wfn.org | Christians say non-violence is the key to struggle against Israeli

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Note #6411 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

"apartheid"
02-March-2001
01084

Christians say non-violence is the key to struggle against Israeli
"apartheid"

Internationals intend to develop a campaign to seek justice for Palestinians

by Alexa Smith

JERUSALEM - A call for a non-violent strategy to resist what Palestinians
call "apartheid" policies of the Israeli government was the focus of a
conference here 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
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 and his listeners were attending a conference sponsored by the Sabeel
Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, an ecumenical think-tank for
progressive Christians.  Sabeel is a partner of the Presbyterian Church
(USA) here.

About 250 internationals and 100 Palestinian Christians attended the Feb.
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.

More than one-third of the Palestinian dead were under 18 years old.

"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.

"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," Wallis said, drawing on Hebrews 11: 1: "Faith
is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

The Rev. Naim Ateek, Sabeel's founder and president, said 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."

Justice and love were seldom the experience of conference speakers

Many 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 the Israeli's insincerity was evidenced
most graphically by the continuing construction of Israeli settlements on
land that displaced Palestinians claim as their own.

When Palestinians property, either by force or out of fear of violence, the
Israeli government's practice was to declare the landowners "absentee," and
seize the property. Although compensation has been offered at some sites,
Palestinians usually have declined payment, saying that they intend to
return to their land.

"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." Under the terms of Oslo I, signed years ago, 92 percent of the West
Bank should have been returned to Palestinian control by now.

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.

Israeli has had five different leaders in the past six years.

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."

Esack 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, internationals 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.

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 Pharoah and Moses, Pilate and
Jesus, the British Empire and Ghandi, 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.

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.  Called "to stand up
with courage and confront the evil and oppression," he said, wearing the
full armor of God.

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.

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."

"I'd rather pay the price with non-violence, and there is a price for that
as well," he said,  "but violence will not get us where we want to go.

"This last Intifada has taken us back in history (further) than we would
like to admit. These four or five months have 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, Atteek said Sabeel
will join together with any religious group that espouses non-violence, Jews
or Muslims.

The conference participants met in regional groups to talk about ways of
highlighting the Palestinian struggle in their home countries.

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