Against IMPOSSIBLE Odds.

You wouldn't know it from media reports, but there's a hopeful movement being born in the Middle East--interfaith, rooted in nonviolence, and containing the seeds of a just peace. A visit to the Holy Land in turmoil.

I arrived at the Tel Aviv airport and after clearing customs rode the 35 miles to Jerusalem, where I would attend an international peace conference convened by the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. Everywhere I looked were enormous Israeli settlements, always on the highest ground, with the most modem, first-world living conditions anywhere, towering over the much-poorer Palestinian villages down in the valleys.

I saw on this trip how Israeli settlements loom over the West Bank and Gaza--and likewise loom over the chances for peace in the Middle East. They are the "facts on the ground" that shape virtually everything about Middle East politics today. Long before he became prime minister, Ariel Sharon controlled the future as the chief architect of the settlement policy. Settlements are aggressive forays into Palestinian territory by people who believe that God has given them all the land. Each one makes lasting peace that much more difficult. It's obvious now that this was the intent of the policy from the beginning.

Many of the settlers are American Jewish immigrants to Israel. Picture an SUV pulling up alongside a Palestinian family whose roots go back 10 generations. An American Jew from New York City, here only two weeks, screams at the Palestinian family: "Get off this land! God gave it to us!" With the settlements policy, that's now happening. Israeli soldiers are in the West Bank and Gaza not to keep law and order, not to protect Palestinians from violence or crime--but only to protect the settlements and the settlers. Control the roads, control movement, control the daily life of the entire Palestinian population--that's the settlements policy.

Most people in the Middle East and elsewhere have accepted the logic of a two-state solution and the formula of land for peace. But after days of watching, listening, and talking to both Palestinians and Israelis, I began to feel that the Oslo process lulled many of us to sleep. (See my interview with Jonathan Kuttab, page 30.) Oslo turned a Palestinian liberation struggle into a "peace process." Jean Zaru, a Quaker leader in the Middle East, says, "Oslo became the structure for our domination."

The more I saw, the more it reminded me of apartheid South Africa. There is no contiguous Palestinian territory in the West Bank or Gaza, no such thing as a Palestinian state nor one in the making. There are only pieces of Palestinian territory, with Israel controlling everything in between.

Rabbi Michael Lerner says the situation is as if somebody took your house away (the way Israel took Palestinian land in the 1967 war), and then says they'll give you parts of your house back (in the Oslo accords). But they still control the hallways and the bathrooms! Palestinians can't get from one bedroom to another without going through a hallway controlled by the Israelis. As long as the settlements remain, the only possibility is disconnected territories housing the Palestinian workers who service the Israeli state.

The Israeli policy is called closure. Everything gets dosed down in the West Bank and Gaza, and Palestinians are not allowed to move freely--to go to school, to work, or even to visit family. All Palestinians are required to have permits and pass through interminable checkpoints. Our group was stopped at every checkpoint, even though we were an international delegation in large buses. We had some clout and were no threat to the Israelis, and they still held us up for hours. If you are a Palestinian, you wait. And you wait. I heard many stories--for example, of a woman in labor, stopped at a checkpoint on the way to the hospital. She was forced to deliver her baby in the back seat of her car, waiting at the checkpoint. The soldiers ordered her outside the car, where she collapsed on the ground in utter exhaustion, with the umbilical cord still attaching her to her baby, while Israeli soldiers laughed. In July, another baby born at an Israeli checkpoint died before reaching the hospital. These women experienced the extreme of the type of indignities visited on Palestinians every day.

ONE OF THE MOST passionate and visible critics of the closure policy is Israeli journalist Amira Hass. When I met her, she admitted to being "obsessed" with her government's practice. She, like many other Jews both in Israel and America, believe the policies of settlements and closure are as morally damaging to the Israelis as they are oppressive to the Palestinians. Hass describes the closure policy as "the theft of spontaneity."

If you were an activist in apartheid-era South Africa, you could be pulled out of bed in the middle of the night and killed. But ordinary South Africans, though poor and oppressed, could still visit their mothers or join their buddies to play soccer, and generally they were able to move freely around the country. Palestinians, however, can't just wake up in the morning and decide to go visit a friend, or end the day by going to see the sunset at the water's edge. The theft of spontaneity. Jean Zaru told me she hadn't worked with her assistant face to face for three months, because they couldn't get in the same room at the same time. It was easier for international visitors to come to the Sabeel conference in Jerusalem than for local Palestinians to get there from their own villages and cities.

There is indeed Palestinian violence against Israeli settlements. Shootings and even mortar shells have been aimed into them. Some people have been killed, and the fear is very high. There have been casualties even among Israeli children. Two 14-year-old boys were found dead in a cave near their settlement, their bodies battered and mutilated with rocks, killed by Palestinians. And we've seen the results of suicide bombers, including at a Tel Aviv disco. In my opinion, attacks against civilian populations are terrorism. Such terror can never be justified. Never.

But the Israelis use such incidents to justify shelling Palestinians in massive, disproportionate retaliation. They've even resorted to bombing Palestinian targets with F-16 fighter planes. The casualties are enormous, including Palestinian children and infants caught in the middle of attacks against civilians that must also be called terrorist.

The Israeli army is shelling the most exposed houses in Palestinian villages directly from the settlements, knowing they're attacking unarmed civilians with families and children. I went into Palestinian homes that had been shelled, met the families. In one I saw the huge shell hole in the wall of the children's bedroom. The kids were scared that night, cowering in their parents' room down the hall, or they surely would have been killed.

By the end of June, 558 people had been killed in the current wave of violence--78 percent of them Palestinians (92 percent of those injured are Palestinians). More than 100 children under the age of 17 had died--86 Palestinian children, and 18 Israeli children. In a very moving moment at the start of the Sabeel conference, we named each victim of the violence, from all sides. Every individual life counts in God's eyes.

Movements are responsible for the images they project. When the Israeli military shot and killed 12-year-old Mohammed Dura in his father's arms as they cowered in fear against a wall in Gaza, the powerful images went around the world. But three days later, two Israeli soldiers were captured and lynched by angry Palestinians in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank. The image flashed around the world was that of bloody hands raised by an angry Palestinian mob over the lynched soldiers' mutilated bodies. If the images from Birmingham and Selma had been dead cops, we wouldn't have won the civil rights struggle in America.

There is no "symmetry" in the violence of the Middle East today. Israeli violence is enormously disproportionate to Palestinian violence. That includes the violence of the settlements and closure policies themselves and the Israeli military practices, especially in their retaliation against Palestinian attacks. Despite this lack of proportionality, there is no moral or strategic justification for the Palestinian violence in response to Israeli domination, especially when it targets civilians. No argument, even lack of symmetry, will suffice.

THE GOOD NEWS in the Middle East today is that voices are emerging to call for nonviolence. New conversation is occurring in the Middle East, the United States, and Europe in support of a nonviolence campaign to redress the injustice of the current deadlock. It is far too early to say whether such discussions will lead to significant action that might make a difference for peace. But at least the right questions are beginning to be discussed. A growing number of people and organizations are committing to nonviolence. They are the signs of hope now.

I visited the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron, one of the most conflicted areas in the West Bank. The Jewish settlements are actually inside the city of Hebron, so there are street confrontations nearly every day. The only force between the warring factions is the CPT, which consists mostly of Americans and Canadians. Days are spent offering presence, relationship, and accompaniment for those who need it. For example, a group of Palestinians were on their way to the mosque for worship, and Israeli soldiers stood in their way. The Muslims went to their knees to pray, refusing to disperse, and the Israelis trained their guns, apparently about to open fire on an unarmed crowd. A 23-year-old American woman and a young man from Canada, both from the CPT team, jumped in front of the soldiers with their arms spread, and said, "Please, these are unarmed people, do not shoot them!" That stopped the soldiers from shooting, but they put the two CPTers in jail for the night. When they came back to the city, people said "it was like welcoming Jesus" because they had saved countless lives.

The Christian Peacemaker Team is both a heroic and practical project of nonviolence in the Middle East, but it's very, very small. Expanding the CPT style of presence in several other areas is one idea under discussion.

Discussions are also underway about sending inter-faith teams--Christian, Jewish, and Muslim--to the Middle East in large and small numbers, both for critical moments and situations as well as for long-term presence. What came to mind for me were invitations from South African anti-apartheid leaders asking many of us to join them for crucial periods in their struggle, and Witness for Peace in Nicaragua, which sent more than 5,000 North Americans to conflicted war zones.

I was most impressed with people--Palestinian and Israeli--who hadn't given up on peace. The peacemaking conference was sponsored and attended by some of the most committed and influential Palestinian activists for peace, many of them Christians. I also spent time with Jewish peace activists who made a deep impression on me. One, Jeff Halper, of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, has done things like lay in front of bulldozers that are about to run over Palestinian houses. Halper helped me understand Jewish feelings today better than anybody I'd heard before.

Israel is strong, Halper said--the fifth largest military power in the world, economically dominant, deep in leadership cadres, healthy in civil society and culture. "But we don't know we're strong," Halper said. "We still believe we are victims. As long as you believe you're a victim, you are not accountable." Israelis do not feel accountable for what they are doing to Palestinians because they believe they are still victims. As victims they must defend themselves whatever the cost, whatever the consequences.

Nonviolence must address what's happening to Jewish souls as well. Not surprising, spousal abuse is at an all-time high among the Israeli population. Jewish therapists say that they're treating many young men who scream at night, unable to sleep because of what they did to Palestinian children. Any movement for nonviolence aims at the souls of all those in conflict.

WE HAVE TO TURN from an ineffectual peace process to an effective peace strategy. The Jerusalem conference created real solidarity for the Palestinian sit-conference created real solidarity for the Palestinian situation. But solidarity is not the same thing as strategy. It's time to move from solidarity to strategy. Most at the conference believed the most effective strategy would focus on the settlements and on ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. A parallel nonviolence movement in the Middle East and in the United States is needed. We cannot call for nonviolence in the Middle East unless we are prepared to enter into nonviolent campaigns on our own turf as well.

Christian Palestinians make up 2 percent of the population, and a nonviolence movement seen to be coming mostly from the Christians will feel like a Western movement to the Muslim Palestinians. There are also Muslims who believe in nonviolence, who believe the Quran forbids the violence and terrorism that others use their faith to justify and defend. Any successful movement based in nonviolence will have to be Christian, Muslim, and Jewish.

There are new hopeful signs of that, both in the Middle East and internationally. We are beginning to see a coming together of people and organizations in the United States for a new nonviolence campaign. Jews United for a Just Peace, or "Junity," had its first conference in May. A new effort, Olive Tree Summer, sent North American Jews and others to the Middle East this summer for a series of high-profile protest activities.

I was most lifted up by the tremendous determination of my Palestinian friends who persevere in the midst of an almost impossible daily situation. Their energy, their faith, their passion, and their determination deeply impressed me. But they know that they can't win by themselves. It will take an international movement to press for a just and lasting solution.

While Middle East leaders and American politicians debate timetables for cease-fires and cooling off periods--all very important--momentum has to build for an end to the violence and for a just peace. We have friends, both Palestinian and Israeli, who are putting their lives on the line for that kind of peace. We can't continue to let them suffer or struggle alone.

RELATED ARTICLE: Getting in the Way of Aggression

On the front lines with Christian Peacemaker Teams 

On June 15, three members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams joined 200 Palestinians and 20 Israelis at a nonviolent protest against the confiscation of a West Bank Palestinian village by Israeli settlers. "I know that you are doing your duty here," Rabbi Arik Ascherman told the Israeli soldiers at the protest, "but I hope that your witness of this event will prove to you that it's possible for Palestinians and Israelis to work together in coexistence."

The soldiers charged into ,the nonviolent protesters. CPTers Anita Fast and Anne Montgomery attempted to intervene when they saw soldiers beating two older Palestinian women and kicking another Palestinian woman as she retreated. "There's no need to use violence," Fast said. She was then hit in the back of the head by a rubber-coated club. "I'm nonviolent. You're hurting me," Fast said repeatedly. The Israeli forces eventually arrested six people, charging them with "refusing to obey a military order to leave" and "resisting detention."

"Getting in the way" of aggression, as Fast and Montgomery did, is one technique of Christian Peacemaker Teams. CPT, an initiative of Mennonite and Church of the Brethren congregations and Friends Meetings, trains small cadres of Christians for nonviolent direct action. Currently, CPT teams are on the ground in six countries.

CPT has been in the city of Hebron in the West Bank since 1995. Team members have occupied Palestinian homes to protest their demolition by the Israeli government and have lasted for 700 hours to highlight the bulldozing of Palestinian homes. An invitation from Hebron's mayor allowed CPT to start a long-term peacemaking project in the largely Muslim city. The team provides a violence-reduction presence with street patrols, responding directly when they hear about trouble and serving as a protective presence when someone is threatened. The team also supports Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers in their work.

Currently the Hebron CPT is sponsoring the Campaign for Secure Dwellings--a network of North American congregations working to end the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "It is dear to us," said Rich Meyer, the U.S.-based campaign coordinator, "that there can be no security for Israelis or Palestinians as long as the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip continues." --Susannah Hunter

Susannah Hunter is news/Internet assistant at Sojourners. For more information, see www.prairienet.org/cpt.

RELATED ARTICLE: `Israel Holds the Cards'

Rabbis for Human Rights 

"During this current crisis," Rabbi Arik Ascherman said, "the question in front of my eyes has always been: What can we say that people can hear?"

The "we" are members of the 13-year-old group Rabbis for Human Rights, the oldest rabbinical coalition in Israel, comprised of more than 90 Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reconstructionist rabbis and students. Their motivation for organizing? Human rights abuses by Israeli military authorities in the suppression of the Palestinian intifada.

"Our position is that violence on all sides is wrong, and we've been very straightforward with the Palestinians we work with that we find hostility and violence, as well as the threat of violence, both morally unacceptable and, frankly, strategically counterproductive," Rabbi Ascherman, co-director of the human rights group, said on a visit to Sojourners in May. "As far as I'm concerned, when the historians write about this intifada, it's going to be seen as a step back and not as an advance of the Palestinian cause. At the same time, we don't accept the proposition of symmetry [that both sides are equally responsible for the violence], because at the end of the day, Israel holds most of the cards in her hands."

The rabbis have brought human rights grievances to the attention of the Israeli public, protested the demolition of Palestinian homes, and organized on behalf of foreign workers, women, Ethiopian Jews, and Jahalin Bedouin--who have been negotiating for decent living conditions after their houses were destroyed. They've also taught students about Judaism and human rights and Islam and human rights, and promoted the welfare and human rights of Jewish Israelis and of non-Jews. They use a combination of strategies that include lobbying, organizing public campaigns, direct advocacy, and sometimes civil disobedience.

"How do we break through [Israelis] feeling threatened and angry and in pain and fearful to [help them] understand a little bit of what's going on here?" asked Ascherman. "Right now, we're in a situation where if you put a peace proposal on the table tomorrow, neither side would take it because things are so inflamed, How do we get people to stand down?

"The bottom line is that actions speak louder than words. While the negotiations are going on, [what's happening] on the ground--land expropriations, water allocation, the control of Palestinian life, demolitions, tree uprootings--is not a peace process for the Palestinians," Ascherman said. "In terms of the Israeli public, there is no quick fix. And what we're going to have to do, more and more, is go around and speak in small groups and to individuals." --Molly Marsh

Molly Mar, sit is an assistant editor of Sojourners. For more information, see www.rhr.israel.net.

RELATED ARTICLE: Violence with a Brooklyn Accent

American Jews in Israel

Unmistakable American accents surface in the Hebrew of many West Bank settlers--as well as in a similar proportion, perhaps, of the Israeli peace camp. As an American-born Israeli Jew who left the blessed United States for the original "promised land" 33 years ago, I find myself becoming more consciously American as the years pass, in transmitting my love for baseball to my son, as well as in using The Simpsons as the point of reference (if not the model) in many of our own family matters.

My high school class graduated in 1971; we were freshmen when the occupation began. Many of my religious Jewish-Israeli high school friends are West Bank settlers, and I feel I have little in common with them today. But there is surely a shared spirituality: While our politics are widely divergent, we all consume Bob Dylan, Shlomo Carlebach (the Singing Rabbi), and candles and wish we meditated more often.

As opposed to most (Jewish) immigrants to Israel, who fled oppression and poverty, Jews from the West came for idealistic reasons and usually don't limit their democratic involvement to election time. And here, of course, is the critical divergence: between those whose concerns are limited to the Jewish people and those who aspire to making Israel a truly inclusive society.

And this, dear North American reader, is as much a statement about America--which also happens to be the destroyer of an indigenous society--as it is about Israel. We all have our privilege, our "savages," and our Manifest Destiny. West Bank settler vigilante violence with a Brooklyn accent has deep American roots, in the past as well as the present, even if Israeli-American Jewish hoodlums are probably the first generation in their families ever to have touched a weapon. I sure hope they will be the last. --Jeremy Milgrom

Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom is co-director of the Jerusalem-based Rabbis for Human Rights.

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Jewish Unity for a Just Peace

Nearly 200 international Jewish activists gathered in Chicago this past May for the Jewish Unity for a Just Peace, or Junity, conference. Their primary message: There is significant and growing Jewish movement to end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories seized in 1967.

This movement crosses all Jewish denominations and includes Jews who are religious and those who identify as secular; Zionist, non-Zionist, anti-Zionist Jews; women and men who range in age from young students to senior citizens. While the adage "two Jews means three opinions" could certainly describe the diverse make-up of Junity, everyone managed to focus attention on one point of clear agreement: A just peace for Palestinians and Israelis alike is not possible until Israel ends the occupation.

The Junity organizers chose not to endorse any particular solution to the current crisis between Israelis and Palestinians. Instead they focused on a campaign of activism and education to end the occupation. Junity makes clear that it supports neither Palestinian nor Israeli violence, and many organizers and participants expressly condemn all violence against civilians, including Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

But other members believe that Jews ought not tell Palestinians how to resist an unlawful occupation; that Palestinians have a right under international law to resist with force; or that condemning both sides obscures the great power imbalance between Israelis and Palestinians. So Junity chose not to make any official statement on violence other than that an end to the occupation is key to ending the violence from both sides and to achieving security for all.

"Jews are committed as Jews, based on our Jewish values, to come together to organize against the occupation," said conference chair Steven Feuerstein. "We have no tolerance for persecution of others--a lesson from being persecuted ourselves." --Rebecca Lillian

Rabbi Rebecca Lillian, a member of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, is active in Chicago's Jewish Peace Forum. Contact Junity at PMB 206, 2859 Central St., Evanston IL 60201; [phone]; www.junity.org.

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Why `Holy Land Tours' miss the real story

Why don't most Christian visitors to Israel and Palestine get it? How can so many tourists who see the painful impact of military occupation maintain an expansionist Israel "right or wrong" point of view?

Four reasons are obvious:

1) Most visitors who come to the Holy Land for the primary reason of "walking where Jesus walked" have never been victims of torture, oppression, unjust imprisonment, or physical deprivation. From their more comfortable lives, they may not be as sensitive to Jesus' marching orders in Luke 4 to "preach good news to the poor ... and release to the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." This is a vacation, after all, not a "mission trip."

2) Many who come believe in a near-heretical apocalyptic theology nurtured by the "late great" prophetic literature that declares that the secular state of Israel is the long awaited pre-messianic event.

3) The vast majority of those who come are traveling with tour agencies or guides trained and supervised by the Israeli government. As a result Arab Muslims and Christians alike are often denigrated as violent, dirty, and criminally inclined people whose neighborhoods should be avoided.

4) Many visitors come with fully arranged schedules and are afraid to reach out to local believers, to worship with them, or to see their reality--especially since many congregations are in the "dangerous" West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The truth is, these visits are rarely dangerous physically, but they can cause troubling spiritual challenge to misperceptions and prejudices. When visitors observe injustice and align themselves with the poor and oppressed--when the scales come off the eyes of pilgrims--the result can be painful internal and doctrinal adjustments, but a deepened spiritual sensitivity. As one of our pilgrim friends, Rev. Katherine Kallis from Boston, said, "The experience with Palestinians sandpapered my heart. I will never be the same." --Tom Getman

Tom German is director of World Vision Palestine.

RELATED ARTICLE: Unmasking False Religion

Following Jesus in occupied territory. BY NAIM ATEEK 

The Pharisees asked Jesus, "When will the kingdom of God come?" He said to them, "The kingdom of God is among you (and within you)" (Luke 17:21). When he said this, the land and people were not experiencing paradise on earth. Most were under occupation. Violence and terrorism were everywhere. Yet Jesus could announce the fact that God's kingdom is breaking in.

In the midst of domination structures, we must follow the example of Jesus when he was living in our country. He had a radical obedience to God's reign. We must continuously declare the ultimate sovereignty of God over every sphere of life.

I am aware that this is exactly what the Jewish religious settlers are saying. They are in those settlements because they believe they are obeying God. In fact, they are ready to disobey their own government if need be in order to remain faithful to God.

The litmus test that we must use in such cases is based on what it means to love our neighbor. The Hebrew scripture, our Old Testament, mentions the dictum "love your neighbor as yourself." To live under the reign of God is to have full loyalty and obedience to God, tested, judged, and defined by our love and concern for the well-being of the neighbors, even if they are our enemies.

Such loyalty to God alone forces us to unmask the powers that oppress us. One is the evil of racism. Arab-Palestinian Israeli citizens have been suffering as a result of this since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Closely connected with race is the mask of nationalism. There is a place for a healthy patriotism so long as, it does not undermine or infringe on the rights and feelings of others. But extreme forms of nationalism threaten Palestinians as well as Israelis.

Another form of the powers that oppress us is security. We all cherish and need security. But in Israel it has become an idol. In the name of the god of security, the Palestinians are today humiliated, dehumanized, and oppressed.

We also need to unmask the ideology of religion. Religion must set God free. This is, unfortunately, one of the worst masks that we have in the Middle East. We are all guilty of it. Jewish religion sees non-Jews as the strangers in the land, without rights. Islam's term for non-Muslims is Ahl-Adhimma. Similarly, Christians have narrowed and limited God's activity outside their own tradition. I cannot adequately express to you how important it is to unmask the ideology of false religion and religiosity everywhere, beginning with Christianity here in Palestine. We must unmask it and move from religion to genuine faith.

The most radical political action we can take is when we speak and testify to the truth. The full armor of God that the writer of Ephesians talks about begins with truth, then includes justice, faith, salvation, the word of God, and prayer. These are our nonviolent means of resisting and struggling against the domination system of the state of Israel and the powers behind it. Jesus Christ, living in our country as a Palestinian under occupation, offers us a different model of power. "

Naim Ateek is director of the Jerusalem-based Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. This is excerpted from an address he delivered in February to Sabeel's international conference on peacemaking.