When kids grow up with gunfire
by Ethan Flad

When I was a kid, I considered Golda Meir one of my heroines. I remember writing a book report about the former Prime Minister of Israel, extolling the efforts of one of the first international women political leaders of the modern era.

Meir was to me a symbol of the oppressed Jewish people. I read about her work to help create a fledgling nation in the midst of what I understood was a hostile Arab region. My sense of justice was awakened by these stories.

Until just a few years ago, my analysis of the conflict between Israel and its neighbors was a fairly simplistic one: Jews were reclaiming their Promised Land, and Arabs were trying to stop them. It has taken me at least a decade of education about the region combined with two trips to Israel/Palestine and a greater understanding of our nation’s role in the "peace process," to un-learn what I previously believed.

While I don’t pretend to be an expert on Middle East politics, I do feel that I now have a more complex and nuanced view of that region than most North Americans. As a person who has been fortunate to travel to several regions of the world, I’ve felt it harder to describe the issues in Palestine/Israel than anywhere else I’ve gone. I’ve been especially frustrated by my increasing belief that the information we receive through our primary international media sources is incredibly biased.

As an example, earlier this year I met an Arab-American who told me how a couple of years ago he was placed on an e-mail list run by the Israeli embassy to the U.S. Every day, David received an e-mail from their DC headquarters with new information straight from Israel. After a while, he began to notice that U.S. newspaper articles on the following day would be taken straight from those e-mail bulletins. Twenty-four hours later, members of our nation’s mainstream media simply re-publish the "news," based on the Israeli state’s communications machine.

As social justice advocates, how can we help achieve a greater balance in objectively representing the words and images that come from that tense region of the world?

In January 1996, I attended a conference in Jerusalem on the future of the dwindling indigenous Christian presence there. The event was convened by a group named Sabeel, an ecumenical Palestinian liberation theology center, whose founder and director is an Anglican Palestinian priest, Naim Ateek. I had met Naim in 1991 in Brazil at an Anglican Peace and Justice Network meeting, and was captivated by his indigenous interpretation of justice. Naim’s ability to contextualize a theology of nonviolence within a violent system drew me to travel to a region I had avoided to that point.

The trip, my first to the Middle East, was at once an exhilarating experience and a depressing one. A major highlight was the first Palestinian election, which was held the day before the conference – an extraordinary coincidence. I joined two other U.S. visitors – Patti Browning, wife of then-Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning, and Jess Gaither, convener of the Episcopal Peace and Justice Network – as guests of Samir Kafity, then-President Bishop of the Middle East, when he voted for the first time in his life. That significant day offered a glimpse of hope for peace.

Conversely, I witnessed intense poverty in the Occupied Territories, I experienced the omnipresent Israeli security checkpoints, saw expanding Jewish settlements, and I encountered blatant racism directed toward an African American friend. Despite the brief euphoria of the Palestinian election, I left the region saddened by what I’d seen and doubtful that the peace process would move forward quickly. My visit also led me to begin to change my previous strong support of Zionism.

In February 2001, I returned to Jerusalem to attend Sabeel’s fourth international conference: "Speaking Truth, Seeking Justice." This time an emotional high was not to be expected. The event was held one week after the election of right-wing hawk Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister. The mood was somber – almost five months had passed since the start of the "new" Intifada, the Palestinian uprising which commenced in the fall of 2000.

The conference had originally been scheduled to take place in Bethlehem, but security concerns caused the organizers to move it to Jerusalem instead. Our visit to Bethlehem ended up being a few hours, rather than a few days, due to almost-daily violence between Israeli military forces and Palestinian militants. Our busses filled with international conference participants were not permitted to pass a checkpoint into Bethlehem, just 10 minutes south of Jerusalem. Instead, we walked across the checkpoint and took new busses. We almost didn’t go there at all, since one of our group, a young Palestinian woman, had "Jerusalem Only" papers. Two hundred fifty people refused to go into Bethlehem unless she could go too.

In Beit Jala, a Palestinian neighborhood in Bethlehem, we saw the result of the violence that took place after dark each day. We visited a home where 18-year-old Osamah Quraby had died in bed three nights earlier. Tank fire from Gilo, the Israeli settlement at the top of the hill, had knocked in the wall of his room onto his bed, suffocating and crushing him. It was depressingly familiar. During the opening worship service of the conference, a screen projector slowly showed the name and age of each person who had died since September – Israeli or Palestinian, Muslim, Jew or Christian. The majority of names were under the age of 30; a frightening percentage of the victims were under the age of 18. Ghassan Andoni, a Palestinian peacemaker working in Bethlehem, told us, "The kids can now tell the difference between different types of guns, just by the sounds."

With kids growing up knowing the sounds of gunfire as part of their daily existence, with restrictions on movement that some compare to the infamous Pass Laws of apartheid-era South Africa (except South Africans, like Muslim theologian Farid Esack, who said, "This is worse than what we experienced!"), with a belief that the news we get from the Middle East is prejudiced toward the U.S.’ historical support of Israel, one could easily lose hope. However, there are causes for hope, as long as there are peacemakers. This issue of The Witness profiles some of those stories. The diverse voices in this issue – Palestinians, Israeli Jews, American Indians, U.S. Christians – give encouragement that together we will eventually create a just, lasting peace.

What is "A Globe of Witnesses"? In the short time since I’ve been working with The Witness, several folks have asked me what this "a Globe of Witnesses" title means. As evidenced by this issue, one key aspect is our intention to increase the amount of material we receive from other parts of the world. While The Witness has always been attentive to international justice and peace issues, traditionally most of our content has been authored in the U.S. Over the coming couple years we hope to showcase more international writers in our print publication – but in the meanwhile, check us out online for articles from around the world. Our efforts with "a Globe of Witnesses" will primarily be on the Internet, so visit www.thewitness.org/agw/ for original commentary and indigenous insights on a range of social justice concerns. [N.B. At press time, The Witness had just been informed we need to change the title of the web site project, "a Globe of Witnesses." See our advertisement below for more information.]

Ethan Flad is editor/producer of "a Globe of Witnesses (see www.thewitness.org/agw/).