Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

I concentrated on relationships between Jews, Christians, and Muslims at the Parliament, and on the status of relations between Israel and Palestine. My encounters yielded astounding discoveries and answered thorny questions. Who uses the word “apartheid” regarding Israel’s treatment of Palestinians? What is the power of personal relationships amid conflict? How present is Mary, mother of Jesus, in the lives of Palestinian women? How can Hope flourish despite worldwide violence and injustice?

Apartheid

When I saw that a panel at the Parliament would discuss the crime of apartheid and Palestine, I was intrigued. But when I arrived at the panel, its title had changed. The words “crime” and “apartheid” had disappeared. One panelist assured us that if we were looking for the panel with the previous title, we were in the right place. Pressured by an unnamed source, the Parliament had dropped those burning words from the title.

Years ago, I saw the word “apartheid” on the separation wall between Israel and the West Bank. I saw Palestinians cut off from their ancestral land, including ancient olive groves. I saw two separate road systems and two sets of laws. You can decide what to call it.

In 2006 Jimmy Carter wrote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Seventeen years later, some Christian denominations, B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Amnesty International, United Nations rapporteurs, and Human Rights Watch have all adopted his shocking language. All agree that this term, defined by international legal principles, accurately describes the reality.

Rabbis in Solidarity with Palestinians

I was deeply moved by hearing two American rabbis use the term. Strong Jewish voices in the U.S. and Israel attempt to link criticism of Israeli policies with antisemitism. Rabbis Brant Rosen, founder of Tzedek Chicago, and Michael Davis, founder of Open Hillel’s Rabbinical Council, use the term.

Rosen appeared on a panel with Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch, human rights lawyer and Christian pacifist Jonathan Kuttab, and Nihad Awad, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Rabbi Rosen grew up in Los Angeles in an atmosphere in which Zionism was an indisputable tenet of his Judaism. He later embraced the “liberal Zionist” belief in a two-state solution to the occupation that began in 1967. Now he traces the real problem to the founding of Israel in 1948. He believes that the commitment to a majority Jewish state is inherently flawed. It is a doctrine of domination, an enshrinement of injustice.

He identifies himself as a Jew in solidarity with Palestinians. He bases this commitment on the Torah’s revelation that all human beings are created in God’s image. Rosen resisted using the term “apartheid” for years, but now he says it aloud. He feels obliged to name it and insists that the principle of equal rights is not a fringe idea.

Teacher and Student

In a separate panel on Palestinian human rights, Rabbi Davis admitted that he does not want his criticism of Israel to distract Christians from taking responsibility for their own role in promoting Israel’s apartheid policies. In stark contrast to Christians who pray and work for equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, most Christian Zionists believe that the land of Israel belongs exclusively to Jews. In this disastrous view, Palestinian Christians and Muslims have no rights to land that God gave to Jews forever.

Davis finds Israel’s policies indefensible. Why, he asked, don’t more Americans protest? Because we need a personal connection. Davis, for example, is studying Arabic via Zoom with a Palestinian woman in Hebron. I remember walking down a deserted street in Hebron in 2007. According to Human Rights Watch, “Israeli forces in Hebron prohibit Palestinians from walking on large sections of what used to be the central thoroughfare of the city as part of a policy of making those areas ‘sterile’ of Palestinians, as per the parlance of the Israeli army.”

A busy commercial street I visited in Palestinian Hebron was covered by a chain-link canopy to prevent injury to people in the street. Israeli settlers, who occupied higher ground, occasionally threw garbage and rocks at the Palestinians below.

Arabic and Hebrew

Rabbi Davis’s teacher lives in these conditions. But she and Davis became friends through studying together. She told Davis that it scares her just to hear Hebrew since she only hears it at checkpoints from armed Israeli soldiers who threaten and harass her. She used to know more Hebrew but has forgotten a lot. Her sister is marrying a Jew, so Davis’s teacher overcame her fear and asked him to give her Hebrew lessons.

Davis is learning Arabic partly because he is devoted to the Sephardic traditions of Judaism. He acknowledges that for centuries, many Jews spoke Arabic, including the great Maimonides (ibn-Maymun) of Cordoba (1135-1204 CE), who wrote many works in Arabic.

The Power of Personal Witness

Two other personal accounts spoke dramatically to me in the panels I attended. Janan Atta Najeeb, President of Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition, noted that although she was born in Jerusalem, she cannot live there. But a Jewish neighbor in Chicago could legally move into her ancestral home.

And Nihad Awad of CAIR recounted how he grew up in the first UN-established Palestinian refugee camp, al-Wehdat, in Jordan. His family lived in tents with no electricity and little access to clean water. He managed to get an education, beginning in Italy. But his exposure to polluted water led to chronic kidney disease. He is alive now because his daughter recently donated one of her kidneys to him. His visit to Chicago was his first trip outside Washington, DC since the operation. Today, because Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison, residents cannot go outside the “prison” to receive health care. More than ninety-five percent of Gaza’s water is unsafe for drinking.

Who Cares?

Why should Americans care? If for no other reason, we live in a democracy. We have a say in how we spend our taxes. In 2020, we gave $3.8 billion to Israel, a typical annual amount, most of which is for military assistance. Palestinians, however, will receive only about $300 million this year, up from less than a million in 2019, most of which is humanitarian aid.

The average American spends about $355 on food monthly. At that rate, American aid to Palestine amounts to around sixty dollars per person, or only six days of food. Compare this to over a billion dollars the American military spent in 2020 to cover costs of “higher healthcare spending and lower productivity” resulting from overweight military personnel.

Maryam: A Woman of Occupied Bethlehem

I was spellbound by two films about Palestinian women at the Parliament. Playwright and theater director Victoria Rue presented Mary Under Occupation, a film about producing Rue’s play Maryam: A Woman of Bethlehem. Mary Under Occupation introduces two young Palestinian women who take turns portraying a series of women. Rue drew the script verbatim from interviews with twenty-five Palestinian women. Since the mother of Jesus also lived under occupation in this same territory, it was fascinating to hear these women’s accounts of suffering, resisting, and thriving in today’s Palestine.

The documentary includes a scene of the actors and Rue viewing an image of Our Lady with the child Jesus painted on the separation wall between Israel and the West Bank. Since Mary/Maryam appears in both the Christian Testament and the Qur’an, Christian and Muslim women have strong impressions of her.

We tend to imagine little or no “conversion” between the cousin-religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but one of the Maryam actresses notes that her ancestors were Jews who later converted to Christianity and then to Islam. So the boundaries that seem impermeable are not. And walls sometimes fall.

Theater is a wonderful way to learn about people and situations we may know little about, and especially if highly politicized sources deliver what little we know. The voices of Palestinian women in these films are intimate and personal, not debate talking points. The two actresses end by reminiscing about the days when they could go to Israel freely, eat scrumptious “Jewish” doughnuts, and celebrate Muslim holidays with their families, dancing under the gaze of Mary.

Help them out. Arrange a viewing of both films in your neighborhood!

Hope

It may sound strange that I came away from the Parliament with a sense of hope. But the Parliament’s profuse number of movements for justice, peace and healing inspired and awed me. It also gave me a dose of patriotism. In America, a member of the Baha’I faith, for example, can speak to an Iranian Muslim without fear of violence. In many parts of the world, the notion of the Tri-Faith Initiative’s Omaha campus including a synagogue, a church and a mosque would be anathema or ridiculous. To witness a Muslim cry out against injustice in the presence of a Rabbi in solidarity with Muslim Palestinians is miraculous.

In their panel “Can Spiritual Mystery Save Us from Political Uncertainty?” the three American “interfaith amigos,” Rabbi Laura Duhan-Kaplan, Imam Jamal Rahman, and Rev. Don McKenzie, explored the power of ritual, prayer, debt forgiveness, song, and laughter to sustain us amid the corruption, threats, and violence of imperial religion.

Rev. McKenzie noted that reality always hangs between despair and hope. That’s why he loves the blues. Without hope, we couldn’t sing. And we sing about heartbreak and loss. We lament. Then we hew a stone of hope out of the mountain of despair. We connect to each other in service and generosity. We bathe regularly in holy silence. Confident that we are loved, we gain strength to resist injustice and sing: “My life goes on in endless song / above earth’s lamentation … Since love is Lord of heaven and earth, / how can I keep from singing?”

The photo at the top of this post is a detail from the Israeli and Palestinian Women’s Peace and Healing Quilt. Click this link to view a brief and beautiful video about the women who created the quilt to express passion, hope, and harmony amid pain and disharmony.