What: Discussion of Jimmy Carter’s new book, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land
When: Sunday, March 1, 2009
Where: CTSA, 1077 S. Newstead Avenue, 63110
Time: 4:00 – 6:30 PM

Dr. Mark Chmiel, adjunct professor of theology at Saint Louis University and member of the Center for Theology and Social Analysis, will offer some brief remarks and lead a discussion of Carter’s book We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land. Chmiel, the author of Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, has traveled to Palestine to work with the International Solidarity Movement and is active in St. Louis in promoting a greater understanding of the political and moral issues raised by Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine and the Palestinian resistance.

Dear Mark,

Almost a year ago, I was reading a book called ‘Blessed among women’ which contained a short profile of Mev. I was instantly captivated, and went online to find out more about her. I stumbled on information about her books on Amazon, and ‘the Book of Mev’ was recommended to me.

I ordered the book, and it arrived two weeks before I was to leave Australia to work with the Jesuits in Paraguay.

The reason I am so captivated by hers and your story is its humanity, sanctity and extraordinary ordinariness. It lifts my spirits, and I have read it almost three times over 4 months – bits and pieces here and there speak to my heart and soul.

I’m an Australian journalist and teacher, photographer and musician living in Asuncion, Paraguay in one of the poorest urban settlements here. I am challenged on a daily basis to live my faith authentically, and view things through the eyes of the poor.

For me, Mev’s story speaks to me on so many levels – her struggles in Brazil, her righteous anger at times with the institutional church, but her faith that light can shine through the darkness. The list goes on.

I wanted to express to you my gratitude for sharing this book with the world, and for your own very personal story which is intertwined in its pages.

Que Dios te acompana!

Beth

1.

Meditate that this came about:

I commend these words to you.

Carve them in your hearts

At home, in the street,

Going to bed, rising,

Repeat them to your children,

Or may your house fall apart,

May illness impede you,

May your children turn their faces from you.

Primo Levi

Auschwitz survivor

Recently, Senator Patrick Leahy, the Senate Judiciary Chairman, spoke of forming a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the possible crimes of the out-going Bush Administration. When a reporter asked President Obama about this, he said, “My view is also that nobody’s above the law and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen.”

The famed Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi strongly agrees with the new president, “that nobody’s above the law.” In fact, last spring Bugliosi published a book that argues that there were clear instances of wrong doing in the U.S. going to war against Iraq. The title of this impassioned legal argument is The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.

Like any good prosecutor, Bugliosi has an instinct for drama: “The book you are about to read deals with what I believe to be the most serious crime ever committed in American history—the president of this nation, George W. Bush, knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war in Iraq under false pretenses, a war that condemned over 100,000 human beings, including 4,000 young American soldiers, to horrible, violent deaths.” [3]

Bugliosi hopes that the U.S. Attorney General in Washington (now, Erich Holder) or any of the 93 U.S. Attorneys in the federal district courts or even a state attorney general from one of 50 states will take heed of his argument and seek to prosecute the former president for the now almost 5,000 dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

According to Bugliosi, the case against Bush would rely on U.S. Code 1117 (conspiracy) and U.S. Code 1111 (murder). “The overriding assumption here has to be that if, in fact, Bush lied to the nation in taking it to war, we all should want to find some lawful way to bring him to justice. That has to be the predisposition among all good [men and women]. It cannot be otherwise.” [91] Here, Bugliosi is quite specific; I wonder if President Obama would agree with the prosecutor.

The definition of murder is “the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought.” Given the months of build-up to the U.S. invasion in March 2003, Bugliosi asserts that premeditation is a given in this case. He believes that “at an absolute minimum, in the absence of a legal justification such as self-defense, Bush’s taking the nation to war would constitute implied malice, that is, an intent to do a highly dangerous act with reckless disregard and indifference to human life, and hence, at least second degree murder in every state, as well as under federal law.” [99]

The crux for Bugliosi is that Bush knowingly distorted the CIA’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate which declared that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat to the United States. Yet, in a speech a week later in Cincinnati in October 2002, Bush stated the just the opposite, that the U.S. had to act now, in self-defense, before it was too late. By Bush falsifying the intelligence report, Bugliosi avers that Bush cannot argue that he was acting in self-defense. Indeed, Bush’s deceitful rhetoric was intended to mobilize the American public’s support for a war that was totally unnecessary.

Many Americans will seek to honor the fallen troops by asserting that they died for freedom or democracy or “our country.” Bugliosi will have none of this sentimentality: “As ugly and grotesque as it is, the fact is that [U.S. soldiers] gave up their lives to further the political interests of Bush, Rove, and Cheney. No political figures in American history ever so shamelessly exploited a war for political advantage as much as these three.” [44]

Professing that he is pained by the deaths of Iraqi civilians, Bugliosi still admits that “I take the reports in the paper of American soldiers being killed in Iraq harder.” [68] I think that many American citizens likewise instinctively take harder the deaths, injuries, impairment, and mental anguish suffered by the U.S. troops. Unlike so many of his fellow citizens, though, Bugliosi locates the root cause of this needless misery: George W. Bush.

Bugliosi dismisses as totally unrealistic the possibility that Bush could be tried for war crimes against the Iraqi people, though attorneys and judges outside the U.S. may have already taken careful note of the precedent involving former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was tied up in investigation for several years before his death.

How appropriate it would be for Bush (and Rumsfeld and Rice) to ever be looking over their shoulders both inside the United States and beyond. Imagining the horrible nightmares veterans and their families are sure to endure in the years ahead, Bugliosi declares “the least I can do in return is to put the thought in Bush’s mind for the rest of his life that he may someday be held accountable in a criminal courtroom for all the murders he alone is responsible for.” [157]

While Bugliosi exudes righteous indignation at Bush, he also manages scorn for his fellow citizens, as in this passage: “It is terribly, terribly, terribly scary that this nation is so abysmally and profoundly stupid that it could easily be talked into going into a deadly war with a nation that wasn’t our enemy and as much of a threat to us as you or I.” [246] Last week, after a gathering of people to watch an Arabic film at a local college, a student from an Arab country asked a friend of mine why the American people didn’t rise up against Bush when what he was doing was so wrong.

2.

But for me, a German, it is not quite so simple. In the end, all who did not put up resistance were implicated, entangled in the belief systems of “these” Germans, lending them a hand and sharing in the profits. Among those who “went along,” in the broadest sense of the words, were all who practiced the art of looking away, turning a deaf ear, and keeping silent. There has been much quarreling about collective guilt and responsibility, but my basic feeling is, rather, one of ineradicable shame – the shame of belonging to this people, speaking the language of the concentration camp guards, singing the songs that were also sung in the Hitler Youth and the Company of German Girls. That shame does not become superannuated; it must stay alive.

Dorothee Sölle

German theologian

The following are excerpts from Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).

“What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider…. the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think…. for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about…..and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated…..by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us…..

“Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’…..must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing…..Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

“You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone….you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

“That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

“You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father….could never have imagined.”

3.

This would be, first and foremost, a war waged within myself, one where my fears and doubts would come face to face with my conscience, a war to reclaim my humanity and my spiritual freedom. It would also be a war against the system I had come from, a battle against the military machine, the imperial dragon that devours its own soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike for the sake of profits. I had to turn my words into weapons, that speaking out was now my own way to fight.

Camilo Mejia

Iraq war veteran and war resister

Who is going to say the unsayable?

Who is going to press for the prosecution of George W. Bush and Company for murder?

Who is going to stand for law and order?

Who is going to dignify the truth by acting on it?

Who is going to pay practical tribute to Lady Justice?

Who is going to remember what we’ve done in Iraq?

Who is going to patiently recite the facts?

Who is going to tell the tales from the Iraq inferno?

Who is going to repeat these tales to their children?

Who is going to meditate on the photographs?

Who is going to keep alive the shame?

Who is going to bring up issues from Morality 101? Legality 101?

Who is going to count the tears?

Who is going to groan lamentations in the streets?

Who is going to hurl imprecations up at the stately buildings?

Who is going to imagine for even 30 seconds a day George Bush eating chow in a maximum security prison?

Who is going to resist the temptation of silence?

Who is going to risk a little derision, a few guffaws, some insults?

Who is going to haunt the criminals?

Who is going to monitor their comings and goings?

Who is going to envision a ten-year strategy?

Who is going to develop the contingency plans?

Who is going to remove one brick amid the billions of bricks that keep the system together?

Who is going to train citizens in going out of their way to make trouble?

Who is going to insist on follow-up?

Who is going to spend even one minute a day imagining one simple step to take?

Who is going to cultivate optimism of the will?

Who is going to be the courage they wish to see in the world?

Who is going to abandon the sidelines?

Who is going to disturb the cozy peace?

Who is going to stop waiting for someone else to say something first?

Who is going to do something inconsequential about it today and then tomorrow?

Who is going to talk to the guys at the firehouse?

Who is going to bring it up at the neighborhood bar?

Who is going to query the hair stylist?

Who is going to take inspiration from the little mosquito?

Who is going to dare make a scene, raise a ruckus?

Who is going to perform an act greater than Camilo Mejía?

Who is going to remove every single thread from the Emperor’s trembling limbs?

If past behavior is any guide, Elie Wiesel must be having a fit. I’m not thinking here of the great loss to his Foundation from the audacious and criminal pilfering of Bernie Madoff. No, I am guessing he is outraged by the growing frequency, since late December 2008, of comparisons made between Israel’s Operation Molten Lead in Gaza and the Nazi period, specifically the Warsaw Ghetto.

Both intellectual commentators and protesting activists have made linkages between the human horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Gaza Ghetto, as well as between the ghettos’ resistance to their tormenters. On the web and via email a photographic juxtaposition is circulating that documents Nazi oppression of Jews and Israeli oppression of Palestinians. A Vatican official, Cardinal Renato Martino, said that increasingly Gaza resembles a “big concentration camp,” while Israeli officials expressed shock at such an offensive comparison.

Back in 1982 Israel carried out Operation Peace for Galilee, a massive bombing and invasion of Lebanon, resulting in an estimated death toll of 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians. During that summer and early fall, Wiesel was interviewed frequently about Israel’s Lebanon attack. Since the June 1967 war Wiesel had been an enthusiastic apologist for Israeli power; what he found so disturbing that summer was not the excessive militarism of the Israeli state but the excessive analogies of Israel’s critics.

Wiesel’s own outrage was directed at those political and intellectual detractors whom he said “profaned the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust by comparing Beirut with the Warsaw Ghetto … Israel’s soldiers with the Nazis; the military operation in Lebanon with the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis — obscene comparisons, twisted analogies, vile and base and rooted in hate.” For Wiesel, the Holocaust was so singular and unparalleled that it shouldn’t be debased by such scurrilous associations. The Holocaust, he believed, is above politics, existing in a sacred realm that ought to be respected.

Nevertheless, critics of Israel’s assault simultaneously undermined Israel’s assumed monopoly of victim status by pointing to its thousands of Arab victims as well as relativized the Holocaust’s incomparability, a double scandal for Wiesel.

And yet the future Nobel Peace laureate should have known how frequently the Holocaust had been invoked in fierce political struggles in Israel from the beginning. David Ben-Gurion juxtaposed the Nazis and Arab leaders such as Nasser. From the right-wing, Menachem Begin used Nazi analogies to attack Ben-Gurion. Israeli leaders even retroactively “Zionized” the Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighters, seeing in them their own willingness to fight, rather than be passive like so many Diaspora sheep to the slaughter.

So, if Israelis from different camps have passionately invoked a whole range of Holocaust/Nazi images, references, and stories to pursue their political aims, others, not surprisingly, will also use some of those same references and images for their own symbolic and political ends. As Joseph Massad pointed out in his recent article, “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising,” the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising “was always inspirational to the Palestinians. In the heyday of the PLO as a symbol of Palestinian liberation, the organization would lay flower wreathes at the Warsaw Ghetto monument to honor these fallen Jewish heroes.”

There have been Israeli establishment figures who have deplored the use of the Holocaust to validate Israeli violence. One is the longtime Zionist leader Nahum Goldman who, in 1981, asserted that “[t]o use the Holocaust as an excuse for the bombing of Lebanon, as Menachem Begin does, is a kind of ‘Hillul Hashem’ [sacrilege], a banalization of the sacred tragedy of the Shoah [Holocaust], which must not be misused to justify politically doubtful and morally indefensible policies.” Thus, Wiesel opposed banal Holocaust discourse if it was used to criticize Israel’s policies, while Goldman contested that same rhetoric if it was to mobilize support for Israel violence.

More recently, former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg has addressed what he sees as the overwhelming presence of the Holocaust in Israel life. In his book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes, he writes, “We have pulled the Shoah out of its historical context and turned it into a plea and a generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah, and therefore all is allowed—be it fences, sieges, crowns, curfews, food and water deprivation, or unexplained killings. All is permitted because we have been through the Shoah and you will not tell us how to behave.” For the Israeli Jewish people to heal, Burg contends, this Shoah-fixation must come to an end.

In his book, Burg quotes the famous teaching from Rabbi Hillel: “What is hateful to thee, do not do unto thy fellow.”

Who doesn’t hate hearing the relentless barrage of dehumanizing propaganda and stereotypes against oneself and one’s co-religionists … or being forced to become a collaborator against one’s own miserable people?

Who doesn’t hate being systematically deprived of normal life—school, work, leisure—by an occupying power with its arbitrary dictates… or trying to fathom the labyrinthine legalities of the bureaucracy that is methodically chipping away at your dignity and resources?

Who doesn’t hate being publicly humiliated by the arrogant troops of the invading conqueror … or seeing one’s children being terrorized by the enemy’s unpredictable raids and incursions?

Who doesn’t hate having no way to protect oneself and one’s family from the oppressors … or having one’s property and land expropriated by those who never let you forget that you are weak, and they are mighty?

Who doesn’t hate witnessing one’s family, friends and neighbors brutally massacred … or concluding in despair that no one in the world either knows or cares about the abyss one’s whole people is falling into?

Hello Mark,

So I have been struggling at Yale. I came here to be exposed to new ideas and learn from world renowned academic minds. Instead I have found myself nose deep in old Hebrew or Greek Lexicons every night wondering how I can discover God and how God works among His people when I’m parsing Hebrew Qal Active Participles.

I began reading The Book of Mev again. I remembered how she thought about doing Biblical Studies but was turned off by all the ancient languages. Now I find myself in the same boat. :)

So I have decided to go down another path. I’m switching my concentration from Bible to a new program here in World Christianity and Missions! I’m going to focus on Africa and do work in anthropology, theology, and comparative studies with Christianity and Islam.

I’m so excited and I feel like this is what God wants me to be doing!

Reading about Mev again has really helped me look at myself introspectively and remember how enriching it is to see how God is present in the experiences of people in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

I just wanted to thank you again for sharing Mev with me and for the wonderful experience I had taking your course at SLU. I hope you are doing well and are enjoying the semester. I’m planning on making a trip back to St. Louis – perhaps we can meet up for coffee or something if you have the time and are in the area.

Talk to you soon!

Take Care,

Hope

Dear Shannon,

I enjoyed our long conversation on Saturday afternoon at 6 North Coffee. I appreciate you taking the time to visit on such a busy weekend. After our chats, the strong impression I am left with is of a person of great integrity and commitment to justice. You want to “walk the walk.” In the idiom of your semester in San Salvador, you want your “praxis” to be real, substantial, and serious.

You were curious about Ralph Nader, whom I mentioned I had been reading recently. My friend Andrew Wimmer and current Social Justice student Dan McGinnis have stimulated me in this deeper consideration of Nader. As I look back on it, I knew his name in my early teens, but I didn’t know who Dorothy Day was until I read her autobiography at 21. Nader was a household name in the Seventies because he was the foremost consumer advocate in the United States.

I assume in your studies in El Salvador you learned about people who made “the preferential option for the poor.” The option wasn’t made only by relatively famous people like Archbishop Romero and Ignacio Ellacuría; it was made by countless poor people in Salvador but also throughout Latin America. I’d like to borrow that expression to describe Nader as having made a preferential option for the American consumer. From his first confrontation with General Motors in the mid-1960s, Nader expressed great suspicion of corporate America’s willingness to seek profits at the expense of individual safety. Through painstaking investigations, he exposed GM’s lethal lack of consideration for auto-drivers.

You surely have come across that conviction of Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Nader seemed to notice problems about which no one else seemed to care. An early example in his life: When he was an undergraduate at Princeton in the 1950s, he wondered if there was any connection between the dead birds appearing on campus and the fact that Princeton’s beautiful trees were sprayed with DDT.

Attracting young people to the nascent consumer movement, Nader and his associates researched corporations and the government itself, seeking to root out injustices and make reforms that were of benefit to large numbers of Americans. Nader’s biographer, Justin Martin, summarized, “Through his efforts, dozens of safety laws have passed, and at times he has shown himself to be as skilled a legislator as any duly elected U.S. senator.” The following are some of the areas in which Nader has made an impact: air bags in cars, seat belts, remuneration when being bumped from a plane, clean air, food safety, lead protections from x-rays in during visits to the dentist, warnings on drug labels, nutritional labeling for foods, automobile crash-testing, cigarette labeling for tar and nicotine, the right to know in your workplace when being exposed to chemicals, among others.

For well over forty years, Nader has played this role of activist, gadfly, and relentless skeptic of corporate power. But he also ran as a presidential candidate in recent years, which has tarnished his reputation among some, but brought his name and mission to younger generations of Americans. His strongest critique is that the two parties, Democratic and Republican, are ensconced with corporate power. In effect, both parties make their own “preferential option for the rich.” Crucial issues are ignored by the entrenched elites of both parties, to the detriment of the U.S. citizenry. Nader believes, “We can have democracy or we can have the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.”

To better understand the arena in which Nader has operated since the 1960s, I’d recommend reading Joel Bakan’s book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. The heart of the book argues that the corporation’s fundamental nature is psychopathic, at least as based on the Personality Diagnostic Checklist from World Health Organization (ICD-10/Manual of Mental Health Disorders, DSM-IV”). The following characteristics match the intrinsic nature of corporations:

1. Callous unconcern for the feelings of others

2. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships

3. Reckless disregard for the safety of others

4. Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit

5. Incapacity to experience guilt

6. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors

Nader has energetically addressed these characteristics in his battles on behalf of the American population. You can imagine it has earned some vociferous enemies. His critics call attention to his self-righteousness, vindictiveness, and caustic tone. One associate, though, Alan Morrison speaks about Nader with great respect: “I have never known anybody who has more ideas about more things than Ralph. He’s not interested in two or three or five or ten things. He’s interested in a million. He sees things differently from everybody else. He just sees injustices, unfairnesses, and improper ways of handling situations that everyone else just accepts. He has a cosmic view of these things, very broad, but at the same time, he is a person who pays enormous attention to details. I never met anybody who can think so big and think so small at the same time.” Nader acknowledged that his work is like “playing fifty chess games simultaneously.”

You can read Nader’s views on many current issues, including his critique of corporate-based globalization, in The Good Fight: Declare Your Independence and Close the Democracy Gap. Apropos of what Morrison said about Nader’s curiosity and hunger for justice, among the issues he treats in The Good Fight are: corporate takeovers, unraveling neighborhoods, cultural decay, political parties dominated by corporations, horrible prisons, the use of the death penalty, the disproportionate percentage of young black males in jail, the war on drugs, the glass ceiling for women, attacks on civil liberties, lack of proper investment in fraud control, deregulation, tax havens and tax avoidance schemes for the rich, the decreasing amount of taxes paid by corporations, mountain top removal coal-mining, dirty air, toxic water, erasing habitats and the killing off of species, the ruthless class war waged by the rich, union busting, pathetic enforcement of weak labor laws, precarious pensions and dwindling heath care, unsafe workplaces, corporate crime, corporate fraud, savings and loan fraud, corporate homicide, the WTO displacing national sovereignty and human rights, declining schools, inadequate transit systems, lack of nuclear disarmament, lack of low cost of drugs for HIV/AIDS, lethal arms trafficking, hunger, and the smoking industry.

Sounds overwhelming, doesn’t it? But as Nader is fond of saying, “Nothing is possible without an individual. Nothing is perpetual without an institution.”

I also strongly recommend his short book, The Seventeen Traditions, in which he pays homage to his upbringing in the Thirties and Forties in a Lebanese immigrant family in a small town in Connecticut. You know the expression, “Mother, home, and apple pie”? I’d add Ralph Nader to that as a fourth item on that list of what is quintessentially American. As you read his warm and loving accounts of the lessons taught to him by his family and community, you will be reminded of how civic life was once nurtured and might be again.

In addressing his readers, Nader wrote this book to provide “stimuli for your own thoughts and recollections—as an occasion to revisit lessons passed on within your family. Such family traditions challenge the notion that fads, technologies, how-to-manuals, and addictions of modern life have somehow taken the place of the time-tested wisdom fashioned in the crucibles of earlier generations.” Among the traditions he highlights are those of listening, health, history, the kitchen table, independent thinking, and patriotism. At the book’s close, he writes, “I feel sure that raising civically responsible children is most likely to happen in the kind of atmosphere my parents created: one of indirection and delights, strong examples and certain boundaries, solitude and conversation, witness and respect, and, above all, the strength of parental love and sacrifice. All of this cannot help but nourish a sense of dedication to help one’s fellow human beings achieve a better life.” I trust that some of these traditions will be quite familiar to you because of how your parents raised you and your siblings.

There may come a time when you are feeling down, pessimistic and despairing that Americans will throw off our ignorance, ethnocentrism, and laziness to address the problems that face us. At such times, it’s good to remember the people who have gone before us marked by a passion for justice, people who stood up and stood out and paid a price. For me, I would want to remember Ralph Nader in those dark times, for he shows that injustices can be fought. Like the saying attributed to Mohandas Gandhi, Nader’s life is his message. He reminds me of a sentence from George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.”

Last thing I’ll say is a quotation from Nader: “All things start with a sign-up sheet.”

I’ll put in the mail to you Nader’s pamphlet, Civic Arousal, and you can tell me what you think.

Hope to see you again this spring and good luck in the Boston Marathon!

Dr C

P.S. In addition to The Good Fight and The Seventeen Traditions, Justin Martin’s biography, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, is worth exploring, as is the 2006 documentary film, An Unreasonable Man, on Nader’s life and career. It’s available now on DVD, and you can check out a Youtube clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS1c5Ei0eIg.

Last, check out http://nader.org/.

The following is a short reflection, which grew out of a talk on Friday 30 January at Karen House, the Catholic Worker House of Hospitality in Saint Louis.

Four decades ago the courageous Brazilian archbishop Helder Camara wrote The Spiral of Violence in an attempt to better understand the social dynamics of his own — and many other – impoverished Third World countries. Written shortly after the pivotal Latin American Bishops Conference at Medellín in 1968, Camara sketched a typology of societal violence in three escalating stages. First is the stage of institutionalized injustice, exemplified by poverty, high infant mortality, unemployment, exploited workers and farmers, and inadequate health care; in other words, a social situation breeding misery. The second stage is that of revolt against the first stage, as more and more people find the status quo intolerable. Repression is the third stage of violence and is a response to quell the revolt and preserve the status quo deemed all too tolerable by its architects and beneficiaries. Camara’s straight-forward analysis calls to mind John F. Kennedy’s view, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

A now familiar case in point of Camara’s analysis is El Salvador. Long dominated by an economic oligarchy of “fourteen families” who were backed by the military, many Salvadorans – of the Catholic Church and the Marxist left – revolted, in different ways, against the pervasive denials of human dignity throughout Salvadoran society. Accordingly, the “preferential option of the poor” – embraced by Father Rutilio Grande, the Jesuit intellectuals at the University of Central America, and Archbishop Oscar Romero – was seen as “subversive” by the Salvadoran elite and the full fury of state terror was inflicted upon them as well as their numerous, less famous companions.

In his book, Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein states, “Looking back after two decades of study and reflection, I am struck most by how uncomplicated the Israel-Palestine conflict is.” Looking at this conflict in the terms of Camara’s analysis confirms Finkelstein’s observation. If people want to reduce the violence in the region, they must first see that the 41-year-old Israeli occupation is at the root of the spiral of violence. What would we think if our land was appropriated by a foreign military power and the citizens of that nation took over our land? What would we think of that military force monitoring and controlling our movements, interfering with our ability to get to at work, visit a doctor, or even visit our extended family? What would we think of power being exercised over our lives without us having any input or representation? What would we think of the humiliation and intimidation with which the military troops treat our friends and family?

Given the Israeli occupation and domination of the Palestinians and their land, Palestinians have resisted, revolted, and attempted to “shake off” (intifada) the Israeli occupation. Some revolt with arms, others with nonviolent methods. The use of rifles, Qassam rockets, suicide bombing, stone throwing, tax resistance, and peaceful demonstrations are among the ways Palestinians express their resistance to being occupied.

Having shown no indication that it wants to end its control of Palestinian territory, Israel must regularly resort to force to repress the insubordinate and insurgent Palestinians. Among the methods it has historically and recently employed for repressing them: imposing curfews for days or weeks at a time; constructing roadblocks and checkpoints; practicing administrative detention, which means one can be arrested without charge and held for months or years; engaging in torture; building a separation Wall; firing sound bombs; shutting down universities and schools; shooting tear gas; assassinating terrorist suspects with predictable “collateral damage”; deporting “trouble-makers,” both Palestinians and international activists; demolishing homes; using white phosphorus in heavily populated civilian areas; bombing “terrorist” infrastructures; imposing an economic blockade. All of these methods only increase the immiseraiton, marginalization, and powerlessness of the Palestinian people, which drive more to despair and compel others to new levels of fury.

What was the dominant theme of discussion in mainstream circles in December and January regarding Gaza? It was the firing of the rockets and Israel’s unquestioned right to defend itself. Notice, though, that the Hamas rockets represent the second stage of violence, that of revolt. Scant attention was paid the harsh humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank, both of which are the first, primary stage of violence. This systematic, on-going, and generative violence of the Israeli occupation and control is overlooked or downplayed. Notice, too, that Israel’s “response” to the rockets was an especially vicious and devastating three-week campaign of repression and state terrorism, resulting in over 1,300 deaths, including hundreds of children, as well as thousands of wounded. Mosques, schools, homes, buildings, and neighborhoods were bombed and destroyed.

Among U.S. commentators and politicians, ensuring Israel’s security is touted as a major pillar of U.S. Middle East policy. It’s worth remembering that, armed with nuclear weapons and backed by the world’s only superpower, Israel has one of the most powerful military forces in the world.

Among U.S. political leaders and media pundits, there is no evidence of a comparable concern for Palestinian security, because U.S. policy is fixated on the second stage of violence, Palestinians violently resisting Israel’s illegal occupation.

Activist A. J. Muste once advised fellow pacifists that their agenda should be “to denounce the violence on which the present system is based, and all the material and spiritual evil it entails for the masses of [men and women] throughout the world. So long as we are not dealing honestly and adequately with this ninety percent of our problem, there is something ludicrous and perhaps hypocritical about our concern over the ten percent of violence employed by the rebels against oppression.”

For citizens in the United States, then, an important ethical imperative is that if we are disturbed by the violence of Hamas rockets and suicide bombers (and are even occasionally taken aback by the or “disproportionate” reaction of the Israeli authorities), we ought to direct ourselves to addressing the complex of social injustices that constitute Camara’s first stage of violence, namely, the Israeli occupation. The reason is simple: That endemic injustice of one nation dominating and oppressing another people is the root of the unsurprising revolt and the guaranteed, consequent repression. Unless the unjust status quo is significantly transformed in the West Bank and Gaza, violence will continue to escalate, including greater numbers of people in its deadly spiral.

The simple words of Pope Paul VI retain their relevance to the current situation, “If you want peace, work for justice.” If we want justice, end the occupation. If we want to end the occupation, we have to transform the U.S. diplomatic, military, financial, media, and congressional support away from Israel’s occupation and toward freedom and some semblance of justice for the Palestinians.

Think of phrases and words you typically hear in mainstream discussions and media reports on the Israel-Palestine conflict. I recently asked some friends, and they mentioned the following: “fighting terrorism,” “the peace process,” “Israel’s right of self-defense,” and “suicide bombers.” Occasionally, “the Holocaust” will appear in these discussions because of the concern for Israel’s security.

An expression that doesn’t get mentioned in mainstream discussions is a crucial one—al-Nakba, Arabic for “the Catastrophe,” which refers to the events of 1948: with the establishment of the State of Israel, Palestinians experienced a catastrophe, including the destruction of 400 villages and the creation of 750,000 refugees.

Last year at the time of the 60th anniversary of al-Nakba, scholar Joseph Massad noted that the policies of Israel’s on-going confiscation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem constitute the continuance of the catastrophe.

In her searing account of the effects of the Vietnam War on the United States, Winners and Losers, journalist Gloria Emerson writes, “The war began like this: one man died, then another, then one more, then the man next to that man. The dying was one by one.” So, too, for the Palestinians, the calamitous experiences of 1948 and the recent past (the massacres at Shabra and Shatila refugee in Lebanon in 1982, for instance). The Nakba, past and present, is a collective experience made up of millions of stories: the land stolen from one family, the murdered son of another family, the imprisonment of two brothers of a third family. One, then one more, then one more still.

فلسطين

Back in the fall of 2003, I worked in Rafah, Gaza for six weeks with the International Solidarity Movement. Our team had members from Sweden, Canada, and the U.S. One Saturday we took a taxi to Gaza City to meet a family. The father, in his early 40s, had been shot in the back during the first intifada and then was later severely beaten by Israeli soldiers. At that time, the mother miscarried as a result of their home being shot at and tear gassed. The father could not lift heavy weights and had been suffering from the trauma of both incidents; he had long been unemployed, not uncommon in Gaza. He and his wife had eight children.

Their eldest son, Mahmoud, 13 years old, served as the family breadwinner by catching birds and selling them at the souq. The week before we arrived, he was catching birds when Israeli soldiers shot at him and a companion. According to eyewitnesses, the boys were 600 meters from the Green Line, which is the border between Gaza and Israel. Mahmoud’s friend got away with being shot only in the foot but Mahmoud did not get away: He was beaten and kicked so often by the soldiers that their boot prints were left on his face.

The soldiers then drug him close to the Green Line, and shot him a total of seventeen times, in the heart, stomach, and legs. Eye witnesses presume dragging him close to the border provided the soldiers with their rationale for killing him; he could then be considered guilty of menacing Israel.

His mother had identified him at the morgue.

As she was telling us this story, his mother Umm Mahmoud held up the jacket he was wearing that day with the bullet holes in the front and back of the jacket. She told us, “My son was doing his work, catching birds in order to survive.” The father then brought out three cages with various birds Mahmoud had caught. She continued, “Don’t they love children? How can they kill him in cold blood? We love all children, Israeli, Palestinians, all. Why?” That question long lingered as I meditated on the shaheed [martyr] poster of Mahmoud that was taped to their wall.

Shortly thereafter, we went out to buy some food to bring back for the Ramadan fast breaking late in the afternoon. When we returned the family had already made food, so with what we brought, it was a bountiful feast. Having been in Gaza for eight months, Lora, a young American Jew, and I stayed the entire night with them, Laura translating the mother’s Arabic for my benefit. We heard from two uncles who had spent 20 and eight years in Israeli prisons. The next day, the mother told us she so grateful for our presence, the eating and sharing with us helped the family, she said, to forget their pain for a while.

Those experiences that day and night in a home of mourning reminded me of an acquaintance, Catholic nun and medical doctor Ann Manganaro, who worked for years in El Salvador during the civil war. When members of the murderous Atlacatl Battalion would come through her village of Guarjíla, she could see the contempt on their faces for the villagers and she pondered, “Where did such malice come from?”

Seventeen bullets in Mahmoud’s body? Stomping on his face? A thirteen year-old?

فلسطين

What happened in 22 days in December and January in Gaza is an extreme intensification and malicious escalation of the continuing Nakba faced by the Palestinian people. Who knows how many of the million and a half Gazans have experienced such lacerating nightmares as that endured by Umm Mahmoud’s family?

The language of the U.S. and Israeli politicians and diplomats cannot contain the excruciating truths of the past and current Nakbas. These truths are exiled, negated, and denied. The powerful—with their nuclear arsenals and their state of the art military machinery of death—blame the incalculable destruction of Gaza on the decisions of Hamas. The lamentations of the relatives of the victims of White Phosphorus won’t reach those in the White House. The photos of children riddled with shrapnel won’t invite a deeper reflection by those Senators who solemnly profess to stand by Israel. The heart-breaking testimony of the heroic doctors working in impossible conditions won’t manage to stir the consciences of the heads of elite editorial pages across the United States.

In his commentary on the prophet Isaiah, Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan wondered, “Where are the Isaiahs of our day? Could they be found among the outsiders — a prisoner or a widow or an orphan or a homeless one or an ‘illegal alien’ or someone driven mad by the system? The vision often starts among such persons who can cut to the essentials in matters of life and death, of compassion and right judgment, while the rest of us know nothing.”

The Palestinians are outsiders to the American political economy of memory. Their Nakbas are not deemed worthy of attention, remembrance, much less protest and interference in the present.

Even at a distance, will we seek out the testimony of the Palestinian widow, the orphan, the homeless, and those driven mad by the Israeli domination of their people? Will we learn something of the essentials of life and death from the Gazan furnace of affliction?

Or will we be at ease, at peace with diversion, knowing nothing of the real world?