Episcopal Press and News
Conference Calls for International Campaign to Seek Justice for Palestinians
Episcopal News Service. March 12, 2001 [2001-60]
Alexa Smith, Reporter for Presbyterian News Service
(Presbyterian News Service) A call for a non-violent strategy to resist what Palestinians call "apartheid" policies of the Israeli government was the focus of a conference in Jerusalem that brought together international and indigenous Christians.
Alluding to the closures, curfews and collective punishments that the Israeli military has imposed on Palestinian towns, U.S. activist Jim Wallis of the Sojourners Community said that the time for mere solidarity with Palestinians is past. What's needed now, he said, is an international campaign to bring about change.
Wallis was a participant in a conference sponsored by the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, an ecumenical think-tank for progressive Christians, with many international partners. About 250 international and 100 Palestinian Christians attended the February 21-24 conference, whose theme was "Speaking Truth, Seeking Justice." The meeting originally was to be held in Bethlehem, but was moved to a site in Arab East Jerusalem after the start of a Palestinian uprising that unleashed six months of violence and has left nearly 400 Palestinians and a much smaller number of Israelis dead.
"We were lulled to sleep by the Middle East peace process. ... There was the sense we were on the road to peace. And we were wrong," said Wallis, a prominent evangelical who worked with South African church leaders to persuade the world to witness against apartheid there in the 1980s. "Our task now is turning from an ineffective peace process to an effective peace strategy. We have to move from solidarity to strategy."
Non-violence imperative
Wallis argued that "social change happens when someone believes it is possible before anyone can see it. ... It begins with faith, that prompts hope, that causes action to occur that makes change." He used Hebrews 11:1 as a text: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
Founder and president of Sabeel, the Rev. Naim Ateek of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, said that non-violence is imperative for Christian witness because it can unmask what he calls "the structures of domination," or in biblical terms, "the powers" in Israel that quietly cloak structural violence in government policy, hide it with religious words, or justify it on the basis of national security.
It was a subdued group that gathered on the conference's first day, lighting candles in memory of the dead on both sides of this latest outbreak of violence and joining the worship leader, the Rev. Sandra Olewine, a missionary from the United Methodist Church, in dreaming "of a world where senseless death is no more, where grief is swallowed up in the victory of justice and love."
Anger and sadness
Many participants spoke with anger and sadness of a peace betrayed over the past seven years by political leaders on both sides of the negotiating table. Palestinians said they had been co-opted into believing in a process that couldn't possibly work, and kept waiting for results that never came.
Jad Isaac, for instance, the general director of Jerusalem's Applied Research Institute, which studies agriculture, environment and water, said the peace talks stopped delivering what they promised long before the negotiations hit the skids. He said Israeli insincerity was evidenced most graphically by the continuing construction of Israeli settlements on land that displaced Palestinians claim as their own.
"Since the peace process started, the land confiscation was continuing. Who were they fooling?" asked Isaac. "There was almost a stop after Oslo II ... in the Rabin years. But there was an increase in settlements when Netanyahu was prime minister, and under Barak (the outgoing prime minister) it did not stop."
Each prime minister, he said, insisted on re-negotiating agreements already signed by their predecessors. The result? Agreements that offer Palestinians less land, diminished water rights and a network of Arab towns that are cut off from each other by the Israeli army.
Grassroots support
The conference speaker who startled his audience was a Muslim columnist from South Africa, who said the randomness of the closures and the collective punishment suffered by Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli military make the Israeli brand of apartheid far worse than that of South Africa, because of its randomness and its acceptance in Israeli society.
The columnist, Farid Esack, said racism is "mainstream" in Israel, and religion is so caught up in ideology that it reduces God "to a real estate agent who dishes out property left, right and center." He said Palestinians must learn to exploit white guilt, as the Zionists have done, and as South Africa's African National Congress did; and to make better use of U.S. media to tell the story of the Palestinians themselves. Moreover, he said, the international community must "be in solidarity" with Palestinians, not to do them a favor, but because each of us must "face God one day and account for what we did."
Esack also said that the Palestinians need to cultivate local grassroots support. "That is your responsibility," he told the Palestinians in his audience.
Moral authority
Wallis drove the same point home that the non-violent peace strategy has to grow from the grassroots and be locally organized. "You need to have leadership here, and we need to listen to (your leaders)," he said, contending that every context of struggle and witness in the world is unique, and every strategy has to be situation-specific.
What stays the same in every case, Wallis said, is the transformative impact of moral authority on sheer power. He cited Pharaoh and Moses, Pilate and Jesus, the British Empire and Gandhi, Southern law enforcement and Martin Luther King Jr. "Those in power," he crowed, "aren't even remembered except in relation to those with authority! ...
"Are we becoming, and nurturing, those kinds of leaders? Believe me, we must," he said. "That is our common cause."
Wallis said news footage of Israeli snipers' killing of an unarmed 12-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed El-Dura, deeply affected U.S. public opinion; but the advantage was lost when the image was replaced by that of a lynch mob in Ramallah killing Israeli soldiers.
Wallis, a committed pacifist and executive editor of Sojourners magazine, a radical Christian monthly, said the methods used to bring about change affect the nature of the change. "Resorting to anger or revenge in liberation struggles ... produces the corrupt, undemocratic governments that do not respect human rights in the end," he said.
Practice resistance
Ateek took the conversation a step deeper, turning to Ephesians 6 and commenting that Christians should practice resistance by using the tools Paul described centuries ago: truth, justice, peace, faith, salvation, prayer and the Word of God.
"Every one of these is a powerful weapon in our resistance to evil, the oppression and domination of people," said Ateek, who emphasized that opposing structural evil and injustice is a theological idea that many Christians resist. "But it is our responsibility to resist evil wherever it is found ... within ourselves, our churches, our homes, our society, our nation, our world," he said.
Ateek added that "power" comes from God and is meant for good, but can become corrupted, or fallen, and then must be redeemed. In Israel, he said, Zionism is a movement that was begun with good intentions, but was corrupted, becoming instead a colonial force that he describes as a kind of "original sin" in the Holy Land. "They could not see that Palestinians were human beings with rights," he said, describing Zionist practices of expulsion, displacement, oppression and humiliation of the local Arab population.
He said that Christians are called to witness to God's reign, and against structural violence and domination, with Christian tools: love, non-violence, servant leadership, truth and justice. He rejected violence as an alternative, even the violence attributed to God in parts of the Old Testament, which he called a projection of distorted human desires.
Christian witness
In answer to a question about the emphasis on non-violence, Ateek said that this current Intifada, or uprising, has demonstrated "the futility of violence, and the great price." He said that he would "rather pay the price with non-violence, and there is a price for that as well--but violence will not get us where we want to go."
The current Intifada has "deepened hatred. Even when we have peace, it will take a long time to get over the hatred and bitterness people will have."
One of Sabeel's board members, human-rights attorney Jonathan Kuttab, told Wallis from the floor that Palestinians have been inclined to hand the peace process over to politicians, a lamentable mistake. He affirmed the integrity of developing a clear Christian witness. "Before we move ahead in our struggle," he said, "we need to be more clear about who we are and what we stand for, what we believe in. Only then can we move into action."
Kuttab said Jewish and Palestinian activists must work together, because part of the government's current strategy is to keep the two communities at odds.
In a later interview with the Presbyterian News Service, Ateek said Sabeel will join together with any religious group that espouses non-violence, Jews or Muslims.