New Rotary Peace Fellowship video

Rotary International recently released a new video about the Rotary World Peace Fellowship, of which I am a recipient. I got to see the video in Birmingham, England a couple of weeks ago, and I’m happy to be able to share it with you now. If you’d like to know more about what I’m doing here, why, and with whom, this is a good place to start:

One of our speakers at the conference was Desmond Tutu. It was good to hear him again, and fun to have a photo op with one of my heroes, even if you can’t see too much of me.

From Tutu

The Real World

the Dubai airport, complete with indoor palm trees

It’s five in the afternoon in Brisbane, and about 10 AM here on this airplane. According to the flight information on the little screen embedded in the seat in front of me, I’m flying over Damascus right now, on my way to England. I spent a few hours in the United Arab Emirates at the Dubai airport this morning, meeting some Peace Fellows from previous classes that I hadn’t known before— from Argentina, Japan and Uganda. They’re all traveling to the same conference, and it’s good to converge, even in airports. I’ve been traveling for twenty-four hours now, with four and a half to go before I get in.

I’ve been lax in keeping the blog up lately as the end of the semester crunch took over my life. The last few weeks have been a blur, and it’s good to be re-emerging and find that the ‘real world’ is still waiting for me. Mason is on the edge of both crawling and cutting teeth, and I’m overdue for putting some new pictures of him up. Soon, I promise.

For now, though, I’m thinking about the end of the semester and looking back at this first stretch. It’s hard to believe that one of my three semesters in Australia is already over, but I turned in my last paper online a half-hour after midnight on Sunday night, and that makes it official. It looks like my ‘marks’ (grades) will be good for the semester, but more importantly, I’ve learned a great deal and made some extraordinary new friends. Rotary is treating us very well, as is the University of Queensland. So much to be grateful for.

Since the Fellowship in Brisbane is eighteen months long, there is a strange contour to the program: When we arrive for the first semester, we are welcomed by the class of Fellows before us. We’re matched up with a ‘buddy’ from the previous class to show us the ropes and ease the transition. At the end of that first semester, though, they graduate and for the second semester it is only our cohort, Class VII in my case. It’s sad to see the Class VI Fellows graduating, but I’m grateful for the time we had, and I look forward to keeping in touch with them and watching their lives and careers continue to unfold.

After the second semester we will head out for three months to our AFE’s (Applied Field Experience), where we will get our heads out of the books and our hands dirty with the work to be done— more on that soon. Then in the last semester we will welcome Class VIII. All of that seems pretty far away at the moment, but the Class VI Fellows tell me that the last two semesters will go progressively faster.

It’s hard to see Class VI leaving, but before the circle of Fellows shrinks it will swell mightily. Over 150 of the four hundred are currently on their way to England to attend the Rotary World Peace Symposium. The keynote speaker is Desmond Tutu, and I’m very much looking forward to hearing him again. In 1999 I had the opportunity to perform at a conference where Tutu was speaking, and though we didn’t cross paths (he didn’t hear my play and I didn’t get to meet him), I did have the treasured opportunity to hear him speak. He addressed the audience for about two hours without a pause, a visual aid or a song to break things up, and when he finished it felt like he had been speaking for about fifteen minutes.

Desmond Tutu indicating how long he’s been speaking (no, not really)

My son Mason’s middle name is Bishop, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that it is my mother’s maiden name and the family name that marks much beloved extended family. The second, though, is that it was a way to name him after Archbishop Desmond Tutu without naming him Desmond or Tutu, neither of which seem to fit the little guy. Tutu really is one of my heroes, and not just for the obvious reasons of his political stands and powerful faith.

In Paul Loeb’s excellent book Soul of a Citizen he tells a wonderful story of being backstage with Tutu at an anti-apartheid rally during the dark days when it still reigned in South Africa. It was an outdoor event with bands and speakers, and when Tutu finished his portion of the program he was followed by a groove-driven reggae band. As Tutu, in his late sixties, came down the back stairs out of sight of the audience, he was boogying down, dancing with joy, and with the same passion he summoned to motivate people to work against apartheid.

I think about that image frequently, though it’s not my own experience, only a vivid picture drawn for me by a good writer. It’s a useful reminder that joy and laughter and bliss are not points on a continuum on the other end of which lies anger, resolve and righteous indignation. The fact is that all of those things can coexist. And when I allow my joy to be defeated by fear, viciousness and oppression, I’m allowing those things, in some sense, to win. Joy doesn’t deny the existence of cruelty and sadness any more than light denies the existence of darkness.

Of the Fellows I’ve met so far, maybe thirty or so, they seem to have a real gift for joy. People who get things done often do, I think, because to allow oneself to be consumed by the heaviness of things can so quickly become immobilizing.

Don’t misunderstand me, though, and think that I mean that in order to keep moving we have to look away from the darkness. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. We just have to also look toward the light. The truth isn’t as it is often portrayed: that the ‘real world’ is so dark that it is only the naive who believe it can be made better. Cynics will pat you on the head and say that it’s sweet and cute for you to pursue such notions while you’re young, but that you will inevitably grow up and get a taste of the real world, and it will wear off.

Tutu, and his good friend Nelson Mandela, are fine antidotes to that falsehood. Who could tell these great men that their hope and belief are rooted in naive inexperience? Who could tell Tutu that his strong commitment to non-violence is rooted in a lack of understanding of the reality of violence? Who could tell Mandela that his ideas of forgiveness are unrealistic— that his 27-year imprisonment and torture were not enough to make him understand the nature of evil? Who can tell these men that they don’t really know how hard the world is?

They do. And they remain authentic voices for hope, peace, reconciliation and forgiveness. Their wisdom is a good gift, and I’m very much looking forward to hearing Tutu again. Clearly I am, because I have left Deanna for a few days for the first time in five months, and left Mason for more than one night the first time in his life. It will be a quick trip, though, so I’ll make it— six days total: three traveling and three there.

And I left him in very good hands. My parents have made the trip to Australia for a month-long visit, and they planned it so they could be there to help Deanna out while I’m gone. It’s tough to miss part of their time there, but I’m so grateful that they are there. Being so far away is hard for all of us, and to get a good visit in is a treasure. I’ll be home Monday morning and we’ll have three more weeks together.

Speaking of missing home, I got to make a guest appearance at the Grey Eagle, my hometown music hall, thanks to the wonders of modern technology. My long-time friend Cecil Bothwell is running for Asheville City Council and I popped in via video link to endorse him in front of capacity crowd of over 400 people.

I also did a radio interview in New York via telephone about my newest recorded song, A Place to Go. It’s now out as a CD-single at CDBaby.com, and as an MP3 download at iTunes, CD Baby and any number of other online retailers. All the proceeds from this one go to museums that commemorate tragic events, so I don’t have to feel awkward about plugging it. I called in at 2AM Brisbane time to be on a Saturday noon radio show. The hosts were concerned about that, but I explained that I was a professional musician for 18 years, so 2AM isn’t such an unusual time to be up and doing.

And that’s the update. Classes start again three weeks into July, so I’ve got time to catch my breath, play my guitar a bit, spend some family time and get refreshed for the next semester, which will involve four classes instead of three. Thanks for staying in touch, and for your kindness. Your supportive comments go a long way toward keeping me inspired and hopeful about the real world and my place in it.

Peace,
David

Remembering Columbine

From random blog photos

News stories about the ten year anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings seemed to jump out from every corner of the internet in the last week. The academic journal Psychological Review gave a whole issue to “Lessons of Columbine.” That experience is etched in our national memory, and though it’s a painful picture, I don’t want to forget it.

Though Columbine has become synonymous with school shootings, it wasn’t the first that the nation faced. About thirteen months before, two boys, an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old, donned camouflaged clothes, pulled a fire alarm and started shooting at students and teachers at their own middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Four students and a teacher died, and ten others were injured.

The students that lived through watching their fellow students and teachers shot, and being shot at themselves, had a whole lot of healing to do, needless to say. They weren’t alone in that effort, though. Many people offered their gifts to help the students get through it.

Among those was my friend David Gill who runs a Presbyterian retreat center just outside of Little Rock, Camp Ferncliff. The Jonesboro shooting happened in March of 1998, and Camp Ferncliff invited any of the kids from there who would like to attend to come to a Spring Break camp in March of 1999. The week went well, but no one was prepared for the fact that a month later there would be another shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

As David wrote to me recently, the kids from Jonesboro “wanted to go immediately.” They realized that though there would be lots of people trying to help, they were among the few in the world who really knew how the Columbine kids felt, and they wanted to be there for them to talk to.

Of course, packing up a bunch of middle and high school students and taking them on a road trip to Colorado is not simple, but David and the rest of the crew took the kids seriously, organized things, and in February of 2000 twenty-two of the Jonesboro kids went to Littleton to spend a weekend with kids from Columbine and from Conyers, Georgia, where another six students had been injured in a school shooting a month after Columbine.

It was at that weekend that, according to David, the Jonesboro students said to the rest of the students, “You guys have to come back to our camp!” And they did. The camp ran for five consecutive years, seeing all of those students through high school. In those five years they also incorporated students from Bosnia who had been living through the war there. In 2002, kids from New York City who had felt the impact of 9/11 joined them as well.

Somewhere in there I was also invited to come along and perform for the kids, as well as lead a writing workshop. I was honored by the invitation and touched to be trusted in such a potentially fragile situation. Writing is inherently vulnerable, and I thought a lot about how to approach the workshops before I got there.

Some of these kids had had bullets removed from their bodies. They had hidden behind trees and trashcans to avoid being shot. That’s an experience I haven’t had, thankfully, and I literally can’t imagine what it must be like emotionally, and how one’s perception of the world in general, one’s theology and one’s psyche might be affected. The emotional scar tissue and the physical scar tissue were both very real. David Gill and I talked a bit about the workshops before they started, though, and he encouraged me to let the kids take things where they want them to go — wherever that is.

He also prepared me, though, for the fact that they might not go to as heavy a place as I imagined, and gently, wisely counseled me not to steer. There is a real danger in this kind of interaction, when the facilitator or leader knows they’re dealing with people who have been through serious trauma, to allow his/her own need to help to outweigh the participants’ need to be helped. It’s a natural way to cope with our own sorrow to want to feel like we’ve done something to help alleviate others’ pain. It’s not necessarily useful, though. People process things in their own times and their own ways, and while it’s good to make oneself available for the tearful, heavy conversations, it’s important not to drag people into feelings that might not be where they are right now, or what they need.

The kids I encountered, as it turned out, were not the war-torn, hollow eyed, fragile children I had imagined. They were teenagers, with all that the term implies. The girls wanted to talk about makeup, giggling in the hallway. The boys were trying to look tough and catching as many casual glimpses of the girls as they could. They had been through a great deal, but they were healing, and if you didn’t know their story you wouldn’t have guessed it. I don’t mean to say that there wasn’t deep damage there, of course, but they were healing.

At the beginning of the workshop I did an exercise to generate some ideas of song topics, and in the end the one the kids came up with and chose to write about was memories of getting up early and sneaking to the TV room on Saturday mornings in sock-footed pajamas, too little to know what time it is, turning on the TV and watching the test pattern until the cartoons started. It was fun, quirky and evocative imagery, and though the actual verses they wrote have long ago faded away, I still remember the word pictures they drew.

The camp had solid, well-trained counselors on hand if they were needed, but they didn’t force the kids to go anywhere they didn’t choose to go. David Gill said to me then, “we’re trying to give the kids a normal camp experience.”

At my concerts there I played the songs I often play, about time and hope, etc., and I played silly songs and yes, some poignant ones that brought some tears up.

In an answer to a note I sent to him this week David wrote:

…the kids didn’t want to come to ‘therapy camp.’ They wanted/needed fun, but we came in the back door with folks like yourself who could use fun and creativity and love to open the door to healing. We didn’t provoke the tears, but they came and we provided a safe haven for them. Stories, worship, nature, ‘getting away,’ community and unconditional love…those were the healers.

I was invited back to the camp for those kids a couple of times, and it was a lot of fun as well as deeply moving for me. I’ve sung my song Hard Earned Smile to holocaust survivors and school shooting survivors, juvenile prisoners and terminally ill patients, and the only way to summon the courage to do that is by also digging for a whole lot of humility.

It was hard to look at those delightful kids and think about what had happened to them. The choice for me, though, isn’t between remembering and staying mired in my fear, anger, betrayal, etc. or forgetting and moving on. I think we can remember, feel the tragedy of it, tell the story honestly, while still acknowledging the beauty that is woven through all of it. The kindness and compassion of people like David Gill and the large crowd of people who made that camp available don’t negate the horror of malicious violence— but neither does the violence negate the kindness and compassion.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotations, from historian Howard Zinn:

To be hopeful in bad times is not being foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of competition and cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness… The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

As I write these words the clock has moved back from four digits to three, so it is no longer my birthday in Australia (though I have another few hours of birthday left back in the U.S.). Time passes, we tell our old stories and move through new ones. What a privilege it is to be invited into others’ stories as we go. Tonight I remember the stories I heard and from those students in Arkansas— about sock-footed pajamas— and the small story I lived with them. Here’s to healing, the greatest miracle I know.

From random blog photos

My First Paper

From random blog photos

I turned in my first paper of my post-grad career today. I’ve been deeply immersed in it for the last couple of weeks, and have learned a great deal. The education has come not only from wrestling with the content, though, but also from wrestling with writing an academic paper, which is a very different kind of writing for me. It’s funny, though, that whatever I know about writing I really have learned from writing songs. My undergrad studies were fine in an undergrad sort of way, but I wouldn’t call it serious academics, looking back now.

The assignment was challenging in two unexpected ways. The first is that it was quite general, and the professor explicitly left it to us to narrow down. The second reason, ironically, was that it was short. We were asked to keep the word count to 2000, with a 10% margin of error. That’s actually not a lot of space to take on a meaningful subject, and it was challenging to trim away enough of what I wanted to say to fit that parameter, while still getting a coherent point across.

The delightful thing about Dr. Bleiker is that he is a fine writer and is passionate about writing. If you’ve had much to do with academia, you may agree with me (and Dr. Bleiker) that it is populated by very bright people who write terribly. It’s a real treat to have a professor who encourages us not only to write clearly and with well-organized structure, but also to consider the question of voice, and to write humanly.

I considered posting it here, but in the end decided that it might be best not to before it has even received a grade. Besides that, it’s hard to imagine that there are many people who are so hard up for procrastination aids that they need to read an academic paper. I titled it “Who’s Zoomin’ Who? Ethical Quandaries in the Application of Cultural Boycotts,” referring to the 1985 Aretha Franklin song.

The assignment was:

It can be argued that the moral significance of boundaries is the key problem in articulating an ethics of international politics. Examine the role of these boundaries, and the respective political consequences, by comparing and contrasting at least two different ethical traditions we have discussed in class.

Anyway, glad to be done with it. Now for the next four papers that I need to be working on simultaneously… (!)

First week of classes

From random blog photos

It’s Saturday morning here in Fig Tree Pocket, our little corner of Brisbane. Deanna was up with a restless Mason through much of the night, so she’s getting some sleep while he is, and I’m watching the morning in a quiet house. I’ve finished my first week of classes at the University of Queensland, and this morning I’m taking stock of where I am and where I’m going.

In case anyone reading this missed the chapters leading up to now, you can go here to read a short post on the Rotary World Peace Fellowship and why I’ve suspended my music career for a while. This is an incredible opportunity, and a rich time for me.

The classes are fascinating, though they’re not even the most exciting part of this for me. This semester will consist of three courses and a weekly small group session to take one of the classes a little further in discussion and exercises. A quick note on each:

Advanced International Relations – This class is going to kick my academic butt all over town, I’m afraid, and I’m strangely happy about that. The first article of four we need to read for Monday’s class is only twenty-eight pages long, but took me over four hours of focused time to plow through. I got excited when I saw that it was written by Colin Hay. I mean how dense could an article by the lead singer of Men At Work be?

Different Colin Hay, as it turns out. The learning curve will be steep here, as we’re starting out looking at the major philosophical and academic schools of thought in the history of the field of political science, and a lot of familiarity with the subject matter is assumed. Sure, I understand that Calvin and Hobbes are more than just cartoon characters, but when we get into the “challenge posed to the political science and international relations mainstream by the distinctly post-positivist agendas of constructivism, critical realism, post-structuralism and and postmodernism,” without defining any of those terms, simply discussing their ontological and epistemological implications — for twenty-eight pages — I confess I’ve got to work pretty hard to keep up.

Fortunately, the professor, Martin Weber, is an animated and engaging lecturer, and has encouraged us to interrupt him constantly with questions and/or objections. I imagine I’ll take him up on that.

Principles of Conflict Resolution in Deep-Seated Conflicts will probably be the most accessible of the three classes for me, since that’s an area where I’ve had at least some training and study in my undergrad degree. There will be a good bit of role-playing involved in that one, which I look forward to.

Ethics and Human Rights is taught by Roland Bleiker, who is one of the reasons I made U.Q. my first choice for this Fellowship. Bleiker’s academic interests include the interplay between aesthetics and peace work, which is right up my proverbial alley. We’ll spend the last chunk of the semester in that class role-playing a war crimes tribunal in the International Court of Justice. Even the first class meeting was promising, though. At one point we went around the room and introduced ourselves briefly by name, nation and reason for choosing this class. Among about fifty students there were twenty-eight nationalities represented.

And that’s my deepest joy and excitement in this experience so far. Deanna, Mason and I are going over to a party being thrown by one of the Fellows in a little while, and I’m pretty confident that all six of the inhabited continents will be represented there, hanging out by the pool and chatting on a warm afternoon. The depth of experience that these people bring when they arrive is rich and enticing. While here, we’ll deepen and broaden that experience with intense academic interaction and with our three-month field assignments around the world. And we’ll take these relationships as well as this knowledge with us when we move on from here.

The caliber of the other Fellows is extremely high. Joseph Hongo, for instance, who has been involved with negotiations between rebels and African governments in several African countries, and Zuska Petovska, who has been working for the UN High Commission on Refugees advising on policy questions around refugee issues in eastern Europe. Pamela Padilla worked for the Philippine government in their peace negotiations with Communist rebels there, and Teddy Foday-Musa, who was involved in founding a third political party in Sierra Leone only a few years ago. There are stories like that for each of them, and having their input on these conversations is invaluable. I promise I’ll tell more of their stories later on.

For now, though, I have some reading to do. Then off to the pool.

From random blog photos

How the World Changes

From random blog photos

Deanna and Mason on the bus

It’s Sunday in Brisbane, and yet another warm, clear day. The quick update is this: Mason turned four-months-old yesterday, we’ve been here for a month, all of the campus orientation events are through and classes start tomorrow.

I’ve met all of the fellows, and they live up to their billing. It’s an extraordinary group of people and I can’t wait to dig into these classes together. The Class VI fellows had a little welcoming party for the Class VII fellows Friday night and I re-connected with some of them that I had met before when I visited Brisbane about a year ago.

One of the pre-requisites for the Rotary World Peace Fellowship is that we are required to have at least three years of field work before we apply, so the people I’ll be studying with have rich field experience in peace and development work before they even show up. I’m eager to know more about their histories, and I woke up this morning musing about a random conversation I had yesterday, and determined to record these stories in a more organized way.

Yesterday Deanna and I were waiting for a bus into town and we started talking with a woman who was also waiting. We were going to a museum and she was headed to a lapidary show. I naturally asked if she works with precious stones and she said that she used to, that she did much more of it when she lived in Canada. Conversation about Canada led to the talk about the gorgeous forests there, which led to her telling us about the time she spent in a maximum-security prison.

Huh?

Yep. Marcel, as her name turned out to be, was imprisoned by the Canadian government in the early nineties for taking part in the largest civil disobedience in Canadian history, where, over the course of several months, about three thousand people sat on the road in front of bulldozers to protect some of the last remaining old-growth forests there. I wasn’t surprised that she did jail time, but maximum security for a non-violent protest? It seems that the judge that tried her case was a former employee of the logging company they were resisting, and she was in the first group of fifty to be arrested (with 700+ to follow), so they wanted to make an example of them.

She wasn’t bitter about it, and our conversation was pleasant and encouraging on the whole. She had some powerful stories to tell about the corruption of the court system and the governmental agencies charged with regulating logging, but she also told us about various ways in which the demonstration had been successful – exposing some of that corruption and in the end, changing some of the rules for the better. I got the impression that while the price she payed was high, it was worthwhile.

And this was a conversation at a bus stop, not related to my studies in any way.

Early in the conversation, though, Marcel said something that really struck me. She said (paraphrasing from memory), “There are so many people doing good work in the world, but there aren’t enough people telling those stories, so people tend to think they’re alone and get discouraged.”

She said those words without knowing the first thing about me or my passion for re-telling those stories, but her casual comment served to crystallize an idea I’ve been stewing on for a while. My plan is to interview people who have been out there doing the work and study the common threads among them in terms of their world views and philosophies, as well as what nourishes and sustains them. I’m embarking on a masters degree program tomorrow, of course, so I won’t make any promises about the frequency of these posts, but my hope is to share them with you fairly regularly here on this blog.

So, though I didn’t really get to interview Marcel in the way I hope to interview some others in the future, she pointed me in a new direction, or at least gave me a new sense of focus, with a casual comment at a bus stop.

And that’s how the world changes. One more bit of evidence for my contention that it’s not foolish to think you can change the world. It’s foolish to think you can be in the world and not change it.

Wish me luck and hold me in the Light as I jump in to classes tomorrow. I’m a little daunted, and joyful too.

Oh, and on a lighter topic, I’ll put up some video of Mason soon.

Class VII Fellows

I’m going to meet up with a few of the Fellows with whom I’ll be studying at the University of Queensland. Some have yet to arrive and some are here and looking for places to live (we’re lucky to have figured that out already).

It’s a fascinating looking group of people. Rotary has posted our pictures, nationalities, languages spoken, etc. here. This is all getting quite exciting!

Gaza

This is a long blog, and I apologize for that. I’ve been sitting with my sadness and frustration about current events in Gaza for over two weeks now, and I’m glad to have taken some time to distill some of my feelings. This is as short as I could go, and I’m sure it will have plenty of follow-up. If I had started writing on Saturday morning, I’m not sure I could have stopped.

That morning I did change my Facebook status to say that I was “enraged and heartbroken at Israel’s actions in Gaza.”

I later regretted that. This issue is nothing if not complex, and though Facebook is useful for many kinds of connections, I don’t think it’s the place to have this conversation. It’s not a bumper sticker issue; the short notes for which Facebook is wonderfully useful aren’t too helpful in this case, and may even be destructive.

One of the responses I got to my little blurb was from someone I know and care about in New York who said “Hamas has been bombing Israel for weeks, killing and injuring civilians. Any concerns about that?” and that was when I realized that it was the wrong venue for the conversation I want to have. Not because I don’t have an answer for that question, but because I have a very long one.

I visited Israel and the West Bank this summer as part of an Interfaith Peace Delegation and spent a lot of time in conversation with people all along the political spectrum on both (or maybe ‘several’) sides of the issue. That doesn’t make me an expert on the situation, only an expert on my own experience, but it did leave me with some strong and lasting impressions, and with a sense of the humanity of the people involved. They’re no longer abstract numbers and strangers to me, and life was easier when they were.

Among the places I visited is the town of Sderot which is the closest town to Gaza and which bears the brunt of Palestinian Qassam rocket attacks. I met a mother there whose teenage daughter still wets her bed and who struggles with night terrors because of those rockets. I had lunch on a kibbutz, saw the elementary school with a concrete shell built over it for protection from missiles, and stood inside the bomb shelters where everyone runs when the sirens sound to indicate incoming rockets. I wept there, and to accuse me of being insensitive to the concerns and suffering of the people of Sderot or other Israelis is simply inaccurate, and arguably unfair.

And that brings me to one of the larger questions I’ve been turning over in my head— how is it that to express sympathy and sorrow and even rage because of the suffering of people on one side of a conflict often means that we dismiss the suffering of people on another side? I vocally opposed the invasion of Iraq long before it started and I mourn the tragedy of tens of thousands of innocents who died under our fire— bullets and missiles I paid for with my tax dollars. Does that keep me from expressing compassion and sympathy for U.S. soldiers serving in that war? It doesn’t. If you doubt that I have done that, both privately and publicly, I have personal references among the military to bear me out.

So let’s establish that first rule for the conversation here — to express compassion for someone is not the same as justifying their actions, and to express anger at a party’s actions in a conflict doesn’t mean that you are without compassion for them or even that you excuse the actions of the other party. Anyone who has ever loved an addict understands that the best way to love someone is sometimes to oppose their wishes— i.e. not to buy them a drink.

As an example, I’ll go on record here and say that I oppose the Israeli occupation of all land beyond the pre-’67 borders. That doesn’t make me anti-Israeli. I’m as pro-Israeli as I am pro-Palestinian, and I think that ending the occupation is the best thing for Israel as well as Palestine. There are many Jews that agree with me on this one, and many, many Israelis (I met quite a few of them there).

I think the message underlying the question from my friend in New York, though, is ‘why all the fuss about Israeli military action and not so much about ongoing Palestinian violence?’

It’s true, though, that while I have compassion and sympathy for all the civilians caught up in this on all sides, I do tend to make more noise about Israeli military action, and in taking my own inventory as to why that is, I have these thoughts to offer. They are personal, more than broadly political.

In the end, my concerns are much more humanitarian than political. I care very little about which parties are in power except regarding how it relates to people’s lives and liberty, and while I do loudly object to the suffering of Israelis, I think the suffering of Palestinians in the current era is hugely out of proportion. The Gaza strip, at the moment, is one of the most densely populated areas on the planet, and has one of the highest infant mortality rates, due to the years long blockade of Gaza.

There is a general misconception in the West, I think, that this is a struggle between equals. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not that. It’s not Iraq and Iran fighting; it’s not India and Pakistan. Israel has one of the world’s most powerful militaries, and though recent days have seen more powerful rockets coming out of Gaza, the Qassams that they have been firing for years look more similar to the model rockets I made in the garage as a kid than to the targeted drone missiles used by the Israeli military, one of the most powerful in the world. They are fueled with detergent and have no guidance systems whatsoever. Between 2004 and a week ago, Qassams killed one Israeli. Fifteen have been killed in the history of the Qassam (since 2001). Every one of those was a precious life, and I don’t excuse that in any way. There have been injuries as well, and as I mentioned above, psychological and property damage that runs deep and will take generations to heal.

To equate those homemade rocket attacks with the current blasting of Gaza, though, is incongruent.

So there is a huge power imbalance in this situation, and in every conflict I hold the more powerful more responsible. The other reason, though, is that I try very hard to take personal responsibility for my own actions in the world, and while I profoundly disapprove of the actions of Hamas, I’m not paying for their rockets myself. That’s not the case with the Israeli rockets. The U.S. sends billions of dollars in explicitly military aid to Israel each year, then sells them the bunker-busting thousand-pound bombs they are dropping as I type this. In this very moment, bombs that I chipped in to pay for are taking the lives of innocents and breeding generations more of hatred. There is a line in my own faith tradition about removing the log in my own eye before I worry about the mote in my brother’s, and that tends to make me more vocal in my criticism of Israel.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that though I sometimes hear U.S. citizens arguing that we should ‘stay out of it,’ ignorantly implying that we ever were out of it, the rest of the world is keenly aware that the U.S. provides huge funding to the Israeli government. They don’t “hate us because we’re free” as President Bush famously suggested. They hate us because we’re bombing their children.

So about Gaza…

Israeli military apologists like to say that Israel “pulled out of Gaza entirely” in 2005 and gave it back to the Palestinians. It would be more accurate to say that Israel moved the prison guards out of the prison to the outside wall (keeping in mind that there are 1.5 million people inside that prison who haven’t been convicted of anything). There is a huge wall around the entirety of Gaza except for the ocean and a checkpoint into Egypt. Egypt is under intense pressure from the U.S. and Israel to keep that one closed, and largely does so, though they’ve been letting ambulances through in recent days. Israel enforces a naval blockade around Gaza that allows nearly no one through, and no goods and supplies. As a result, the economy has completely collapsed.

You may wonder if I’m exaggerating about Gaza being a prison, and all I can do is show you these pictures, which I took this summer.

This is the edge of Gaza:

From Israel/Palestine

And this is an Israeli prison:

From Israel/Palestine

Hamas, which rules Gaza, is in my view a violent and corrupt bunch of thugs, and I explicitly oppose both their position that Israel has no right to exist and their ongoing rocket attacks. It’s important to note, though, that they came to power democratically, by harnessing generations of frustration with oppression among Palestinians.

I’ve walked through the checkpoints that Palestinians have to deal with daily to go to school, to work, to do their lives at all. Sometimes those checkpoints are closed arbitrarily for days, and no matter what you may need to do, whether it’s important business, your wedding or life and death surgery, you can’t get through. I’ve also been on cattle ranches in Wyoming, and I find the checkpoints resemble nothing so much as a cattle branding run, with long cages (the roof caged as well) and full-body turnstiles that one has to walk through to reach a central chamber where you are either allowed through or sent back after pressing your papers against glass on the side of the chamber. It’s terrifying and humiliating, and of course, I didn’t have to be there. Israeli citizens and foreigners with credentials like mine can just drive right past it on a road that Palestinians are not allowed to use.

Collective punishment of a people for the crimes of a group within that people is explicitly illegal in international law as well as immoral. Hamas was democratically elected for two reasons— one, the Palestinians were frustrated by the lack of any progress on the part of more moderate voices, and two, Fatah is notoriously corrupt and Hamas seemed at the time to be less so.

On Sunday I went to listen to Raphael Danziger, who is the Director of Research and Information for AIPAC, the Israeli Government lobbying organization in the U.S. He gave talking points to defend the Israeli action, and as part of his talk he gave the two objectives of this current military action.

• One, to bring peace to the people of Southern Israel by stopping the Qassam rockets.

• Two, to significantly weaken or destroy the resupplying tunnels from Egypt that have been dug to get around the blockade.

This first objective seems staggeringly naive to me— killing 900 people inside Gaza will weaken the party that calls for a violent response to violence rather than peaceful efforts? The killing of civilians always strengthens the military factions within a political struggle unless the entire population is wiped out so that there are no more relatives of the dead.

It reminds me of the story of the crab man who found starfish eating his crabs, so he cut them into tiny pieces and threw them back in the ocean. Each piece becomes a new starfish. That’s not a productive strategy.

The second objective, to destroy the tunnels, also seems like a weak justification for the loss of so many precious lives. These tunnels, which have been used to smuggle in arms as well as to bring water, food and medical supplies that have been blockaded by Israel, will doubtless be hugely damaged— and then quickly replaced. I’m sure the current military action will do huge damage to that tunnel system, and I’m also sure, as I think almost everyone is, that they will be rebuilt in a few weeks.

Another note that I received on Facebook from a friend whose views and wisdom I deeply respect said this: “What were the options for Israel? Hamas waited until the end of the truce, I guess just out of political deference to Egypt, and then started firing rockets into Israel. I don’t understand what Israel is supposed to do.”

The six month cease-fire that ended a couple of weeks ago saw Qassam rocket fire only reduced, not eliminated. It went down from about forty rockets a day to two, according to Mr. Danziger. Two is two too many, of course, and “what else could they do?” is a reasonable question. One thing that needs to be mentioned, though, is that Qassams are— literally— homemade rockets, and Hamas doesn’t have a military. They’re not allowed to. Some of these rockets are being fired by people who simply don’t buy into the ceasefire, and I don’t think Hamas has control over everything happening there. There are many people who support Fatah rather than Hamas in Gaza (left of Hamas), and it’s reasonable to assume that there are also people who are even farther to the right.

So the rockets went from 40 to 2 a day, which is a significant decrease, but not a complete cease fire— they were violating the terms of the agreement if those rockets were coming from Hamas, which they may have been, though they didn’t claim responsibility for them as they did for the non-cease fire rockets.

The astounding omission on the news reports of this so far, though, is that the Israeli part of the cease fire was that they were going to ease the blockade. And that simply didn’t happen at all. While I don’t excuse any Qassam, I find the question that was posed to me “I don’t understand what Israel is supposed to do” applies equally in the other direction. Is the scenario that Israel is not required to keep to its part of the bargain, but Hamas is?

I think the options for Israel could have included lessening the humanitarian suffering in Gaza, which Israel alone has the power to do, and which I believe could have had the effect of lessening the power of Hamas. I have a hard time believing that the current bombing campaign will do so.

And here’s the rub – the logic I’ve heard presented most often for this whole situation basically boils down to “he hit me first.”

We’ve got to be bigger than that. ‘I’ll stop firing when they stop firing’ means no one ever stops firing. Being the one that stops firing first does buy some moral authority, and decimating an entire people spends it.

William Sloan Coffin said “Not to take sides is effectively to weigh in on the side of the stronger.” I’m sure he didn’t mean taking the side of one people against another. I think he was suggesting, though, that silence— not taking a position on a contentious question— is not to be confused with fairness. Because I care about the people of Israel and I care about the people of Gaza and the West Bank, I loudly, firmly and compassionately oppose the current military action of the Israeli government.

P.S. U.S. government politicians seem to be uniformly supporting Israel’s actions. The House voted overwhelmingly just a few days ago to put the entire blame for the current situation on Hamas and not on Israel or ourselves. Here are a few organizations that are presenting another view (all of them Jewish, incidentally). Below that is a link to Jon Stewart’s commentary of the other night on “The Daily Show.” It was at first hard to watch for me, given that he is making comedy out of a hard situation, but that’s what he does, and does well. Beyond that, though, he makes some very salient points politically, especially his reply to Michael Bloomberg’s statement. He’s bound to be receiving more hate mail than he ever has in his career at the moment, so if you feel inclined to sign the note thanking Jon, who is Jewish, for his courage, it is included in the link.

Also, I welcome comments here, especially from those that disagree. Wrestling with each other over political questions is the heart of democracy, and I believe in it (I went to hear the guy from AIPAC and listened quietly and attentively). I only ask that you be respectful in your comments. If that isn’t adhered to, they won’t be posted. No hate. Thank you.

Something I think is worth doing

This summer I spent two weeks in Israel and Palestine, mostly in the West Bank. The group I traveled with, Interfaith Peace Builders, met with people from all sides of the conflict there, and had first-hand experience of the way people are treating each other. It left me somewhat radicalized, but not necessarily in the ways you might imagine. I didn’t end up more “pro-Palestinian,” or more “pro-Israeli.” In fact, I came to the conclusion that those terms are outdated.

What I am, if we have to put a label on it, is anti-occupation. I think the occupation is damaging everyone involved, Israelis as well as Palestinians. It is the nature of oppression that it oppresses everyone, even the oppressors, and this oppression must end, for the good of all.

This is a short video of the Shministim, who are young Israelis refusing to serve in the Israeli military on grounds of conscience. They are going to jail because of it. Below the video is an online petition that you can sign if you feel so moved.

Gandhi said that he believed in the goodness of the British people and wanted to show them their own injustice, believing that when injustice is sufficiently exposed, people stand up against it. In retrospect, he was right. I believe in the goodness of the Israeli people as well, and in fact, many do stand against the occupation, as I do.

Shalom and Salaam,

David

Sign the petition

One Last Article

This nice article came out a this weekend in Blue Ridge Now. That may be my last press for a while. I guess I’m officially retired now.