The Conflict in Iran and Our Own Backyard

Thursday February 29, 2012

       If the conflict with Iran does not rise to nuclear grade next week, the politics behind it will.  President Obama is expected once again to bend to the view that U. S. and Israeli interests hold all things in common. Prime Minister Netanyahu is reported to believe “there should be no space between Israel and the U. S. should Israel choose to attack Iran.” Especially true if there is—as all experts seem to believe will happen—a counter-attack by Iran and its allies.   Meanwhile all the President’s political opponents are thrilled by the possibility that the President might prove uncooperative, giving them an easy target—“Obama is anti-Israel”-- and the chance to break the Democrats’ hold on the Jewish vote.

      It is not too much to conjecture that while the war flags are being waved they also provide cover for one of Israel’s apparent largest objectives—to continue to build cities in the West Bank with the ultimate goal of pushing out the Palestinian population into Jordan and other near-by countries. The rhetoric of Israel far Right leader, Avigdor Lieberman, speaks of just such desire. His view lies closer than one might think to the mainstream of Israeli leadership.  Every Israeli administration since the 1967 war has expanded construction of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory. 

      

      The churches bear a measure of responsibility for why the U. S. stands today on the brink of another Middle East War. Christians of all stripes endlessly study the texts about the small world where Jesus walked two thousand years ago but seem deeply averse to studying and engaging what is happening in the same location now.

      Its old news but most Christians are surprised even today to learn that nearly 500,000 Israelis already live in city-size “settlements” built on Palestinian land with more construction underway.

Principal among the enforcers of the current politics is, of course, the powerful American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) which last Spring forced a joint session of Congress to hear Netanyahu, and last summer flew two-thirds of the House of Representatives to Israel for a briefing.

      The AIPAC dynamic not only pushes the President but drives the strategy of local interfaith relations among Christians and Jews. Both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, for somewhat different reasons, have been in decline for decades. It’s not just the triumph of rationalism over faith, but the loss of social status when Protestants provided a cutting edge in the Civil Rights movement and then condemned the Vietnam War (Iraq too).  Pastors, under fire when issues they champion cut contributions to the budget, are glad to receive the next Jewish community relations award for being unobstreperous about Israel and its practices. AIPAC deeply knows this and guides its local minions accordingly. The least the weakened and vulnerable Christians can do is say thank you and stick to the next food drive or home construction project.

It doesn’t have to be and should not be this way.  Faithful silence betrays the demands of history and truth. Consider for instance the proportionality of suffering in the Israel-Palestine conflict.    Most Jews know, as do some Christians and Muslims,that Israel’s border towns have been struck by rockets over the last seven year period with thirty-three Israelis killed by this rocket fire launched by Palestinians organizations. 

What most do not know is that in one three week period alone (December 27, 2008 – January 18, 2009) the Israeli War in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead) killed 1,397 Palestinians. Five Israeli soldiers died. 

      This picture of disproportionality extends over decades. In Lebanon in 2006 Twelve hundred Lebanese died and one hundred twenty-one Israelis. The Israeli prison system holds 4,387 Palestinian prisoners. The Palestinians hold 0 prisoners.

      The only way you can accept this disproportionate suffering is if you believe the Palestinians are a little sub-human and the Jews a little super-human. Is there something wrong about this picture?

       A very long string of books have been published in the past ten years that outline why Israel’s position in relation to the UN Promise to Palestinians of an independent state is wrong and untenable. From Jimmy Carter’s We Can Have Peace In the Holy Land to Mearsheimer and Walt’s analysis of The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy to dozens of books authored by Israelis themselves. Mearsheimer and Walt identify a simple goal:

Encourage a more open debate about these issues, in order to correct existing myths about the Middle East and to force groups in the lobby to defend their position in the face of well-formed opposition. In particular, Americans need to understand the real history of Israel’s founding and the true story of its subsequent conduct [p. 350]

       No such well-informed opposition yet exists.  It could still happen. That’s why faith communities could turn the nuclear direction events have taken into their faith’s finest hour by speaking truth to power, speaking out against a 40 year long occupation of the Palestinian lands by Israel.  Faith communities will bear a significant measure of responsibility if war against Iran is chosen instead of peaceful solutions.

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Unfairness: Villages not connected to a water network [edited]

Per capita daily water consumption for household and municipal use in communities connected to a central running-water network in the West Bank is some 73 liters a day. In Israel, per capita daily use is 242 liters in towns and 211 liters in local councils, more than 3.5 times greater.

The principal reason for the water shortage in the West Bank is the unfair distribution of the water resources shared by Israel and the Palestinians. One of these resources is the Mountain Aquifer which is composed of a few reservoirs of groundwater that lie on both sides of the Green Line. Although this aquifer is the sole water source for residents of the West Bank, Israel uses eighty percent of it, leaving only the remaining twenty percent for the Palestinians. Israel refuses to alter this distribution…

The water shortage is especially hard on residents of Palestinian villages that are not connected to a water network. According to data from 2008, some 191,238 Palestinians live in 134 villages without a running-water network. There are an additional 190,000 Palestinians who live in communities in which the water system is very limited. In the winter and fall, these residents collect rainfall in pits next to their homes and use the water for all their needs. In the spring and summer months, when the water in the pits runs out, the residents rely on water from nearby springs and on water they purchase from owners of private water-tankers.

There are also hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who live in communities with a central running-water network that supplies water irregularly in limited amounts and does not reach everyone in the community. For this reason, some Palestinian authorities supply water in the summer months on a rotation basis: each neighborhood receives water once every few days, for one day or several hours at a time. To supplement the water supplied, these residents have to buy water brought to them in privately owned water-tankers.                                          [B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights]

Correction to Feb. 21st Truth Force Blog

An early draft of my February 21st Blog title Truth Force contained an error that accidentally was not corrected. It concerns Kurt Weil, composer with Maxwll Anderson of the musical drama Lost in the Stars.  Kurt Weill was never a member of the Communist Party. I regret the error.

TRUTH POWER—CAN WE FIND ITS LANGUAGE AGAIN?

TRUTH POWER—CAN WE FIND ITS LANGUAGE AGAIN?

When language is distorted by misuse as propaganda, false advertising, social manipulation, fraudulent information,  the consequences are not only that it can leave us speechless, but the words themselves can become irretrievable, their original meaning lost.  The purpose of the supposed good news about economic recovery this month is to build enthusiasm without providing a realistic assessment.  For that realistic perspective read Noriel Roubini in Slate who describes the Eurozone  in deep recession, the Chinese economy  weakening, and the U. S. economy tightening later this year. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/project_syndicate/2012/02/austerity_china_the_housing_market_and_the_middle_east_four_reasons_to_stay_gloomy_about_the_economy_.html   

This year is the 400^th anniversary of the translation of the Greek, Latin and Hebrew scriptures into a vernacular English that became the King James Bible.  The KJ’s voice gave new language to the voices of Shakespeare, Milton, the Puritans, Jefferson, Melville and virtually all Western writers.  William Tyndale did much of the heavy lifting and told Pope Alexander VI, “I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, will know more of the scriptures than thou dost.” Opposed by prominent voices including Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas Moore, Tyndale—after the penal fashion of the times—was strangled, impaled and burned on a stake in 1636.  The language he used in the KJ had what Gandhi called Satyagraha, “Truth Power.”  Harold Bloom calls it “cognitive music.” Such Truth Power is badly needed in our present era of the ninety-nine and the one percent.  

Today these texts (including drastically worse modern translations) appear to ricochet off the walls of most churches as many congregations grow grayer.  There is only modest evidence that churches have the Tyndalian will to speak words of truth to the unjust use of power.  Prayers yes, but mostly self-concern predominates. Yet, ironically, the churches nested at the heart of American culture could make the difference in this age of financial hierarchies.  There’s precedent for Truth Power in recent history, but it means really getting to work on it.  It means building a big movement to reinstate truth.  Here’s one blue print we could all learn from.

In 1952 a small group met at Union Theological Seminary in New York to organize “Americans for South African Resistance.”  The need was to support the emerging South African Campaign to Defy Unjust Laws just launched by the African National Conference (ANC).  The same year the seminary created a teaching fellowship with cross-pollination potential appointing a South African regional ANC leader, Methodist pastor Z. K. Matthews, who was working closely with Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu. 

The New York executive committee  included early civil rights and labor leaders:  Methodist George Hauser (director of CORE at that time), Socialist Norman Thomas (a former Presbyterian minister), Bayard Rustin (strategic advisor to MLK, Jr.),  A. Philip Randolph (President of the Sleeping Car Porters Union--the first African American union to win major concession from a white dominated corporation),  Roger Baldwin (founder of the ACLU) and Conrad Lynn, a Black civil rights lawyer and Left activist

Others joined in:   A. J. Muste, (Congregationalist pastor and founder of the Fellowship of Reconciliation), NYC Unitarian Pastor, Donald Harrington, Unitarian and socialist, Homer Jack. 

Their activist records were a mix of human rights motifs and socialist ideas; most were pro-labor advocates who helped faith communities become supporters of labor leaders such as Walter Reuther and John L. Lewis. Forty years had passed since Mohandas Gandhi led the first rebellion in South Africa  against the notorious passbook laws.  In their desperation against apartheid, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo moved away from non-violence toward guerilla warfare, subsequently receiving life prison sentences that lasted 27 years. 

In the still totally segregated U. S., civil rights for Blacks was an uphill struggle to say nothing of the struggle in  South Africa.  Nevertheless the waves from this small and diverse band spread far and wide. The composer Kurt Weill (a committed Communist party member) joined with playwright Maxwell Anderson to produce a heartbreaking Broadway musical drama, Lost in the Stars, based on Alan Paton’s equally heartrending South African novel, Cry the Beloved Country.     

Bayard Rustin became the chief strategist for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Philip Randolph chaired the planning that led to the 1964 March on Washington. George Hauser became a liaison with many decolonizing African nations.

 And Gandhi achieved the liberation of India from the British Empire. Philip Glass wrote an opera, Satyagraha, about Gandhi’s Truth Power.

In the latter 20^th century ecumenical leaders such as Tim Smith at the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) documented U. S. corporate complicity actively doing business with the South African Apartheid regime. Paul Stagg, an American Baptist minister and executive director of the New Jersey Council of Churches used ICCR’s analysis of corporate America’s apartheid connection to persuade Governor Tom Kane to divest New Jersey’s large portfolio from such companies—a groundbreaking act.  Nationwide, divestment movements among the churches brought events to flood tide:   by 1990 Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress imprisoned leaders would be released and in 1992 Mandela would be elected President of the new South Africa.  

One recent evening a group of “Occupiers” gathered outside Lincoln Center to harass all the rich one percenters coming out of the opera house after a Satyagraha performance. Philip Glass, the opera’s composer crossed the picket line to join the Occupiers and using their human microphone method said

“When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again”  [as quoted by Alex Ross in The New Yorker, Feb. 13 and 20 edition, 2012]

It’s time for a Truth Power national movement again.

(This Blog has drawn on The New Yorker, Feb. 13 & 20 2012; on the essay “The Book From Which Our Literature Springs” by Robert Pogue Harrison in The New York Review of Books, Feb 9, 2012 and on the book by George Hauser, No One Can Stop the Rain, 1989, Pilgrim Press  

                                                                                                              

The Words Count

Monday, February 13, 2012

THE WORDS COUNT

As the clothing of Athens policemen burst into flames on our television sets and pitched street fighting grows in the European region, many in the U. S. clearly view this as if from Mars.  U. S. perspectives depend on the linguistics of soothing slogans even when bewilderment is the order of the day.  As people discover that the number of school days (or weeks) for their children, their community libraries, their health and safety forces, their own pay levels and pensions (if they have one) all are on the chopping block, they don't need a language of nostalgia but a language that empowers their own engagement with the powers that can lead to their own destruction.  

The term "social justice," for example, is increasingly used by progressives but remains a classic linguistic problem--illegible and largely unknown in the modern lexicon. Justice more likely means you get what you deserve. Social justice is more easily associated with the prison system where others get what they deserve.  

It’s not going to be easy. I audited a recent presentation to supposedly liberal clergy on growing inequality; the power points appeared to fall on unpracticed ears and appeared not comfortably relevant to their line of work.   The pastors’ available framing device (linguist George Lakoff’s term} seemed tuned to familiar metaphors of hope, not engagement.  It is one thing to demand that a mayor make a different decision, but quite another to demand that you begin to reshape your mission by learning a new vocabulary that can engage the fires that are now burning closer.  The same struggle was visible at a presentation to community leaders about revenues and taxation where the harsh realities did not seem to move past the puzzlement stage. “Maybe we’ll deal with this only when we finally hit bottom,” said one participant. The truth is the bottom is near at hand.  

The vague civic theology used by publicists, news media, high tech investors, and most churches, supposedly guards us against that bottom but is based on nostrums that invoke hope but not comprehension.  This is nothing less than a neural challenge say linguists like Lakoff and Noam Chomsky who demonstrate that repeating the same alleged truth endlessly embeds it as truth in the neural operation of our brains.  The capacity to understand and teach others about the fraud of inequality and possible further tragic economic decline depends on writing new stories about ourselves and new terms for their expression.  Surrounded by the reinforcement of old frameworks that amount to programmed passivity, such frames are hard wired into our brains when a practical transformative strategy is needed.  

New strategies require new language that services the truth;  strategies such as training programs for jobs indefensibly shipped overseas, 21^st century versions of a Civilian Conservation Corps that can turn disadvantaged workers into computer engineers; and a new WPA that puts enormously gifted people back to productive work.  Nothing less will do.

Becoming programmatic and active in our advocacy for justice for all will help in the linguistic battle where we are alternately assaulted by the old language of Catholic Bishops opposing contraceptives used by 98 percent of their parishioners; or by the preposterous claim of an Israeli government and its U. S. supporters that they’re serious about a two state solution while building more and more city-size Israeli settlements inside the Palestinian lands.  

           While many faith leaders show signs of resistance to a vacuous theology of hope intended to make engagement unnecessary, the sheer illegibility of goals such as social justice is what’s burning the pants off police forces around the world. If the old words have been made into the flesh of lies, it’s our task to breathe life into new words that are both legible and true.