their lives. That’s why I get impatient when the news headlines the assaults on journalists in Cairo. While I understand that may be that opening to engage others in conversation about what’s really going on, that’s not the story. The story is with the people on the ground, with the grassroots.
Here are some threads of that story.
The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported on two sisters, Muslims, walking to Tahrir Square to join the pro-democracy demonstrators. “[T]hey looked timid and frail as thugs surrounded them, jostled them, shouted at them....The two sisters stood their ground. They explained calmly to the mob why they favored democratic reform and listened patiently to the screams of the pro-Mubarak mob. When the women refused to be cowed, the men lost interest and began to move on -- and the two women continued to walk to the center of Tahrir Square.”
I’ve read about doctors bringing medicine and bandages to Tahrir Square and treating the injured. I’ve read about the women and men bringing food and water for those staying in the Square overnight. I’ve read about others surrounding those being assaulted to protect them from their attackers.
In Palestine we learn about those individuals and families sitting sumud [steadfastness] in the midst of oppression. I recall a conversation with a Palestinian Christian woman who lives and works in East Jerusalem. I said, “I don’t know how you do this [continue to live and work under these conditions]. I don’t know that I could. I can leave.” She replied, “Yes, but we choose to stay.”
“We choose to stay.”
A bishop once said, “My message for the churches at Christmas is stop mentioning the word Bethlehem unless you care about [the Palestinian community]. Stop singing ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ unless you come and visit with its people, unless you do something....”
Bethlehem is surrounded by Israel’s apartheid wall, cutting its inhabitants off from Jerusalem, from their olive groves and orchards and vineyards, from what little grazing land is left for their flocks.
Ecumenical News International reported “Deputy mayor of Bethlehem George Saade noted that since the construction of the Israeli separation [sic] wall, the traditional greeting of the Latin, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Patriarchs by Bethlehem dignitaries at their respective Christmas processions, now takes place behind two nine-foot (2.7 metre) tall steel doors, out of sight of locals who come to watch the ceremony.... Another steel gate...must also be opened to permit the processions to enter Bethlehem.”
My first guide in Palestine, Zoughbi Zoughbi, of Wi’am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center, reminds us that Mary and Joseph would not “be able to come to Bethlehem because of the 500 checkpoints that prevent free movement...There are no more shepherds in the fields because 87% of the land in Bethlehem is either under Israeli control or confiscated for building settlements, bypass roads or erecting the Apartheid annexation wall.”
Security clearances govern whether Christians in Gaza will be allowed permits to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas. Demolition of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley is on the upswing.
The Israeli military is attacking nonviolent demonstrators at the weekly demonstrations against the building of the apartheid wall and against settlement expansion in villages around the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. The Shepherds’ Fields would likely have been declared a closed military zone by the Israeli military and the angels would have been shot in their heads with high velocity teargas canisters. Movement towards a peace with justice in the land is frozen.
In July 2005, Palestinian civil society “call[ed] upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.” The statement continued, “These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law.”
Last December KAIROS Palestine stated, “We understand [boycott of and divestment from everything produced by the Occupation] to integrate the logic of peaceful resistance. These advocacy campaigns must be carried out with courage, openly [and] sincerely proclaiming that their object is not revenge but rather to put an end to the existing evil, liberating both the perpetrators and the victims of injustice.”
So please join me in ‘doing something.’ Learn about the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) Movement and how you can participate locally. Go and visit with the people in the land where Jesus was born or support someone who can go. Hear the stories. Tell the stories. Work for a peace with justice.
As for me I didn’t sing ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ this year. Call it a reverse boycott.
25 December 2010
Durham NC USA
Note: This is adapted from a reflection shared at a gathering of Episcopalians who met to discern next steps in supporting the calls for a peace with justice in Israel/Palestine.
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against the enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
Ephesians 6:10-17
In 1998 this passage called a group of pilgrims to the Lambeth Peace Pilgrimage, organized by the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, during which we walked and prayed and sang along portions of the Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury where we witnessed to the Anglican bishops gathered for their decennial Lambeth Conference. It’s a passage that has helped me to hold steady in my work over the years with Christian Peacemaker Teams Palestine and other organizations standing for a peace with justice in Israel and Palestine.
I see the struggle as one against the rulers and the authorities -- secular and religious. I’m still in discernment and probably will be forever over what are the tools in this struggle. What is ‘the whole armor of God’?
What solidified my point of view was the 2006 General Convention where the Standing Commission on Anglican and International Peace with Justice Concerns and the Committee on Corporate Social Responsibility (formerly the Executive Council Committee on Social Responsibility in Investments) presented a series of resolutions on Israel and Palestine coming out of their visit to the region in 2005. Having taken them around Hebron and spent some time with them in Jerusalem, I went to General Convention in 2006 to testify in support of the resolutions. Most never made it through the legislative process. I vowed I’d never go to another General Convention.
True to my word I did not go to the 2009 General Convention where resolutions on Israel and Palestine again were rode over roughshod. I was in Hebron when I read this from Episcopal News Service:
The House of Bishops on July 17 rejected a resolution that called for dismantling the wall
between Israel and Palestine and for creation of a "sovereign Palestinian state."
Several bishops who opposed the measure said they favored a more balanced approach toward Israel and Palestine.
The bishops voted 53 to 43 against Resolution B027, which would also have called for "an end to the ongoing confiscation of Palestinian land, demolition of housing and the displacement of people" and for a just resolution for Palestinian refugees.
However, bishops adopted Resolution A037, urging that every Episcopalian "pray, especially in Advent and during the Christmas season, for the wall around Bethlehem and all other barriers to come down."
So I carefully crafted a letter to ENS. ENS's deletions appear in bold.
Where is the justice? At General Convention, our bishops called for an end to the blockade of Cuba, support for the church and people of Pakistan and protection of all victims of human trafficking. They defeated Resolution B027 calling for justice for the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, Israel continues to blockade Gaza. In international waters, its navy boards a ferry boat carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, tows it to an Israeli port, arrests its passengers and "deports" those who are not Israeli citizens.
Meanwhile, a right wing Israeli group produces posters opposing US President Barack Obama, showing Obama in a black and white keffiyeh, with the words 'Barack Hussein Obama. Anti-semitic. Jew-hater.'
Meanwhile in Hebron Israeli soldiers and settlers beat a sixteen-year-old
Palestinian boy within sight of his home on Tel Rumeida, next to an illegal
Israeli settlement enclave. According to the Hebron settlers, probably the most
radical of settlers, all Palestinians are terrorists. This young man said, "The
soldiers tried to make me angry and violent. But I was so quiet. I was so
strong. If we stay in the way of peace, I think we will soon have our freedom."
At the last two General Conventions, resolutions were passed calling for prayer around this issue. Prayer seems an easy thing to stand for, justice for the Palestinians not so easy. So I ask where is the justice and cry with the psalmist, "How long, O Lord? Will you forget [them ] forever?" (Psalm 13:1)
It is now November 2010. The Episcopal Church's Executive Council passed some resolutions in the wake of the defeat of B027. Israel military forces attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters at the end of May, killing nine activists. Israeli military forces boarded a Jewish boat to Gaza at the end of September -- nonviolently, they said. Passengers differed. Yonatan Shapiro of Combatants for Peace was tasered and beaten in that attack. The Gaza blockade continues. The settlement freeze that wasn’t mocks the concept of honest negotiations and truly good intentions as the Obama Administration offers ‘incentives’ -- other commentators have called them ‘bribes’-- to the Israeli government to implement another settlement freeze in the West Bank only.
So what ARE our tools in this struggle against the rulers and the authorities? What IS this whole armor of God?
We have our marching orders. We are overdue in mobilizing the grassroots to support the Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement, to heed Palestinian civil society’s call to boycott, divestment and sanctions and to support KAIROS Palestine: A Moment of Truth, A Word of Faith, Hope and Love from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering. It’s time to build a movement in our parishes and communities to end the Occupation through BDS and to create Occupation-free faith communities. It’s time to subvert the powers that be and to work around them if through them doesn’t work -- to bring about God’s peace with justice in the Land of the Holy One.
18 November 2010
Durham NC USA
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