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My chapel talk on my sabbatical

03 Saturday Nov 2012

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Two weeks ago I gave a talk to my school about a few of my reflections on my sabbatical year in Israel and Palestine. It was given in the context of a the Episcopal service of evening prayer, which my school holds every Wednesday after a community meal. For the readings I selected Psalm 122 and Isaiah 2:1-4. For the hymn we sang “This Is My Song.” In my talk I refer to several previous talks given this year: a Convocation address by Elizabeth Roach, chair of the English Department and chapel talks by Tad Roach, Head of School and Will Speers, Associate Head of School.

Chapel talk

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When thinking about where to go for sabbatical, the four members of my family had different needs. I wanted adventure. My wife Hilary wanted safety, and urban life and good pediatric health care. Hannah wanted a school where her teachers would speak English. And Margaret, at the time just turning three, ask “Do I go too? Is there food there? May I eat it?” Eventually we settled on Jerusalem, which was adventurous, safe, urban, with great health care, a terrific school for the girls, and food Margaret could eat. By the way, we did decide, after a family meeting, to take Margaret with us.

Last year I sat down for individual interviews with thirty Palestinian and Israeli religion teachers. During my talk this evening you will hear some of their voices. Some will be Jewish, some Muslim, some Christian. Some will be secular, others observant. Some you may agree with, and others you may strongly disagree with. In between their thoughts, I will try to describe some of the hopes and frustrations I experienced in Jerusalem. If I came away from Jerusalem with one overriding sense, it was that we must work incredibly hard to understand the deep commitments held by those who differ most from us.

[#1] An orthodox Jew: “That we have now a state and that the Jewish people came back to Israel, this is unbelievable to think. And this is a miracle – this is a great miracle.”

[#2] A Palestinian Muslim: “This Occupation is a reality which we all live, teachers and students. I myself have to go across the checkpoint every day. I tell my students that every person has to go sometimes through pains and oppression, but if you are patient, this will not be for nothing. I talk about prophet Mohammed and how he had a very hard life at times.”

Hannah, Margaret, Hilary and I walk east down a street in Jerusalem. At a certain point, all the shop signs and the conversations around us change from Hebrew to Arabic. Where further up the street we had passed a synagogue, now we pass a mosque. We notice a pair of Israeli soldiers, while further up the street we would have seen only a police officer. Painted on the walls are pictures of the Dome of the Rock, the holiest spot for Muslims in Jerusalem, in the red and green colors of Palestine.  Up the block there were the light blue and white Israeli flags flying, the Star of David visible everywhere. Here is more trash in the street, the sidewalks are more crowded, and the buildings are in worse repair than just a brief walk to the west.

[#3] A secular Jew: “You have to teach Jews how to speak Arabic. There are Arabs everywhere. 20% of the population of Israel is Arab, so put that as an element in the curriculum, visiting villages, exposing Jews to the Arab culture along with the language.”

[#4] A religious Jew: “This school is not a school that exposes our students to the other. You might have visited schools that try to have students meet Arabs, and that’s not the thing here. In general, they are seen as the enemy. It’s not ‘let’s feel sorry for them.’”

What changed so radically in my family’s short stroll down a street heading from west to east? On our walk, my family and I had crossed an invisible line, one that until 45 years ago was the cease-fire line between Israel and the surrounding Arab states.

This walk was peaceful; there was no risk of Israelis and Palestinians erupting into clashes, and I was never worried for the safety of my family. Jerusalem is a safe place. Peace, however, is not the same as justice, or a sense of long-term security. To the Israelis living up the street, there is a powerful sense of living near, next to, on top of an enemy that at times has sworn to drive them into the sea, to kill them. Memories of the Holocaust, of millions of Jews being killed and millions more being displaced, are never far from the surface. Though the horror was committed by a different people in a different place and time, many Israelis cannot help but see the shadow of the Nazis in the hateful statements of Hamas or other Palestinian groups.

[#5] An Orthodox Jew: “It’s very important to challenge students with the history of what Jews went through in other countries and with other people, like the Muslims and the Catholics. For example, the theme of the Holocaust is very strong here. Every second year we go to Poland. The students see there all the things that went on.”

[#6] A secular Jew: “Normally we teach a lot about the Holocaust. It’s important, but it keeps us in the place where we see ourselves, the Jewish people, as victims. Now that we’re in our own country, we have to think, we have to teach more about what we can learn from the Holocaust.”

To the Palestinians in the neighborhood we had just entered, there are the thousand burdens of occupation. They risk being forced out of their homes. Getting good work is difficult,  especially since they are unable to travel around the country without special permits. The school system is underfunded, as are other social services. To my eyes, evidence of Palestinian loss abounds. Jerusalem in 2012 is a city at peace, but that does not mean it is a peaceful city.

I was immensely frustrated by the inequities I encountered, for two reasons. First, they are completely human-made. The first thing most people will say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “it is complicated.” I disagree. Without the extremists on both sides acting as spoilers, the outlines of a relatively fair political settlement are clear, and have been clear for decades. Second, life in Jerusalem is getting more and more unfair. In the United States, for all our failings, the arc of domestic human rights in my lifetime has advanced from Martin Luther King to the womens’ rights movement to the gay rights movement. In Jerusalem and in all of the occupied territories, it is the opposite. Palestinians have been losing houses, employment, and rights of movement throughout this same stretch of time.

The tragedy of Jerusalem is the inability to listen, and not simply to listen to the debating points of the other side in order to refute them. Many on each side fail to appreciate the deep feelings beneath the arguments. These two people, the Israelis and the Palestinians, claim the city as their own. I sought to soak myself in the stories each had to tell, stories filled with sacred joy, with moments of triumph and beauty, with instances of deep connection. I attended and nodded as I was told stories resonant with visceral suffering, with sadness and longing, with powerful experiences of loss. Sometimes my conversationalists would erupt in anger. Occasionally I would be the one to feel anger, as when a Jewish teacher repeated the claim that most Palestinians had only been in the land 100 years, or when a Palestinian artist joked lightly about his dad having built bombs.

In her Convocation address, Mrs. Roach encouraged us “to resist defensiveness, closed-mindedness, and competition, to practice using a tone that invites conversation, thought and reflection. In these moments, we cannot hide from each other; we are open, vulnerable, exposed, to an extent; they are moments that we cannot fully control but rather moments in which we need to be fully present and open and real, moments that may lead to new ideas and new understandings about ourselves and the world around us.” How do Israeli and Palestinian teachers open themselves up to each other in these ways? In my interviews I asked each teacher why, of all the paths open to them, did they choose to become teachers? Why specifically did they end up teaching about religion? What did they most hope their students took away from their studies? I also wanted to know how I as a teacher could teach more effectively about those people very different from my students and from me.

[#7] An ultra-Orthodox Jew: “We learn the same stuff that we learned 2000 years ago. When we die we will meet the people who wrote our books. We will talk to them on the same level, they will understand us and we will understand them, because these 2000 years that have passed haven’t changed anything for us.”

[#8] A Palestinian Muslim: “My students are happiest when they learn about Islamic civilization and Palestine. They imagine they are living in past times. They imagine how they would act, if they were in the place of a historical person how they would act.”

[#9] A Palestinian Christian: ““So we teach the Word of God. Because as Christians we believe that we are worshipping one God, Jesus Christ, even if we have different denominations.”

I found their answers fascinating, and to a certain extent disturbing. Unlike our commitment at St. Andrew’s to expose students to a wide range of perspectives and beliefs, I discovered that many teachers in Israel and Palestine teach almost exclusively their own religious tradition. Though in Jerusalem they pass each other in the street every day, the level of distrust and lack of empathy can be extreme. I felt annoyed at times when I heard members of each group steep themselves in their own past, not teaching or learning the past of the other people around them. I spoke with Israelis who believed that the Palestinians, who have lived in Jerusalem for thousands of years, do not consider the city of Jerusalem sacred, and should be willing to live just as happily in Jordan. I met Palestinians who believed that Israelis made up the claim that there once was a Jewish temple on the mount where al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock now stand. This is not only a central tenet of Jewish faith and identity, it is also an archeologically and historically indisputable fact. I came to believe that these peoples’ religious education had failed them, no matter how well one could argue Talmud, or the other could chant the Qur’an. It had failed them. They had not practiced the art of steeping themselves in the personal, social, political, historical and religious milieu of the other. They need, to quote Mrs. Roach again, “to find ways to communicate, to connect, to think, to live in productive, vibrant and generous ways.”

Encouragingly, I also met both Palestinian and Israeli teachers who sought, often without much support from their schools, to communicate an understanding of the other. They could express the holiness of Jerusalem for themselves and for others, a holiness you heard Mr. Speers evoke so beautifully. Whether it is a Jew placing a written prayer in the Western Wall, a Muslim standing shoulder to shoulder with other believers and prostrating at the al-Aqsa mosque, or a Christian kneeling to kiss the stone that held Jesus’ cross, Jerusalem holds almost too much meaning for too many people. As Mr. Speers’ wondered about the Western Wall, “How could a barren, undecorated, lifeless wall be so intimate, nourish such a communion, touch me back?” I often felt relief and comfort when I spoke with the Muslim, Christian and Jewish teachers who make room to listen to this feeling of connection not just within themselves, but within their neighbors.

[#10] A Palestinian Muslim: “The Qur’an and the Hadith speak about the love between peoples, peace between peoples, and hope.”

[#11] A religious Jew who teaches at a rare multiethnic school: “It’s so important to us that every child be exposed to the three monotheistic religions, of whom we have representatives in the school.”

I also admired those teachers who sought to ask themselves difficult questions about their own histories, beliefs and actions. Mr. Roach modeled this for us in our first St. Anne’s chapel when he simultaneously celebrated the history of the church and yet acknowledged, “As beautiful as this church is, I always remind myself that ‘good Christian people’ (Flannery O’Connor’s phrase) worshipped and prayed here and accepted a balcony section reserved for slaves. Such congregations once gathered secure in their beliefs that they were following God’s word; they simply did not allow the words of the service to awaken them to the depravity of racism.” Again, we come back to Mrs. Roach’s call to us to listen, in this case to think critically about our own tradition.

[#12] A Palestinian Muslim: I don’t teach in an extreme way. For example in Islam, we are not supposed to listen to music, OK? So when my students ask me what about music? I say, no we can listen to music. I myself listen to music, but we have to choose what kind of music to listen to. Because of globalization and because of the use of internet and um Facebook and computers, now it’s an open world. We don’t have to be extreme.

[#13] A secular Jew: When I introduce a reading from just one perspective, the students now object, “but this is the Jewish point of view. We are not religious, we want to see other points of view. We understand we are living in the Jewish culture and we want to know about it, but can we learn something else? Something that we can decide to live by?” And it became very clear that they want to meet as many options as possible.

Many times in our year of walking around Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, and Ramallah, and the Galilee, and the desert, Hannah and Margaret would encounter something that made them say, “That’s not fair.” Usually it was the way the Palestinians were being treated under occupation, though sometimes it was the history of the Jewish people. Of course, a reflexive sense of fairness does not necessarily lead to an open appreciation for the others’ hopes and fears. It can be, however, a beginning. How do we seek to make the world more fair? I feel even more strongly now than when I departed for Jerusalem that we must acknowledge the importance of knowing ourselves, our history, and our beliefs. We then push beyond that to making a deep connection to knowing others, their history, and their beliefs. We need not come to believe what they believe, but we should seek to have a rich understanding of how they came to be who they are.

I am incredibly grateful to Mr. Roach and Mr. Speers, to St. Andrew’s School, to the Fulbright Fund, and especially to my wife Hilary for giving me this amazing opportunity. I am also appreciative of the work of all those across the world fighting for the right of peoples to live justly in multiethnic states. I pray, not just for the peace of Jerusalem, but also for a deep mutual understanding in Jerusalem, an understanding that leads to justice.

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Less and more encouraging signs in Ramallah

09 Wednesday May 2012

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Qalandia in the morning; schoolgirls heading to Jerusalem

In the morning I crossed the Qalandia checkpoint, as I often do, at the same time as many students. In this case I was heading to Ramallah while many kids were heading in the other direction. My goal was to meet a representative of the PA Ministry of Education who could introduce me to teachers to interview.

PA Ministry of Education

Ministry of Education sign

The PA Ministry of Education is far less architecturally imposing than the Israeli Ministry, but I draw no real conclusions from that other than the PA building is in the traditional style and the Israeli building was unfortunately erected as an Internationalist wonder, probably in the 70s.

I had no appointment, only a name, so several people gave me directions through the building. The third person actually offered to guide me. An Austrian-Palestinian, Sami Aburoza is a consultant for the German Icon Institut and, I found out later, someone who has done significant work and writing on Palestinian economic issues. His goal is to centralize all the various educational donor projects under a single plan. As he noted, the possibilities for saving money are significant – for example, to have all donors accept the same report rather than having different bureaucrats write different reports for donors with whom they are working.

Poster supporting hunger strikers

Upon reaching my contact’s office, we discovered that many people (including students) would be out for the afternoon for a rally in support of the hunger striking prisoners in Israeli jails. While my contact was out, his assistant got all my information and I will set up a meeting for next week.

Small rally in clocktower square supporting hunger strikers

I then went over to clocktower square to see the rally. The organizers had set up a tent with photos of the prisoners, music was playing, and some students were chanting. Perhaps several hundred people were there, and it did not seem to have yet gotten off the ground. I went to lunch, and upon return things were quiet. It seems the rally was less of a massive event and more one of many that are currently revolving around the hunger strike. While I find hunger striking saddening, I do hope that the shift to non-violent techniques on the Palestinian side continues.

Poster for Nakba Day insisting on right of return

Meanwhile Nakba Day is coming up, the day on which Palestinians mourn their loss in the 1948 war and subsequent refugee status. Signs have been put up, some of which state that the right of return to homes in 1948 Israel is the only condition that will statisfy them. As I’ve written before, since Israel has most of the power and will never agree to that demand, I find it gets in the way of thinking about a route forward to the two-state solution, which I believe is still the quickest way for most Palestinians to improve their lives.

Benzion Netanyahu on the essential nature of Arabs

05 Saturday May 2012

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Professor of History Benzion Netanyahu recently died, and because his son is the Prime Minister of Israel, his work has been revisited in many places. I recently read on the blog +972 excerpts from a 2009 interview with Prof. Netanyahu. See the excerpts below.

I’m most interested in his belief in cultural essentialism, which I believe is inaccurate. Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail argues powerfully against cultural essentialism, as does Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. As a teacher, I wonder how pervasive cultural essentialism is in the schools, or to say it more positively, what kind of work is being done to question, complicate and problematize that worldview.

On the “essence” of Arabs
Prof. Netanyahu: The Jews and the Arabs are like two goats facing each other on a narrow bridge. One must jump to the river – but that involves a danger of death. The strong goat will make the weaker one jump … and I believe the Jewish power will prevail.
Q: What does the Arabs’ “jump” entail?
A: That they won’t be able to face [anymore] war with us, which will include withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more. They won’t be able to exist, and they will run away from here. But it all depends on the war, and whether we will win the battles with them.
Q: I suppose you don’t believe in the peace process.
A: I don’t see any signs that the Arabs want peace. … We will face fierce attacks from the Arabs, and we must react firmly. If we don’t, they will go on and Jews will start leaving the country. … We just handed them a strong beating in Gaza, and they still bargain with us over one hostage. … If we gave them a beating that would really hurt them, they would have given us Gilad Shalit back.
Q: Operation Cast Lead was one of the worst beatings we ever handed on a civilian population.
A: That’s not enough. It’s possible that we should have hit harder.
Q: You don’t like the Arabs, to say the least.
A: The Bible finds no worse image than that of the man from the desert. And why? Because he has no respect for any law. Because in the desert he can do as he pleases. The tendency toward conflict is in the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him any compromise or agreement. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war.
Q: Is there any hope of peace?
A: Out of an agreement? No. The other side might keep the peace if it understands that doing anything [else] will cause it enormous pain. The two-state solution doesn’t exist. There are no two peoples here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population. … There is no Palestinian people, so you don’t create a state for an imaginary nation. … They only call themselves a people in order to fight the Jews.
Q: So what’s the solution?
A: No solution but force … strong military rule. Any outbreak will bring upon the Arabs enormous suffering. We shouldn’t wait for a big uprising to start, but rather act immediately with great force to prevent them from carrying on. … If it’s possible, we should conquer any disputed territory in the Land of Israel. Conquer and hold it, even if it brings us years of war. We should conquer Gaza, and parts of the Galilee, and the Golan. This will bring upon us a bloody war, since war is difficult for us – we don’t have a lot of territory, while the Arabs have lots of space to retreat to. But that’s the only way to survive here.
There is valuable experience [on this matter] we don’t pay notice to. I mean the Ottoman rule over the Arabs. The Turks ruled over the Arabs for 400 years, and there was peace and quiet everywhere. The Arabs hated the Ottomans, but every little thing they did brought mass killings and hanging in towns squares. They were hanging people in Damascus, and Izmir … every town had hanging posts in its center. … The Arabs were so badly beaten, they didn’t dare revolt. Naturally, I don’t recommend the use of hangings as a show of force like the Turks did, I just want to show that the only thing that might move the Arabs from the rejectionist position is force.
On the peace process
Prof. Netanyahu: The problem with the Left is that it thinks the war with the Arabs is like all the wars that nations around the world are conducting. These wars end with a compromise after one side wins or after both sides get tired from war and understand that victory is not possible. But in the Arabs’ case, their nature and character won’t allow any compromise. When they talk of compromise, it’s a way of deceiving. They want to make the other side stop giving its best efforts and fall into the trap of compromising. The Left helps them with that goal.
Q: If compromise replaces war, what is the damage?
A: Compromise is not realistic. It weakens our positions and brings us to a state of limpness, of false believes, of illusions. Every illusion is weakening.
On Arab citizens of Israel
Prof. Netanyahu: We don’t have a real partnership with them. The Arab citizens’ goal is to destroy us. They don’t deny that they want to destroy us. Except for a small minority who is willing to live with us under certain agreements because of the economic benefits they receive, the vast majority of the Israeli Arabs would chose to exterminate us if they had the option to do so. Because of our power they can’t say this, so they keep quiet and concentrate on their daily life.
I think we should speak to the Israeli Arabs in the language they understand and admire – the language of force. If we act with strength against any crime they commit, they will understand we show no forgiveness. Had we used this language from the start, they would have been more careful.
I am talking about strength that is based on justice. They should know that we will maintain a just attitude toward them, but a tough one. You don’t kill or hurt people or deny their right to make a living just like that. In the villages that we rule, we need to grant them all the rights – infrastructure, and transportation and education … but they have to give things in return. If the teachers are inciting the students, we should close the schools and expel the teachers. … We should preserve their rights, but also ours.
On his son, Israel’s prime minister
Prof. Netanyahu: Benjamin, or Bibi, is, in several aspects, a great man. He can influence and motivate people to do what’s necessary. … He is loyal to his people, and has a sense of responsibility. … He is not one who prefers the comfort of compromise just to rid himself of pressure.
Q. Is he influenced by your opinions?
A: Sometimes I feel Bibi is influenced by them from a very early age, and sometimes I don’t. We don’t always have the same opinions…
Q: And still, how much do you think you’ve influenced his opinions today?
A: I have a general idea. Bibi might aim for the same goals as mine, but he keeps to himself the ways to achieve them, because if he gave expression to them, he would expose his goals.
Q: Is that your wish?
A: No, I just believe that this could be the case. Because he is smart. Because he is very careful. Because he has his ways of handling himself. I am talking about tactics regarding the revealing of theories that people with a different ideology might not accept. That’s why he doesn’t expose them – because of the reaction from his enemies as well as from the people whose support he seeks. It’s an assumption, but it might be correct.

The future of Libya?

05 Thursday Apr 2012

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I just heard BBC Channel 4 International Editor Lindsey Hilsum speak at Foyle’s Bookshop in London on her new book, Sandstorm. After a few days off from the Middle East and North Africa, it drew me back in. It is refreshing to hear the changes in the Arab world be discussed for an hour with no mention of Israel/Palestine. (Not that I don’t think Palestine and Israel are quite important, simply that there are other lenses through which to view events in the region.)

Parliament is easy to see - we took the London Eye. Truly inclusive parliamentary democracy, however, is hard to create.

While most of Sandstorm is about the horrors of the Qaddafi regime and the heroism of some the longer-term resistors, Hilsum did speak a little about the future of Libya. Since I am currently reading Why Nations Fail, and especially its section on why revolutionary movements often slip back into dictatorship, I was especially curious about her thoughts on whether Libya can resist such a failure. Encouragingly, she does not believe that a decline back into a nondemocratic regime is inevitable.

Some of the biggest barriers Hilsum points out are tribal divisions, Islamists as the most organized group, and most importantly a lack of a political culture of negotiation and democratic rule. I note that yesterday two warring towns in Western Libya swore to keep fighting. That said, she cited as strengths the small size of the population, the high level of education, and the oil wealth (though I might note the resource curse makes the last a mixed blessing at best). She argued that while Islamism will do well initially, she does feel that currently Libyans are “allergic” to strong men. She hopes that the Libyans will remain focused on the benefits of democracy for supplying the basic goods a society needs.

Religion in U.S. Presidential Elections

27 Tuesday Mar 2012

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The following is a talk I gave this evening at America House, whose mission is “to encourage a dialogue between the United States and Jerusalemites in order to foster mutual understanding and emphasize shared values.” I spoke on the role of religion in U.S. presidential elections. As perhaps can be seen in my talk, I expected a small gathering of a high school or university students. Instead, I spoke to two NGO directors, three professors, and the head of a major Islamic endowment. It was exciting and a bit intimidating. We had a half-hour discussion afterwards, which I hope they continue without the need for it to be constantly translated for me into English, which slowed down the conversation some!

I’d like to begin by thanking the entire America House team, and especially Christine and Nada, for inviting me this evening. In my life in the United States I teach comparative religions in a private high school, and this year I have been on sabbatical doing research. I miss the classroom, and I am excited for our conversation this evening. Also, my work this year has been focused on Palestinian and Israeli teachers, and I welcome the opportunity to reflect a bit on my home country.

As we think about the role of religion in United States Presidential elections, allow me to begin with a quote from the United States Bill of Rights. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Founders of the United States placed this statement in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution as they recognized the diversity of religious belief within the U.S. colonies and the difficulty they would have keeping those colonies unified if they established one faith as the official religion of the new United States. After all, whose religion would it be? Would it be the Puritanism of New England, the Catholicism of Maryland, the Quakerism of Pennsylvania or the Anglicanism of Virginia? In the 1600s Europe had torn itself apart in religious wars, and the Founders felt that too close an intermingling of religion and politics was dangerous. Not only, did they reason, could it cause political instability, it also was bad for religion itself. As Thomas Jefferson argued, religious coercion “tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage.” The Founders also specified that elected officials should not be required to be of any religion. They wrote, “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” At the same time, the United States was, and remains today, a very religious country. Currently 92% of Americans say they believe in God, and 65% say that religion is important in their daily lives, compared to a 38% average across the developed world. Religion plays a far larger role in political debates in the United States than it does in many other Western democracies. There thus arises in American political life a perceived tension between many citizens’ personal religiosity and their desire to maintain freedom of worship for themselves and their neighbors. This manifests itself in the way Americans think of their Presidential candidates. Each person wants a candidate who reflects his or her values. At what point does supporting a candidate who reflects one’s values, including one’s religious values, shade into applying a religious test?

In earlier times, in the age before radio, television and the Internet, many presidents’ personal religious beliefs were not as intense a subject of discussion as they are today. In the 20th and 21st centuries, however, they have become the source of political debate. In 1928 a Catholic, New York Governor Al Smith, ran for president and encountered a good deal of resistance on the basis of his religion. Some believed he would obey the Pope and not pursue the interests of the United States. This concern combined with anti-Catholic prejudice more widely, and with an hostility to immigrants. Many historians argue it was a central reason for Smith’s loss of the election.

In 1960 a second Catholic candidate ran for president and the accusation of divided loyalties arose again. Former senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts addressed the issue head-on, speaking to a group of Protestant ministers who had expressed skepticism. “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me. Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise. But if the time should ever come — and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible — when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.”

 Some hear in such principles a test that means that religious people can’t run for president. Recently, former Senator Rick Santorum, another Catholic and a current candidate for the Republican nomination for president, critiqued Kennedy’s speech, going so far as to say it made him “sick to his stomach.” Senator Santorum argued, “What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?” Others note, however, that government neutrality toward religion is not the same as excluding religious people from public office. President Obama, when a Senator in 2006, argued, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers…Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason.”

This last statement is subtle and requires some unpacking. Let’s say that a lawmaker deeply believes that, because that is God’s will, we should tax the rich more heavily and support the poor more directly. That is absolutely his right to believe that. In order to convince others in a society with many different kinds of belief, however, he cannot simply argue that redistribution of wealth is the revealed word of God. He must argue that it will benefit many, that the advantages of his plan will outweigh the disadvantages, and that it will be practical to implement. Notice the lawmaker is still a believer, motivated by his beliefs. He is speaking in a language, however, that people of many faiths or none at all can also speak.

The worry that a president will defer to his religion’s leaders rather than take the best action for the country has been raised again in this election cycle. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and at the moment the frontrunner in the Republican primary race, is a Mormon. Mormonism, a relatively new Christian denomination that began in the United States, believes in scriptures revealed in the 19th century. Most important for our discussion, however, like Roman Catholicism it has a single hierarchy. A conservative Christian pastor who supports another candidate claimed recently that Mormonism is not a true religion but a cult. Romney responded by citing the U.S. Constitution, saying, “The founders of this country went to great lengths to make sure and even put in the Constitution, that we would not choose people who represent us in government based on their religion.”

As Americans continue to evolve in their understanding of faith and the presidency, when will we see the first president from a world religion other than Christianity? The election of Barack Obama shows that common wisdom about what biases govern the typical U.S. voter can be very wrong. Still, a portion of the U.S. electorate does remain prejudiced against people of different faiths. Anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiments, for example, have decreased sharply but still influence some voters, particularly older voters. In the 2008 election, for example, opponents of Barack Obama tried to use the claim that he was Muslim to turn voters against him. The attempt failed. As former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican, countered, “Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”

The United States has an increasingly diverse religious representation in government. In 2000 the Democratic vice-presidential nominee was Jewish. The first Muslim member of congress was elected in 2007, and there are now two Muslims serving in the congress. 2007 also saw the election of the first two Buddhist representatives, and a long serving congressman became the first openly atheist member. While no Hindu has yet been elected to congress, a Hindu priest has offered prayers at the opening of a Congressional session.

To summarize, then, Americans are a religious people, who have been becoming more tolerant of their fellow citizens who worship in a broad spectrum of faiths, or follow no faith at all. While some resistance remains, the number of Americans who say they would refuse to vote for an otherwise well-qualified candidate based on his religion has been in decline across the 20th and into the 21st century. From time to time specific issues with religious implications arise in presidential elections. Candidates on the political right are currently more likely to directly appeal to the religiosity of their voters than those on the political left. As Robert Putnam points out in the most recent edition of Foreign Affairs magazine (and I recommend his article) this has not always been the case. For candidates across the political spectrum, acknowledging religious faith of some kind remains important, while religious exclusivism seems to be more damaging than advantageous to presidential candidates.

The secular security concern

06 Tuesday Mar 2012

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Last night I heard Professor Gershon Gorenberg speak about the history of Israel, which he divides into three periods. He labels 1948-1967 the “First Republic,” and he argues that while it was an ethnocracy, it was within those bounds democratic, and most importantly as a distinction from the next period, held a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

The second period he called the “accidental empire,” in which he argues that people both within and outside of the government used extra-legal, non-governmental means to advance the settlements, while increasing the ethnocratic nature of the country. He argued that much of the impetus for holding onto the Occupied Territories and placing the settlements came from the new national religious interpretation of the scriptures, seeing it as a religious imperative to control the entire land from the Jordan River to the sea, though it was initially led, he claimed, by the secular right wing. He sees us as still living in this second period.

He hopes for a “Third Republic,” in which Israel will withdraw from the territories, thus putting behind it the tangle of non-state and quasi-state uses of force, and will continue to struggle with its ethnocratic/democratic identity in a still messy but more coherent state. He argued that a true settlement was required, not a unilateral withdrawal, which he blamed for the post-withdrawal violence. He theorized that an internationalization of the holy places is the best solution for those disputes, and perhaps the presence of international peacekeepers in parts of the formerly occupied territories.

I found his talk fascinating and persuading, but I was sitting with an Israeli friend who had at several times in the talk clearly disagreed with Professor Gorenberg. I asked my friend what he had found concerning. The following is a paraphrase, though I believe an accurate one:

Nearness of Ra'anana to Qalqilya. Also, one can see the separation wall (gray) surrounding Qalqilya, and its difference from the 1948 border (red). Click to enlarge and zoom around, or use Google Earth (Google maps does not show the separation wall).

“From my apartment in Ra’anana I can see over Kfar Saba to Qalqilya. I do not want a rocket coming in my living room window. That’s not a religious issue, that’s not a nationalist issue. That’s a basic concern of a citizen. Professor Gorenberg did not address security once in his talk.

What should be done? I don’t know. Professor Gorenberg talks about a truly negotiated settlement, as opposed to the unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza. He believes that this kind of settlement will leave us in peace. But we have decades of experience with Palestinian plausible deniability. There will always be issues that have not been settled – for example, the Palestinian right of return. So we would withdraw, there would be a period of peace, and attacks would begin again. The Palestinian government will say ‘well, the agreement on right of return (or something else) was insufficient, so we can’t control the peoples’ feelings. We are trying, but we can’t.’

A better view of the separation wall surrounding Qalqilya.

Professor Gorenberg referred to the use of peacekeepers. We’ve had experience with peacekeepers. In 1967 there were UN troops in the Sinai. Nassar told them to pull out, and they pulled out. No international troops are going to do effective counterterrorism. Italian troops aren’t going to gather effective intelligence and then go into somebody’s basement in Qalqilya to find rocket-making equipment.”

Is my friend correct? Are rocket attacks on the center of Israel likely if Israel withdraws from the Occupied Territories as part of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians? If not, why not? If so, what steps can the international community and the Palestinians take to change that likelihood?

Is annexation headed to the ash heap of history?

29 Wednesday Feb 2012

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Going out of style?

How rare are attempted or completed annexations of territory in the postwar world? Examples I have found so far:

  • China annexes Tibet, 1951 – successful to date
  • Ethiopia annexes Ogaden, 1954 – successful to date
  • Indonesia annexes Timor, 1975 – overturned in 1999
  • Morocco annexes Western Sahara, 1975 – successful to date
  • Iraq annexes Kuwait , 1990 – overturned in 1991

Does anyone have additional examples, other than East Jerusalem and whatever the West Bank settlements are supposed to be? At first glance, annexation and attempted annexation appears to be rare in the contemporary postwar world.  Annexation is a particularly depressing form of political domination, especially when joined with an attempt to displace the local people. (Displacement can happen in many other forms, including the displacement of Jews in most Arab countries since Israeli independence, and should also be condemned.)

I’m wondering about annexation because I am currently reading the section of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined in which he argues that an large number of war related statistics have dropped to zero or near zero since the Second World War, for the first time in history.

I have spent a lot of this chapter on the statistics of war. But now we are ready for the most interesting statistic since 1945: zero. Zero is the number that applies to an astonishing collection of categories of war during the two-thirds of a century that has elapsed since the end of the deadliest war of all time…Zero is the number of times that nuclear weapons have been used in conflict… Zero is the number of times that the two Cold War superpowers fought each other on the battlefield… Zero is the number of times that any of the great powers have fought each other since 1953 (or perhaps even 1945, since many political scientists don’t admit China to the club of great powers until after the Korean War)… Zero is the number of interstate wars that have been fought between countries in Western Europe since the end of World War II. It is also the number of interstate wars that have been fought in Europe as a whole since 1956, when the Soviet Union briefly invaded Hungary…Zero is the number of interstate wars that have been fought since 1945 between major developed countries (the forty-four with the highest per capita income) anywhere in the world (again, with the exception of the 1956 Hungarian invasion)…Zero is the number of developed countries that have expanded their territory since the late 1940s by conquering another country…Zero is the number of internationally recognized states since World War II that have gone out of existence through conquest…The point of this chapter is that these zeroes— the Long Peace— are a result of one of those psychological retunings that take place now and again over the course of history and cause violence to decline.

– Pinker, Steven (2011-10-04). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Kindle Locations 5577-5578). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

In Jerusalem the past is everywhere, and one obvious conclusion is that waves of empires and peoples follow each other in unending succession. Of those peoples, whom do we see and remember? In declining order of importance:

  1.  Those that settle more people here for a greater period of time.
  2. Those that remove more of other populations.
  3. Those that remain emotionally connected to the land.
  4. Those that build massive physical works.

Thus, the British left few traces. The Romans left buildings. The Christians left many buildings and a small population. The Muslims left many buildings and a large population. Jerusalem implies a powerful realpolitik lesson for the Israelis: this is the way the world works.

Pinker’s book, though, offers a counterargument. While this is the way the world worked, and the way much of the world continues to work, it works less and less this way. The Enlightenment has been a success. It has had a slow, fitful progress with the single largest setback in human history in World War II and the Holocaust. The Enlightenment, as many have pointed out, failed the Jews. Nonetheless, Pinker argues persuasively, the trend lines are in the right direction. Cosmopolitan humanism is also a better way to live than tribalism, nationalism or other models. It yields greater economic success, more stability and richer cultural life. It results in less war, fewer homocides, and a decline or virtual elimination in many horrors: slavery, child labor, public torture and animal cruelty for entertainment, among others.

So, a tentative assertion: forced annexation is an evil that is not only no longer necessary, but on its way out as a method of doing the business of peoples and states.

Who precisely is “the conflict”? Who taught them?

27 Monday Feb 2012

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The pamphlet

The pamphlet

Two weeks ago Israeli police found pamphlets that read, “Members of the Likud Caucus [the right-wing party currently in power], along with its thousands of members, headed by Moshe Feiglin [a political activist] are hereby invited to arrive at Temple Mount and praise God, and declare that healthy leadership begins with total control over Temple Mount. (Let us) purify this place from the enemies of Israel, who rob lands, and build the Temple on the ruins of mosques. We need not be afraid!” Police banned Feiglin from going onto the Haram al Sharif, which he tried to do. This news spread through the Palestinian community, and some began protesting. A week later, a rumor spread through some Palestinian circles that Feiglin and his supporters were going to try again, and young men again protested and threw stones at the army. This past Friday, Talat Ramia was among young men throwing rocks at a checkpoint, when he was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier. An Israeli army spokesperson said that Ramia had thrown firecrackers at the soldiers.

Since I am interviewing both Israeli and Palestinian teachers, this news made me wonder: where did Moshe Feiglin go to school? Where did Talat Ramia go? What I would have hoped from each would have been different – from Feiglin, a broader and more welcoming view of humanity, and from Ramia, better self-control and understanding of what will actually further his hopes and dreams. Did Feiglin have teachers who introduced him to an understanding of and respect for people of different faiths? Did Ramia have teachers who sought to inculcate in him emotional self-regulation and an insight into what actions actually effect political and social change?

For Feiglin a quick web search in English turns up masses of information, including where he went to high school, facts about his family, his two books, his regular writings and his many speeches. For Ramia, 15 minutes of searching in English yielded me only his hometown and a picture of his relatives mourning. In any case, Feiglin is a 50 year-old highly influential Israeli nationalist political activist, and Ramia was a 25 year-old Palestinian angered by the latest rumor. Of course, both were influenced by many people before and after high school, most powerfully by their families. Nonetheless, were there teaching opportunities to turn them, even if ever so slightly, off the path that led to this tragedy?

Will the Israelis save the world?

23 Thursday Feb 2012

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Waterfall in the Golan

 

Where the world will get clean water, and what it will do with its wastewater, are crucial issues for the future. Fortunately, the combination of an arid landscape, a small country and a powerful high tech sector have made Israel a great place to work on the solution. As we visited the northern Galilee, I talked water with my fellow Fulbrighter, writer and environmental economics scholar Sarah Hilzinger.

Snow in the Golan

The setting was auspicious. The Jordan is the source of much of Israel’s water, and after a blessedly rainy winter the headwaters were flowing fast. We even got to see real snow in the Golan. Hilzinger, meanwhile, talked about water that is not quite so pure. Israel recycles about 70-80% of its black water (sewage). The second-place country in these sweepstakes, Spain, comes in at 20%. Israeli researchers are working on even less expensive and more scalable methods than those they currently use. Indeed, one company seeks to turn wastewater treatment from a process that consumes energy to one that produces energy.

Other water technologies, like desalinization and drip irrigation, also emerge from Israel in advanced forms. Hilzinger works, among other things, on trade in these technologies between Israel and China.

For an encouraging look at the intersection between humanitarian and technical advances, check out some of Hilzinger’s writings here.

The Israeli right understands the situation; the Palestinian right does not

01 Wednesday Feb 2012

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A hajji's door in the Old City

The Palestinian right wing looks like this: In 2008, a 26 year-old Palestinian man from Jabel Mukader in East Jerusalem killed eight students in their yeshiva. A poll found 84% of Palestinians supported the attack. As one walks around Ramallah, and even East Jerusalem, one sees posters of martyrs, including those who attacked Israeli civilians inside Israel. Posters at Abu Dis University as well in refugee camps proclaim, “Haifa, we are coming,” implying that refugees and their descendants should view 1948 Israel as their land. At Hamas anniversary celebrations in December, leader Ismail Hanina said, “We affirm that armed resistance is our strategic option and the only way to liberate our land, from the sea to the river.” This month Hamas has fired at least nine rockets from Gaza into Israel.

The Israeli right wing: A teacher at an Israeli national religious school I interviewed recently said that most teachers and students at her school would consider Arabs the enemy. The school would not even think of having meetings between their students and Palestinian students with Israeli citizenship. Recently a Jewish settler in Hebron, asked by visiting students what he thought the solution was to the hostilities in Hebron, answered, “to encourage the emigration of our enemies.” Last week Hebron settlers attacked a Palestinian woman’s home, burned Palestinian cars, and beat two Palestinian men. More broadly, in the last two years Israelis have killed 259 Palestinians; Palestinians have killed 19 Israelis.

I’ve often heard Israeli centrists and leftists say that the Israeli right is playing for the long term. Keep pushing – take a few more homes, intimidate a few more Palestinians, build a few more settlements – until there is a large Jewish majority in all of mandate Palestine, and the Palestinians who live there are a small and dwindling minority. I’ve also heard Palestinian centrists and leftists say that the real strategy of the Palestinian right is to hang on, to tough it out for the long term. The Israelis are just the latest in a series of imperial powers, they reason, and they too will eventually weaken and leave.

The right on each side seems to agree: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a zero sum game in which neither group can compromise and where each group is playing a long game for massive majority status and absolute governmental control in all of historic Palestine. This does not have to be the case, of course: beneficial co-existence has succeeded among many other hostile groups in the past, and real peace is the ultimate “value added” solution. But putting that to the side, there is one huge difference between the Israeli and the Palestinian right wings. The Israeli right has accurately predicted the future of a no-compromise policy, and the Palestinian right has badly misunderstood the character of Israeli presence in the land.

Israel holds almost all the cards: a gdp per capita ten times the size of the Palestinian territories, close to absolute backing by the world’s sole superpower, a highly effective army, a populace willing to continue with the status quo, and a sophisticated legal, political and administrative structure allowing them to move forward with oppressive policies without pushing the U.S. or their own population into outrage over injustices. Palestinians hold almost no cards. Palestinian violence only strengthens the Israeli right. Palestinians don’t have the money, the connections or, it seems, the sophistication to get their message out to the U.S. The surrounding Arab states have either made separate peaces (Egypt, Jordan), and/or are caught up in their own internal politics (Syria, Egypt, Lebanon). In any case, these countries have never been effective advocates of the Palestinian cause. Most obviously, the Palestinian territories are, well, occupied. Describing the situation as asymmetric is a deep understatement.

The vision of the Palestinian right will never come true; they need to reduce their goals sharply and unite with the Palestinian center and left and with the Israeli left. They need to forge a broad national consensus of absolute non-violence, giving up all arms, absolute rejection of a claim on 1948 Israel, and a policy of zero-tolerance for anti-Semitic talk. They need to throw themselves on the mercy of the international community on the issues of East Jerusalem and right of return or compensation for refugees. They need to make it clear that they will take whatever they can get, today. As a friend of mine said, “They need to be Israel in 1948. ‘You’re giving us swiss cheese? Great! We’ll dance in the streets!’”

The Palestinians have to make this sharp shift because the Israelis are not an imperial power. They have no homeland, no capital of London, Constantinople, Cairo or Damascus to which they will return. They are not here due to a combination of economic interest and colonial hubris. They feel this to be home more deeply than perhaps any other people on earth. To Palestinians, who look back a mere 160 years to when 96% of the population was Muslim or Christian and 4% was Jewish, the Israeli identification with the land seems unbelievable – but it is deeply, psychologically true. Waiting, in the best case for the Palestinians, will simply do nothing to lessen Israeli presence. We are, however, far from the best case for the Palestinians. Instead the Palestinians will be moved: one detour in the wall, one hilltop settlement, one secretly purchased Old City house, one demolished terrorist’s home at a time.

Both right-wings are, ethically, deeply in the wrong. For reasons of justice, human rights, concern for the other, and their own people’s humanity, both side should change their views and behaviors radically, in my opinion. But if these ethical arguments do not resonate, and one takes a narrow, identity-based, zero-sum view, only one party must change – the Palestinian right-wing.