Is Dialogue a Good Thing?

Dear Friend,

I'm trying to lighten up on the frequency of my posts.

Richard Forer is a "friend" whose recent post I wanted all of you to read. Thank you Richard for your insight and sensitivity to existing reality. JRK






What Does “Dialogue” Do for Peace among Israelis and Palestinians?

28 August 20123 Comments




Richard Forer

Richard Forer
United States

“Dialogue groups place Palestinians in a position where, in order to share their experience with Israelis, they are compelled to acquiesce to a distorted reality. If they refuse, they are perceived as . . . disinterested in peace.”

***

A couple of years ago, a secular Israeli High School refused to allow its students to form an Israel-Palestine dialogue group. Reports indicated that the school’s principal was concerned participation would reduce the rate of students serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. Apparently, from the principal’s perspective, Israel’s need for security was more important than its need for either side to empathize with the other side’s suffering; and those needs were mutually exclusive. Whether aware of the deeper implications of his decision or not, the principal chose to cultivate seeds of conflict rather than of peace.

Dialogue groups have the potential to put a human face on the “other,” to transform him or her from an enemy image in one’s mind to a human being with the same needs and dreams as anyone else. It is, in fact, virtually impossible to commit acts of violence against a fellow human. The human must first be objectified, or dehumanized, before he or she can become a target of physical or emotional violence. Dialogue groups are, therefore, a threat to those who are wedded to the belief that the other is the source of conflict and must be vanquished.

Notwithstanding their ability to bring a greater humanity and compassion into the lives of their members, however, there is another factor that needs to be honored for these groups to achieve their full potential. That factor is reality. The dialogue groups that I have encountered – and there may be some I am unaware of that do not conform to my experience – presume a symmetrical relationship between the Palestinian and Israeli sides. They begin by establishing parameters that favor psychological comfort over historical truth with simplistic presumptions such as, for example, that both sides have been traumatized, that both have committed acts of violence, and that the two sides are, in essence, equally responsible for the failure to arrive at a peaceful resolution to the problem.

Whenever dialogue groups ignore the documented history of Israel-Palestine, they fail to fully disabuse Israelis of the unfair characterization that Palestinians are, by nature, incapable of compromise. They condemn Israelis to a state of denial in which their characterization of Palestinians is undoubtedly true of themselves.

A different way of saying this is that as long as Israelis blindly believe state-sponsored Zionist myths, passed down for generations, of Israel’s birth and its benign attempts to make peace with the Palestinians, it is the Israelis who will be incapable of compromise.

Correspondingly, dialogue groups place Palestinians in a position where, in order to share their experience with Israelis, they are compelled to acquiesce to a distorted reality. If they refuse, they are perceived as disinterested in what the other side has to say and, therefore, disinterested in peace.


Rich and friends in Beit Sahour

Dialogue groups are tricky because, on the one hand, it is important to keep the members involved, yet on the other, involvement that doesn’t acknowledge history only perpetuates delusion. And it is often the case that the groups are led by counselors or therapists who, not having studied the history of Israel-Palestine yet hoping to support some kind of emotional healing, are unaware that by establishing these parameters they are profaning the history.

And although the first two parameters are indeed true, without historical context their inclusion robs Israelis of the opportunity to take responsibility for their participation in the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

For years I have heard comments like “Israel has always offered land for peace but the Palestinians have always rejected the offer.” In 1977 Nahum Goldmann, founder and president of the World Jewish Congress and a president of the World Zionist Organization, said: “Israel has never presented the Arabs with a single peace plan. She has rejected every settlement plan devised by her friends and by her enemies. She has seemingly no other object than to preserve the status quo while adding territory piece by piece.”

In 1948 Syria offered to take in 300,000 Palestinian refugees as part of a comprehensive peace plan. UN Mediator and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ralph Bunche pleaded with David Ben-Gurion to respond to the Syrian offer but Ben-Gurion refused, just as he refused to talk with Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, who used British, Maltese, and Quaker emissaries to try to negotiate with the Israeli prime minister. Instead of negotiating, Ben-Gurion labeled Nasser the “Hitler of the Middle East,” a phrase that persuaded Jews around the world that Israel’s neighbors were more interested in igniting another genocide than in peace. Jordanian, Yugoslavian, and American attempts to resolve the conflict were also ignored or rejected by Israel. Israel has never honored the terms of the 1978 Camp David Accords that call for “full autonomy” for the Palestinians; and for years insisted that peace was impossible because of Yasser Arafat. Arafat died in 2004. Israel has never responded to the 2002 Arab peace initiative that would have ended the Arab-Israeli conflict, normalized relations with the entire Arab world, and provided security for “all the states of the region.”

A study of Israel’s history leads to the unavoidable conclusion that it has used peace negotiations as a strategy to mask its true motives. Peace has always been secondary to the acquisition of more land. Former opposition leader Tzipi Livni, laying out Israel’s true motives: “Israel takes more land [so] that the Palestinian state will be impossible . . . the Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we’ll say that is impossible, we already have the land and we cannot create the state.”

The bottom line is that good intentions are not good enough. A just resolution to the Israel-Palestine problem requires all of us to challenge our beliefs through sincere and objective research. Otherwise, we will never intuit our roles in the suffering of others, nor will we intuit how to alleviate that suffering. And for those of us who happen to be strongly identified with one side or the other, our anxiety will remain unresolved, leaving us with the dilemma of victimization: Why does the world not understand my people juxtaposed against evidence that is beyond dispute?

Richard Forer is the author of Breakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion – A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict. He can be contacted through his website, www.RichardForer.com.

Acting Out our Attitudes Toward "OTHERS"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Friends: The fabric of Israeli national unity is being torn, shredded. The ideal of a "Jewish and democratic state" is fraying. It's not holding together. Can people talk about this? Openly? Intergenerationally? Inter-ethnically? Between and among us? What's going on here? What's behind all this violence? Is there a way forward? Who are those with "answers". What about respect for the rights of neighbors instead of demonizing them? God help us all!


August 20, 2012


Young Israelis Held in Attack on Arabs

By ISABEL KERSHNER


JERUSALEM — Seven Israeli teenagers were in custody on Monday, accused of what a police official and several witnesses described as an attempted lynching of several Palestinian youths, laying bare the undercurrent of tension in this ethnically mixed but politically divided city. A 15-year-old suspect standing outside court said, “For my part he can die, he’s an Arab.”

The police said that scores of Jewish youths were involved in the attack late Thursday in West Jerusalem’s Zion Square, leaving one 17-year-old unconscious and hospitalized. Hundreds of bystanders watched the mob beating, the police said — and no one intervened.

Two of the suspects were girls, the youngest 13, adding to the soul-searching and acknowledgment that the poisoned political environment around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has affected the moral compass of youths growing up within it.

“If it was up to me, I’d have murdered him,” the 15-year-old suspect told reporters outside court on Monday. “He cursed my mother.” The young man who was beaten unconscious, Jamal Julani, remained in the hospital.

The mob beating came on the same day that a Palestinian taxi on the West Bank was firebombed, apparently by Jewish extremists, though there have been no arrests. The two episodes, along with a new report by the United States State Department labeling attacks by Jews on Palestinians as terrorism, have opened a stark national conversation about racism, violence, and how Israeli society could have come to this point.

“There appears to be a worryingly high level of tolerance — whether explicit or implicit — for such despicable acts of violence,” The Jerusalem Post editorialized on Monday. “A clear distinction must be made between legitimate acts of self-defense aimed at protecting Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and pointless, immoral acts of violence.”

In the popular Yediot Aharonot newspaper, a commentator asked of the 13-year-old suspect, “Where on earth does a bar-mitzvah-age child find so much evil in himself?” The article said parents should be held responsible.

But on Channel 1 news Monday night, Nimrod Aloni, the head of the Institute for Educational Thought at a Tel Aviv teachers college, said, “this cannot just be an expression of something he has heard at home.”

“This is directly tied to national fundamentalism that is the same as the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, Taliban and K.K.K.,” Mr. Aloni said. “This comes from an entire culture that has been escalating toward an open and blunt language based on us being the chosen people who are allowed to do whatever we like.”

The police said Thursday’s beating of Mr. Julani, who regained consciousness in the hospital on Sunday, resulted from a brawl after a girl in a crowd of Israeli youths complained that she had been harassed by an Arab. Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, said the girl had spurred the crowd to seek vengeance, though her lawyer denied that on Israel Radio on Monday. The crowd then arbitrarily focused on Mr. Julani and his friends, Mr. Rosenfeld said, beating Mr. Julani until he lost consciousness.

“According to those questioned, there was a fight, there was cursing,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “One thing led to another.”

Mr. Julani, a youth of slender build with fashionably short hair from the predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ras al-Amud, said in an interview from his hospital bed on Monday that he had no memory of what had happened — or even of being downtown on Thursday. But relatives at his bedside, including a cousin who was with him at the time of the assault, said the attack had been unprovoked.

The cousin, Muhammad Mujahid, 17, said he and four friends were walking in the square and suddenly found themselves being chased by a group of youths. “They were shouting ‘Arabs, death to Arabs,’ ” he said. “I saw about 50 people chasing us. We ran, but about 10 of them caught Jamal.”

Asked whether he would return to West Jerusalem at night, Mr. Mujahid said: “I don’t want to go back there. I’ve learned.”

Mr. Julani’s mother, Nariman, described the attackers as “terrorists, fanatics.”

“We have no ideas about politics,” said Mrs. Julani, 44. “We brought our children up to study, to be good and to love their homeland.”

One floor above Mr. Julani, in the new wing of the Hadassah University Hospital-Ein Kerem in southwest Jerusalem, lay the driver whose taxi was hit by a firebomb on Thursday outside the West Bank settlement of Bat Ayin. He and his five passengers, all members of the Abu Jayada family from the West Bank village of Nahalin, suffered burns; one remained in intensive care on Monday.

The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, strongly condemned the firebombing of the taxi and promised the Palestinian leadership that all efforts would be made to arrest the perpetrators.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, said of the beating, “We unequivocally condemn racist violence and urge the police and law enforcement community to act expeditiously to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

Some commentators connected the violence against Palestinians with other racial issues pervading Israeli society. The latest attacks came after a summer of simmering resentment and some violent protests against the swelling number of African migrants and asylum seekers in Tel Aviv. The outburst of popular rage, fanned by provocative statements by some rightist politicians, led to a government crackdown to stem the influx.

Gavriel Salomon, a professor of educational psychology at Haifa University, told Israel Radio on Monday that the attacks could be attributed to increasing racism in Israeli society, increased levels of violence in general and an atmosphere of “legitimacy.”

“Suddenly it’s not so terrible to burn Arabs inside a taxi,” he said.

One of those who came to the hospital where Mr. Julani was recovering on Monday was Zohar Eitan, 57, a Tel Aviv University lecturer in musicology. He said he had come as “an ordinary citizen” to show solidarity and called the attack “very sad but unfortunately not shocking. It is the result of the indoctrination that these kids get.”

Jerusalem is home to about 500,000 Jews and some 300,000 Palestinians, who mostly coexist peacefully though with a constant undertone of political and religious tension.

Most of the Palestinians, who chose not to be Israeli citizens but carry Jerusalem residency cards, live in the eastern sector of the city that was captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 war and later annexed in a move that has not been internationally recognized. The Palestinians demand that East Jerusalem, which contains Jewish holy sites as well as Muslim and Christian shrines, be the capital of a future state.

While the Jewish and Arab residents of the city mingle freely in the parks and shopping malls of West Jerusalem, there is less and less meaningful interaction between the two populations, other than some at workplaces.

The western side bears small monuments to the suicide bombings that killed scores here on buses and in cafes after the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000. In some of the tenser predominantly Arab neighborhoods, Israeli cars and buses are frequently stoned.

Mr. Julani’s relatives said they were not involved in politics and, when asked about the future of their city, seemed at a loss for answers. His father, Subhi Julani, who works in construction, said he had many Jewish friends, including employers.

“Jamal is lucky; we are lucky that he is still among us,” Mr. Julani, 50, said of his son, who is studying for his matriculation exams and also does home renovations for a Jewish boss. “I do not know why they did this.”



































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Mark Braverman on Avraham Burg

Dear Friend,

Remember my last post? The op-ed from Avraham Burg called "Israel's Fading Democracy"?

I was impressed with it. Mr. Burg seemed to be attacking what he called "Ethnic Democracy" and calling for reform. Many of you got back to me with appreciation.

Well, Mark Braverman got back to me right away, applauding Burg's critique of Israel, but questioning whether Burg was showing "the way forward". What is the way forward that Mr. Burg is proposing (was his question).

Mr. Braverman, a D. C. Jew who works with Christians on KUSA, claims that Zionism and "Democracy" just don't go together at all, and that Mr. Burg appears to be unwilling to part with Zionism.

Are you with me here? There is more.


So, we went back and forth by email, Mr. Braverman pointing me to his chapter nine (9) of FATAL EMBRACE, his 2010 book, where he discusses Mr. Burg's vision specifically. I sent him my critique of his treatment of Burg in chapter 9 in the light of Burg's NY Times op-ed. Then, he sent me his critique of my critique (ask me for the documents).

Bottom line for Mr. Braverman is this: There is no way to "reform" or "purify" Zionism and still have "Democracy". One or the other has to go. That is the choice. Whether that means a "One State" with equality for all; or a "Two State" side by side in peace and security.

If you are willing to go deeper and further, I urge you to ask me for two documents that detail our email correspondence. Consider for yourself what might be a "way forward" for the US and people of faith. (BDS has to be considered a live option!)

BTW, for Holland, FPI people: THE COURSE I'LL BE LEADING @ HASP, (Oct. 31, Nov. 7 and 14) WILL BE ON KAIROS USA (NOT KAIROS PALESTINE). Kairos USA is an American Christian response to K Palestine. Sorry about any confusion. Please sign up and let's have civil discourse on the important topic of US policy in Isr/Pal. JRK

An Accurate Perspective & Prescription

Dear Friend,
Once in a while an essay captures historical perspective and prescribes a credible way forward. Avraham Burg gives it in this NY Times op-ed, August 5, 2012. Who will act on it? Will the US urge his democratic views to be honored? JRK


Israel’s Fading Democracy

By AVRAHAM BURG

Published: August 4, 2012


WHEN an American presidential candidate visits Israel and his key message is to encourage us to pursue a misguided war with Iran, declaring it “a solemn duty and a moral imperative” for America to stand with our warmongering prime minister, we know that something profound and basic has changed in the relationship between Israel and the United States.

My generation, born in the ’50s, grew up with the deep, almost religious belief that the two countries shared basic values and principles. Back then, Americans and Israelis talked about democracy, human rights, respect for other nations and human solidarity. It was an age of dreamers and builders who sought to create a new world, one without prejudice, racism or discrimination.

Listening to today’s political discourse, one can’t help but notice the radical change in tone. My children have watched their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, kowtow to a fundamentalist coalition in Israel. They are convinced that what ties Israel and America today is not a covenant of humanistic values but rather a new set of mutual interests: war, bombs, threats, fear and trauma. How did this happen? Where is that righteous America? Whatever happened to the good old Israel?

Mr. Netanyahu’s great political “achievement” has been to make Israel a partisan issue and push American Jews into a corner. He has forced them to make political decisions based on calculations that go against what they perceive to be American interests. The emotional extortion compels Jews to pressure the Obama administration, a government with which they actually share values and worldviews, when those who love Israel should be doing the opposite: helping the American government to intervene and save Israel from itself.

Israel arose as a secular, social democratic country inspired by Western European democracies. With time, however, its core values have become entirely different. Israel today is a religious, capitalist state. Its religiosity is defined by the most extreme Orthodox interpretations. Its capitalism has erased much of the social solidarity of the past, with the exception of a few remaining vestiges of a welfare state. Israel defines itself as a “Jewish and democratic state.” However, because Israel has never created a system of checks and balances between these two sources of authority, they are closer than ever to a terrible clash.

In the early years of statehood, the meaning of the term “Jewish” was national and secular. In the eyes of Israel’s founding fathers, to be a Jew was exactly like being an Italian, Frenchman or American. Over the years, this elusive concept has changed; today, the meaning of “Jewish” in Israel is mainly ethnic and religious. With the elevation of religious solidarity over and above democratic authority, Israel has become more fundamentalist and less modern, more separatist and less open to the outside world. I see the transformation in my own family. My father, one of the founders of the state of Israel and of the National Religious Party, was an enlightened rabbi and philosopher. Many of the younger generation are far less open, however; some are ultra-Orthodox or ultranationalist settlers.

This extremism was not the purpose of creating a Jewish state. Immigrants from all over the world dreamed of a government that would be humane and safe for Jews. The founders believed that democracy was the only way to regulate the interests of many contradictory voices. Jewish culture, consolidated through Halakha, the religious Jewish legal tradition, created a civilization that has devoted itself to an unending conversation among different viewpoints and the coexistence of contradictory attitudes toward the fulfillment of the good.

The modern combination between democracy and Judaism was supposed to give birth to a spectacular, pluralistic kaleidoscope. The state would be a great, robust democracy that would protect Jews against persecution and victimhood. Jewish culture, on the other hand, with its uncompromising moral standards, would guard against our becoming persecutors and victimizers of others.

BUT something went wrong in the operating system of Jewish democracy. We never gave much thought to the Palestinian Israeli citizens within the Jewish-democratic equation. We also never tried to separate the synagogue and the state. If anything, we did the opposite. Moreover, we never predicted the evil effects of brutally controlling another people against their will. Today, all the things that we neglected have returned and are chasing us like evil spirits.

The winds of isolation and narrowness are blowing through Israel. Rude and arrogant power brokers, some of whom hold senior positions in government, exclude non-Jews from Israeli public spaces. Graffiti in the streets demonstrates their hidden dreams: a pure Israel with “no Arabs” and “no gentiles.” They do not notice what their exclusionary ideas are doing to Israel, to Judaism and to Jews in the diaspora. In the absence of a binding constitution, Israel has no real protection for its minorities or for their freedom of worship and expression.

If this trend continues, all vestiges of democracy will one day disappear, and Israel will become just another Middle Eastern theocracy. It will not be possible to define Israel as a democracy when a Jewish minority rules over a Palestinian majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — controlling millions of people without political rights or basic legal standing.

This Israel would be much more Jewish in the narrowest sense of the word, but such a nondemocratic Israel, hostile to its neighbors and isolated from the free world, wouldn’t be able to survive for long.

But there is another option: an iconic conflict could also present an iconic solution. As in Northern Ireland or South Africa, where citizens no longer spill one another’s blood, it will eventually become clear that many Israelis are not willing to live in an ethnic democracy, not willing to give up on the chance to live in peace, not willing to be passive patriots of a country that expels or purifies itself of its minorities, who are the original inhabitants of the land.

Only on that day, after much anguish, boycotts and perhaps even bloodshed, will we understand that the only way for us to agree when we disagree is a true, vigorous democracy. A democracy based on a progressive, civil constitution; a democracy that enforces the distinction between ethnicity and citizenship, between synagogue and state; a democracy that upholds the values of freedom and equality, on the basis of which every single person living under Israel’s legitimate and internationally recognized sovereignty will receive the same rights and protections.

A long-overdue constitution could create a state that belongs to all her citizens and in which the government behaves with fairness and equality toward all persons without prejudice based on religion, race or gender. Those are the principles on which Israel was founded and the values that bound Israel and America together in the past. I believe that creating two neighboring states for two peoples that respect one another would be the best solution. However, if our shortsighted leaders miss this opportunity, the same fair and equal principles should be applied to one state for both peoples.

When a true Israeli democracy is established, our prime minister will go to Capitol Hill and win applause from both sides of the aisle. Every time the prime minister says “peace” the world will actually believe him, and when he talks about justice and equality people will feel that these are synonyms for Judaism and Israelis.

And for all the cynics who are smiling sarcastically as they read these lines, I can only say to Americans, “Yes, we still can,” and to Israelis, “If you will it, it is no dream.”




Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset, is the author of “The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise From Its Ashes” and the chairman of Molad, the Center for Renewal of Democracy.

Will the EU Listen to Hanan Ashrawi?

Dear Friend,

Let me tell you about Hanan Ashrawi:
Ashrawi was born to Palestinian Christian parents on October 8, 1946 in the city of Nablus, British Mandate for Palestine, now part of the West Bank.[4] Her father, Daoud Mikhail, was one of the founders of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Her family later moved to Ramallah, where she attended the Ramallah Friends Girls School. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in literature in the Department of English at the American University of Beirut. While a graduate student in literature at the American University in Beirut she dated Peter Jennings of ABC News who was then stationed there as ABC's Beirut bureau chief.[5]

When the Six-Day War broke out in 1967, Ashrawi as a 22 year-old student in Lebanon, was declared an absentee by Israel and denied re-entry to the West Bank. For the next six years, Ashrawi traveled and completed her education gaining a Ph.D. in Medieval and Comparative Literature from the University of Virginia. Ashrawi was finally allowed to re-join her family in 1973 under the family reunification plan.[6] [from Wikipedia]

On August 8, 1975 she married Emil Ashrawi (born 1951),[7] a Christian Jerusalemite who is now a photographer and a theater director.[8] Together they have two daughters, Amal (born 1977) and Zeina (born 1981).[9]

Ashrawi calls on EU to review economic relations with Israel


Ma'an News Agency
July 24, 2012 - 12:00am
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=507069


Senior PLO official Hanan Ashrawi on Tuesday called on the European Union to review its relations with Israel in light of its persistent violations of international law.

The EU-Israeli Association's annual meeting, held in Brussels on Tuesday, is an opportunity for the EU to ensure any economic relations with Israel are contingent on its compliance with international obligations, Ashrawi said in a statement.

"Rather than rewarding Israel by giving it preferential treatment,the EU should use its economic influence to end Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine."

"As the market for 60 percent of Israel’s exports, the EU has the ability to prevent Israel from destroying the chances for peace. All it needs is the political will," Ashrawi said.

By expanding cooperation between government agencies and within business sectors, Ashrawi said the EU was separating issues of international law from issues of trade and economy, "allowing the EU to ignore Israel's ongoing violations" against Palestinians.

She urged the EU to revoke any preferential treatment Israel receives in view of its "willful and persistent violations of its agreements and obligations."

Article 2 of the Euro-Mediterranean agreement conditions Israel's membership on respect for human rights and democratic principles, she noted, while Article 83 precludes applicability to all the occupied territories and so excludes settlement produce.

The executive director of international aid agency Oxfam Jeremy Hobbs also called Tuesday on the EU "to step up and take a leadership role" and to match its condemnations of settlement expansion "with urgent and concrete measures."

"Europe's condemnation of Israel's settlement expansion is welcome but words alone mean nothing when people's lives keep worsening," Hobbs said in a statement.

At the 2011 EU-Israeli Association meeting, statements condemning Israeli settlement expansion were issued "yet we've seen a sharp rise in new settlement construction across the West Bank," he added.

"Meanwhile, Palestinian displacement and Israeli-led demolition of Palestinian homes and water cisterns, many of which were funded by EU taxpayers, has increased."

--

Preamble to KUSA

Dear Friend,

As you now must know, FPI is joining KUSA in helping to move the "ecumenical" (and "evangelical"?) churches to support Kairos USA (KUSA).

So you may familiarize yourselves, please click on www.kairosusa.org to read (download) the whole document.

It gives an accurate portrayal of the realities on the ground. It hears the cry for help from our Christian brothers and sisters in Palestine and it lays out a plan for addressing systemic problems.

This is not a formulaic plan. It is a rough outline of how to proceed. It will need input from all of us, discernment, continued patience and touch choices to get the attention of the Israeli (and Palestinian) public that the time for change has come.

The status quo will not hold. JRK


PREAMBLE


“The crisis is not only in our society. The crisis is in our churches. ... For the churches, too, this is a kairos moment in which we are called to conversion, our structures, values, habits and assumptions in need of basic transformation.”
— “On the Way: From Kairos to Jubilee,” U.S. Kairos document, 1994


“The mission of the Church is prophetic, to speak the Word of God courageously, honestly and lovingly in the local context and in the midst of daily events.”
—“A Moment of Truth: A word of faith, hope and love from the heart of Palestinian suffering,” Kairos Palestine document, 2009

In June 2011, a group of U.S. clergy, theologians and laypersons, cognizant of our responsibility as Americans in the tragedy unfolding in Israel and Palestine, and mindful of the urgency of the situation, met to inaugurate a new movement for American Christians. We have been inspired by the prophetic church movements of southern Africa, Central and South America, Asia and Europe that have responded to the call of their Christian sisters and brothers in occupied Palestine. This is our statement of witness and confession—and our response as U.S. Christians to the Palestinian call.

It was in ancient Israel that the prophets called states and peoples to the core principles of God’s rule: equal rights and justice for all, compassion for the most vulnerable and the unity of all humankind. Jesus proclaimed the reign of God as a present possibility and a demand to follow God’s commandments to do justice. The tragic realities of Israel and Palestine today would deeply trouble Jesus and the prophets. The land in which Jesus lived and was crucified by the Roman imperial rulers is again a place of violence, inequality and suffering. Palestinians and Israelis are trapped in a spiral of violence that is destroying their humanity, squandering their resources and killing their children. Palestinians are prisoners in their own land, powerless as Israel’s program of dispossession and annexation continues. Israeli citizens, having endured five wars and intermittent attacks of violence during their brief history as a nation, continue to live with a deep sense of insecurity and a lamentable ignorance of the people with whom they share a love of this land.

The mission of Kairos USA is to mobilize the churches in the United States to respond faithfully and boldly to the situation in Israel and Palestine. In so doing, we heed the call of our Palestinian sisters and brothers in Christ to bear witness to their nonviolent struggle for human rights. We also express our love for our brothers and sisters in Israel, who suffer from the social, psychological and spiritual costs of militarization and war. In this way, we stand with Kairos movements throughout the world, lifting up the ideal of nonviolent resistance to injustice in accordance with the teachings of our faith. We call upon our government to be faithful to the principles of universal human rights, equality and justice articulated in its foundational documents, enshrined in international law and expressed in the resolutions of the United Nations.

We acknowledge the tragic history of Christian persecution of Jews. We lament the centuries-long experience of marginalization, oppression and physical threat, culminating in the near total destruction of European Jewry in the last century. We recognize that it was this history of oppression that gave rise to the modern project of the Jewish people to establish a national homeland. We support the right of the Jewish people to live in security and to build a society free of the scourge of anti-Semitism. But the State of Israel’s present course will not bring it the security it seeks nor grant the Jewish people freedom from fear. The still vivid memories and long shadow of the Nazi Holocaust have fueled self-defeating strategies of self-protection among sectors of Israeli society and the Jewish community at large. Violence toward Israelis used by some Palestinians has contributed to the suffering of Israelis and evoked considerable fear and insecurity. But the cause of the current calamity is not the result of any historic or natural enmity between the two peoples, or the presence of deep-seated hatred directed against the Jewish people. Rather, it is the overwhelming imbalance of power, Israel’s practices of state violence, the ongoing abridgement of the human rights of the Palestinian people and the failure of the international community to hold Israel to principles of international law.

We recognize our responsibility as followers of Jesus to honor and protect the image of God in every person. We recall the central role of the church in the Civil Rights movement in our country, when the courage of African-American pastors and laypersons changed the political and social landscape of America. We lift up the example of the South African church when, declaring its Kairos moment in the 1985 Kairos document “Challenge to the Church,” it summoned the church to speak and act against the evil of Apartheid. This action of the South African churches signaled the beginning of the end of the system that had so poisoned their society. Two decades ago, the church in our country, recognizing its Kairos on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus, created “On the Way: From Kairos to Jubilee.” This groundbreaking statement called on the power of the Gospel to acknowledge historic and current injustices to our own indigenous and marginalized peoples as well as our responsibility for injustice and suffering on a global scale. Even as we respond to the invitation to Kairos from our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers, we recognize the ways in which we have failed to respond faithfully to injustice in our own country, and we recommit ourselves to that work in our own context. In our own day, Kairos groups in Europe, Asia and South America have issued their own statements of faith and calls to action in response to the Palestinian document and in witness to the injustices in their own national contexts.

The focus of this Kairos initiative is on Israel and Palestine, reflecting the growing recognition of this longstanding and worsening human rights situation as an urgent challenge to our churches and our world today. At the same time, we are aware that this is only one of many issues facing us as we strive to follow the prophet Micah’s injunction to “do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God.” It is our hope and prayer that the wisdom and courage we bring forth in answering the call for justice in Israel and Palestine will strengthen and deepen our awareness of other ways in which our nation’s political, economic and ethical actions must be brought into harmony with Jesus’ call for a world in which all share in God’s peace.

In the tradition of Kairos statements past and present, this document will focus on three topics, with an additional section on Interfaith Relationships:

Part One: The Signs of the Times
Part Two: Theological Reflections
Part Three: Interfaith Relationships
Part Four: Call to Action

--


John & Sharon

www.friendsofpalestiniansandisraelis.blogspot.com

A New Era Begins

Dear Friend,

I did not attend Gen. Ass. in Pittsburg, but followed developments very closely.


Anna Baltzer, ond of our "friends" was there,. She is a beautiful Jewess, in every sense of the term. She heads up the US Campaign to END THE OCCUPATION. I forwarded her latest blog post to my FPI Listserve. (Google her blog to read all the developments. Below is my commentary leading into her exciting blog.

Some of us think the tipping point has been reached and and we are about to go into uncharted territory. Sympathizers with Israel as it has emerged (especially since the occupation of 1967) have reason to be alarmed. RCA and PCUSA conservative persons are fearful, wondering about BDS (see below). I will be prodding the RCA to get going on the the "Network" idea in each (regional) "Classis" to inform people about the realities on the ground and to get information out to our congregants. KUSA is emerging as an ally of those wanting to take active nonviolent action to oppose the Occupation of Palestinian land.


BTW, the so-called Levy report (from a commission appointed by PM Netanyahu) has concluded there is NO Occupation, because there was no "nation" that previously controlled the land. If Bibi's "Settlement" Chief adopts the report, watch for the settlements to explode even faster than before. I have not gotten excited about the Levy report. It is irrelevant to what is happening on the ground as I write this. The present Likud government has never sought justification for its settlement activity. It has always gone full speed ahead in the face of almost total internation condemnation. That the US government has sanctioned and supported the colonialization of all the land of Isr/Pal is to our lasting discredit (and must change. Read on).


I know some of you are "scared" where this is all leading. Friends, we are in new territory. It is, as Anne say, the beginning of a "New Era". Fasten your seat belts. And stay sane and sensitive to Israeli distrust and anxiety. The younger generations will be served. New leadership is emerging. The status quo will not hold. The concrete is breaking up by the force of growing roots from underneath. Faithfully yours, JRK