Powerless and Prayerful

The world is spinning maddeningly, dizzyingly off-kilter. Georgia is preparing to execute Troy Davis, a man widely believed to be innocent. Georgia has the legal right to do so because all of the legal formalities have been observed so far and the Supreme Court has never ruled that it is a violation of human or civil rights to execute an innocent person - as long as they have had due process that meets the legal definition. The gulf between legal and moral has never been wider or seemingly more impassable. The state has the legal right, power and authority to kill and seems hell bent on doing so. People are protesting and preying, writing letters, faxes and emails and making phone calls. It remains to be seen whether this will make a difference in Troy's life or in our own.

And frustrated by decades of occupation and failed and floundering peace talks, the Palestinians are ready to appeal to the United Nations to recognize them as a sovereign state. If the UN does so, Israel will immediately be (more) guilty of occupying a sovereign state as opposed to a (merely) disputed territory - as they now justify their presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza under international law. Israel has been exerting pressure on nations to oppose the bid for statehood, most of all the United States which has veto power. President Obama has said that he will veto the Palestinian appeal because the statehood issue needs to be worked out between Israel and Palestine in the peace process. This is the most disingenuous thing I have ever heard him say. The peace process is broken. Israel continues to flout it by building and protecting settlements inside of the Palestinian Territories. Israel has unilaterally rejected the internationally approved boundaries by building a wall on Palestinian land shaping new boundaries in their favor. What peace process? What other options do the Palestinians have? Politically, supporting Israel is more beneficial than sporting the Palestinians. But is is not the right thing to do. The US needs to use its influence with Israel - our money, the billions of dollars we send them every year while we are in a depression (if you're black, brown and poor) - and pressure Israel back to the table for meaningful negotiations and real compromise.

Both of these situations leave me feeling absolutely powerless. And so I pray. I hope. I believe.
I pray that even if my prayers are not answered I will still believe in the power of prayer.

A Jewish State

I have so many questions about the future of Israel and Palestine and hopes for a just and lasting peace. I have these hopes in spite of the questions. Yet the questions are urgent, pressing and unrelenting.
What does it mean to be a Jewish State?

What does it mean for non-Jews to be citizens of a Jewish state?

How are the citizenship and contributions 

of non-Jewish citizens acknowledged and honored in a Jewish state?

Which Judaism is the official Judaism of the Jewish state?

Who decides which Judaism is the official Judaism of the Jewish state?

How is the diversity of Jewishness of citizens acknowledged and honored 

in a Jewish state with a particular designation 

of one type (or sub-set) of Judaism as legitimate and normative?

Can a state be Jewish (religiously or culturally) and democratic?

What happens if (when) a fully enfranchised minority outnumbers the dwindling majority?

Captive Daughter Zion

The icon that I've brought with me embodies the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some of it's historical underpinning and my own angst:

A One State Solution

Recently I heard a proposal for a one state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This Palestinian pastor and scholar called for a whole new paradigm: A single nation-state for all Palestinians, Israeli Jews, Christian and Arabs. A new state with a new name to reflect all its people. A new state with a new song (national anthem) and a new flag.

He acknowledged that was virtually impossible in the current climate, but he was dreaming what could be. A true democracy where all enjoyed full citizenship, respect, dignity, the right to assemble, live, work and play. An end to Palestinian reservations and Israeli-only neighborhoods, and roads that by-pass some communities and only connect others with no on or off ramps. He dreamed a state where the rights up the minorities would be vigorously upheld and enshrined. he suggested moving the capital, perhaps  to Tev-Aviv, perhaps Ramullah, perhaps both. (I say why not Hebron.) He imagined Jerusalem as a federally protected unified enclave, with only one nation, there would be no need to divide it any further.
There is that could be critiqued in his dream. But I don't want to critique him or his dream. I want to join him in dreaming. I want others to join us in dreaming. I want us to dream, envision and imagine the world that might be and work together with each other and God to make it happen.
Keep dreaming sir...

Living in a Holy (Wholly Sinful) City

I said I wanted to experience what it was like to live in Jerusalem, to be more than a tourist or pilgrim passing through. I don't know that I'll accomplish that even in two months but I am having more contacts with regular folk in neighborhoods away from shrines and monuments. I am heartened that so many of the Christians who are here for more than a pilgrimage are peace workers or actively engaged in interfaith and ecumenical work. I'm also struck by how loud (and rude) is the conservative minority that wields nearly majority power. There are some truly awful people here crafting heinous dehumanizing policies in the name of God, scripture and religion. There is also a huge mass of people who are embarrassed by them but are not politically involved enough to reign them in. I see them as complicit. Israel's treatment of its own citizens differs depending on whether they are Arab or (ostensibly) Jewish. Where they can live, move, build, get permits, travel.
And the truth is the Arab Israelis live far better than the Palestinians who are largely kept in squalor. Israel collects tax money "for them" and then does not release it to pay teachers or police or even to pick up trash. Israel refuses to let the Palestinian police enter Palestine to investigate crimes or protect the people but won't go in themselves because it's "foreign soil."
There ought not be any role for systematic governmental discrimination in the modern world. And our tax dollars ought not support it. Right now the US is building roads for Palestinians which the Israelis are designating as reservation roads, to keep the Palestinians off their Israeli roads.
I've never understood how a traumatize people could traumatize others: Whether it was the newly liberated Israelites enslaving each other and the Canaanites, or the AMerican revolutionaries throwing off the yoke of England but keeping the yoke on their African slaves, or black folk denying the civil rights of gay folk or any oppressed community making sure the women and girls are more oppressed than the boys and men.
Jerusalem is a holy city and a wholly sinful city. It is filled with people after all. But as long as it is an Israeli city - including the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and 1/4 to 1/3 of all Israelis live within it, its suburbs and illegal occupying settlements on seized Palestinian land, Jerusalem will remain the crucible of jihad - righteous struggle against evil.
The struggle for the soul of Jerusalem is the struggle for sole control of Jerusalem. Israel deems itself as custodian of the holy places of all faiths - even as it shuts them down, digs under them and declares them state treasures.
Without justice there can be no peace. Without basic respect for human dignity, religious and cultural diversity, there can be no justice.
I still can't believe that we live in the world where those who so narrowly escaped the fires of hatred seek to destroy someone else's children. How did the children of Israel come to this? And who willed them through the wilderness of sin to the promised land where each shall sit under their own olive trees and none shall make them afraid.
Micah puts it this way:

Micah 4:1 In days to come the mountain of the house of the Holy One of Old

shall be established as the highest of the mountains, 

and shall be raised up above the hills.

Peoples shall stream to it, 2 and many nations shall come and say:

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Holy One of Old,

to the house of the God of Jacob; that God may teach us God's ways

and that we may walk in God's paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Holy One from Jerusalem. 

3 God shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; 

4 but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,

and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Holy One of Heaven's Armies has spoken.

Partial, Unfair and Imbalanced

Impartial, fair and balanced. Objective. Trustworthy. The claims of professional opinion-makers. None of them live up to them. None of the rest of us do either.
Today I proclaim that I am partial, unfair and imbalanced. I have my own perspective. Mine. It may not be yours. But it and I am trustworthy. I am speaking for myself.
I had a particularly hard time claiming my voice today. I am in Israel and found myself struggling to name the Israeli occupation, even when I could see the wall from my roof, cutting farmers off from their olive trees, strategically isolated on the Israeli side, along with the settlement road, designed to bypass Arab villages - there are no on or off ramps.
I was afraid of being called an anti-Semite, a Nazi, a supporter of holocaust ideology. That is the level of rhetoric some - and only some, but with loud voices and media access - American Jews and Israelis use to assault critics of the state of Israel. I'm writing a public blog with my name and face and my employer's name and I am oh-so-careful that I not draw heated and hated scrutiny.
And I have been anxious. Anxious about my encounters with religious Israelis here and Jewish friends at home for whom the welfare of the state of Israel and it policies are tender issues.
I have also felt pressure - internally - to couch each critique in a narrative that at least places equal blame on the Palestinians for the necessity of the wall and/or recounts the sufferings of the Israelis through and as a result of the many bombing campaigns and Intifadas.
But I don't want to make a carefully nuanced hopefully politically acceptable statement. I just want to say how I feel. I saw the wall today and it took my breath away - all those olive trees on one side and only one side and the Arab village on the other. It hurt. I hurt. I wanted to cry but the tears wouldn't come. They are coming now.
I am here in part because of something the Canon of the St. George Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem told me the last time I was here, that Christian presence and prayers in Israel were active peace-making. Holy One let me be an instrument of your peace.
May it be so, even in our days that Jesus is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us all. Amen.

You Shall Not Oppress A Resident Alien

Exodus 23:9 You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. 

The current discussion series of monologues between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu have re-centered the Israeli/Palestinian conflict for the American people. (And have stirred me up as well.) There are three pernicious issues that perpetually plague negotiations discussions about the formation of a Palestinian state. There are others but these seem to be the most thorny:

1) potential borders,
2) settlement of Palestinian refugees
3) who gets Jerusalem.

Each of these is its own morass. That morass is made even more difficult to navigate by selective memory and the construction of alternate, novel and/or incomplete histories. In response to some of what I have heard, some of which gives me hope, some of which discourages me, some of which disappoints me, some of which makes me really angry, I am reflecting on these three questions:

Where will the Palestinian state be and how large will it be?

Right now the Palestinians are in two disconnected pieces of real estate, the Gaza Strip on the western side of Israel and the West Bank on the eastern side, (albeit west of Jordan). A Palestinian state will have to be contiguous. I believe that the Palestinians will have to relinquish the Gaza Strip. Connecting the two is unfeasible, costing Israel nearly a third of its land. The Palestinian State will be based around the West Bank territories where the majority of Palestinian peoples live. The boundaries that mark that territory were established and accepted by the international community in 1967 after the Six Day War in which Israel took and then relinquished the Sinai Peninsula. However since then, Israelis have with the support and sanction of their government, moved into the West Bank building settlements that now house some 650,000 Israelis. Some of those settlements will be incorporated into Israel and some into Palestine, in any arrangement reducing the size of Palestine, which will have had to previously surrender the Gaza Strip in theory. Israelis are still building those settlements in what many see as an all out land grab, seizing the most fertile land and olive groves to preempt their inclusion in a future Palestinian state. Israel has to prevent the establishment of any more settlements or the expansion of those that exist and, has to prepare to relinquish the great bullet of them. 

What will happen to the Palestinian refugees?

When Israel was founded in 1947 on the heels of World War 2 after the Holocaust, it was primarily settled by European Jews. There were Jews in the land whose ancestors had not been dispersed to Babylon, Persian, Egypt or Europe. But the modern state of Israel was built by immigrants. And they did not immigrant to an empty land. They immigrated to a land that was inhabited by Arabs, Jews, Druze and Christians. As the state of Israel took shape Arab inhabitants were dislocated, in spite of having ancestral land claims for centuries and modern titles to their homes, lands and businesses under the British Mandate. Those displaced persons became refugees; some of them were taken in by Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt, others stayed in the region, called Palestinians using the British terminology (based in part on the Hebrew word for Philistine - don't ask!). Israel says it will not permit the return of the decedents of these people because they will outnumber the Jews - without regard for the legitimacy of their land claims and property titles. I think that Israel has to let some of those families who held clear titles to their land return. Israel will find itself adopting the policies of fascism and apartheid if it tries to guarantee a perpetual racial, cultural or religious supremacy.

What will happen to Jerusalem? 

Will Jerusalem remain the undivided capital of Israel? It was not always so. Sometimes the four quarters: Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Armenian have been governed independently.  Israel claims that it has preserved access to the holy places of all three faiths, but access to the Dome and other mosques is severely limited from time to time. Will the Palestinians get Jerusalem, the home of the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall of the Temple built by Solomon (renovated by Herod)? That is less likely. Giving the Palestinians the Muslim (and Christian?) Quarter is complicated by the proximity of the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall to each other. And made even more complicated by the archaeological digs and tunnels underneath, when not prohibited entirely. Some have talked of making Jerusalem and independent city-state like Vatican City, but there is no single organizing body that can manage it. There are many Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican churches, religious orders and communities in Jerusalem, some in the same building, like the Holy Sepulcher, and their fights - literally fist fights - are legendary. I actually favor a divided Jerusalem, if such a thing were possible.

Matthew 23:37 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 

Two Nations are In Your Womb

Genesis 25:23 The Holy One of Old said to Rebekah, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.”

While this text is about Jacob (Israel) and Esau in its initial context, today it speaks to me of Israel and Palestine. Another text that speaks to me is:

Exodus 23:9 You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. 

In both of these texts the moral agency is placed on Israel in my reading. Israel should know better. This is why I am so aggrieved with Prime Minister Netanyahu's response to President Obama's recent speech on the Middle East, rejecting the 1967 boundaries of Israel out of hand as "indefensible." They who have been hunted to the brink of extinction have been commanded not to turn around and do the same thing to anyone else. Particularly if they see themselves as a Jewish state for whom the bible is scripture.

Prime Minister Netanyahu said that the on-the-ground reality has changed since 1967; there are as many as 400,000 Israelis living in what is Palestine according to the 1967 map. He is saying that the fact that they are there, means the land can't be Palestine (there will be no Palestinian state within the borders he claims for Israel) - however the fact that there are Palestinians there does not mean to him that the land can't be Israel. And of course those settlements were (and are) constructed illegally inside of what was Palestine's internationally recognized borders. And at the same time Israel is demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, claiming they were illegally constructed, while refusing to grant permits for new construction and preventing Arab citizens from living with their spouses in Jerusalem if the new spouse does not have a residency permit - there is no way for them to get one.
Now, what President Obama said - what every American president since Clinton has said - is that the borders of the two nations should be based on - not even identical with - the internationally accepted borders, allowing for negotiation, give-and-take, land swaps.
A deeper issue for me is what Netanyahu and others seem to mean by a "Jewish state." They don't mean religion, they mean race. They mean to create and keep an ethnic majority by any means necessary. They imagine a future in which all of the Jews in the region are Israelis and all of the Arabs are in a greatly-reduced Palestine or are refugees absorbed by the other Arab nations.
The last time in recent memory that a modern state was founded along ethnic and religious lines was the partition of Pakistan from India. The partition was accompanied by monstrous violence and the ongoing and continuing hostility between the two nations has led to the increase of terror in the world (the Mumbai bombings, the escape of OBL and other Al Qaeda leaders at Tora Bora and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border).
I said that Israel should know better. Even if Israel is not a religious state, it was founded on the principles of equity for all peoples in the bible. The founding declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel says in part:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

It is time for Israel to live up to and into the words of its founding mothers and fathers and the prophets whom they venerated. Hear them now:

Micah 4:1 In days to come the mountain of the house of the Holy One of Old shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills; peoples shall stream to it. 2 And many nations shall come and say:

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Holy One, to the house of the God of Jacob; that God may teach us God's ways and that we may walk in God's paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Fire of Sinai from Jerusalem. 3 God shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; 4 but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Commander of Heaven's Armies has spoken. 5 For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of God-Whose-Name-Is-Holy, our God forever and ever.

Seeking Shalom

Seek the Shalom of Ir-Shalom, Jerusalem, and

pray for the peace of Palestine.

A proposal for peace:
If I had one, I'd offer one. I am neither stateswoman nor diplomat. (Nor the daughter of a diplomat.)  don't have a specific plan. But I do have some ideas about the conditions for peace, the environmental factors necessary for peace to thrive.

There can be no peace without justice.

An absence of violence without justice is not peace.
Apartheid is not peace. Segregation is not just.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing are not solutions.
There can be no peace in or with a nation formed entirely of one ethnic or religious identity by the exclusion, expulsion or extermination of another.

I believe that the only path to peace is the way of compromise.
True compromise is not merely voluntary nor simply choosing the most palatable options from a buffet. Compromise is painful.
A true compromise will leave both sides unhappy. In fact that may be the measure of the justness of a proposal - the degree to which it is unacceptable to both sides.
There can be no quantification of suffering. There is no valuing of the suffering of one community above the suffering of another.
All have suffered and are suffering. More will suffer.
There will never be enough vengeance to assuage all of the hurts of all of those who have been hurt.
Each community will have to forswear violence and revenge.
Each community will have to accept a remedy that is less than they would have desired.
Individuals who have stakes in specific pieces of ground will have to accept that they may find themselves on that piece of land in a different nation.
Arabs and Israelis, Jews, Christians and Muslims must learn to live in peace.
We can't wait for someone else to capitulate.
There will be no ultimate victory for one at the expense of another.

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.