15 posts tagged “israel”

Obama Cairo Speech [Full Speech PT1] June 04 2009

I just got the opportunity to listen to Barak Obama's speech in Cairo June 4. I would highly recommend it as it sets a tone for a future based on possibilities rather than practicabilities, a future based on a chosen way of seeing the world rather than an inherited one. Naturally, the question will have to be settled: Can we really chose new ways of seeing the world, or must we endure the ones that we have earned by our past behaviors and mistakes? Obama's speech also asserts, without an argument, that the world can move forward without arguing about the validity of its episimological sources of cultural values because, and this is the lynchpin of the assumptions he makes, those sources (Bible, Talmud, Qur'an) are fundamentally, not in conflict about anything that "really" matters.

Though asserting that he was himself a Christian, in a number of places he made reference to "our Holy Quran". Rhetorically, it was extremely effective. But on a pure logical level, I can see it being fraught with difficulties. The question is, will people respond on a level of logic or a level of sentiment? I suspect the later. And maybe therein lies our salvation as we make our way forward. Can one argue for some things (peace, human values, non-violence) on the basis of an authority that - if read in entirety - ALSO rejects some of the same propositions that you are arguing for? i.e. the status of Jerusalem or the West Bank/Judea-Samaria?

“The Holy Koran tells us …”

“The Talmud tells us …”

“The Holy Bible tells us …”

President Obama makes a powerful argument that these sacred books all agree on certain things. But what of the differences? He advocates - by his silence - ignoring them. Regard them as authoritiative where the ends are consistent with a peaceful world. Neglect the aspects of their messages where those messages might lead to contrary ends. I think that is essentially the argument that he is making.

“Faith should bring us together” he says, " As the Holy Quran tells us, be conscious of God and speak always the truth. . . . Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad joined in prayer”

In several places, he made the argument that America and Islam are not based on competing assumptions and he said so with such authority that his tone of voice and assurance carried the argument. But I myself feel a need to think more on the matter.

"America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition," he said, "The freedom to live as you chose. These are not just American ideas. They are human rights and that is why we will support them everywhere.”

And it is at this point where the most interesting debate should occur. Are the Qur'an or the Bible or the Talmud really arguing that human beings should be given the freedom to live as they chose? Is a religion whose name MEANS submission, a religion of choice? Is the Talmud a record of a debate about what humans want to do? Or is it a record of people trying to discern in the minutest of detail what God wants them to do? When Jesus says in his Sermon on the Mount "Anyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them is like a man who builds his house upon sand and when the floods come ..." is He advocating autonomy from divine command? When the Apostle Paul says "Have this mind in you that was in Christ ..." is his goal the autonomous individual, free to live as they chose?

Barak Obama has taken the approach that all sources of certainty can be regarded as equally valid and authoritative as long as none are. No one thus wins. No one looses. No one must admit to having been misled for a few hundred or thousand years.

It remains to be seen if this argument, made forcefully and diplomatically, and frequently enough, can carry the day.

Question for Comment: If we assume for a moment that major Western Religions are a Ven Diagram of concentric circles - each advocating certain assertions that are common and certain assertions that are exclusive, is there any reason to retain the exclusive elements if the result is irreconcilable conflict?

To Die In Jerusalem

To Die in Jerusalem is a story of two mothers. Two mothers that illustrate and exemplify two whole peoples. In the last half hour of the movie, a mother who’s daughter has been killed in a suicide attack speaks with the mother of the girl who committed it. I confess, it was almost like watching Sarah and Hagar reincarnated.

It was as if electricity was moving up out of the ground in one and meeting electricity coming down through a lightening bolt out of the other’s sky. And just as the very place where their hearts connected, the force of the energy exploded. As if to say, "Now that I know you are listening, I need to be able to tell my story of suffering so that it can neutralize and even negate yours.” I have a confession to make. I am no fan of suicide bombers in general and certainly not when they are children killing children. But I honestly felt like the Palestinian woman gave the better arguments and came across as less “stuck” even though it was her daughter who had committed the act that took the other’s life. She was simply saying, “understand the context in which young people like my daughter must make moral decisions” and the Israeli woman would respond “Why do you hate us?”   

I think it is fair to say that throughout history, circumstances have created in people anger and leaders have directed it. Someone holding a hose will not be able to do anything with it if there is no water pressure. But water pressure undirected cannot be blamed for what someone holding a hose can do. A suicide bombing is an act of desperate inexpressible anger. It seems obvious that Israelis need to understand that they play a part in the creation of that reservoir of anger. By the same token, takig a young seventeen year old girl’s anger and using it to blow up another girl her age indiscriminately is a concern that Palestinian leaders need to examine themselves about.

People need to understand that whole societies are creating the anger that portions of societies are using to create more. Hatred is something some people profit by and they will invest the principle as long as they are allowed to do so.

This was a hard movie for me to watch. This was not like many of the documentaries I have seen where individual citizens are simply seen offstage as world leaders argue. This was a movie about the ground floor and grass roots of animosity. It seems like the positions are or have been almost set in concrete now. Israelis seem to have decided that the responsibility for the happiness of refugees lies in the hands of surrounding Arab countries. If those refugees are unhappy, they believe the animosity should now be directed at the surrounding countries that will not take them in. Either because of their historical education or their religion, they believe that the Palestinian right to return to their homes in 1948 is subsumed and nullified.

Palestinians have concluded that justice demands their return to their lost homes and lost status as a people worthy of a dignified place among the nations. Like Serbians who wanted to be members of a Serbian State in 1914 or Kurds who want to be members of a Kurdish State in the modern world, they see no reason to inflict an apartheid status on themselves and agree to relocation. Armed with these positions, there is nowhere to go besides conflict it seems. If only land could be stacked up like a bunk bed.

Justice and understanding of another person’s history: I have always regarded these things as the pre-requisites to peace. But in cases where there are two notions of justice and two notions of history, the conflict is made worse by them and I wonder if a region wide self-induced amnesia is what is required.

I hope to bring some measure of mutual understanding to my Middle East courses this summer. A task to which I now turn.

Question for comment: Have you ever been in a situation where justice for you would have entailed an injustice for someone else? Is one morally obligated in any way to fight for one’s own justice? For another’s or for a split of the difference?

Under The Bombs

Under the Bombs is a war movie that covers the topic of war not by rolling the cameras during the war itself but by starting them when the war is over. This is a movie about people trying to pick the pieces of their lives up – It is about good people caught in the crossfire and the devastation subsequent to the actual violence.

Imagine a war in your back yard. Imagine trying to find your six year old child for two days. Imagine not knowing what you will find at the end of the search. There is little redemption to be had other than the clear conclusion at the movie’s end that there is no way to compensate someone for the loss of the ones they love. There is nothing one can do but to find someone who has lost someone themselves and offering to be to them what they have lost, hoping against hope that someone will do the same for you.

 This movie could never substitute for being there. It merely points the way."Who is my neighbor?" someone once asked Jesus. His answer was basically, "Who can you be a neighbor to?" This movie is a about that.

Question for Comment: Have you ever gotten involved in helping someone and discovered that their needs were going to entail more commitment than you bargained for? This movie is about that.

Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine

Raja Shehadeh

Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine by Raja Shehedeh

There are many different reasons to appreciate this book. For one, it gives an eyewitness account of the crucial events in the Palestinian experience. Secondly, it supplies insights into the way that the battle for Israeli/Palestinian land is being fought in the context of “civilized” law as well as armed conflict. One can get a clearer picture of how legalities and regulations – the niceties of civilized life – are instruments of warfare as well as tanks and bullets. Thirdly, it is a masterful account of a man’s relationship to his father and how their differencing ideologies and preferred approaches to shared problems creates tension in what would otherwise be a firm bond. Lastly, it is a fascinating look at the psychology of loss and redemption. It is a book for anyone who can relate to the challenge of acceptance versus persistence. Robert Frost’s poem

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
Robert Frost

 When should we as humans hang on to dreams and when should we let them go? A few of my favorite passages from the book will have to serve in thinking about this question.

“I was always told that we were made for a better life -- and that this better life had been left behind in Jaffa. Jaffa, I was told, was the bride of the Sea, and Ramallah did not even have a sea.  Jaffa was a Pearl, a diamond -- studded lantern rising from the water, and Ramallah is a drab, backward village where nothing ever happened.”

[My grandmother’s] eyes were always on the horizon, and through following her gaze I too learned to avoid seeing what was here and to fix my site on the distant horizon.  I saw Ramallah and its hills not for what they were but as the observation point from which to view what lay beyond, and the Jaffa I had never known. . . . my sense of place is not mine.  I never thought I had a right to claim it.  My elders knew better.  I felt it was natural to defer to them on such matters.”

“Even though some two decades had passed since the Nabkeh [Palestinian word for “disaster” – the loss of their homes in 1948] there was not the slightest indication that anyone was abandoning the dream.  There was no waning in the certainty that return was inevitable.  Life in Ramallah was the only life I knew, but even for me there was a sense of it being temporary.  I viewed it as a pale reflection of the other life.”

“Because the dream was stronger than the reality and because all my knowledge of it he derived from the elders, I had no reality of my own.  My own life could not be validated unless confirmed by their gaze. . . . life here in Ramallah was lived day to day but it was not inspiring.  There was no conviction or pride in it.  This was a temporary abode and you do not dig in and create roots in what is temporary.  It will do for now but it is just for now.”

“We had been stunned, bewildered, jettisoned across an imaginary border.  We remained on the other side, looking at what we left behind, leaving in the process both what was lost and what we had managed to keep.  Our dumbfoundedness in this had been so petrifying that we could not manage to continue the life we had lived before.  Because of our loss of the parts, we had abandoned the whole.  All that remained was a shadow of life, a life of dreams and anticipation and memory.  We didn't allow the new generation to make a new life for themselves because we continued to impress them with the glory of what was, a magic that could never be a replicated. … We defined our loss as total, forgetting that we still had something; we had ourselves a life to live. . . . instead of developing a vital life in whatever was left for us we wandered throughout the world complaining, like the Ancient Mariner stopping every wedding guests to tell our story.”

I found myself wondering as I read this compelling narrative “How have I responded to the losses in my own life? It occurred to me that distinctions should perhaps be made between losses that are only random and losses that are truly the result of injustices. There is something about a loss combined with an unjust cause that makes it particularly difficult to move on. Something within us that knows that an injustice has taken place makes it impossible to surrender up the loss for good. Surely, in a just universe, under a just God, that which we have lost will be returned?” we insist to ourselves. And hang on. And maybe we should. Maybe. But to what end?

Interestingly, Shehedeh himself struggles to maintain an ability to enjoy the life he has with this stubborn need for justice and despite his advocacy for a two state solution (a compromise of ideals that betrays his own loss), he refuses to accept the passive surrender of more loss.

“Staying put,” Shehadeh writes, is the biggest act of Palestinian heroism: “in our case [bureaucratic hassles] were not random, occasional, or intermittent. They were persistent and constant, part of a policy to make the life of Palestinians so difficult that it would seem better to leave than to stay and suffer. In our determination to stay put lay our heroism, not in acts of daring or even in military operations taken in resistance to the occupation. These were carried out by the smallest minority. The majority was resisting through staying put.”

“By occupying the West Bank the Jewish state is reclaiming Jewish patrimony of the land.  When the occupation began, only one third of the land in the West Bank was registered in the name of the Palestinian owners.  For the rest, if the owner ceased to use the land for a period of 10 consecutive years, he was deemed by the military authorities as having lost his right to the area. The Israeli authorities were then justified in declaring it state land.  It now reverted to the exclusive ownership of the Jews.  We, non-Jews, were no more than squatters with no inherent rights to our land.  The Jewish state was willing to allow us to keep the land that we were actually using, but the rest went back to its rightful owners, not through force but by legal ploys and by distorted interpretations of local land laws.”

My compliments to the author of this book for how intelligently he has analyzed his own life in ways that help me to do the same for mine.

Questions for Comment: Is your life a life you have "gotten" or a life you have made? How committed and dedicated to it are you?

Occupied Minds

"The greatest weapon in the arsenal of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed" I often tell my students. But it may also be said that the second greatest weapon in the arsenal of the violent is the ignorance of the neutral. I have a large and growing collection of movies about the Middle East and the one I am reporting on tonight, Occupied Minds,  is one of my new favorites. I think it is because it approaches conflict the way I think it should be approached, as a team. Two somewhat elderly men, one a Jew and one an Arab, take each other into the worlds that as individuals, they could never be allowed to enter. They work as a team together, with each one giving the other access to the people who the other has questions for.

Both of them now live in America and that may be the greatest strength and greatest weakness of their attempt to find reconciliation. They both have a safe place to go when they are done with their objective thinking and I suspect that it is the absence of a safe place to go that makes it so difficult for those involved to do the same. And so the conflict continues.

I feel like I have to keep coming back to this truth. People who are living in a state of anger  fear, of deprivation, of grief, are almost prevented by the power of these emotions from seeing what is so obvious. And herein lies a danger and a warning for History teachers. Perhaps I speak arrogantly but it does seems as though we have the power to focus on anger-inducing events, fear-inducing events, deprivation-inducing events, and grief-inducing events. I like this movie because, even though it finds no solutions, it is the solution. "The darkest place is right under the candle" says one of the men. The solution, ironically, I think , is to be found only when the opposing sides team up to find a non-existing solution. Call it a paradox.

this is not just a movie about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It is about how we all must come to approach conflict wherever we live.

Question for Comment: What is the most intractable conflict in your life? How might someone from an opposing side help you to find a resolution to it?

European Muslims and Muslims and Eastern Christians: The Broken Mirrors

In the past week, I have been slowly and methodically making my way through a fairly lengthy documentary on the lives of religious minorities in the Balkans and Middle East. The creator of this movie invests a good deal of time introducing us to the people of Macedonia, Bosnia, Albania, Turkey, Lebanon, and Israel by selecting interviewees who come from religious minorities in each of these regions. I suspect that it would be a movie too long for many people who don't bring an interest in religion and Middle Eastern history to it but there are moments of it where the application of their human dilemmas can be regarded as universal. We all have people in our lives who have left wounds on us. Imagine what it is like for people who have centuries of historical conflict that they have inherited on TOP of their own personal baggage. How do they sort things out.

And how do they sort out their own identities when they belong to nationalities as minorities within those nationalities? Is an Armenian Christian a Christian, an Armenian, or a Turk? Is an Israeli former Palestinian Arab Christian a Palestinian, an Israeli, an Arab, or a Christian? Or should all regard themselves as humanists.

I confess, the most interesting of the interviews to me personally were the last two (In Lebanon and in Nazareth) though I really enjoyed getting a feel for the geography and topography and human demographics of each of these regions. The gentleman interviewed from Lebanon ran a Christian organization that sought to help marginalized people assimilate back into society. The gentleman from Nazareth ran a school for multi-ethnic and religious kids and spoke inspiring of his work with Jews in trying to create bridges by which they might enter into each other's narratives of suffering.

If a reader found the subject interesting, these last two would be worth the price of the movie. The director films almost ever interview in the presence of or through the prism of a broken mirror.

One last thing. I have been reading a lot lately about the basic accouterments of the sacramental system of Ancient Israel and this movie about the various sects of Orthodox, Eastern, Syriac, Armenian, and in some cases Islamic sacramental life is intriguing to watch. All of the vestments, the icons, the sacred dress, the sacred furniture, the incense, etc. It is all still there in some of these modern versions of ancient faith's and is well documented in this movie. I find myself mystified by why people still derive satisfaction from these things and this documentary feeds my curiosity even more.
 

Question for Comment: Have you ever attempted to enter into the suffering narrative of a person (or group of people) who has caused you pain? Does it help? Or does it simply make your suffering worse?

The Inner Tour

Tonight's movie was The Inner Tour, a rather unscripted movie that essentially takes the viewer on a bus ride around Israel with a number of Palestinians from several refugee camps and villages in the West Bank and Gaza. Imagine perhaps a tour bus full of Sioux Indians being given their first experience traveling in the Black Hills. Most of them had never been out of their own restricted areas. Some had been in jail. A few had lost husbands or fathers to one of the various conflicts. Some are old and have nothing but memories of the Israel of their childhoods to buoy up their spirits in the face of Israeli statehood. This movie provides an opportunity to become more personally aware of the inner lives of typical Palestinians and how they engage emotionally and intellectually and spiritually with the realities of their respective losses.

One of the most moving moments, to me, was watching a young Palestinian woman explain how her husband had been sentenced to life in prison for killing an Israeli soldier. She was articulate about the pain she lived with and the pain she had to live with in her future. I think that was the saddest moment really. That moment of realization that there is no law in this universe that says that the pain that you have already gone through will serve as some coupon for a pain free future. In the last scene, an old Palestinian man finds the grave of his father in the fields that lie where his village once stood. And the following words appear on the screen:

"A new chapter will have to be written in the two parallel and contradicting books which reflect the history of our land."

An excellent movie to have on the shelf if one is interested in seeing the conflict through the eyes of real people ... and we all should have such an interest I think.

Question for Comment: If you could hire a personal historian to help find common ground between your history of some period or event in your life and someone else's, what would you set them to researching?