Peace Quote of the Day - acknowledging the other

"What then is the source of our redemption, our salvation? It lies ultimately in our willingness to acknowledge the other - the victims we have created - Palestinian, Lebanese and also Jewish - and the injustice we have perpetrated as a grieving people. Perhaps then we can pursue a more just solution in which we seek to be ordinary rather than absolute, where we finally come to understand that our only hope is not to die peacefully in our homes as one Zionist official put it long ago but to live peacefully in those homes."

Sara Roy, quoted in Mark Braverman, Fatal Embrace

Peace Quote of the Day - why won't Christians call Israel to account?

"So there are two strains within Christianity: one conservative (Christian Zionism) and one liberal/progressive (interfaith reconciliation). Both produce a tendency to support both the concept and the reality of the Jewish state. Both act powerfully to stifle criticism of Israel. This helps explain the reluctance - phobia might be a better word - of many Christians to call Israel to account for its human rights abuses and its denial of justice to Palestinians. We are presented with a daunting irony: Christians, attempting to atone for the crimes committed against the Jews, are by this very fact blocked from confronting the crimes committed by the Jews."

Mark Braverman, Fatal Embrace

I think that there are more than these two strains within Christianity, and I believe the reasons for Christian support of Israel are more complex than he gets at here, but Braverman touches on a vitally important issue, which must be unraveled if we are to make any progress for peace in Palestine - Christian support for the State of Israel, and the fact that among what seems to be a majority of American Christians, it is impossible to voice any criticism of Israel, on any basis. Peace is not possible, without confronting and changing this roadblock.

Peace Quote of the Day - tears for Jerusalem

Everyone I know who has traveled in the Occupied West Bank and has seen the realities of the Occupation and met with people who are working against it and for justice, has had a life-changing experience. This account is typical, with the exception that the author is an American Jew, grandson of a 5^th-generation Palestinian Jew, which lends a different kind of weight to his witness:

“Traveling in Israel and the occupied territories in the summer of 2006, my defenses against the reality of Israel’s crimes crumbled. I witnessed the Separation Wall grabbing huge swaths of Palestinian land, the checkpoints controlling the movement of Palestinians within their own territory and strangling farming, commerce, access to health care, education, and social intercourse. I saw the network of new roads restricted to Israelis; I learned about the assassinations, midnight raids, and collective punishment; I saw the massive, continuing construction of illegal Jewish settlements and towns; I heard firsthand about the vicious acts of ideological Jewish settlers, and words like apartheid and ethnic cleansing sprang to my mind, unbidden and undeniable. That summer, forty years after my first encounter with the land, I saw all this, and my relationship with Israel changed forever.

“My last night in Palestine that summer fell on the ninth of Av, a Jewish day of fasting and mourning, the traditional date of the destruction of the Temple of Solomon and the beginning of the exile of the Jews two thousand years ago. The book of Lamentations, a source text for our liturgy of mourning, attributed by tradition to the prophet Jeremiah, is chanted that night. It is a harrowing description of a people fallen and traumatized.

        Jerusalem has greatly sinned

        Therefore has she been made a mockery

        All who admired her despise her

        For they have seen her disgraced.

        Panic and pitfall are our lot,

        Death and destruction.

        My eyes shed streams of water

        Over the brokenness of my poor people

        (Lam. 1:8, 4:46-48; author’s translation)

“On that night, I sat on a hill overlooking the Old City, in the company of congregations of praying Jews, mostly American émigrés worshiping, I felt, at the shrine of their Jerusalem – a Jerusalem ‘reclaimed’ at the expense of the Palestinian people; a Jerusalem that for Palestinians is also a spiritual and political center; a Jerusalem that is being taken from them street by street, farm by farm, village by village. I stood on that hill and chanted the words as I had every year on this day, descriptions of starvation, rape, slaughter, destruction of homes, and banishment from the land, and, for the life of me, I could apply the words only to the Palestinians. In these words, I now felt their suffering. And my eyes shed streams of water for them, my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and yes, for the brokenness of my own people.”

Mark Braverman, Fatal Embrace

If peace is ever going to come to Palestine, to the Israelis and Palestinians, Jewish, Muslim and Christian, it will be through people like Mark Braverman – through people who can step out of their place, their reality, their perspective, their view of the world (comfortable as it is), enter into the experience of those who are not only “other” but even the enemies of their people, feel their pain, and in fact, change to the degree that all that speaks of their own personal pain, can come somehow to connect to the reality of the pain of their enemy, who they can begin to think of as their “brothers and sisters.”

Would that we all would be able to make a journey like Mark Braverman’s, and experience the transformation which radically changed his life.

Peace Quote of the Day - the perils of empowerment

"But if we [the Jewish people] now become slaves to the consequences of empowerment, then we are not free, and we are not truly powerful. The Jewish state, by using the Holocaust as justification for unjust actions, is betraying the meaning we should take from our history of persecution and marginalization. You cannot achieve your own deliverance, even from the most unspeakable evil, by the oppression of another people."

Mark Braverman, Fatal Embrace

Peace Quote of the Day - the impact of Yad Vashem on our pursuit of peace

Fatal Embrace is the remarkable account of the personal journey of an American Jew, grandson of a fifth generation Palestinian Jew, into his Jewish identity through the process of visiting Israel and the Occupied West Bank and beginning to grapple with the realities of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people.

Here is an account of the impact of a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, after having spent time in the West Bank. He begins by describing the location of Yad Vashem on Mount Herzl, the Mount of Memory, and the entry to the Museum. The whole account is well worth reading. Here is part of it. Read it slowly.

“I was shattered. A hand had reached into me, grabbed hold of my heart, and drawn me back into my past, into the collective memory of my people. How could I turn my back on this? How could I walk away from my history, from this incalculable, unfathomable loss, and, more so, from Israel, my deliverance? It had worked. I was hooked. What was I to do now? I had no choice. Emptied, numb, and confused, I turned and walked down the hall into the museum.

“It’s a brilliant exhibition. One walks down, into it. It is subterranean – no windows, no light, no escape. You are led through corridors and tunnels, with no control and no way out but through. One traverses the whole, familiar story: from the laws enacted in the thirties, the walls of isolation, privation, and degradation closing in, to the Final Solution: the ovens, the stacked bodies, the faces of the children. Darkness closes your heart – you feel you will never escape from this horror, this black hole of evil and despair. Then, turning a corner into the final gallery, on display are the blown-up photos of the ships bringing the refugees to the shores of Israel, faces shining with hope and gratitude. There is David Ben-Gurion, reading from the Israeli Declaration of Independence. And then, suddenly, you emerge. Ascending a wide flight of stairs, you are outside, in the light and the open air, standing on a wide patio that looks out on the Jerusalem Hills. It’s the final exhibit. And then it hit me. This was no mere museum. This was a lesson; this was indoctrination: from the biblical quote at the entrance [‘I will put my breath into you and you shall live again and I will set you upon your own soil,’ Ezekiel 37:14], into the depths, and to this sight – The Land. The reward. Our destiny.

“The fifty-eight-year spell was broken. I got it. And something let go, and it was okay.

“Diane, a fellow delegate, turned to me as we walked out and asked if I had seen the part about how the Nazis acted to marginalize, dispossess, and banish the Jews, the part before the extermination camps and the ovens. She asked if I had seen that this was what we had witnessed over the last few days. Yes, I had seen. The spell was broken. I got it. And it was okay.

“Treading, as I had so many times, the sacred ground of the Holocaust, I had, for the first time, broken The Rule: our Holocaust, the Holocaust, must not be compared to any other disaster, genocide, or crime. It has to stand as the ultimate humanitarian crime, the genocide. Not only that, I had also broken a rule so fundamental, so important that it is never even spoken: I had compared the Jews to the Nazis. And it was okay. Because, for the first time, I knew what I had to do; I knew how to understand and integrate the Holocaust. For one thing had not changed: the Nazi Holocaust would continue to be the formative historical event of my life. But now, from this day forward, finding the meaning of the Holocaust meant working for justice for Palestine. There were too many parallels, too many ways in which Israel was doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to us. No, we had not built death camps. But we were turning into beasts, into persecutors, and we were killing a civilization.

“Here was the most terrible irony in this scenario: in enshrining our own memory, in living out our liturgy of destruction, to use theologian Marc Ellis’s phrase, we have been erasing the history of another. It is a terrible irony that Yad Vashem, along with Har Herzl, is built on top of these hills west of Jerusalem, hills littered with the remains of Palestinian villages. Some have been turned into parks for the Jews of Jerusalem. Most are ruins, stones bleaching in the sun, standing guard over uncultivated terraces of olives and grapes, witnesses to shattered lives and a murdered civilization.”

Mark Braverman, Fatal Embrace: Christians, Jews, and the Search for Peace in the Holy Land

This is an example of the kind of journey, the kind of transformation, which must take place, individual by individual, if there is ever going to be peace in the so-called Holy Land, the land of Jesus and so many prophets. Non-Jews must see, experience, internalize the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, to understand what lies behind the significance of the State of Israel, and the actions of the Israeli government toward the Palestinians. Jews must see, experience, internalize the Palestinian suffering, and see how their response to the Holocaust has led to the unthinkable – repeating the inhumanity they experienced, in their treatment of the Palestinians.

This is a stunning book. If you are interested in peace, anywhere, you should read it.

Peace Quote of the Day - "my people are those who seek peace"

“Tel Aviv, Israel, 2001. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, who was thirteen years old when she was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber in September 1997. After Smadar's death, Nurit and her husband, Rami, Jewish Israelis, opened their house of mourning to Palestinian supporters and to other bereaved parents. Years later, Nurit said this in a speech in Tel Aviv:

‘When my little girl was killed, a reported asked me how I was willing to accept condolences from the other side. I replied without hesitation that I had refused to meet with the other side: when Ehud Olmert, then the mayor of Jerusalem, came to offer his condolences I took my leave and would not sit with him. For me, the other side, the enemy, is not the Palestinian people. For me the struggle is not between Palestinians and Israelis, nor between Jews and Arabs. The fight is between those who seek peace and those who seek war. My people are those who seek peace. My sisters are the bereaved mothers, Israeli and Palestinian, who live in Israel and in Gaza and in the refugee camps. My brothers are the fathers who try to defend their children from the cruel occupation, and are, as I was, unsuccessful in doing so. Although we were born into a different history and speak different tongues, there is more that unites us than that which divides us.’”

Quoted in Mark Braverman, Fatal Embrace:

Christians, Jews, and the Search for Peace in the Holy Land

(emphasis mine)