And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that “everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. 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. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”
- Milton Mayer – They Thought They Were Free
Like almost everyone else in America, I’ve been watching the news from Israel for a few days and to say that I’m saddened would be an understatement. To say I’m shocked, however, would be a gross overstatement.
I’m not shocked. I know people on both sides of this intractable issue. My first exposure to the Palestinian side came years ago. I was in the Air Force at the time and had come home to Boston on military leave and learned that my sister had gotten married to a Palestinian man named Said Zawawi. I called her and invited myself over to her house for dinner so that I could meet him. I met Said the next night. He was handsome, with dark brown penetrating eyes, and curly black hair, punctuated by flecks of silver and gray. He was muscularly built. I found out a little about him at the dinner table. He worked as a teller in a local bank and that he still had family living in Palestine. To me, he appeared to be quite charming and I left for home a bit later feeling good about my sister’s fortunes. A second visit seemed to confirm those thoughts. The third visit, which came a day before my leave was up, changed my thinking. I got to my sister’s place a few minutes before the NBC Nightly News and Said suggested we watch to see what was “going on in the world.” Everything seemed alright until the reporting about an Arab blockade of the Suez coming on the heels of a recent speech from Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser that made Egypt’s geopolitical intentions quite clear – “We intend to open a general assault against Israel. This will be total war. Our basic aim will be to destroy Israel.”
Israel’s U.N. representative, Abba Eben, responded with a plea on Israel’s behalf about the threats and the subsequent Egyptian blockade of the Suez Canal. Said sat, rigid, while the report continued. Things changed dramatically when the broadcast team offered what they termed insight into the situation. Said stood up and started cursing at the television about what he felt was reporting that was too pro Israel. His rage built to the point that he went and got a hammer and started smashing at the screen, screaming “Filthy Jews must die” as he did. It didn’t take long for the screen to break into pieces and fall on the floor. The only response I could offer was to excuse myself as politely as I could and leave. My sister called me the next day and tried to explain why Said had done what he did. “His father was killed by an Israeli soldier.” She didn’t offer anything else by way of explanation. She ended the conversation by revealing something I had already learned from the incident. “He hates all Jews!
My second experience with the Palestinian people came years later when I was a service engineer at FedEx’s Eastern Region in New Jersey. The district engineering manager, who was a Turkish citizen, called me to his office and asked me if I would consider mentoring a young Palestinian engineer who hadn’t been with FedEx very long. “I think it would be a good fit, Phil. You’re a devout Christian with an advanced degree in theology and he’s a devout Muslim. I know you’re both competent engineers and I think your respective religious views might be an interesting combination.” I agreed.
Our first few days together were pretty uneventful. We had adjacent offices and I’d occasionally drop by to see if there was anything he needed from me. On one of those casual visits I noticed a poster he had put on the wall of his office, proclaiming the “100 names of Allah.” When he saw me looking at it he smiled and asked, “What do you think, Bucko?” (he was already being quite casual in his conversations with me)? He asked. I offered a two word response – “Quite impressive.” His smile broadened. “Do you Christians have names like that for God?”
“We do, but there aren’t a hundred. In the Old Testament He’s called “the Lord our Healer, the Lord our Provider, the most high God, the Lord our Banner, and so forth. In the Christian New Testament he’s referred to as “Our Father.”
He seemed pleased with my responses.
A week or so after that we were sitting in on a conference call outlining to pluses and minuses of the previous day’s operations. Everything seemed to be going quite well until someone mentioned a serious service failure that had occurred. The call coordinator looked stunned and blurted out, “Oh, mother of God, how did that happen?” Walid straightened up in his chair and asked in loud terms, “Who is this mother of God, Barb?’ Her response was immediate. “You know, Walid. It’s Mary. You know who Mary is, don’t you?” Walid’s answer was, in my mind, pitch perfect. “I see, you mean Jesus’s mom.” Barb now seemed befuddled and decided to call on me for help. “Phil, please correct Walid on this. You’re our resident theologian” I gathered my thoughts and responded. “Walid’s right, Barb. He and I might disagree on many points of theology, but he’s right on this one. I think Mary was a wonderful woman, but she was not the mother of God. She was, as Walid said, Jesus’s mom.”
The fallout from the encounter, from Walid’s perspective, almost immediate. Our daily encounters became increasingly pleasant and productive. We were making the district we served a model of professionalism and service. I decided that my best course of action was to not inject the tensions between Israel and Palestine into our conversations. I believed it these conversations were to ever take place, he would have to be the one to initiate the conversation(s).
That time eventually came.
We were sitting in a coffee shop near Newark Airport after a long night at the Hub. We spent about ten minutes analyzing the operation we had seen, laughing as we did. “Oh, Bucko,” he said. “It was a real mess. It’s gonna take forever to fix things here.” I agreed with him and I was going to respond, but he cut me short. “Bucko, I’ve got to know something. What do you think it’s gonna’ take to fix things in Palestine?” I responded with all the earnestness and brotherly love I could muster. “Walid, there’s got to be a way for Jews and Muslims to live together in peace. There’s plenty of room in that land for both Jews and Muslims.” He sat stone faced as he answered. “Never, never. We must drive the Jews to the sea and kill them all.” My mind flashed back to my encounter years earlier with my sister’s Palestinian husband.” I tried to plead with Walid, “There’s got to be a way for Jews and Muslims to learn to live together. “Never, never,” he intoned. He was adamant and I finally saw that there was no possibility the conflict would ever end.
It’s now Saturday. I’ve been giving thought to events this past week in Israel. It’s really difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that there will never be a peaceful resolution to the conflict in the Middle East. “Why not?” I wonder. There have been wars. Nations have fought against other nations, but many times they’ve found ways to end the fighting and reconcile in some fashion or other. Think of America and Japan or America and Germany. Less than a hundred years ago we were enemies at war. Today those guns have gone silent and we’re now allies. If the people of Germany, Japan, and the United States can reconcile, why can’t Jews and Muslims? I keep searching for answers, but the heavens seem like brass.
I’ll take that as a sign that it’s time to turn my focus to things outside my living room window, things closer to home.
It’s quiet here in Kansas City’s Pendleton Heights neighborhood. I’ve just finished putting food out for our outdoor cats, Charro, Mambo, Chocolate, and Blackie. As I sit here typing I occasionally gaze at the Vietnamese Buddhist temple across the street. I’m really glad to have them as neighbors. While our respective faiths are different, we share the wonderful bonds of peace and good will. It’s life in a neighborhood as it should be.
It’s been over sixty years since I served a one year tour of duty in Vietnam. I arrived in Saigon early in the conflict. By the time I left, in 1966, Vietnam had become a cauldron of violence, accompanied by the bureaucratic slogans that all too often described the mayhem – “search and destroy,” “rural pacification,” “body count,” “rolling thunder.” It went on till 1975, when Saigon fell to the communists of North Vietnam.
Today I have some of the painful memories of that conflict- a black granite wall with the names of 58,318 Americans who died in what became a geopolitical tragedy of epic proportions or the searing pain I felt in my gut when I saw the news reports of victorious North Vietnamese tanks rumbling down Saigon’s wide boulevards.
Those painful memories linger, but there are also signs of hope. Vietnam is at peace. The Vietnamese economy is growing and, according to the World Bank, “is one of the most dynamic emerging countries in the East Asia region.” As I gaze out my window here in Pendleton Heights I can also take great comfort in knowing that I have wonderful Vietnamese Buddhist neighbors.
These are a few of the signs that demonstrate that conflict, war, and hate don’t have to be the perpetual foundation of relationships between nations and people.
It’s Saturday, the Sabbath in Israel. Here in America Sunday is, traditionally, a day of rest. It’s a tradition that’s rooted firmly in the history of the people of Israel. About 3,500 years ago, Moses ascended Mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments from God. The fourth of those commandments reads “Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.” (Exodus 20:8-11). There was a time in America when we took the need for a sabbath day of rest more seriously than we do now. Early in our national experience “Christian” America changed that day of rest from Saturday to Sunday. There were prohibitions on what we couldn’t do on the sabbath day. “Blue laws” were instituted in many municipalities, prohibitions on the sale of alcohol were common, for example. I grew up in Massachusetts, where even operating an over the highway freight truck was prohibited on Sundays from sunrise to sunset . Much has changed since my formative years. Today, booze is sold seven days a week, freight rumbles along Massachusetts highways, and the wheels of commerce hum constantly.
Things in Israel, the home of the Ten Commandments, things are a bit different. Saturday is the Sabbath day of rest in Israel rather than our traditional Sabbath Sunday. When it comes to labor, the people of Israel, particularly religiously observant Jews, take the commandment quite seriously. Take, for example, the Shabbat elevators. “What’s a Shabbat elevator?” you might be asking. In keeping with the fourth commandment, Shabbat elevators in Israel make stops on every floor of a building. If one happens to be on the seventh floor and wants to go to the hotel lobby, for example, he or she must wait until that elevator has stopped at every floor on the way up to the seventh floor, then stops at every floor on the way back down to the lobby, irrespective of whether or not there is anyone waiting on the floors on the way up or down.
The American mindset probably sees it all as counter productive. To the Jewish people there is far more at stake. The Sabbath command is over three thousand years old. The original reminder was to set aside a day to rest and consider, prayerfully, the God who loved and provided for this tiny nation. Given the importance of that rest and quiet contemplation, something like a Shabbat elevator is a very minor inconvenience.
Shabbat has been observed in Israel for over 3,000 years. There have been a few times when observing Shabbat proved costly for Israel. On October 6, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian military forces attacked Israel along the Golan Heights and Gaza. The date chosen was strategic. The Egyptians and Syrians knew that the beginning of Yom Kippur, Israel’s “Day of Atonement,” coincided with Israel’s Shabbat in October of 1973. They had calculated that Israel would be unprepared for such an attack and they were right. Israel was caught flat footed and it cost them dearly. The war lasted for about three weeks and in that time close to 3,000 Israeli soldiers had died. It was a very painful victory.
In the years since that deadly Yom Kippur there have been Palestinian uprisings, or intifadas. In 2007, Hamas, a terrorist organization dedicated to the eradication of Israel and the Jewish people from the face of the earth. The following citation from Hamas’ 1988 charter will give you a very clear picture of Palestinian intentions:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
I can assure you that the Palestinians mean business. As I wrote earlier, in my assignment as a service engineer at FedEx’s eastern region I was responsible for training a young Palestinian engineer. We spent many days working together and, in that time, I came to admire his work ethic. We even came to the place where we could express our respective faiths. Those interactions were almost always cordial. They changed when the subject of Israel came up. I once expressed my hope for a two-state solution to the conflict and he rejected that idea categorically. “We must drive the Jews to the sea and kill them all!” No matter how I tried I could not persuade him to rethink his position. He once asked me whose side I would be on when that day of reckoning came. My heart was heavy when I responded to him – “I love you like a brother, but if that choice were forced upon me, I would have to take the sword up against you.”
It’s been years since those interactions. I am absolutely certain that neither his feelings nor mine have changed. I find it all profoundly discouraging, but it is what it is. There is no two state solution; there is no path to peace that I can see. In order for peace and brotherhood to prevail the two parties must come together and find avenues of compromise that they find agreeable. The Jews are willing. The Palestinians are not. It’s as simple as that.
Events of the past week in Israel make the futility of a peaceful solution to the problems between Israel and the Palestinans crystal clear. Last Saturday, on a Sabbath, Palestinian terrorists from Gaza swooped in from land, sea, and air and slaughtered innocent men, women, children, and even infants without mercy. There’s no need for me to recount the details for you. You already know them. The barbarians have stormed the gates.
Israel is now at war and for us watching events unfold it’s also a time of choosing. For me that means choosing Israel! I choose Israel because I know the truth. I know the history, the good and the bad of it. I know when Hamas’s apologists in the media or academia are lying to me. And, I know because I’ve been in Israel four or five times. I’ve mingled with the Jewish people on the Golan Heights. Along with fellow pilgrims and our Israeli guide I’ve cleaned up trash left by tourists in the area around the Church of the Multiplication. I’ve walked around the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. I’ve shed tears at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. I’ve sat quietly in one of the traditional sites of the Garden tomb, contemplating what that very first Easter morning must have felt like. I’ve prayed at the Wailing Wall with Jewish men. I’ve been to the Temple Mount and I’ve been inside Antonia Fortress, where a worried Pontius Pilate interrogated Jesus about whether or not he was threat to his rule. He needn’t have worried. Jesus explained that His kingdom “was not of this world.” I’ve been to Masada, the site where all Jewish military officers used to take their commissioning oath, proclaiming “Never again,” which is another way of saying that the Jewish people will never again be passive in the face of evil men bent on their annihilation.
I’ll make this as clear as I possibly can. The Jewish people belong in Israel. It is their homeland, a treasure. The depth of love for that homeland was expressed beautifully long go in the 137th Psalm, which some scholars attribute to King David and others attribute to the prophet Jeremiah:
“If I forget you, Jerusalem
May my right hand forget its skill.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
If I do not remember you,
If I don’t consider Jerusalem
My highest joy!”
I’ve seen Israel and I’ve seen the thousands of years of Jewish presence in the precious land. It’s palpable. As Charles Krauthammer once observed:
“Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store.”
I know the Jewish people. The same love they have for their homeland is the same love they want to express for their neighbors, including the Palestinians. They want to live in peace and harmony.
Today I see the tragedy on the ground in Israel. It’s bad enough, but when I see the vitriol being unleashed against the Jewish people in cities all around the world, I feel broken hearted. How can it be that America’s great educational institutions like Harvard University have become hotbeds of support for the indiscriminate murder of innocent Jews? How can it be that thousands gather in New York City waving banners proudly supporting terror and mass murder? How can it be that Australians now gather in the streets shouting, “Gas the Jews”?
I can’t fathom it, but it is happening. Some are trying to convince us there is a context to all of this. There is absolutely none! As Anglican priest/journalist Giles Fraser said a few days ago. “And for today at least, I have no time for those who want to see “both sides” of the situation. This was a massacre, hideously reminiscent of the Shoah. They beheaded children. I do not want to hear those whose first sentence expresses condolences, and whose second sentence begins with a “But”
Men and women of goodwill, especially Christians, must not allow this to happen. We must reject those who would inflict unending pain on the Jewish people. We must speak up and act as their firm supporters. To do otherwise would be tantamount to a surrender to evil and terror.
We must heed the words of of warning Milton Mayer penned following interviews with good German citizens who had failed to act in response to Adolph Hitler’s madness in the 1930’s:
“Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—’Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.”
The warning extends to us today. We must resist the beginnings; We must consider the ends. And, we must act before it becomes too late