“Many of us worked for so many years for a two-state solution. But the two-state solution is dead, completely dead, and the Israelis have killed it. Our message — especially in the West — must speak this word clearly.”
These are the words of Jeff Halper, the founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, to my colleague Michael Spath earlier this month in Jerusalem. Michael and I were in the West Bank to attend the international conference to mark the fifth anniversary of the Kairos document, “Moment of Truth: a cry of faith, love and hope from the heart of Palestinian suffering.” Michael and I had both arrived at this same conclusion from our time at the gathering. There was clear consensus that there is no two-state solution on the table, that we have arrived at one state, and it is called Israel, and it is a state that in its policies and actions practices a form of apartheid that visiting South Africans declare is worse than the system that prevailed in their country before it was brought down by the coordinated and persistent action of the global community.
I agree with Halper that we must speak this clearly: that the two-state remedy that is being peddled is a dangerous illusion, and that the reality that we now confront is unacceptable to us, as U.S. citizens, as members of faith communities, as secular people committed to justice. What then remains is the issue of how, and when, the right to live with dignity and with the rights that are guaranteed under international law will be restored to Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. This is important not only for the sake of the oppressed Palestinians, but – and I know this is true for Israeli Jeff Halper – out of love for the citizens of Israel, Jewish and non-Jewish, who deserve to be liberated from a system that sickens their society and steals from their children the chance for a decent future.
So what can we do? In the Kairos Palestine “Moment of Truth,” Palestinians have provided a clear and direct answer to this question in calling for “peaceful resistance.” The occupation of Palestinian lands and the land theft and human rights violations that have accompanied it “is an evil that must be resisted,” maintains the document, because “[r]esistance is a right and a duty for the Christian. But it is resistance with love as its logic.” This means that it is active but nonviolent. “The aim is to free both peoples from extremist positions of the different Israeli governments, bringing both to justice and reconciliation.”
Kairos Palestine specifically references boycott as one form of this resistance. The global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement received significant attention at the Bethlehem conference. International delegates joined Palestinians in two days of meetings following the event to discuss how to coordinate their activities in support of Palestinian liberation, with an entire day devoted to BDS.
The Kairos USA “Call to Action: A word of confession and faith from Christians in the United States” is a confession of responsibility and acknowledgement of obligation to act.:
As the body of Christ in the United States, we confess that by not speaking truth to power we have failed to follow the call of Jesus to serve God with love and compassion for all people. We have failed to challenge our government’s policies. Rather than acting as an honest broker in negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, our government has consistently supported, both financially and diplomatically, the actions of Israel that have brought suffering to Palestinians, continuing insecurity to Israelis and the declining prospect of a just peace. As individuals and as church institutions, we have supported a system of control, inequality and oppression through misreading of our Holy Scriptures, flawed theology and distortions of history. We have allowed to go unchallenged theological and political ideas that have made us complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people. Instead of speaking and acting boldly, we have chosen to offer careful statements designed to avoid controversy and leave cherished relationships undisturbed.
Fundamental principles that support both Christian and American values come together in this statement. Last week, as part of NPR’s coverage of the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogation practices, Palestinian-American Rami Khoury offered these thoughts:
The whole historical contribution of the concept of the United States of America was citizenship based on the consent of the governed…Therefore the people need to know what is being done in their name so that the people, the citizens, can maintain a certain value system in public life that reflects what is written in their Declaration of Independence. So it’s a very difficult but very important moment for the United States. This is a very American moment.
As I listened to Khoury, I agreed that what were we seeing in the release of this report was the worst of America but also the best of our country in our willingness to call ourselves to account. I found myself thinking back to October 5, 2012, when 15 leaders of U.S. Protestant denominations and several Roman Catholic orders published an open letter to the members of the US Congress. The letter includes this statement:
As Christian leaders in the United States, it is our moral responsibility to question the continuation of unconditional U.S. financial assistance to the government of Israel. Realizing a just and lasting peace will require this accountability, as continued US military assistance to Israel — offered without conditions or accountability — will only serve to sustain the status quo and Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories.
The letter also urged Congress to conduct “an immediate investigation into possible violations the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act and the U.S. Arms Export Control Act that respectively prohibit assistance to any country which engages in a consistent pattern of human rights violations.”
Can we envision another “American moment” like the one we have just experienced? Can we dare to imagine, that, through the exercise of creative resistance, we can bring our nation in similar fashion to question the legality and rightness of our financial and diplomatic support for Israel’s illegal activities, activities that include not only land taking and colonization, but systematic denial of human rights, including imprisonment and torture? It has never been more clear that our response to the call of our Palestinian sisters in brothers in distress calls us to a witness that reaches beyond Palestine, as we consider our nation’s record of systematic economic, judicial and law enforcement violence against African Americans, our torture of prisoners, and abrogation of immigrant rights. The voice of the Palestinians is the voice of our own consciences, because it is a voice that calls us to be true to foundational values of our society. And it calls us to action, as expressed in the Kairos USA document:
“We appeal to 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 call to mind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s charge in his historic speech on the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in 1967. “These are the times,” Dr. King told us, “for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every [person] of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.”
U.S. Lutheran theologian Robert Smith expresses this clearly in his remarks that opened the Bethlehem conference:
“How can those of us who are not Palestinian weave resistance into the fabric of our lives? One way is to identify how the structures perpetuating the sin of occupation inform injustices in our home contexts. This is what is intended as the message of Kairos for Global Justice. How do we participate in struggles against those injustices in our local contexts, consciously linking them to the quest for justice in Palestine? How do the theologies identified as harmful in Kairos Palestine harm others as well; how do those imperial theologies benefit not just Israeli power but power and privilege in many other places as well?”
Smith’s reference to theology reminds us that the role of our faith leaders and faith communities is critical. “The Kairos call for creative resistance,” Smith continued, “is not about addressing economic structures alone. Support for the matrix of Israeli occupation challenges the very nature of how we interpret the Bible and how Christian communities engage and challenge political powers and principalities.” As was true for the South African and the black liberation struggle in this country, the church is called to lead. For the church in the U.S., the challenge presented by the Palestinian call is the same as that expressed by the church leaders in South Africa in their 1985 Kairos document “Challenge to the church:”
“It is serious, very serious. For very many Christians in South Africa this is the KAIROS, the moment of grace and opportunity, the favorable time in which God issues a challenge to decisive action. It is a dangerous time because, if this opportunity is missed, and allowed to pass by, the loss for the Church, for the Gospel and for all the people of South Africa will be immeasurable…A crisis is a moment of truth that shows us up for what we really are. There will be no place to hide and no way of pretending to be what we are not in fact. At this moment in South Africa the Church is about to be shown up for what it really is and no cover-up will be possible.”
The example of South Africa becomes increasingly compelling as the Israeli project to create one state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan moves toward completion. We made our government say “no” to apartheid then, and it was not easy, and we persevered, and we prevailed.
Mark Braverman is the Executive Director of Kairos USA. This post first appeared on the Kairos USA website.
Zionists could have had a secular and democratic but “culturally Jewish” Israel. They chose instead to establish an oppressive, colonialist, expansionist and religion-supremacist “Jewish State” of (Greater) Israel. Their hatefulness, immorality and insatiable greed will ultimately be their undoing.
Thanks, Mark.
The intransigence of Israel on full display:
“Hatnuah Chairwoman Tzipi Livni said Jerusalem will always remain under Israeli sovereignty during a Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony at the Western Wall on Sunday, which she held together with Labor head Isaac Herzog.
“Israeli sovereignty here, in this place, in Jerusalem, is the expression of “the historic link between a people and its land” Livni said during the ceremony.”This holy place, this historical place, this place to which our deepest recesses are tied, will remain under Israeli sovereignty forever.”
The issue of the sovereignty over Jerusalem is one of the most contested core issues between Israel and the Palestinians. After the 1967 war, Israel formally annexed East Jerusalem, an act which was never internationally recognized. The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the seat of a future Palestinian state.
PM: Israel won’t abide to outside dictates
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would oppose the Palestinian resolution in the UN Security Council setting a deadline for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.
“We expect responsible elements in the international community to reject this proposal, but in any case we’ll oppose it determinedly and of course, would not abide by any dictates,” Netanyahu said at a Hanukkah ceremony he held will IDF troops at a base near Jerusalem.”
http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel-election-2015/.premium-1.633037?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
How the US/ world can support this is really and truly unfathomable.
http://original.antiwar.com/avnery/2014/12/19/splendid-isolation/
Uri Avnery on the US veto and the Israel election.
Thanks for that link Mooser, Uri Avnery spells it out correctly…
These, then, are the battle lines:
A Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital, an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, the end of the occupation, peace between Israel and the entire Arab and Muslim world, or a Greater Israel, continuous occupation or annexation, more settlements and ethnic cleansing, permanent war.
Israel has to choose.
So has the world.
I read this telling tidbit today wrt “interfering in elections”:
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far raised nearly 539,000 shekels ($137,000) in his bid to retain his position at the head of Likud. The sum came from 15 donors, all of whom are from overseas. Fourteen are from the United States, while one is from Spain.
At this point, Netanyahu’s only challenger is Danny Danon, who has raised a total of 261,000 shekels from 11 donors – 10 of whom reside in the United States.
…
Among the U.S. donors to Netanyahu’s campaign is Kenneth Abramowitz, who heads the American Friends of Likud and contributed about 40,000 shekels. The donors also included four members of the Miami-based Falic family, which owns the largest duty-free retail firm in the United States. The four each gave the maximum permitted.”
http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/.premium-1.632896?v=FEDC3919CB43C8D31A2B4949C653A0CD