Manifest Destiny in Israel

by Patti Browning

Some of you know of my passion for the Holy Land, that tiny part of the world in which the centers of holiness for three faiths converge. My husband Ed and I became deeply involved with the Palestinian situation during his service as Presiding Bishop [of the Episcopal Church, USA from 1985-97] and I spent a lot of time there, but actually we had visited and studied and talked with people about it for years before then. I was immediately deeply affected by what I saw there, for reasons I am still sorting through in my thinking and always will be, I guess

I was, and remain, sorrowful and angry that most of my fellow and sister Americans do not understand what is going on in Israel, and how important it is for the world that it change. That most of my fellow and sister Americans do not understand how our government's conduct in the Middle East in general has damaged us and those who live there. That raising the issue, since September 11, sounds to most Americans like treason. I am sorrowful and angry that our government does not help us see, and I am sickened by the thought that the reason for this is oil and the money that flows from it. That human lives can actually be judged less important - WAY less important - than the immense fortunes of Americans who traffic in it. That, even though we know that rampant consumerism is a disease among us that is killing us, sapping our strength and the strength of our imaginations and those of our children as well, even though we know that the world's environmental health depends on our behaving in ways other than the ways in which we behave, the money shouts louder and drowns all that out.

In a few places I do discern, since the bombing in New York, a touch more willingness to become informed about what we are doing there that actively worsens the whole situation in the Middle East and Asia. The bombing ought to have been a wakeup call anyone could have heard. But the response to those who heard it and dared to say so has been swift, negative and sometimes even violent.

Nobody wants to hear that we had any role at all in the terrible thing that happened on September 11. But we do. Our having had a role in our own suffering does not mean that the terrorists are somehow excused for their actions, which any fool could see were evil ones. It does not mean we somehow deserved it. But it does mean that there are actions we can and must take to ensure that such a terrible thing does not happen again. It does mean that, if we do nothing and go on as before, we will certainly see more of such suffering. We don't get different results by doing the same old thing over and over. To get different results, you have to do something different.

Our uncritical support of any expansionist project the state of Israel wants to carry out MUST END. The history of the Holy Land did not begin in 1948, any more than the history of the United States began in 1942. There were people here when Europeans first arrived. There were people living in Palestine when the first postwar powers made their momentous decisions about how life would unfold there in the future. The bigotry and condescension that makes powerful industrial societies unable to really see people in traditional societies - that bigotry was at work in the way in which those who had survived the Holocaust were re-introduced into the land we all call holy.

The immigrating Jews felt about Israel the same way white Americans felt about the American West, a feeling articulated in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny: this land is here, therefore it must be ours. [It is] not that of the people who currently inhabit it, but ours. You know that the history of our westward expansions told us often of barbarism, but located it only in the Native Americans who were here first. Recently, we as a nation have come to admit that barbarism animated the other side as well - our side. Those Native Americans who remain force us to remember treaties made lightly and broken easily, genocidal sweeps through local populations that would have been called pogroms if they'd happened in Russia.

We, who now tremble at the thought of Arab people with germ warfare capability, must force ourselves to remember that the only time smallpox has been used in warfare was when European Americans used it against Native Americans, deliberately infecting blankets with the disease. We must force ourselves to remember, when we fear the thought of Arab people with nuclear weapons, that the only time nuclear weaponry has been used in warfare was when we used it. Not someone else. Us.

None of this difficult and painful remembering means that America now deserves whatever horrible things our enemies want to do to us. No one deserves a terrorist attack. None of our errors justify the evil of others. But all of it can help us not to make the same errors and commit the same sins in the future that we have in the past.

Those Muslim nations who consider us their great enemy have told us that the Palestinian situation is a big reason why. Most Americans don't believe them, but after 40 years of involvement with this situation, I do. For the Muslim nations, the Palestinian situation is simply an example of what they perceive when they see us: an enormous great power that has absolutely no interest in the Muslim world other than an instrumental one. We are concerned for them if we think they might be useful to us. We are concerned for them if they have something we need, like oil. But we are not concerned for them as fellow citizens of the world. Or as fellow citizens of God.

So taken are we with the reliving of our experience of Manifest Destiny in Israel, so thoroughly are we trained to see the situation there only through Israeli eyes, that even many Episcopalians do not realize that our church's relief work there is among the Palestinians, not among the Israelis. The Israelis in the State of Israel care for themselves very well, and don't need the missionary assistance of the Episcopal Church. They don't go to our hospitals or send their children to our schools, although they would be welcome to do so. They have great institutions of their own. The Christians of Palestine aren't Jews. They're Palestinians. The people cartooned in American mythology as terrorists.

But as not all Jews are terrorists, though some are, so all Palestinians are not terrorists, though some are. Groups like Hamas and the many fanatic Jewish settler groups do not represent the majority or even a significant minority in either community. Our work is with people with other concerns: our work in Palestine has not been about fanning the flames of hatred, but about feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and educating the young. Our concern about politics there is concern about the Palestinian peoples' right to be there. About their right to be seen as part of the human family, people with rights as we are people with rights.

When Middle Eastern people see America cooperate with Israel in policies designed to deprive Palestinians of the exercise of their most basic rights - the right to go to work, the right to see education for one's children, the right to security within one's home - they find it difficult to believe our talk about being the land of the free. They see us enthusiastically supporting policies of un-freedom, and they apply what they see to themselves. If the Americans will allow the Palestinians to be kept firmly as an underclass, they say, they will not stop at countenancing the same for us. And, because we have supported so many dictatorships in that part of the world, we cannot blame them for believing this. They have only what they see from which to judge.

We need not turn our back on our longstanding support of the State of Israel. But it MUST change. Israel cannot be indulged as we have indulged it for so long. It must join the human race, a race in which the lifeblood of survivable politics is a fair and just compromise. Nobody in life gets everything he wants. We must all give, and we must keep our word when we give. Just this week another settlement in Hebron expanded - suddenly, literally in the middle of the night - in direct contradiction to a hard-won recent agreement. If agreements are regarded with such cynicism, and we give tacit approval by our silence, nobody should be surprised at the Palestinians' lack of faith in agreements.

Perhaps one of the most hopeful things I have heard in recent weeks - and we all must admit this has not been a very hopeful autumn - was a small thing: President Bush used the words "Palestinian state" in a public statement. No American president has used it before. A state of Palestine is the only thing that will allow these ancient, kindred people to live side by side in a small place where each has a venerable historical claim.

I lie in bed and hear the radio. I weep to think that we are bombing to avenge bombing. I think of my children and grandchildren and weep for the young people of that part of the world: young people brought up to desire a fiery death, young people defending a regime that has done nothing but oppress them, young people far from home fighting in a war for our country, the country we love even with all its errors and self-deceptions. War affects the young most of all. They are the ones who do the fighting and, for the most part, they are the ones who do the dying. Even the civilians who died here were young - people in the prime of life, people just starting out, people raising families, people starting on the careers of which they had dreamed as teenagers - lost forever in their 20s and 30s and 40s, gone too soon.

Let us insist that our government do something different. Let us use the power with which our forebears entrusted us to affect the course of government. Let us speak, and let us speak about the things you're not supposed to speak about, insisting on the necessity of doing so. Nobody ever shed light on a topic by not talking about it. Let us speak about being a different presence in the Middle East than the presence we have been. We may never have a better chance than we have right now to change the world by changing ourselves. Let us speak out about doing so. Let us reason together, as we say, and be together the society for which we are now calling on young people to give their lives.

I would like to end with a quote from Tom Getman, former director of the World Vision office in Jerusalem who recently moved to Geneva to take over the World Vision International office of Humanitarian Affairs:

Some of my well-meaning colleagues who haven't lived in the Middle East keep asking why this monumental struggle continues, "with each side contributing to the ongoing conflict." It is important to reassert one last time through this organ that this is not a fair fight with equal combatants using equal force