Last Day in Israel and Palestine
Tonight we'll conclude our pilgrimage with a celebration back on the other side of the segregation wall in the West Bank. This morning I'll be back in East Jerusalem with the good people of Sabeel, leaders in developing a faithful Christian theology contextual to the Palestinian occupation. I was there the other day and met Keas Keasler, a fellow American who has been blogging on his experience here. You'll see that what he's experiencing has much in common with what our little band of pilgrims has been experiencing.
While at Sabeel, it was a pleasure and honor to finally meet Naim Ateek, whose work and writings I have long admired from a distance. Naim is a Palestinian signatory to an important statement called the Kairos Document, created by Christian leaders across denominational lines across Palestine. You can add your name to it, as I have.
One of our pilgrims is Dave Gibbons. What an energetic, smart, positive, and visionary leader he is! He's been blogging and vlogging about our trip all along; I wish I had linked to it sooner. Here's his window into our shared experience here. I wish you could have seen Dave and Shane Claiborne covered in Dead Sea mud from hairline to waterline ... absolutely unforgettable.
Mike Todd continues to blog about our pilgrimage too. Be sure to see his photo of a stranger-than-fiction sign at the Mount of Beatitudes in Galilee here. We have taken so many amazing photos, some serious, some funny. Here's a funny one from a serious place - the church next to the Garden of Gethsemane.
I doubt I'll have an opportunity to blog again for the next day or two. I'll be heading straight to Phoenix, AZ, to be part of the National Urban Academy this weekend. If you're in the area, it would be great to see you. Thanks for your interest in our journey, and for your prayers. Stay tuned for more reflections in the weeks to come.
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Helping Haiti long-term
Have you heard about the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good? They're advocating debt relief for Haiti. Rev. Steven Martin, their Executive Director, says it like this:
A nation buried in rubble should not be buried in debt.
If you're from an Evangelical background and would like to add your name to the petition, as I have, you can do so here.
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Countdown Day 12
[The Genesis narrative] begins with God creating a good world, continues with human beings creating evil, and concludes with God creating good outcomes that overcome human evil…. God’s good prevails. Good has the first word, and good has the last. (54)
From A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (available February 9, 2010)
"A New Kind of Christianity is a stellar accomplishment, a combination of hard tack fact and unfettered hope, an overview in delightful narrative of the long way of our coming to this time and of the multiform ways of our arriving. In every way, a dispatch from the front." (-Phyllis Tickle, author of The Great Emergence )
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Jewish voices …
We have spoken with many Palestinians in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem so far in our pilgrimage, both Christian and Muslim. Their voices are seldom heard in our corporate media, so it has made sense to meet, listen to, and understand them. But of course we've met with Israeli folks too. Yesterday we had some particularly important conversations with Israeli Jewish voices. They agreed that there will be no change in Israeli policy until the US decides to stop giving Israel a blank check.
One older Israeli gentleman explained it like this: Some Israelis, of course, fully support the occupation and don't consider the human rights of Palestinians, and many others simply choose not to think about it. But quite a few feel a deep discomfort about what's going on. They feel ashamed that their nation continues stealing Palestinian land through the settlements - little colonies that are built in strategic places in Palestinian territory, and then connected to other colonies, gradually squeezing Palestinians out. They don't like the separation fence; it reminds them of segregation in the US and apartheid in South Africa. They want security - and they deserve security - but they are not happy about what they are becoming and their Palestinian neighbors are suffering in the name of homeland security.
However, as long as huge amounts of money flow in through US military aid, they know the occupation will continue and expand, because politicians can get elected and reelected by appealing to fear much more easily than by appealing to the hope of reconciliation. So here was the sentence that really stuck with me, and all of us who heard it:
Americans must provide the alibi to allow the Israelis to make the concessions they know they need to make.
I think most Americans, if they could see for themselves what the Palestinians were experiencing, would feel like the Israelis described by this Israeli gentleman whose home we visited yesterday. We like neither what we're doing to others nor what we're becoming ourselves in the name of homeland security. We wish there were some alibi - some motivation or reason to change directions and find another way, a better way. May God help us, and them, find it.
Jesus' words came to mind often yesterday as we walked down the Mount of Olives: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! If only you knew what makes for peace ..." We could also say, "O Washington! Washington! O Tehran! O London! O Paris! O ..."
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Guest Blog by Greg Barrett: From Jerusalem
Greg Barrett is part of our band of pilgrims in Israel and Palestine. He's been interviewing people who have experienced the occupation in ways that don't typically get much if any coverage by the corporate media.
Only when Right equals Might will peace be found
In witnessing the inhumane imbalance of the Holy Land, generated primarily by Zionists and their U.S. tax dollars, one book repeatedly springs to mind: “Power versus Force” by Dr. David Hawkins.
I don’t need to dissect Hawkins’ theories on applied kinesiology to explain. Authentic power is a partnership bound up soulfully in honesty, peace, cooperation; it’s mutually coordinated and mutually beneficial. Force, however, creates counterforce. Always. As Hawkins writes in his 2002 bestseller, “Because force incites polarization, it inevitably produces a win/lose dichotomy; and because someone always loses, enemies are created. Constantly faced with enemies, force requires constant defense. Defensiveness is invariably costly, whether in the marketplace, politics, or international affairs.”
Yesterday I interviewed a 48-year-old Palestinian Christian who was arrested as a 20-year-old college student. He had been involved in a protest of Zionist policies that made the protesting of Zionist policies illegal. No kidding. Until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 it was illegal for Palestinians to protest the occupation of their land. They were not allowed to even fly the red, white, green and black of the Palestinian flag, much less to throw a rock at Israeli Defense Forces. In 1982 this Palestinian, now a soft-spoken father of four, was a student leader who dared to throw a stone during a protest of Israeli occupation. He said his ensuing arrest and interrogation lasted thirty-six days and included beatings, nakedness, scalding water, freezing water, and an anxious moment of near strangulation.
But the memory that moved him to tears yesterday wasn’t about the physical torture. It was about the inhumanity forcefully applied. Denied food for three days, he said his IDF interrogators cuffed his hands behind his back and set a bowl of yogurt on the table in front of him. They were bored and wanted to be entertained, he suspected. The imbalance of power that had left a young Palestinian alone with an army of grown men was supposed to reduce him to behaving like an animal. To eat he would have to lap at his food. Recalling this, his eyes welled up. “I was starving, starving,” he said.
“But I didn’t eat.”
Might equals right? We desperately need to reverse illogical thinking.
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