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Commentary: A Future of Hope for Palestine-Israel?
April 22, 2024 / By Rev. Gary E. Doupe / .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
The Rev. Gary E. Doupe is a retired Upper New York elder and wrote the following reflection on behalf of the Upper New York Task Force for Peace with Justice in Palestine-Israel.
Since retiring from full-time pastoral work, I’ve been part of our UNY Conference Task Force on Peace with Justice in Palestine-Israel. In 2012 I traveled to the West Bank, Israel, Jerusalem, and Gaza with a group known then as “Interfaith Peace-Builders” (now called “Eyewitness Palestine” (EP)). I cannot commend its leadership and work highly enough. If you’re interested in seeing for yourself, I encourage you to consider a trip with EP or another responsible group who will introduce you to both Israelis and Palestinians. You would want to hear from people actively engaged in building relationships and foundations for a just and lasting peace. The New York State Council of Churches is preparing such a trip for this coming fall. Contact the Council directly or email me at gary@doupe.com if you’re interested.
Over the last couple of decades, I have read widely, engaged with deeply-rooted and knowledgeable people, experienced the Holy Land, visited its homes, and searched my heart. I can imagine only one way for there to be justice among all who feel deeply connected to the Holy Land: that they welcome one another as partners in a democratic, unitary state. You and I have no mandate to create such an outcome. We of the United States have no special wisdom or position to do so. The money we’ve invested in the governments of Israel and Palestine does not give us that power, even if we should think it does.
Though the Arabic and Hebrew languages emerged from a common root (making these two Semitic peoples in a real sense “cousins”), we know that a family tree does not guarantee family-feeling. Holy Land conflict is not about religion, as some may assume, but rather a dispute over land and power. Palestinian Christians and Muslims manifest no conflict or ill feeling toward each other, and get along well. All Palestinians were concerned when farms, homes, and land were taken by Jewish immigrants.
Jewish people driven from their Palestinian homes by Romans, almost 2000 years ago, had created a Jewish culture in Europe. They settled in many places, but their greatest challenge was the anti-Jewish attitudes of so-called “Christian” peoples and nations. In Spain, Jews were expected to adopt Christianity, and when they refused, the inquisition condemned many to torture and death. Escaping Spain, Jews were welcomed in Muslim countries, but not so much among Christians. In the wake of the 16th century Protestant Reformation, Luther and other Protestant leaders interpreted the Gospel of John as indicting Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus. While in some places Jews blended into European culture, oftentimes they kept Jewish traditions alive in small communities or ghettos. Barely tolerated in some places, in others Jews won respect as professionals, businessmen, and intellectuals. Yet anti-Jewish attitudes surfaced and resurfaced, and when “Master Race” (Aryan culture) theories were developed by the German Nazi Party in the 1930s, Jews were subjected to expulsion, imprisonment, and mass murder in death camps—a policy later described as the “Holocaust.” Some six million Jews died, victims in no small measure of a malignant, distorted theology, where self-identified “Christians” substituted for the love of Christ a hatred for Jews.
The Holocaust was, in other words, a hideous blasphemy by an offspring of “Western Christian” culture which knew too little of Christ.
At the end of WW II, guilt-ridden governments: English, French, American and others, responded to the Holocaust with the help of the newly formed United Nations, by partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab sectors. They would solve the “Jewish problem” by shuffling Jews into a country “all their own” (thereby reducing Jewish presence in Europe and America). Some justified that unilateral decision of November 1947 by reference to a shallow slogan: “A land without people for people without a land.” The slogan was bogus. Palestine had been occupied and farmed, by mostly-Arab people, for centuries. Far from being empty, it was populated, prodigiously productive, and peaceful. An increasing minority of Jews lived and worked alongside their Arab-majority neighbors.
Some Jews in the U.S. asked leaders of the Jewish state (self-proclaimed in May 1948) to be attentive to the just needs of Palestinian Arab families driven out when Jewish para-military groups—Haganah and Irgun—took possession of their farms and homes. More than a hundred Palestinian villages were eliminated by such groups. After a slaughter of villagers in Deir Yassin, many Palestinians fled for their lives, and afterward were barred by Israel from returning home—in direct violation of international law. When U.S. Jewish critics voiced concern, Israeli officials worked to silence their voices.
Don Peretz, who taught Middle East Studies for many years at Binghamton University, was one of those voices(1). I was fortunate to become a friend of Don (born of two Jewish parents, his father born in Jerusalem) and eventually to learn that Don had volunteered to work with Quakers in the resettlement of Holy Land families after WW II. His Ph.D. dissertation (Columbia University) was the first ever to explore the plight of Palestinian refugees after Israel’s declaration of statehood. Don knew at first hand the “Nakba”—the catastrophe—suffered by Palestinians and did not want their suffering to continue.
Once I commented to Don that there seemed to be no “solution” to the conflict. He replied, “Well, there are lots of solutions. But people must be willing to take them.”
It is anyone’s guess how a process may unfold that will build sufficient trust for peace and hope to prevail. I do not believe that for our country to continue spending several billions of dollars each year to arm the Israeli Defense Force, to continue a policy of separation and mutual resentment, will accomplish that goal.
I know this. When I visited apartheid South Africa in 1978, I never imagined I’d live to see the end of that apartheid system. Yet apartheid was replaced with universal suffrage in 1994. South Africa is still segregated in fact, but it no longer lives under separation laws, and is working toward justice. On hopeful days, I say the same for my land: we are working toward justice! To say we live in “United States” is an act of faith—just by stating our name!
[1]The story of Don Peretz and other Jewish voices of conscience is detailed in a recent book by Geoffrey Levin: Our Palestine Question, published 2023 by Yale University Press.