Last week (February 1), Amnesty International released a powerful report, bearing witness to the devastating dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people. The report is clear, troubling and so convincing that several news outlets--afraid of a backlash here at home--have refused to report on it (see The New York Times). But Amnesty's long history of advocacy and truth-telling offers testimony enough. What is happening to Palestians (and Israelis too, we should add) is systemic and terrible; and international partners must call it what it is. Apartheid.
The full report--which is called "Crime of Apartheid"--is FOUND HERE.
The question for us, in the church (or at least, the United Church of Christ), is: "What will we do?" We can't say we didn't know. We can't say we had no way of responding. Our Palestinian and Israeli partners have bravely called on us to see, to hear, to know. And they've just as courageously offered us faithful (and nonviolent) strategies for solidarity and companionship. Isn't this exactly what the church is? Isn't this precisely what the church is to do? To respond, in love and compassion, to the suffering of the oppressed, to the dispossession of the occupied? If we don't, what does this say about us?
To call Amnesty International's work "anti-Semitic" is cruel and dismissive. Rabbis around the world are joining the call for meaningful resistance to apartheid--as a profoundly JEWISH response to injustice, militarism and occupation itself. Will we join them?
